I find myself doing my best to take in the events of the past few days, and I am at the brink of total despair when I think about the future of this country. Maybe I shouldn't say "this country." Maybe I should say what's left of this country.
And I am simultaneously haunted by Donald Trump's words from 2016 about how, when he was President, there would be so much "winning" that we simply couldn't stand it.
He was right about that much. I can't stand it, and I don't think the vast majority of Americans can stand it, either. If the following isn't perfectly clear by now, you are either working overtime not to pay attention, or you are so deeply in the tank for Trump that not even death could persuade you: "winning," for Trump and his most devoted followers, means a full-scale racial civil war, one designed to upend the entire constitutional order of the past 200-plus years and replace it with a power structure based solely on white supremacy.
We have, almost from the moment of Barack Obama'a election, seen an acceleration of this trend, one that has been slowly on track under the media radar for decades. White men armed to the teeth Assault-rifle mass shootings in the most innocent of settings, even elemenatry schools. "Stand-your-ground" laws that have no purpose except to facilitate the targeting and shooting of young men of color. White people, women in particular, patrolling neighborhoods ready to make "citizen's arrests" of delivery drivers and movers who are guilty only of being black. And the escalation of police assaults on suspects of color that has gone hand-in hand with the over-militarization of local police forces in the post-9/11 era.
But, in the Trump years, this acceleration has reached a climax, especially in recent months and days.
Breonna Taylor.
Amy Cooper.
The horrific murder-by-cop-knee of George Floyd, and the subsequent violence unleashed by the police against peaceful protests of that murder.
Assaults by the police that not only did not spare the media, but actually targeted them.
And outside agitators, mostly white and conservative, determined to upend the protests for their own purposes. In the short run, to spread violence and fear. In the long run, to lay the foundation for martial law and an open dictatorship of white men.
If you think that Trump and his more deep-pocketed supporters aren't behind this, you haven't been paying attention.
We all need to start paying attention now. It may not be long before we need to do a lot more than that if we want to save our democracy.
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Saturday, May 23, 2020
No, Freedom Most Definitely Is Not Free
If, prior to the pandemic, you had told me that public health could become a partisan issue, to the point at which one side would openly declare war on science, I would have been, to put it politely, been skeptical. Science, so far as I am concerned, and as far as the majority of as are concerned, is science, and that includes medical science, the science we rely on to live. True, we have political dust-ups on some science-related questions, such as when life begins, and the extent to which the Bible can be relied on as a literal record of human history. But I had thought of those dust-ups as exceptions that prove the rule: namely, that if science says X, we don't immediately take Democratic versus Republican positions for or against Y. We may have debates about how to address X, or about exactly how important X is relative to other things. But we don't debate the truth of X.
We do now.
Face masks have suddenly become the new flashpoint in the culture wars that seemingly have no end. Face masks. A simple, affordable, highly practical way of containing the spread of a virus that is, to put a fine point on the obvious, a respiratory virus. A precaution not merely endorsed, but strongly encouraged by every medical official with anything to say about COVID-19. A precaution endorsed by the Trump Administration's own health officials.
But not, alas, by President Trump himself. Somehow, he has conceived the idea that wearing a face mask is a kind of cowardly act, something that only fearful, gutless, liberal weaklings need to do. Which is why he doesn't wear one. Why he has managed to intimidate those who know better to let him refrain from wearing one. And, worst of all, why he has managed to rally his supporters to intimidate others from wearing them.
As I understand it, the requirement mandated by state and local governments to wear masks in public places is seen as an affront to individual liberty--and, in the context of worship services, an affront to religious liberty. Somehow, the notion that individual liberty also mandates that others be protected so that they can live their lives as they see fit seems to have never come up in this analysis of what it means to be free. Not even from the angle of thinking about what it means for protecting the mask opponents themselves, so that they can continue to enjoy freedom.
In fact, some of the anti-mask folks have gone so far as to co-op the liberal argument for reproductive freedom for their purposes: "It's my body and my choice."
Hmm.
