When it rains, pieces of glass, pottery, and metal rise through the mud in the hills surrounding my Maryland home. The other day, I walked outside barefoot to fetch one of my kid’s shoes and a pottery shard stabbed me in the heel. Nursing a minor infection, I wondered how long that fragment dated back.

A neighbor of mine found what he said looked like a cartridge case from an old percussion-cap rifle in his pumpkin patch. He told us that the battle of Monocacy had been fought on these grounds in July 1864, with 1,300 Union and 900 Confederate troops killed or wounded here. The stuff that surfaces in my fields when it storms may or may not be battle artifacts, but it does remind me that the past lingers and that modern America was formed in a civil war.

Increasingly, I can’t help thinking about possible new civil wars in this country and the violence we could inflict on each another. Recently, a family member reposted a YouTube video on her Facebook page that supposedly showed an Antifa activist accidentally setting himself on fire (with the 1980s hit “Footloose” playing mockingly in the background). “I’m just going to leave this here,” read her caption. Shortly thereafter she claimed that the “YouTube speech police” had taken it down.

I thought of saying something to her about how, in countries where I’ve worked, ones without a democracy, people celebrate the misery of their opponents. Was that really, I wanted to ask, the kind of country she’d like our children to see us creating? But I decided not to, rather than further divide our family, which has grown ever more apart since Donald Trump took office. In addition, I knew that confronting her would do neither of us any good. Inspired by a president who offers a sterling example of how never to self-police what you do, she would simply have dismissed my comments as the frivolous words of the “politically correct.”

War and peace These days, when I watch the news and see clashes among the police, Black Lives Matter protesters, far-right “militias,” and Antifa supporters, I’m often reminded that just because no one’s declared a civil war begun, doesn’t mean we aren’t staring at the makings of an armed conflict.

Our military service members and their families have toiled for endless years now in Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa under the mantle of establishing democracy and conducting a “war on terror.” They’ve done so to the tune of more than 7,000 of their own lives, a million of their own injuries and illnesses, hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in those distant lands, and significantly more than $6 trillion in funding provided by the American taxpayer. Not surprisingly under such circumstances, they now live in a country that’s under-resourced and fractured in ways that are just beginning to resemble, in a modest fashion at least, the very war zones in which they’ve been fighting.

This is both a personal and professional matter to me. As the spouse of a Navy officer who served three tours of duty on nuclear and ballistic missile submarines and one on an aircraft carrier, and the mother of two young children, I bear witness in small but significant ways to the physical, emotional, and financial toll that endless war has had on those who fight. I’m thinking of those long separations from my husband, his (and my) unlimited hours of work, the chronic health issues that go remarkably unaddressed in the Navy, the hazing by war-traumatized commanders, one near-fatal boat crash, the rising frequency of violence and suicides among military families, a recent lack of regard for obvious safety precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the service’s under-resourced healthcare and childcare systems — and that’s just to begin a far longer list.

As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project and a therapist who has worked with active-duty troops, veterans, and most recently children and adults who have arrived here as refugees and asylum seekers from the very lands in which the U.S. still fights, I continue to bear witness in my own way to the human costs of war, American-style. As I look up into the forest of oaks and elms in the hills around my home where, once upon a time, Americans undoubtedly sought shelter from bullets fired by their countrymen, it seems ever less far-fetched to me that my family could be asked to take part in an armed conflict on American soil.

Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with a line from former President Barack Obama’s recent Democratic National Convention speech still in my head: “Do not let them take your democracy.” In my lifetime, I’d never heard a former president refer to a government that’s still supposed to be of, by, and for the people as “them” — especially a president as prone to understatement as he is. As a military spouse, I wonder where my family will fall in that ever-deepening chasm between “us” and “them.”

Homefront, warfront Obviously, intimidation and even armed attacks are already realities in American cities. Take, for example, the president’s decision to send federal troops using tear gas to clear away peaceful protesters near the White House so he could pursue a botched photo op. And that only happened after he had declared “war” on a virus whose effects are made worse by the inhalation of that very gas. He and Attorney General William Barr have similarly turned a blind eye to physical violence against, and the intimidation of, protesters by far-right groups whose racism, anti-Semitism, and support for this country’s slave history is obvious. Our commander-in-chief, while threatening but, so far at least, shying away from starting new foreign wars (thank goodness), has used military helicopters to intimidate protesters and allowed Department of Homeland Security agents to kidnap demonstrators from the streets of an American city.

To be sure, the Antifa activist featured in that video my relative posted (if it even was real) could have been part of the same problem, as were those who looted storefronts, vehicles, and public property to make a point (or not) during the protests of these last months. And yet what choices did many of them have? Isn’t our major problem that those with power in a country growing more economically unequal by the month increasingly see themselves not as of the people but only as threatened by the people — by, that is, us?

More to the point, as Professor Robin Kelley wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times, what kind of society values property over Black lives?

Even journalism, once considered a hallmark of our democracy, has become the target of endless presidential insults and intimidation, including memes like the one in which the president is shown punching an opponent with CNN emblazoned on his head. What’s more, some of the Republican Party’s most vocal leaders all but directly condone racism. Typical of this Trumpian moment, for example, that rising star in the Republican Party Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has called slavery a “necessary evil.” In June, he even urged that the Army’s 101st Airborne Division be sent into the streets to deal with Black Lives Matter protesters.

Under these circumstances, violence may be the only thing that actually captures the attention of parts of a nation seemingly indifferent to the dehumanization and disenfranchisement of large swathes of this country’s people.

Like Iraq and Afghanistan, which have borne witness to increasing sectarianism and violence, the United States seems to be devolving into its own kind of sectarian conflict. After all, the police, now regularly armed by the Pentagon with weaponry and other equipment sometimes taken from this country’s distant war zones, increasingly wage a kind of proto-counterinsurgency warfare on our streets.

At the heart of today’s crisis lies a grim but simple fact: in this century, America’s power brokers decided to invest staggering sums of taxpayer dollars, manpower, and time in distant and disastrous “forever wars.” As Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford, co-directors of the Costs of War Project, wrote in a recent op-ed, had some of the money this country spent on its post-9/11 wars been invested in healthcare, we would have had the tools to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic so much more effectively. The same might be said of our crumbling infrastructure and cash-starved public schools.

Speaking of public education, as economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier has pointed out, $1 million in federal spending creates nearly twice the number of jobs in public education as it does when “invested” in the Pentagon. If money had been diverted elsewhere from the military-industrial complex, perhaps we would have been able to return to school reasonably safely with enough teachers, staff, and protective equipment to ensure small-group instruction, sanitation, and social distancing. Our inability to deal with the pandemic effectively has, in turn, fed into our children losing the chance for in-person education — for, that is, reasonably safe interaction with peers and teachers from all walks of life.

Recently, after my kindergartener overheard a conversation about the police killing of Breonna Taylor in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, he asked me whether “they” might be coming to kill us in our home, too. I assured him that they weren’t, but I did mention our (white) privilege in relation to some of his black friends in the preschool that he loved and can’t attend in person this fall.

I then tried to explain how, in this country, the right to life is not evenly shared. He responded simply enough, “Yes, but I don’t see them anymore.” And I couldn’t help but think that precisely this kind of social distancing, where you don’t get to interact with people whose lives and perspectives are different from yours, could be one grim sectarian legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic in a country that looks like it might be starting to come apart at the seams. In these months, the Black Lives Matter activists so often filling our television screens and streets with their righteous rage are among the few who remind my children to care about racial inequality.

In the footsteps of 9/11? How did this country reach a point where a significant portion of us — our president’s most vocal supporters — are comfortable debasing the humanity of Blacks and liberals or progressives of every sort? Think of it as the road from 9/11, from that moment when, in response to a set of terror attacks by 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, the Bush administration launched what it quickly termed “the Global War on Terror,” invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then… well, you know the rest of the forever-war nightmare that’s never ended. In the process, they turned the Pentagon (and the war industries that go with it) into a sinkhole for our tax dollars and our dreams of the future.

