These days, teaching graduating college seniors has me, as the Brits would say in the London Underground, “minding the gap.” In my case, however, it’s not the gap between the platform and the train I’m thinking of, but a couple of others: those between U.S. citizens and our government, as well as between different generations of Americans. The Covid-19 crisis has made some of those gaps far more visible than usual, just as my students leave school with many of their personal expectations in tatters.

The chasms illuminated by the coronavirus are many: the gender pay gap; the wealth gap between African Americans and Latinos on one side and white Americans on the other, not to speak of the gap in their healthcare access and health outcomes; the gap in the amount of domestic work and childcare done by women and men; and that’s just to start down a longer list. Covid-19 has exacerbated all of these gaps in very concrete ways. To take just one example, the children of families with the fewest resources will be the ones most affected by missing almost half a school year or more.

The generous resiliency of my racially diverse students continues to surprise me. They know it’s a bitter world out there, but many of them seem determined, gaps or not, to change it.

Unbelievable Born in 1952, I was too young for the “missile gap,” which animated John F. Kennedy’s 1960 run for president. On the Senate floor, as early as 1958, he began claiming that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union in the production and deployment of nuclear missiles. In reality, that gap was all in the other direction, but it did help get him elected and spurred a major escalation of U.S. nuclear development and testing.

Eventually, a series of agreements would reduce Cold War nuclear tensions, although it now looks as if the Trump administration is going to withdraw from the last of those pacts early next year. It’s already pouring staggering amounts of money into further nuclear arms development, while contemplating the first U.S. nuclear test since 1992. So prepare for a new “missile gap.”

The first national abyss I personally became aware of was the “credibility gap.” That phrase signified the distance between what the U.S. government claimed was happening in Vietnam and the country’s doomed war effort there. As that conflict lumbered on, the gap only grew. Reporters in South Vietnam were, for instance, regularly treated to what came to be known as “the Five O’Clock Follies.” These were, as Susan Glasser recently wrote in the New Yorker, “nightly briefings at which American military leaders claimed, citing a variety of bogus statistics, half-truths, and misleading reports from the front, to be winning a war that they were, in fact, losing.” The Follies featured daily “body counts” of the dead presented like so many football scores, except that winner was the team with the fewest “points.”

Somehow the visitors always won and yet, after apparently taking every game, we lost the war. In 1975, the United States finally turned out the lights on the war effort, having lost more than 58,000 soldiers, while killing millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians — another less noted gap. (In recent months, headlines like this one from Reuters became commonplace: “U.S. coronavirus deaths surpass Vietnam War toll” — quite true if you don’t count the dead from the countries where that war was fought.)

As others have pointed out, President Trump’s coronavirus press briefings were contemporary Five O’Clock Follies, complete with bogus victory statistics on how this country leads the world in Covid-19 testing. It’s worth remembering, however, that modern presidential dissembling hardly began with Donald Trump.

Sadly enough, the credibility gap is associated with Lyndon Johnson who, from 1963 to 1968, actually presided over the country’s greatest efforts to end poverty since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Great Depression-era New Deal. He also oversaw the first organized federal-level challenges to racial injustice since Reconstruction. If it weren’t for the Vietnam War, Johnson might be remembered today for another “war” entirely, his War on Poverty, which gave us Head Start, an academic and nutritional enrichment program for poor children, and Medicare, guaranteeing healthcare for people 65 and older. And it was Johnson who finagled — through a Congress that still contained a host of white supremacists — passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. None of those laws dismantled institutional racism, but each provided legal leverage for those seeking to ameliorate its worst effects.

A harvest of doubt Still, Johnson’s tragedy (and our own) was that, in those years, his Vietnam-inspired credibility gap created fertile ground in which to plant the greatest gap of all: a robust distrust of government in general, a belief that collective action at the national level represented a dangerous and intractable obstacle to the common good. Partially thanks to that very credibility gap, he would be succeeded by Richard Nixon, who would continue the Vietnam War in an increasingly mendacious fashion, including the secret bombing of Cambodia. Nixon’s CIA would also give secret moral and logistical support to General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, plunging that country into decades of torture, murder, and dictatorship.

Nixon’s own presidency collapsed under the weight of the duplicity and corruption that came to be known as “Watergate.” So redolent of scandal did the name of that Washington office complex (where Nixon’s minions burgled Democratic National Committee headquarters) become, that decades of scandals-to-come would regularly be labeled “gates” of various sorts. The latest is, of course, “Obamagate,” Donald Trump’s attempt to conjure up a scandal out of thin air about our last president. When the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker tried to winkle an actual definition of the supposed crime involved out of the president, he replied, “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”

Ronald Reagan would go on to manipulate Johnson’s and Nixon’s inheritance of distrust over his eight years in office. In his January 1981 inaugural address, he proclaimed that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” He then set out to dismantle Johnson’s War on Poverty programs, attacking the unions that underpinned white working-class prosperity, and generally starving the beast of government. We’re still living with the legacies of that credo.

The Reagan revolution, as it was called, actually continued in the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Republican Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the House of Representatives, supposedly helped write what would be called the Contract with America. Originally conceived in the bowels of the conservative Heritage Foundation, that document contained language taken directly from Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union address. It enshrined his version of the credibility gap in 10 pieces of proposed legislation. Among them were mandatory sentencing laws that helped make the U.S. the world’s leader in mass incarceration. Keeping so many people in jail is a curious outcome for an initiative supposedly rooted in a commitment to getting government out of people’s lives.

Nor should we forget those lies about Saddam Hussein’s reputed weapons of mass destruction and his links to al-Qaeda. This doctored intelligence allowed President George W. Bush to launch his much-desired, and disastrous, invasion and occupation of Iraq — another credibility gap-based folly of the first order.

Now, after three and a half years of Donald Trump, many Americans and much of the world simply accept that the U.S. has a credibility chasm of a previously unimaginable sort. Somehow, it’s become so much the norm that, even as the Washington Post has tallied up 18,000 of Trump’s “false and misleading statements,” few Americans expect to have a president who actually tells the truth anymore. The credibility gap of the 1960s and 1970s, the distrust it engendered in the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention the credibility follies of George W. Bush, all paved the way for a president who would lie multiple times a day while continuing to dismantle government policies that protect ordinary Americans and the environment that sustains their lives.

Indeed, on May 19th, President Trump issued an executive order to “combat the economic consequences of Covid-19” by insisting all agencies “address this economic emergency by rescinding, modifying, waiving, or providing exemptions from regulations and other requirements that may inhibit economic recovery…” Add this to the damage his administration has already done to regulations protecting our air, water, wetlands, and national monuments and you’re way beyond gaps.

OK, Boomer The credibility gap and the war that generated it gave rise to another kind of division: “the generation gap.” Largely (though not entirely) a white middle-class phenomenon, the phrase stood for a deepening cultural rift between the generation that had constructed the post-World War II United States and the one conscripted to fight its then-latest war. In the space of a few years, that gap, too, would quickly widen into a chasm. On one side would stand the parents who had faced down fascism in Europe and Asia, while filling the factories with Rosie the Riveters and enduring shortages and rationing at home; on the other stood their own children who, at least if they had white-collar or unionized parents, had been born into a life that promised unprecedented economic abundance.

Imagine the pain of those parents when their children, heading out onto the streets to protest Washington’s latest war, rejected that life of security and plenty for which they had sacrificed much and the values that went with it. Imagine the pain of those privileged but anxious children, growing up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, for whom a promised world of security, plenty, and freedom came to seem ever more like a cheat and a mirage. Imagine their sense of betrayal when a growing Civil Rights Movement revealed that plenty and freedom had always been grotesquely ill distributed in the Land of the Free. Imagine their shock when they realized that the price of plenty was another kind of unfreedom — felt in uniform in distant Southeast Asia where American soldiers were committing murderous acts to support a standard of living dependent on the extraction of cheap raw materials from impoverished developing nations.

Imagine how they felt when they discovered that their parents were prepared to send thousands of them to die in an immoral and pointless war. The Canadian poet Leonard Cohen captured this horror in his song of that moment, “The Story of Isaac and Abraham,” a mournful rendering of the biblical tale of a father willing to obey a god even if it meant slaughtering his own child. As Cohen’s Isaac said to the parents of the Vietnam War era:

“You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children,
You must not do it anymore…”

Fifty years ago this spring, such sacrifices seemed plentiful enough. The National Guard, called onto the campus of Kent State University in Ohio to suppress students protesting the invasion of Cambodia, shot and killed four of them. Just weeks later, local police killed two protesting African-American students and wounded 12 more at Jackson State University in Mississippi. No wonder that when we looked at the hands of our parents’ generation, they seemed to cradle what Cohen called “their hatchets blunt and bloody.” No wonder our unofficial slogan then was: “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

Today, however, boomers like me stand on the other side of a new generation gap. We’re the ones younger people increasingly feel they shouldn’t trust. And who can blame them? If we ever consent to get off stage along with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the rest of them, we’ll be leaving behind a shattered planet, including the most profound economic inequality in a century, mass extinctions of every sort, and a climate crisis that threatens all of humanity, starting with the poorest of us.

Mending the gaps And then came the coronavirus. Although Covid-19 kills people of all ages, it’s been deadliest among the old — especially old people living in “congregate settings,” also known as nursing homes. (It seems, in fact, to rampage through just about anyplace — like prisons or meatpacking plants — where people are squashed together.) If I were in my twenties or thirties today, maybe I’d be tempted to accept a mass culling of boomers as the price of “reopening” — or (as the Trump campaign’s new slogan has it) a new “Transition to Greatness.” In fact, however, it only seems to be members of my own generation, like Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who are echoing Republican talking points by calling on “lots of grandparents” to risk their lives to get the economy going again.

Americans are suffering under lockdown. Almost 40 million of us have filed for unemployment and a third of us show signs of clinical anxiety and/or depression. At the same time, boomers who are paying attention already know that the millennial generation — those born between 1981 and 1996 — will not experience the economic bonanza that made life so relatively comfortable for our era’s white working and middle classes. Those days are not coming back. The coronavirus is the third major recession that has savaged their jobs and earnings.

The coronavirus has changed my university, too. Halfway through the term, we moved online and the students I knew in person turned into little faces in boxes on my computer screen. Even through that strange medium, however, I could feel how frightening the world looks to graduating seniors today. It was bad enough a decade ago, when graduates were leaving school in the midst of the Great Recession of 2008. They knew that it might take decades to catch up economically with friends who’d finished just a couple of years earlier.

Now, this cohort is facing something far worse. But the funny thing is, frightened as they are, they seem to be determined that the world on the other side of this pandemic must be different than the one they stood to inherit a few short months ago. They don’t want things to get “back to normal.” Over and over this spring, they described the pandemic as an opportunity for a radical break with the way things were BC (Before Covid-19). That determination is pretty inspiring to this weary old boomer.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 June 2020

Word Count: 2,396

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Class of 2020, wherever you are, I had planned to address you on this graduation day. But how can I?

Yes, I know that former President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks all took part in elaborate online graduation ceremonies, offering commentary, advice, and encouragement in our now campus-less world, but I’m a hapless old guy with a flip phone from another age. And, of course, you’re not here on this glorious, sunny graduation day. There’s no verdant campus. No gowns. No caps to toss in the air. No gate to walk out of into a future that many of you mortgaged your lives to be part of. Nor is there a crowd of joyous parents and grandparents, some of whom may even have grown desperately sick and possibly died in these last months thanks to the Trump administration’s catastrophic response to a global pandemic.

Nor are there other more eminent speakers to give you hope or inspiration. Just me. Just here. Just now. All alone in this room — and you there, wherever you are, perhaps alone or with family, brooding about a world that may never be, about a future that, it seems increasingly likely, can’t be and won’t be.

Your future, as previously imagined, is — not to put too fine a gloss on it — no more. In a sense, it has already become my future and since, at almost 76, I really don’t have much of a future, that’s a terrible thing for an old man to have to say.

The pandemic shock Still, since I’m here and you’re there, let me address you in my own way by starting with the obvious: You deserved so much better than this. I’m ashamed, deeply so. Every adult in this country (except perhaps the front-line caregivers and workers who have sacrificed so much in this pandemic moment for the rest of us) should be similarly ashamed.

And that brings me to one obvious question: Why aren’t so many of us, especially those in that deeply loyal base of Donald Trump’s, more ashamed of the world they’re preparing to leave you, even as their own worlds crash and burn around them?

In the end, we could be talking about nothing less than the destruction of the planet as we humans have known it for thousands of years. To put matters bluntly, that base helped elect, and continues to support, a president who aims to be nothing less than a planet destroyer. That’s been an obvious goal of Donald Trump and his Republican allies and sycophants since his election. It’s what they were clearly dedicated to (however they explained it to themselves) even before the coronavirus arrived to offer such a helping hand.

But let me say this: at my age, I’m still shocked by what’s happened in these last months. It wasn’t that I didn’t know about the Black Death and the destruction it wreaked on Medieval Europe or China in the fourteenth century or even the devastation and death caused by the Spanish Flu barely a century ago. Still, never for a second did I actually imagine this happening to us in the here and now, with the dead and dying, the sick and desperate, jobs lost by the tens of millions, businesses destroyed. I never thought that such a pandemic would descend on us or that it would do so with such a president and crew in power in Washington.

I mean, what else do you need to know about our world at this moment than that a series of countries led by democratically inclined women (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Taiwan) have more or less suppressed the coronavirus (at least for now)? Meanwhile, in the viral sweepstakes presently engulfing parts of the Earth, the three leading lands when it comes to record numbers of cases are Donald Trump’s America, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In other words, it’s no happenstance that three autocratically inclined right-wing “populists” who give more of a damn about themselves than anything else imaginable are winning the race to hell.