If I thought that there was even a chance--a tiny, tiny one--that the mask foes could be successfully co-opted into becoming pro-choice (which I'm sure they aren't now) by my accepting their embrace of this argument, I just might do it.
Because I would still argue that we should all wear masks in public, by co-opting one of their war-on-terror slogans: "Freedom isn't free."
This means that, in the face of a public emergency, one that threatens every member of the public, the government has not merely the right, but the obligation, to take whatever reasonable and necessary steps are available to protect the public from the emergency and allow them to otherwise live their lives as they see fit. Government is not the tyrant here; the virus is the tyrant. Viruses do not care about borders, constitutions, theories of natural law or Biblical verses. They're viruses. They do what they want. We fight the virus on its terms, or we lose. And, if we lose, freedom will no longer something we will be in a position to think about, much less exercise.
Perhaps this is the influence of the Boomer generation, of which I confess to being a part, but one of the things about the present age which worries me the most is what we have done to concepts such as freedom, to say nothing of citizenship. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that freedom is not merely an individual experience, but an experience that we share as part of a free society. Society exists because government exists--and, so long as government is ultimately controlled by the whole people, freedom isn't threatened by government, and government is able to take whatever steps are necessary at different points in time to protect personal and social freedom.
Freedom, to put it another way, is not simply about what I want, but about what each one of us wants. This is way we we were willing to tear apart our nation in the nineteenth century, so that it could be put back together as a nation in which no one had the privilege of infringing the freedom of others based on the color of skin.
That is why freedom is never free.
And it's why it may be about your body, but it's also about thwarting the virus' choice.
We do now.
Face masks have suddenly become the new flashpoint in the culture wars that seemingly have no end. Face masks. A simple, affordable, highly practical way of containing the spread of a virus that is, to put a fine point on the obvious, a respiratory virus. A precaution not merely endorsed, but strongly encouraged by every medical official with anything to say about COVID-19. A precaution endorsed by the Trump Administration's own health officials.
But not, alas, by President Trump himself. Somehow, he has conceived the idea that wearing a face mask is a kind of cowardly act, something that only fearful, gutless, liberal weaklings need to do. Which is why he doesn't wear one. Why he has managed to intimidate those who know better to let him refrain from wearing one. And, worst of all, why he has managed to rally his supporters to intimidate others from wearing them.
As I understand it, the requirement mandated by state and local governments to wear masks in public places is seen as an affront to individual liberty--and, in the context of worship services, an affront to religious liberty. Somehow, the notion that individual liberty also mandates that others be protected so that they can live their lives as they see fit seems to have never come up in this analysis of what it means to be free. Not even from the angle of thinking about what it means for protecting the mask opponents themselves, so that they can continue to enjoy freedom.
In fact, some of the anti-mask folks have gone so far as to co-op the liberal argument for reproductive freedom for their purposes: "It's my body and my choice."
Hmm.
If I thought that there was even a chance--a tiny, tiny one--that the mask foes could be successfully co-opted into becoming pro-choice (which I'm sure they aren't now) by my accepting their embrace of this argument, I just might do it.
Because I would still argue that we should all wear masks in public, by co-opting one of their war-on-terror slogans: "Freedom isn't free."
This means that, in the face of a public emergency, one that threatens every member of the public, the government has not merely the right, but the obligation, to take whatever reasonable and necessary steps are available to protect the public from the emergency and allow them to otherwise live their lives as they see fit. Government is not the tyrant here; the virus is the tyrant. Viruses do not care about borders, constitutions, theories of natural law or Biblical verses. They're viruses. They do what they want. We fight the virus on its terms, or we lose. And, if we lose, freedom will no longer something we will be in a position to think about, much less exercise.
Perhaps this is the influence of the Boomer generation, of which I confess to being a part, but one of the things about the present age which worries me the most is what we have done to concepts such as freedom, to say nothing of citizenship. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that freedom is not merely an individual experience, but an experience that we share as part of a free society. Society exists because government exists--and, so long as government is ultimately controlled by the whole people, freedom isn't threatened by government, and government is able to take whatever steps are necessary at different points in time to protect personal and social freedom.
