I saw this on KCPT this evening. So eye-opening. Most I knew.
Still think the nation doesn't owe African-Americans reparations?
Still?
Links:
Thursday, April 30, 2020
The Racial, Very Racist History of Kansas City So Few Locals Know---Or Care to Know or Acknowledge
I saw this on KCPT this evening. So eye-opening. Most I knew.
Still think the nation doesn't owe African-Americans reparations?
Still?
Links:
Charlie Parker, On This Day
On this day, April 30, 1941, Kansas City's own Charlie Parker solos for the first time on Decca Records.
As a member of Jay McShann's orchestra, Charlie Parker has his first commercial recording session in Dallas, TX for Decca Records. Playing the alto sax, he solos on 'Swingmatism' and 'Hootie Blues.' He also earns his famous nickname 'Bird' around this time.
Links:
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Breaking News, Kansas City!!! On Our Stay-at-Home Order!!
Heads up, Kansas City! 10/10/10 rule!
Under the plan, phase one allows buildings to reopen with 10 percent building occupancy or 10 people allowed inside a business, whichever is greater.
--Allows buildings and businesses that service the public to reopen with 10% building occupancy or
--10 people allowed inside a business, whichever is greater.
--Sign-ins with contact information will be required for anyone who visits a business for more than 10 minutes.
We may get back to normal yet, folks!
Let's be careful out there!
Jack Cashill Comes Out Against Mass Transit?? Say It Isn't So!
BREAKING NEWS TODAY!! (last week?)
None other than very Right Wing, conservative JACK CASHILL has come out SQUARELY AGAINST MASS TRANSIT here in the Kansas City area!
Shocking!
Imagine that!!
A middle-aged (senior?), very white, middle- to upper-class, again, Right Wing, conservative--Republican? Libertarian?---coming out against MASS TRANSIT!!
Naturally, I first read of this shocking, shocking development over at some local blog.
KANSAS CITY URBAN PLANNER FACT CHECK: CONSERVATIVE JACK CASHILL EXAMINES DENSITY & PUBLIC TRANSIT ROLE IN DEADLY CORONAVIRUS!!!
Thank goodness I checked that out! (Thanks for the heads up, Ton...)
You just can't get any more controversial or daring than that!
You just can't get any more controversial or daring than that!
Be able to take light rail from, say, the airport to downtown? Or out in the city??
Have the city bisected by light rail with East/West and North/South routes??
This daring Right Winger is having nothing of it!
And Mr. Cashill so rightly makes a DIRECT CONNECTION between this MASS TRANSIT NONSENSE and the current CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC!!
We knew there was one, right??
So what if light rail is successful in St. Louis and Denver and, oh, I don't know, Chicago and New York and EVERY OTHER CITY it's in ACROSS THE ENTIRE WORLD!!
Next thing you know, people will want to---oh, I don't know--SAVE MONEY and SAVE TIME and have it be CONVENIENT and POLLUTE LESS??
I say again---GET AROUND THE ENTIRE METROPOLITAN AREA EASIER AND FASTER AND MORE CONVENIENT AND LESS EXPENSIVE AND POLLUTE LESS??
We'll have none of that!
We'll be gripping our steering wheels UNTIL WE DIE, right Jack??!!
Thank God someone, someone is taking on these tough, tough, controversial issues in this day and age and area!
God bless you, Jack Cashill!
Keep up that great, ground-breaking, courageous work, sir!! We're right with you!!
Back here in the 1890s.
(I'm dyin' ovah heyah).
Quote of the Day -- On This President
Trump, as a person and politician, is riddled with flaws. But he also has an ignominious super power: He is completely unencumbered by the truth, the need to tell it or accept it. He will do and say anything that he believes will help him. He has no greater guiding principles. He is not bound by ethics or morals. His only alliances are to those who would support and further his devotion to self-promotion.
--Charles M Blow, New York Times Columnist
From his column today:
Additional link, to give a person hope:
Be well out there, everyone. Stay safe. Stay at home.
Monday, April 27, 2020
Notes on this Presidential Election This Fall
Note one.
And that is on top of this earlier one.
Just the facts, folks.
And this is on top of the fact that Trump himself attacked Fox this weekend.
Stay tuned.
Wish, hope, work and vote for good things, better things.
