Forget about the old days. They are gone. Forget about the old ways of doing things. They are gone. You are facing things your parents never faced. Your children are facing things that you, as a child, never faced. Everything has changed. I mean that completely, categorically. The one exception is our belief in a return to normal. There is no normal. Unless you mean chaos and disaster. Unless you mean they’re normal.

There was a brief period when this country could have done something about the novel coronavirus now crawling over every nook and cranny of our individual lives and society. There was a time when it could have been minimized, even stopped, while we recovered from damage already done. That moment has passed. The pandemic is here to stay. Its individual and social impact is permanent. At first we talked about a lost month. Then about a lost summer. Soon, a lost year, lost decade, until finally, if we’re lucky and if we’re wise, we realize what we’re talking about is a lost generation.

“The first thing I’m going to do when the pandemic is over is give one of my friends a big hug.” That’s what my 9-year-old child said today over breakfast. I’m guessing your children, or grandchildren, have said something similar. I’m guessing they have expressed a longing for a return to normal, a longing you are powerless to make real. I’m guessing you felt the pain I felt but could not — would not — give voice to. Never in the child’s presence. New Haven’s school board decided against in-person teaching. Classes will be virtual. “You will never be able to hug your friends again,” I thought.

Nearly 100,000 children came down with Covid-19 in late July, according to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics. That number is likely to go up. The school year has begun in states whose governments refuse to mandate wearing facemasks. Do not believe Joe Biden’s victory, should that happen, will mean going back to sane public health policy. These states decided to endanger the wellbeing of their own children to score political points. Moreover, 11 percent of the country won’t wear a mask no matter what, according to a recent Wall Street Journal survey. That percentage will triple, even quintuple, under a Democratic president. They will rally in numbers high enough for viral spread under flags declaring “Don’t Tread on Me.” Many will refuse to get vaccinated, whenever a vaccine is viable, which might take years, because they already believe vaccines generally are secret plots to harm them. Resistance to masks and vaccines will have the backing of the Republican Party and its billionaire donors. You thought the coronavirus was going to go away someday. Think again.

No one knows the effect on kids. Some exhibit symptoms. Most blessedly don’t. More certain is they give it to you, your parents, your grandparents — teachers, coaches, instructors, tutors — anyone spending time with kids. But again, no one knows. There’s some evidence of what the disease does to the heart. Professional athletes are getting sidelined. There’s more evidence of what it does to the brain. “There are also longer-lasting consequences for the brain, including myalgic encephalomyelitis /chronic fatigue syndrome and Guillain-Barre syndrome,” wrote Natalie Tronson. The University of Michigan neurologist gave us reason to be worried about more than death tolls. “COVID-19 will continue to impact health and well-being long after the pandemic is over. As such, it will be critical to continue to assess the effects of COVID-19 illness in vulnerability to later cognitive decline and dementias.”

The death toll surpassed 160,000 Sunday. The number of infections crested 5,000,000. That’s sure to double, at least, by the time we know who the winner of the election is (a process, as I said last week, that will drag on until 2021). Doubling is sure to happen, I have no doubt, because all things will be equal between now and then; and all things will be equal, because Donald Trump does not want to know whether he’s done a good job of containing the pandemic. He only wants his toadies to tell him that he’s done a good job.

“With polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop,” according to the Washington Post. “They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.”

The US is a patchwork. Thirteen and a half thousand school districts with 13,500 ways of going back to school amid a pandemic. The only safe way, however, is with a national response. “We need not only adaptive safety practices at the schools but also lower amounts of virus in each community,” Tom Bossert, a former White House homeland security adviser under Trump, told the Post. “A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy.”

A national response is precisely what the president did not want. For one thing, he thought blue-state people were the only ones getting sick. For another, leading a national response would put him at risk of being wrong. And Donald Trump is never wrong. “Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.”

This is Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

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: 10 August 2020

Word Count: 937

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Among things we can do together to try preventing the president from stealing the election is demanding more from the pundit corps. (This includes yours truly.) We are entering a dangerous period fraught with instability and apprehension as well as potential for violence and bloodshed. Donald Trump is most likely to contest anything that’s short of a landslide for Joe Biden. The president is almost certain to drag the process out well into 2021. Moreover, he has friends and allies inside and outside the GOP and law enforcement able to use extra-legal means of keeping him in power.

As Nils Gilman, of the Transition Integrity Project, told USA Today, the president will “create as many possible pre-narratives for claiming that the results are not legitimate. He wants to create fear, uncertainty and doubt so that people feel frozen and paralyzed, and then the man of action, Trump himself, can ride in and seize the day.”

This is a time for grave seriousness from the pundit corps, especially those with the biggest megaphones. This is not a time to tolerate punditry-as-usual, which is more about entertainment and pose-striking than hard-nosed polemics. I think most of us get it (Gilman and TIP co-founder Rosa Brooks certainly do), but many of us don’t. They are still making pre-2016 arguments for a post-2016 America spiraling madly. Use your free speech to urge them to face reality and force them to snap out of it.

Case in point is SE Cupp. She’s a New York Daily News columnist and CNN host. She’s white, conventionally attractive, wears black glasses and gives the impression of being a deep thinker. In her latest, she said the choice between voting for Biden and a write-in candidate (she’s against Trump) depends on Biden’s choice of a running mate. “As a staunch conservative who has voted Republican in past elections, I don’t take this lightly. I don’t agree with everything that Biden supports, nor am I 100 percent comfortable with the direction he wants to take the country. … For moderates like me who are looking for reasons to vote for Biden, we need to know who’s on that ticket, and soon. I’m hoping, for the sake of the country, he chooses someone I can support.”

For the curious, Cupp likes Kamala Harris, dislikes Susan Rice. (They are reportedly Biden’s top two picks.) It would be interesting if Cupp were to say Harris could ignite the Democratic base, especially Black Democrats and Democrats of color, thus doing the most to ensure Trump’s defeat in a tidal wave. Alas, Cupp doesn’t go there. Instead, she leans into the false thesis of needing a good reason to vote for Biden, as if nearly four years of authoritarianism, corruption, madness and treason were not enough.

Fact is, no one knows if running mates have any effect on voter behavior. Few people base their vote on the person running with a nominee. (The exception widely cited is Sarah Palin.) This goes double this year, because many Americans who say they are voting for Biden aren’t really voting for Biden. They are voting against Trump, which means Biden himself is a secondary thought, which means his running mate is a tertiary thought — if they’re thinking about vice presidents at all, which is unlikely.