Freedom, to put it another way, is not simply about what I want, but about what each one of us wants. This is way we we were willing to tear apart our nation in the nineteenth century, so that it could be put back together as a nation in which no one had the privilege of infringing the freedom of others based on the color of skin.
That is why freedom is never free.
And it's why it may be about your body, but it's also about thwarting the virus' choice.
Saturday, May 16, 2020
This Won't Be Over When Trump's Gone
When Trump's gone.
At this point, it's far from a foregone conclusion that he will be gone next January. As far as the likelihood of that happening is concerned, it's not public opinion I fear. True, there are times when I wonder why, as one fiasco has been piled on top of another, he has as many supporters as he does, somewhere around 40 percent of the voting population. But I remind myself that, even at the deepest point of Richard Nixon's Watergate disgrace, he still had roughly one out of every four Americans behind him. No, what I fear is not the voice of the people, but the insidious, behind-the-scenes activities of the real Deep State: the one that has spent decades using dark money, gerrymandering, and outright voter suppression to squash that voice.
A free and fair election is not guaranteed by any means, but I hope and pray that it happens, as should we all, and will do whatever I can to ensure that outcome, as should we all. So let's assume that it does, and Trump is sent packing (or into the arms of the law), and we get President Biden and, G-d willing, overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. What then?
I wish I could say that, to borrow a phrase from General Electric, a great big beautiful tomorrow for all of us. But there's just one problem: all of us will still be living in the same America that put Trump in the White House in the first place.
And that America, I'm sorry to say, is in several respects a fundamentally corrupt place, at times almost as corrupt as are Trump and his fellow-travelers.
This corruption stems fundamentally from two basic, related facts. Too many Americans define patriotism in essentially self-centered terms. Perhaps worse yet, that self-centered perspective is flavored with a heavy, and not always well-concealed, dose of racism.
Both of those characteristics have been on display over that past few weeks, as demonstration after demonstration has taken place all over the country, in both red and blue states, allegedly protesting the perceived unreasonableness of various stay-at-home orders issued by governors in response to the coronavirus pandemic. If you paid attention to the visuals that accompany the news coverage of these protests, however, you might be hard-pressed to know that that's what they're all about. Between the pro-Trump signs and the Confederate flags, to say nothing of the military-level arms decorating many of the protestors, it's very hard to see the intentions behind these events as being strictly benign.
And they are not.
Listen very closely to what a lot of these people are asking for. We're supposed to think that the protests are a reflection of small-business America, itching to roll up its sleeves and get back to pumping up the economy through good-old fashioned hard work. The chattering classes on the far right are happy to help promote that image, even to the point of describing the pandemic in the language of class warfare, while simultaneously decrying the use by others of that very same language. Sadly, Peggy Noonan, for whom I'd like to have a measure of respect, seems to have jumped on this particular bandwagon.
But these protesters aren't protesting the loss of their jobs They're protesting the loss of being serviced by people in jobs that are often held by people of color. They're protesting the loss of white privilege. They regard masks as a sign of cowardice, and not as the cheapest, most practical way of protecting everyone from coronavirus transmission. And they are willing to disable representative government itself in order to garner their fifteen minutes of "fame," even though the size of their crowds is not reflected in the popularity of their governors in the polls. It's not an exaggeration to say that the Michigan state legislature's decision to cancel its session for this year is an existential threat to democracy throughout the nation.
Somehow, the us-versus-them posture of modern conservatism has left the movement and its followers utterly unprepared to fight a menace that doesn't care about where people live, or how educated they are, or whether they work with their hands or their head, or how much money they are or are not making, or (let's just say it) whether or not they look or sound like each other. It's a virus, folks. This is not about advancing one section of the country over another. It's about protecting all of us from a menace we could be sharing with anyone and everyone without realizing it! So no, you don't have a patriotic right to live your life in such a way that it threatens someone else's. Freedom isn't a gift to one political party or another; here in the U.S., it's a gift that's meant to be enjoyed by everyone.