In no small part, we’ve reached this point of unease, sectarianism, and strife due to our reverence for the military as the way to solve what are actually problems of staggering and growing global and American inequality, economic and otherwise. My spouse and I stay up late talking about the upcoming elections. Even if (and that’s a big “if”) the November 3rd vote turns out to be free and fair — hard to imagine with a pandemic that has further disenfranchised communities of color and given Trump’s shenanigans encouraging double-voting, bad-mouthing mail-in ballots, and seeking to obscure or rewrite national intelligence information about Russian election interference — who wouldn’t worry about November 4th? Or 5th, or 10th, or whenever all those mail-in votes are finally counted? What uproar will this president stoke among his supporters, including a heavily armed and rogue Department of Homeland Security, if he seems to be losing?

And what about inauguration day? Trump has already threatened not to accept results that don’t please him. My husband feels sure that, if necessary, our military will escort him from the Oval Office and provide a hypothetical President Biden with the nuclear football. This I question, thanks to such acts as Trump’s recent appointment of retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata, a staunch supporter of his, known for his extreme Islamophobia and racist remarks, to the Department of Defense’s number-two policy post over the bipartisan objections of Congress.

That we even have to imagine a military solution to the usual peaceful transition of power is both absurd and 2020’s version of reality. That’s why what its enemies call “political correctness” — respect for standards of decorum, kindness, and the peaceful mechanisms of democracy — is vital. If you don’t like what the other side’s nominees say or do, then vote them down at the ballot box. Organize other voters. Write letters and attend town hall meetings. Support evidence-based journalism. But don’t debase the mechanisms that have, for centuries, allowed us to better our union.

War is an indescribable nightmare. I’ve gotten the barest taste of its horror from my work at the Costs of War Project; from photos of bloodied, pain-ravaged children in our war zones; from testimonies I’ve heard from refugees and survivors grieving over the killing, maiming, or rape of loved ones; and from the stories of veterans haunted by having to shoot other people, even armed children, in cold blood.

We can’t let such violence consume us. I don’t want to be left wondering whether someday my family and others like us could find ourselves hiding in the woods to escape a government that might ask us to do the unthinkable and kill or torture fellow Americans. Military families — most so much more than mine — have already suffered for far too long without watching our own country become a new war zone.

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

Copyright ©2020 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 September 2020

Word Count: 2,294

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It may not look like it (I do my best to hide it), but I normally struggle to gather my thoughts to write Monday mornings. There’s just something about taking two days off. It requires more oomph to get the mind up and running again. Given the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Friday evening, today’s struggle is going to be harder.

First, I should counsel skepticism. Be careful when reading about the politics of her replacement, especially as it pertains to the presidential election. It’s not clear it will make a difference. It’s not clear it won’t. Whether it does is going to take time, more than most reporters have patience for. You can expect to see “game changer” and other colorful turns of phrase suggesting a dramatic upheaval to an otherwise relatively stable election. Understand, though, that that’s not established, and can’t be. Not yet.

Expect also to see verbiage masking who’s doing what to whom. The press corps “must demarcate unblurred lines of accountability,” but is already failing, wrote CJR’s brilliant young critic Jon Allsop.

Recognizing [Mitch] McConnell’s unique hypocrisy will be essential to this, as will avoiding language that gamifies the nomination process as entertainment; or that casts Republican dirty tricks in passive, impersonal terms (‘political struggle,’ ‘partisan brawl’); or that suggests Democrats are the real radicals if and when they raise court reforms as a possible response to said dirty tricks.

Second, I should caution against cynicism. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said in 2016 that he could not in good conscience allow a vote for Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee, to go to the floor during an election year. The American people had to have a say, he said. He made up that “rule” to get something he wanted (Neil Gorsuch on the US Supreme Court). He’s throwing out that “rule” to get something similar. Within hours of news of Ginsburg’s death, McConnell said the Senate would confirm Donald Trump’s nominee. (More on why he didn’t say when in a moment.)

The Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, are rightly crying foul. They are holding the Republicans to their own standard. In truth, McConnell isn’t being hypocritical. He’s just being a hard-shelled partisan. Most normal people are not, and won’t be, that cold-blooded, though. The Democrats know it.

It’s tempting to be cynical and say that complaining about McConnell’s disgusting hypocrisy is useless. (“It won’t work. Don’t bother.”) But he’s not the Democrats’ true audience. Their true audience is normal people recoiling from McConnell’s naked power-lust. It’s people who might be a majority supporting court reforms.

Schumer, who is normally and infuriatingly squishy, said Saturday nothing is off the table, a strong signal that if McConnell and the Republicans proceed, there will be a price to pay if the Democrats take the Senate.

That isn’t the Democrats’ immediate concern. Right now, they are trying to force vulnerable Republican senators to break with McConnell. So far, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowsky of Alaska have said they’re against confirmation hearings before Election Day. If they get two more on board (perhaps Cory Gardner of Colorado or Mitt Romney of Utah), the Democrats will have won a small victory, but they will not yet have won the battle. (They will have at least prevented the awful potential of five friendly justices deciding the outcome of the election should Donald Trump throw it to the court.)

Remember McConnell is a turtle-necked nihilist. Nothing but power matters to him. If he can’t get a justice before the election, he’ll get one afterward. Not even Collins and Murkowsky have ruled out confirmation during a lame-duck session of the Congress. Yes, McConnell would do this even if Trump lost. He’s that terrible.

This is where I must talk to you straight. The question isn’t whether the Democrats can stop the Republicans from installing a new justice, giving the Supreme Court a 6-3 conservative super-majority (meaning Gorsuch would be the swing vote, which means there won’t be any swing votes). The likelihood of that happening is probably zero.

McConnell has the means and the will to make it happen. The real questions, the ones we should put our energies into answering, is first, how much can the Democrats slow down this process, which I have already discussed; and second, how are they going to respond to losing?

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the base of the party, especially women fearing the fate of Roe, will not accept the same-old gee-whiz reaction. Actually, don’t believe me. ActBlue, a Democratic fund-raiser, raised $100 million between the time of Ginsburg’s death and 2 p.m. Sunday.

Before Bret Kavanaugh, liberals were horribly complacent about the court. Post-Kavanaugh, not so much.

In any case, the Democrats must take the Senate. With the Congress unified, they could enact reforms restraining the court’s conservatives. Without control, though, they can do little but watch the republic burn.

I’m struggling to make sense of politics this Monday after Ginsburg’s passing. But it’s pretty clear, even to me, that the Senate is more important to the fate of the nation than even the fight over her replacement.

The Democrats must slow down losing to buy enough time for Joe Biden to move a majority of Americans in his direction, so that the party can win in the future.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 September 2020

Word Count: 890

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Sparked by George Floyd’s murder last May, Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police violence in the United States expanded spontaneously into worldwide calls to remove public statues of history’s white supremacists and colonial oppressors.

Americans targeting statues of Confederate generals have now been joined by activists in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand and other lands calling to remove or put in museums statues of numerous racist colonial figures.

To fully remedy our world’s ravages and human pain from white supremacy and colonial racism, we must also address one of the colonial era’s most audacious and long-lasting political crimes, one which still reverberates across the Middle East and further afield: the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

In a letter to the prominent Anglo-Jewish leader Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour said the British government supported the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine — when Palestine was 94 percent Palestinian Arabs and just 6 percent Jewish — and while it had no legal right to designate the future of a territory it did not control or possess.

Balfour’s name and policies should be added to the list of targeted racists like slave trader Bully Hayes, Captain James Cook, and Andrew Hamilton in New Zealand and Australia, or slave trader Edward Colston and colonial maestro Cecil Rhodes in the UK and South Africa. The immoral policies he represented are as bad as theirs, and their impact may be even longer lasting due to the Arab-Israeli conflict’s genesis in the Balfour Declaration.

Memorials to racist colonialists should be removed or stored in museums which offer adequate context, because they offend people of all colours who oppose white supremacy and 19th-early 20th century colonialism. These European policies and officials planted their vulgar values around the world, enforced them through massive military violence, and degraded the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

They also left a continuing legacy of tension and violence to this day in India, Syria, Kenya, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and many other countries in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. The statues still widely hurt the South, as they also haunt righteous people in the North.