What This Pandemic and Our Situation Is and Is Not
You are not seeing Socialism. What you are seeing is one of the wealthiest, geographically advantaged, productive capitalist societies in the world flounder and fail at its most basic test. Taking care of its people.
This crisis is not about the virus.
This crisis is about the massive failure of our, "Booming economy," to survive even modest challenges. It is about the market dissonance of shortages in stores, even as farmers/producers destroy unused crops and products. This crisis is about huge corporations needing an emergency bailout within days of the longest Bull Market in our history ending and despite the ability to borrow with zero percent interest rates.
This crisis is about corporatized healthcare systems being unable and ill equipped to provide basic healthcare, at the same time they post record profits. It is about crisis response depending on antiquated systems nobody remembers how to operate.
But most of all, this crisis is a direct result of the politicization of every aspect of our society for the benefit of a privileged few. The vilification of education, science, media, natural rights, rural lifestyles, urban lifestyles, charity, compassion, and virtually everything else for brief political gain has gutted our society.
What you are seeing is a quarter century of technological brilliance being reduced to a narcissistic popularity contest. You're seeing the folly of basing the health and welfare of an entire society on personal greed. You're seeing all the necessary tools, for us to shrug off this crisis, go unused while people argue over who should get the credit and profit. Even worse, you're seeing vital help withheld because recipients might not, "deserve it..."
You're seeing a lot of things nobody thought they'd ever see, but you're not seeing Socialism...
"Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves."-- Horace Mann
I think the man is spot on.
This Is Just How Scary Ignorant This President Is
The President of these, our United States, was ranting a Twitter storm yesterday. This is part of a series he posted.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
FOX ISN"T BOOTLICKING ENOUGH FOR DONALD TRUMP!
Yes sir, Mr. and Mrs. America, the Fox Network and what they call news is now officially not good enough any longer for this Republican Party President Donald J "The John" Trump. His own words, earlier today on Facebook:
Fox News just doesn’t get what’s happening! They are being fed Democrat talking points, and they play them without hesitation or research. They forgot that Fake News CNN & MSDNC wouldn’t let Fox News participate, even a little bit, in the poor ratings Democrat Debates. Even the Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats laughed at the Fox suggestion. No respect for the people running Fox News. But Fox keeps on plugging to try and become politically correct. They put RINO Paul Ryan on their Board. They hire “debate questions to Crooked Hillary” fraud Donna Brazile (and others who are even worse). Chris Wallace is nastier to Republicans than even Deface the Nation or Sleepy Eyes. The people who are watching Fox News, in record numbers (thank you President Trump), are angry. They want an alternative now. So do I!
That's magnificent!
This President just isn't familiar with our Constitution and Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Thanks, Republicans!
This President just isn't familiar with our Constitution and Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Thanks, Republicans!
That's quite the guy you got there!
Quite the guy you foisted on us all, on the nation!
Quite the guy you foisted on us all, on the nation!
Y'all better check in on him and see if he isn't melting down, however.
For your sake and all of ours.
Link:
Link:
Absolutely Scathing, If Also Sadly Realistic Article Out Now on This President Trump and Our United States
Yes sir and ma'am, this article out just now at The Irish Times is just that, scathing, in its assessment, yes, of this Trumpian President but of us, the United States of America. Because you must have a subscription in order to read it online, I'm posting the entire read here. Read it and weep, America.
The world has loved, hated and envied the US,
Now, for the first time, we pity it
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity, and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real-time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What is supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care, and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students traveling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious provincialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other, they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that the government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests that demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society, and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually, when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party, and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realization that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalized. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show anymore. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.”
As I've said especially out on social media so many times---
Thanks, Mr. President.
Thanks, Republicans.
This Coronavirus Pandemic and the Tough State Of and For Kansas
There's a pretty comprehensive article in today's New York Times, covering the overall situations across the nation with this pandemic, no surprise.
In both red and blue states, governors, health departments and hospitals are finding innovative ways to cope, but still lack what experts say they need to track and contain outbreaks.
Interestingly, tellingly and helpfully if probably also unfortunately, they have an entire section of it dedicated to the State of Kansas.
Credit...John Hanna/Associated Press
“We are nowhere near where we need to be with testing supplies,” Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas said.
