Donald Trump is not a president. He can’t even play one on TV. He’s a corrupt and dangerous braggart with ill-concealed aspirations for a Crown and, with an election coming up, he’s been monopolizing prime time every day, spouting self-congratulation and misinformation. (No, don’t inject that Lysol!) His never-ending absurd performances play out as farce against the tragic background of the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the nation. If we had a real president, which is to say, almost anybody else, things would be different. We would have seen the pandemic coming. It would not have attacked me in my old age. And most of the dead might still be alive.

The records of other countries make this clear. South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, and Norway have all had commendable success in protecting their people. Could it be by chance that seven out of eight of the most successful nations in combating the Covid-19 pandemic are headed by women? Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, Sanni Marin of Finland, Angela Merkel of Germany, Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, and Erna Solberg of Norway have all been described in similar terms: as calm, confident, and compassionate leaders. All of them have been commended for thorough preparations, quick decisive action, and clear, empathic communication. Erna Solberg has even been hailed as the “landetsmor,” the mother of her country.

Perhaps in such disturbing times as these we feel some primal yearning for a capable, comforting mother, but we need not resort to such psychological speculation. The fortunate countries turn out to be those with the fairness and foresight to have welcomed women into government decades ago.

What seems anachronistic in this critical time is the presence in leadership posts of so many self-aggrandizing, sociopathic male autocrats: Jair Bolsinaro of Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Donald Trump of the United States, and more. Faced with the pandemic, none of these “powerful” men had a clue. They encountered an invader that could not be bullied, bribed, banished, or bombed. And for their ignorance and vanity, the people pay (and pay and pay).

Lessons in leadership I know something about the difference good leadership makes because I’ve been locked down now in two different countries. One kept me safe, the other nearly killed me. I happened to be in Norway when the virus arrived and saw firsthand what a well-run government can actually do. (Yes, I know Norway seems small indeed when compared to the United States, but both of the governments that locked me down, Norway and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where I now reside, represent roughly 5.5-6.5 million people, and Norway’s capital, Oslo, is only slightly more populous than Boston. So some comparisons may be revelatory.)

More to the point, with any population, the difference between success and failure is preparation, swift action, and the techniques applied to overcome the pandemic. On February 26th, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health announced the first case of Covid-19: a woman who had returned a week earlier from China. The next day, it reported two cases in travelers returning from Italy and another from Iran. After that came two skiers also back from Italy. One of them, an employee of Oslo’s largest hospital, went right back to work, where tracers would soon witness just how fast the unseen virus could move.

And here’s the key that escapes political leaders in America: in Norway, testers and tracers were on the job from the start. As February rolled into March, they were already testing and tracking some 500 Norwegian skiers returning from the Austrian Alps and northern Italy. Some had frequented convivial après-ski taverns there and, once back home, were quick to catch up with friends. One Norwegian tracer labeled such skiers “very sociable people.”

Systematically, Norway would test all its returning travelers (every one of them!), then track down all the contacts of those who had tested positive and test them and their contacts as well, and so on down the line. Working with remarkable speed, the tracers used immediate test results — a tool apparently available in the U.S. only to the rich and famous — to track the trajectories of the virus as it spread. When cases began to multiply without known contacts, the tracers knew that the virus had begun to hitchhike through an unwitting community and were quick to surround it and shut it down.

In response to the pandemic, the government gradually closed down the capital and other centers of contagion. In Oslo, places of assembly went first: theaters, cinemas, concert halls. Norwegians were even asked to stay away from the World Cup Ski Championships being held at Holmenkollen, on the edge of Oslo.

Universities and schools moved online, while offices of all sorts soon followed suit. Restaurants and bars shut their doors. By March 12th, only two weeks after the first reported case, the capital and much of the country had closed down. On that day, in fact, officials reported the death of an elderly man, the first Norwegian casualty of Covid-19.

By mid-April, some five weeks after the shutdown went into effect, the government began to open up public life again, proceeding carefully step by step. Toddlers were the first to return to their preschools on April 20th, with grade schoolers to follow. By April 30th, Norway had administered 172,586 tests and recorded 7,667 positive cases of the coranavirus, 2,221 of them in Oslo. The dead numbered 207, suggesting a per capita mortality rate lower than that of any other European country and far from America’s tragic loss of life. But how to explain this Norwegian record?

Experts attribute it to the government’s early and deep preparations, enabling it to respond immediately to the very first case to appear in the country and, after that, to its quick, unrelenting testing and tracing of the contagion. This painstaking effort, backed by Norway’s universal health care system, enabled the state to get ahead of the virus, save lives, and stop the pandemic short.

The country’s remarkably effective welfare system has bolstered its population throughout the shutdown. Furloughed workers drew full pay from the government for 20 days, and about 62% of their full salaries after that. They’ll return to their jobs ready for work in factories, shops, and businesses as the quarantine is lifted. The government’s effective and well-targeted expenditures are ensuring smooth transitions; a quick return to production; and, best of all in this troubled time, some peace of mind for employers, workers, and families. The shutdown is bound to be costly, perhaps the worst blow to the economy since World War II, but such thoroughgoing, bottom-up arrangements are less expensive — in both financial and human terms — than America’s striking neglect of marginal (aka “essential”) workers, thrown under the bus of crony capitalism with nothing but lectures on the overrated American freedom to fend for yourself.

In Norway, the invasion of Covid-19 was seen from the outset as a national problem and part of a global emergency. It was never politicized. Norway’s conservative prime minister, Erna Solberg, is now receiving high marks indeed, even from opposition parties, for her calm leadership. Children like her too. During the crisis, she gave two nationwide “press conferences” to children to answer questions they submitted about the pandemic. (“Can I have a birthday party?” “How long does it take to make a vaccine?”) From the outset, she told them it was okay to be scared. And then she set an example of what a smart, hard-working leader and a collaborative, many-partied parliament can do for all the people, even in scary times.

Remarkably, Norway very quickly achieved the lowest rate of contagion in Europe. From the start, it aimed to stifle the virus to the point where one infected person might infect only one more. In scientific terms, it aimed for an R-0 rate (a rate of reproduction) of 1.0. By the time Solberg announced that goal on March 24th, however, the magic number had already fallen to 0.71. Today, with only 81 Covid-19 patients hospitalized and their contacts already traced and tested, Norwegians can begin to return with considerable confidence to something that edges ever closer to normal life.

Amateur night The United States has become an example for the world of just the opposite: a corrupt government unprepared for and even in denial of warnings from within and without. Years ago, President Obama created within the National Security Council a directorate for global health security and bio-defense to prepare for the pandemics sure to come. That directorate even briefed the incoming Trump team on the urgency of pandemic preparations before the president’s inauguration. But on taking office, Trump eliminated the threat by eliminating the directorate.

As president, he was also informed of a viral outbreak in Wuhan, China, in early January of this year, but he ignored the message. As has been widely reported, he wasted at least two months in self-serving fantasies, claiming the pandemic would disappear of its own accord, or was Fake News, or a “new hoax” of Democrats plotting his downfall. By March, his conduct had become increasingly erratic, obtuse, combative, and often just flat-out nasty. In April, he abandoned altogether his most pressing presidential duty, first claiming “total power” as president and then shifting the job of testing and protecting the people from an unrestrained pandemic onto state governors already struggling to find basic medical supplies for front-line health care personnel in their own states.

Worse, he roused his most militant followers, some heavily armed, to defy the emergency directives of several states led by Democratic governors. In short, he first unloaded the responsibilities of his office onto state governors, then made it his mission to undermine and threaten some of them. For good measure, he cut off U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, the single U.N. agency best equipped to deal with global health emergencies. Trump already had a proud record of getting away with highly offensive, even criminal, acts in plain sight. Now, through egotism, bravado, and just plain ignorance he’s made an epidemic great again (MEGA!), for Covid-19 cases and fatalities in the United States have by now far outstripped those anywhere else on Earth.

Welcome to America On March 11th, as Oslo was shutting down, President Trump issued an order to take effect in 72 hours: no one flying from Europe would be allowed to enter the United States. It sounded crazy, but — worried about worse to come — I changed my flight home to meet the deadline. The next day, the American embassy clarified the president’s ultimatum: the travel ban did not apply to U.S. citizens. By that time, of course, it was impossible for me to change my ticket back.

So I left Oslo on March 14th, after assuring friends that I would be okay because Massachusetts, home of Elizabeth Warren, is a progressive state.

Hah!

Changing planes in London, I found myself in a different world: packed into the tail section of that flight among a crowd of American students summoned home from European universities by their anxious parents. Some were in transit from northern Italy, already the heartland of the European Covid-19 outbreak. From the seats behind me came insistent sounds of boys coughing. The flight attendants wore rubber gloves and made themselves scarce. I wrapped a long scarf round and round my face, feeling as if somehow I’d been suckered into a trap.

Seven hours later, we stumbled into Boston’s Logan Airport, destined to spend a few more all-too-intimate hours together. I crept along a zigzag trail, amid those coughing boys, with no way of putting distance between us, to the passport inspectors and then beyond. Finally, one by one, we were ushered into a curtained area to experience that airport’s first night of official “screening.”

I was pleased to think that we were all, at least, to be tested for the virus. But no such luck. When my turn came, the official screener voiced no greetings, asked no questions, offered nothing but a single order: “Go home and take your temperature.” Had I been held all that time among those coughing boys for this? Later that week, a local paper reported approvingly that the new airport screening, the first line of defense against the foreign plague, took “less than a minute.”

I was angry to have been forced onto that dangerous flight by the president’s arbitrary edict and doubly angry that he had terminated travel from Europe without consulting any of his European counterparts. By the look of things that evening, no one from his administration had even informed key American airports receiving flights from Europe until the last minute. I saw a bunch of those coughing boys board a Silver Line bus into Boston and others grabbing taxis. And so we all went off into the night, apparently leaving behind no trace of the state of our health or where we were headed. Some days later, I was not merely angry but very ill.

Ten days after that, in a hospital parking garage, a masked nurse worked a giant Q-tip up my nose. A doctor told me to quarantine myself at home (as I had been doing anyway) until I got the test results in about 5 days. But why should it take so long? Wasn’t the whole point of a test to learn what was going on as quickly as possible? The speed of the test result had been the very point in Norway. Combined with the immediate work of the tracers, it enabled the National Health Service to stay ahead of the pandemic and, in the end, essentially, to shut it down.

I went home and got worse. Five days passed with no word. On the 12th day, I felt well enough to call my doctor, who tracked down the result of my test (“just in”). It was positive, but almost two weeks old. So, over the telephone, the doctor gave me the all-clear to put on my mask (a souvenir of my trip to the ER) and go forth to shop. Knowing no Norwegian doctor would turn me loose so soon without another test, I asked for one. Sorry, short supply, only one to a customer. I’ve kept myself in quarantine at home ever since.

Covid-19 hitches a ride in America On April 10th, came news of the death of 59-year-old Vitalina Williams, an immigrant from Guatemala, who worked a full-time job at a Walmart in Lynn, Massachusetts, as well as a part-time job at a supermarket in Salem. Like the nurse and doctor in the ER, this cashier was an “essential worker,” the first grocery store employee in Massachusetts to work herself to death. Here’s an immense difference between Massachusetts and Norway. In that country, one job would have paid her a good wage and also given her paid leave to see her own doctor in the National Health Service when she first felt ill. She would have been taken in, diagnosed, cared for, and very likely saved. That is simply how a national health care system works in a social democracy.

So what was my Covid-19 test for? What useful information did it give anyone? I had walked home from the ER in the dark (so as not to endanger others by taking a bus) and gone to bed. Nobody checked up on me because nobody knew my test was positive — something I, of course, didn’t know either. And throughout those nearly two weeks of waiting for the test results, no tracer called to learn if I lived with other people who might be endangered and available for testing. (There were, in fact, no tracers then.) No one asked me a single question about my family, friends, or others I might have contacted since that “screening” at the airport. And had I died in my bed, no one would or could have traced that bright red line between me, those coughing boys, and Donald Trump’s compulsory flight to a state caught totally off guard in a country both dysfunctional and unprepared.

On April 20th, five weeks after I returned to Boston, Massachusetts was designated a Covid-19 “hot spot.” With 38,077 cases and 1,706 deaths at that time, the state stood in third place behind New York and New Jersey. This was not an honor, but it may be what prompted Governor Charlie Baker to turn to testing — and belatedly to tracing.

The number of new cases in this state was rising every day, as it has from the first reported case in February. The governor, who also holds a press conference every day, explained that we are now “right in the middle of an expected surge,” apparently unaware that a “surge” is what you get when you have missed the moment for preventative testing and tracing. (This is also what you get when, as in the nation’s capital, politicians rather than scientists run the show.)

Belatedly, Massachusetts started testing people at the rate of about 9,000 per day, while private agencies funded by the state are in the process of hiring perhaps 1,000 tracers to conduct phone interviews with the contacts of all Massachusetts residents who have already tested positive. Today, May 6th, we official “positives” number 70,271, though 4,212 of us are already dead.

In the first few days of May, the number of positive patients hospitalized fell slightly and state officials adopted an attitude of “cautious optimism.” Presumably, something of importance will be learned from those belated tests. As Norway recognized, however, if you don’t jump on this virus fast, it rapidly disperses beyond simple person-to-person contacts. It spreads out sociably like so many Norwegian skiers — or American students. It rides the chairlift and the bus. It gets on the plane. It hangs out at the airport. It hitches a ride with someone stopping at the grocery store. To tally its contacts may become simply a matter of counting the dead.

Tracers in Norway have already moved on to other tests to find asymptomatic carriers who may be contagious or perhaps have developed antibodies. Anyone in that country with even the mildest symptoms may ask for a test. These precautionary studies are essential in case the virus should find new life as the quarantine is lifted. What scientists might learn from such studies, like the new tracing one in Massachusetts, remains to be seen, but surely one inescapable conclusion is that this virus is smarter, more agile, and faster on its feet than any of its associates we’ve met before or, for that matter, than most of our public officials, from a failed president on down. And for any readers who believe in politics more than science, let me just say that without science you won’t even know what hit you.

Ann Jones writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a non-resident fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. She is at work on a book about social democracy in Norway (and its absence in the United States). She is the author of several books, including Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and most recently They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books original.