The Balfour Declaration was among the most destructive such colonial decisions in its brazen racism as well as its enduring ability to create pain and chaos. It ignited the Palestinian-Israeli and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts, which in turn contributed heavily to other tensions that ravage the Middle East, and spread around the world.

These include post-1940s Arab military rulers who ultimately drove their countries to collapse and their people to poverty; Iranian tensions with the US and Israel; modern political terrorism in the region; and the entrenchment of Arab autocrats supported by western and Eastern powers who devise new forms of colonial manipulation and exploitation, to mention just the most obvious.

Real changes might now occur across societies whose wounds from racism are visible throughout communities of color, in health, education, income, housing, and other sectors. A supreme irony of racist colonialism’s long shelf life is that the global movement to remove offensive statues started in the United States — a former colony of the mother lode of colonialism, Great Britain.

Balfour’s promise to support a Jewish homeland in overwhelmingly Arab Palestine did not even have the courtesy or honesty to acknowledge the Palestinian Arabs by their name, calling them the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The British and Zionist colonial attempt to erase Palestinians from history has not worked, because the 1.5 million Palestinians in 1948 are now some 13 million, and they continue to battle to demolish the statues of their own colonial nightmares, especially Mr Balfour and the repeatedly duplicitous British government he symbolizes.

The Trump administration has now assumed the racist mantle of British colonialism in Palestine. It supports Israel’s annexation of Palestinian lands, while only throwing leftovers to the Palestinians if they behave and accept to live in apartheid-like Bantustans. The same colonial methods applied over several centuries in different continents reveal themselves more clearly and grotesquely in Palestine than in any other place on earth, perhaps because they have endured here and engendered a conflict that will not go away as long as Zionism’s spoils remain unchallenged.

The leading scholar of Palestinian modern history, Rashid Khalidi, notes that this historical background shows us the path, “…towards a real lasting, sustainable peace, and towards real reconciliation and compromise between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples.

Genuine reconciliation depends on acknowledging historical realities rather than ignoring them. And genuine compromise must be based on justice and absolutely equal treatment, and absolutely equal rights, for all, not on the imposition of the will of the stronger on the weaker.

Righting historical wrongs in Palestine by promoting the birth of a Palestinian state alongside Israel would contribute to peace and security in the Middle East more than almost any other conceivable move. Correcting the wrongs of Great Britain in Palestine, embodied by Mr Balfour, is straightforward and feasible. The British government can temper its colonial bias towards Zionism by affirming Palestinian equal rights now.

It should start with a new statement today, followed by a unanimous UN Security Council resolution recognising the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis to live in their own sovereign states in the land of Palestine (essentially the two-state solution of a new Palestinian state alongside Israel, in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, on 22 percent of historical Palestine).

A British government with some moral fibre would also bilaterally de jure recognise the state of Palestine within the two-state borders, as many others around the world have done. This would affirm its equal support for the equal rights of Palestinians and Israelis, which could help drive a new peace negotiation, while also atoning for its past sins.

As the anti-colonial struggle moves into its second century around the world, atoning for the criminal acts of Mr Balfour and his government would send a strong signal that the past, indeed, is past; the colonial era has ended, and Arabs and Israelis can look forward to a new age of justice and peace for all.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

This article originated in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 September 2020

Word Count: 1,021

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It was August 2017 and Donald Trump had not yet warmed up to Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s portly dictator. In fact, in typical Trumpian fashion, he was pissed at the Korean leader and, no less typically, he lashed out verbally, threatening that country with a literal hell on Earth. As he put it, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” And then, just to make his point more personally, he complained about Kim himself, “He has been very threatening beyond a normal state.”

Only a year and a half later, our asteroidal president would, of course, say of that same man, “We fell in love.” Still, that threat by an American leader to — it was obvious — launch a nuclear strike for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nearly obliterated in August 1945 was memorable. The phrase would, in fact, become the title of a 2018 bestselling book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by journalist Michael Wolff. Two years later, amid so many other threatening phrases from this president, “fire and fury” has, however, been left in history’s dustbin, largely forgotten by the world.

“This is not an act of God” Too bad, since it seems so much more relevant now that California, Oregon, and Washington, not to speak of a Southwest already officially in a “megadrought,” have experienced the sort of apocalyptic fire and fury (and heat and smoke) that has turned daytime skies an eerie nighttime orange (or yellow or even purple, claims a friend of mine living in the San Francisco Bay Area). We’re talking about a fire and fury that’s forced cars to put on their headlights at noon; destroyed towns (leaving only armed right-wing militants behind amid the flames to await imagined Antifa looters); burned millions of acres of land, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans under evacuation orders; turned startling numbers of citizens into refugees under pandemic conditions; and crept toward suburbs and cities, imperiling the world as we’ve known it.

In the wake of the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, we are, in other words, talking about the sort of apocalyptic conditions that the president undoubtedly had in mind for North Korea back in 2017, but not even faintly for the U. S. of A; we’re talking, that is, about a burning season the likes of which no one in the West has ever seen before, a torching linked to the overheating of this planet thanks to the release of fossil-fuel-produced greenhouse gasses in ever greater quantities. In fact, as Washington Governor Jay Inslee pointed out recently, we shouldn’t even be talking about “wildfires” anymore, but about “climate fires” whose intensity has already outpaced by years the predictions of most climate scientists. (Or, as Inslee put it, “This is not an act of God. This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.”)

Significant hunks of the American West have now been transformed into the natural equivalent of furnaces, with fires even reaching the suburban edges of Portland, Oregon (which, for days, had the worst air quality of any major urban area on the planet), and promising a future in which cities will undoubtedly be swept up in such conflagrations, too. Admittedly, Donald Trump didn’t threaten to launch “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against Portland (though he did send federal agents there to snatch peaceful protesters off its streets and continues to insult and threaten that city’s mayor). If anything, as the fires scorched those states to a crisp, he did his best to avoid the subject of the burning West, as in these years more generally he’s largely treated climate change (that “hoax”) like… well, a pandemic that should be ignored while America stayed “open.”

And it’s not a subject he’s been grilled on much either, not until recently when Western governors began laying into him over his stance on climate change. To offer just one example, as far as I can tell, Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor and court chronicler of presidents who, for months, had unparalleled access to Trump and grilled him on so many subjects, never bothered to ask him about the most important, most dystopian, most apocalyptic future Americans face. And mainstream Democrats didn’t do much better on the subject while those fires were building to a crescendo until Joe Biden finally called the president a “climate arsonist.” He added, aptly enough, “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?”

There’s no question that, at the beck and call of the fossil-fuel industry, Donald Trump and his demonic crew have worked without qualms or remorse to ensure that this would be a fiery and furious America. Freeing that industry of restrictions of every sort, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, opening up yet more areas for oil drilling, wiping out environmental safeguards, and even (at the very moment when the West was burning) appointing a climate-science denier to a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the president and his crew proved themselves to be pyromaniacs of the first order.

Of course, the heating of this planet has been intensifying for decades now. (Don’t forget, for instance, that Barack Obama presided over a U.S. fracking boom that left people referring to us as “Saudi America.”) Still, this president and his top officials have put remarkable energy (so to speak) into releasing yet more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. And here’s the strange thing: they made it deep into the present apocalyptic moment in the West without — Greta Thunberg and climate change protesters aside — being held faintly accountable for their urge to fuel the greatest danger humanity faces other than nuclear weapons. In fact, as is increasingly obvious from the torching of the West, what we’re beginning to experience is a slow-motion version of the nuclear apocalypse that Trump once threatened to loose on North Korea.

In an all-too-literal fashion, The Donald is indeed proving to be history’s “fire and fury” president.

And don’t for a moment think that there was no warning about the over-the-top burning now underway in this country. After all, in 2019, parts of Australia were singed to a crisp in a way never before seen, killing at least 25 humans and possibly more than a billion animals. And that country, too, was headed by a climate-change denier, a man who once brought a piece of coal to parliament and handed it around while soothingly telling other legislators, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared.” In addition, in recent years, the Arctic (of all places) has been smoking and burning in an unprecedented fashion, heating its permafrost and releasing staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Oh, and this June, the temperature in a small town in Siberia crossed the 100-degree mark for the first time.