Making Cupp’s thesis more absurd: Writing in a candidate is throwing her vote away, which means Biden is the only choice, no matter who his VP pick, if she really means it when she says she’s “sick of all the crap”: “The gaslighting, the puerile tweets, the divisiveness, the rampant ignorance and the utter inability to put the country before his fragile ego. I’m ready to move on, I’m ready to make the presidency normal again.”

To the extent that she insists that writing in a candidate is legitimate, I don’t know what to say, because that’s not voting against Trump. That’s voting for someone who will have no impact, which means Cupp’s opposition to Trump isn’t serious, which means a column about how much depends on Biden’s pick is just striking a pose.

No one knows if running mates matter, but an argument about Harris as Biden’s running mate is a good argument. To pick Harris is to say to the Democratic base: yes, it can happen here. A United States senator from California, former prosecutor and biracial daughter of immigrants could be president one day — if you make it happen. Even if that never happens, the mere possibility of it happening would be enough, in the age of Donald Trump, to supercharge Democratic turnout, fueling a landslide election, which is probably the only thing that would push Trump out of office.

And yet Cupp doesn’t go there.

Ultimately, I think Cupp and others aren’t adapting to our new age of danger, because they don’t want to let go of the old regime once so nurturing to their respective styles of conservative thought. That time is long gone. We are no longer in an age of rugged individualism, because we can’t be. Anything short of we’re-all-in-this-together might kill us all.

Push pundits to accept reality, expect more, or demand they move on.

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: 07 August 2020

Word Count: 860

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BOSTON — The massive explosion in Beirut that devastated many parts of the city is a tale with three distinct but linked parts, about the past, the present, and the future. The past is about how this could happen, given that for the last six years the government knew about that the thousands of kilos of dangerous ammonium nitrate stored in the port, and did nothing about it.

The present is about how the immediate reconstruction and humanitarian aid processes will impact on the current government that has very little domestic or international credibility.

The third, and most important in the long run, is about whether in future the Lebanese people’s heightened anger with their government, for subjecting them to yet another massive source of sustained suffering, will translate into political action that removes the government and starts to reform the entire political-economic structures of the country.

These three dimensions also relate to the lives of several hundred million civilians across the Arab region, who suffer the consequences of their own cruel regimes, of which Lebanon is only the most dramatic, painful, and recent example. Lebanon is instructive because it is one of a handful of Arab countries where tens of thousands of citizens are out in the streets almost daily demonstrating peacefully against their governments for what they see as their mistreatment by those governments.

The Beirut port explosion is a consequence of the cumulative incompetence, corruption, lassitude, amateurism, and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments, going back two decades, which has brought the Lebanese people to a point of majority pauperization and desperation. Ordinary citizens don’t have enough clean water. They don’t have electricity. They don’t have good new jobs. They don’t have reasonably priced food. They cannot get their own money from the banks. Education quality is declining. Trash is not properly collected or disposed of. Environmental conditions deteriorate across the land. Their currency has collapsed. The future is bleak for all, other than the very wealthy.

Every dimension of life in Lebanon has declined, steadily and uninterruptedly, for the last 20 years. But perhaps the worst aspect of this, in the citizen’s eyes, is that the government does not seem to care, or to do anything to fix the situation, as in most Arab countries. The Beirut port explosion is the most catastrophic example of how an uncaring, inattentive, and criminally negligent government operates, because the ruling oligarchic power structure circles the wagons and protects itself against angrier and angrier citizens in the street.

Because nobody in power did anything about the ammonium nitrate in Beirut port, as has been the case with water, garbage, electricity, and the economy, the political aftershocks are likely to be the most significant dimension of this incident. These will happen only after some time, as the country absorbs the psychological and physical shocks of the explosion, and deals with the massive humanitarian suffering.

The Lebanese people — like the Algerians, Sudanese, Iraqis, and others — are actively focused on understanding how they can demonstrate and mobilize politically in order to achieve a common goal: to recreate a legitimate, credible, effective, and humanistic government system that treats its own citizens as human beings and not as animals without rights, without feelings, without voice.

This populist force across the entire region has been out in the streets demonstrating now for a decade. Since the 2010-11 uprisings, Arab men and women have signaled the intensity of the political deficiencies and the populist quest for dignity in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan, Algeria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Mauritania, and Lebanon.

A core problem that must be resolved is how to overcome the mistrust of power that defines all Arab countries experiencing uprisings. The Lebanese people certainly don’t trust their government anymore, because they’ve suffered the physical and emotional consequences of its cruelty and deficiencies over the last 20 years. That’s why most Lebanese demand an independent international investigation to find out how the port explosion happened and who should be held accountable.

Similarly, many also ask that international humanitarian aid should not go to the Lebanese government, but rather to non-governmental organizations or international groups who can be trusted not to steal the money. When the minister of justice went to inspect one badly damaged area today, she was hounded out of the neighborhood with shouts of “resign!” and “revolution”!

These are signs from the Lebanese citizens of why, when they march in protests, they call for the departure of all the governing elite, not just one or two bad apples. This is similarly the case in the protests in Iraq and Algeria, where disgruntled, and dehumanized citizens, demand the removal of the entire governing elite, and its replacement with a more participatory, accountable, and rule-of-law-based system.

This is the critical issue now in Lebanon — the transition from the humanitarian catastrophe of the explosion to a political reconfiguration of the political system. Yet, Arab citizens marching in the streets largely have not been able to remove their governments by popular will in the last 30 years. So the region continues to be ruled by autocratic, authoritarian, and increasingly militarized regimes, whose policies have led to around 75% of all Arabs being poor or vulnerable.

The explosion destroyed much of Beirut. It might soon destroy the old, heartless, political system that allowed it to happen.

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

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

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Released: 07 August 2020

Word Count: 888

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There’s nothing wrong with treating American politics like a sport as long as everyone involved in the competition is playing the same sport by the same rules. There’s nothing wrong as long as both sides agree the rules are legitimate, both commit to obeying them and both accept the consequences when they break them.

But there is a problem with treating American politics like a sport when one side is playing soccer and the other is playing football while neither can agree to the rules, because one side won’t commit to obeying them. There is something wrong when one side not only refuses to accept the consequences of rule-breaking but sets out to undermine the idea of rules altogether. In that case, treating politics like a sport, as the Washington press corps habitually does, isn’t helpful. It’s harmful. Even dangerous.

The biggest problem with the upcoming election, from the point of view of Americans who want to see the incumbent gone, is something that would not normally be a problem. Indeed, it has never been a problem in our lifetimes. It has been a civic good. What I’m talking about is blind institutional faith. Most of us, even the great cynics among us, still believe the system is fundamentally sound. We believe the rules are inviolate. Little appears to be standing in the way of a 2020 Democratic landslide.