There’s something about our world growing ever worse amid a Covid-19-induced instant Great Depression that makes you — that is, me — feel so small, so inconsequential, which is, of course, exactly what I am, what just about any of us is in this coronaviral moment. But why me or you and not him? That question’s been preying on my mind — and you know just who I mean.

In these last weeks, only Donald Trump’s most devoted followers, those at the heart of his base, could really do anything they wanted in public, because, following him as they did, they didn’t believe in shutting themselves in, social distancing, wearing masks, or anything else that the scientists tell us might help slow down this deadly virus or bring it under control. So they’ve felt free to mix and match and destroy (themselves above all).

Collapsing roofs The question is: how did we get here? How did we make it to such a leader and such followers in such a crisis? We’re talking about a man who, unlike President Herbert Hoover, may usher us into a true Great Depression and possibly not suffer a staggering defeat at the polls in November, as that president did in 1932. (Of course, to put things in perspective, Joe Biden isn’t exactly Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is he?)

If you’re wondering how all this could have happened in such a fashion, and why that base of the president’s remains so remarkably faithful amid the rubble of our world, I offered my own answer years ago. After all, there never was much of a question about Donald Trump himself. He was, without a doubt, a self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, self-absorbed monster of a man and — to give him full credit — he never made the slightest secret of who he was. Nonetheless, in the middle of election season 2016, when it became increasingly obvious to me that he had a real shot at beating Hillary Clinton and becoming president of the United States, I started wondering why that might be so.

That June, as the presidential race was heating to a boil, I offered my own pre-answer to all such future questions. In a piece at TomDispatch, I suggested that, in a country of already grotesque inequality,

 

“a significant part of the white working class, at least, feels as if, whether economically or psychologically, its back is up against the wall and there’s nowhere left to go. Under such circumstances, many of these voters have evidently decided that they’re ready to send a literal loose cannon into the White House; they’re willing, that is, to take a chance on the roof collapsing, even if it collapses on them.”

Yes, even if it collapses on them. I also pointed out that “The Donald represents, as a friend of mine likes to say, the suicide bomber in us all,” adding that a vote for him would be “an act of nihilism, a mood that fits well with imperial decline.”

Nihilism indeed. Donald Trump, the birther king, was then visibly the opposite of great, despite that MAGA slogan of his. He was, from the beginning, a degraded (or, if you prefer, de-greated) personification of imperial decline. And now that the roof has indeed collapsed on his base, among so many others, his personal responsibility for the severity with which it’s happened should be obvious enough. Still, don’t kid yourself: everything about this America of ours suggests that, for a significant minority of the population, it’s not. Not yet, perhaps not ever.

And here’s the weirdest thing for me: I answered that question in 2016, but all these years later, as I address you on graduation day 2020, I have yet to fully accept it. At some level, I still can’t believe it and I’ll bet you can’t either.

What it means to “transition to Greatness” in 2020 America One thing is now clear enough to me. If Covid-19 hadn’t helped that roof collapse, something else would have because, even before the pandemic broke out, even before he was in office, Donald Trump and his crew-to-be were already intent on the destruction of the world as we’ve known it. Don’t think, by the way, that I’m speaking figuratively. Imagine the three obvious ways our world could be desperately degraded — climate change, nuclear Armageddon, or massive environmental destruction — and in the years before Covid-19 arrived on our shores, Trump and crew were hard at work on all three.

This was, after all, the man who called climate change a “Chinese hoax” long before he ever got near the White House. And erratic as he may look, he’s been remarkably steadfast in a deeper way ever since. Note, for instance, that even then he was already blaming every problem in the world on two things: China and Barack Obama, as he is now. (“Wuhan virus!” “Obamagate!”) And long before the pandemic hit, he and his crew were deeply engaged in ensuring that this planet would become the hothouse from hell. Whether by leaving the Paris climate accord or opening the way for methane gas releases, expanding offshore drilling or encouraging Arctic drilling while freeing coal plants to release more mercury into the atmosphere, he and his associates have engaged in a grim version of “make it so,” the famed line of Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s USS Enterprise. In these years, largely in the service of Big Energy, he and his crew have transformed themselves into so many pyromaniacs.

In a similar fashion, Trump and his team have turned their attention to ensuring that this planet would once again be swept up in a nuclear arms race. In these years, from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to the Open Skies Treaty, his administration has systematically withdrawn from Cold War-era nuclear pacts. At the same time, they’ve been pouring money into what’s euphemistically called the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in amounts only matched by the other eight nuclear powers combined. They are now reportedly even considering restarting underground nuclear testing (abandoned 28 years ago) and possibly pulling out of the final significant Cold War nuclear agreement, the New START Treaty, early next year.

Similarly, as with climate change, his administration, especially the Environmental Protection Agency, has worked with striking intensity to roll back environment rules and regulations of every sort — the New York Times recently toted up 100 of them — again largely in the service of the desires of Big Energy. In other words, they’ve focused on ensuring that this country has significantly dirtier, more polluted air, water, and wetlands, while far more toxic chemicals are floating in our all-American world. Meanwhile, he and his people have been similarly hard at work endangering the Endangered Species Act.

And this was all before the president ignored his own scientists and advisers on the coming pandemic, ensuring that tens of thousands of extra Americans (or, in his terms perhaps, extraneous Americans) would die by shutting down the country significantly too late and remarkably ineptly. He then guaranteed that yet more would die by reopening it too soon — and by swearing, while he was at it, that no matter what hit this country next, he would never “close it down” again. All of this he recently termed a “transition to Greatness.”

And imagine what will happen when any of these areas of destruction begin to reinforce one another. Consider, for instance, that in a climate-changing world, the intensity of storms is now on the rise and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center expects an “above normal” Atlantic hurricane season this fall. So check out the cyclone of record intensity that only recently hit India in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving desperate people anything but socially distanced in shelters, and then think about the coming fall here on the East Coast of the U.S. or, for that matter, what will happen when you combine the coronavirus with intensifying wildfires in the West.

A conundrum planet So that roof I was thinking about in 2016 has indeed come down to varying degrees on just about every American and yet Donald Trump may not be the new Herbert Hoover.

Or put another way, on this, your graduation day, I’m sending you out into his world and that of the Mitch McConnellized party that hitched its wagon to his horse. (Imagine that, once upon a time, the Republicans were considered the party of the environment!) On such a planet, there is just one thing that matters to those in power — and no, I’m sorry to say that it’s not you. It’s his reelection, which means so much more than life, liberty, or the pursuit of anyone’s happiness other than his own. If his numbers weaken the slightest bit among aging evangelicals, for instance, then it’s time to open the churches NOW!! If, however, your numbers weaken, as indeed they have, tough luck.

If he wants a full-scale in-person convention (and so the televised extravaganza that will go with it) for that reelection bid, then make it so and to hell with the delegates themselves or their hosts in Charlotte, North Carolina (or wherever it ends up). And good luck to the Democrats keeping Joe Biden in a basement somewhere and potentially holding a virtual convention!

Donald Trump’s base elected a planet destroyer and he’s never let them (or himself) down. In that sense, he’s been fulfilling his duties big time. So, on your graduation day, welcome to a world in which the ceiling’s on the floor. I know I’m supposed to offer you words of wisdom and encouragement today, but how can I? Not when we’ve now reached the true moment of Trumpian nihilism. Why not golf while scores of Americans die even if you did criticize the previous president for his golfing habits? (“Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf?”)

This is the moment when I would normally say: class of 2020, gather yourselves together and, arm in arm, take this path through that gate and off this beautiful campus where you’ve just spent four years of your life. It’s time for you to enter our world and make it a better place.

Today, however, there is no path; there is no gate; and you can’t join hands (not unless you’re fervent supporters of Donald Trump). You’re graduating not into a world but into a conundrum. I know you’ll do your damnedest. After all, what can any of us do but that? Still, my heart goes out to you, though little good that’s likely to do.

I’m sorry. I truly am. You didn’t deserve this.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 June 2020

Word Count: 2,466

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Many economists believe that a recession is already underway. So do millions of Americans struggling with bills and job losses. While the ghosts of the 2008 financial crisis that sent inequality soaring to new heights in this country are still with us, it’s become abundantly clear that the economic disaster brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has already left the initial shock of that crisis in the dust. While the world has certainly experienced its share of staggering jolts in the past, this cycle of events is likely to prove unparalleled.

The swiftness with which the coronavirus has stolen lives and crippled the economy has been both devastating and unprecedented in living memory. Whatever happens from this moment on, a new and defining chapter in the history of the world is being written right now and we are that history.

Still, to get our bearings, it’s worth glancing back nearly a century, to a time when another economic crisis ravaged the country. While the U.S. has come a long way since the Great Depression, there are still lessons to be learned from it about where we might be heading today. Four key factors from that era — unemployment, the economy, the market, and the Federal Reserve’s response — can provide us with a roadmap for putting this era into historical context.

Unemployment then and now In 1933, the height of the Great Depression, the U.S. unemployment rate reached a stunning 24.9%. In an eerie parallel with today, that double-digit increase had leapt from an era of remarkably low unemployment, 3.2% in the crash year of 1929. By mid-1931, mass layoffs were the new norm and despair was acute and widespread.

Fast forward to the present. In February, the unemployment rate stood at a similar 3.5%. Yet, by May 22nd, in the aftermath of city and state shutdowns and coronavirus shocks, including the collapse of the airline industry and professional sports, new filings for unemployment claims hit an estimated 40 million in 10 weeks, the most jobs lost in the shortest period in American history.

In April, the official unemployment rate reached 14.7%, the worst since the Great Depression, and that official figure doesn’t even account for the full scope of the disaster underway. It excludes workers the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers “marginally attached” to the workforce, meaning those not looking for a job because the prospects are so dim, or those who were only laboring part-time. If you factor them in, the unemployment rate already stands at a Great Depression-level 22.8%. Some industries, of course, felt more pain than others. Employment in the leisure and hospitality sector, for instance, fell in April by 7.7 million, or 47%.

Worse yet, low-wage workers have taken the hardest hit. According to a recent Federal Reserve survey, although one in five American workers have lost their jobs, among the lowest-earning Americans, 40% have done so. Among the highest-earning American workers (many of whom could work from home), the rate was “only” 9%.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard has already predicted that the unemployment rate could reach 30% before the end of June. Other Fed economists have suggested that it could go even higher, exceeding Great Depression levels, a chilling thought. As the country, pushed by President Trump’s reelection desires, “reopens” relatively quickly (at whatever cost in further Covid-19 deaths), many workers will undoubtedly be brought back or rehired, but there’s no avoiding the obvious reality that any number of “temporary” layoffs will become permanent realities.

The economy: A century apart yet much the same When Covid-19 first hit and self-isolation set in, the stock market plunged and many businesses were forced to shut down normal operations. Various economists and media commentators then began musing about a V-shaped economic rebound — that is, a quick drop followed by a quick recovery.

As the fallout and uncertainty only expanded, however, it’s become increasingly evident that such a pattern was a fantasy. At this point, the best recovery outcome imaginable would be U-shaped in which the bottoming-out period lasted significantly longer before we started heading up again. But don’t count on that either. Consider the possibility of an elongated L, in which for the vast majority of Americans the economy just limps along for endless months, if not years (even if the stock market rallies).

In 1930, the American gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 8.5% as the economy contracted in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. It would shrink a further 6.4% in 1931 and another 12.9% in 1932. It wasn’t just the crash that did in that economy. The economic excesses of the 1920s and the borrowing that supported it were also responsible. Money funneled into the stock market in a previous age of inequality fueled grotesque financial speculation. Instead of financing productive investments, the markets provided only the illusion of stability and prosperity while enriching the few at the top. (Sound familiar in the age of Donald Trump?)

Yet the Republican president of that moment, Herbert Hoover, didn’t want to admit that the bottom had truly fallen out on his watch. On May Day 1930, for instance, he declared, “We have now passed the worst, and with continued unity of effort, we shall rapidly recover.” (Such a claim, too, should ring a few bells in 2020 America.) That statement became the marker for a nearly two-year Dow Jones average dive to a Depression-low of a mere 41 points on July 8, 1932. His inability to truly take in what was right in front of his eyes only lengthened the Great Depression.

Turning to the present, the CARES Act, signed into law by President Trump on March 27th, unleashed an estimated $2.2 trillion in government relief (significant parts of which were aimed at giant corporations and the wealthy). That, combined with the Federal Reserve’s backing of the economy, could add up to perhaps $6.2 trillion. What promptly transpired for Wall Street, which had previously seen the Dow plunge 34%, was one of the best months for the stock market in more than 33 years.

Beltway leaders had learned the pivotal lesson of the moment: even if the market’s not the economy, it always craves more. They stood ready to green-light Wall Street with yet another stimulus package skewed to help corporate interests, even as the majority of Americans on Main Street were simply left further behind.

Meanwhile, the gross domestic product had fallen 4.8% in the first quarter of 2020, before Covid-19 and the corresponding social shutdown really hit hard. In other words, GDP for the second quarter of this year is guaranteed to be truly awful. Estimates of its contraction range from 20% to 30%, either of which would eclipse the contractions of the Great Depression era.