And, as those on the right are so fond of saying, it isn't free. Sometimes, it requires sacrifice. Should that sacrifice be spread as broadly as possible? You bet. That's why Democrats in the House of Representatives just approved a $3 trillion spending package to do that--a package that has already been shot down by Republicans, since it doesn't do enough for those who have already had enough done for them.
The protesters like the ones in these "events," and those who fund their Astroturf demonstrations, will still be around when Trump is gone, still wrapped up in themselves, still animated by bigotry, still willing to use violence to disable constitutional government. They aren't going anywhere, and the media, dedicated as ever to the illusion of covering "both sides," will pump them up for short-term ratings at the expense of long-term safety. That's why this won't be over when Trump is gone.
And I don't know what the cure for this state of affairs is, any more than I know what the cure for the coronavirus is. I fear that suffering is the only immediate guarantee for the immediate months ahead.
At this point, it's far from a foregone conclusion that he will be gone next January. As far as the likelihood of that happening is concerned, it's not public opinion I fear. True, there are times when I wonder why, as one fiasco has been piled on top of another, he has as many supporters as he does, somewhere around 40 percent of the voting population. But I remind myself that, even at the deepest point of Richard Nixon's Watergate disgrace, he still had roughly one out of every four Americans behind him. No, what I fear is not the voice of the people, but the insidious, behind-the-scenes activities of the real Deep State: the one that has spent decades using dark money, gerrymandering, and outright voter suppression to squash that voice.
A free and fair election is not guaranteed by any means, but I hope and pray that it happens, as should we all, and will do whatever I can to ensure that outcome, as should we all. So let's assume that it does, and Trump is sent packing (or into the arms of the law), and we get President Biden and, G-d willing, overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. What then?
I wish I could say that, to borrow a phrase from General Electric, a great big beautiful tomorrow for all of us. But there's just one problem: all of us will still be living in the same America that put Trump in the White House in the first place.
And that America, I'm sorry to say, is in several respects a fundamentally corrupt place, at times almost as corrupt as are Trump and his fellow-travelers.
This corruption stems fundamentally from two basic, related facts. Too many Americans define patriotism in essentially self-centered terms. Perhaps worse yet, that self-centered perspective is flavored with a heavy, and not always well-concealed, dose of racism.
Both of those characteristics have been on display over that past few weeks, as demonstration after demonstration has taken place all over the country, in both red and blue states, allegedly protesting the perceived unreasonableness of various stay-at-home orders issued by governors in response to the coronavirus pandemic. If you paid attention to the visuals that accompany the news coverage of these protests, however, you might be hard-pressed to know that that's what they're all about. Between the pro-Trump signs and the Confederate flags, to say nothing of the military-level arms decorating many of the protestors, it's very hard to see the intentions behind these events as being strictly benign.
And they are not.
Listen very closely to what a lot of these people are asking for. We're supposed to think that the protests are a reflection of small-business America, itching to roll up its sleeves and get back to pumping up the economy through good-old fashioned hard work. The chattering classes on the far right are happy to help promote that image, even to the point of describing the pandemic in the language of class warfare, while simultaneously decrying the use by others of that very same language. Sadly, Peggy Noonan, for whom I'd like to have a measure of respect, seems to have jumped on this particular bandwagon.
But these protesters aren't protesting the loss of their jobs They're protesting the loss of being serviced by people in jobs that are often held by people of color. They're protesting the loss of white privilege. They regard masks as a sign of cowardice, and not as the cheapest, most practical way of protecting everyone from coronavirus transmission. And they are willing to disable representative government itself in order to garner their fifteen minutes of "fame," even though the size of their crowds is not reflected in the popularity of their governors in the polls. It's not an exaggeration to say that the Michigan state legislature's decision to cancel its session for this year is an existential threat to democracy throughout the nation.