Copyright ©2020 Ann Jones — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 May 2020

Word Count: 3,149

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The 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945 ought to prompt thoughtful reflection. For Americans, V-E Day, as it was then commonly called, marked the beginning of “our times.” The Covid-19 pandemic may signal that our times are now coming to an end.

Tom Engelhardt, editor and proprietor of TomDispatch, was born less than a year prior to V-E Day. I was born less than two years after its counterpart V-J Day, marking the surrender of Imperial Japan in August 1945.

Tom is a New Yorker, born and bred. I was born and raised in the Midwest.

Tom is Jewish, although non-observant. I am a mostly observant Catholic.

Tom is a progressive who as a young man protested against the Vietnam War. I am, so I persist in claiming, a conservative. As a young man, I served in Vietnam.

Yet let me suggest that these various differences matter less than the fact that we both came of age in the shadow of World War II — or more specifically in a time when the specter of Nazi Germany haunted the American intellectual landscape. Over the years, that haunting would become the underlying rationale for the U.S. exercise of global power, with consequences that undermined the nation’s capacity to deal with the menace that it now faces.

Tom and I both belong to what came to be known as the Baby Boom generation (though including him means ever so slightly backing up the official generational start date). As a group, Boomers are generally associated with having had a pampered upbringing before embarking upon a rebellious youth (Tom more than I), and then as adults helping ourselves to more than our fair share of all that life, liberty, and happiness had on offer. Now, preparing to exit the stage, we Boomers are passing on to those who follow us a badly damaged planet and a nation increasingly divided, adrift, and quite literally sick. A Greatest Generation we are not.

How did all this happen? Let me suggest that, to unpack American history during the decades when we Baby Boomers sashayed across the world stage, you have to begin with World War II, or more specifically, with how that war ended and became enshrined in American memory.

Of course, we Boomers never experienced the war directly. Our parents did. Tom’s father and both of my parents served in World War II. Yet neither were we Boomers ever truly able to put that war behind us. For better or worse, members of our generation remain the children of V-E Day, when — so we tell ourselves — evil was finally vanquished and good prevailed.

Never forget For Tom, for me, and for our contemporaries, World War II as history and as metaphor centers specifically on the Nazis and their handiwork: swastikas, mammoth staged rallies, the Gestapo and the SS, the cowardice of surrender at Munich, the lightning offensive campaigns known as blitzkrieg, London burning, the Warsaw Ghetto, slave labor, and, of course, a vast network of death camps leading to the Holocaust, all documented in film, photographs, archives, and eyewitness accounts.

And then there was der Führer himself, Adolf Hitler, the subject of a fascination that, over the decades, proved bottomless and more than slightly disturbing. (If your local library ever reopens, compare the number of books about Hitler to those about Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini or wartime Japanese emperor Hirohito.) Seventy-five years after his death, Hitler remains among us, the supreme villain routinely pressed into service by politicians and media pundits alike intent on raising the alarm about some imminent danger. If ever there were a man for all seasons, it is Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s centrality helps explain why Americans typically date the opening of World War II to September 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Only in December 1941 did the United States (belatedly) join the conflict, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor and other American installations in the Pacific forcing Washington’s hand. In fact, however, a full decade earlier Japan had already set out to create what it would eventually call its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In September 1931, its forces invaded then Chinese-controlled Manchuria, an undertaking that soon enough morphed into a very large and brutal armed conflict with China proper in which the United States participated on a proxy basis. (Remember the Flying Tigers?) In other words, World War II actually began in Asia rather than Europe, with the first shots fired years before the Nazi attack on Poland.

Yet launching the narrative in September 1939 has the effect of keeping the primary focus on Germany. From a moral perspective, there are ample reasons for doing this: Even in a century of horrendous crimes — the Armenian genocide, Stalin’s extermination of Ukraine’s kulaks, and Mao Zedong’s murderous campaign against his own people — the sheer unadulterated evil of the Nazi regime stands apart.

From a political perspective, however, intense preoccupation with one example of iniquity, however horrific, induces a skewed perspective. So it proved to be with the United States during the decades that followed V-E Day. Subsumed within the advertised purposes of postwar U.S. policy, whether called “defense,” “deterrence,” “containment,” “liberation,” or “the protection of human rights,” has been this transcendent theme: “Never Again.” That is, never again will the United States ignore or appease or fail to confront a regime that compares to — or even vaguely resembles — Nazi Germany. Never again will it slumber until rudely awakened by a Pearl Harbor-like surprise. Never again will it allow its capacity for projecting power against distant threats to dissipate. Never again will it fail to lead.

Of all Donald Trump’s myriad deficiencies, large and small, this may be the one that his establishment critics find most difficult to stomach: his resurrection of “America First” as a primary principle of statecraft suggests a de facto nullification of “Never Again.”

To Trump’s critics, it hardly matters that “America First” in no way describes actual administration policy. After all, more than three years into the Trump presidency, our endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; U.S. troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically. Even so, the president does appear oblivious to the historical antecedent — that is, the imperative of standing ready to deal with the next Hitler — that finds concrete expression in these several manifestations of U.S. national security policy. No one has ever accused Donald Trump of possessing a profound grasp of history. Yet here his apparent cluelessness is especially telling.

Not least among the unofficial duties of any president is to serve as the authoritative curator of public memory. Through speeches, proclamations, and the laying of wreaths, presidents tell us what we should remember and how. Through their silence, they give us permission to forget the parts of our past that we prefer to forget. Himself born barely a year after V-E Day, Donald Trump seems to have forgotten World War II.

New signs for a new time? Yet let’s consider this admittedly uncongenial possibility: perhaps Trump is onto something. What if V-E Day is no more relevant to the present than the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812? What if, as a basis for policy, “Never Again” is today just as outmoded as “America First”? What if clinging to the canonical lessons of the war against Hitler impedes efforts to repair our nation and our planet?

An abiding problem with “Never Again” is that U.S. policymakers have never applied it to the United States. Since V-E Day, individuals and regimes deemed in Washington to be the spawn of Hitler and the Nazis have provided justification for successive administrations to accumulate arms, impose punishments, underwrite coups and assassination plots, and, of course, wage war endlessly. Beginning with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong, the list of malefactors that U.S. officials and militant journalists have likened to Hitler is a long one. They’ve ranged from North Korea’s Kim Il Sung in the 1950s to Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the 1960s to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. And just to bring things up to date, let’s not overlook the ayatollahs governing present-day Iran.

Two decades after V-E Day, a succession of presidents deployed lessons ostensibly derived from the war against Hitler to justify the Vietnam War. John F. Kennedy described South Vietnam as “the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the Keystone of the arch, the finger in the dike.” Failing to defend that country would allow “the red tide of Communism,” as he put it, to sweep across the region much as appeasers had allowed the Nazi tide to sweep across Europe. “Everything I knew about history,” Lyndon Johnson reflected, “told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what [Neville] Chamberlain did in World War II,” a reference, of course, to the Munich Agreement with Hitler, which that British prime minister so infamously labeled “peace in our time.” Even as late as 1972, Richard Nixon was assuring the public that “an American defeat” in Vietnam “would encourage this kind of aggression all over the world.”

Vietnam provides but one example among many of how viewing problems through the lens of World War II in Europe has obscured real situations and actual stakes on this planet. In short, the promiscuous use of the Hitler analogy has produced deeply flawed policy decisions, while also deceiving the American people. This has inhibited our ability to see the world as it actually is.

Overall, the approach to statecraft that grew out of V-E Day defined the ultimate purpose of U.S. policy in terms of resisting evil. That, in turn, provided all the justification needed for building up American military capabilities beyond compare and engaging in military action on a planetary scale.

In Washington, policymakers have shown little inclination to consider the possibility that the United States itself might be guilty of doing evil. In effect, the virtuous intentions implicit in “Never Again” inoculated the United States against the virus to which ordinary nations were susceptible. V-E Day seemingly affirmed that America was anything but ordinary.

Here, then, we arrive at one explanation for the predicament in which the United States now finds itself. In a recent article in the New York Times, journalist Katrin Bennhold wondered how it could be that, when it came to dealing with Covid-19, “the country that defeated fascism in Europe 75 years ago” now finds itself “doing a worse job protecting its citizens than many autocracies and democracies” globally.

Yet it might just be that events that occurred 75 years ago in Europe no longer have much bearing on the present. The country that defeated Hitler’s version of fascism (albeit with considerable help from others) has since allowed its preoccupation with fascists, quasi-fascists, and other ne’er-do-wells to serve as an excuse for letting other things slip, particularly here in the homeland.

The United States is fully capable of protecting its citizens. Yet what the present pandemic drives home is this: doing so, while also creating an environment in which all citizens can flourish, is going to require a radical revision of what we still, however inaccurately, call “national security” priorities. This does not mean turning a blind eye to mass murder. Yet the militarization of U.S. policy that occurred in the wake of V-E Day has for too long distracted attention from more pressing matters, not least among them creating a way of life that is equitable and sustainable. This perversion of priorities must now cease.

So, yes, let’s mark this V-E Day anniversary with all due solemnity. Yet 75 years after the collapse of the Third Reich, the challenge facing the United States is not “Never Again.” It’s “What Now?”

For the moment at least, Tom and I are still around. Yet “our times” — the period that began when World War II ended — have run their course. The “new times” upon which the nation has now embarked will pose their own distinctive challenges, as the Covid-19 pandemic makes unmistakably clear. Addressing those challenges will require leaders able to free themselves from a past that has become increasingly irrelevant.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 May 2020

Word Count: 2,062

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At this moment of unprecedented crisis, you might think that those not overcome by the economic and mortal consequences of the coronavirus would be asking, “What can we do to help?” A few companies have indeed pivoted to making masks and ventilators for an overwhelmed medical establishment. Unfortunately, when it comes to the top officials of the Pentagon and the CEOs running a large part of the arms industry, examples abound of them asking what they can do to help themselves.

It’s important to grasp just how staggeringly well the defense industry has done in these last nearly 19 years since 9/11. Its companies (filled with ex-military and defense officials) have received trillions of dollars in government contracts, which they’ve largely used to feather their own nests. Data compiled by the New York Times showed that the chief executive officers of the top five military-industrial contractors received nearly $90 million in compensation in 2017. An investigation that same year by the Providence Journal discovered that, from 2005 to the first half of 2017, the top five defense contractors spent more than $114 billion repurchasing their own company stocks and so boosting their value at the expense of new investment.

To put this in perspective in the midst of a pandemic, the co-directors of the Costs of War Project at Brown University recently pointed out that allocations for the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health for 2020 amounted to less than 1% of what the U.S. government has spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone since 9/11. While just about every imaginable government agency and industry has been impacted by the still-spreading coronavirus, the role of the defense industry and the military in responding to it has, in truth, been limited indeed. The highly publicized use of military hospital ships in New York City and Los Angeles, for example, not only had relatively little impact on the crises in those cities but came to serve as a symbol of just how dysfunctional the military response has truly been.

Bailing out the military-industrial complex in the Covid-19 moment Demands to use the Defense Production Act to direct firms to produce equipment needed to combat Covid-19 have sputtered, provoking strong resistance from industries worried first and foremost about their own profits. Even conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot, a longtime supporter of increased Pentagon spending, has recently recanted, noting how just such budget priorities have weakened the ability of the United States to keep Americans safe from the virus. “It never made any sense, as Trump’s 2021 budget had initially proposed, to increase spending on nuclear weapons by $7 billion while cutting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding by $1.2 billion,” he wrote. “Or to create an unnecessary Space Force out of the U.S. Air Force while eliminating the vitally important directorate of global health by folding it into another office within the National Security Council.”

In fact, continuing to prioritize the U.S. military will only further weaken the country’s public health system. As a start, simply to call up doctors and nurses in the military reserves, as even Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has pointed out, would hurt the broader civilian response to the pandemic. After all, in their civilian lives many of them now work at domestic hospitals and medical centers deluged by Covid-19 patients.

The present situation, however, hasn’t stopped military-industrial complex requests for bailouts. The National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group for the arms industry, typically asked the Pentagon to speed up contracts and awards for $160 billion in unobligated Department of Defense funds to its companies, which will involve pushing money out the door without even the most modest level of due diligence.

Already under fire in the pre-pandemic moment for grotesque safety problems with its commercial jets, Boeing, the Pentagon’s second biggest contractor, received $26.3 billion last year. Now, that company has asked for $60 billion in government support. And you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Congress has already provided Boeing with some of that desired money in its recent bailout legislation. According to the Washington Post, $17 billion was carved out in that deal for companies “critical to maintaining national security” (with Boeing in particular in mind). When, however, it became clear that those funds wouldn’t arrive as a complete blank check, the company started to have second thoughts. Now, some members of Congress are practically begging it to take the money.

And Boeing was far from alone. Even as the spreading coronavirus was spurring congressional conversations about what would become a $2 trillion relief package, 130 members of the House were already pleading for funds to purchase an additional 98 Lockheed Martin F-35 jet fighters, the most expensive weapons system in history, at the cost of another half-billion dollars, or the price of more than 90,000 ventilators.

Similarly, it should have been absurdly obvious that this wasn’t the moment to boost already astronomical spending on nuclear weapons. Yet this year’s defense budget request for such weaponry was 20% higher than last year’s and 50% above funding levels when President Trump took office. The agency that builds nuclear weapons already had $8 billion left unspent from past years and the head of the National Nuclear Security Agency, responsible for the development of nuclear warheads, admitted to Representative Susan Davis (D-CA) that the agency was unlikely even to be able to spend all of the new increase.

Boosters of such weapons, however, remain undeterred by the Covid-19 pandemic. If anything, the crisis only seems to have provided a further excuse to accelerate the awarding of an estimated $85 billion to Northrop Grumman to build a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), considered the “broken leg” of America’s nuclear triad. As William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, has pointed out, such ICBMs “are redundant because invulnerable submarine-launched ballistic missiles are sufficient for deterring other countries from attacking the United States. They are dangerous because they operate on hair-trigger alert, with launch decisions needing to be made in some cases within minutes. This increases the risk of an accidental nuclear war.”

And as children’s book author Dr. Seuss might have added, “But that is not all! Oh, no, that is not all.” In fact, defense giant Raytheon is also getting its piece of the pie in the Covid-19 moment for a $20-$30 billion Long Range Standoff Weapon, a similarly redundant nuclear-armed missile. It tells you everything you need to know about funding priorities now that the company is, in fact, getting that money two years ahead of schedule.