The stock market: A casino shadowing an economic problem The Roaring Twenties claimed that moniker not just thanks to the free-flowing bootlegged booze but rampant financial speculation — and the lack of rules to protect citizens from nefarious Wall Street shenanigans. Having hit record highs in the summer of 1929, stock prices began their decline that September. By mid-October, the fall had gained steam. On October 24th, as panic set in on what would become known as “Black Thursday,” a then-record 12,894,650 shares were traded by investors and speculators seeking to lock in profits before the bottom fell out of the market.

By the next Monday — “Black Monday” — it had gone into free fall. And that would be followed by “Black Tuesday,” when stock prices plummeted yet further amid record trading volume. Billions of dollars were lost and thousands of investors wiped out. (Once upon a time, I even wrote a novel about that era called — you guessed it — Black Tuesday.)

By then, the Dow had dropped 24.8% in three days, though for several weeks thereafter stock prices would partially recover and bond prices rise on rumors that the Federal Reserve was going to purchase government securities. (Again, that should sound familiar in 2020.)

Bankers, then fortified by the Fed, did indeed inject yet more speculative money into the market in the post-crash moment, yet none of this could hide what were by then obvious systemic problems in the economy, which meant that prices soon headed south again. By July 1932, stocks were worth only 20% of their 1929 values and the country had plunged into the Great Depression. It would take years, substantive federal action, and ultimately an industrial mobilization for World War II to truly turn the situation around.

Fast forward to 2020. By March 23rd, when the coronavirus sell-off was underway, the Dow had lost about 35% of its value. Since then, equity markets, though down significantly from their February peaks, have rallied and the Dow has risen about 30%.

As in 1929-1930, this could all prove to be an illusion, especially since the market’s April rally did not reflect the longer-term economic issues that lie ahead. It was in large part a response to something that didn’t exist during those crash years of the Great Depression: an extremely amped up Federal Reserve.

The Fed: A revamped mechanism from the last depression In the wake of the Crash of 1929, Wall Street bankers pushed the Fed to keep interest rates low so they could borrow money more easily to make up for their losses. In May 1932, the Fed finally initiated a massive bond-buying program, agreeing to purchase $26 million of them from its member banks each week.

The idea was that those banks would sell their U.S. Treasury bonds to the Fed and use that money to pay off their debts. They could then lend out the remaining cash to a desperate Main Street. As it happened, however, they didn’t launch such a generous loan program (another Great Depression reality that might ring a bell today).

The Fed eventually lowered rates from to 2.5% in 1934 to 1.5% in September 1937 to inject more money into the system. That did not, however, inspire an outpouring of lending either, nor did rates make it down to zero.

In the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns, the Fed has indeed cut rates to zero. As Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on May 13th, “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent, significantly worse than any recession since World War II.” He added: “We have acted with unprecedented speed and force.” His counterpart, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, even termed what was going on “a war.”

Because of quantitative easing — the Fed’s purchasing of securities, a term that didn’t exist in the Great Depression era — its balance sheet now sits at nearly $7 trillion spent. That’s almost double the figure from just last summer and equivalent to one-third of the $21.5 trillion gross domestic product. The Fed has been injecting money into the markets and scarfing up securities backed by debt at — to steal a term the president only recently applied toward developing a coronavirus vaccine — “warp speed.”

With a genuine arsenal at its disposal to fight this “war,” the Fed’s activities are jacked up on the financial equivalent of steroids. The nation’s central bank is prepared to provide money to the financial system in quantities and ways unimaginable in the Great Depression era.

Why history matters What’s happening today is not, of course, a replica of the Great Depression. That nightmare was catalyzed by a prolonged market crash, thanks to banks lying about the real value of certain securities and too much debt in the system. Today’s crisis has been catalyzed by a viral pandemic spreading across the planet, by supply-and-demand shocks the world over, and by the collapse of a global economic system, as well as widespread lockdowns. Yet certain factors are common to both eras in which economic disaster was exacerbated by too much corporate debt, a Fed-stoked market rally, and grotesque levels of inequality.

A century ago, the Fed put just a financial toe in the water to support the markets on the assumption that this would be enough to sustain the economy. Today, it has jumped in big time and Chairman Powell has vowed that it “is not going to run out of ammunition.” The result could be a financial tug of war that lasts years.

The Fed can electronically print money, but it can’t print jobs. It can buy bonds, but it can’t cure a virus. It can continue to try to stimulate the market, but it can’t banish fear. As it happens, the economy needs much more than Fed-style monetary support. As even Powell noted on May 13th, “Additional fiscal support could be costly, but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery. This tradeoff is one for our elected representatives, who wield powers of taxation and spending.”

What’s needed, above all, is greater strategic action from Washington politicians who are more desperately divided and tribalized than ever in the Trump era. History tells us that political actions matter even more in times of crisis. During the Great Depression, the state of the country became so bad that, in 1932, Herbert Hoover lost the presidential vote to Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide. However, it took until 1934, even with a president ready to do much to help Americans in trouble, for the country to slowly emerge from the malaise.

Though unemployment remained near 22% then, the national mood lifted (and people started to spend again) in part thanks to growing confidence in President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Those included the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority — the nation’s first regional supplier of public power — numerous jobs programs, and the passage of the Social Security Act. Add to that the regulation of the banking system through the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which protected ordinary people’s bank deposits and note as well that such forward-looking, economy-stabilizing programs were bipartisan acts.

In the face of devastation today, despite multi-trillion-dollar federal stimulus packages, real political action has been lackluster at best. Relief efforts have been skewed toward helping banks and big corporations rather than the Main Street economy. No substantive plan has been offered for real national action to get people working again in ways that would reflect the new norms of the Covid-19 era.

Roosevelt saw such an opportunity to bolster confidence by taking on banking reform (with the surprising help of bankers), launching public works initiatives, and establishing infrastructure programs meant to build up the nation, the very opposite of the speculative activity that enflamed the Crash of 1929. That’s just the sort of thing that’s needed to sustain the economy in our truly bad times (whether the coronavirus becomes seasonal or not).

Floating trillions to Wall Street banks and big corporations might push their share prices up, but it won’t solve the issues that truly matter. Struggling small businesses, stranded high school and college graduates with nowhere to land, and workers in devastated businesses that won’t see their jobs return any time soon are now guaranteed one thing: they’ll be left behind by just about any version of an attempted bipartisan “recovery.” For them, a Newer Deal is desperately needed, one that provides a cushion for workers, new openings for the young, better healthcare prospects for all, and infrastructure projects that meet the challenges of a post-coronavirus world.

As President Roosevelt told Americans in the midst of the Great Depression: “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

As long as Donald Trump is in the White House, focusing on optimizing his reelection prospects, he alone has a rendezvous with destiny. But it’s crucial, now more than ever, not to lose sight of the dream that tomorrow can be better than today. The only real way forward, in the end, is to meet the complex challenges of the Covid-19 moment with creative and long-lasting solutions.

Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). Her latest book is Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. She is also the author of All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power and five other books. Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb work on this piece.

Copyright ©2020 Nomi Prins — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 May 2020

Word Count: 2,664

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Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy, may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question America’s most malignant policies at home and abroad.

Regarding Washington’s war policies abroad, there’s been speculation that the coronavirus might, in the end, put a dent in such conflicts, if not prove an unintended peacemaker — and with good reason, since a cash-flush Pentagon has proven impotent as a virus challenger. Meanwhile, it’s become ever more obvious that, had a fraction of “defense” spending been invested in chronically underfunded disease control agencies, this country’s response to the coronavirus crisis might have been so much better.

Curiously enough, though, despite President Trump’s periodic complaints about America’s “ridiculous endless wars,” his administration has proven remarkably unwilling to agree to even a modest rollback in U.S. imperial ambitions. In some theaters of operation — Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Somalia above all — Washington has even escalated its militarism in a fit of macabre, largely under-the-radar pandemic opportunism.

For all that, this is an obvious moment to reflect on whether America’s nearly two-decade-old “war on terror” (perhaps better thought of as a set of wars of terror) might actually end. Predictions are tricky matters. Nonetheless, the spread of Covid-19 has offered a rare opportunity to raise questions, challenge frameworks, and critically consider what “ending” war might even mean for this country.

In some sense, our post-9/11 wars have been gradually subsiding for some time now. Even though the total number of U.S. troops deployed to the Middle East has actually risen in the Trump years, those numbers pale when compared to the U.S. commitment at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The number of American soldiers taking fire overseas has, in recent years, dropped to levels unthinkably low for those of us who entered the military around the time of the 9/11 attacks.

That said, in these years, even unwinnable, unnecessary wars have proven remarkably unendable. For evidence of this, look no further than that perennial war hawk Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Given the lack of success of the various campaigns run by U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, across that continent and the Pentagon’s stated desire to once again pivot to great-power competition with China and Russia, just before the pandemic arrived on our shores Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced plans for a modest troop drawdown in parts of Africa. Appalled by even such minor retrenchments, Graham, leading a bipartisan group of lawmakers, reportedly confronted Esper and threatened to make his “life hell,” should the secretary downsize U.S. forces there.

Less than two months later, AFRICOM declared a public-health emergency at the largest of this country’s African bases in Djibouti amid concerns that even far smaller, more spartan American facilities on that continent lacked the requisite medical equipment to fight the spreading virus. Whether the pandemic facilitates Esper’s contemplated reductions remains to be seen. (A mid-April AFRICOM press release offering reassurance that the “command’s partnership endures during Covid-19” doesn’t bode well for such a transformation.)

Still, the disease will surely have some effect. Just as quarantine and social-distancing measures have transformed people’s lives and work in the U.S., Washington’s war fighting will undoubtedly have to adapt, too. Minimally, expect the Pentagon to wage wars (largely hidden from public view) that require ever fewer of its troops to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with allies and fewer still to die doing so. Expect Washington to mandate and the Pentagon to practice what might increasingly be thought of as social-distancing-style warfare.

Soldiers will operate in ever smaller teams. Just as senior leaders constantly counseled us junior officers in the bad old days to “put an Iraqi face between you and the problem,” so today’s and tomorrow’s troopers will do their best to place drones or (less precious) proxy lives between themselves and enemies of any sort. Meanwhile, the already immense chasm between the American public and the wars being fought in its name is only likely to widen. What may emerge from these years is a version of war so unrecognizable that, while still unending, it may no longer pass for war in the classic sense.

To grasp how we’ve made it to a social-distancing version of war, it’s necessary to go back to the earlier part of this century, years before a pandemic like Covid-19 was on anyone’s radar screen.

American wars don’t end, they evolve When, as a young Army lieutenant and later captain, I joined what were then called “surges” in Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2011, conventional foot soldiers like me were the main game in town. The doctrine of counterinsurgency, or COIN, then ruled the Pentagon’s intellectual roost. The trick, so key commanders believed, was to flood the war zone with infantry brigades, securing the conflict’s “center of gravity”: the locals. Behind the scenes, Special Operations units were already taking on ever-larger roles. Nevertheless, there were ample “boots-on-the-ground” and relatively high casualties in conventional units like mine.

Times have changed. Full-scale invasions and long-term occupations, along with COIN as a war-on-terror cure-all, long ago fell out of favor. By Barack Obama’s second term, such unpopular and costly campaigns were passé. Even so, rather than rethink the efficacy of imperial interventionism, Washington simply substituted new methods masquerading as the latest strategy of success.

By the time Donald Trump delivered his “American carnage” inaugural address, the burdens of Washington war-making had flipped. When I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, about half of the Army’s 40-odd combat brigades were deployed in those two regional theaters at any given time. The remainder were training for their next rotations and already on the “patch chart” where each unit’s logo indicated its future scheduled deployment. This was the life on the conveyor belt of American war that a generation of soldiers like me lived. By January 2017, however, the number of conventional brigades deployed in the war on terror could be counted on one hand.

For instance, the Army’s most recent round of deployments, announced this April, included just six brigades. Of these, two were aviation units and, among the ground forces, one was headed for Europe, another for Kuwait. Only two ground combat brigades, in other words, were slated for Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan and one of them was a reconstituted Security Force Assistance Brigade — essentially a skeleton crew of officers and noncommissioned officers meant to train and advise local troops. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces, which had by then crested above 70,000, a figure so large as to raise questions about how “special” they remained, stepped onto that conveyor belt. America’s commandos now bear most of the burden of forever-war deployments and (modest) casualties.

A two-tier war-making system When the virus struck, the Pentagon had long been developing a bifurcated military machine with two separate and largely discrete roles. The commandos — with key assists from drones, CIA paramilitaries, local proxies, and private security contractors — continued to fight the lingering war on terror. They were generally handling the lethal end of American war, calling in airstrikes, while training, advising, and sometimes even leading often abusive indigenous forces.

Conventional active-duty brigades — reduced to 32 — were largely given quite a different task: to prepare for a future revamped Cold War with Russia and, increasingly, China. That crew — infantry, armored brigades, and Navy carrier squadrons — had the “new,” purportedly vital mission of checking, containing, or challenging Moscow in Eastern Europe and Beijing in the South China Sea. Senior generals and admirals were comfortable with such Cold War-style tasks (most having been commissioned in the mid-1980s). However, viewed from Russia or China, such missions looked increasingly provocative as ever more American riflemen, tanks, and warships regularly deployed to former Soviet republics or, in the case of the Navy, to Western Pacific waters that abut China, making the risk of accidental escalation seem ever more conceivable.

Meanwhile, those shadowy special operators were directing the ongoing shooting wars and other conflicts, which, though given precious little attention in this country, seemed patently counterproductive, not to say unwinnable. For the Pentagon and military-industrial-complex profiteers, however, such unending brushfire conflicts, along with a new great power build-up, were the gift that just kept giving, a two-tiered modus operandi for endless war-funding.

