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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 May 2020

Word Count: 2,455

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As I said Monday, the new coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to change the minds of dedicated abortion partisans. Those for it are still going to be for it. Those against it are still going to be against it. That “the most pro-life president ever” is wishing away a disease that has killed more than 83,500 Americans isn’t going to change things.

It should, obviously. Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, is being called “this generation’s polio.” It’s deadly, and even survivors are debilitated for years. The biggest question is what it does to child development. Meanwhile, the disease is spreading into the red-state heartland, where Republican governments are ill-prepared or refusing to prepare out of deference to Donald Trump. The University of Washington’s model, used by the White House, revised its estimate to 147,000 deaths by August.

Reality won’t change things, of course, because “pro-life” never really meant “pro-life.” It was and will be a magical incantation declaimed by celebrants of the politics of the occult. They do not intend to make sense, refuse to make sense when asked to, and are hostile toward anyone trying to make sense of something that makes no sense. The politics of the occult only makes sense to its celebrants who understand perfectly well its true political objectives. “Pro-life” means what they say it means same as life begins when they say it begins. If you can’t figure all that out, that’s your problem.

Because the politics of the occult is occult (veiled, hidden, secret, impervious to any and all critical inquiry), it is not practiced in good faith. It can’t be. If it were, it wouldn’t be occult. It would, therefore, be useless. Writer Julia Ioffe said recently in all seriousness: “I still can’t get my head around the pivot from ‘every life matters, even that of the unborn’ or ‘some people are going to die.’” She can’t get her head around the pivot, because there is none. A pivot would make sense. The occult never does.

The most we can hope for (the most I can hope for, I guess) is that the pandemic gets Americans on the sidelines of the abortion debate to recognize the occult nature of “pro-life” and therefore doubt its meaning. More specifically, getting them to see that “right to life” applies to the unborn, but not the already born, and that Republican champions of “the sanctity of life” are actually profaning said sanctity by insisting people get back to work, and thus endanger their own lives, for the economy’s sake.

The very best we can hope for (the very best I can hope for, I guess) is that fence-sitters see who the actual champions of life are. They are not they who say they are.

The real champions of life are states and cities (mostly blue, though not all) that invest in maintaining and expanding a civilized way of life. Life’s enemies are the states (though not cities) as apathetic to human flourishing as they are to human suffering. It’s no surprise that most who are standing against life are the same most who are standing for barbarism.

I use “barbarism” pointedly.

It’s usually the preserve of people like Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon advisor who wrote The Death of the West (2001), which was a veritable blueprint for the resurgence of American fascism. Buchanan and his confederates believe Western civilization faces annihilation due to white people having fewer babies and brown people having more. He literally thinks the US will no longer be a western country once white Americans are a minority at some point in this century. He and anyone extolling virtues of “western civilization” believe they are keeping watch against invading barbarians.

As is often the case in Republican politics, the accusers are the guilty party. As The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson wrote on Tuesday: “The real difference between blue states and red, if I may borrow a term from the anti-choice movement, is that the blue states are pro-life while the red states are largely indifferent to same.” Florida’s government, for instance, starved itself of funding so much that less than a quarter of nearly 2 million out-of-work Floridians are receiving unemployment benefits. Texas, Meyerson wrote, claims to be well-managed and low cost, but “the state’s supposed fiscal rectitude has created the highest rate of medical uninsurance in the nation.”

To Buchanan, the barbarians are a nation within a nation — immigrants numbering in the millions — who are reproducing their way toward “white genocide.” That, of course, is upside down. The real nation within a nation is one entirely imagined by white Americans fearing “white genocide” so much they abandoned previous commitments to democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, instituted policies enfeebling working (brown) people, advanced laws invoking eminent domain over a woman’s property, i.e., her own body, and now stand idly by while plague ravages the landscape.

The Nazis believed they stood for the best of Western civilization. In seeking purity, they founded barbarism, the politics of the occult, and mass death. We are not there yet, but that’s where we are headed. All we need is more people expressing more doubt.

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: 13 May 2020

Word Count: 862

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When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are hearing three stories. There’s one about human health, one about politics and one about economics. There’s a fourth, however. It’s thus far untold, though it’s arguably the largest for linking the other three. That story is about public trust, especially its new, massive and growing deficit.

As I mentioned last week, businesses can reopen, but they can’t force consumers to resume their previous spending habits. Restaurants, bars, theaters, churches, sporting venues, any public space with a capacity to hold more than five people — none were designed for “social distancing.” In the absence of a vaccine, or the new coronavirus mutating its way into oblivion, all are liabilities. Expecting consumers to trust after witnessing more than 82,000 Americans die is a rough exercise in magical thinking.