Before explaining why blind institutional faith is a problem, let me add that it feels so good to have blind faith in our institutions. All of us want to believe the only thing threatening Joe Biden’s victory is voter apathy, and many of us want to believe that voter apathy is moot after the trauma that was the 2016 election. Blind institutional faith is moreover affirmed, and that good feeling compounded, by a Washington press corps that habitually treats American politics like a sport. If all the major polls show Biden ahead of the president by double digits in critical swing states, then surely this nightmare is about to end. Good will triumph over evil, and everything will be fine.

Everything won’t be fine, though, and good might not triumph over evil if recent findings by Nils Gilman and Rosa Brooks are any indication. Together with about 70 experts — legal scholars, retired military officers, former US officials, strategists and attorneys — they oversaw a series of “war games” that “peered ahead to the Nov. 3 election, now less than 90 days away, and explored how the race between Trump and Joe Biden could turn into a post-election crisis,” wrote USA Today’s Joey Garrison. In the process, they demonstrated, I think, how blind institutional faith is problematic.

Called the Transition Integrity Project, the group gamed out, in June, a series of plausible and possible scenarios. Its findings are frightening. “In an election taking place amid a pandemic, a recession and rising political polarization, the group found a substantial risk of legal battles, a contested outcome, violent street clashes and even a constitutional impasse,” Garrison wrote. Here are the key points of group’s report:

The election won’t end on Election Day: “We face a period of contestation,” the report said. “The winner may not, and we assess likely will not, be known on ‘election night’ as officials count mail-in ballots.” “An unscrupulous candidate” — meaning Trump — will cast doubt on the election’s legitimacy and “set up an unprecedented assault on the outcome.” Everyone must be “educated to adjust expectations” starting now.

The election will be contested well into January 2021: “We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides.” The president “will very likely use the executive branch to aid his campaign strategy, including through the Department of Justice. There’s a chance the president will try convincing red-state officials “to take actions — including illegal actions — to defy the popular vote.” Of particular concern, the report said, is “how the military would respond in the context of uncertain election results.”

The transition will be highly disrupted: Instead of handing off power, “Trump would prioritize personal gain and self-protection,” the report said. He “may use pardons to thwart future criminal prosecution, arrange business deals with foreign governments that benefit him financially, attempt to bribe and silence associates, declassify sensitive documents, and attempt to divert federal funds to his own businesses.”

The report offers recommendations. They boil down to getting ready. This is not a normal president. This won’t be a normal transition. We are entering a period of historic uncertainty in which none of us can take anything for granted, not even the rules — laws, norms, institutions — that many of us place our trust in. There’s still time to re-balance expecting the worst with hoping for the best. That’s fortunate, because most of us are still expecting the best to happen while praying the worst won’t.

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: 06 August 2020

Word Count: 810

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The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases, journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death. Public interest is fueled by deep fears, often more intense during an epidemic because the whole population is at risk. In a war, aside from military occupation and area bombing, terror is at its height among those closest to the battlefield.

The nature of the dangers stemming from military violence and the outbreak of a deadly disease may appear very different. But looked at from the point of view of a government, they both pose an existential threat because failure in either crisis may provoke some version of regime change. People seldom forgive governments that get them involved in losing wars or that fail to cope adequately with a natural disaster like the coronavirus. The powers-that-be know that they must fight for their political lives, perhaps even their physical existence, claiming any success as their own and doing their best to escape blame for what has gone wrong.

My first pandemic I first experienced a pandemic in the summer of 1956 when, at the age of six, I caught polio in Cork, Ireland. The epidemic there began soon after virologist Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for it in the United States, but before it was available in Europe. Polio epidemics were at their height in the first half of the twentieth century and, in a number of respects, closely resembled the Covid-19 experience: many people caught the disease but only a minority were permanently disabled by or died of it. In contrast with Covid-19, however, it was young children, not the old, who were most at risk. The terror caused by poliomyelitis, to use its full name, was even higher than during the present epidemic exactly because it targeted the very young and its victims did not generally disappear into the cemetery but were highly visible on crutches and in wheelchairs, or prone in iron lungs.

Parents were mystified by the source of the illness because it was spread by great numbers of asymptomatic carriers who did not know they had it. The worst outbreaks were in the better-off parts of modern cities like Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Melbourne, New York, and Stockholm. People living there enjoyed a good supply of clean water and had effective sewage disposal, but did not realize that all of this robbed them of their natural immunity to the polio virus. The pattern in Cork was the same: most of the sick came from the more affluent parts of the city, while people living in the slums were largely unaffected. Everywhere, there was a frantic search to identify those, like foreign immigrants, who might be responsible for spreading the disease. In the New York epidemic of 1916, even animals were suspected of doing so and 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs were hunted down and killed.

The illness weakened my legs permanently and I have a severe limp so, even reporting in dangerous circumstances in the Middle East, I could only walk, not run. I was very conscious of my disabilities from the first, but did not think much about how I had acquired them or the epidemic itself until perhaps four decades later. It was the 1990s and I was then visiting ill-supplied hospitals in Iraq as that country’s health system was collapsing under the weight of U.N. sanctions. As a child, I had once been a patient in an almost equally grim hospital in Ireland and it occurred to me then, as I saw children in those desperate circumstances in Iraq, that I ought to know more about what had happened to me. At that time, my ignorance was remarkably complete. I did not even know the year when the polio epidemic had happened in Ireland, nor could I say if it was caused by a virus or a bacterium.

So I read up on the outbreak in newspapers of the time and Irish Health Ministry files, while interviewing surviving doctors, nurses, and patients. Kathleen O’Callaghan, a doctor at St. Finbarr’s hospital, where I had been brought from my home when first diagnosed, said that people in the city were so frightened “they would cross the road rather than walk past the walls of the fever hospital.” My father recalled that the police had to deliver food to infected homes because no one else would go near them. A Red Cross nurse, Maureen O’Sullivan, who drove an ambulance at the time, told me that, even after the epidemic was over, people would quail at the sight of her ambulance, claiming “the polio is back again” and dragging their children into their houses or they might even fall to their knees to pray.