By the way, Russia, too, is run by a leader who until recently was a climate denier. I mean, what is it about the urge of so many of us in such a crisis to support those dedicated to quite literally destroying this planet as a livable place for… well, us? (Hey there, Jair Bolsonaro!)

Our very own firenado An almost unimaginable near-half-century ago on a different planet, I lived in San Francisco. I can still remember the fog rolling in daily, even during summer in one of the coolest, breeziest cities around. Not this year, though. On September 6th, for instance, the temperature there broke 100 degrees, “crushing” the previous record for that day. In Berkeley, across the Bay, where I also once lived long, long ago, it hit 110. As a heat wave swept the state (and the West), temperatures near Los Angeles soared to a record-breaking 121 degrees (almost challenging overheated Baghdad, Iraq, this year), while reaching 130 degrees in the aptly named Death Valley — and that’s just to start down a list of soaring temperatures across the West from the Canadian to the Mexican borders.

As those fires filled the skies with smoke and ash, turning day into the eeriest of nights, a smoke cloud the likes of which had never before been seen appeared over the coastal West. Meanwhile, firenadoes were spotted and the ash-filled air threatened terrible things for health. As has been true for the last 46 years, I’m thousands of miles away from my old Bay Area haunts. Still, I regularly check in with friends and TomDispatch authors on that coast, some aged like me and locked in their homes lest the smoke and ash, the air from hell, do them in. Meanwhile, their cars are packed to go, their evacuation checklists ready.

My heart goes out to them and, really, to all of us (and, above all, to those to whom we oldsters will be leaving such a blazing, tumultuous world).

Sadly, among the endless scandals and horrors of the Trump era, the greatest one by far scandalized all too few for all too long among those who officially matter on this beleaguered planet of ours.  Even in 2016, it should have been obvious enough that a vote for Donald Trump was a vote for the apocalypse. Give him credit, though. He made no secret of that fact or that his presidency would be a fossil-fueled nightmare. It was obvious even then that he, not climate change, was the “hoax” and that this planet would suffer in unique ways from his (ad)ministrations.

And in every way imaginable, Donald Trump delivered as promised. He’s been uniquely fiery and furious. In his own fashion, he’s also been a man of his word. He’s already brought “fire and fury” to this country in so many ways and, if he has anything to say about it, he’s just gotten started.

Don’t doubt for a second that, should he be losing on November 3rd (or beyond, given the mail-in vote to come), he’ll declare electoral fraud and balk at leaving the White House. Don’t doubt for a second that he’d be happy to torch that very building and whatever, at this point, is left of the American system with it before he saw himself “lose.”

Since he is, in his own fashion, a parody of everything: a politician, a Republican, an autocrat, even a human being, he sums up in some extreme (if eerily satiric) fashion human efforts to destroy our way of life in these years. In truth, fiery and furiously fueled, he’s a historic cloud of smoke and ash over us all.

By his very nature, to use those 2017 nuclear words of his, he is “threatening beyond a normal state.” Think of him as the president from hell and here I mean a literal hell. Four more years of him, his crew, and the fossil-fuelized criminals running the major oil, gas, and coal companies who are riding his coattails into profit heaven and planetary misery are the cast of a play, both comedy and tragedy, that none of us should have to sit through. He’s our very own firenado and — it’s not complicated — four more years of him will consign us to a hell on Earth of a sort still only faintly imaginable today.

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 (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: 21 September 2020

Word Count: 1,890

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Joe Biden was on a CNN town hall Thursday night. The Democratic nominee’s performance was fine. Nothing special. Good enough. Relative to the president’s performance two days prior, however, Biden’s was virtuosic.

As you’ll recall, Donald Trump is a lying, thieving, philandering sadist. That didn’t change Tuesday night when he fumbled through an ABC News town hall. Compared to that, all Biden needed to do is comb his hair, brush his teeth, stand up straight and act a little bit presidential.

Biden did more than that, obviously. The former vice president touched a nerve sending quick shots of pain through the body politic. I hope we remember them as we entered the final weeks. He brought up recent comments by the US attorney general, who said lock downs ordered to stop the spread of the new coronavirus were “like house arrest.”

“Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” Bill Barr said Wednesday.

Biden demurred. “What Bill Barr recently said is outrageous. … I will tell you what takes away your freedom: not being able to see your kid, not being able to go to the football game or baseball game, not seeing your mom or dad sick in the hospital, not being able to do the things, that’s what is costing us our freedom.”

Biden went on to say our collective loss of liberty is the result of a president who knew how bad the pandemic was going to be “in clear terms” but failed “to deal with this virus.”

I don’t think most people knew the nerve was hurting until Biden touched it. I don’t think Biden himself knew. Most people are just enduring a pandemic that has killed more than 202,000 Americans (per Worldometer, as of this writing), infected more than 6.8 million others and brought the US economy to the brink of collapse. But this moment, amid an objectively so-so performance, was like that feeling of lightning flashing down your arm. You knew you were in pain. You didn’t know how much till now.

Trump hasn’t just failed to protect us. He’s failed to protect our liberty, too.

Hold that truth firmly in your minds as you face a barrage of breathtaking propaganda for which every accusation against Biden and the Democrats is either a confession of what the president and his GOP confederates are doing, or a projection of what they would like to do.

In that world, up is down, left is right, wrong is right. When it comes to understanding Trump’s campaign rhetoric, presume first that it’s a lie, and second that whatever degree of truth it contains is upside down, backward and prolapsed.

On this score, John Avlon did yeoman’s work. The CNN analyst recently compiled a list of things the president and his confederates accuse Biden and “the left” of being while showing the accusations are precisely what the president and his confederates are. They accuse liberals of being “snowflakes.” Trump and his supporters are world-historical snowflakes. They accuse the Democrats of practicing “identity politics.” They’d be nothing without white identity politics. They accuse Democrats of wasteful spending. Trump and the GOP have spent our way to historic levels of national debt.

They accuse liberals of warping the US Constitution yet they stand by a president acquitted of attempting to defraud the American people. Treason, in other words.

When they demand “law enforcement,” they are really demanding punishment of their imagined enemies. When they demand “traditional values,” they are really demanding control over their women. When they demand “freedom,” they are really demanding conformity to group identity, which equates morality to obedience to white authority. When they demand “patriotism,” they are really demanding an envisioned nation-within-a-nation, handpicked by God, achieve dominion over America in God’s name.

Most important, they accuse “radicals” of being violent when the obvious source of violence is from right-wing actors who believe accusations against Biden and “the left” justify any and all reactions, including violent ones. This is why it’s a mistake to see hypocrisy where there’s actual motivating reasoning. It doesn’t matter that they are in fact what they accuse others of being.

To them, what matters is creating excuses to act as they wish. Upside down, backward and prolapsed — if you do not understand that, you are allowing yourself to be duped, and in the process surrendering your liberty.

Fortunately, I think most Americans know who the real tyrants are. I think most of us understand how much pain we are in. If we don’t, perhaps Biden’s performance helped. There’s nothing like lightning shooting down your arm to wake you up.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 September 2020

Word Count: 779

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On Aug. 21, people gathered around the Washington County School District building in St. George, Utah. They came by the hundreds to protest the governor’s mandate requiring schoolchildren to wear face masks. According to local newspaper The Spectrum, a protester said during a closing prayer that “safety is not as important as our freedom and liberty.” He went on: “Forcing masks on our children is child abuse.”

Another protester “compared mask-wearing to the death of George Floyd.”

“When George Floyd was saying ‘I can’t breathe’ and then he died, and now we’re wearing a mask, and we say ‘I can’t breathe,’ but we’re being forced to wear it anyway,” St. George resident Shauna Kinville told KTVX, a Salt Lake City TV station. Video of KTVX’s report went viral this week after Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher shared it.