Moreover, businesses, especially the giants, are lobbying lawmakers to shield them from future lawsuits seeking damages for getting sick and/or dying. How on earth can businesses expect consumers to trust them when businesses won’t trust themselves? They want the freedom to turn a profit, but none of the social responsibility? The US economy isn’t the only thing in rapid retreat. So is the public’s willingness to trust.

A recent Edelman survey showed for the first time in 20 years less trust in CEOs than in government. According to Business Insider, most of the 13,000 respondents in nearly a dozen countries “said they believe business is not putting people before profits, not implementing enough safety measures to protect employees, and not helping small business suppliers and customers by extending credit or payment terms.”

Richard Edelman said recently the pandemic may inspire a reconsideration of the role of government, specifically its regulation of private enterprise. He said that publicly traded companies should act in the best interest of stakeholders, not stockholders. If they do not show greater concern and care for the broader public interest, “if it’s bad performance by business, just short-term profits, I believe there will be much more government involvement, if not control, over key parts of the economy,” he said.

Trust in government is on the rise — with a huge exception. A new CNN poll shows only 36 percent of Americans trust the president’s statements regarding the new coronavirus pandemic. His job approval, meanwhile, is 45 percent. As John Berman pointed out, that means some of Donald Trump’s own supporters don’t think he’s a trustworthy source of information. (Even fewer trust what they watch on Fox News.)

A poll showing some people support the president despite distrusting him is new, but that cognitive dissonance has probably always been present in the populace. Trump has been unpopular, and therefore weak, since the morning he delivered an inaugural speech written not for US citizens but for “real Americans” living in a confederate and wholly imagined nation within a nation. His legitimacy has always been in doubt. It took an emergency to show that the doubters include more than his dedicated critics.

Some will say the reason is his administration’s bungling of the federal response to the plague, but that doesn’t seem right. Americans are willing to trust a president even if he fails, as long as he demonstrates he’s trying in good faith. Trump isn’t, though. He’s not bothering even to pretend he’s trying. He’s walking away from the crisis, refusing to acknowledge its existence, acting like everything’s OK. The president has always been weak, but what’s new may be the public’s increasing intolerance for that weakness.

Why, though? As I said, the link between competence and job approval is overblown. The actual link, I think, is the one between public trust and courage. A president who demonstrates courage — looking for answers, asking for patience, willing to be held accountable for failure — is a president who can inspire broad public trust. The current president, however, cuts and runs, as they like to say on Fox News. (He literally walked away yesterday in the face of hard questioning by women reporters.) A president who demonstrates cowardice like that is a president who inspires broad public distrust.

That’s bad for him. That’s bad for everyone. If the public can’t trust businesses that refuse to trust themselves, to whom should businesses turn to get the economy going again? In the last major crisis, they turned to a new president who had just won with a huge majority of the US electorate. The work was hard. Barack Obama made mistakes. In the end, however, he led the country through the worst recession in eight decades.

This time, they have the cowardly anti-Obama.

And the crisis is worse.

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: 12 May 2020

Word Count: 767

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Roger. Two Kiowas. Ten minutes.”

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

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

My soldiers erupted in cheers and I felt smug.

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

“Ox, how was the rest?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t forget.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 Erik Edstrom — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 May 2020

Word Count: 3,314

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As of this writing, more than 80,600 Americans have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new strain of the coronavirus. Twelve thousand of that total died in the last seven days alone. The rate of death has increased from less than 2,000 a day now to more than 2,500 a day. We are likely going to see about 100,000 deaths by week’s end.

The more governments push people back to work, the more people are exposed to disease, sending the daily death toll higher. While all leaders must find a way to balance public safety and economic order, Donald Trump and his confederates aren’t bothering to search. GOP governors in states like Georgia have not only dismissed his “reopening” guidelines; they have inspired his administration to abandon them.

Republican governors know sending Americans back to work is almost certainly going to worsen the pandemic in the absence of a viable vaccine. They are moving forward anyway. In doing so, they are in essence telling their constituents that government isn’t going to nanny you. The state isn’t going to second-guess you. They are saying that private decisions of life and death are not the government’s to make. They are yours.

This of course flies in the face of the Republican Party’s monolithic opposition to abortion. If private decisions of life and death are yours to make, not the government’s, why are Republican-controlled states doing everything they can to outlaw abortion so that a private decision of life and death is the government’s to make, not yours?