Somehow, the us-versus-them posture of modern conservatism has left the movement and its followers utterly unprepared to fight a menace that doesn't care about where people live, or how educated they are, or whether they work with their hands or their head, or how much money they are or are not making, or (let's just say it) whether or not they look or sound like each other. It's a virus, folks. This is not about advancing one section of the country over another. It's about protecting all of us from a menace we could be sharing with anyone and everyone without realizing it! So no, you don't have a patriotic right to live your life in such a way that it threatens someone else's. Freedom isn't a gift to one political party or another; here in the U.S., it's a gift that's meant to be enjoyed by everyone.
And, as those on the right are so fond of saying, it isn't free. Sometimes, it requires sacrifice. Should that sacrifice be spread as broadly as possible? You bet. That's why Democrats in the House of Representatives just approved a $3 trillion spending package to do that--a package that has already been shot down by Republicans, since it doesn't do enough for those who have already had enough done for them.
The protesters like the ones in these "events," and those who fund their Astroturf demonstrations, will still be around when Trump is gone, still wrapped up in themselves, still animated by bigotry, still willing to use violence to disable constitutional government. They aren't going anywhere, and the media, dedicated as ever to the illusion of covering "both sides," will pump them up for short-term ratings at the expense of long-term safety. That's why this won't be over when Trump is gone.
And I don't know what the cure for this state of affairs is, any more than I know what the cure for the coronavirus is. I fear that suffering is the only immediate guarantee for the immediate months ahead.
Saturday, May 9, 2020
We're In The Grip Of A Suicide Cult.
The mantra "Never let a good crisis go to waste" has become, in 21st-century American politics, an approach to achieving, maintaining, and expanding political power that both sides of our current deep divide have been able to claim for their respective purposes. In fact, it was used first in the Obama Administration, which saw in the 2008 Wall Street meltdown an opportunity to gain ground in policy areas dear to liberals: financial re-regulation, obviously, but also stimulus spending that employed union workers and expanded the use of renewable energy sources, and health care reform that would end the threat of pre-existing conditions to the insurability of many Americans. And, to a degree, that approach paid off. Not, of course, to the complete satisfaction of American progressives. But to a degree that now fills those same progressives with a more appreciative, nostalgic perspective.
And to a degree that made most Republicans angry. Hoping that Obama would screw up his Presidency and play into the racism that many of us have known for decades serves as the fuel for their own political goals, they waited for an opportunity to once again take control and smash all of his accomplishments to pieces If they have not completely succeeded, it is mainly because of the determined efforts of attorneys (full disclosure to newcomers: my wife and I have our own law firm), and the 2018 election that restored the House of Representatives to Democratic control. Obama was their "crisis," so far as they were concerned.
But, in a twist of fate, focusing on undoing everything the first African-American President done distracted them from the most fundamental obligation any government can have to the governed: safety. Trump's dismantling of the pandemic apparatus Obama had put into place, and his subsequent willingness to ignore the mounting warning signs, allowed the coronavirus pandemic to devour almost every aspect of our lives, and has created a physical climate in which, in the systemic absence of testing and contact tracing that would give us a more precise idea of the pandemic's scope (and how to treat and end it), no one can feel safe because no one knows what the path to safety looks like. We have all been hoisted, along with the Republicans, on the petard of the way in which the Trump Administration has practiced its own form of "crisis" politics.
And, amazingly they are still at it.
Last weekend, I was reading this in the New York Times Magazine, about Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx. Today, it's become the burial ground for COVID-19 victims who had neither families who could claim their bodies, nor the means otherwise to afford a decent funeral. These people were predominantly those who were at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the people who get ignored the most, in part because they remind us of the level of poverty all of us are separated from by no more than one small twist of fate. An even more powerful reason for the neglect that we give is the fact that, not by coincidence, they are people of color.
As outlined in the article, Hart Island has historically been a convenient place to ignore the dispossessed in American society. So it's not terribly surprising to see it fulfill that role again. Indirectly, it reminded me of the controversy over Donald Trump failing to follow the precedent other presidential candidates before him have of releasing his tax returns. This failure, which exist solely for the purpose of hiding his status as an utter failure in business, is of a piece with his utter ignorance of American history and his general mental instability. Once this nightmare of an Administration is over, I think that we should pass a law requiring all presidential candidates to not only release 10 years worth of tax returns, but also submit to a full mental and physical medical examination by an independent physician, and pass a test indicating that they understand the basics of American history.