It was in microcosm something we should expect in macrocosm if we’re lucky enough to see Joe Biden win the presidency. The Democratic nominee has promised to impose a nationwide mask mandate to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has now killed more than 201,000 Americans (as of this writing), infected more than 6.8 million more, and injured scores of thousands of businesses and communities around the country.

The pandemic is deadliest in rural and southern counties, places most likely to benefit from a nationwide mask mandate but least likely to obey one.

Should Biden win, we can expect a St. George anti-mask protest writ large in the coming years. It will probably follow a playbook similar to the one used a decade ago by the so-called “Tea Party,” by which small reactionary groups, funded by billionaires and organized by professional GOP operatives, present themselves as a grassroots revolt against centralized government tyranny.

The press corps will probably play along, covering it the way it did the last “insurrection” — as if red-blooded Americans, dedicated to the cause of liberty and driven by the principle of rugged individualism, are taking back their country from eastern elites in the name of freedom and God. (Instead of the “Tea Party,” it might be the “Q Party,” after the QAnon conspiracy theory). From these political conditions, we can anticipate a permanent pandemic.

Scholars will play a role, too. Indeed, they already are. The Brookings Institution and other social scientists are studying why some Americans refuse to wear masks even though masks are the best way of avoiding contagion. (The virus is airborne, living in water droplets so small they hang in the air.) Already scholars are coming to the wrong conclusion: that the American frontier mentality, and the individualism at the root of the innovation and self-reliance that constitute our national character, trumps the government’s interest in public health.

“Safety is not as important as our freedom and liberty,” the St. George protester said. Some academics, like Boston University’s Martin Fiszbein, have argued for the reevaluation of rugged individualism, a principle he calls “dangerous” in the face of public health crises demanding collective action.

America does not have too much rugged individualism. It has too little. The more we think rugged individualism is the problem, the bigger the real problem will be. People who refuse to wear masks are not reflecting the American frontier mentality. They are not rejecting commonsense out of the nobility of self-reliance.

They are not harming themselves, literally, due to outrage against government overreach. They are acting in the interest of the groups they identify with. More importantly, they are acting out of fear of being punished by their group. They’re not individualists. They’re collectivists.

If we keep saying that individualism is why some Americans won’t wear masks, we can expect to occupy a hell more hellish than the one we already occupy, in which mass death is now normal because there’s no apparent way to resolve the conflict between gun rights and public safety. We should not, and cannot, allow conventional wisdom to gel in which the demands of individuals grind endlessly against the demands of public health.

We must speak the truth. The tension isn’t between individualism and collective action. It’s between two collectivisms. One good and one very, very bad.

In one kind, individuals defend, maintain and expand liberty by way of accepting responsibility for and working toward a collective good. In the time of the ’rona, we are all in this together. We rise and fall, as one.

In the other, individuals subordinate their interests and surrender liberty to group identity. (The group is not “America,” because the United States is not where “real Americans” live.)

They claim to be rugged individualists, but they know individualism is punishable. One kind of collectivism rewards moral courage. The other kind, on the other hand, rewards moral cowardice.

We need an individualism that’s as moral as it is rugged. We need individuals rugged enough to make a hard moral choice between two visions of our country’s future. About half the country seems prepared to make that choice. That, alas, isn’t enough.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 September 2020

Word Count: 830

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Last year, when LeBron James described some of President Trump’s public statements as “laughable and scary,” Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham ordered the basketball superstar to “shut up and dribble.”

LeBron responded thoughtfully by saying that her comment “resonated with me, but I think it resonated with a lot of people to be able to feel like they can be more.”

Those “people” have come to include most of the National Basketball Association and hundreds of other athletes in professional baseball, hockey, football, women’s basketball, and the top tiers of college sports. As for that “more” they have become? They are now active participants in the most significant and inclusive wave of the often crushed or coopted yet ever breathing “athletic revolution” that first took shape in the 1960s.

Thanks to the pandemically isolated “bubbles” in which some teams are now living and playing, and driven by Donald Trump’s continuing racially based attacks on various sports, some athletes are now communing with each other ever more regularly and making collective decisions as never before — decisions often supported by their teams and even leagues. In the process, many of their protests against systemic racism and specific acts of police brutality have gone from messages at their usual social media outlets to acts like forcing games to be postponed via wildcat strikes.

As baseball and basketball, battered by the Covid-19 pandemic, cautiously continue their delayed and shortened seasons and the National Football League and some college football conferences finally launch their own belated starts, more and more questions arise: Will such physically dangerous playing conditions be sustainable? (Is there even such a thing as a socially distanced tackle?) Will fans accept rule changes meant to take the coronavirus into account and still keep watching (while their own lives threaten to go down the tubes)? Will former San Francisco 49er Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked the current sports revolt by kneeling to the national anthem four years ago and was subsequently abused by the president and functionally banished from football, ever get to play again? And above all, what effect will the various protests of such athletes have, if any, on the election?

The women led the way However it plays out, the most recent victory of National Basketball League players striking during their playoffs over yet another grim death of a black man at the hands of the police was spectacular. The team owners agreed that, in the Covid-19 moment with polling places potentially in short supply on November 3rd, pro basketball arenas would be made available as just such sites. Consider this path breaking: it’s the first time a player-owner bargaining agreement has included such a gift to democracy from two of the (previously) most self-centered groups in America.

Before we cry “Bravo!” however, let’s cry “Brava!” After all, it was the most marginalized of the professional leagues, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), that provided the impetus for the current movement and remains its moral center. Keep in mind that, for years now, women pro basketball players have been protesting against gun violence and police brutality, both individually and as teams, while their male equivalents, who earn so much more money and possess so much more security, tended to posture and pontificate while putting themselves at much less risk.

Last month, the women upped their game. The WNBA’s Atlanta Dream players donned T-shirts endorsing Dr. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic opponent of Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, who has disparaged Black Lives Matter and, as the New York Times reported, “publicly and frequently derided the league for dedicating its season to the Black Lives Matter movement.” Loeffler just happens to be the Dream’s co-owner. Other teams in the league followed suit and soon most teams were wearing such “Vote Warnock” T-shirts, while also proclaiming that Black Lives Matter. (BLM, by the way, was a group founded by women.)

Soon after, something stunning happened in the male version of pro basketball with the NBA in the first round of its playoff games in a “bubble” at Florida’s Disney World. After a white police officer shot an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, in the back seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take part in their next playoff game. And that protest then produced a cascade of brief strikes by other NBA and WNBA teams and, most surprisingly, by predominantly white Major League Baseball teams.

While the statements of the protesters tended to describe the strikes as a response to recent incidents of police brutality, the underlying cause may have lain elsewhere. Those angry strikes may really have been side effects of the Covid-19 “bubbles” in which they were playing. In them, the usual focus on the game of the moment and the party to follow was replaced by conversations about Donald Trump, racism, and the responsibilities of rich Black sports celebrities to express themselves and act in the interests of their communities.

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner conducted a revealing interview with Andre Iguodala, a Miami Heat forward and the first vice-president of the NBA players’ union, who said:

 

“African-Americans are trying to search for ourselves and ask where we stand in the world and where we stand in America. And we don’t know. We shoulder a lot of the burdens of our community, but I think a lot of that responsibility should fall on the majority, and those who are the lawmakers and who are supposed to insure that every man and woman is treated as an equal. But we still haven’t seen that. So we are still searching for our place.”

Take the money or march? One of the most poignant expressions of that search came from the coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, Doc Rivers, whose father had been a police officer. “It’s amazing,” he commented, “why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back. It’s really so sad… I’m so often reminded of my color… We got to do better. But we got to demand better.”

What exactly does “demand better” mean and what could it achieve? In the sports world, at least, with the possible exception of those still-must-be-seen-to-be-believed arena voting sites, the sporadic protests of various players over the years for equality and social justice have usually resulted, at best, in yet more discussion about the issues they were raising rather than actual solutions, however provisional. Although over the decades, the integration of baseball, the introduction of free agency, and the emergence of the Black quarterback could all certainly be viewed as progress in the sports world itself.