Moreover, if “the unborn” have a “right to life,” why don’t the already born have that same and equal right? If a fetus isn’t a cluster of cells but a person constitutionally protected under the 14th Amendment — if abortion is a civil rights issue, as anti-abortionist claim — isn’t the onus on the government to protect that right? Isn’t “reopening” economies, and sending some to their doom, a violation of that right?

It’s tempting to quip that the pandemic has turned the Republicans into a pro-choice party (life and death decisions are yours and yours alone). That’s clearly false, though. Truer, I think, is the pandemic has revealed something about the GOP’s stance on abortion. It doesn’t make sense, because it’s not supposed to make sense unless you’re in on a game whose real goal has nothing to do with the rights of “the unborn.” The point is controlling women — or punishing them for experiencing “illegitimate” sex.

This isn’t news, obviously, and it shouldn’t take a pandemic to reveal the moral and legal absurdities of the “pro-life” movement. Think about it. If a fetus is a person, as the anti-abortionists claim, what are they really saying? They are really saying that the government can and should force one person (the mother) to give another person (“the unborn”) access to her body with or without her consent. Flip this around and you have an argument nearly refusing to recognize the moral profanity and legal crime of rape.

But the absurdity doesn’t end there. If there’s a such a thing as a “right to life,” and if a fetus is a person with a constitutional right to access the body of another person for the purpose of living, why not the already born? For instance, if I need a new kidney to avoid dying, and you have one to spare, can I call on the government to force you to surrender one ? A reasonable person would say hell no, but the “pro-life” movement might accept such absurdity if accepting it led to the goal of controlling women and what they choose to do with their bodies, especially their individual freedom to say no.

I hope it’s clear I’m not defending murder (which is one of the moral knots pro-choice people must untie once they concede that a fetus is a person). I am, however, defending abortion as it stands for the benefit of people indifferent to it. The pandemic isn’t going to move partisans, but it might show people on the fence that the argument isn’t about the child so much as the mother’s body, and the argument says less about the rights of “the unborn” than it does the rights of the already born, which include men.

The “pro-life” movement asks us to take seriously a certain set of moral premises, which the movement itself doesn’t take seriously. If it did, Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas would not rush to “reopen” his state knowing with a certainty that doing so will increase the likelihood and daily rate of death, not only violating the right to life but falsely suggesting he now believes a women’s body is hers to control.

Since the “pro-life” movement doesn’t take its own premises seriously, all it’s doing is practicing the politics of the occult — it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t intend to make sense, is hostile toward sense-making, and, to the degree that it does make sense, makes sense only to people already in on the movement’s true political objective.

The pandemic isn’t going to change the minds of “pro-life” partisans.

But at least it can reveal their politics of the occult.

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: 11 May 2020

Word Count: 864

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Do you hear that silence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 Belle Chesler — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 May 2020

Word Count: 2,316

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On Monday, I talked about the GOP’s anti-American animus. For the Republicans, treason is always an option, because their greatest loyalty isn’t to the United States but to a nation within a nation, an “imagined community” in which the idea of equality is offensive to the “real Americans” chosen by God to rule a country given by God.

On Tuesday, I talked about the president’s belief in his “genetic superiority.” That constitutes a worldview in which Donald Trump is infallible by dint of being born with “morally good” genes. It’s in keeping with eugenics, fascism, white supremacy or “any political thought privileging the in-group for reasons made out of whole cloth, any rightwing movement rationalizing the out-group’s pain, suffering and even murder.”

Today, I want to connect these, starting with a reminder — that an enemy nation violated our sovereignty by kneecapping the Democratic candidate, thus aiding and abetting the president’s 2016 victory. A bipartisan Senate panel affirmed last month the truth of it, and in doing so, affirmed once and for all Donald Trump’s illegitimacy.

Therefore, an illegitimate president has installed hundreds of jurists, including two justices to the US Supreme Court, who will shape US law for a generation and more.

Therefore, an illegitimate president betrayed his own country by seeking foreign interference in the next election before getting away with it with the help of a Republican Party more loyal to a confederate nation within a nation than to the US.

Therefore, an illegitimate president now stands idly by while a deadly new coronavirus ravages the US population, killing more than 76,600 Americans so far — 2,500 in the last 24 hours alone — and sending the real unemployment rate upwards of 20 percent.

We need to understand, in other words, that the president of the United States is not a true president in any fully republican sense as much as he is a figurehead unworthy of respect except to a nation within a nation advancing an insurrection begun 40 years ago that does not seek political independence from the whole so much as domination of it.