Enter the coronavirus.

In cold blood Thought of a certain way, American war will, in the future, increasingly be waged in cold blood. While Covid-19 spreads virally through respiratory droplets, the disease of endless war continues to be blood-borne (even if ever less of it is American blood), ensuring that the social-distancing-style combat of the future could become even more of an abstraction here.

In addition, the preferred post-pandemic warriors of that future may not be uniformed soldiers, special or otherwise, or necessarily American — or in some cases (think drones and future robotic weaponry) human. U.S. war fighting has already been increasingly privatized. Only recently, Erik Prince, the former CEO of the private military company Blackwater, an influential Trump ally as well as the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, pitched the president on a far-fetched plan to privatize the whole Afghan War.

The Donald passed on the offer, but that it was even considered at such a high level suggests the role of private contractors and soldiers of fortune in future American war-making may be here to stay. In that sense, the recent fiasco of an armed raid led by former Green Berets-turned-mercenaries and aimed at the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro may prove as much a foreboding glimpse of the future as it was a farce.

When uniformed U.S. service members are deemed necessary, the trend toward using just handfuls of them to run an increasingly proxy-war machine is likely to accelerate. Such teams will fit well with public-health guidelines limiting gatherings to 10 people. For instance, drone ground control stations, essentially mobile trailers, require only a pair of operators. Similarly, the military’s newest cyberwar branch (formed in 2015) may not be made up of the hackers of Donald Trump’s imagination (“somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”), but they, too, will work in tiny teams abroad, and at a great distance. Pushing those guidelines just a tad will be Army Special Forces A-Teams of 12 Green Berets each, which may prove to be core building blocks for a new American version of post-pandemic warfare.

Most disturbingly, American social-distancing ways of war will likely operate smoothly enough without suppressing terrorist groups any more successfully than the previous versions of forever war did, or solving local ethno-religious conflicts, or improving the lives of Africans or Arabs. Like their predecessors, future American wars in cold blood will fail, but with efficiency and, from the point of view of the military-industrial complex, lucratively.

Here, of course, is the deep and tragic paradox of it all. As the coronavirus should have reminded us, the true existential threats to the United States (and humanity) — disease pandemics, a potential nuclear Armageddon, and climate change — will be impervious to Washington’s usual military tools. No matter the number of warships, infantry and armored brigades, or commando teams, none of them will stand a chance against lethal viruses, rising tides, or nuclear fallout. As such, the Pentagon’s plethora of tanks, aircraft carriers (themselves petri-dishes for any virus around), and towers of cash (sorely needed elsewhere) will, in the future, be monuments to an era of American delusion.

A rational (or moral) system with any semblance of genuine legislative oversight or citizen input might respond to such conspicuous realities by rethinking the national security paradigm itself and bringing the war state to a screeching halt. Unfortunately, if America’s imperial past is any precedent, what lies ahead is the further evolution of twenty-first-century imperial war to the end of time.

Post-pandemic war Still, Covid-19 may prove the death knell of American war as classically imagined. Future combat, even if broadly directed from Washington, may be only vaguely “American.” Few uniformed citizens may take part in it and even fewer die from it.

During the prolonged endgame of wars that don’t really end, U.S. military fatalities will certainly continue to occur in occasional ones and twos — often in far-flung places where few Americans even realize their country is fighting (as with those four U.S. troops killed in an ambush in Niger in 2018 and the Army soldier and two private contractors killed in Kenya earlier this year). Such minuscule American losses will actually offer Washington more leeway to quietly ramp-up its drone attacks, air power, raiding, and killing, as has already happened in Somalia, with assumedly ever less oversight or attention at home. As in the Horn of Africa of late, the Pentagon won’t even have to bother to justify escalations in its war-making. Which raises a sort of “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there…” conundrum: if the U.S. is killing brown folks around the world, but hardly anyone notices, is the country still at war?

Moving forward, policymakers and the public alike may treat war with the same degree of entitlement and abstraction as ordering items from Amazon (especially during a pandemic): Click a button, expect a package at the door posthaste, and pay scant thought to what that click-request set in motion or the sacrifice required to do the deed.

Only in war, one thing at least stays constant: lots of someones get killed. The American people may leave their wars to unrepresentative professional “volunteers” led by an unchecked imperial presidency that increasingly outsources them to machines, mercenaries, and local militias. One thing is, however, guaranteed: some poor souls will be at the other end of those bombsights and rifle barrels.

In contemporary battles, it’s already exceptionally rare that a uniformed American is on that receiving end. Almost midway through 2020, only eight U.S. service members have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yet many thousands of locals continue to die there. No one wants U.S. troops to die, but there’s something obscene — and morally troubling — about the staggering casualty disparity implicit in the developing twenty-first-century American way of war, the one that, in a Covid-19 world, is increasingly being fought in a socially-distanced way.

Taken to its not-unimaginable extreme, Americans should prepare themselves for a future in which their government kills and destroys on a global scale without a single service member dying in combat. After the pandemic, in other words, talk of “ending” this country’s forever wars may prove little more than an exercise in semantics.

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. His forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, will be published in September. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 May 2020

Word Count: 2,413

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There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.

This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.

Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.

Iraq redux? Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated to fabricating intelligence on Iraq.

Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.

In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.

To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.

To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.

Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.

It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.

The Wuhan lab lies As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.

On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared in London’s Daily Mail the previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.

A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus. Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index.)

Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, while he began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”

Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”

On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.

A finger on the scale The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, and bioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.

Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.

There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.

Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.

Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.

John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”

Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.

Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.

By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

Copyright ©2020 Bob Dreyfuss — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 May 2020

Word Count: 2,332

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This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as polar opposites and enemies: Supreme Leader Ali Khameini’s Iran and Donald Trump’s America.

On the U.S. side of things, New Orleans pastor Tony Spell, for instance, has twice been arrested for holding church services without a hint of social distancing, despite a ban on such gatherings. His second arrest was for preaching while wearing an ankle monitor and despite the Covid-19 death of at least one of his church members.

The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s famed Origin of the Species, arguing as it did for natural selection (which many American evangelicals still reject), might be considered the origin point for the modern conflict between religious beliefs and science, a struggle that has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Unexpectedly, given Iran’s reputation for religious obscurantism, the science-minded in the nineteenth and twentieth century often took heart from a collection of Persian poems, the Rubáiyát, or “quatrains,” attributed to the medieval Iranian astronomer Omar Khayyam, who died in 1131.

Edward FitzGerald’s loose translation of those poems, also published in 1859, put Khayyam on the map as a medieval Muslim free-thinker and became a century-and-a-half-long sensation in the midst of heated debates about the relationship between science and faith in the West. Avowed atheist Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney at the 1925 “monkey trial” of a Tennessee educator who broke state law by teaching evolution, was typical in his love of the Rubáiyát. He often quoted it in his closing arguments, observing that for Khayyam the “mysticisms of philosophy and religion alike were hollow and bare.”

To be fair, some religious leaders, including Pope Francis and Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, have followed the most up-to-date science, as Covid-19 spread globally, by supporting social-distancing measures to deal with the virus. When he still went by the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and lived in Buenos Aires, the Pope earned a high school chemical technician’s diploma and actually knows something about science. Indeed, the Catholic Church in Brazil has impressively upheld the World Health Organization’s guidelines for dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, defying the secular government of far right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, that country’s Donald Trump. Brazil’s president has notoriously ignored his nation’s public-health crisis, dismissed the coronavirus as a “little flu,” and tried to exempt churches from state government mandates that they close. The archbishop of the hard-hit city of Manaus in the Amazon region has, in fact, publicly complained that Brazilians are not taking the virus seriously enough as it runs rampant in the country. Church authorities worry about the strain government inaction is putting on Catholic hospitals and clinics, as well as the devastation the disease is wreaking in the region.

Here, we witness not a dispute between religion and science but between varieties of religion. Pope Francis’s Catholicism remains open to science, whereas Bolsonaro, although born a Catholic, became an evangelical and, in 2016, was even baptized as a pastor in the Jordan River. He now plays to the 22% of Brazilians who have adopted conservative Protestantism, as well as to Catholics who are substantially more conservative than the current pope. While some U.S. evangelicals are open to science, a Pew Charitable Trust poll found that they, too, are far more likely than the non-religious to reject the very idea of evolution, not to speak of the findings of climate science (action on which Pope Francis has supported in a big way).

Death in the Bible Belt In the U.S., a variety of evangelical religious leaders have failed the test of reasoned public policy in outrageous ways. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, railing at “tyrannical government,” refused to close his mega-church in Florida until the local police arrested him in March. He even insisted that church members in those services of 500 or more true believers should continue to shake hands with one another because “we’re raising up revivalists, not pansies.”

As he saw it, his River Tampa Bay Church was the “safest place” around because it was the site of “salvation.” Only in early April did he finally move his services online and it probably wasn’t to protect the health of his congregation either. His insurance company had cancelled on him after his arrest and his continued defiance of local regulations.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis muddied the waters further in early April by finally issuing a statewide shelter-in-place order that exempted churches as “essential services.” Then, after only a month, he abruptly reopened the state anyway. DeSantis, who had run a Facebook group dominated by racist comments and had risen on Donald Trump’s coattails, has a sizeable evangelical constituency and, in their actions, he and Pastor Howard-Browne have hardly been alone.

It tells you all you need to know that, by early May, more than 30 evangelical pastors had died of Covid-19 across the Bible Belt.

Two epicenters of the pandemic In the Muslim equivalent of the Bible Belt, the clerical leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, stopped shaking hands and limited visits to his office in early February, but he let mass commemorations of the 41st anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Republic go forward unimpeded. Then, on February 24th, he also allowed national parliamentary elections to proceed on hopes of entrenching yet more of his hardline fundamentalist supporters — the equivalent of America’s evangelicals — in Iran’s legislature. Meanwhile, its other religious leaders continued to resist strong Covid-19 mitigation measures until late March, even as the country was besieged by the virus. Deputy Minister of Health Iraj Harirchi caught the spirit of the moment by rejecting social-distancing measures in February while downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak in his country, only to contract Covid-19 himself and die of it.

The virus initially exploded in the holy city of Qom, said to have been settled in the eighth century by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s filled with a myriad of religious seminaries and has a famed shrine to one of those descendants, Fatima Masoumeh. In late February, even after government officials began to urge that the shrine be closed, its clerical custodians continued to call for pilgrims to visit it. Those pilgrims typically touch the brass latticework around Fatima Masoumeh’s tomb and sometimes kiss it, a classic method for passing on the disease. Its custodians (like those American evangelical pastors) continued to believe that the holiness of the shrine would protect the pilgrims. They may also have been concerned about their loss of income if pilgrims from all over the world stopped showing up.

Despite having a theocratic government in which clerics wield disproportionate power, Iran also has a significant and powerful scientific and engineering establishment that looks at the world differently, even if some of them are also devout Shiite Muslims. In the end, as the virus gripped the country and deaths spiked, the scientists briefly won and the government of President Hassan Rouhani instituted some social-distancing measures for the public, including canceling Friday prayers and closing shrines in March, though — as in Florida — those measures did not last long.

In this way, as the U.S. emerged as the global epicenter of the pandemic, so Iran emerged as its Middle Eastern one. Call it an irony of curious affinity. Superstition was only part of the problem. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif blamed the Trump administration’s sanctions and financial blockade of the country for the government’s weak response, since the Iranians had difficulty even paying for much-needed imported medical equipment like ventilators. Indeed, the U.S. government has also had Iran kicked off global banking exchanges and threatened third-party sanctions against any companies doing business with it.

President Trump, however, denied that the U.S. had blockaded medical imports to that country, a statement that was technically true, but false in any other sense. The full range of U.S. sanctions had indeed erected a formidable barrier to Iran’s importation of medical equipment, despite attempts by the European Union (which opposes Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran) to allow companies to sell medical supplies to Tehran.

Still, as with Trump’s policies in the U.S. (including essentially ignoring the virus for months), Iranian government policy must be held significantly responsible for the failure to stem the coronavirus tide, which by early May had, according to official figures, resulted in more than 100,000 cases and some 7,000 deaths (numbers which will, in the end, undoubtedly prove significant undercounts).

A Rubáiyát world Whether in America or Iran, fundamentalist religion (or, in the U.S. case, a Trumpian and Republican urge to curry favor with it) often made for dismally bad public policy during the first wave of Covid-19. Among other things, it encouraged people, whether in religious institutions in both countries or in American anti-shutdown protests, to engage in reckless behavior that endangered not just themselves but others. Ironically, the conflict in each country between defiant pastors or mullahs and scientists on this issue should bring to mind the culture wars of the early twentieth century and the place of the Iranian poetry of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam in what was then largely a Western debate.

That makes those poems worthy of reconsideration in this perilous moment of ours. As I wrote in the introduction to my new translation of the Rubáiyát:

 

The message of the poems… is that life has no obvious meaning and is heartbreakingly short. Death is near and we might not live to exhale the breath we just took in. The afterlife is a fairy tale for children… The only way to get past this existential unfairness is to enjoy life, to love someone, and to get intimate with good wine. On the other hand, there is no reason to be mean-spirited to other people.

Some of the appeal of this poetry to past millions came from the dim view it took of then (as now) robust religious obscurantism. The irreverent Mark Twain once marveled, “No poem had given me so much pleasure before… It is the only poem that I have ever carried about with me; it has not been from under my hand for 28 years.” Thomas Hardy, the British novelist and champion of Darwin, wove its themes into some of his best-known fiction. Robert Frost wrote his famous (and famously bleak) poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Night” with Khayyam’s quatrains in mind. Beat poet Jack Kerouac modeled Sal Paradise, the unconventional protagonist of his novel On the Road, on his idea of what Khayyam might have been like.