In the midst of the spreading pandemic, the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command similarly saw an opportunity to use fear-mongering about China, a country officially in its area of responsibility, to gain additional funding. And so it is seeking $20 billion that previously hadn’t gained approval even from the secretary of defense in the administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal. That money would go to dubious missile defense systems and a similarly dubious “Pacific Deterrence Initiative.”

How not to deal with Covid-19 Along with those military-industrial bailouts came the fleecing of American taxpayers. While many Americans were anxiously awaiting their $1,200 payments from that congressional aid and relief package, the Department of Defense was expediting contract payments to the arms industry. Shay Assad, a former senior Pentagon official, accurately called it a “taxpayer rip-off” that industries with so many resources, not to speak of the ability to borrow money at incredibly low interest rates, were being so richly and quickly rewarded in tough times. Giving defense giants such funding at this moment was like giving a housing contractor 90% of upfront costs for renovations when it was unclear whether you could even afford your next mortgage payment.

Right now, the defense industry is having similar success in persuading the Pentagon that basic accountability should be tossed out the window. Even in normal times, it’s a reasonably rare event for the federal government to withhold money from a giant weapons maker unless its performance is truly egregious. Boeing, however, continues to fit that bill perfectly with its endless program to build the KC-46 Pegasus tanker, basically a “flying gas station” meant to refuel other planes in mid-air.

As national security analyst Mark Thompson, my colleague at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), has pointed out, even after years of development, that tanker has little hope of performing its mission in the near future. The seven cameras that its pilot relies on to guide the KC-46’s fuel to other planes have so much glare and so many shadows that the possibility of disastrously scraping the stealth coating off F-22s and F-35s (both manufactured by Lockheed Martin) while refueling remains a constant danger. The Air Force has also become increasingly concerned that the tanker itself leaks fuel. In the pre-pandemic moment, such problems and associated ones led that service to decide to withhold $882 million from Boeing. Now, however, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, those funds are, believe it or not, being released.

Keep all of this behavior (and more) in mind when you hear people suggest that, in this public health emergency, the military should be put in charge. After all, you’re talking about the very institution that has regularly mismanaged massive weapons programs like the $1.4 trillion F-35 jet fighter program, already the most expensive weapons system ever (with ongoing problems galore). Even when it comes to health care, the military has proved remarkably inept. For instance, attempts of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense to integrate their health records were, infamously enough, abandoned after four years and $1 billion spent.

Having someone in uniform at the podium is, unfortunately, no guarantee of success. Indeed, a number of veterans have been quick to rebuke the idea of forefronting the military at this time. “Don’t put the military in charge of anything that doesn’t involve blowing stuff up, preventing stuff from being blown up, or showing up at a place as a message to others that we’ll be there to blow stuff up with you if need be,” one wrote.

“Here’s a video from Camp Pendleton of unmasked Marines queued up for haircuts during the pandemic,” tweeted another. “So how about ‘no’?” That video of troops without masks or practicing social distancing even shocked Secretary of Defense Esper, who called for a military haircut halt, only to be contradicted by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, desperate to maintain regulation cuts in the pandemic moment. That inspired a mocking rebuke of “haircut heroes” on Twitter.

Unfortunately, as Covid-19 spread on the aircraft carrier the USS Theodore Roosevelt, that ship became emblematic of how ill-prepared the current Pentagon leadership proved to be in combatting the virus. Despite at least 100 cases being reported on board — 955 crewmembers would, in the end, test positive for the disease and Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr. would die of it — senior Navy leaders were slow to respond. Instead, they kept those sailors at close quarters and in an untenable situation of increasing risk. When an emailed letter expressing the concerns of the ship’s commander, Captain Brett Crozier, was leaked to the press he was quickly removed from command. But while his bosses may not have appreciated his efforts for his crew, his sailors did. He left the ship to a hero’s farewell.

All of this is not to say that some parts of the U.S. military haven’t tried to step up as Covid-19 spreads. The Pentagon has, for instance, awarded contracts to build “alternate care” facilities to help relieve pressure on hospitals. The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences is allowing its doctors and nurses to join the military early. Several months into this crisis, the Pentagon has finally used the Defense Production Act to launch a process to produce $133 million worth of crucial N95 respirator masks and $415 million worth of N95 critical-care decontamination units. But these are modest acts in the midst of a pandemic and at a moment when bailouts, fraud, and delays suggest that the military-industrial complex hasn’t proved capable of delivering effectively, even for its own troops.

Meanwhile, the Beltway bandits that make up that complex have spotted a remarkable opportunity to secure many of their hopes and dreams. Their success in putting their desires and their profits ahead of the true national security of Americans was already clear enough in the staggering pre-pandemic $1.2 trillion national security budget. (Meanwhile, of course, key federal medical structures were underfunded or disbanded in the Trump administration years, undermining the actual security of the country.) That kind of disproportionate spending helps explain why the richest nation on the planet has proven so incapable of providing even the necessary personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers, no less the testing needed to make this country safer.

The defense industry has asked for, and received, a lot in this time of soaring cases of disease and death. While there is undoubtedly a role for the giant weapons makers and for the Pentagon to play in this crisis, they have shown themselves to be anything but effective lead institutions in the response to this moment. It’s time for the military-industrial complex to truly pay back an American public that has been beyond generous to it.

Isn’t it finally time as well to reduce the “defense” budget and put more of our resources into the real national security crisis at hand?

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Copyright ©2020 Mandy Smithberger — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 May 2020

Word Count: 2,269

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“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” So I wrote back in June 2012, with a presidential election approaching.

I was referring then to the war on terror’s CIA and military drone assassination programs, which first revved up in parts of the Greater Middle East in the years of George W. Bush’s presidency and only spread thereafter. In the process, such “targeted killings” became, as I wrote at the time, “thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president.” In Barack Obama’s years in the Oval Office, they were ramped up further as he joined White House “Terror Tuesday” meetings to choose individual targets for those attacks. They often enough turned out to involve “collateral damage”; that is, the deaths of innocent civilians, including children. In other words, “commander-in-chief” had, by then, gained a deadly new meaning, as the president personally took on the role of a global assassin.

I had little doubt eight years ago that this wouldn’t end soon — and on that I wasn’t wrong. Admittedly, our present commander-in-chief probably doesn’t have the time (given how much of his day he’s spent watching Fox News, tweeting his millions of followers, and, until recently, holding two hour press-briefings-cum-election-rallies on the coronavirus pandemic) or the attention span for “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Still, in his own memorable fashion, he’s managed to make himself America’s assassin-in-chief par excellence.

After all, not only have those drone programs continued to target people in distant lands (including innocent civilians), but they have yet again been ramped up in the Trump years. Meanwhile, still in our pre-Covid-19 American world, President Trump embraced the role of assassin-in-chief in a newly public, deeply enthusiastic way. Previously, such drones had killed non-state actors, but he openly ordered the drone assassination of Major General Qassim Suleimani, the top military figure and number-two man in Iran, as he left Baghdad International Airport for a meeting with the prime minister of Iraq.

Of course, for American presidents such a role was not unknown even before the development of Hellfire-missile-armed drones. Think of John F. Kennedy and the CIA’s (failed) attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro or the successful killings of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and Dominican Republic head Rafael Trujillo. Or, for a change of pace, consider the Vietnam War-era CIA assassination campaign known as the Phoenix Program in which tens of thousands of supposed “Vietcong” supporters (often enough, civilians swept up in the murderous chaos of the moment) were murdered in that country, a program that was no secret to President Lyndon Johnson.

And it’s true as well that, in this century, our commanders-in-chief have overseen endless conflicts in distant lands from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Yemen, Somalia, Niger, and beyond, none of them congressionally declared wars. As a result, they had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians, as well as for the uprooting of millions of their compatriots from settled lives and their flight, as desperate refugees, across significant parts of the planet. It’s a grim record of death and destruction. Until recently, however, it remained a matter of distant deaths, not much noted here.

A new kind of drone war on the pandemic front However, the assassin-in-chief may now be coming home, big time, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Little did I imagine that, by 2020, an American president without a lick of empathy for other human beings, even Americans who loved him to death (so to speak), would be targeting not just civilians here in “the homeland” (as it came to become known after the 9/11 attacks), but his most fervent followers. In the age of Donald Trump, the assassin-in-chief now seems to be in the process of transforming himself into a domestic killer-in-chief.

That reality — at least for me — came into focus only recently. True, until then, even beyond those drone strikes, American presidents have had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of startling numbers of civilians in faraway lands where the U.S. military has been making war (remarkably fruitlessly) for almost 19 years. The devastating use of American air power generally has only increased during the Trump years in, for instance, both Afghanistan and Somalia, where U.S. airstrikes have hit new levels of destructiveness, as Nick Turse reported recently at the Intercept — more of them in the first four pandemic months of 2020 than in all of the Obama years combined.

Still, historically speaking, killing Afghans or Iraqis or Syrians or Yemenis or Somalis has always been one thing, but Americans? That’s another story entirely, no?

As it happens, the answer is indeed no, not in 2020, and once again, in a sense, air power is at the heart of the matter. In this case, though, we’re talking about the spread of Covid-19, in part through respiratory droplets (think of them as microscopic Hellfire missiles). In that new air-powered context, with the equivalent of a drone virus in the hands of one Donald J. Trump, the president is bringing the role of assassin-in-chief home. He is, in fact, in the process of becoming a killer-in-chief for his very own base — anyone, that is, who listens to what he says and believes fervently in him. Set aside for a moment the deaths he’s undoubtedly responsible for because of, as Juan Cole put it recently at his Informed Comment website, “those two months he pissed away calling [Covid-19] a hoax and setting up the country for Vietnam War-level death tolls.” Put aside as well his repeated and dangerous medical advice to find and take anti-malarial drugs. Put aside as well his suggestion that perhaps people fearing they have the coronavirus should try to inject or internally take disinfectants (which, a recent study showed, do kill that virus on surfaces and in the air), an act medical experts assure us could result in death.

Think of each of those potential death sentences for his most fervent believers as a striking combination of grotesque ignorance and narcissism. But what about an actual decision, as commander-in-chief and president, to kill off members of his base?

Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have been harder to imagine — until, that is, President Trump noticed the first demonstrations against state shutdowns focused on preventing the deadly Covid-19 virus from spreading. Those protests against “stay-at-home” orders, organized or encouraged by what the New York Times describes as “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the White House,” have continued to bring out demonstrators in Trump-election-like rallies by the dozens, hundreds, or even (in a few cases) thousands.

Often, the demonstrators are not wearing the very masks that the president has recommended for other people (but not himself); nor are they keeping the social distance he has also officially backed (but continues to find it impossible to keep). They sport bizarre signs (“Don’t cancel my golf season,” “My body/my choice, Trump 2020” [with an image of a face mask crossed out], “Give me liberty or give me Covid-19,” “We demand haircuts”), carry American flags and occasional Confederate ones, and are sometimes armed to the teeth (not exactly surprising, given that the protests have been supported by conservative pro-gun or armed militia groups).

The Donald was clearly pleased with the earliest of those demonstrations, being so eager himself to “reopen” America and “the greatest economy in the history of our country” (then headed for the pandemic subbasement). It mattered little that, despite the grim pressures of the moment, polling showed significant numbers of Americans, including Republicans, preferred to keep the U.S. largely shut down for now. In response, he tweeted: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” All were states run by Democratic governors. And his focus on supporting such demonstrations quickly got the media’s attention, as they began to spread elsewhere.

At one of his nightly coronavirus briefings, the president then said this of the demonstrators: “These are people expressing their views. I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

With his future election campaign undoubtedly in his sightlines and his base in the forefront of his brain, he then began to encourage more of the same from both protesters and governors — and the Republican governor of Georgia broke the ice, so to speak, by attempting to reopen everything down to nail salons and movie theaters (something even the president would later criticize), while the Republican governor of Florida reopened that state’s beaches.

Targeting his base Now, here’s the obvious thing in this pandemic moment: if you’re the president of the United States (no less the governor of Georgia, Florida, or other Republican administrations or legislatures in a hurry to reopen the country), you’re encouraging people to sicken and die. To support citizens turning out to protest without either protection or any sense of social distancing is to support people potentially giving each other Covid-19, a disease which clearly spreads best in close quarters like nursing homes, prisons, crowded housing of any sort, or assumedly protests of this very kind. As one epidemiologist put it in response to a gathering of perhaps 2,500 protesters in Seattle, Washington, “I predict a new epidemic surge (incubation time — 5-7 days before onset [of] symptoms, if any, and transmission to associates around that time, even among asymptomatics)… so increase in 2-4 weeks from now.”

At this point, in a country leading the world by a long shot in known cases of, and deaths from, Covid-19, none of this should exactly be rocket science. It’s beyond obvious that if you encourage such demonstrations, you’re increasing the odds that the protesters will both catch and pass on a disease that’s already killed 60,000 Americans, more than U.S. fatalities from 20 years of war in Vietnam.

And that, of course, makes the president of the United States a killer, too. Or thought of another way, the assassin-in-chief in distant lands has just transformed himself into an assassin-in-chief right here at home, a man who might as well have fired Hellfire missiles into such crowds or put a gun to the head of some of those protesters and their wives or husbands or lovers or parents or children (to whom the disease will undoubtedly be spread once they go home) and pulled the trigger.

The act of encouraging members of his base to court death is clearly that of a man without an ounce of empathy, even for those who love and admire him most — and so of a stone-cold killer. You couldn’t ask for more proof that the only sense of empathy he has lies overwhelmingly in his deep and abiding pity for himself (which matches his staggering sense of self-aggrandizement) and perhaps for his children, other billionaires, and fossil-fuel executives. Them, he would save; the rest of us, his base included, are expendable. He’d sacrifice any of us without a second thought if he imagined that it would benefit him or his reelection in any way.

But there’s no point in leaving it at that. After all, as he pushes for a too-swiftly reopened country, he’s declaring open season on Americans of all sorts. And every one of us who will die too soon should be considered another Covidfire missile death and chalked up to a president who, by the time this is over, will truly have given a new meaning to the phrase assassin-in-chief.