But I digress.
It's important to remember that, in a crisis of the magnitude of the current one, the hardest-hit are always people of color, because our Republic, from the very beginning, has placed them at the very bottom, first by way of their legal status, and later by way of laws that denied them the most basic opportunities for economic advancement. As I read the Times article, I found myself thinking: is that what this shocking defiance of medical science by Trump all about? Is this simply, in the disco of his mind, one last effort on the way out the door of the White House to shaft people he has always looked down about, that he was taught from the beginning of his life to look down upon? In and of itself, it's plausible enough; I mean, this is Trump we're talking about.
But the one thing that Trump never stops doing is calculating his self-interest, and how to preserve, protect, and advance it. Thousands of people may be dying, but Trump, narcissist that he is, goes on. Which is why I found this article by David Frum in The Atlantic so disturbing. Frum, a Never-Trump Republican, describes what he calls a Plan A and a Plan B in Trump's thinking. In Plan A, he just gives up entirely any effort to contain the virus and protect the American people, and throws anyone and everyone but himself and people who are useful to him to the pandemic wolf. In Plan B, to shore up what's left of his chances for re-election, he takes whatever political spoils are available and deprives his opponents of them, while sharing them generously with those who are willing to help him.
And no sooner did this week begin than Plan A went into effect.
Per the Trump Administration, the daily death toll from COVID-19 is now predicted to double by next month. To be precised, about 3,000 daily.
And what is the Trump plan for dealing with this doubling?
There is no plan, as it turns out. According to the "President," we are supposed to think of ourselves as warriors, drafted into a war we are losing, and one that was launched in no small part through his own negligence.
And is our Commander-in-Chief going to give us any supplies in order to fight this war? Doesn't look like it. At a moment in our history when health care for everyone has been more essential than ever, he's still putting in a full-scale effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Oh, I'm sorry; that's repeal and replace it with "I can't tell you until I'm re-elected, but it'll be some time after I show you my tax returns." That, of course, is Trumpspeak for "never." Even his own Attorney General, whose disbarment proceedings can't begin fast enough, had enough political sense to suggest to Trump that getting rid of the ACA right now shouldn't be a priority. Trump, for once, ignored him. Unsurprising again, especially coming from a man who refuses to even help pay for burying the dead, and forcing states like New York to make grim use of places like Hart Island.
Equally unsurprising, the rest of his party is no better. Congressional Democrats are calling to stop using federal bailout money to comfort the comfortable, and redirect it to ending the affliction of the afflicted. So what do we get? Mitch McCONnell, calling the Senate back into session for the sole purpose of confirming Trump's rancid political appointees, and even more rancid judicial nominations. (If it's any consolation, this week brought a thin ray of hope that something might be done to push back against the latter.)
And don't expect any help from Republicans at the state level. With a few notable exceptions, their message is clear: either go to work for employers who will not be required to protect you from death, or starve. In fact, the entire party has, for all practical purposes, been effectively Nazified, a process that has been taking place in earnest for several decades, and has finally reached the point at which its elected officials are cheerfully calling on those who don't vote for them to drop dead, so that the Dow Jones industrial average can continue to set new records. This Daily Kos piece describes that process in detail, and I strongly recommend that you take some time to look at it. At the same time, you can see two examples of how far along in the process we are: law enforcement is openly disrespected, and Ku Klux Klanners feel free to announce themselves in your local grocery store.