The local authorities in a poor little city like Cork where I grew up understood better than national governments today that fear is a main feature of epidemics. They tried then to steer public opinion between panic and complacency by keeping control of the news of the outbreak. When British newspapers like the Times reported that polio was rampant in Cork, they called this typical British slander and exaggeration. But their efforts to suppress the news never worked as well as they hoped. Instead, they dented their own credibility by trying to play down what was happening. In that pre-television era, the main source of information in my hometown was the Cork Examiner, which, after the first polio infections were announced at the beginning of July 1956, accurately reported on the number of cases, but systematically underrated their seriousness.

Headlines about polio like “Panic Reaction Without Justification” and “Outbreak Not Yet Dangerous” regularly ran below the fold on its front page. Above it were the screaming ones about the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian uprising of that year. In the end, this treatment only served to spread alarm in Cork where many people were convinced that the death toll was much higher than the officially announced one and that bodies were being secretly carried out of the hospitals at night.

My father said that, in the end, a delegation of local businessmen, the owners of the biggest shops, approached the owners of the Cork Examiner, threatening to withdraw their advertising unless it stopped reporting the epidemic. I was dubious about this story, but when I checked the newspaper files many years later, I found that he was correct and the paper had almost entirely stopped reporting on the epidemic just as sick children were pouring into St. Finbarr’s hospital.

The misreporting of wars and epidemics By the time I started to research a book about the Cork polio epidemic that would be titled Broken Boy, I had been reporting wars for 25 years, starting with the Northern Irish Troubles in the 1970s, then the Lebanese civil war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the war that followed Washington’s post-9/11 takeover of Afghanistan, and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. After publication of the book, I went on covering these endless conflicts for the British paper the Independent as well as new conflicts sparked in 2011 by the Arab Spring in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

As the coronavirus pandemic began this January, I was finishing a book (just published), War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Confrontation with Iran. Almost immediately, I noticed strong parallels between the Covid-19 pandemic and the polio epidemic 64 years earlier. Pervasive fear was perhaps the common factor, though little grasped by governments of this moment. Boris Johnson’s in Great Britain, where I was living, was typical in believing that people had to be frightened into lockdown, when, in fact, so many were already terrified and needed to be reassured.

I also noticed ominous similarities between the ways in which epidemics and wars are misreported. Those in positions of responsibility — Donald Trump represents an extreme version of this — invariably claim victories and successes even as they fail and suffer defeats. The words of the Confederate general “Stonewall” Jackson came to mind. On surveying ground that had only recently been a battlefield, he asked an aide: “Did you ever think, sir, what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?”

This has certainly been true of wars, but no less so, it seemed to me, of epidemics, as President Trump was indeed soon to demonstrate (over and over and over again). At least in retrospect, disinformation campaigns in wars tend to get bad press and be the subject of much finger wagging. But think about it a moment: it stands to reason that people trying to kill each other will not hesitate to lie about each other as well. While the glib saying that “truth is the first casualty of war” has often proven a dangerous escape hatch for poor reporting or unthinking acceptance of a self-serving version of battlefield realities (spoon-fed by the powers-that-be to a credulous media), it could equally be said that truth is the first casualty of pandemics. The inevitable chaos that follows in the wake of the swift spread of a deadly disease and the desperation of those in power to avoid being held responsible for the soaring loss of life lead in the same direction.

There is, of course, nothing inevitable about the suppression of truth when it comes to wars, epidemics, or anything else for that matter. Journalists, individually and collectively, will always be engaged in a struggle with propagandists and PR men, one in which victory for either side is never inevitable.

Unfortunately, wars and epidemics are melodramatic events and melodrama militates against real understanding. “If it bleeds, it leads” is true of news priorities when it comes to an intensive care unit in Texas or a missile strike in Afghanistan. Such scenes are shocking but do not necessarily tell us much about what is actually going on.

The recent history of war reporting is not encouraging. Journalists will always have to fight propagandists working for the powers-that-be. Sadly, I have had the depressing feeling since Washington’s first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 that the propagandists are increasingly winning the news battle and that accurate journalism, actual eyewitness reporting, is in retreat.

Disappearing news By its nature, reporting wars is always going to be difficult and dangerous work, but it has become more so in these years. Coverage of Washington’s Afghan and Iraqi wars was often inadequate, but not as bad as the more recent reporting from war-torn Libya and Syria or its near total absence from the disaster that is Yemen. This lack fostered misconceptions even when it came to fundamental questions like who is actually fighting whom, for what reasons, and just who are the real prospective winners and losers.

Of course, there is little new about propaganda, controlling the news, or spreading “false facts.” Ancient Egyptian pharaohs inscribed self-glorifying and mendacious accounts of their battles on monuments, now thousands of years old, in which their defeats are lauded as heroic victories. What is new about war reporting in recent decades is the far greater sophistication and resources that governments can deploy in shaping the news. With opponents like longtime Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, demonization was never too difficult a task because he was a genuinely demonic autocrat.

Yet the most influential news story about the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S.-led counter-invasion proved to be a fake. This was a report that, in August 1990, invading Iraqi soldiers had tipped babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left them to die on the floor. A Kuwaiti girl reported to have been working as a volunteer in the hospital swore before a U.S. congressional committee that she had witnessed that very atrocity. Her story was hugely influential in mobilizing international support for the war effort of the administration of President George H.W. Bush and the U.S. allies he teamed up with.

In reality it proved purely fictional. The supposed hospital volunteer turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. Several journalists and human rights specialists expressed skepticism at the time, but their voices were drowned out by the outrage the tale provoked. It was a classic example of a successful propaganda coup: instantly newsworthy, not easy to disprove, and when it was — long after the war — it had already had the necessary impact, creating support for the U.S.-led coalition going to war with Iraq.

In a similar fashion, I reported on the American war in Afghanistan in 2001-2002 at a time when coverage in the international media had left the impression that the Taliban had been decisively defeated by the U.S. military and its Afghan allies. Television showed dramatic shots of bombs and missiles exploding on the Taliban front lines and Northern Alliance opposition forces advancing unopposed to “liberate” the Afghan capital, Kabul.

When, however, I followed the Taliban retreating south to Kandahar Province, it became clear to me that they were not by any normal definition a beaten force, that their units were simply under orders to disperse and go home. Their leaders had clearly grasped that they were over-matched and that it would be better to wait until conditions changed in their favor, something that had distinctly happened by 2006, when they went back to war in a big way. They then continued to fight in a determined fashion to the present day. By 2009, it was already dangerous to drive beyond the southernmost police station in Kabul due to the risk that Taliban patrols might create pop-up checkpoints anywhere along the road.