You could say, I suppose, that he’s just been putting his stamp of approval on the recent statement of Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, another politician in a rush to reopen his state not to business, but to the business of pandemics. Patrick classically summed up the president’s position (and those of the protesters as well) in this fashion: “there are more important things than living.” Indeed, how true, though not, of course, for Donald Trump, or the Trump Organization, or that hotel of his in Washington, or his other presently sinking properties, or for his reelection in November 2020.

As for the rest of us, in Covid-19 America, we are all now potential Suleimanis.

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: 30 April 2020

Word Count: 2,075

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Energy analysts have long assumed that, given time, growing international concern over climate change would result in a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise. The result: a greener, less climate-degrading system. In this future, fossil fuels would be overtaken by renewables, while oil, gas, and coal would be relegated to an increasingly marginal role in the global energy equation. In its World Energy Outlook 2019, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that, by 2040, renewables would finally supersede petroleum as the planet’s number one source of energy and coal would largely disappear from the fuel mix. As a result of Covid-19, however, we may no longer have to wait another 20 years for such a cosmic transition to occur — it’s happening right now.

So take a breath and, amid all the bad news pouring in about a deadly global pandemic, consider this: when it comes to energy, what was expected to take at least two decades in the IEA’s most optimistic scenario may now occur in just a few years. It turns out that the impact of Covid-19 is reshaping the world energy equation, along with so much else, in unexpected ways.

That energy would be strongly affected by the pandemic should come as no surprise. After all, fuel use is closely aligned with economic activity and Covid-19 has shut down much of the world economy. With factories, offices, and other businesses closed or barely functioning, there’s naturally less demand for energy of all types. But the impacts of the pandemic go far beyond that, as our principal coping mechanisms — social distancing and stay-at-home requirements — have particular implications for energy consumption.

Among the first and most dramatic of these has been a shockingly deep decline in flying, automobile commuting, and leisure travel — activities that account for a large share of daily petroleum use. Airline travel in the United States, for example, is down by 95% from a year ago. At the same time, the personal consumption of electricity for telework, distance learning, group conversations, and entertainment has soared. In hard-hit Italy, for instance, Microsoft reports that the use of its cloud services for team meetings — a voracious consumer of electricity — has increased by 775%.

These are all meant to be temporary responses to the pandemic. As government officials and their scientific advisers begin to talk about returning to some semblance of “normalcy,” however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many such pandemic-related practices will persist in some fashion for a long time to come and, in some cases, may prove permanent. Social distancing is likely to remain the norm in public spaces for many months, if not years, curtailing attendance at theme parks and major sports events that also typically involve lots of driving. Many of us are also becoming more accustomed to working from home and may be in no rush to resume a harried 30-, 60-, or 90-minute commute to work each day. Some colleges and universities, already under financial pressure of various sorts, may abandon in-person classes for many subjects and rely far more on distance learning.

No matter how this pandemic finally plays out, the post-Covid-19 world is bound to have a very different look from the pre-pandemic one and energy use is likely to be among the areas most affected by the transformations underway. It would be distinctly premature to make sweeping predictions about the energy profile of a post-coronavirus planet, but one thing certainly seems possible: the grand transition, crucial for averting the worst outcomes of climate change and originally projected to occur decades from now, could end up happening significantly more swiftly, even if at the price of widespread bankruptcies and prolonged unemployment for millions.

Oil’s dominance in jeopardy As 2019 drew to a close, most energy analysts assumed that petroleum would continue to dominate the global landscape through the 2020s, as it had in recent decades, resulting in ever greater amounts of carbon emissions being sent into the atmosphere. For example, in its International Energy Outlook 2019, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy projected that global petroleum use in 2020 would amount to 102.2 million barrels per day. That would be up 1.1 million barrels from 2019 and represent the second year in a row in which global consumption would have exceeded the notable threshold of 100 million barrels per day. Grimly enough, the EIA further projected that world demand would continue to climb, reaching 104 million barrels per day by 2025 and 106 million barrels in 2030.

In arriving at such projections, energy analysts assumed that the factors responsible for driving petroleum use upward in recent years would persist well into the future: growing automobile ownership in China, India, and other developing nations; ever-increasing commutes as soaring real-estate prices forced people to live ever farther from city centers; and an exponential increase in airline travel, especially in Asia. Such factors, it was widely assumed, would more than compensate for any drop in demand caused by a greater preference for electric cars in Europe and a few other places. As suggested by oil giant BP in its Energy Outlook for 2019, “All of the demand growth comes from developing economies, driven by the burgeoning middle class in developing Asian economies.”

Even in January, as the coronavirus began to spread from China to other countries, energy analysts imagined little change in such predictions. Reporting “continued strong momentum” in oil use among the major developing economies, the IEA typically reaffirmed its belief that global consumption would grow by more than one million barrels daily in 2020.

Only now has that agency begun to change its tune. In its most recent Oil Market Report, it projected that global petroleum consumption in April would fall by an astonishing 29 million barrels per day compared to the same month the previous year. That drop, by the way, is the equivalent of total 2019 oil usage by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Still, the IEA analysts assumed that all of this would just be a passing phenomenon. In that same report, it also predicted that global economic activity would rebound in the second half of this year and, by December, oil usage would already be within a few million barrels of pre-coronavirus consumption levels.

Other indicators, however, suggest that such rosy predictions will prove highly fanciful. The likelihood that oil consumption will approach 2018 or 2019 levels by year’s end or even in early 2021 now appears remarkably unrealistic. It is, in fact, doubtful that those earlier projections about sustained future growth in the demand for oil will ever materialize.

A shattered world economy As a start, a return to pre-Covid-19 consumption levels assumes a reasonably rapid restoration of the world economy as it was, with Asia taking the lead. At this moment, however, there’s no evidence that such an outcome is likely.

In its April World Economic Outlook report, the International Monetary Fund predicted that global economic output would fall by 3% in 2020 (which may prove a distinct underestimate) and that the pandemic’s harsh impacts, including widespread unemployment and business failures, will persist well into 2021 or beyond. All told, it suggested, the cumulative loss to global gross domestic product in 2020 and 2021, thanks to the pandemic, will amount to some $9 trillion, a sum greater than the economies of Japan and Germany combined (and that assumes the coronavirus will not come back yet more fiercely in late 2020 or 2021, as the “Spanish Flu” did in 1918).

This and other recent data suggest that any notion China, India, and other developing nations will soon resume their upward oil-consumption trajectory and save the global petroleum industry appears wildly far-fetched. Indeed, on April 17th, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that the country’s GDP shrank by 6.8% in the first three months of 2020, the first such decline in 40 years and a staggering blow to that country’s growth model. Even though government officials are slowly opening factories and other key businesses again, most observers believe that spurring significant growth will prove exceedingly difficult given that Chinese consumers, traumatized by the pandemic and accompanying lockdown measures, seem loath to make new purchases or engage in travel, tourism, and the like.

And keep in mind that a slowdown in China will have staggering consequences for the economies of numerous other developing nations that rely on that country’s tourism or its imports of their oil, copper, iron ore, and other raw materials. China, after all, is the leading destination for the exports of many Asian, African, and Latin American countries. With Chinese factories closed or operating at a reduced tempo, the demand for their products has already plummeted, causing widespread economic hardship for their populations.

Add all this up, along with a rising tide of unemployment in the United States and elsewhere, and it would appear that the possibility of global oil consumption returning to pre-pandemic levels any time soon — or even at all — is modest at best. Indeed, the major oil-exporting nations have evidently reached this conclusion on their own, as demonstrated by the extraordinary April 12th agreement that the Saudis, the Russians, and other major exporting countries reached to cut global production by nearly 10 million barrels per day. It was a desperate bid to bolster oil prices, which had fallen by more than 50% since the beginning of the year. And keep in mind that even this reduction — unprecedented in scale — is unlikely to prevent a further decline in those prices, as oil purchases continue to fall and fall again.

Doing things differently Energy analysts are likely to argue that, while the downturn will undoubtedly last longer than the IEA’s optimistic forecast, sooner or later petroleum use will return to its earlier patterns, once again cresting at the 100-million-barrels-per-day level. But this appears highly unlikely, given the way the pandemic is reshaping the global economy and everyday human behavior.

After all, IEA and oil-industry forecasts assume a fully interconnected world in which the sort of dynamic growth we’ve come to expect from Asia in the twenty-first century will sooner or later fuel economic vigor globally. Extended supply lines will once again carry raw materials and other inputs to China’s factories, while Chinese parts and finished products will be transported to markets on every continent. But whether or not that country’s economy starts to grow again, such a globalized economic model is unlikely to remain the prevailing one in the post-pandemic era. Many countries and companies are, in fact, beginning to restructure their supply lines to avoid a full-scale reliance on foreign suppliers by seeking alternatives closer to home — a trend likely to persist after pandemic-related restrictions are lifted (especially in a world in which Trumpian-style “nationalism” still seems to be on the rise).

“There will be a rethink of how much any country wants to be reliant on any other country,” suggests the aptly named Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I don’t think fundamentally this is the end of globalization. But this does accelerate the type of thinking that has been going on in the Trump administration, that there are critical technologies, critical resources, reserve manufacturing capacity that we want here in the U.S. in case of crisis.”

Other countries are bound to begin planning along similar lines, leading to a significant decline in transcontinental commerce. Local and regional trade will, of course, have to increase to make up for this decline, but the net impact on petroleum demand is likely to be negative as long-distance trade and travel diminishes. For China and other rising Asian powers, this could also mean a slower growth rate, squeezing those “burgeoning middle classes” that were, in turn, expected to be the major local drivers (quite literally, in the case of the car cultures in those countries) of petroleum consumption.

A shift toward electricity — and a greater reliance on renewables Another trend the coronavirus is likely to accelerate: greater reliance on telework by corporations, governments, universities, and other institutions. Even before the pandemic broke out, many companies and organizations were beginning to rely more on teleconferencing and work-from-home operations to reduce travel costs, commuting headaches, and even, in some cases, greenhouse gas emissions. In our new world, the use of these techniques is likely to become far more common.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is, among other things, a massive experiment in telecommuting,” observed Katherine Guyot and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution in a recent report. “Up to half of American workers are currently working from home, more than double the fraction who worked from home (at least occasionally) in 2017-2018.”

Many such workers, they also noted, had been largely unfamiliar with telecommuting technology when this grand experiment began, but have quickly mastered the necessary skills. Given little choice in the matter, high school and college students are also becoming more adept at telework as their schools shift to remote learning. Meanwhile, companies and colleges are investing massively in the necessary hardware and software for such communications and teaching. As a result, Guyot and Sawhill suggest, “The outbreak is accelerating the trend toward telecommuting, possibly for the long term.”

Any large increase in teleworking is bound to have a dramatic dual impact on energy use: people will drive less, reducing their oil consumption, while relying more on teleconferencing and cloud computing, and so increasing their use of electricity. “The coronavirus reminds us that electricity is more indispensable than ever,” says Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA. “Millions of people are now confined to their homes, resorting to teleworking to do their jobs.”

Increased reliance on electricity, in turn, will have a significant impact on the very nature of primary fuel consumption, as coal begins to lose its dominant role in the generation of electrical power and is replaced at an ever-accelerating pace by renewables. In 2018, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2019, a distressing 38% of world electricity generation was still provided by coal, another 26% by oil and natural gas, and only 26% by renewables; the remaining 10% came from nuclear and other sources of energy. This was expected to change dramatically over time as climate-conscious policies began to have a significant impact — but, even in the IEA’s most hopeful scenarios, it was only after 2030 that renewables would reach the 50% level in electricity generation. With Covid-19, however, that process is now likely to speed up, as power utilities adjust to the global economic slowdown and seek to minimize their costs.

With many businesses shut down, net electricity use in the United States has actually declined somewhat in these months — although not nearly as much as the drop in petroleum use, given the way home electricity consumption has compensated for a plunge in business demand. As utilities adapt to this challenging environment, they are finding that wind and solar power are often the least costly sources of primary energy, with natural gas just behind them and coal the most expensive of all. Insofar as they are investing in the future, then, they appear to be favoring large solar and wind projects, which can, in fact, be brought online relatively quickly, assuring needed revenue. New natural gas plants take longer to install and coal offers no advantages whatsoever.

In the depths of global disaster, it’s way too early to make detailed predictions about the energy landscape of future decades. Nonetheless, it does appear that the present still-raging pandemic is forcing dramatic shifts in the way we consume energy and that many of these changes are likely to persist in some fashion long after the virus has been tamed. Given the already extreme nature of the heating of this planet, such shifts are likely to prove catastrophic for the oil and coal industries but beneficial for the environment — and so for the rest of us. Deadly, disruptive, and economically devastating as Covid-19 has proved to be, in retrospect it may turn out to have had at least this one silver lining.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books).

Copyright ©2020 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 April 2020

Word Count: 2,669

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Historically, in hyper-crises, local and global systems can change fundamentally. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit first China and then the rest of the globe, the question of whether the American imperial era might be faltering was already on the table, amid that country’s endless wars and with the world’s most capricious leader. When humanity emerges from this devastating crisis of disease, dislocation, and impoverishment, not to mention the fracturing of a global economic system created by Washington but increasingly powered by Beijing on a climate-stressed planet, the question will be: Has the Chinese dragon pushed the American eagle down to a secondary position?

To assess that question objectively in this unsettled moment, it’s necessary to examine on a day-to-day basis how the two contemporary superpowers handled the Covid-19 crisis, and ask the question: Who has proved better at combating the deadliest disease of modern times, President Donald Trump or President Xi Jinping? It’s chastening to note that whereas China under Xi has suppressed the latest coronavirus at the human cost of three lives per million population, the U.S. under Trump is still struggling to overpower it, having already sacrificed 145 of every million Americans.

In the afterglow of Trump’s December 16, 2019, touting of a partial trade deal with China (after a lengthy trade war), a Sino-American exchange took place. George Gao, director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC), spoke with his American counterpart, Robert Redfield, on January 3rd, alerting him to the arrival of an as-yet-unidentified, pneumonia-inducing virus in the city of Wuhan (news of which the Chinese government would for crucial days withhold domestically). Redfield then briefed Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar on that conversation.

Ever since, the trajectories of the policies followed by Beijing and Washington have diverged by 180 degrees. Mind you, the potential prize for the winner of the contest for killer of the super-virus is the World Leadership Trophy.