Although compilers have always attributed those poems to that great astronomer and mathematician of the Seljuk era, it’s clear that they were actually written by later Iranian figures who used Khayyam as a “frame author,” perhaps for fear of reaction to the religious skepticism deeply embedded in the poetry (in the same way that the Thousand and One Nights tales composed in Cairo, Aleppo, and Baghdad over centuries were all attributed to Scheherazade). The bulk of those verses first appeared at the time of the Mongol invasion of Iran in the 1200s, a bloody moment that threw the region into turmoil and paralysis just as Covid-19 has brought our world to an abrupt and chaotic halt.

As if the war’s urban destruction and piles of skulls weren’t enough, historians have argued that the Mongols, who opened up trade routes from Asia into the Middle East, also inadvertently facilitated the westward spread of the Yersina pestis bacillus that would cause the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, a pandemic that would wipe out nearly half of China’s population and a third of Europe’s.

A fifteenth-century scribe in the picturesque Iranian city of Shiraz would, in fact, create the first anthology of quatrains entitled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, many composed during Mongol rule and the subsequent pandemic. The dangers of what we would now call religious fundamentalism, as opposed to an enlightened spirituality, were trumpeted throughout those poems:

 

In monasteries, temples, and retreats
they fear hellfire and look for paradise. But those who know the mysteries of God
don’t let those seeds be planted in their hearts.

While some turn to theology for comfort during a disaster, those quatrains urged instead that all of us be aggressively here and now, trying to wring every last pleasure out of our worldly life before it abruptly vanishes:

 

A bottle of Shiraz and the lips of a lover, on the edge of a meadow —
are like cash in hand for me — and for you, credit toward paradise.
They’ve wagered that some go to heaven, and some to hell.
But whoever went to hell? And whoever came back from paradise?

The poetry ridicules some religious beliefs, using the fantasies of astrology as a proxy target for the fatalism of orthodox religion. The authors may have felt safer attacking horoscopes than directly taking on Iran’s powerful clergy. Astronomers know that the heavenly bodies, far from dictating the fate of others, revolve in orbits that make their future position easy to predict and so bear little relationship to the lives of complex and unpredictable human beings (just as, for instance, you could never have predicted that American evangelicals would opt to back a profane, womanizing, distinctly of-this-world orange-faced presidential candidate in 2016 and thereafter):

 

Don’t blame the stars for virtues or for faults, or for the joy and grief decreed by fate! For science holds the planets all to be
A thousand times more helpless than are we.

Wars and pandemics choose winners and losers and — as we’re learning all too grimly in the world of 2020 — the wealthy are generally so much better positioned to protect themselves from catastrophe than the poor. To its eternal credit, the Rubáiyát (unlike both the Trump administration and the Iranian religious leadership) took the side of the latter, pointing out that religious fatalism and superstitions like astrology are inherently supportive of a rotten status quo in which the poor are the first to be sacrificed, whether to pandemics or anything else:

 

Signs of the zodiac: You give something to every jackass. You hand them fancy baths, millworks, and canals —
while noble souls must gamble, in hopes of winning their nightly bread. Who would give a fart for such a constellation?

In our own perilous times, right-wing fundamentalist governments like those in Brazil and the United States, as well as religious fundamentalist ones as in Iran, have made the coronavirus outbreak far more virulent and dangerous by encouraging religious gatherings at a time when the pandemic’s curve could only be flattened by social distancing. Their willingness to blithely set aside reason and science out of a fatalistic and misguided faith in a supernatural providence that overrules natural law (or, in Donald Trump’s case, a fatalistic and misguided faith in his own ability to overrule natural laws, not to speak of providence) has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths around the world. Think of it as, in spirit, a fundamentalist version of genocide.

The pecuniary motives of some of this obscurantism are clear, as many churches and mosques depend on contributions from congregants at services for the livelihood of imams and pastors. Their willingness to prey on the gullibility of their followers in a bid to keep up their income stream should be considered the height of hypocrisy and speaks to the importance of people never surrendering their capacity for independent, critical reasoning.

Though you might not have noticed it on Donald Trump’s and Ali Khameini’s planet, religion seems to be in the process of collapsing, at least in the industrialized world. A third of the French say that they have no religion at all and just 45% consider themselves Catholic (with perhaps only half of those being relatively committed to the faith), while only 5% attend church regularly. A majority of young people in 12 European countries claim that they now have no religion, pointing to a secular future for much of the continent. Even in peculiarly religious America, self-identification as Christian has plunged to 65% of the population, down 12% in the past decade, while 26% of the population now disavows having a religion at all.

In post-pandemic Iran, don’t be surprised if similar feelings spread, given how the religious leadership functionally encouraged the devastation of Covid-19. In this way, despite military threats, economic sanctions, and everything else, Donald Trump’s America and Ali Khameini’s Iran truly have something in common. In the U.S., where it’s easier to measure what’s happening, evangelicals, more than a fifth of the population when George W. Bush was first elected president in 2000, are 16% of it two decades later.

Given the unpredictable nature of our world (as the emergence of Covid-19 has made all too clear), nothing, secularization included, is a one-way street. Religion is perfectly capable of experiencing revivals. Still, there is no surer way to tip the balance toward an Omar Khayyam-style skepticism than for prominent religious leaders to guide their faithful, and all those in contact with them, into a new wave of the pandemic.

Juan Cole writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. His new book is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian (IB Tauris). He is also the author of Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment.

Copyright ©2020 Juan Cole — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 May 2020

Word Count: 2,849

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Remember the song Over There?

Over there, over there

Send the word, send the word over there

That the Yanks are coming,

The Yanks are coming,

The drums rum-tumming everywhere…

Maybe not, since it was popular so long ago, but it was meant to inspire American troops saying goodbye to their country on their way to a Europe embroiled in World War I. Written by George M. Cohan, the song paid homage to an American wartime urge to do good in the world, to take what was precious about this country and spread it to less fortunate, endangered peoples elsewhere. As Jon Meacham and country music star Tim McGraw reminded us, that song’s message couldn’t have been simpler: The good guys are coming.

A century later, that sentiment in Cohan’s lyrics had merged with a related but ultimately contrary message: the supposed determination of America’s leaders to keep at bay and away the dangers rife in so much of the rest of the world. As President George W. Bush repeatedly assured Americans after the 9/11 attacks, this country would keep the threat of terrorism “over there” — and so away from our shores. “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America,” he typically told American legionnaires back in 2007.

More than a decade later, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham offered a reminder of the lingering persistence of such an “over there” mindset. Defending President Trump’s decision to keep American forces in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, he explained: “I want to fight the war in the enemy’s backyard, not ours.”

Trump’s version of keeping danger “over there” manifested itself most notably in his attempts to keep the immigrant version of the dangerous Other over there. Beginning with his “big, fat, beautiful wall” and his Muslim ban, such efforts, including most recently his April 22nd proclamation of a 60-day suspension on immigration by those seeking green cards, have never ended.

One “immigrant” he could not keep out, however, was the coronavirus, which — owing significantly to his acts (or lack of them) — has played havoc with the over-there conceit. When it comes to Covid-19, undeterred by a military presence abroad or border walls, keeping the threat to this nation at bay is no longer a possibility. Instead, an array of dangers, deprivations, and fears that have long beset the rest of the world — and from which the United States considered itself largely immune — have now entered our supposedly separate, well-guarded, very exceptional American world. Like the giant “murder hornets” from Asia detected for the first time in the United States in April, perils once reserved for places abroad are now squarely in our own backyard.

Like it or not, Over There is now Right Here.

America as a war zone The stage for bringing “there” to the homeland was aptly set when President Trump declared the country at war with a disease. Suddenly, America’s forever wars of the twenty-first century were no longer distant affairs. “War” was here and now, and this time we weren’t the invaders, but the ones who had been invaded.

Appropriately enough, in these last months, New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic in this country, has been described by many in terms normally reserved for a war zone: the bodies of the dead laid out in rows as after battlefield encounters; tents like those seen at the outskirts of battle zones serving as makeshift hospitals in parks; sirens screaming day and night as emergency vehicles transport severely ill casualties of the virus to exhausted and overworked medical teams. And in the context of such a war at home, the military — along with the various National Guard units — has been on hand to help build temporary hospitals and distribute food and supplies.

Inside this new war zone, the basic circumstances of life have begun to resemble those long considered forever distant. For years now, we’ve been reading about casualty figures from places where Washington has pursued its “over there” war on terror. As Brown University’s Costs of War Project has reported, since 9/11 more than 800,000 people have been killed in U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani borderlands alone.

Now, by far the largest numbers of deaths are no longer over there but right here in the United States, thanks to the invisible virus among us. The world watches us as we lose Americans by the thousands on an almost daily basis. Health systems worldwide, and particularly in Africa, have long been a focus of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other medical groups. For decades, specialists have tried to ameliorate a lack of doctors, an absence of medical equipment, a need for more hospitals and greater access to healthcare on that continent. That was over there. No longer.

Life in the U.S. becomes precarious Alongside images of war, the U.S. healthcare system is now experiencing the kind of shortages and incapacity that had previously been associated with those in impoverished countries. As a 2017 WHO report concluded, “Half the world lacks access to essential health services.”

This past month, as Covid-19 patients overwhelmed New York City hospitals, conditions there began to resemble those in such lands. The most basic things like access to emergency rooms or to urgent care for people with the virus (but also for those with other problems entirely) became less certain. As the numbers of Covid-19 patients soared, those experiencing other life-threatening symptoms began to be treated according to a new, far grimmer calculus. At the same time, individuals in need of emergency care for other reasons came to fear going to ERs and exposing themselves to the pandemic, sometimes dying at home instead.

In these months, for instance, the number of organ transplants fell precipitously. On March 31st, the Regional Emergency Medical Advisory Committee of New York City announced that adults in cardiac arrest were not to be transported to the hospital for additional attempts at revival if their hearts had not restarted after 20 minutes. Many cancer surgeries have been delayed until further notice.

And it’s not just emergency care that’s under siege. Doctors have become unavailable for non-urgent matters. Messages like this one from a medical group tell it all: “If you are young, healthy, and sick but otherwise stable at home, please limit your calls to your doctor’s office so we can manage the high volume of calls incoming from high-risk patients.” While tele-health appointments with your general practitioner have become a way of life, they are no substitute for a yearly physical, let alone in-person attention to medical disorders and diseases. Dentists are, of course, not performing regular services. How many of us will have to forego our yearly mammograms, our regular dental check-ups, our annual physicals during this pandemic?

If lack of access to adequate healthcare is a measure of a country under wartime-like stress, the United States is no longer an exception.

An American world of deprivation Other normal expectations about American life are also breaking down in ways once associated with foreign lands. As George Packer recently wrote in the Atlantic, the federal government now looks more like a failed state than a vibrant democracy. As he put it, the Trump administration’s reaction to the coronavirus crisis was more “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.” In fact, the government’s response to the crisis has failed in a striking set of ways, ranging from the unpreparedness of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the failure of diplomatic and domestic efforts to procure ventilators and protective masks or implement the distribution of stockpiles of medical equipment.

Meanwhile, the socio-economic level of the country has plummeted as middle-class Americans lose their jobs and begin the long fall into another existence. Since March, significant parts of the economy have been shut down and more than 33 million people laid off with 6% of the labor force filing for unemployment in the last two weeks of that month alone. Official U.S. unemployment recently hit 14.7%, a figure unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment claims have surged catastrophically and are still climbing weekly.

For an increasing number of Americans, food insecurity has become a fact of life. Empty shelves for some products are increasingly common in grocery stores nationwide. While predictions of shortages and price increases vary from cautious denials to measured concern, certain aspects of the usual food chain do seem to be breaking down. As Shub Debgupta, an economist who focuses on supply-chain risks to food, has pointed out, supplies from other countries that the United States depends on are likely to dwindle in the coming months. So, too, will farm labor, often made up of guest workers from across the southern border.

In the food industry and elsewhere, from grocery stores to hospitals, safe working conditions have deteriorated as the pandemic spreads, heading in directions previously associated with exploitative, impoverished, and corrupt countries. The proximity of workers inside the country’s meat-processing plants has, according to the CDC, already led to the infection of an estimated 5,000 workers (1,000 in a single plant).

Meanwhile, as the homelessness rate grows, many shelters have closed and those that remain open, social distancing being impossible and sanitary conditions bleak, are now potential hotbeds of infection, or as Emma Grey Ellis put it in Wired, “Homelessness is incompatible with health.” And let’s not forget the nightmare of nursing homes, some of which have become literal graveyards for the aged and infirm.

Prisons and detention centers have similarly become incubators for the spread of the disease, as our incarceration system suffers the kinds of deaths that might once only have been possible in countries like Chile, El Salvador, Peru, or elsewhere in Latin America (where notoriously overcrowded prisons have led to the rampant spread of Covid-19). Authorities in Arizona, for instance, now predict a 99% infection rate in its prison system and, despite the release of prisoners and immigration detainees across the country, unsanitary conditions and overcrowding still make prisons, as one expert remarked, “a ticking time bomb.”

In these and other areas where deprivation is being enhanced as the coronavirus runs wild in America, the burden has fallen overwhelmingly on low-income groups, blacks and Hispanics in particular. In doing so, it has heightened an already all-American reality. Though billionaires continue to prosper, low-income groups with heightened health-risk factors are now suffering disproportionately from Covid-19.