None of the wars I covered then have ever really ended. What has happened, however, is that they have largely ended up receding, if not disappearing, from the news agenda. I suspect that, if a successful vaccine for Covid-19 isn’t found and used globally, something of the same sort could happen with the coronavirus pandemic as well. Given the way news about it now dominates, even overwhelms, the present news agenda, this may seem unlikely, but there are precedents. In 1918, with World War I in progress, governments dealt with what came to be called the Spanish Flu by simply suppressing information about it. Spain, as a non-combatant in that war, did not censor the news of the outbreak in the same fashion and so the disease was most unfairly named “the Spanish Flu,” though it probably began in the United States.

The polio epidemic in Cork supposedly ended abruptly in mid-September 1956 when the local press stopped reporting on it, but that was at least two weeks before many children like me caught it. In a similar fashion, right now, wars in the Middle East and north Africa like the ongoing disasters in Libya and Syria that once got significant coverage now barely get a mention much of the time.

In the years to come, the same thing could happen to the coronavirus.

Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London and the author of six books on the Middle East, the latest of which is War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Confrontation with Iran (Verso). This article originated at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2019 Patrick Cockburn — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 August 2020

Word Count: 2,527

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BOSTON — The devastating explosion Tuesday that ravaged much of Beirut’s human and physical infrastructure will rightly generate massive amounts of humanitarian aid from around the world. This happens in the context of a devastated Lebanese economy and citizenry, and a widely discredited political order and government whose negligence, ineptitude, and/or corruption are widely blamed for allowing the thousands of pounds of ammonium nitrate to be stored in the port, when the dangers of this were well known and pointed out to the state several times.

Most Lebanese people will not trust their government to investigate this preventable tragedy, hold accountable all former and current officials who played a role in it, or honestly and efficiently disburse the hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction funds that will flow into the country. I propose to Lebanese officials, organizations, and citizens alike to consider using this critical moment of immense human need combined with enormous distrust of the state that they see this as an opportunity to start on the road of real reform that they all say they wish to pursue.

Real structural, political, fiscal, and administrative reforms are a pressing priority for Lebanon and most Arab governments, whose citizens suffer under similarly low-quality governance systems. Lebanon’s immediate humanitarian emergency could converge with its political and economic crises to make this a moment of innovation, opportunity, and hope for real reforms across a better Arab region.

My suggestion is that the humanitarian and reconstruction funds that flow into Lebanon should be disbursed and overseen by a newly created consortium comprising a few credible and efficient government officials, proven non-governmental organizations and humanitarian foundations, a few credible international aid agencies, and some individuals with respected professional expertise.

This is needed because the governments of the past three decades have proven to be unable or unwilling to serve the Lebanese people equitably and efficiently. A better way must be found to spend public money — and this must happen immediately in Lebanon’ precarious condition.

Lebanese NGOs, universities, professionals, and other private institutions are world-class outfits in most of what they do, and they are already drawing up plans for how to manage the state and society equitably in a future politically reformed system. The leverage of international aid can be used quickly now to speed up this process, force the state to share decision-making with the citizenry, and respond to the country’s dire humanitarian needs in a speedy and fair manner.

Such a shared decision-making system of spending and monitoring aid funds will help donors commit quickly as they become confident that their donations will not be stolen or misused. It will vastly speed up the implementation of urgently needed projects that people need to survive (unlike the state’s years of wasted time and stolen money in not addressing the garbage collection and electricity issues, for example).

It will create a model of fruitful public-private partnerships that genuinely include the views and talents of the private sector. And it will offer a signal of hope to Lebanon and many other Arab countries whose citizens urgently need real political reforms to prevent further slides into mass poverty, marginalization, and helplessness.

This proposal would also shake up a mostly dysfunctional system of international aid and international NGO involvement that offers some assistance to some people in need, but mostly allows the decrepit states to continue their failed policies and widespread corruption, while officials and their cronies amass immense private wealth without earning it.

Donors should require this kind of oversight of how their funds are spent, and if Arab governments refuse they should send aid directly to non-governmental organizations and others in society who will use it properly.

The key benefit of this idea is that it combines Arab citizens’ desires to reform their state with the international community’s often expressed but rarely implemented desire to do the same thing. If the two join hands, the state will have no option other than to go along with this, to the benefit of all concerned. Also, this mechanism would allow the voices of ordinary Arab citizens to impact their countries’ policy-making mechanisms for the first time ever — in ways that Arab parliaments have never done with any credibility.

Here is a way to check Arab state corruption, improve state efficiency, generate state-society collaborative action, expand the citizenry’s participation in decision-making, encourage more international aid and investment, and give the bludgeoned and battered Arab citizens a rare sense of hope that they can fix their dilapidated country and hold their heads high, as they know they can.

I hope that French President Macron and other leaders who are expressing their desire to assist Lebanon consider such new ideas to do what they have failed to do for the past century — promote genuine national development, prosperity, and security in Arab countries based on the consent of the governed and the will and skill of the citizenry.

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

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

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Released: 05 August 2020

Word Count: 819

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On Feb. 4, 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush was campaigning for reelection at the National Grocers Association convention in Orlando. There, the president “grabbed a quart of milk, a light bulb and a bag of candy and ran them over an electronic scanner,” wrote New York Times correspondent Andrew Rosenthal. “The look of wonder flickered across his face again as he saw the item and price registered on the cash register screen.”

“This is for checking out?” asked Mr. Bush. “I just took a tour through the exhibits here,” he told the grocers later. “Amazed by some of the technology.”

Rosenthal said this small moment was symbolic of something larger: The president, he wrote, “seems unable to escape a central problem: This career politician, who has lived the cloistered life of a top Washington bureaucrat for decades, is having trouble presenting himself to the electorate as a man in touch with middle-class life.” The Times’ frontpage headline — “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed” — was enough to set off a wave of news stories about Bush’s alleged remoteness from Americans worried about an economic recession that defined the election.

I’ll return to this. For now, I couldn’t helping thinking of this moment in campaign history after watching the current president’s Axios interview. In a long and winding exchange, Donald Trump claimed that the new coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed 160,000 Americans and infected almost 5 million — with no end in sight — is under control. “Under the circumstances right now, I think it’s under control.”

Jonathan Swan, stunned, asked: “How? One thousand Americans are dying a day.” To which the president said: “They are dying. That’s true. And it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.” To which Swan, giving Trump room to back away from it is what it is, asked: “You really think this is as much as we can control it? One thousand deaths a day?” To which Trump said — well, nothing really, except more of the same, by which I mean blaming other people for his problems.