Attacked by a virulent virus, China fights back China’s National Health Commission (NHC), which had dispatched a team of experts to Wuhan on December 31st, informed the World Health Organization (WHO) that cases of pneumonia of an unknown sort had been detected in that city, linked to human exposure at a 1,000-stall wholesale seafood market, selling fish and other animals, dead and alive. With that, the Chinese scientists faced two separate challenges: to isolate the pathogen causing the disease in order to set out its genome sequencing and to determine whether or not there was human-to-human transmission of the virus.

On January 3rd, the NHC centralized all testing related to the mysterious disease and, two days later, in conjunction with experts in infectious diseases caused by pathogens that jump from animals to humans, completed the sequencing of the genome of the virus. It became accessible worldwide that January 7th. And on January 10th and 11th, the WHO issued guidance notices to all its member states about collecting samples from any patients who might show symptoms of the disease, listing stringent precautions to avoid the risk of human-to-human transmission.

On January 14th, Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of the WHO’s emerging diseases unit, offered a mixed message on the situation. She told reporters that there had, so far, been only the most limited kinds of human transmission between family members in China. Nonetheless, she added, the possibility of wider human-to-human transmission should not be regarded as “surprising” given the similarity of the new virus to the ones in the earlier SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreaks. However, Reuters and China’s Xinhua News Agency also quoted her as saying that there had been only the most limited human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus so far, mainly among small clusters of family members and that “it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission.”

On January 16th, scientists at the German Center for Infection Research in Berlin developed a new laboratory test to detect the novel coronavirus. This offered the possibility of diagnosing suspected cases quickly. The WHO publicized it as a guideline for diagnostic detection. The leaders of many countries adopted it, but not President Trump who, in America First-style, demanded a test produced by U.S. scientists. Only on February 29th, however, would the Food and Drug Administration allow laboratories and hospitals to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process. That was four weeks after the WHO had started distributing its effective test globally.

On January 19th that China’s National Health Commission confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. On that day, it publicly confirmed the first cases of person-to-person transmission. Headed by a cabinet minister, the NHC classified the novel coronavirus as a category B infectious disease under the country’s 1989 Law on Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases (revised in 2004 and 2013). This law allows the upgrading of an infectious disease to category A subject to the decision of the cabinet. Under that classification, medical institutions are authorized to treat patients in isolation in designated places and take necessary preventive measures to discover and deal with their close contacts.

On January 20th, after chairing a cabinet meeting, Premier Li Keqiang first spoke of the necessity of controlling a coronavirus epidemic, demanding that all Communist Party and government units address the situation. While endorsing Li’s call, President Xi Jinping stressed “the importance of informing the public to safeguard social stability.” As one high-level Communist Party committee typically stated in a posting on WeChat, “Whoever deliberately delays or conceals reporting for the sake of their own interests will be forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame.”

All this happened on the eve of the week-long Chinese New Year holiday, a time when hundreds of millions of people return to their homes for celebrations. On January 22nd, three days before the New Year, the authorities suspended all rail and air links out of Wuhan.

The next day, the central government imposed a complete lockdown on that bustling city of 11 million and other large urban centers in the province of Hubei. Residents were forbidden to leave their homes, while food and other supplies were to be delivered by neighborhood committees. This set a precedent for similar measures in other cities, as in the coming weeks many areas across China imposed such “closed management” situations on communities. Up to 760 million people were subjected to travel curbs of one sort or another, while the economy was reduced to 40%-50% of its normal capacity.

During a meeting with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Beijing on January 29th, President Xi assured him that he had personally overseen and directed the response to the viral outbreak and the prevention and control measures that went with it. On January 30th, with the novel coronavirus having spread to 17 countries including the United States, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a “global health emergency.” On February 11th, it labeled the disease caused by the latest coronavirus, which can culminate in death-inducing pneumonia, Covid-19.

Meanwhile, in Trumpland… On January 29th, President Trump officially inaugurated a task force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to monitor, contain, and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus while also keeping Americans informed on the matter.

Azar and the Centers for Disease Control Prevention’s Robert Redfield had already been involved in protecting Americans from the deadly virus. On January 7th, Redfield had established the CDC’s Covid-19 Incident Management System and, on the 21st, he activated its emergency response structure. On that very day, the first lab-confirmed coronavirus case was reported in Olympia, Washington. (Earlier ones would later be detected.) The president noted the news with a tweet: “It’s one person coming in from China and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

Inside the White House, Trump’s national trade adviser, Peter Navarro addressed a warning memo to the National Security Council stating that the present “lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” He estimated that such a pandemic could kill half-a-million people and deliver a $5.7 trillion hit to the economy.

Two days later, in response to these developments, all Trump did was ban the arrival of non-US citizens who had recently traveled to China. From then on, he repeatedly touted this as evidence that he had acted early. Azar’s plan to set up surveillance in five cities at the cost of $100 million fell through when, on February 21st, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that problems with the kits to test for Covid-19 were still unresolved.

In the absence of meaningful testing, the number of cases in the U.S. looked small. “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted on the 24th. “CDC & World Health [Organization] have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” He ignored Navarro’s memo of the previous day and its warning that “there is an increasing probability of a full-blown Covid-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”

Instead, on February 25th, at a news conference in New Delhi during his trip to India, the president haughtily claimed that a vaccine for Covid-19 would soon be available. “Now they have it, they have studied it, they know very much, in fact, we’re very close to a vaccine,” he said confidently.

That same day, in a CDC briefing in Washington, Nancy Messonnier described the situation this way: “Ultimately, we expect we will see [the infected] community spread in this country… [and] disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need to start thinking about now.” That led to a staggering 1,031 point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which infuriated Trump. He promptly urged Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, to go on television and preach confidence. Accordingly, Kudlow told CNBC, “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”

On his return to Washington on February 26th, Trump replaced Azar as the head of the coronavirus task force with Vice President Mike Pence, and charged him with disseminating positive messages in order to steady a jittery stock market. The next day, the grievance-laden president complained that the media were doing all they could “to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible.”

Meanwhile, back in the Middle Kingdom On February 10th, Chinese President Xi visited a hospital in Beijing where he held a video call with health workers in Wuhan. Coverage of it and his temperature being taken by a doctor filled the front page of the official newspaper, the People’s Daily. By then, Communist Party chiefs in Wuhan and Hubei province had been “replaced” because of their poor initial response to the coronavirus.

In Wuhan, an extra 60,000 hospital beds for Covid-19 patients were created within a month by converting 16 exhibition halls and sports venues into field hospitals and constructing two brand new hospitals as well. On February 23rd, Xi teleconferenced with 170,000 local officials, describing the pandemic as the hardest public-health emergency to contain since the founding of the People’s Republic. He noted that the situation remained grim and complex, while Hubei Province and significant parts of the rest of the country (as well as the economy) had been shut down.

The highest priority was given to the production of personal protective equipment. According to an official March 6th press briefing, production of protective clothing had jumped from less than 20,000 pieces daily to 500,000 pieces daily. The output of specialist N95 masks shot up eightfold to 1.6 million and ordinary masks totaled 100 million.

During a trip to Wuhan four days later, Xi praised front-line medical workers, military officers, soldiers, community workers, police officers, officials, and volunteers fighting the pandemic, as well as patients and residents in the locked-down city. The epidemic had by then caused 3,000 deaths. On March 9th, however, daily new cases in Wuhan had already dropped to 19 from thousands a day a month earlier. All the makeshift hospitals were closed. Nonetheless, Xi warned that prevention-and-control work required constant vigilance.

When 114 countries reported coronavirus cases to the World Health Organization on March 11th, it declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic.

By mid-March, the Chinese government and the Jack Ma Foundation, part of the giant corporate conglomerate Alibaba Group, had sent doctors and medical supplies to Belgium, Cambodia, France, Iran, Iraq, Italy, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, and the United States. The foundation announced that it would ship “20,000 testing kits, 100,000 masks and 1,000 protective suits and face shields” to every country in Africa and added that Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, would “take the lead in managing the logistics and distribution of these supplies to other African countries.”

Of the 89 countries that, by March 26th, had received emergency assistance from China to fight the pandemic, 28 were in Asia, 16 in Europe, 26 in Africa, nine in the Americas, and 10 in the South Pacific. Such medical supplies mainly included testing kits, masks, protective suits, thermometer guns, and ventilators. China also invited officials and experts from more than 100 countries to a video conference on Covid-19, while President Xi conducted 26 telephone conversations with 22 foreign leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, Spanish King Felipe VI, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and Donald Trump.

Trump wakes up On March 13th, President Trump declared a national emergency, pledging to dramatically speed up coronavirus testing (which he disastrously failed to do). By then, he had chalked up a remarkable series of false claims and outright lies about the fast-spreading disease. Typically, on a visit to CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 6th, he had boasted of his “natural ability” to understand the subject of epidemiology.

On March 13th, he falsely announced that a Google website was being developed to help people find places to get Covid-19 tests, something Google’s officials turned out to know nothing about. The next day, he lined up executives from Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Roche Diagnostics, insisting that they would help expedite testing to stop the quick-spreading virus. In fact, little happened and the nation began to shut down. Public schools closed, sports leagues postponed or cut off their seasons, people began working from home in large numbers (as others by the millions simply lost their jobs), and supplies of hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and toilet paper disappeared from store shelves. A month on, very few of the president’s promises had materialized, while the disease had spread dramatically and deaths had begun to soar.

Asked about the shortage of testing kits and sites, which has left America lagging far behind South Korea and other countries in dealing with the still-spreading virus, Trump couldn’t have been clearer. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said. And yet, locked into his “Make America Great Again” bubble, until March 6th he blocked an offer from the Jack Ma Foundation to send 500,000 testing kits and one million masks to the U.S. to be distributed by the CDC.

By heeding the WHO’s battle cry of “test, test, test,” South Korea had managed to avoid the kinds of lockdowns implemented by China, many Western European countries, and some American cities. In a desperate phone call to President Moon Jae-in on March 24th, Trump begged him to rush test kits to the United States. In response, Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the South Korean equivalent of the CDC, agreed, but only at a level that would not diminish his own country’s testing capacity.

Soon after the arrival of 1,000 Chinese ventilators at John F. Kennedy International Airport on April 4th, much to the relief of a grateful Governor Andrew Cuomo, a tweet from Trump read, “USA STRONG!” His boast, however, sounded hollow, given the grim news that, between February 12th and March 11th, the Dow Jones index had dropped around 8,000 points from its historic peak, as national unemployment tripled from a low of 3.5% (with more to come).

To counter this, on April 9th, the Federal Reserve released business lending and other programs worth $2.3 trillion to steady a fast-sinking economy. It had already injected $500 billion dollars into the financial system in March, with plans for a further $1.5 trillion to come.

By March 27th, as the U.S. had gained the global status of number one in coronavirus cases, the president also signed into law the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed almost unanimously by Congress, to rush federal assistance to workers and businesses. It included the payment of $1,200 to most taxpayers; enhanced unemployment benefits; a $500 billion lending program for large companies, cities, and states; and a $367 billion fund for small businesses.

Despite all this, the country’s gross domestic product is expected to fall by at least 10.8% in the second quarter of 2020. China’s GDP contraction of 6.8% in the first quarter of the year was a historic drop. However, at 5.9%, the jobless rate in urban areas in March 2020 was down by 0.3% from the previous month.

Passing on the world leadership trophy? The question that many experts on geopolitics are now pondering is this: Have their responses to Covid-19 shifted the balance of power between China and the U.S. in a way that will matter in a post-coronavirus world? Watching the chaos of Trump’s daily press conferences and his administration’s failure to stop the virus effectively proved an alarming reminder that rational people can plan for anything — except an irrational American president. After all, under his watch 746,459 Americans had contracted Covid-19, and 39,651 had died by mid-April. The comparable figures for China were 82,747 cases and 4,632 deaths.

Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, recently offered a pertinent historical parallel to consider. She cited the 1956 Suez crisis — Britain’s unsuccessful, if conspiratorial, alliance with France and Israel to militarily topple the nationalist regime of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser. It is now considered the sunset moment for Britain’s imperial power. In the present context, she speculated that the Covid-19 pandemic may prove to be a “Suez moment” for the United States.

Ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health experts, President Trump threatens to disastrously extend his coronavirus chronology from hell into an increasingly painful future by “reopening” the country too soon. By so doing, he will only accelerate the day when the World Leadership Trophy, held by America since 1946, is handed to the People’s Republic of China.

Dilip Hiro writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World among many other books. His latest book is Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy (Oxford University Press).

Copyright ©2020 Dilip Hiro — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 April 2020

Word Count: 3,142

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Reopening day 2020?

by Robert Lipsyte

As controversies about the “reopening” of America loom over our lives, nothing seems as intrinsically irrelevant — yet possibly as critically important — as how soon major spectator sports return.

If sports don’t trump religion as the opiate of the masses, they have, until recently, been at least the background music of most of our lives. So here’s my bet on one possible side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic to put in your scorebook: if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual — or, at least, to his twisted version of the same.

That’s why he announced at a recent daily coronavirus briefing-cum-rally his eagerness to bring professional sports back quickly. Though it was Major League Baseball that he mentioned — “We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old” — the sport that truly matters to him is football, the only major mass entertainment (other than Trumpism) that endorses tribalism and toxic masculinity so flagrantly and keeps violence in vogue. Football supports Trump in its promotion of racial division, the crushing of dissent, and the spread of misinformation, inequality, and brutality.

Whether or not the president can survive the loss of the 2020 baseball season — already poisoned by last year’s Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal — is up for grabs. Certainly, the proposed plan to turn stadiums in the Phoenix, Arizona, area into the sports equivalent of a vast movie set for the games of all 30 major league teams (to be played without fans) seems far-fetched at best.

But football, now the true national pastime, is another matter.

In sports terms, as in so much else in coronaviral America, these are desperately deprived times, even for casual fans. There will be intense pressure — and not only from the president’s base — for that sport’s return. For many people, mostly men, it’s the sustaining soap opera that has always carried them into the next week and the one after that, a porn-ish escape hatch from work and family, a currency of communication with other men, an eternal connection to a non-demanding hive.

Games for lives? Without professional (or even college) sports right now or realistically in the near future, fans feel even more unmoored in lives that, for all of us, are distinctly adrift. As they become edgier, it’s a reasonable bet (or at least my hope) that they will also become more open to questioning Trump’s mismanagement — or, to put it more bluntly, sacrifice — of their lives. Recent polls already seem to reflect this, with the latest Gallup Poll showing the steepest approval decline of his presidency.