Blacks, for instance, have so far made up 25% of the deaths in this country from the virus, nearly twice their numbers in the general population. In New York alone, as the disease engulfed the city, black and Latino residents are estimated to have perished at twice the rate of whites. In states like Michigan and Illinois, the disparities have been similarly pronounced, while unemployment rates among African Americans now overshadow that of whites to a degree that is breathtaking. William Rodgers, former chief economist at the Department of Labor, has estimated that, as early as March, the real unemployment rate for African Americans may already have climbed to 19% and has only increased since.

The world, in other words, is coming home.

Long-simmering realities In many ways, the current crisis has, of course, just exposed conditions that should have been attended to long ago. Much that suddenly seems broken was already on the brink when the coronavirus appeared. If anything, the pandemic has simply accelerated already existing trends. As a December 2019 Century Foundation report on “racism, inequality, and health care for African Americans” concluded, “The American health care system is beset with inequalities that have a disproportionate impact on people of color and other marginalized groups.” In fact, in 2019, the London-based Legatum Institute’s Prosperity Index had already ranked the American healthcare system 59th in the world for its standard of services.

As bad as Donald Trump and his administration have been, the growing American coronavirus disaster can’t simply be blamed on them. Covid-19 has brought home to the rest of us how over here over there really was. And now, the pathetic White House leadership in this crisis has raised another possibility: autocracy.

The Trump administration’s failure to handle the crisis competently stems in part from the president’s perception that whatever he says, in autocratic fashion, goes — or, as he has often put it, “I can do whatever I want.” From his early assertion that the virus was destined to go from 15 cases to one or disappear in the warmth of April to his fantasy numbers when it came to virus testing or obtaining crucial medical equipment to his recent advocacy of ingesting disinfectants as an antidote for Covid-19, the leader of the United States has come to resemble a run-of-the-mill autocrat spreading disinformation in his own interests. It’s one thing to point to the power-grabbing of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the underhanded machinations of the dictator of North Korea, or the ruthlessness of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. It’s quite another to have a power-hungry leader as our own head of state. Once again, we are not immune. There is here.

With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope. Fading from sight are the days when this country’s engagement with the world could be touted as a triumph of leadership when it came to health, economic sustenance, democratic governance, and stability. Now, we are inside the community of nations in a grim new way — as fellow patients, grievers, and supplicants in search of food and shelter, in search, along with so much of humanity, of a more secure existence.

The world, in other words, has turned upside down. Perhaps it’s sadly time to change those famed lyrics of George M. Cohan accordingly:

Over here, over here

Send the word, send the word over here.

Whether from there or from here, the sooner the good guys arrive, the better.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, as well as the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief. She is the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, the editor of Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink, and host of the Vital Interests Podcast. Julia Tedesco and Sofia Cimballa contributed research to this article.

Copyright ©2020 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 May 2020

Word Count: 2,357

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“When he first came home, it was tough.” So Aleha, the wife of an airman in Colorado, told me. She was describing her family’s life since her husband, who lives with chronic depression, completed a partial hospitalization program and, in March, along with other members of his unit, entered a pandemic lockdown. He was now spending full days at home with her and their four children, which offered needed family time and rest from the daily rigors of training. Yet the military’s pandemic lockdown had its challenges as well. Aside from weekly online sessions with his therapist (the third the military had assigned him in so many weeks), Aleha was left to provide her husband with needed emotional support, while homeschooling their older children and caring for their toddler.

Her husband, like the other 1.3 million active-duty service members in the United States, faces what most of the rest of the country is facing: orders to stay at home and distance themselves from those outside their households to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus that has killed more than 82,000 Americans and more than 295,000 people worldwide.

Yet there’s something distinctive about what members of the American military (whose suicide rates now surpass civilian ones) face: the stress posed by the threat of the most literal “front-line service” in these times of endless war and pandemic. They find themselves in uniform in an era of more frequent deployments and longer training days. Even in pre-pandemic times, they needed the support of psychiatrists and therapists like me and of their military community, including commanders whose default approach to mental-health problems has often been to coach them on what not to say to avoid being medically disqualified from duty.

Troops and their families have needed access to supportive social groups, including religious ones, antidepressants and other mood medications, and off-base mental-health providers who can counsel them in a more unbiased way. In many cases, they also need access to inpatient facilities for when the going gets really rough.

In the past months, daily life for our troops and their families has been transformed in previously almost unimaginable ways. For example, many new recruits are now quarantined when they arrive at military bases. Physical training is staggered and conducted in smaller groups. Given bans on movement, military spouses and kids scheduled to relocate (a common enough phenomenon in such a life) or families with a member deployed elsewhere in the world are living in striking states of isolation and uncertainty. They are increasingly unsure when they will see loved ones again or where they will live or study in the months to come. How starkly Covid-19 restrictions can affect already vulnerable members of the military was highlighted by the suicides of two students at the U.S. Air Force Academy last month. Those deaths came after that school’s leadership decided to place the 1,000 seniors still on campus in single rooms, the equivalent of solitary confinement, for weeks on end to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

It’s striking how little effort our military’s high command has put into understanding the effects of national crises on the health of military families. After all, though it’s seldom mentioned, such spouses and other family members have been subject to the same job losses, homeschooling issues, and lack of childcare as other Americans amid a spreading pandemic — and all of this has only been heightened by the loss of local social connections due to frequent moves.

In addition, as in the society at large, within military communities inequalities abound. The government has deemed both my husband, a naval officer, and Aleha’s husband “essential workers.” That means my husband must go into the Pentagon a few days a month right now to handle mysterious — to me, at least — matters related to our country’s nuclear arsenal. In return for this modest risk to his own and our family’s health, my “essential” husband is otherwise able to watch our kids almost full time while I pursue my work as a mental-health therapist from home. Our privilege in rank and pay places me in a very different position from the spouses of enlisted troops.

Social distancing in a mental-health crisis Despite that position of privilege, given my work, I have a strong sense of how this national crisis has deepened existing social inequalities. In 2011, along with Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford, I co-founded the Costs of War Project, a nonpartisan, multidisciplinary team of academic, health care, and legal experts who continue to analyze the costs of the U.S. decision to respond to the 9/11 attacks with full-scale military action, including the opportunities missed to invest in critical domestic areas like health care. I’m also a therapist who specializes in trauma-focused care for military veterans and their families, refugees, and immigrants to the United States, many of whom have been affected by armed conflicts in their homelands.

In addition, as a Navy spouse and mother of two young children who has completed four military-related moves in the course of my husband’s career as a submariner, I know what social isolation and uncertainty can feel like and how they can affect the human psyche. I’m aware as well that, as the Covid-19 crisis drags on and more troops fall ill, my spouse could be sent back to sea or to one of the many increasingly Covid-19-destabilized places where our military has a presence or is fighting what are increasingly pandemic wars.

And believe me, when you’re alone during a spouse’s deployment, even in the best of times, which these aren’t, the shit can hit the fan remarkably fast. In 2017, for instance, while my husband was at sea and out of contact, I contracted a nasty, vaccine-resistant version of the flu. I was single-parenting two toddlers and found myself Ubering with my children to the ER at three in the morning because I had a fast-rising fever that made walking, let alone lifting a baby, difficult.

A neighbor, the divorced wife of a Navy veteran, left Campbell’s soup on our doorstep but shied away from taking my children long enough for me to get care. This was at a moment when my husband’s ship commander (who could only be described as a “toxic leader”) threatened spouses who frequented anything but command-sanctioned Family Readiness Groups, formed to support troops during deployments. This made it that much less likely that wives like me in that military community would establish friendships strong enough to lead someone to take a chance on helping a sick friend.

If an experience as fleeting and minor as mine felt as trying as it did, then what have the family members of the crew of the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, more than 1,000 of whom tested positive for Covid-19 recently, experienced in their moments of need? During my own mini-drama with the flu, I continued to receive emails from the command’s volunteer ombudsperson, herself the wife of an enlisted sailor, reminding me of my “essential role” in national security. Spouses like me were not to even think about writing our husbands concerning our own problems, including illnesses, lest we distress them and so endanger national security. I wonder if the spouses of the infected crew members of the Roosevelt felt similarly “protected” by a naval leadership that refuses to disclose significant information about the well-being of their loved ones, even as they no doubt struggle with the spread of this virus, too.

In our gender- and class-stratified society, you are usually deemed “essential” only when those in power feel they truly need you. The rest of us non-essentials are seldom sufficiently protected, valued, or seen, and in truth that turns out to be the reality for most essentials as well. (If you don’t believe me, just check out the conditions in any meat-processing plant still open in your state.)

It’s no secret anymore that one casualty of our national “war” against this pandemic is a mental-health crisis on a staggering scale. Among therapists like myself, it’s widely known that being in a community where you feel you’re a contributor offers genuine protection when it comes to suicidal urges. Among people I know who work in low-paid staff jobs where social distancing is impossible, the difference between feeling depressed and hopeless and having the energy to get to the next day is often the conviction that you’re appreciated by coworkers and those you are helping.

One way of getting recognition for your struggles at work and elsewhere today is through group therapy and support. I’ve seen this firsthand at the community mental health clinic where I work, while also dealing with veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. Speaking in face-to-face groups gives you the opportunity to feel supported even as you support others. And in the social-distancing era of Covid-19, because so much communication is nonverbal and Zoom therapy captures only talking heads, such methods may be losing their power.

This makes military spouses, as well as janitors, medical aides, nurses, doctors, and care workers of every sort who must encounter people with health crises on a daily basis, so vital to our current struggle against this virus. They provide medical help, of course, but also deeply needed support at a moment when social distancing has placed on pause many other outlets for it.

The essential, the vulnerable, and the unseen Much ink has been spilled recently on the heroic nature of such care workers, and for good reason. They’re up against an invisible pathogen and a president who empowers his supporters to shun the advice of medical professionals and scientists — including his own. A recent image of a masked retired surgeon with a homemade sign (“You have no ‘right’ to put us all at risk. Go home!”) standing in front of a car to register his disagreement with last month’s (largely white) anti-lockdown pro-Trump protests in Richmond, Virginia, catches the essence of this conflict.

I recently spoke with a young woman of color who cried when she saw that very image, because a family member of hers is a cafeteria worker in a military hospital ward treating Covid-19 patients. “People don’t realize how their protests affect my family,” she told me, explaining that they could be susceptible to any wave of Covid-19 infection resulting from such thoughtless protests. Yet none of her family members had either the knowledge, money, or connections to get the best health care, if infected. In an age of growing division between hospitals with ample funding, supplies, and staffing, and those where doctors, driven by a manufactured scarcity, are making arbitrary and discriminatory decisions about who deserves life-saving care, I understand her anguish.

As anti-poverty activist Liz Theoharis has pointed out, many of the tasks most vital to stemming this epidemic are going to be performed by low-paid workers with the least access to decent housing in which to socially distance themselves and to the money and social connections that would link them to the best medical advice. How can this country care for those the powers-that-be deem “essential,” like doctors and military personnel, when we don’t care for those who care for them? Similarly, you would have to include not just therapists like me, who find ourselves supporting an ever-more-isolated, stir-crazy, and stressed-out populace, but also the staff members and janitors who help us and clean our offices.

In the military, you would also have to include spouses homeschooling their kids (including those with special needs) while working or struggling to figure out how to pay their bills. Caring for all such people is important not just because the value of a human being should be absolute, whether you’re essential or not, but because, in this pandemic world of ours, devaluing anyone’s life will have consequences for us all.

The costs of war, pandemic-version In a recent op-ed, Costs of War Project co-directors Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford argued that, no matter what President Trump says, we’re not in a “war” against the coronavirus. War did, however, play a crucial role in getting us into this mess.

Congress has allocated an average of $230 billion dollars annually to waging our hopeless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while only a microscopic fraction of such moneys have been going into health care and education at home. Costs of War Project economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier showed that, had this country invested the same amount of money in health care rather than its forever wars, twice the number of jobs would have been created and that’s no small thing at a moment when the U.S. faces a dire shortage of doctors — more than 9,000 health-care workers have already been infected by Covid-19 — and physicians are being called out of retirement in order to serve.

If there’s one thing the Costs of War Project has made clear, it’s this: war is about the destruction of the very institutions it purports to protect. At a time when health care, education, and other social services, including food aid, are so badly needed, why is the military still being funded at astronomical levels, while other agencies are gutted?

My husband and I sometimes argue about the designation “essential” worker. How can he be called “essential” when we spend most of our days together on our Maryland farm as he collects his Department of Defense salary? He always reminds me that redundancy in government allows us to function under the worst of circumstances. If, for instance, Pentagon officials responsible for dealing with threats to our nuclear arsenal were to fall ill en masse or be killed in a sudden attack, others would be available to take their place.

Yet the obvious corollary to that argument has certainly not been applied to our health care infrastructure in these years and we’re paying for that today. If the president had not gutted the Department of Health and Human Services, perhaps there would have been enough people to ensure that our federal stockpiles of ventilators were properly maintained in preparation for a crisis we knew was coming. If the pandemic task force created under President Obama hadn’t been disbanded, perhaps we would have been better prepared for the spread of Covid-19. And if so much of our money hadn’t gone into the military-industrial complex, perhaps there would have been enough health-care workers to weather this crisis better.

As this invisible pathogen spreads across much of the world, what families like mine worry about is that our nation’s ever-expanding global conflicts will only continue to grow in scope and intensity, threatening food and medical supply chains. Then, in the worst of times, with our military infrastructure in increasing disarray, many more families, including possibly mine, could once again be called into armed conflict.