As has been the case since the Civil War, when confederates talk about freedom, they mean their freedom. When they talk about rights, they mean their rights. When they talk about patriotism, they mean their love of a wholly imagined community, not the US. Your patriotism is not equal, because God’s chosen do not have equals. In speaking of their “American values,” confederates always speak in a zero-sum terms. In order for them to win, you must lose; for them to prosper, you must labor for pennies; for them to rule, you must submit.

The president and his confederates say the country can’t stop functioning in the face of a plague, and they are making economic arguments toward that end. But make no mistake. This isn’t an economic debate. It’s a political act. They are not fighting an “invisible enemy.” They are appeasing it. The enemy of their enemy is their friend.

The large majority of the pandemic’s victims are Americans of color residing in large cities or coastal blue states. As the plague creeps across the country, the confederates are right in surmising that its future victims will be akin even if they live in red states. They know “reopening” states will kill more people of color than white people, and they are moving along. The right to life does not apply to the body politic. The right to life applies only to the very few — the privileged few endowed by God to punish the deviant. Such was the natural order envisioned and enforced by slave regimes of yore.

Murder isn’t the goal, of course, because where would they be without cheap labor? Instead, the goal is domination. In choosing to jam Americans of all races and creeds between the need to earn a living and the need to remain healthy, the confederates are discovering a new and improved form of social control, a means of violating and suppressing individual liberty without appearing to do so. The choice in November is less between two men than between two worlds, one of servitude or one of freedom.

Mitch McConnell has said the decision of greatest consequence in his long career was the decision to nullify Barack Obama’s right to nominate a Supreme Court justice. Of equal consequence, but probably more, was his decision to look the other way while Russians attacked our sovereignty and violated the right of the American people to consent to Donald Trump’s rule. It was an easy choice for the Senate majority leader. His greatest loyalty, after all, isn’t to the US. For him, treason was always an option.

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: 08 May 2020

Word Count: 780

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Two and a half thousand people died Wednesday from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, between the time I published yesterday’s edition of the Editorial Board and right now as I’m typing these words. The total number of dead, as of this writing, is over 74,500. The frequency of death is increasing, and there’s no end in sight. By next week, we will reach 100,000, and, thereafter, a 9/11 every single day.

The president meanwhile appears to believe he can pay attention to other things — anything, really, it doesn’t matter what, but a bogeyman is most likely — and with his attention will go the attention of the press corps and the rest of the country. Donald Trump appears to believe that once the country is “reopened,” the economy will “snap back” to where it was when spending was strong and markets bullish. He does not appear to understand the role of public trust — or the immense damage done to it — in restoring the people’s health and sparking any semblance of economic recovery.

Indeed, the president and the Republicans in the Congress seem ready to move on to shielding businesses and corporations against future lawsuits seeking damages related to death or injury by Covid-19. Trump and his party seem to have no awareness that passing such legislation would send an unambiguous message to an electorate already in shock — that it can’t trust business owners to have consumer interests in mind. After all, if businesses cannot trust themselves not to kill you, why should you?

During a press briefing yesterday, the president said the coronavirus pandemic is worse than the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center. His goal was hyping how bad it’s been to hype how good it’s been to have him as our leader. But the real outcome was an invitation to compare him to Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush, and the immediate outcome of that was: Can you imagine either president telling us to overlook mass death and suffering, and go back to business as usual?

It’s impossible. Regardless of what you think of either man, Roosevelt and Bush understood the dynamic relationship between public trust and courageous leadership. It takes courage to be any kind of leader; to face a country’s problem; to search for solutions and endure failure; and to ask for trust and risk accountability. Importantly, Roosevelt and Bush understood a nation trusts a leader demonstrating courage. More importantly, they understood a nation distrusts a leader demonstrating cowardice.

I think Amanda Marcotte was right when she said Trump is bored with the pandemic “and, now that things are getting really hard, he’s ready to abandon it and move on. That’s exactly what he did during his entire career in the real estate business — and in his marriages — abandoning one failed venture after another the second things turned rocky. Now he’s doing it to the entire country.” But liberals should take that further.

Why does a man abandon things “the second things turned rocky”? It could be he’s selfish. It could be he’s greedy. It could be he has the focus of a gnat. But at the root of these is fear — fear of being left out, fear of missing out, fear of not being recognized for being better than everyone else. We all have fears, of course, but most of us screw up our courage to face them. We must. That’s never been the case for Donald Trump.

Liberals usually do not make a big deal of fear, because liberals are empathetic. They do not, as conservatives are wont to do, ridicule someone for being afraid, especially men who are not supposed to feel fear and should “man up.” But empathy can go too far. One limit should be when presidents include children and seniors among the “warriors” prepared to die for glory and honor. We have reached a point where it’s not only appropriate to call out cowardice; it’s appropriate to express contempt for it.