But she said the tortuous path to freeing up even minimal supplies for testing remains the biggest reason she was reluctant to lift the stay-at-home order she imposed on March 28.
“We are nowhere near where we need to be with testing supplies,” she said on Thursday. “I’m looking down a lot of rabbit holes trying to figure out how we are going to get those test kits here. It’s imperative if we are going to be able to lift that stay-at-home order.”
The state is so short of plastic test swabs that he has appealed to dentists to manufacture them in their offices by modifying 3-D printers used to make dental models.
Since March 20, Kansas has sent the Federal Emergency Management Agency nine requests for medical supplies, including for 235,000 testing swabs, 60,000 kits to transport samples and 178,200 kits to analyze them. As of Wednesday, the agency had sent “nothing,” said Jonathan York, the state’s coordinating officer. Federal officials told him that other states were in more desperate shape.
In mid-April, the federal government delivered 273,000 surgical masks, the kind needed to protect medical workers who administer tests. But Dr. Norman said the masks, which had been privately donated, “were so substandard they wouldn’t even make a good coffee filter.”
State officials have had no luck trying to buy supplies themselves. Dr. Norman said Kansas had standing requests with private suppliers for $43 million in equipment, a “staggering” sum equivalent to nearly a third of his department’s annual public health budget.
“But the pipelines have pretty much dried up,” he said.
Kansas is still dealing with the hangover of seven years of draconian budget cuts under former Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican. Ms. Kelly said the state health department “had been pretty much decimated” by the time she became governor in 2018, with the laboratory that now processes many Covid-19 tests resembling “something out of the past...”
Thanks, Governor Brownback! Thanks, Republicans!
...The state plans to rely heavily on volunteers to create a corps of 400 workers to monitor the contacts of people who test positive.
Although the state is far from meeting the broad guidelines for testing capacity the White House has recommended for reopening, Ms. Kelly is under growing pressure to allow her stay-at-home order to expire as scheduled on May 3. The Republican-controlled state legislature has moved to curb her emergency powers, and protesters gathered on Thursday on the statehouse grounds.
“What is an acceptable level of risk?” Dr. Norman asked. “We cannot get it down to zero, so how can we guarantee that people won’t get sick?”
You know, the tests this Republican Party President Trump says are so plentiful.
Meanwhile, this from Trump's own lead on the pandemic.
Heavens help Kansas.
Help us all.
Heavens help Kansas.
Help us all.
Donald Trump: Russian Plant or Honestly Just That Stupid?
As of this moment, the United States of America has more confirmed deaths from this coronavirus pandemic than any other nation in the world.
More confirmed deaths than any other nation.
We have more than 1/4 of all the deaths in the world. Over 52,000 as of yesterday and there are approximately 200,000 deaths worldwide.
And the deaths in America from this are still climbing, keep that in mind.
China has a population of nearly 1.5 billion people. We have about 335 million citizens. But we have more, far more, of the total deaths from this pandemic than China or any other nation?
The "wealthiest nation in the world" has more deaths from this pandemic than any other nation and no way near enough protective equipment or, God knows, tests.
Then, with all this, a few days ago, our own President of the United States suggested, in the middle of one of his own daily press conferences on the coronavirus, that Americans inject disinfectants to treat themselves.
This is after the same President recommended Americans use a drug the medical field don't, in fact, recommend.
Trump recommends hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19
Our National Institute for Health had to come out against this advice.
His own FDA, our Food and Drug Administration, also had to come out after, as other doctors did, and say don't, a few days ago.
Along with this is the fact that earlier in this President's administration, he also praised Russia's Vladimir Putin. And more than once.
Trump Praises Putin
And that's just a little bit of the evidence and information that brings me to my, this question.
Seriously, is Donald Trump a Russian plant in our nation, in our White House, our government?
Or is he just honestly this stupid?
Quote of the Day -- On Religion
“Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual; and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism."
--Albert Einstein
Saturday, April 25, 2020
The Picture Tells It All
Thanks, Republicans.
That's quite a guy you have there.
Quite a guy you foisted on us all.
Sick of Winning
I ran across an excellent, brief article on this President and our current situation and had to share.