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2020 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 May 2020

Word Count: 2,455

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“Every day is a copy of a copy of a copy.” That meme, from the moment when Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club offers a 1,000-yard stare at an office copy machine, captures this moment perfectly — at least for those of us removed from the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis. Isolated inside a Boston apartment, I typically sought new ways to shake the snow globe, to see the same bubble — the same stuff — differently.

Quarantine has entered a new season. The month of May has brought daffodils and barbeque grills. Memorial Day is just around the corner. And every Friday at 7:00 PM, residents in my neighborhood hang out of their windows to bang pots and cheer until they get tired (usually, about two minutes later). It’s a nice gesture to healthcare workers, a contemporary doff of the cap, but does it change anything? Perhaps it’s just another permutation of that old American truism: if you’re getting thanked for your service, you’re in a job where you’re getting shafted.

The war against President Trump’s “invisible enemy” spasms on and we’re regularly reminded that healthcare workers, dangerously ill-equipped, must beg for personal protective equipment. But this Memorial Day, the 18th during America’s War on Terror, our national focus is likely to shift, even if only momentarily, to the soldiers who are still fighting and dying in a self-perpetuating war, now under pandemic conditions.

Reflecting on my own time as a soldier deployed to combat in Afghanistan, I hope that Covid-19 causes us to redefine what “patriotism” and “national security” really should mean. My suggestion: If you want to honor soldiers this Memorial Day, start by questioning the U.S. military.

With this on my mind, and all alone in that apartment, I knew exactly where to look for inspiration.

The journal Just before deploying to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in May, 2009, I bought a journal. It was brown, faux-leather, and fit in the hip pocket of Army combat trousers. It wasn’t particularly nice — just something you might pick up at Office Max.

Nonetheless, my soldiers ribbed me for it. “Dear diary,” they snickered.

“No, no, this is a war journal,” I would reply, imagining such a distinction as sufficiently manly to overcome whatever stigma they had when it came to this self-appointed diarist.

At first, journaling was a distraction. I captured images of my platoon, a lovable assemblage of misfits and Marlboro men. But soon, that journal acquired a more macabre tone, its lines filling with stories of roadside bombs, shootouts, amputated limbs, and funerals playing out in a page-by-page street fight of scribbles and scratch-outs.

On a humdrum route-clearance patrol on our fourth day in-country, before the unit of soldiers we were replacing even had a chance to depart, my squad leader’s vehicle was catastrophically destroyed by a roadside bomb. We loaded four broken, bloody, ketamine’d soldiers onto an Air MEDEVAC helicopter en route to urgent care at Kandahar Airfield. (At this rate, I realized, my platoon of 28 would be wiped out within a month.)

I reassured the soldier who was most coherent that he was “going to be okay.” Truth was: I didn’t know. And what did “okay” in battlefield injury-speak even mean? A quadruple amputee with a pulse? Years of horrific facial reconstruction surgeries? Or maybe, with luck, merely a traumatic brain injury or a single leg amputation below the knee, which my wounded friends from Walter Reed Hospital called “a paper cut.”

For this soldier, okay turned out to mean broken bones and lacerations bad enough to send him home, but not bad enough to keep him there. He was stitched-up and sent back to war five months later. When he finally returned to America, in Oregon, he murdered and dismembered someone he didn’t even know in a bathtub. Then he stole the dead man’s car to rob a bank. He’s currently serving life in prison.

But such stories, however raw and urgent they felt, were small. We were, after all, just one platoon in a big, ugly mess of a war, committing acts of political violence against people we didn’t know for reasons we didn’t fully understand.

Although I was told that I’d be “fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan, most of the people our unit was killing turned out to be teenagers or angry farmers with legitimate grievances, people tired of America’s never-ending occupation of their land, tired of our country’s contemptuous devaluation of Afghan lives. And frankly, when I searched my own soul, I couldn’t blame them for fighting back. Had I been in their shoes, I would have done the same.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the U.S. military did not encourage me to think too much or too deeply about the morality of the war I was fighting. A popular military aphorism was: “stay in your lane.” And so I jotted down my real thoughts in private and continued with the “mission,” whatever that was, since there appeared to be no coherent plan or strategy, something fully substantiated when, late last year, the Washington Post released “the Afghanistan Papers,” secret and frank interviews by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan with top U.S. commanders and officials.

“Operation Highway Babysitter” That brown journal of mine lived through a lot and, at the end of my deployment, it earned a just retirement at the bottom of a cardboard box — until recently, when, in the midst of self-isolation in the Covid-19 moment, I excavated it from its resting place and brought it into the light of day as if it were so many dinosaur bones.

The cover was a wreck, the pages, earth-stained and dog-eared. Nonetheless, my chicken-scratched entries were enough to reconstruct old, long-buried memories. Those pages cast into relief how far I’ve come. Physically, I’m 6,632 miles away. Temporally, I’m a decade older. But morally, I’m a completely different person.

The first two — distance and time — don’t add up to much. I’ve returned home. I’ve gotten older. But what about the third? Why do I look back on my role in that still never-ending war not as a hero or as a well-intentioned participant, but as a perpetrator? And why, now, do I feel like I was a genuine sucker?

In a sense, I already knew the answers to those questions, but I wanted to revisit the journey I’d taken by flipping those pages past coffee-ring stains and even dried blood. And here’s what I found: I crossed my moral threshold on a dusty road, a glum bit of terrain I watched over for 15 hours straight. The mission’s apt nickname, scrawled in that journal, was “Operation Highway Babysitter.”

It worked like this: we, the infantry, secured a road in Kandahar Province, allowing logistics convoys to resupply the infantry, so that we could secure the road, so that the logistics convoys could resupply us, ad nauseam and in perpetuity. Such a system was mockingly derided by my troops as a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

Despite the effort we put into stopping IED — that is, roadside bomb — emplacement, we neither stopped them, nor created anything that might have passed for “progress.” The problem with IEDs was simple enough: we could watch some of the roads all of the time or all of the roads some of the time, but never all of the roads all of the time. Wherever we couldn’t patrol was precisely where the next one would be emplaced.

Quickly enough, we saw the futility of it all, yet what alternative did we have? We belonged to the Army and so were destined to spend our Afghan tour of duty playing human minesweepers.

Ox, my platoon sergeant, internalized his frustration. During Operation Highway Babysitter, he cut a striking image of Oscar the Grouch, with a fat dip of chewing tobacco puckering his cheek. Just above that egg-sized wad was a small scar from a bullet fragment that had skipped off an Iraqi pavement during the 2003 invasion of that country. One could say that Ox carried the war with him in the most literal sense.

And if we weren’t getting blown up by insurgents, we were getting shot by the Afghan National Police. No kidding. One hot afternoon, an Afghan policeman, visibly high, shot my team leader, Brody, from six feet away with a machine gun. The 7.62 mm bullet hit him in the torso, a spot not covered by body armor. It was a negligent discharge and Brody lived, but my whole platoon wanted to murder that policeman. We didn’t, which seemed rather commendable.

Even as we became increasingly disillusioned, we remained soldiers, trained to execute, however ludicrous the task. If we had to stay in our lane, though, at least we wanted the satisfaction of fighting our enemy face-to-face. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been there, but the desire to fight hadn’t left us and, as it turned out, we got our chance on Halloween 2009 — a day caught vividly in that brown journal of mine.

The sound of revenge A couple of hours into highway babysitting that day, our stakeout was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. We buttoned up the trucks and set out for danger. When we arrived, the shooting had stopped. All we saw were a few men — maybe farmers, maybe insurgents — in a large grape field. It was hard to make out what they were doing, but there were no weapons to be seen.

Armed only with speculation, there were no grounds (under the rules of engagement we lived by) to shoot them, so our G.I. Joe energy began to melt away and we were distinctly disappointed.

I concede that it’s a strange emotion to actually want to kill someone, knowing there will be no repercussions for doing so — except possibly praise and maybe even medals if you’re successful. What’s first degree attempted murder in the United States is just another day at the office for an infantryman in combat. In five months, however, my platoon had yet to run into a real firefight and we were aching to kill some of those responsible for the plague of roadside bombs that had decimated our battalion. We were amped, hungry for payback.

About 10 of us dismounted from the trucks. We moved into the field, using a V-shaped, wedge formation, hoping the Afghans there knew something about the resistance fighters. Fifteen seconds later our world erupted in gunfire. Machine-gun rounds cut through the grape vines, trimming the hedges around us. Immediately, I was mainlining adrenaline.

We pressed inward, shooting as we went, hoping to suppress the resistance fighters and gain fire superiority. Some of my soldiers hunkered down behind the remnants of a crumbly mud wall, others found what cover they could: a little ditch, a mound of earth, anything amid the grapevines.

I turned to my forward observer, Brock. “Can we get rotary-wing assets on station?”

“Roger. Two Kiowas. Ten minutes.”

Finally, real kinetic combat! I paused to look around. My soldiers were sweating profusely and sucking wind, but miraculously there were no casualties. The sound of the approaching OH-58 Kiowa attack helicopters, codenamed “Shamus,” confirmed our survival.

Jaws unclenched, lips loosened, eyes relaxed. My sweat-slick soldiers chortled with relief. Today, we live. We talked the birds on station, marking our position in the grape field with fluorescent VS-17 panels, visible from the air. The pilots acknowledged. Then the two Kiowas race-tracked around the grape fields, evidently spotting their targets because they released a salvo of rockets on a nearby village. They followed by strafing the area with their .50-caliber machine guns until they had expended all their ammunition.

My soldiers erupted in cheers and I felt smug.

The awakening It was evening when we returned to Forward Operating Base Wilson after that 15-hour patrol. I was haggard, worn, bleary-eyed. Ox walked over to me. I had given him the day off because the patrol schedule was killing us.

“Ox, how was the rest?”

“I didn’t do shit yesterday. Slept all day. It was great.”

“Oh, yeah? You heard about the big firefight we got into?”

“I heard you guys were in contact, so I went to battalion headquarters to watch the live video feed from Scan Eagle [an unarmed drone]. They had a TV screen so we could watch you guys in the fight.”

“You see how many guys were shooting at us, where were they located?”

“Nope. I showed up a bit late, but neither Scan Eagle nor the Kiowas could actually see the enemy.”

My heart sped up. “Well, what the fuck were they shooting at? We had no idea where the insurgents fled to — only a general direction.”

Ox offered a version of his nervous, graveyard-humor laugh. “Yeah, the helicopters didn’t have PID [positive identification] on anything. Scan Eagle was zooming in on some dead lady in a blue burka and the battalion XO [executive officer] said to Shamus, ‘What the hell are you shooting at?’ Shamus said, ‘Uhhhhh… we had reports of small-arms coming from this direction.’ The XO gets back on the radio to yell at the pilots, ‘Did you see weapons or have PID on anything at all?’ Shamus obviously didn’t, so the response was, ‘Uhmmmm… negative.’ The XO was pissed. He said, ‘Well, I’m looking at three dead civilians right now. Do you want to explain that?’ Shamus said, ‘Uhhhhh . . . I guess they’re enemy KIA [killed in action].'”

Anxiety turned to dread. How could they have made a mistake like that and then justified the dead as “enemy KIA”? I dropped my equipment in a heap inside my tent and walked to the company headquarters to fill out the debrief paperwork. First, I looked at the SIGACT (significant activity) whiteboard to see what the Army chose to report and it was vague indeed: small-arms fire, grid location, calling for helicopter air support. But the final column — the punch line — left me fuming. Its header was “BDA,” or “Battle Damage Assessment.” And there, in bold capital letters, was: “UNKNOWN.”

No mention of civilian casualties. The Army had covered it up. I felt urgently sick. Where was the honesty? Where was our morality? Where was the “integrity” — an Army value I was taught at West Point?

I wanted to give the military the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps logging the civilian deaths as “unknown” had been a clerical error, even if made at the exact moment when it would cover up homicide. But I had already given so many other incidents a pass. All the things that I’d let slide and tucked away suddenly shifted in their hiding places. Standing before that whiteboard, I felt a crisis of conscience. Repressing, forgetting, or deluding myself was no longer an option.

And that was my awakening, faithfully recorded in that brown journal still in my hands.

The Army never would investigate that incident either. It didn’t matter that I personally raised it with my battalion commander. I felt betrayed and ashamed of my once-boyish excitement for war. In places like Zhari District in Afghanistan, it was now clear to me that the prevailing truth was whatever the U.S. military wanted it to be.

The price of blind patriotism When I returned home seven months later, I felt grateful but empty. Just about everything in America looked the same, which felt rude, given how much we had changed.

For those first six months after my return from war, thudding back slaps and free beers from well-meaning civilians numbed my sense of betrayal. But over time, I realized that all of this “thank you for your service” stuff was just a culturally ingrained reflex, like saying “bless you” to someone who sneezes. When it comes to our military, the mantra of the public is: thank, don’t think. To most of them, war — the war my friends died for — is elevator music. Perhaps Americans have generally forgotten that, almost 19 years after the Afghan War began, numbers, names, and percentages don’t go in the graveyard, people do.

I don’t forget.

While serving in the U.S. Army Honor Guard, I helped bury Tyler Parten, one of my best friends from West Point, in Arlington National Cemetery. Like so many other fallen American soldiers, he was a good and gentle man — not a violent man — and yet he died a violent death on a mountain escarpment in Afghanistan, according to an officer from his company.