Perhaps worst of all, Trump is taking his political cues from the evangelical Christian community, which has no political vision for the world as a whole beyond being raptured off of it, and leaving everyone else to suffer. As a consequence, they believe any efforts to preserve and enhance life on this planet are essentially contrary to the will of God; good Christians, in this formulation, strive to accelerate the apocalypic timetable for their benefit, even though Jesus himself said that "no one knows the hour or the place" (Full disclosure: as a former evangelical, I know what I'm talking about. So does the author of this Mother Jones article.) This, of course, makes their anti-abortion advocacy even more hypocritical than it would be otherwise, but I'll save that topic for another day.
How does Trump himself sum up, for public consumption, this sorry state of affairs? By focusing on himself, of course. And doing it in a fairly spectacular way, one that, apparently, involved pulling a few strings.
He had the audacity to be interviewed at the feet of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, and compare himself to Honest Abe, in terms of suffering. Lincoln himself, were he in a position to do so, would respectfully beg to differ. As it was, when I saw footage of the moment in which Trump made the comparison, I half hoped for the statue to reveal that it had laser eyes and zap Diaper Donnie out of our misery, while saying "You want suffering? I'll show you suffering."
But no. It's up to all of us to get out of this mess, with G-d's blessing and help. And what a mess it is.
We're in the grip of a suicide cult. I hope and pray that we can get out of it after November.
And to a degree that made most Republicans angry. Hoping that Obama would screw up his Presidency and play into the racism that many of us have known for decades serves as the fuel for their own political goals, they waited for an opportunity to once again take control and smash all of his accomplishments to pieces If they have not completely succeeded, it is mainly because of the determined efforts of attorneys (full disclosure to newcomers: my wife and I have our own law firm), and the 2018 election that restored the House of Representatives to Democratic control. Obama was their "crisis," so far as they were concerned.
But, in a twist of fate, focusing on undoing everything the first African-American President done distracted them from the most fundamental obligation any government can have to the governed: safety. Trump's dismantling of the pandemic apparatus Obama had put into place, and his subsequent willingness to ignore the mounting warning signs, allowed the coronavirus pandemic to devour almost every aspect of our lives, and has created a physical climate in which, in the systemic absence of testing and contact tracing that would give us a more precise idea of the pandemic's scope (and how to treat and end it), no one can feel safe because no one knows what the path to safety looks like. We have all been hoisted, along with the Republicans, on the petard of the way in which the Trump Administration has practiced its own form of "crisis" politics.
And, amazingly they are still at it.
Last weekend, I was reading this in the New York Times Magazine, about Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx. Today, it's become the burial ground for COVID-19 victims who had neither families who could claim their bodies, nor the means otherwise to afford a decent funeral. These people were predominantly those who were at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the people who get ignored the most, in part because they remind us of the level of poverty all of us are separated from by no more than one small twist of fate. An even more powerful reason for the neglect that we give is the fact that, not by coincidence, they are people of color.
As outlined in the article, Hart Island has historically been a convenient place to ignore the dispossessed in American society. So it's not terribly surprising to see it fulfill that role again. Indirectly, it reminded me of the controversy over Donald Trump failing to follow the precedent other presidential candidates before him have of releasing his tax returns. This failure, which exist solely for the purpose of hiding his status as an utter failure in business, is of a piece with his utter ignorance of American history and his general mental instability. Once this nightmare of an Administration is over, I think that we should pass a law requiring all presidential candidates to not only release 10 years worth of tax returns, but also submit to a full mental and physical medical examination by an independent physician, and pass a test indicating that they understand the basics of American history.
But I digress.
It's important to remember that, in a crisis of the magnitude of the current one, the hardest-hit are always people of color, because our Republic, from the very beginning, has placed them at the very bottom, first by way of their legal status, and later by way of laws that denied them the most basic opportunities for economic advancement. As I read the Times article, I found myself thinking: is that what this shocking defiance of medical science by Trump all about? Is this simply, in the disco of his mind, one last effort on the way out the door of the White House to shaft people he has always looked down about, that he was taught from the beginning of his life to look down upon? In and of itself, it's plausible enough; I mean, this is Trump we're talking about.