The president, I suspect, fears just this, though perhaps, in the end, the hole in everyday life where sports once was may only reinforce fans’ sense (like the president’s) that the games are too important not to bring back, safety be damned. Certainly, Trump and other Republican politicians have already been willing enough to forfeit lives to boost their reelection chances.

The values and sensibilities of football are, of course, Trumpist in nature. That’s why former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s demonstration against racism — performed in a kind of public isolation — elicited such a harsh reaction from the president in the now-distant pre-pandemic era. That’s why the sport’s billionaire owners, predominantly Trump donors, shunned Kaepernick (although some of their teams could have used his skills). They didn’t dare to, or care to, give him another platform, not in an era when “president” and “racism” were becoming synonymous.

Even more tellingly, in an understandable but still disappointing me-first display, few of Kaepernick’s fellow players, most of whom are also African-American, supported him publicly. After years of being celebrated as America’s “warriors” and “role models,” they came up desperately short when it counted. Compare them to healthcare workers and other front-line heroes of this pandemic and you’ll realize just how far short they fell of even the most modest form of everyday bravery.

Not that, when it comes to pro sports, football was such an outlier. As activism goes, baseball, a sport that once produced transcendent progressive heroes like Jackie Robinson, Jim Bouton, and Curt Flood, has been eerily quiet in recent years. It’s a sport that the president has paid relatively little attention to — except for suggesting recently that Pete Rose, banned from baseball for life for betting on the Cincinnati Reds while he was that team’s manager, should be allowed into its Hall of Fame.

How Trumpian was that? Such betting is, of course, strictly forbidden for active players and managers who are obviously privy to inside information. But, hey, does disregarding inconvenient rules to profit from a privileged position ring any bells these days in Washington?

Trump has, in fact, been uncharacteristically silent on the recent revelation that during the 2017 season, the World Series winners, the Houston Astros, concealed a video camera in center field to steal the pitching signs of opposing teams. That’s also illegal. Major League baseball punished the team by suspending its manager and general manager for a year, imposing a $5 million fine on its owners, and taking away its first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.

For some fans and commentators, the Astros’ punishment was too severe or too mild. Opposing players, feeling victimized by the scheme, thought specific Astros should have been penalized, too. Yet such cheating is hardly new. In 1951, the “shot heard round the world,” a famed home-run that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants and sent them to the World Series, was linked to the stealing of signs from the Brooklyn Dodgers through a hand-held telescope. Only the technology has improved.

A changing national pastime Once baseball’s opening day passed without a pitch this April, proof that the plague was winning, the Phoenix Plan was floated. It would require all major league players and employees to be sequestered in that area and continually tested at a moment when tests might still not be universally available. But, hey, haven’t VIP Jocks always gone to the head of the line? (Actually, a massive study of 10,000 Major League Baseball employees, from players to popcorn vendors, being conducted by Stanford University and the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory to find out how many contracted and may have recovered from the virus has already gotten access to such testing kits at a time when even some front-line workers can’t get them!)

For those who think this country needs baseball now to raise its depressed spirits, you might consider a cautionary historical precedent, the Summer of Swat of 1998. As the country reeled from the revelation of President Bill Clinton’s sexual liaison with a White House intern and with his impeachment just around the corner, a feel-good legend was born. A white man and a brown man rose in friendly rivalry to break the 37-year-old record of 61 home runs by Roger Maris, who, in turn, had bested Babe Ruth’s famed 60 in 1927.

The good-natured competition between Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals (who won with 70 homers) and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs (66) was, at the time, celebrated as a balm that should soothe the country. And perhaps for many fans it did indeed serve as a comforting distraction in a difficult political moment.

But that summer’s golden glow soon faded as both players were reported to have taken steroids to muscle up. McGwire would admit it years later; Sosa would not. (A dark-skinned Dominican, he further complicated his legend by bleaching his skin to whiten himself, as if in anticipation of the Trumpian racial preferences to come.) Their contemporary, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, would eventually become the single-season home run leader with 73, but has never shaken rumors that he, too, used steroids.

Nor did baseball ever fully recover its sense of primacy as the national pastime or its sense of righteousness as one of America’s first major institutions to integrate. In fact, the sport is still overwhelmingly white and skewed toward an older audience, as well as slow and outdated in an era of tweeting speed.

Which is why, whether or not baseball opens this season in a vast sports self-isolation experiment, the key to President Trump’s future lies in his perverse relationship with the National Football League. That goes back more than 30 years to the moment he tried unsuccessfully (as with so many other business ventures) to elbow his way into the sport. Give him credit, though: ever attuned to the public mood, he did sense the rise of a new national pastime.

Bet on this One reason for the NFL’s growing popularity is the way it uses college football as its minor leagues and early showcase for pro players (though possibly not this fall). For a passionate pro football fan, it’s a pleasure to see the stars of tomorrow in the making. Of course, the famously corrupted higher education sports market is a happy NFL partner and crime may pay after all, as it often does in the Trump league. In a recent commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nathan Kalman-Lamb of Duke opines that high-revenue men’s football and basketball “will become more valuable than ever as an enticement to lure steep tuition from students.”

And here’s an innovation that the president would glory in, one that would make post-pandemic football an even greater success: the addition of real-time nationwide legal gambling on games. Just imagine the sort of Trump-donor dollars that would be stacked up to support such a future industry. After all, estimations are that illegal gambling on pro and college football is already a $93 billion business. Legal or not, it’s an integral part of the fan experience (though in the post-pandemic world there will be a lot less money in so many pockets to gamble with).

The dream of easily accessible, high-tech legal gambling has been lurking on the sidelines for years. All that’s necessary to make it come true is for Congress to reverse the 1992 Professional & Amateur Sports Protection Act, the federal law that bans it in most states. And the pandemic moment may prove perfect for just that, for “reopening” football in a new and even more Trumpian way, allowing fans to sit at home and bet what money they have left on games in progress: Will that field goal attempt split the uprights? Will Tom Brady in his new Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform make that crucial third-down conversion?

However, to reopen pro football, as the president would wish, to make life seem “normal” again, stadiums might have to remain empty (or partially empty). Imagine, for instance, if San Francisco had actually beaten Kansas City (which it didn’t) in the Super Bowl on the first Sunday in February and the expected championship parade had followed a few days later, drawing a million people to that city’s streets. It might have proved an early version of Mardi Gras (a 2020 coronaviral disaster of a get-together).

Of course, social distancing will be inconceivable for football players and the results all too predictable in a world in which Covid-19 is likely to hang around for a long, long time. From the huddle to tackling, the game is, in every way, a potential disease transmitter. The only example of social distancing (besides Kaepernick kneeling alone) I can even remember might have been the 1958 West Point football team, which fielded a “lonesome end,” Bill Carpenter. On every play, he set himself up near the far sideline in an innovative formation. He never even joined the huddle and that team went undefeated.

If it proves impossible to stage football games, given social-distancing rules, the inevitable sport of the future is already waiting in the wings. Just under the radar of most of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those without access to children, is a fiercely contested, already commodified, fan-friendly industry with championships, heroes, endorsement contracts, and a ready market for expensive gear. I’m thinking, as you may have guessed, of competitive online video games, or esports.  (Think of it as the revenge of the nerds.) No matter what Donald Trump does, sooner rather than later they’re likely to replace the old up-close-and-contagious live games.

It’s not hard to imagine a future in which individual competitors, regional and national teams, leagues, or even some version of the Olympics, would be watched by millions on streaming platforms on home screens and, once social distancing becomes a historical footnote, on the screens of sports bars as well, if not theaters and arenas. While combat games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, along with sports knock-offs like Madden and NBA Live, currently dominate esports, the future will undoubtedly include brainier fare that will turn art, architecture, banking, diplomacy, music, and maybe even poetry into online competitions even Nike and Google could sponsor.

Esports already supports ESPN-style commentary. There might even be room someday for a new reality show about them hosted by a motor-mouthed, pumpkin-headed former one-term president.

Who needs football after all? It would, in fact, be the definition of madness to launch a football season in a coronaviral world. But that doesn’t mean Donald Trump won’t push for just that. The advisory board he appointed for the reopening of sports includes, as my colleague Dave Zirin points out, “a group of brigands defined by their lack of care in normal times for the safety and well-being of their employees.”

It’s Trump’s dream team because, to win in November, he needs an America in which the National Football League is back in business big time. For him it’s open arms for the NFL, which could mean open season on the rest of us.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2020 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 April 2020

Word Count: 2,301

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Inequality and the coronavirus

by Liz Theoharis

My mom contracted polio when she was 14. She survived and learned to walk again, but my life was deeply affected by that virus. Today, as our larger society attempts to self-distance and self-isolate, my family has texted about the polio quarantine my mom was put under: how my grandma fearfully checked my aunt’s temperature every night because she shared a bedroom with my mom; how they had to put a sign on the front door of the house that read “quarantine” so that no one would visit.

Growing up with a polio survivor, I learned lessons about epidemics, sickness, disability, and inequality that have forever shaped my world. From a young age, I saw that all of us should be valued for our intrinsic worth as human beings; that there is no line between the supposedly deserving and the undeserving; that we should be loved for who we are, not what we do or how much money we have. My mom modeled for me what’s possible when those most impacted by inequality and injustice dedicate their lives to protecting others from what hurts us all. She taught me that the dividing line between sickness and wellbeing loses its meaning in a society that doesn’t care for everyone.

Here’s the simple truth of twenty-first-century America: all of us live in a time and in an economic system that values our lives relative to our ability to produce profits for the rich or in the context of the wealth we possess. Our wellness is measured by our efficiency and — a particular lesson in the age of the coronavirus — our sickness, when considered at all, is seen as an indication of individual limitations or moral failures, rather than as a symptom of a sick society.

About 31 million people are today uninsured in America and 14 states have not even expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The healthcare system is seemingly structured in defiance of the people it should serve, functioning as yet another way to maximize profits at the expense of millions. In this coronavirus moment, many more Americans are finally awakening to the bitter consequences, the damage, wrought when even a single person does not have access to the resources he or she needs to live decently or, for that matter, survive. With the spread of a pandemic, the cost to a nation that often treats collective care as, at best, an afterthought should become apparent. After all, more than 9,000 medical workers, many not adequately protected from the disease, have already contracted it.

For decades, both political parties have pushed the narrative that illness, homelessness, poverty, and inequality are minor aberrations in an otherwise healthy society. Even now, as the possibility of a potentially historic depression looms, assurances that the mechanics of our economy are fundamentally strong (and Covid-19 an unexpected fluke) remain commonplace. And yet, while that economy’s productivity has indeed increased strikingly since the 1970s, the gains from it have gone to an increasingly small number of people (and corporations), while real wages have stagnated for the majority of workers. Don’t be fooled. This crisis didn’t start with the coronavirus: our collapsing oil and gas industry, for instance, points to an energy system that was already on the brink and a majority of economists agree that a manufacturing decline had actually begun in August 2019.

The cost of inequality It should no longer be possible to ignore the structural crisis of poverty and inequality that has been eating away at American society over these last decades. Historic unemployment numbers in recent weeks only reveal how expendable the majority of workers are in a crunch. This is happening at a moment when it’s ever clearer how many of the most “essential” tasks in our economy are done by the least well-paid workers. The ranks of the poor are widening at a startling clip, as many more of us are now experiencing what dire insecurity feels like in an economy built on non-unionized, low-wage work and part-time jobs.

In order to respond to such a crisis and the growing needs of millions, it’s important to first acknowledge the deeper history of injustice and pain that brought us all here. In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., put it well when he said that “the prescription for the cure rests with an accurate diagnosis of the disease.” To develop a cure not just for this virus but for a nation with the deepest kind of inequality at its core, what’s first needed (as with any disease) is an accurate diagnosis.

Today, more than 38 million people officially live below the federal poverty line and, in truth, that figure should have shocked the nation into action before the coronavirus even arrived here. No such luck and here’s the real story anyway: the official measure of poverty, developed in 1964, doesn’t even take into account household expenses like health care, child care, housing, and transportation, not to speak of other costs that have burgeoned in recent decades. The world has undergone profound economic transformations over the last 66 years and yet this out-of-date measure, based on three times a family’s food budget, continues to shape policymaking at every level of government as well as the contours of the American political and moral imagination.

Two years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside Reverend William Barber II) and the Institute for Policy Studies released an audit of America. Its centerpiece was a far more realistic assessment of poverty and economic precariousness in this country. Using the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure as a baseline, which, among other things, measures family income after taxes and out-of-pocket expenses for food, clothing, housing, and utilities, there are at least 140 million people who are poor — or just a $400 emergency from that state. (Of that, there are now untold examples in this pandemic moment.)

As poverty has grown and spread, one of the great political weapons of politicians and the ruling elite over the past decades (only emphasized in the age of Trump) has been to minimize, dismiss, and racialize it. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” coded it into Republican national politics; in the 1980s, in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the fabricated image of “the welfare queen” gained symbolic prominence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s welfare “reforms” enshrined such thinking in the arguments of both parties. Today, given the outright racism and xenophobia that has become the hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency, “poor” has become a curse word.

It is, of course, true that, among the 140 million poor people in the U.S., a disproportionate number are indeed people of color. The inheritance of slavery, Jim Crow, never-ending discrimination, and the mass incarceration of black men in particular, as well as a generational disinvestment in such populations, could have resulted in nothing less. And yet the reality of poverty stretches deep into every community in this country. According to that audit of America, the poor or low-income today consist of 24 million blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asian-Americans, two million Native peoples, and 66 million whites.

Those staggering numbers, already a deadweight for the nation, are likely to prove a grotesque underestimate in the coronaviral world we now inhabit and yet none of this should be a surprise. Although we couldn’t have predicted the exact circumstances of this pandemic, social theorists remind us that conditions were ripe for just this kind of economic dislocation.

Over the past 50 years, for instance, rents have risen faster than income in every city. Before the coronavirus outbreak, there was not a single county in this country where a person making a minimum wage with a family could afford a two-bedroom apartment. No surprise then that, throughout this crisis, there has been a rise in rent strikes, housing takeovers, and calls for moratoriums on evictions. The quiet fact is that, in the last few decades, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and homelessness have become ever more deeply and permanently structured into this society.