I presented the folded flag to Tyler’s crying mother. After the family left, I looked around and noticed all the freshly dug graves that did not yet contain their occupants. And with more time and more wars, those headstones will become just like all the other headstones.

And here’s the thing with Memorial Day: my memories don’t resemble the tidy sacrifices that this country memorializes on that day each year. Soldiers know the slaughterhouse; America knows chicken nuggets — lifeless things processed and commoditized, marketed and sold on the cheap, and always worth whatever they cost.

Twenty-first-century American patriotism is crass, slippery, and gross. It isn’t about moral courage or speaking out; it’s about protecting and preserving corporate image and individual reputations. American patriotism is sad-button Facebook emoticons and 20%-off Memorial Day mattress sales.

But blithely tolerating a yearly moment of silence to think abstractly about dead soldiers — and assume that their deaths are part of an unfortunate but necessary exchange to preserve American-style “freedom” — is not enough. It never has been.

Soldiers and veterans don’t need priority boarding, 10% discounts at gimmicky chain restaurants, or a few crinkled bills stuffed into a charity’s coffee can. What they need is a nation that can find the courage and conviction to stop misusing their service. For 18 Memorial Days, the American public has been complicit in allowing our troops to be sent into a series of wars that everyone knows to be costly and self-defeating, while simultaneously maintaining the audacious idea that, in doing so, they “support the troops.”

Believe me, that’s not patriotism. The most intimate betrayal is to be sent to kill or die for nothing by your countrymen.

Maybe 2020 is the year when we finally look ourselves in the mirror and admit it — that we are really a nation of 330 million bumper-sticker patriots willing to sell-out future generations to pay for endless war, no matter who gets killed, as long as someone in the Pentagon believes they deserve it. Maybe this year the American public will finally realize that the war on terror drags on because the United States is perfectly arranged to give us that outcome, because Americans are not allowed to question the military or military spending. The act of doing so is taboo or, as I titled my new book, Un-American.

If we don’t like this reality, it should be our civic responsibility to change the forces that guide this nation. We must redefine what patriotism and national security truly stand for. To confront real threats to humanity — like climate change — we must grow in our capacity for cooperation, not conflict. Maybe 2020 will finally be the year.

After 18 Memorial Days, when will we ever learn? After an hour, I realized that I was still sitting on the carpet hunched over my journal. Yes, I had shaken the metaphorical snow globe. No, I did not feel better.

I thumbed through it one last time and a quote suddenly caught my eye: “These stupid people,” I had recorded one sergeant first class saying, “all they understand is violence and force.”

That did it. The journal went back in the box and I closed the lid. I got up, flicked off the light, and shut the door. As that door clicked tight, my mind returned to that quote: “These stupid people — all they understand is violence and force.”

I wondered: Was he referring to the people of Afghanistan or to us?

Erik Edstrom is the author of the new book Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War (Bloomsbury). He is a graduate of West Point and the University of Oxford, was an infantry officer, Army Ranger, and Bronze Star Medal recipient who deployed to direct combat in Afghanistan. This article originated at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2020 Erik Edstrom — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 May 2020

Word Count: 3,314

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Do you hear that silence?

That’s the absence of footsteps echoing through our nation’s public school hallways. It’s the silence of teaching in a virtual space populated with students on mute who lack a physical presence. It’s the crushing silence of those who are now missing, who can’t attend the classroom that Zoom and Google built.

Maybe you heard the shouted pleas of teachers across the country last year as we walked out of our classrooms and into the streets, begging for affordable housing, health care, and access to equitable funding and resources for our students? Or maybe you heard the impassioned screams of frightened kids as they stormed into the streets and onto the news, demanding safety and an end to the threat of gun violence in our nation’s school buildings? Now, there’s nothing left to hear.

Today, all we’re left with is a deafening silence that muffles the sound of so much suffering. The unfolding public health, mental health, and economic crisis of Covid-19 has laid bare the fragility of what was. The institutions charged with caring for and guiding our most valuable assets — our children — were already gutted by half a century of chronic underfunding, misguided curricular policies that prioritized testing over real learning, and social policies that favored austerity over taking care of the most vulnerable members of our society. Now that so many teachers are sequestered and alone or locked away with family, our bonds of proximity broken, we’re forced to stare into that void, scrambling to find and care for our students across an abyss of silence. The system is broken. The empire has no clothes.

Not so many weeks ago, I used to be a teacher in a sprawling public high school outside Portland, Oregon. Before the virus arrived, I taught painting, drawing, ceramics, and filmmaking in three different studio classrooms. There, groups of students ranging across the economic, ethnic, religious, racial, and linguistic spectrum sat shoulder to shoulder, chatting and creating, day after day, year after year. Music played and we talked.

On some days, the classes were cacophonous and chaotic; on others, calm and productive. In those spaces, we did our best to connect, to forge thriving communities. What I now realize, though, is that the physical space we shared was the only thing truly tying us all together. Those classrooms were the duct tape securing the smashed bumper on the wreck of a car that was our public education system.

Now, it couldn’t be more obvious: no one’s going to solve the problems of our present and near future with the usual solutions. When desperation leaves us without imagination, clinging to old answers, scrambling to prop up systems that perpetuated and solidified inequity, it means missing the real opportunity of this otherwise grim moment. The “great pause” that is the Covid-19 shutdown has allowed us all to stare into the void, to see far more clearly just how schools have long shouldered the burdens of a society that functions largely for the privileged, leaving the rest of our nation’s children and families to gather the crumbs of whatever remains.

The privilege of homeschooling In the first weeks after schools closed across the country, as parents struggled to “homeschool” their children, memes, rants, tweets, and strongly worded emails to school administrators popped up across the Internet. They expressed the frustrations of the moment. Those shared tales of the laughably insane trials and tribulations of parents trying to provide a reasonable facsimile of an education to kids sequestered at home, while still trying to work full time under the specter of a pandemic, amazed and depressed me.

Television producer and writer Shonda Rimes tweeted, “Been homeschooling a 6-year old and 8-year old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.” Rimes’s tweet seemed to encapsulate the absurd reality of life at home with kids in the time of the coronavirus. As I read her tweet, I laughed out loud and in utter solidarity with her. A teacher no less, I, too, was trying and failing spectacularly to oversee the “education” of an increasingly frustrated and resistant third grader from home.

For those of us siloed in our privilege — healthy, with plenty of food stocked away in cupboards, quiet rooms with doors that shut, ample Internet access, and enough Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share among the members of our households — our quarantined home life is challenging, but not impossible. Our daily frustration continues to be a function of that privilege. For those without it, those who were already living in poverty or at its brink when the pandemic struck, homeschooling poses yet another crushing hurdle in life. How can you provide an education for your children when simply securing food, work, and shelter is your all-consuming reality?

Meanwhile, as exhausted parents screamed at school districts, teachers, and administrators on the Internet about providing virtual learning resources and online curricula to engage students during the school day, public school officials (at least in my world) were scrambling to deal with a far more immediate threat: kids going hungry. What this pandemic promptly revealed was that the most fundamental and urgent service schools provide to many children is simply feeding them.

The gravest and most immediate threat to our most vulnerable students was, and continues to be, hunger. If schools are closed, so is the critical infrastructure that helps keep our nation’s children fed. Aside from SNAP (the food stamp program), the National School Lunch Program is the largest anti-hunger initiative in the country. It feeds 29.7 million children on school days, with an additional 14.7 million children fed thanks to the School Breakfast Program and more than 6.1 million via the Child and Adult Care Food Program. And those numbers don’t even include the informal system of food distribution that teachers often provide students in their classrooms. On average, teachers spend upwards of 300 of their own dollars yearly providing food to students.

So, no wonder that, as soon as Covid-19 closed the doors of our schools, administrators, teachers, custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and volunteers across the country mobilized on a large — and downright heroic — scale to attempt to keep those students fed. In the Beaverton school district where I teach, a “Grab and Go” curbside meal distribution program was quickly set up, making daily meals accessible to every student in the district. As economic conditions head for Great Depression-level misery, think of these as 2020 versions of the infamous breadlines of that era, only in this case they’re for children (and sometimes their families).

The responsibility for feeding students was not the only immediate concern. The adults in our school typically also serve as first responders for those students. We monitor their moods and listen to their stories. We notice when kids are struggling emotionally and, as mandatory reporters, step in when we suspect a child is living in a perilous or unsafe situation.

In the first weeks after we left our classrooms, calls to Oregon’s child abuse hotline dropped by more than half. Other states across the nation reported similar declines. The drop in calls has frightening implications. Coupled with increasing economic insecurity and social isolation, rising rates of child abuse are undoubtedly imminent. When teachers, counselors, and school social workers are no longer able to observe and communicate openly with students, signs of neglect or abuse are much more likely to go undetected and unreported.

The closure of our buildings also poses a huge barrier to the normal support of students struggling with mental-health issues. Our children are already suffering from alarming rates of depression and anxiety. Isolating them from their friends, peers, mentors, caregivers, and teachers will only compound their mental-health challenges.

Trying to bridge the digital divide Add the surreal nature of an invisible foe to a lack of clear directives from both the federal and state government and you have a formula for problems. When we were finally instructed to leave our school, it was without advanced warning. In my classrooms, half-finished clay projects littered the countertops, while palettes loaded with acrylic paint and incomplete canvases were left to desiccate and gather dust on the shelves.

Students departed without cleaning out their lockers or often even gathering their schoolwork and books, not to speak of the supplies they’ll need to complete that work at home. And even though our students do have access to technology — three years ago, our district adopted a policy of providing a Chromebook to each student — it soon became apparent that there were huge obstacles to overcome in transforming our brick-and-mortar classrooms into virtual spaces. Many students had, for instance, broken or lost their Chromebooks. Some had missing chargers. And even many of those who had their Chromebooks with them at home had limited or no access to Wi-Fi connectivity.

Trying to reach all my students across that digital divide became the central focus of my waking hours. I made calls; I texted; I emailed; I posted announcements in my digital classroom stating that we’d be reconvening online. Still, none of these efforts mattered for the students stuck at home without Wi-Fi or lacking the necessary devices.

Before our nation’s schools closed, the Federal Communications Commission estimated that around 21 million people in America did not have broadband Internet access. According to data collected by Microsoft, however, the number who can’t access the Internet at broadband speeds is actually closer to 163 million. While districts across the country scrambled to provide mobile hotspots and working devices to students, teachers like me began the demoralizing and herculean task of scrapping years of thoughtfully crafted curriculums in order to provide an entirely new online learning experience. We stepped into our virtual classrooms with the knowledge that, no matter how many shiny new digital resources we have at our disposal, there’s nothing we can do to provide equitable access to education remotely.

And even if we were to solve such problems, we couldn’t offer the space or the support students need to learn. Kids living in cramped situations will struggle just to find a quiet place to attend our online classes. Those whose working parents suddenly need childcare for younger siblings have sometimes found themselves taking on the roll of primary caregivers.

Some students whose families were in ever more perilous economic situations increased their work hours and scrapped the idea of attending school altogether. And many of our English-as-a-second-language, or ESL, students, as well as the 14% of students nationally who require additional “learning supports,” are now in trouble. They’ve been left to navigate a complex web of digital platforms and new learning approaches without the individualized attention or frequent checks for understanding that they rely on from their teachers.

What virtual learning can never stand in for is the moment when a student leans over and asks me or a peer for help. That simple act of vulnerability that builds a bridge to another human being may be the most important moment in any classroom and now it’s gone. In Covid-19 America, when school kids need help most, they can’t simply lean over and ask for it.

The time to pivot Today, I teach from my kitchen, my dining room, or the floor of my bedroom. I stare across the digital abyss into the pixelated faces of just a handful of students. It’s impossible to read their emotions or body language. Even when I unmute them, most choose not to speak.

Each day, fewer of them show up to class. Sometimes, students turn off their videos, and I speak only to a sea of black rectangles, the white text of the student’s name the sole indicator of his or her presence in my new classroom. Not surprisingly, our sessions together are stilted and awkward. I try to make jokes and connect, but it’s impossible to replicate online the intimacy of a face-to-face interaction. The magic of what was, of 25 to 40 students working cohesively in community, is lost.

And in the darkest hours of the early morning, when I wake with a start, crushing anxiety pushing on my chest, I think about all the third graders unable to participate in my daughter’s distance-learning classroom. I wonder about the students I’ve still been unable to reach — the ones who haven’t responded to my emails or completed any assignments, and whose faces I never see online. Where are they? How are they? I have no way of knowing.

Our world no longer looks the same. This pause, which has caused, and will continue to cause, so much suffering may also be a gift, offering a shift in perspective and a chance to pivot. Perhaps it’s a rare opportunity to acknowledge that our nation’s public schools should not be left so alone to provide food, mental health care, and digital connectivity for our nation’s children. That should be, in a fashion almost unimaginable in America today, the role of the larger society.

Now is not the time to be silent but to raise our voices, using any privilege we may have, be it in time, money, or simply access, to demand major changes both in how all of us think about our American world and in the systems that perpetuate such inhumane and unconscionable disparities for so many.

There is no way to continue putting yet more duct tape on that smashed bumper of a public education system that was already such a wreck before the coronavirus arrived on these shores. Nor is this the time to retreat into our silos, hoarding privilege along with toilet paper and hand sanitizer, too cowardly to demand more for all the children in this country. It’s time instead to reach out across the six feet of social-distancing space that now divides us all and demand more for those who aren’t able to demand it for themselves.

Belle Chesler writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon, and is now teaching from her home in Portland, Oregon.

Copyright ©2020 Belle Chesler — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 May 2020

Word Count: 2,316

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