It makes no sense whatsoever to say things are under control while at the same time blaming others for letting things get out of control. That’s not my point, though. My point is the president’s perfect absence of human emotion. One thousand deaths a day. That’s one Sept. 11, 2001, every third day. (Globally, someone dies every 15 seconds from Covid-19, according to Reuters.)

In a previous America, a previous American president encountered a supermarket check-out and expressed a bit of amazement at some newfangled technology. We were told it captured something bigger. We were told he’s out of touch. In this life, this president feels nothing in the face of death and disease. He’s not astonished. He’s not shocked. And It is what it is. Has any president been as out of touch? The headline should be: “Trump Encounters Suffering, Unamazed.”

The thing about President’s Bush’s amazement in 1992 is there was a good reason for it. The Associated Press ran a story a week after Rosenthal’s appeared in the Times, explaining that the check-out technology was novel at the time. Bush wasn’t amazed by the sight of a supermarket scanner. He was amazed that the supermarket scanner could read bar-code labels that had been “ripped and jumbled,” a true advancement.

Maybe Andrew Rosenthal just got it wrong, but I suspect something else. The press corps often wants to tell a certain kind of story, a story that will get attention, and it searches for opportunities to tell it. In his case, Rosenthal probably wanted to tell a story about a cloistered incumbent grown distant from the little people, and “the look of wonder” that flickered across Bush’s face was all the prompting he needed.

The same goes for Trump. Even now, the press corps maintains the story of a rich populist with the common touch, because maintaining it mangles political stereotypes in ways wholly satisfying to professionals wholly bored by political stereotypes. That might not be so bad if it did not also undermine previous criteria for being out of touch. Trump has never cooked his own meals, washed his own clothes, paid his own bills, or ever raised his own kids. He sure as hell never went grocery shopping. Yet Bush was out of touch and Trump isn’t, even as this president stares blankly at mass death.

I think we’re seeing less storytelling and more truth-telling. CNN’s Jim Acosta reported this morning what “a source familiar with Trump’s Tuesday Oval Office meeting with his coronavirus task force said” about the president. Trump, the source said, “is still not demonstrating that he has a firm grasp of the severity of the pandemic in the US. ‘He still doesn’t get it,’ the source said. ‘He does not get it.’”

Acosta said that even when the team “tried to stress the dire nature of the situation to the president during the meeting, the source said Trump repeatedly attempted to change the subject.” That’s what you do when you’re out of touch. That’s what you do when you’ve never been in touch. That’s what presidents do when they just don’t care.

Let’s say so.

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: 05 August 2020

Word Count: 887

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Axios released last night clips of Jonathan Swan’s interview with the president. In one of them, Donald Trump shares print-outs of charts and graphs in an apparent bid to convince Swan that the United States is doing better than other countries in the fight against the new coronavirus pandemic. I’ll link to it instead of describing it, but I will say this. The clip is an example of why our collective respect for stupidity is lethal.

Focusing only on stupidity is short-sighted, though. We must also consider incentives. Fact is, the White House is full of ambitious people eager to tell the president what he wants to hear, no matter how idiotic. The president, moreover, is desperate to believe his yes-men. Here’s how my friend Frank Wilkinson characterized this closed circuit: “They gave him big, brightly colored kindergarten charts to pretend the deaths away. His aides know he is a corrupt buffoon who is killing people. But they like working at the White House. And he’s afraid of prison. So many thousands more must die.”

A fool of a president alone isn’t the problem. A fool of a president surrounded by intelligent, craven and morally degenerate toadies who manipulate his stupidity for their own purposes — there’s the problem. But this doesn’t drill down enough, I think. If we’re going to understand how and why the pandemic has now killed nearly 160,000 Americans, infecting nearly 5 million others, blowing up the economy and pretty much ruining our and our children’s lives, we need to search further. We need to look at familiar things with fresh eyes, old structures so normal and ubiquitous as to be invisible. Here I’m talking about the Electoral College, and how this relic of our slave-owning past isn’t just an anti-majoritarian thorn in our sides. It’s an incentive to kill.

The Electoral College is the reason why individuals don’t choose presidents. States do. If individuals chose presidents, the outcome of the contest would be determined by the popular vote. It isn’t. It is determined by the most number of votes by electors, meaning officials picked by each state to represent the choice of most of voters in that state. Combined with a winner-take-all political system, this is why Connecticut’s seven electoral votes (five House members plus two senators) went to Hillary Clinton in 2016 while Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes (18 House members plus two senators) went to Trump. The Electoral College is why we talk about states in terms of red and blue. It is also why so much of our political discourse is grounded in political fictions. Fact is, there are plenty of Republican voters in Connecticut and plenty of Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, but we don’t talk about that political reality, because it mostly doesn’t matter — not when electors choose presidents, not the American people as a whole.

I doubt very much that Donald Trump comprehends any of this, not even a little, but he does understand the talking-heads on Fox who talk about states in terms of red and blue, so that, in the president’s mind, there aren’t any Republicans in Connecticut, and there aren’t any Democrats in Pennsylvania, and anyway, though he has no clue, having a clue doesn’t matter, because, again, individual Americans will not determine the outcome of presidential elections. The point here is that the president, when it came time to choose a plan to respond to the pandemic, didn’t think about the nation as a whole, because the nation as a whole did not, and cannot, decide who’s going to be president in November. To Trump, there are friends and there are enemies; there are red states and there are blue states; and if blue states were getting the worst of the pandemic in the early months, well, so what? What had they done for him lately?

We have known since the beginning that the president is a fool. We have known since the beginning that he surrounds himself with stooges. What we did not know — until Vanity Fair published Katherine Eban’s investigation into the Trump administration’s pandemic response last week — is that the White House consciously decided against a national approach (abdicating the president’s responsibility), because it thought Covid-19 was affecting Trump’s blue-state enemies only.

What we did not know, until Eban’s revealed it to us, is that stupidity combined with corruption combined with an anti-majoritarian structure created an incentive for negligent homicide. You can blame Trump for disease and mass death, and you should. You can blame corrupt aides feeding him “brightly colored kindergarten charts to pretend the deaths away,” and you should.

But the blame can’t end there. Blame the Electoral College, too.

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: 04 August 2020

Word Count: 777

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American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has emerged as a potential source of transmission both domestically and abroad.”

Indeed, the military is sick and I think of it as both a personal and an imperial disaster.