Today, however, it remains a question whether players will continue pushing for social reform or, as so often in the past, settle for better salaries and pensions. As Iguodala put it:

 

“Historically, money determines a lot of our actions. Do we stand up for something or take the money? We will always get caught in those crosshairs. But I think players are smartening up, and I think that will come into play with a lot of guys.”

Similar optimism has been expressed recently by a number of sporting icons including Hall of Fame basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar who began his career with the Milwaukee Bucks. He found hope in “the instantaneous support of other sports teams and athletes,” especially ones from Major League Soccer (only 26% black), Major League Baseball (8%), and overwhelmingly white pro tennis.

Times, Jabbar believes, may indeed be changing. After all, he remembers that “when I boycotted the 1968 Olympics because of the gross racial inequities, I was met with a vicious backlash criticizing my lack of gratitude for being invited into the air-conditioned Big House where I could comfortably watch my community swelter and suffer.”

Another long-time sports activist, retired sociology professor Harry Edwards who was instrumental in inspiring the memorable Black power salute given from the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico Olympics by American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos, is similarly hopeful. An adviser to Kaepernick, Edwards sees an opening for genuine change in this moment because, he says, it’s no longer just about the acts of individual sports figures. This wave of protest, he adds, “is distinctively different from the single athletes who were involved. These are entire teams that are reacting to this situation and leveraging their power to demand change. It’s not just a Colin Kaepernick or Eric Reid or Michael Bennett or Maya Moore. This one is about an entire organization and I could see this coming from the time the University of Missouri football team protested.”

That was back in 2015 when that football team joined a campus-wide demand for the resignation of the university’s president for mishandling racial incidents at the school. (He did finally resign.) Such a full-scale involvement of a college sports team in a protest movement was unheard of at the time. It would take another five years and so many more racial nightmares before that spirit of unity with a larger protesting culture in this Black Lives Matter era, not to mention the willingness of athletes to risk their own brief careers, would bloom throughout sports.

“Spoiled rotten millionaires” The current reaction of the Trump administration and its allies to such protests has underlined the threat that they clearly feel from wildcat strikes, bent knees, and other actions disrupting their notions of “normality” in an unnerved and unnerving world. The president, in particular, has been counting on the return of pro sports and college football to help project an image of him being in control in this ongoing pandemic.

Weighing in from the White House, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner typically dismissed the recent set of basketball wildcat strikes by saying, “Look, I think that the NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially.”

That snide attempt to separate the athletes from their fan base, itself stricken by a weakening economy, the still-spreading coronavirus, and a mounting sense of political anxiety, soon blossomed into something more like a political campaign theme. At the right-wing website Newsmax, for instance, conservative radio host Chris Salcedo attacked “the spoiled rotten millionaires.” He then added: “Pro sports is no longer about unifying us but about shoving left-wing politics down our throat and up our nearest orifice. They push social justice, which is the absence of justice.”

For all the right-wing outrage over the basketball protests, football is now the true American national pastime and carries the most weight with Trump and gang. Several months ago, I speculated that, “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.”

Despite the fact that most NFL owners have been Trump donors, the league, which did away with pre-season games, has been bending leftward to avoid a NBA-style set of strikes that could cripple the season just as it’s starting. Last month, League Commissioner Roger Goodell professed regret for not paying more attention to Colin Kaepernick’s message when he took those knees. Topping that, earlier this month, Goodell announced that “End Racism” and “It Takes All of Us” signs will be stenciled in the end zones of all stadiums this season and the so-called Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” will be sung before each opening game. Political slogans will even be allowed on helmets.

In certain ways, when it comes to the Trump voter in particular, the return of college football — a major multibillion-dollar business that pays most of its “employees” nothing whatsoever — with its own cult-like regional passions is of particular importance. While college football fans tend to lean right and insist on their entertainment, no matter who has to die for it, college players have used the health risks of Covid-19 to ramp up their demands for more control over their lives and a share of the revenue that their schools collect from the sale of jerseys with their names on them.

After two of the five major conferences, the West Coast’s Pac-12 and the Midwestern-based Big 10, worrying about the toll that the pandemic might take, called off their fall seasons, the Trump campaign declared: “The Radical Left is trying to CANCEL college football.” The electoral implications were obvious: five key swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota — have Big Ten teams and calling off the season in this fashion does, of course, send a message to future voters about the state of Trumpian America.

In reality, the urge to protest playing football in the midst of a pandemic was spreading (and not just among the usual suspects). Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, a famed book on high school football in Texas, for instance, called on players in the remaining leagues to boycott their games:

 

“[M]any of the states advocating to play are the same states that find wearing protective masks optional, college football a sacred American right. Football is not like other sports. It is blood, snot, sweat and spit, bodily meals the virus craves. How can these schools even be contemplating the risk when several medical advisers to the N.C.A.A. said it was ill advised? Some coaches have suggested that football players alone should return to campus, which provides additional evidence that they are viewed more like employees than traditional students and should be compensated.”

Such evidence has, of course, been in plain sight for years, but maybe it takes a plague to see it clearly. College administrators may be no better than Trumpsters in their willingness to sacrifice lives for money and power. They certainly do fit comfortably with the sort of sentiments Donald Trump, Jr., expressed on Chris Salcedo’s show: “I can’t tell if some of this stuff is politically motivated because not going back to normalcy allows you to instill some fear that can be used as political leverage. Let them play, man.”

In other words, the position of the Trump administration as it makes a Covid-19-ignoring scoring drive for November 3rd is distinctly shut up and dribble. However, the question, in this moment from hell, is: Will the players and fans agree?

Who will take the next knee?

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: 17 September 2020

Word Count: 2,401

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Let’s talk about a genre of political punditry that appears genuine and reasonable but has more in common with conspiracy theory than well-intended debate in the interest of democracy, intellectual honesty and the common good. On closer inspection, in fact, it’s clear these writers are modeling ways of rationalizing political decisions that have already been made. They are, moreover, demonstrating a total lack of caring about whether their “arguments” are plausibly right or wrong.

Opinion editors have incentive to balance views, obviously, but they have no incentive to sort good faith from bad. They themselves don’t care if opinion writers care about the truth, because the business of journalism doesn’t care. It encourages and rewards venomous bullshit.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The genre I’m talking about was in wide circulation when the Democratic Party was searching for a new standard-bearer. Everyone envisioned a nominee who could unite the party while appealing to disaffected white Republicans, the balance being critical to amassing the majority needed to defeat the president. Bernie Sanders seemed to be the frontrunner. Op-ed pages were filled with dire warnings — apparently in good-faith — against the party choosing “a socialist.” The perspectives varied, but the conclusions were the same. Picking Sanders would guarantee four more years of Donald Trump.

These arguments had almost no effect, fortunately. Joe Biden’s nomination was rooted in the preferences of pragmatic Black voters, in the south and midwest, more than the preferences of disaffected white Republicans. (Black Democrats saw Biden as a shield against white supremacy and other bigotries more than white Democrats favoring a progressive candidate, and they were right.)

That these arguments had almost no impact on party decision-making allowed them to stay in circulation. Writers who said they’d vote for Trump if the Democratic Party picked “a socialist” are now saying the same thing: they’ll vote for Trump if the Democrats keep “being socialist.”

You get the feeling it doesn’t matter what Biden does. The goal isn’t genuine engagement in free speech. It’s exploiting free speech to sow confusion, cast doubt and otherwise discredit the Democratic nominee. Moving the bar is what serial abusers do.

Opinion editors don’t seem aware of their complicity in the gaslighting of trusting readers. More importantly, opinion editors do not seem aware that this genre of punditry, however much it might appeal to their need for balancing an array of political views, does not care whether it’s plausibly wrong or right.

Caring about the rightness or wrongness of an argument means caring about the practical consequences of it, which means taking responsibility for the integrity of the social relationships that constitute a community.

In other words, caring about rightness or wrongness means caring about trust.

Writers of I-was-for-Biden-before-I-was-against-him don’t care whether you trust them. They care instead about poisoning public discourse, making it harder for voters to make good choices, and thus improving the president’s chances of winning.