But the one thing that Trump never stops doing is calculating his self-interest, and how to preserve, protect, and advance it. Thousands of people may be dying, but Trump, narcissist that he is, goes on. Which is why I found this article by David Frum in The Atlantic so disturbing. Frum, a Never-Trump Republican, describes what he calls a Plan A and a Plan B in Trump's thinking. In Plan A, he just gives up entirely any effort to contain the virus and protect the American people, and throws anyone and everyone but himself and people who are useful to him to the pandemic wolf. In Plan B, to shore up what's left of his chances for re-election, he takes whatever political spoils are available and deprives his opponents of them, while sharing them generously with those who are willing to help him.
And no sooner did this week begin than Plan A went into effect.
Per the Trump Administration, the daily death toll from COVID-19 is now predicted to double by next month. To be precised, about 3,000 daily.
And what is the Trump plan for dealing with this doubling?
There is no plan, as it turns out. According to the "President," we are supposed to think of ourselves as warriors, drafted into a war we are losing, and one that was launched in no small part through his own negligence.
And is our Commander-in-Chief going to give us any supplies in order to fight this war? Doesn't look like it. At a moment in our history when health care for everyone has been more essential than ever, he's still putting in a full-scale effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Oh, I'm sorry; that's repeal and replace it with "I can't tell you until I'm re-elected, but it'll be some time after I show you my tax returns." That, of course, is Trumpspeak for "never." Even his own Attorney General, whose disbarment proceedings can't begin fast enough, had enough political sense to suggest to Trump that getting rid of the ACA right now shouldn't be a priority. Trump, for once, ignored him. Unsurprising again, especially coming from a man who refuses to even help pay for burying the dead, and forcing states like New York to make grim use of places like Hart Island.
Equally unsurprising, the rest of his party is no better. Congressional Democrats are calling to stop using federal bailout money to comfort the comfortable, and redirect it to ending the affliction of the afflicted. So what do we get? Mitch McCONnell, calling the Senate back into session for the sole purpose of confirming Trump's rancid political appointees, and even more rancid judicial nominations. (If it's any consolation, this week brought a thin ray of hope that something might be done to push back against the latter.)
And don't expect any help from Republicans at the state level. With a few notable exceptions, their message is clear: either go to work for employers who will not be required to protect you from death, or starve. In fact, the entire party has, for all practical purposes, been effectively Nazified, a process that has been taking place in earnest for several decades, and has finally reached the point at which its elected officials are cheerfully calling on those who don't vote for them to drop dead, so that the Dow Jones industrial average can continue to set new records. This Daily Kos piece describes that process in detail, and I strongly recommend that you take some time to look at it. At the same time, you can see two examples of how far along in the process we are: law enforcement is openly disrespected, and Ku Klux Klanners feel free to announce themselves in your local grocery store.
Perhaps worst of all, Trump is taking his political cues from the evangelical Christian community, which has no political vision for the world as a whole beyond being raptured off of it, and leaving everyone else to suffer. As a consequence, they believe any efforts to preserve and enhance life on this planet are essentially contrary to the will of God; good Christians, in this formulation, strive to accelerate the apocalypic timetable for their benefit, even though Jesus himself said that "no one knows the hour or the place" (Full disclosure: as a former evangelical, I know what I'm talking about. So does the author of this Mother Jones article.) This, of course, makes their anti-abortion advocacy even more hypocritical than it would be otherwise, but I'll save that topic for another day.
How does Trump himself sum up, for public consumption, this sorry state of affairs? By focusing on himself, of course. And doing it in a fairly spectacular way, one that, apparently, involved pulling a few strings.
He had the audacity to be interviewed at the feet of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, and compare himself to Honest Abe, in terms of suffering. Lincoln himself, were he in a position to do so, would respectfully beg to differ. As it was, when I saw footage of the moment in which Trump made the comparison, I half hoped for the statue to reveal that it had laser eyes and zap Diaper Donnie out of our misery, while saying "You want suffering? I'll show you suffering."
But no. It's up to all of us to get out of this mess, with G-d's blessing and help. And what a mess it is.
We're in the grip of a suicide cult. I hope and pray that we can get out of it after November.
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