As the wife of a naval officer, I bear witness to the unexpected ways that disasters of all sorts play out among military families and lately I’ve been bracing for the Covid-19 version of just such a disaster. Normally, for my husband and me, the stressors are relatively mild. After all, between us we have well-paid jobs, two healthy children, and supportive family and friends, all of which allow us to weather the difficulties of military life fairly smoothly. In our 10 years together, however, over two submarine assignments and five moves, we’ve dealt with unpredictable months-long deployments, uncertainty about when I will next be left to care for our children alone, and periods of 16-hour workdays for my spouse that strained us both, not to speak of his surviving a major submarine accident.

You would think that, as my husband enters his third year of “shore duty” as a Pentagon staffer, the immediate dangers of military service would finally be negligible. No such luck. Since around mid-June, as President Trump searched for scapegoats like the World Health Organization for his own Covid-19 ineptitude and his concern over what rising infection rates could mean for his approval ratings, he decided that it was time to push this country to “reopen.”

As it turned out, that wouldn’t just be a disaster for states from Florida to California, but also meant that the Pentagon resumed operations at about 80% capacity. So, after a brief reprieve, my spouse is now required to report to his office four days a week for eight-hour workdays in a poorly ventilated, crowded hive of cubicles where people neither consistently mask nor social distance.

All of this for what often adds up to an hour or two of substantive daily work. Restaurants, dry cleaners, and other services where Pentagon staffers circulate only add to the possibility of his being exposed to Covid-19.

My husband, in other words, is now unnecessarily risking his own and his family’s exposure to a virus that has to date claimed more than 150,000 American lives — already more than eight times higher than the number of Americans who died in both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed.

In mid-August, he will transfer to an office job in Maryland, a state where cases and deaths are again on the rise. One evening, I asked him why it seemed to be business as usual at the Pentagon when numbers were spiking in a majority of states. His reply: “Don’t ask questions about facts and logic.”

After all, unless Secretary of Defense Mark Esper decides to speak out against the way President Trump has worked to reopen the country to further disaster, the movement of troops and personnel like my husband within and among duty stations will simply continue, even as Covid-19 numbers soar in the military.

America’s archipelago of bases Global freedom of movement has been a hallmark of America’s vast empire of bases, at least 800 of them scattered across much of the planet. Now, it may prove part of the downfall of that very imperial structure. After all, Donald Trump’s America is at the heart of the present pandemic. So it’s hardly surprising that, according to the Times, U.S. troops seem to be carrying Covid-19 infections with them from hard-hit states like Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas, a number of which have had lax and inconsistently enforced safety guidelines, to other countries where they are stationed.

For example, at just one U.S. base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Marine Corps reported nearly 100 cases in July, angering local officials because American soldiers had socialized off-base and gone to local bars in a place where the coronavirus had initially been suppressed. No longer. In Nigeria, where official case counts are low but healthcare workers in large cities are reporting a spike in deaths among residents with symptoms, the U.S. military arms, supplies, and trains the national security forces. So a spike in cases among U.S. troops now places local populations (as well as those soldiers) at additional risk in a country where testing and contact tracing are severely lacking. And this is a problem now for just about any U.S. ally from Europe to South Korea.

What this virus’s spread among troops means, of course, is that the U.S. empire of bases that spans some 80 countries — about 40% of the nations on this planet — is now part of the growing American Covid-19 disaster. There is increasing reason to believe that new outbreaks of what the president likes to call the “Chinese virus” in some of these countries may actually prove to be American imports. Like many American civilians, our military personnel are traveling, going to work, socializing, buying things, often unmasked and ungloved, and anything but social distanced.

Public health experts have been clear that the criteria for safely reopening the economy without sparking yet more outbreaks are numerous. They include weeks of lower case counts, positive test rates at or beneath four new cases per 100,000 people daily, adequate testing capacity, enforcing strict social-distancing guidelines, and the availability of at least 40% of hospital ICU beds to treat any possible future surge.

To date, only three states have met these criteria: Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. The White House’s Opening Up America plan, on the other hand, includes guidelines of just the weakest and vaguest sort like noting a downward trajectory in cases over 14-day periods and “robust testing capacity” for healthcare workers (without any definition of what this might actually mean).

Following White House guidance, the Department of Defense is deferring to local and state governments to determine what, if any, safety measures to take. As the White House then suggested, in March when a military-wide lockdown began, troops needed to quarantine for 14 days before moving to their next duty station. At the close of June, the Pentagon broadly removed travel restrictions, allowing both inter-state recreational and military travel by troops and their families. Now, in a country that lacks any disciplined and unified response to the global pandemic, our ever-mobile military has become a significant conduit of its spread, both domestically and abroad.

To be sure, none of us knew how to tackle the dangers posed by this virus. The last global pandemic of this sort, the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1919 in which 50 million or more people died worldwide, suggested just how dire the consequences of such an outbreak could be when uncontained. But facts and lived experience are two different things. If you’re young, physically fit, have survived numerous viruses of a more known and treatable sort, and most of the people around you are out and about, you probably dismiss it as just another illness, even if you’re subject to some of the Covid-19 death risk factors that are indeed endemic among U.S. military personnel.

Perhaps what the spread of this pandemic among our troops shows is that the military-civilian divide isn’t as great as we often think.

Protecting life in the Covid-19 era Full disclosure: I write this at a time when I’m frustrated and tired. For the past month, I’ve provided full-time child care for our two pre-school age kids, even while working up to 50 hours a week, largely on evenings and weekends, as a psychotherapist for local adults and children themselves acutely experiencing the fears, health dangers, and economic effects of the coronavirus. Like many other moms across the country, I cram work, chores, pre-K Zoom sessions, pediatrician and dentist appointments, and grocery shopping into endless days, while taking as many security precautions as I can. My husband reminds me of the need to abide by quarantines, as (despite his working conditions) he needs to be protected from exposing top Pentagon officials to the disease.

Yet the military has done little or nothing to deal with the ways the families of service members, asked to work and “rotate,” might be exposed to infection. In the dizziness of fatigue, I have little patience for any institution that carries on with business as usual under such circumstances.

What’s more, it’s hard to imagine how any efforts to quarantine will bear fruit in a country where even those Americans who do follow scientific news about Covid-19 have often dropped precautions against its spread. I’ve noted that, these days, some of my most progressive friends have started to socialize, eat indoors at restaurants, and even travel out of state to more deeply affected places by plane. They are engaging in what we therapists sometimes call “emotion-based reasoning,” or “I’m tired of safety precautions, so they must no longer be necessary.”