Making all this worse is these “arguments” are seen as respectable. They’re more like dangerous conspiracy theories, though, and opinion editors should see them as such.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Conspiracy theories are not just crazy cult conniptions. They are the rational result of people deciding to sever previous obligations to the democratic process and the common good, because the democratic process and the common good are getting in the way of their political goals.

For many now welcomed into the GOP, it’s no longer possible to win by arguing the Democrats are right or wrong about this or that policy. Reasonable good-faith arguments are insufficient. (Reasonable good-faith arguments, moreover, demand sharing space with political opponents deserving annihilation, not respect.)

Conspiracy theories not only create boogeymen that justify any means of destruction; they attack the ways by which the enemy maintains an advantage: the persuasive power of free speech. Undermine free speech. Undermine the enemy.

As I said before, QAnon “believers” don’t care whether their conspiracy theory is true. All they care about is bringing to mainstream attention the allegation that the Democrats, and by extension Joe Biden, are part of a secret cabal of pedophiles and cannibals conspiring to bring down the president from the inside of the federal government.

The conspiracy theory, in other words, is merely a convenience that, among other goals, legitimizes political violence in a society that normally shuns political violence. In a very real sense, all Republican rhetoric is conspiratorial.

Biden is a Trojan Horse for the radical left. The Democrats tried stealing the 2000 election. Jamie Harrison, Senate candidate, is hiding something in tax returns he won’t release. (He did.)

Making the allegation is the point. Caring about whether it’s true isn’t.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 September 2020

Word Count: 784

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White centrist pundits like New York’s Jonathan Chait have an annoying habit of downplaying the authoritarianism that ambushed the American liberal tradition before crashing through democracy’s guardrails down the road to serfdom. They keep failing to see what’s happening with their own eyes. Indeed, they won’t see.

They’re too invested in the idea of America being the exception to the tendency of other nations to eat themselves. Yet this exceptionalism cannot be squared with the following truth: No one expects Donald Trump, should he emerge victorious, to win the popular vote.

And I mean no one. Not his rivals, his donors, his supporters, his campaign, not even the president himself. All things being equal — by which I mean if we’re lucky and the president behaves somewhat “normally” — Trump’s only chance of winning reelection is by moving just enough white people in just enough states to eke out an Electoral College win.

His victory in that case would be the third time in six elections the winner of a democratic election was determined by a minority of voters. (That’s compared to one time it happened between 1789 and 2000.) We can quibble about whether he’s more of a crook than a fascist, but we can’t quibble about this fundamental fact. Our system isn’t preventing authoritarianism. It’s maintaining conditions for its rise.

Actually, we can’t quibble about the crook-fascist thing either. Quibbling about whether this president is more this (crook) than that (fascist) is just another way white centrist pundits avoid seeing what’s right in front of them. Fact is, the Nazis and other authoritarian regimes were and are breathtakingly corrupt. Corruption is their bag. They can’t be otherwise.

Authoritarians do not compete against legitimate political opponents according to an agreed-to set of rules. Politics is an end, not a means. They refuse to be restrained by laws, institutions, and other people. Enemies are not just defeated. They can’t be permitted to fight another day. Enemies must be annihilated.

The president is a clown, to be sure. He’s a clown who’s preternaturally corrupt and metabolically incapable of recognizing the authority of moral, legal or institutional constraints on his appetites. From his brain worms can come things white centrist pundits won’t allow themselves to imagine, because imagining them would mean questioning faith in America as the exception to the world’s evils.

The irony is they don’t have to imagine. Trump told Fox’s Jeanine Pirro on Monday that he’d declare victory and “put down” any challenge. “Look, it’s called insurrection,” he said.

We just send them in and we do it very easy. I mean it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes. Minneapolis, they were having problems. We sent in the National Guard within a half an hour. That was the end of the problem. It all went away.

Nor do we have to imagine what many normal people will do in the face of corruption seeking dominance above all. My friend Greg Sargent wrote that Trump’s cronies “are also corruptly manipulating the levers of your government to [turn lies] into truths, or inflate them into issues that will garner news coverage that helps him in some way, or both.” Greg went on to say:

Because the crush of governmental manipulation to serve Trump’s personal and political ends is so relentless, we often focus only on isolated examples as they skate past. But we need to connect the dots. Taken together, they tell a larger story that is truly staggering in its levels of corruption.

Greg pointed out seven ways the president is corrupting the government for his own reelection purposes, including “rushing coronavirus treatments,” “limiting disclosure of knowledge of Russian sabotage,” and “discrediting vote-by-mail,” and while Greg is right, there’s another way of looking at this. It’s what white centrist pundits fail to see, because seeing it contravenes their cherished beliefs.

Leaders don’t actually run things. They need normal people for that, and the fact is, lots of normal people in this government are willing to roll over and give an authoritarian whatever he wants.

Anyone maintaining the argument that authoritarianism can’t happen here must contend with the fact that so much authoritarianism is already happening here.

It’s time we stopped asking if Trump is trying to place himself above the law. It’s now time to say he succeeded. The question now should be whether he’s going to be punished.

Chait fortunately says, in “The Case for Consequences,” that the president should be punished. Unfortunately, he says fascism is the wrong way to understand him. There’s no reason to separate the two. The world’s fascists were world-historical criminals. Turning criminal behavior into politically legitimate and socially acceptable behavior is, after all, what makes authoritarianism terrifying.

It won’t be enough to punish Trump for his crimes. We must reform our political system, too, so that a minority of voters determines the presidential winner once every 200 years, not thrice every 20.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 September 2020

Word Count: 840

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In our new era of nearly unparalleled upheaval, as a pandemic ravages the bodies of some and the minds of nearly everyone, as the associated economic damage disposes of the livelihoods of many, and as even the promise of democracy fades, the people whose lives were already on a razor’s edge — who were vulnerable and isolated before the advent of Covid-19 — are in far greater danger than ever before.

Against this backdrop, many of us are scanning the news for any sign of hope, any small flicker of light whose gleam could indicate that everything, somehow, is going to be okay. In fact, there is just such a flicker coming from those who have been through the worst of it and have made it out the other side.

I spoke with Rafael Rodriguez of Holyoke, Massachusetts, on a sweltering Thursday afternoon in late July. He had already spent hours that day on Zoom and, though I could feel his exhaustion through our pixilated connection, he was gracious. His salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed, he nodded gently in answer to my questions. “Covid-19 has made it more and more apparent how stigmatizing it is to be less fortunate,” he said. As we spoke, the number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits had just ticked up to around 30 million, or about one in every five workers, with nearly 15 million behind on their rent, and 29 million reporting that their households hadn’t had enough to eat over the preceding week. Rodriguez is an expert in what happens after eviction or when emergency aid dries up (or there’s none to be had in the first place) — what becomes, that is, of those in protracted isolation and despair.

Drug-overdose deaths were up 13% in the first seven months of this year compared to 2019, according to research conducted by the New York Times covering 40% of the U.S. population. More than 60% of participating counties nationwide that report to the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program at the University of Baltimore saw a sustained spike in overdoses following March 19th, when many states began issuing social-distancing and stay-at-home orders. This uptick arrived atop a decades-long climb in drug-related fatalities. Last year, before the pandemic even hit, an estimated 72,000 people in the United States died of an overdose, the equivalent of sustaining a tragedy of 9/11 proportions every two weeks, or about equal to the American Covid-19 death toll during its deadliest stretch so far, from mid-April to mid-May.

What people do in the face of protracted isolation and despair is turn to whatever coping strategy they’ve got — including substances so strong they can be deadly.

“I think of opioids as technologies that are perfectly suited for making you okay with social isolation,” said Nancy Campbell, head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose. Miraculously, an opioid overdose can be reversed with the medicine naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan. But you can’t use naloxone on yourself; you need someone else to administer it to you. That’s why Campbell calls it a “technology of solidarity.” The solidarity of people looking out for one another is a necessary ingredient when it comes to preserving the lives of those in the deepest desolation.

Yet not everyone sees why we should save people who knowingly ingest dangerous substances. “I come from a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania and I have a large extended family there,” Campbell told me. She remembers a family member asking her, “Why don’t we just let them die?”