Covid-19 and the descent Into poverty Over the years, one political narrative has been trumpeted by both parties: that we don’t have enough to provide for every American. This scarcity argument has undergirded every federal budget in recent history and yet it falls flat when we look at the 53% of every federal discretionary dollar that goes to the Pentagon, the trillions of dollars that have been squandered in this country’s never-ending war on terror, not to speak of the unprecedented financial gains the wealthiest have made (even in the midst of the current crisis). Of course, this economic order becomes a genuine moral scandal the moment attention is focused on the three billionaires who possess more wealth than the bottom half of society.

Since the government began transferring wealth from the poor to the very rich under the guise of “trickle-down” (but actually gusher-up) economics, key public institutions, labor unions, and the electoral process have been under attack. The healthcare system has been further privatized, public housing has been demolished, public water and sanitation systems have been held hostage by emergency managers, and the social safety net has been eviscerated.

In these same years, core government functions have been turned over to the private sector and the free market. The result: levels of poverty and inequality in this country now outmatch the Gilded Age. All of this, in turn, laid the groundwork for the rapid spread of death and disease via the Covid-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on poor people and people of color.

When the coronavirus first became a national emergency, the Fed materialized $1.5 trillion dollars in loans to Wall Street, a form of corporate welfare that may never be paid back. In the following weeks, the Fed and a congressional bipartisan stimulus package funneled trillions more in bailouts to the largest corporations. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans were left out of that CARES Act: 48% of the workforce did not receive paid sick leave; 27 million uninsured people and 10% of the insured who couldn’t even afford a doctor’s visit have no guarantee of free or reasonably priced medical treatment; 11 million undocumented immigrants and their five million children will receive no emergency provisions; 2.3 million of the incarcerated have been left in the petri dish of prison; three million Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients saw no increase in their benefits; and homeless assistance funds were targeted at only about 500,000 people, although eight to 11 million are homeless or housing insecure. Such omissions are guaranteed to prove debilitating, even potentially lethal, for many. They also represent cracks in a dam ready to break in a nation without a guaranteed living wage or universal healthcare as debt mounts, wages stagnate, and the pressures of ecological devastation and climate change intensify.

Recently, news reports have made it far clearer just where (and whom) Covid-19 is hitting hardest. In New York City, now the global epicenter of the pandemic, for instance, the areas with the highest rates of positive tests overlap almost exactly with neighborhoods where the most “essential workers” live — and you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that most of them are poor or low-income ones, 79% of them black or Latino. The five zip codes with the most coronavirus cases have an average income of under $27,000; while, in the five zip codes with the least, the average income is $118,000.

Across the Black Belt of the southern states, the poor and black are dying from the coronavirus at an alarming rate. In many of those states, wages are tied to industries that rely on now interrupted regular household spending. They also have among the least resources and the most vehement anti-union and wage-suppression laws. That, in turn, leaves so many Americans all that more vulnerable to the Covid-19 crisis, the end of which is nowhere in sight. Chalk this up, among other things, to decades of divestment in public institutions and the entrenchment of extremist agendas in state legislatures. The Black Belt accounts for nine of the 14 states that have not expanded Medicaid and for 60% of all rural hospital closures.

Nor are these the only places now feeling the consequences of hospitals being bought up or closed for private profit. In Philadelphia, for instance, Hahnemann Hospital, which had served that city’s poorest patients for more than 170 years, was recently bought and closed by a real-estate speculator who then attempted to extract a million dollars a month from the local government to reopen it. Now, as the coronavirus ravages Philadelphia, Hahnemann’s beds sit empty, reminiscent of the notorious shuttering of New Orleans’ Charity Hospital in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In fact, lessons from the catastrophe of Katrina resonate heavily today, as the poor suffer and die while the rich and their political allies begin to circle the ruins, seeing opportunities to further enhance their power. After Katrina, many poor and black residents of New Orleans who had to evacuate were unable to return, while the city became a laboratory for a new onslaught of neoliberal reforms from health care to housing. One state legislator was overheard telling lobbyists, “We finally cleaned out public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” It hardly takes a stretch of the imagination to envision similar braggadocio in the post-coronavirus era.

Inescapably bound together The dual crises of pandemic and inequality are revealing ever more clearly how the descent into poverty is helping to destroy American society from the inside out. In a remarkably brief span of time, these crises have also highlighted our collective interdependence.

One of my earliest memories is of helping my mom walk when I was younger than my youngest child is now. As we slid down the wintry streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, my small hand in hers, she suddenly fell and I went down alongside her. I had been unable to keep us from crashing to the ground.

And yet, even when I couldn’t do what needed to be done alone, I recognized, with the clarity that perhaps only a child can have, how much we as a family (and, by extension, as a people) were inescapably bound together — that when one of us falls, so many of us fall. And that’s why, whatever Donald Trump or Jared Kushner or the rest of that crew in Washington and across the country may think, we can no longer tolerate leaving anybody out.

Hasn’t the time finally come to reject the false narrative of scarcity? Isn’t it time to demand a transformative moral agenda that reaches from the bottom up?

If the wealthy were to pay a relatively modest amount more in taxes and we shrank our war economy to support the common good, then universal health care, living wages, and a guaranteed income, decent and affordable housing, strong programs for the poor, and even more might finally be within reach. This crisis is offering us a striking demonstration of how an economy oriented around the whims of the rich brings death and destruction in its wake.

A society organized around the needs of the poor, on the other hand, would improve life for all of us — and especially in this Covid-19 moment, exactly this might be possible.

Liz Theoharis is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. She teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. This article first appeared at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 April 2020

Word Count: 2,558

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My partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.) We spent that first summer arguing about the Vietnam War. I was convinced that the U.S. never should have gotten involved there. Though she agreed, she was more concerned that the growth of an antiwar movement would distract people from what she considered far more crucial to this country: the Civil Rights movement. As it happened, we were both right.

She took off that fall for college at the University of California, Berkeley, where, as she says, she majored in history with a minor in rioting. I went back to junior high school. And we’ve been arguing about politics ever since.

So maybe it’s no surprise that, since the coronavirus pandemic exploded, we’ve been fighting about the president. Not about his character (vile and infantile, we both agree) or his job performance (beyond dismal), but about whether anyone with a conscience should watch his never-ending television performances. Since 2016, she’s done her best not to expose herself to either his voice or his image, and she’s complained regularly about the mainstream media’s willingness to broadcast his self-evident lies, to cover any misconceived or idiotic thing he might decide to say at rally after rally as if it were actual news. More recently, she’s said the media should send their interns to cover his Covid-19 “news” conferences. (Of course, MSNBC and CNN now no longer always broadcast those events, whose ratings the president so treasures, in full. In fact, by April 13th, CNN appeared to have let their chyron writer off the leash to run legends below that day’s news conference like “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session” and “Breaking news: Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes.”)

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been watching each live broadcast of the Trump Follies, otherwise known as the White House daily coronavirus task force briefings. Readers who, like me, remember the Vietnam War may also recall the infamous “Five O’Clock Follies,” the U.S. military’s mendacious daily briefings from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, during that endless conflict. There, its spokesmen regularly offered evidence, including grimly inflated “body counts” of enemy dead, that allowed them to claim they were winning a losing war. The question today, of course, is whether the present pandemic version of those follies offers at least a small glimmer of hope that the president may now be mired in his own Covid-19 version of Vietnam.

After I’ve spent a couple of irretrievable hours of my life gaping at the muddled mind of Donald Trump, I always feel a sickening sensation, as if I’d kept eating Oreo cookies long after they stopped tasting good. But it doesn’t matter. The next day, I just turn it on again. I wonder if it’s people like me who are responsible for that TV ratings bump of his?

It took my partner a while to catch on to what I’ve been doing. The reason: like an alcoholic whose bottles are stuffed away in secret corners, I’ve been hiding this perverse habit by sneaking down to the basement and watching while working on my loom. Or I would catch my Trump fix while she was out on the streets of San Francisco taking photographs for her 10-year project to both walk and record every voting precinct in the city.

But one evening, returning a little early, she walked in on me before I had time to slam the laptop cover down. “Nobody should be watching those press conferences!” she said emphatically, when she twigged to what I’d been up to. “How can you sit there and listen to lies? Why are you exposing yourself to that crap? Anything you actually need to know you can read in newspaper summaries the next day.”

What’s the appeal? And I have to admit that those were fair questions. Why am I exposing myself to such a pure, unmediated stream of falsehoods, ignorance, and preening self-congratulation day after day? Why, though I loathe his lies as much as she does, do I keep listening to them in real time? As he typically said at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 6th, “Anybody that wants a [coronavirus] test can get a test”; “The tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right?… This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good.” (No one knows what “letter” he was referring to, though he probably meant the summary transcript of his phone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.)

Why don’t I switch the press conferences off when he begins to praise and congratulate himself as he always does? (“I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”; “Every one of these [CDC] doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”)

Why am I fascinated by the way just about everyone on the podium fawns all over him, starting with Vice President Mike Pence, the titular head of “the president’s” Coronavirus Task Force (unless, this week, it’s Jared Kushner)? Why do I keep listening to Pence intoning, “The president has directed that…” or referring to “President Trump’s 15-day coronavirus guidelines,” as if Trump himself had written them and designed the oversized postcard outlining them, which arrived in people’s mail at the end of March? Why am I mesmerized as assorted business “leaders” like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell trip over themselves outdoing each another in praising the president? Lindell, in fact, used his minute and a half of fame to tell the world that God had essentially elected Donald Trump in 2016. (I guess that explains it! I knew I hadn’t voted for him.)

I think what provides me (and so many others) with that nightly hit of dopamine is the sheer brazenness of the president’s lies on show for all to see. Not for him the mealy-mouthed half-truth, the small evasion. No, his are, like the rest of his persona, grandiose in a way that should be beyond belief, but remains stubbornly real.

Here he is, for instance, in mid-March, speaking of Americans flying back from Europe: “If an American is coming back or anybody is coming back, we’re testing. We have a tremendous testing setup where people coming in have to be tested… We’re not putting them on planes if it shows positive, but if they do come here, we’re quarantining.” Anyone who saw the photos of weary travelers crammed together in U.S. airports then knows that none of this was faintly accurate. But no matter.

Then there’s Trump’s use of those television performances and the audiences they garner as the ultimate measure of presidential achievement. By now, who isn’t familiar with his delight in the ratings the coronavirus press briefings have attracted? As he tweeted on March 29th:

 “Because the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers’ according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. ‘Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him,’ said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!”

So it’s no surprise that he also uses media ratings as the metric by which he judges the performance of everyone working to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. For him, governing is nothing but a performance. At his March 29th briefing, for example, he gave himself credit for the media attention being paid to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and someone he called “the General” (whose name he seemed to have forgotten). After observing that the Washington Post, like my partner, thinks Americans should shun his pressers, he pointed out that he’d inaugurated other people’s TV careers:

 “We’re getting the word out. We’re getting the accurate word out. And a lot of people are happy about it, and a lot of people aren’t. But they should be happy. When I have the General, when I have Seema [Verma, head of Medicare and Medicaid Services], and when I have Tony [Fauci], and when I have our — our incred- — these are, like, people that have become big stars, okay?”

Then there’s the astonishing ignorance he’s so happy to put on display regularly, as at the April 10th task force briefing. Asked whether “reopening” the country would depend on having enough Covid-19 tests available to make it possible to do surveillance and contact tracing, he replied that such tests would be unnecessary in “vast areas of the country” because they don’t (yet) have outbreaks. Given that no state by then lacked coronavirus cases, it was yet one more display of his inability to grasp the basics of the potential for exponential growth in a highly contagious disease.

Finally, there’s the eternal assumption in just about everything he says that no one could possibly know more about any subject than he instantly grasps. In a terrifying exchange on April 10th, a reporter asked what metrics he would use in deciding when and how to reopen the country, a decision he had just falsely claimed he has “absolute authority” to enforce.

“The metrics right here,” he replied, pointing to his temple and, presumably, the brain behind it. “That’s my metrics. That’s all I can do. I can listen to 35 people. At the end, I got to make a decision.” He went on to explain that he had just figured out how big a decision it was. “And I didn’t think of it until yesterday. I said, ‘You know, this is a big decision.’” Who could possibly have known how big a decision it was until that very moment when the president claimed to have grasped that reality?

Strange attractors In the end, maybe what truly draws me to those news conferences and keeps me hooked is the cognitive dissonance of it all. I’ve never been a fan of reality TV, partly because I don’t like watching people be mean to one another, but mainly because what happens on such shows is anything but “real.” Mean (or “nasty”) as he may be, Trump’s press conferences are real. And isn’t that the contradiction, the eerie fascination, of it all — that the unbelievable is actually true? Donald Trump is, in fact, the president of the United States, even if watching each of those televised events is like encountering a creature from another dimension, a being who simply doesn’t conform to earthly reality. And that, in a terrifying way, is fascinating. I can’t look away.

The field of mathematics called chaos theory, which deals with extremely complex, dynamic systems like the movements of liquids or gasses, has a concept called “strange attractors.” An attractor is a point that a graph of the system keeps cycling around and returning to over time. (Not being a mathematician, that’s the best I can do.) Strange attractors are fractal, meaning that each part of one of them will display the same pattern no matter how much you magnify it, no matter how deep you go — in other words, very much like the mind of Trump.

Some strange attractors are part of chaotic systems that don’t repeat at any regular interval and will vary greatly over time. The weather is like that; a small difference in temperature or pressure at a given moment can affect whether a local change becomes a hurricane. But if a chaotic system has strange attractors, then, over many years, the same initial conditions will most often settle into one of two results, the equivalents of a clear day or a bad storm. You can’t say what will happen in any given year, but you can say what is most likely to happen over 100 years. As Wikipedia puts it, “Thus a dynamic system with a chaotic [strange] attractor is locally unstable yet globally stable.”

Should — the gods and statistics forbid — Trump win reelection this November, we’ll have a real-life example of a system that is locally unstable, but globally horribly stable for the next four years. In his case, of course, we’re talking about how a “very stable genius” will be able to spin the chaos he creates into an ever more authoritarian regime.