And that’s not even taking into account the no-maskers among us who flaunt the safety guidelines offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to indicate their supposed love of individual liberties. A relative, an officer with the Department of Homeland Security, recently posted a picture on Facebook of his three young children and those of a workmate watching fireworks arm in arm at an unmasked July 4th gathering. The picture was clearly staged to provoke those like me who support social-distancing and masking guidelines. When I talk with him, he quickly changes the subject to how he could, at any moment, be deployed to “control the rioters in D.C. and other local cities.” In other words, in his mind like those of so many others the president relies on as his “base,” the real threat isn’t the pandemic, it’s the people in the streets protesting police violence.

I wonder how the optics of American families celebrating together could have superseded safety based on an understanding of how diseases spread, as well as a healthy respect for the unknowns that go with them.

Sometimes, our misplaced priorities take my breath away, quite literally so recently. Craving takeout from my favorite Peruvian chicken restaurant and wanting to support a struggling local business, I ordered such a meal and drove with my kids to pick it up. Stopping at the restaurant, I noted multiple unmasked people packed inside despite a sign on the door mandating masks and social distancing. Making a quick risk-benefit assessment, I opened the car windows, blasted the air conditioning, and ran into the restaurant without my kids, making faces at them through the window while I stood in line.

A voice suddenly cut through the hum of the rotisseries: “Shameful! Shameful!” A woman, unmasked, literally spat these words, pointing right at me. “Leaving your kids in the car! Someone could take them! Shameful!” I caught my breath. Riddled with guilt and fearful of what she might do, I returned to my car without my food. She followed me, yelling, “Shameful!”

Aside from the spittle flying from this woman’s mouth, notable was what she wasn’t ashamed of: entering such a place, unmasked and ready to spit, with other people’s children also in there running about. (Not to mention that in Maryland reported abductions of children by strangers are nil.)

What has this country come to when we are more likely to blame the usual culprits — negligent mothers, brown and Black people, illegal immigrants (you know the list) — than accept responsibility for what’s actually going on and make the necessary sacrifices to deal with it (perhaps including, I should admit, going without takeout food)?

Typically in these years, top Pentagon officials and the high command are prioritizing the maintenance of empire at the expense of protecting the very bodies that make up the armed services (not to speak of those inhabitants of other countries living near our hundreds of global garrisons). After all, what’s the problem, when nothing could be more important than keeping this country in the (increasingly embattled) position of global overseer? More bodies can always be produced. (Thank you, military spouses!)

The spread of this virus around the globe, now aided in part by the U.S. military, reminds me of one of those paint-with-water children’s books where the shading appears gradually as the brush moves over the page, including in places you didn’t expect. Everywhere that infected Americans socialize, shop, arm, and fight, this virus is popping up, eroding both our literal ability to be present and the institutions (however corrupt) we’re still trying to prop up. If we are truly in a “war” against Covid-19 — President Trump has, of course, referred to himself as a “wartime president” — then it’s time for all of us to make the sacrifices of a wartime nation by prioritizing public health over pleasure. Otherwise, I fear that what’s good about life in this country will also be at risk, as will the futures of my own children.

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: 04 August 2020

Word Count: 2,194

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I’m not sure what kind of game Steven Mnuchin is playing, but it’s pretty clear that it’s a game. Gross domestic product fell by nearly 10 percent in the second quarter, as all of us were forced to cut back on account of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The drop, according to the New York Times, was the equivalent of a 32.5 percent annual rate of decline, “the most devastating three-month collapse on record,” which wiped out five years of growth. All of this would have been worse without government stimulus.

If the president and the US Congress don’t want to see a depression that dwarfs the “Great” one that struck over 90 years ago, here’s what they must do next, according to economists interviewed recently by Businessweek: “a new round of direct payments, especially for those with low income; some extension of extra unemployment benefits; and a sizable chunk of aid to state and local governments,” which was missing from the last round of legislation. (The CARES Act appropriated some $150 billion for municipalities and states to fight Covid-19, but not to replace lost revenues.)

Yet here’s Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the United States Treasury, appearing on ABC’s “This Week” sounding as if the future of his boss, Donald Trump, is less certain than the future of the Republican Party — as if the president’s reelection were already lost and the time had come to re-lay ideological grounds anticipating a President Joe Biden. “There’s obviously a need to support workers and support the economy,” Mnuchin said. “On the other hand, we have to be careful about not piling on enormous amount of debts for future generations. … In certain cases where we’re paying people more to stay home than to work, that’s created issues in the entire economy.”

His remarks set off familiar ideological flare-ups. Mnuchin is the son of a Goldman Sachs banker, a millionaire hundreds of times over. For a man of the idle rich to suggest it’s bad for people to get a buck more than they’d normally earn, even as they stand in line at food kitchens, is a slap in the face. But while ideological flare-ups are today getting the attention, something important is getting lost. Mnuchin is making this out to be a conventional inter-party fight between the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s not, though. It’s really an intra-party fight. And Trump is losing.

Think about it. If you were a president who let a pandemic get out of control, because you thought it would hurt enemies more than friends, you’d want your team, in this case the Senate Republicans, to dump as much cash as possible onto the economy in the hope that saving it would bring victory. Knowing that’s your best shot (aside from cheating in various and sundry ways), you tell your team to stop bickering and vote for the Heroes Act, the $3.5 trillion aid package already passed by the House. But while your team was on board last time, pushing $2.2 trillion into the economy, almost certainly preventing a drop in GDP from being worse than nearly 10 percent, this time is different. This time, your team is worried about debt. It’s worried about people being “overpaid.” It’s worried about things getting in the way of your being reelected.

Something happened between last time and this time. That something is obvious: poll after poll showing the incumbent behind the challenger by double digits in swing states (or ahead of the challenger within the margin of error in normally safe states). The Republicans, especially in the Senate, seem to be losing faith in this president and now are looking toward a day when they will need to stand on conservative ideology to oppose a Democratic agenda. The president, meanwhile, can’t see what’s happening, not even when his own Cabinet member goes on TV and uses the same talking points cosplay fiscal hawks use to justify why they won’t support any measure to fatten the economy. (Maybe the president didn’t notice, because he was golfing!) Trump can’t quite see he’s being snookered into believing the House Democrats are threatening his reelection by holding things up. They are not. The Republicans are.

When the president suggested postponing the election last week, it was widely interpreted as a sign of weakness, especially after the Senate Republicans said no can do. The so-called reawakening of fiscal hawks is a more potent sign of Trump’s impotence, though. You can’t use ideology to justify postponing an election, but you can to position yourself in case he loses to Biden while also defending yourself against GOP interest groups who would scream if they knew you had lost faith. Either way, the Republicans win the game, which is likely the same one Steven Mnuchin is playing.

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: 03 August 2020

Word Count: 798

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