Any of us can answer that question by imagining that the person who just overdosed was the one you love most in the world — your daughter, your son, your dearest friend, your lover. Of course you won’t let them die; of course it’s imperative that they have another chance at life. There are people like Rafael Rodriguez who have dedicated themselves to ensuring that their neighbors have access to naloxone and other resources for surviving the absolute worst. One day, naloxone may indeed save someone you love. Perhaps it already has.

Another technology of solidarity has recently become commonplace in our lives: the face mask. Wearing such a mask tells others that you care about their well-being — you care enough to prevent the germs you exhale from becoming the germs they inhale, and then from becoming the germs they exhale in the company of still others. Face masks save lives. The face mask is a technology of solidarity. So is naloxone. And so is empathy.

“The sheer power of being with someone in the moment” As Rafael Rodriguez slowly told his astonishing story, I could see on my computer screen a spartan office behind him and a single bamboo shoot, its stem curled beneath a burst of foliage. When he was younger, he said, he used food as his coping mechanism for an embattled life, over-eating to the point where doctors worried he would die. Then, at age 23, he underwent gastric bypass surgery and lost a dramatic amount of weight. The doctors were pleased, but now his only means of coping with life’s hardships had been taken away. When three of his dearest family members died in rapid succession, he began drinking. Eventually he sought something that could help him stay awake to keep drinking, and so he started using cocaine. Later on, he needed something that could ease him off cocaine in order to sleep.

“That’s where heroin came into my life,” he told me.

Using that illegal drug left him feeling ashamed, though, and soon he found himself pulling away from his remaining family members, becoming so isolated that, in 2005, he fell into a long stretch of homelessness. Only after he had spent almost a year in a residential rehabilitation facility and gotten a job that left him surrounded by supportive colleagues did Rodriguez begin to name the dark things in his past that had driven him to use drugs.

“No one ever knew that I was sexually assaulted as a child,” he explained. After years in recovery, he is now in possession of a commanding insight. During the most troubled years of his life, he was punishing himself for someone else’s grim actions.

Portugal famously decriminalized all substance use in 2001 and multimedia journalist Susana Ferreira has written that its groundbreaking model was built on an understanding that a person’s “unhealthy relationship with drugs often points to frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves.” The root problem, in other words, is seldom substance use. It’s disconnection and heartache.

In 2016, Rodriguez was hired by the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community in Holyoke, where heroin use constituted a crisis long before opioid addiction registered as a national epidemic. Rodriguez now dedicates himself to supporting others in their recovery from the trauma that so often underlies addiction. And while tight funding and staffing limitations have led many community organizations across the country to reduce services during the pandemic period, the Recovery Learning Community has sought to expand to meet increasing need. When state restrictions capped the number of people the organization could allow into its indoor spaces, Rodriguez and his team improvised, offering services outside. They prepared bagged lunches, set up outlets so people could charge their phones, and distributed hand sanitizer and bottled water. And they continued to offer compassion and peer support, as they always had, to people wrestling with addiction.

Helping those in the midst of painful circumstances, Rodriguez says, isn’t about knowing the right thing to say. It’s about “the sheer power of just being with someone in the moment… being able to validate and make sure they know they’re being heard.”

In many situations, he adds, he has helped people without uttering a word.

Criminalization versus “any positive change” It’s something of an understatement to say that, in the United States, empathy has not been our go-to answer for addiction. Our cultural tendency is to regard signs of drugs or the persistent smell of alcohol as marking users as outcasts to be avoided on the street. But medical science tells us that addiction is actually a chronic relapsing brain disease, one that often takes hold when a genetic predisposition intersects with destabilizing environmental factors such as poverty or trauma.

Regardless of the science, we tend to respond unkindly to folks in the throes of addiction. In her book Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis, Dr. Kimberly Sue describes a complex and corrupt system of prosecutors, forensic drug labs, prisons, and parole and probationary systems in which discipline is meted out primarily to low-income people, disproportionately of color, who use illegal substances. An attending physician at Rikers Island in New York, Sue is also the medical director of the Harm Reduction Coalition. The philosophical opposite of criminalization, “harm reduction” is an international movement, pioneered by people who have used or still use such drugs, to reduce their negative consequences.

“Treat people with dignity and respect, respect people’s bodily autonomy” was the way Sue described to me some of harm reduction’s core tenets. In this country, we typically expect folks to cease all substance use in order to be considered “clean” human beings. Harm reduction instead espouses a kind of compassionate incrementalism. “Any positive change,” from the decision to inject yourself with a sterile needle to carrying naloxone, is regarded as a stride toward a healthier life.

In tandem with its decision to decriminalize all substance use, Portugal put harm reduction at the heart of its national drug policies. And as of 2017 (the most recent year for which data are available), nearly two decades after that country’s groundbreaking move, the per-capita rate of drug-related fatalities in the U.S. stood 54 times higher than in Portugal.

Now, the pandemic has made addiction even more dangerous. In addition to inflicting the sort of widespread hardship that can drive people to opioids (or even greater doses of them) and to take their chances with the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl, Covid-19 has stymied efforts by Dr. Sue and others to provide effective guidance and care. In normal times, opioid users can at least protect themselves from dying of an overdose by using their drug in the company of others, so that someone can administer naloxone if it becomes necessary. Now, however, that safety mechanism has been fatally disrupted. While social distancing saves lives, stark solitude can be deadly — both as further reason for using such drugs and because no one will be present with the antidote. Referring to naloxone as a miracle medicine, Sue said that there is no medical reason why people should die of an opioid overdose.

“The reason they die is because of isolation.”

Rx: friendship Back in March, one of the first recommendations for reducing the transmission of the coronavirus was, of course, to stay home — but not everyone has a home, and when businesses, restaurants, libraries, and other public spaces locked their doors, some people were left without a place even to wash their hands. In Holyoke, Rafael Rodriguez and his colleagues at the Recovery Learning Community, along with staff from several other local organizations, rushed to city officials and asked that a handwashing station and portable toilets be installed for the many local people who live unhoused. Rodriguez sees such measures not only as fundamental acts of humanity, but also as essential to any viable treatment for addiction.

“It’s really hard to think about recovery, or putting down substances, when [your] basic human needs aren’t being met,” he said. In the midst of extreme summer heat, he pointed out that there wasn’t even a local cooling center for people on the streets and it was clear that, despite everything he had seen in his life, he found this astonishing. He is now part of a community movement that is petitioning the local city government for an emergency shelter.

“When you have no idea where you’re going to rest your head at night, using substances almost becomes a survival tactic,” he explained. “It’s a way to be able to navigate this cruel world.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Sue continues to care for her patients whose maladies are often rooted in systemic injustice and the kind of despair that dates back to their early lives. Affirming that substance use is indeed linked to frayed relationships, she told me that, in this pandemic moment of isolation, what drug users most often need is a sense of connection with others.

“How do I prescribe connection?” she had asked during our phone call. “How do I prescribe a friend?”

Several days later, while writing this article, I left the air-conditioned space in which I was working and walked a couple of blocks to run some errands. In the stifling midday sun, I saw a woman sitting on the ground. I realized I’d seen her before and guessed that she was homeless. Her arms and face were inflamed with a rash. She said something to me as I passed. At first, I didn’t catch it. Her words were garbled and she had to repeat herself several times before I understood.

She was asking for water.

I blinked, nodded, and went into a nearby drug store where I grabbed a water bottle, paid in a few seconds at self-checkout, and gave it to her. And yet, if I hadn’t been working on this article, I might not have done that at all. I might have passed right by, too absorbed in my life to realize she was pleading for help.

Amid the sustained isolation of a global pandemic whose end is nowhere in sight, I asked Rafael Rodriguez what lessons could be learned from people who have long experienced isolation in their lives.

“My hope is that, as a society, we gain some empathy,” he replied.

Then he added, “Now that’s a big ask.”

Mattea Kramer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is at work on a novel about a waitress’s love affair with a prescription pill.

Copyright ©2020 Mattea Kramer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 September 2020

Word Count: 2,323

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