Oh, and as that Wikipedia article adds, “Strange attractors may also be found in the presence of noise…” Let me apologize instantly for perverting some poor mathematician’s meaning, but how can I not point out that our presidential Strange Attractor is indeed surrounded by the constant noise of the media, fake and otherwise, cycling around and feeding off the one constant point that is Trump in the chaos of his universe.

So who’s right, my girlfriend or me? Just as was true years ago, I suspect we’re both right. No one should engage with that chaotic noise and the strange attractor at its center. All of us should deprive Donald Trump of attention of every sort, which is the oxygen that sustains him. And yet, someone has to watch, because strange as it is, our lives depend on it.

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: 20 April 2020

Word Count: 2,197

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In retrospect, it’s no surprise that, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, dystopian fiction enjoyed a spike in popularity. However, novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which soared on Amazon, would prove more horror stories than roadmaps. Like so many ominous sounds from a dark basement, they provided good scares but didn’t foreshadow the actual Trumpian future.

Of course, it didn’t take an Orwell or an Atwood to extrapolate from the statements of candidate Trump to the policies of President Trump — and such projections bore little resemblance to the worlds of Big Brother or an all-powerful patriarchy. Many Americans quickly began bracing themselves for something quite different: less totalitarian than total chaos. There would likely be unmitigated corruption, new wars, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy, along with an unprecedented reduction in government services and the further concentration of power in the executive branch. And it was a given that there would be boastfully incoherent presidential addresses, as well as mockery from officials in countries that had only recently been our closest allies. A Trumpian dystopia would be a Frankenstein monster constructed of the worst parts of previous administrations with plenty of ugly invective and narcissistic preening thrown in for bad measure.

And yet, there was still a lingering hope that those unsettling noises from the basement were just the equivalent of a broken furnace — annoying and expensive to fix, yes, but nothing like a living, breathing monster. Trump, after all, was going to be a singularly incompetent leader, or so his multiple bankruptcies and failed ventures suggested. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to do that much damage tweeting from the White House or phoning in from the links. And even if his minions in Congress did manage to push through some disturbing legislation, the guardrails of democracy would continue to contain his administration, and dystopias would, for the most part, remain the stuff of scary novels, not everyday life.

For many Americans, a Trump presidency did indeed usher in harder times. The earnings of farmers, dependent on exporting their crops, plummeted during the trade war with China. Nearly 700,000 people were poised to lose access to food stamps. Hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees from Haiti, El Salvador, and other countries faced the loss of their temporary protected status.

Still, many of those farmers received government subsidies to offset their losses and the courts blocked the administration from following through on some of its cruelest immigration policies, at least postponing the worst nightmares. Meanwhile, the 2018 midterm elections signaled a possible post-Trumpian future, as the Democrats, led by a crew of new women candidates, won control of the House of Representatives. Admittedly, the ultimate failure of the impeachment effort was a setback, but it was still just a matter of holding on for less than a year until election 2020 and then quite possibly waving the Trump era farewell.

That has now all changed.

Thanks to the coronavirus, dystopia is here, right now — but with a twist. As science fiction writer William Gibson once so aptly put it, “The future has arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In April 2020, the same applies to our new world.

Pandemic Dystopia arrived not with a bang, but a cough. The culprit wasn’t a looming monster or a totalitarian state, but a microscopic speck that’s technically not even alive. And that basement, by the way, turned out to be far-off Wuhan, the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus first appeared. With Hubei province overwhelmed by sickness and death, China responded by using the powers of a centralized state to shut down everything — from travel to restaurants, public gatherings to dissent — in a draconian fashion.

The Trump administration chose to ignore those warnings.

Meanwhile, given the level of international travel in a globalized economy, other countries soon became hotspots. South Korea used technology — widespread testing, contact tracing, and apps to monitor quarantining — to contain the problem. Iran’s initial poor response, even as members of its leadership took sick and in some cases died, was compounded by punitive Trump administration sanctions. The hospitals in northern Italy were overwhelmed by Covid-19 and the government suddenly shut down the country in a belated attempt to stave off disaster.

Still, Washington dawdled. Trump and his crew squandered 70 full days during which they could have implemented valuable lessons being painfully learned elsewhere in the world.

Now, Covid-19 has decisively put the lie to American exceptionalism. Not only can it happen here, but it’s happening here, far worse than anywhere else. The United States is adding upwards of 30,000 new infections daily, twice the rate of China on February 12th, that country’s worst day, and nearly five times what Italy faced at its peak on March 20th.

Meanwhile, adding depression to disease, the U.S. economy has crashed. Claims for unemployment benefits have risen by an astounding 17 million in just three weeks, pushing the jobless rate close to 10% (and still rising fast). Yes, the whole global economy is taking a hit, but other countries have moved in more sensible directions. China’s blunt-force quarantine has now enabled it to restart its economy, South Korea’s pinpoint approach has so far avoided a full-scale economic lockdown, and Denmark has paid its companies directly to maintain their payrolls and retain workers during the downturn of self-isolation.

In other words, in true dystopian fashion, Washington has managed to fumble both its response to the pandemic and its potential economic recovery plan. Presidential incompetence, incomprehension, and intransigence have been key to these glaring failures. The myriad defects that Donald Trump displayed from his first day in the White House, then largely grist for the monologues of late-night talk-show hosts, have now turned truly tragic. They include his stunning disregard for science, his undeniable compulsion to spread misinformation, his complete refusal to take responsibility for anything negative, his thoroughgoing contempt for government, and his abrupt vacillations in policy.

Most of all, the president exhibited extraordinary hubris. Out of a belief in his own infallibility, he thinks he knows better than the experts, any experts, no matter the topic.

As it happens, he doesn’t.

In ordinary times, such an epic fail might bring thousands, even hundreds of thousands, out into the streets to protest. Not in this pandemic moment, however. Most Americans, if they can, are now sheltering in place, watching a dystopian scenario unfold in real time on their screens and expressing gratitude to front-line workers who are suiting up to fight the microscopic monster every day.

When the world outside becomes too much to bear, we escape into stories. Right now, however, dystopian fiction about other times and places just doesn’t do the trick. Instead, desperate to understand how and why this fate has befallen us, we’ve been watching films about infectious disease. In early March, 2011’s Contagion became the number one streaming movie of the moment, while Outbreak recently cracked Netflix’s top 10 even though it came out 25 years ago. And when we’re not streaming, we’re reading novels about epidemics that, from Camus to Crichton, are back on bestseller lists.

Don’t be surprised if you’re feeling a nagging sense of déjà vu. Bingeing on stories about plagues during a plague? Doesn’t that ring a bell? Could it have been something you were assigned to read or see on stage back in school?

Know Thyself — Or Not In 430 BC, the second year of its war with Sparta, the legendary democracy of Athens in ancient Greece was struck by an unknown infectious disease. The Athenians first suspected that the Spartans had poisoned their reservoirs. As it turned out, though, their undemocratic adversary wasn’t to blame. According to the historian Thucydides, the plague came from faraway Ethiopia and entered the city by ship. Since Athens had built its empire with naval power, it was perhaps grimly fitting that its greatest strength would prove in that moment to be its signal weakness.

The plague spread quickly. “At the beginning, the doctors were quite incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the right methods,” wrote Thucydides. “In fact mortality among the doctors was the highest of all, since they came more frequently in contact with the sick.” (Sound familiar?) The disease soon overwhelmed the city’s rudimentary health-care system and dead bodies lay about the streets, rotting and unburied. And yet, despite the plague, the Peloponnesian War continued. That forever war of the ancient world (sound familiar again?), already in its second round, wouldn’t end until 405 BC, a quarter-century later.

Over five years and three successive outbreaks, the plague would, however, ultimately claim more Athenian lives than the war. Nearly a quarter of that city-state’s population, an estimated 100,000 people, would die from the disease. Even its esteemed leader, Pericles, would lose two sons. Another victim: the vaunted Athenian political system. According to classical scholar Katherine Kelaidis, “The Great Plague of Athens wrote the first chapter in the end of Athenian democracy.”

During those plague years, Athens didn’t, however, completely lock down the city. It continued, for instance, to hold its annual drama festival at the Theater of Dionysus where, at some point, a new play by Sophocles had its debut. In itself, that was anything but unusual as he wrote more than 100 plays during his long lifetime. But this drama also proved painfully topical. Sophocles took the legendary story of Oedipus the king and added a wholly original element: he set its plot in motion with a plague.

Oedipus Rex takes place in Thebes while “a fiery demon” grips the city. Its king, Oedipus, desperate to understand why the gods have called such a plague down upon his realm, sends an emissary to the famed Delphic Oracle to find out. Its answer is unexpected: to rid Thebes of the plague, he must bring to justice the murderer of the previous king. As it happens, Oedipus himself killed that previous king. What’s worse, that king was also his father. In doing so, Oedipus had, however inadvertently, fulfilled the first part of a previous Delphic prophecy: that he would kill his father and marry his mother. In other words, he is the cause of the religious pollution that has brought plague down on Thebes.

All of this qualified Oedipus as the classic example of the tragic hero, a son of nobility who lacks self-knowledge, in this case an understanding of his true origins. Moreover, he demonstrates an extraordinary arrogance, believing that only he can rule wisely or save Thebes. Even when the oracle predicts a tragic outcome for him, he scoffs, believing that the will of the gods is no impediment to his actions.

The Greek word for this kind of arrogance is hubris and, in Greek drama, it’s associated with the pride that precedes the fall of a powerful man. The inevitable result of hubris is a visit from Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, often depicted with a sword and scales.

Focused as it was on the inevitable downfall of a tragic hero in a plague-stricken city, Oedipus Rex must have been deeply disturbing, if not terrifying, to watch in the Athens of that moment. Given the pandemic at hand, it’s remarkable that Athenians were still staging plays at all. But like Oedipus, its citizens undoubtedly wanted to better understand the cause of their affliction. This early example of horror fiction — with its plot twists involving murder, incest, and pandemic — surely helped some of them come to terms with their predicament and decide who or what to blame for it, just as, almost 2,500 years later, we watch films or read novels about plagues, among other things, to try to grasp ours.

In that first season of the plague, the citizens of Athens would indeed turn their fury against their leader, Pericles, and drive him from office. Later, after a brief return to power, he, too, would die of the disease.

Every society gets the tragic hero it deserves Now, another democracy is being overwhelmed by contagion. It, too, is involved in endless wars and led by a man whom millions of its citizens once believed to be the last-chance savior of the country.

Donald Trump didn’t kill his father or marry his mother, nor is he the cause of the coronavirus.

Still, in other respects, he hews to a distinctly modern, reality-TV version of the tragic hero. He, of course, became as rich as Croesus, even as he bathed in the adulation of his television viewers. Thanks to the Delphic Oracle of the Electoral College, he then rose to the most powerful political position in the world. Yet, through it all, he has exhibited virtually no self-knowledge. To this day, his understanding of his own faults remains near zero, while his amplification of his imagined strengths is off the Richter scale. Admittedly, Donald Trump lacks the gravitas of Oedipus and would never have been able to answer the riddle of the Sphinx, but this is twenty-first-century America, not ancient Greece, and every society gets the tragic hero it deserves.

As with Oedipus, the president’s extraordinary arrogance has put the country in peril. His denial of the scientific evidence for climate change prompted him to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, a monumental blunder that will plague later generations. His “deconstruction of the administrative state,” the unravelling of government institutions patiently constructed by his predecessors, significantly crippled his administration’s response to the coronavirus. His gargantuan pre-pandemic addition to the national debt through simultaneous tax cuts and military budget increases put the country at great economic risk. All of these policies were pushed through over the advice of wiser counsels, even within his administration.

Now, on a daily basis, the president appears before the American people and pretends to know much more than he does: about when to lift shelter-in-place restrictions (Easter because “it’s a beautiful day”), which experimental drugs to use (“I’m not a doctor, but I have common sense”), and how to meet the needs of states desperate for ventilators (“try getting it yourselves”). Serial failure has not tempered his hubris, not faintly. In adversity, he’s simply fallen back on a tactic he’s deployed his whole life in the face of adversity: double down. If hubris didn’t work, then uber-hubris is the cure.

Through it all, Donald Trump has somehow eluded the grasp of Nemesis. Poised with her scales of justice, the goddess watched over last year’s impeachment hearings. Yet courtesy of a phalanx of Republican senators, Trump was not brought to justice, despite his unconstitutional behavior.

Now, it seems, Nemesis has returned, this time brandishing her sword.

Trump’s incompetence in the face of Covid-19 has helped cause a soaring American death toll. The U.S. is being serially laid to waste, a reality for which he accepts no responsibility. Unlike Oedipus Rex, Trump Rex has not the slightest interest in confronting the truth of his sins or the horror of his actions. Don’t expect the president to put out his own eyes, as Oedipus does at the end of the play. No need, in fact. Trump has always been blind and, not surprisingly, his blind ambition combined with his blind greed has culminated in an administration in which the blind are indeed leading the blind.

Come November, it falls to the American people, if all goes well, to deliver the ultimate judgment of Nemesis.

The end of the world? Dystopian fiction is about how the world ends — not the extinction of the planet but the end of our familiar world. How we got from here to dystopia isn’t normally central to such novels. In fact, the end of that familiar world has usually taken place before you open the book and you may, at best, see it through brief flashbacks. The point is to plunge you directly into a future from hell like, for example, the post-apocalyptic landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Nightmares don’t work with long explanatory introductions.

In a similar fashion, we’re not experiencing the end of the world itself right now. We’re not (yet) in the midst of nuclear annihilation or, say, the extinction of the human species via some extreme version of climate change. The current coronavirus pandemic is an apocalypse, to be sure, but a passing one. As Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki wrote long ago about the everyday horrors of communism in A Minor Apocalypse, “Many generations have thought the world was dying, but it was only their world which was dying.”

Herein lies the sobering reassurance of such stories. They remind us that worlds, like people, die all the time, only to be replaced by new worlds. Cities fall and rise again, as do civilizations. Even dystopian places like Idi Amin’s Uganda or the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodian killing fields eventually burn out. The handmaid lives to tell her tale and Gilead, too, crumbles in the end.

Athens survived the plague, though its democracy was compromised by war and disease. America, too, will live on. But it will have lost some further measure of its greatness thanks in no small part to the man who, however cynically, wanted to make it great again.

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and book two of his Splinterlands series.

Copyright ©2020 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 April 2020

Word Count: 2,861

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