Some time ago, Mike Wallace was asked a hypothetical. If he knew beforehand that the Vietcong were about to ambush US troops in Vietnam, would he alert them? The late “60 Minutes” correspondent answered with a definitive no. He’s a reporter, he said, and reporters remain neutral, even if that means his countrymen are slaughtered.

Wallace was sitting on an ethics panel with other esteemed figures, including George M. Connell, “a Marine colonel in full uniform.” According to James Fallows’ classic description, the panel’s moderator asked Connell to respond to Wallace. “Jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell said, ‘I feel utter contempt.’”

We are not living in a hypothetical. By all accounts, the president knew beforehand the coronavirus would ambush us. He did not act, blocked others from acting, and kept former administration officials from telling on him. He knew it was coming and failed to warn us not out of principle — however misguided Wallace’s might’ve been — but out of plain ordinary cowardice. Like Col. George Connell, Americans should show contempt.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 842

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 Ann Jones — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 May 2020

Word Count: 3,149

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On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush gave a triumphant speech atop an aircraft carrier in which he celebrated “the end of major combat operations in Iraq” and the toppling of its dictator, Saddam Hussein. Though the president conceded there was much work to be done, in the background blazed a huge banner sending a quite contrary message:

“Mission accomplished.”

That was a lie. Even as television audiences were told American troops would be hailed as liberators, administration officials knew, or at least suspected, that there were months ahead, perhaps years, in which the US might be bogged down in a bloody sectarian civil war even as it spent trillions rebuilding a sovereign nation it destroyed.

Specifically, “mission accomplished” was one half of a bigger lie. The other half was telling Americans that the US must invade a country that did us no harm on Sept. 11, 2001, even if we could not prove definitively that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” Why wait for a smoking gun when a smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud? Thus was the beginning of the end of the United States as global champion of peace, prosperity, law and order. The beacon of hope in a dark world was blowing out.

The American public would not catch up to administration suspicions until well after the 2004 election, by which point Bush had established himself as a war president and by which point his campaign had slandered a war hero into electoral oblivion. This is perhaps the most insidious facet of the Bush administration’s dishonesty. It lied until it could not lie anymore. By that point, tens of thousands were dead, maimed and wounded, the world order was in deep rot, but at least a Republican was president.

Donald Trump is, as I’ve often said, a lying, thieving, philandering sadist. But even he must put some effort into eclipsing George W. Bush’s record. The current president is a golf ball-sized hail storm of lies, but his lies have not yet yielded a body count equal to the years-long US occupation of Iraq, which is estimated to be 185,000 to 208,000. The current president, however, is on track, and instead of Iraqis, they’re Americans.

Two thousand people died in this country yesterday from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, bringing the tally of dead, as of this writing, to more than 72,000. Two thousand people are probably going to die today. Two thousand people are probably going to die tomorrow. More than 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

By June, death by Covid-19 may reach 3,000 every day. All things being equal, half a million Americans may be dead by Election Day. By then, the president will have smashed George W. Bush’s body-count record, and then some.

Trump is now pretending the worst of the pandemic is over. As a “war president,” he’s celebrating the defeat of the “invisible enemy.” The White House task force charged with coordinating a nationwide response will pivot to “reopening” the economy as well as finding a new coronavirus vaccine. From now until November, the president will likely spend his time hyping how much his administration has done for the American people. He will, in other words, follow a predecessor’s playbook — lie until he can’t lie anymore. But by that time, all the lies won’t matter, and neither will the legion of dead.

Bush and Trump are different in an important way. While Bush put a higher value on American life than he did Iraqi life (3,000 dead Americans in one day, it could be argued, are worth 185,000 dead Iraqis over years), Trump doesn’t value any lives.

The president knows the pandemic will kill more of us, and he knows it will kill more of us as a result of the White House rushing to “reopen” the economy for the sake of political expedience. In telling us he knows, the president is telling us life is cheap.

Trump told ABC News last night: “There’ll be more death, that the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal.”

“I always felt 60, 65, 70, (thousand) as horrible as that is,” the president told anchor David Muir. “I mean, you’re talking about filling up Yankee Stadium with death! So I thought it was horrible. But it’s probably going to be somewhat higher than that.”

We promised ourselves we’d never forget the 3,000 victims of 9/11. We erected huge memorials to honor their names. We altered world history avenging their deaths. What are we going to do when the pandemic is over. Conveniently forget — or remember?

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 May 2020

Word Count: 799

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