Just a portion of the article:
With the advent of the coronavirus, we are all – quite literally – sick of all this “winning.” The Trump administration has proven itself uniquely incapable of effectively slowing and stopping COVID-19, with the president’s often corrupt and always narcissistic war on technocrats and his penchant for conspiracies and/or “hoaxes,” leaving the world’s wealthiest country tragically unprepared. Many more Americans have died as a result. And as Trump tries to engineer another “win” by prematurely “re-opening the economy” and inciting protests in states with whose governors he feuds, there is a great risk that many more will continue to do so.
There is a deep irony at work here. Trump is America’s first viral president, a showman/conman candidate who married the old political tools of misinformation and ethnic grievance with new social media to spread his pop ethno-nationalism among voters in red and purple states. And now a real virus has emerged: Not an ephemeral, superficial artifact of the internet age but a biological, seemingly immutable pathogen that is as fundamental as life and death. As real as Trump is fake; as deep as Trumpism is shallow.
So much for winning; in fact, America is clearly losing.
And, hopefully, we’re sick of it.
I think and certainly hope this is at least part of what the author is referring:
Mark Y. Rosenberg is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs
I think and certainly hope this is at least part of what the author is referring:
Mark Y. Rosenberg is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs
Quote of the Day -- Devastating Version
I just ran across this today out on social media. On President Donald J Trump.
It made wonder--and search--for who this Evan McMullin is:
David Evan McMullin (born April 2, 1976) is an American political activist and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations officer who ran as an independent during the 2016 United States presidential election.
He labeled himself as the only true conservative running for President at the time, too.
Link:
Friday, April 24, 2020
Quote of the Day -- On This President and the GOP
“The Trump captivity of the GOP has reached its sad, inevitable destination: a failed presidency defended by a cowed party...Across a continent filled with elected Republicans, only a few have taken a stand for sanity...”
--Michael Gerson
How Is Donald Trump Even Still President?
We have a President who, in the middle of the worst pandemic of the last 100+ years, actually advised American citizens to--wait for it--inject disinfectants to fight the virus.
"It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves," one doctor said.
The makers of these products has had to warn Americans about this.
And check it out. Even HIS OWN FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, had to clarify that this President's recommendations are a patently bad and wrong idea.
Keep in mind, too, this isn't the first ignorant--stupid?--dangerous thing this President has advised we the American people on this pandemic.
The same President who was shown in a court of law to have taken funds from a charity, for God's sake, for his political campaign. He had to pay back 2 million dollars by that same court.
I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. and Mrs. America, how is this man even still President?
"Only the best people." "So much winning."
Thanks, Republicans. We have so, so much to thank you for now, with this deeply irresponsible, ignorant, self-serving, now dangerous buffoon.
To Trump Followers, Supporters, Republicans and Right Wingers Across America
You say your body is your own, but you get angry at a woman who demands the same.
You are against abortion saying every life is precious, yet you are willing to sacrifice your parents and grandparents for the economy.
You claim corona virus is fake, yet you wear a mask, gown, and gloves.
You say healthcare is a privilege, but want your Covid-19 hospitalization covered.
You say Socialism is bad, yet your hand is out for a stimulus check, unemployment benefits and you wait in line at a food bank.
What you say confuses me.
Forgive me if I no longer care what you say.
-Author unknown
To be clear, you made no sense long, long before this President, too.
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Quote of the Day -- Poignant, Timely Presidential Version
“What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.”
― William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
On this, the anniversary of the Bard's birth, today, April 23, 1564 and death, 1616.
What the Absolute Heck, Mr. President??
Kushner-backed program chartering flights to address hospital shortages raises questions in Congress
The details:
"A flight from China chartered by the U.S. government touched down at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on Wednesday last week. Inside were nearly 6 million surgical masks and some respiratory equipment.
But the supplies on board weren’t tucked into the national stockpile or distributed by the federal government among cities hardest hit by novel coronavirus despite the average taxpayer bill of $750,000 to $800,000 per flight.
Instead, the masks and other life-saving equipment were owned by Medline, one of the nation’s largest privately held manufacturers and distributors of medical supplies. They were loaded onto cargo trucks and driven to the company’s warehouse in suburban Chicago.
It was up to Medline to decide who gets the protective gear and what price they would pay.
The sole federal requirement imposed on Medline was that it would promise to sell half its cargo to designated 'hot spots' facing outbreaks of the coronavirus."
What the absolute heck?
Our Federal dollars are spent but a private company is going to decide who gets what, when and how---and they'll no doubt pocket any and all profit from it all?
How is this right?
Can you imagine the Republican Party uproar if the previous President did anything remotely similar?
Why are they, why is he, Mr. Trump, getting away with this?
Why are we letting him get away with this?
Thanks, Mr. President!
Thanks, Republicans!
Two Headlines From Yesterday That Show What a Completely Bizarre, Republican Party, Trumpian Rabbit Hole Into Which We Are
The reason I can't believe this one---because I can totally believe Trump and his administration would fire him---is that we let this go one under this Republican Party President and his administration but the Republicans and Right Wing would absolutely flip if the opposing political party even attempted such a thing.
But this next one, the second, wow. It takes the cake. Check this out.
This is so bizarre, I'll give you two sources for it.
This Trump administration picked---wait for it---a former Labradoodle breeder, a breeder of dogs, for God's sake, to lead this Covid-19 pandemic response team.
Isn't that reassuring? Doesn't that give you confidence? Make you feel safer, Mr. and Mrs. America?
How are we even letting this happen?
Into what bizzaroworld have we stepped, ladies and gentlemen?
How far are we going to let this madman go?
At long last, what will be "too far"?
Incredible Article On President Trump and This Pandemic, No. 2
The second incredible on this President, the pandemic and our nation just this moment is from The Atlantic magazine by George Packer, one of their staff writers.
A bit of the article:
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
...The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face...
The author goes on about President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
...To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation...
Again, I can't recommend both articles enough.
Read these two full articles, folks. They're quite an education.
God help us all.
Incredible Article On This President and Pandemic, No. 1
I ran across two articles that I think are so good, they're downright important.
The first is from CNN and written by Gary Kasparov, Russian chess grandmaster, former world chess champion, writer, and political activist.
A small bit of the article:
Trump has spent his time in office weakening the nation's systemic immune system -- or institutions that hold him in check -- and setting the US up for a disaster when those institutions are needed more than ever. All autocrats and would-be autocrats have the narcissistic superpower of thinking only of themselves. While normal people are worried about the cost in human lives or the economic impact of a crisis, an autocrat races to exploit it to his personal advantage.
This ability to focus only on power, to consider actions that shock everyone else, is how would-be autocrats become actual autocrats. Russians, myself included, underestimated the extremes Vladimir Putin would go to retain power. By the time we began ringing the alarm bells, the levers to stop him had been removed from the political machine. The Russian opposition and the international community had wasted precious time fretting over Putin's power grabs, surprised at every turn by his ruthlessness. We said, "Surely he would never...," and "Doesn't he realize how bad it looks?" But people like Putin don't care about traditions or what others have never done before. They don't care how it looks. They only care if it works -- for them. They don't ask why; they only ask why not.
This is how emergency powers become permanent and unsavory alliances of convenience become the new status quo. A crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic is a deadly example of how this process works and it has plenty of predecessors, including the war on terror. There is a rising number of democratically elected leaders in the world transforming themselves into authoritarians -- just look at Hungary's Viktor Orban.
These abuses can happen in democracies far more robust than Russia's, or even Hungary's. In the US, Republicans are coming out against voting by mail in the 2020 presidential election because they see voter turnout as a threat. This is a battle that has gone on in state legislatures and courts for years, usually via baseless allegations of fraud. But an autocratic mentality would instead look at the direct method of shutting down or sabotaging the US Postal Service.
Why not? An autocrat's only calculation is how it would impact his election chances, not who gets harmed in the process.
And if you're hoping members of the GOP will push back against Trump's tyrannical illusions, look only at their spinelessness as he claimed "total authority" last Monday, before saying state governors were responsible for reopening the economy.
Trump covets authority without responsibility, the creed of every strongman. To use the golfing language he understands, such contradictions are par for Trump's course, as when he now claims that he always knew about the pandemic when in fact he spent weeks saying no one could have seen it coming. Well, which is it? Did Trump know and do almost nothing, or was he oblivious despite the experts' many warnings?
Who would know better tendencies of autocrats than someone from Russia?
I can't recommend the entire article enough, to all adult Americans.
This afternoon--important article number 2.
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