Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“In silk and satin
was the flea now made up;
he had ribbons on his clothing,
and he had also a cross there,
and had soon become a minister
and had a large star.
Then his siblings became
great lords and ladies of the
court as well.”
—
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Song of the Flea”
—
Translated by Emily Ernst
This wasn’t
supposed to happen. Not during my lifetime, anyway. After all, it hadn’t
happened for 102 years — not since the last true viral pandemic, the so-called
“Spanish” flu of 1918-1919, ravaged the world. There’ve been a few viral crises
since, notably polio in the 1930’s, when swimming pools were closed to stop the
spread of the virus, but nothing like this in my living memory or that of just
about anyone alive today.
Not that we
weren’t warned. For the last 50 years epidemiologists and virologists have been
screaming their little heads off about one virus or another that was supposed
to cause a pandemic and kill millions of people worldwide. Remember
Legionnaire’s Disease? Swine flu? Swine fever? SARS? MERS? Ebola? Zika? None of these materialized as pandemics. Even AIDS, as
devastating as it was to the Gay male community and the other so-called “risk
groups,” never became a general threat in the developed world, either because
the virus was so weakly transmissible (according to the HIV/AIDS mainstream,
your likelihood of getting infected from a single unprotected sexual contact is
one in 500) or, as I’ve believed all along, because it was never a viral
disease at all.
Indeed, one
thing I’m not upset about regarding the
U.S. government in general, and the Trump administration in particular, to the
pandemic universally referred to as COVID-19 or the “novel coronavirus” (though
the virus’s official name is SARS-CoV-2, indicating that it’s not “novel” at
all but is a further evolution of the original SARS-CoV discovered in China in
2003), is that it took a long time to respond. The epidemiologists and
virologists had been screaming so long about one pandemic threat or another
they had become the scientific equivalents of the boy who cried wolf. I didn’t
take the back-page newspaper stories from January 2020 about this weird new
virus out of China seriously, and I suspect a lot of people — including
President Trump — didn’t either because the scientific “experts” had cried wolf
so often, and the wolf had never materialized.
Until now. Just
why SARS-CoV-2 spread so rapidly out of its original Chinese base to infect the
world in general, and locales like New York City and Italy in particular, is
not known, and probably never will be known. But, like the flea in Goethe’s
poem quoted above — who was elevated from lowly fleahood by a king, made into a
noble and scared the shit out of the courtiers, who were afraid to swat insects
or scratch themselves lest they kill the king’s new favorite — this virus has
taken on an extraordinary level of power over virtually all humanity.
This
submicroscopic package of RNA, proteins and a lipid coat has done what the
armed forces of Germany and Japan were unable to do to the U.S. in two world
wars: end professional sports and live concerts, shut down the Broadway
theatres and make millions of Americans essentially prisoners in their own
homes. It has caused almost all the world’s advanced industrial countries to
bring their economies to a skidding halt and zoomed the U.S.’s unemployment
rate from 3.4 to 14.7 percent in just one month (from February to March 2020).
It threatens to start a long-lasting worldwide depression rivaling the one from
the 1930’s.
And, in a
particular bit of cruelty unique to the United States — still the only country in the advanced industrial world
that does not guarantee access health care to all its citizens as a right — by
throwing millions of people out of work, SARS-CoV-2 has also deprived them of
their access to health care just when they most need it. If anything illustrates the need for the U.S. to junk its absurd,
cruel, wasteful and inadequate health care non-system and enact a single-payer
“Medicare for All” program in its place, it is the epidemic of SARS-CoV-2 and
COVID-19, the disease it causes.
Yet the piss-ant
loser the Democratic Party seems determined to nominate as Donald Trump’s
principal opponent in November, former vice-president and previous two-time
failed Presidential candidate Joe Biden, angrily responded to Bernie Sanders as
he tried to make that point in what turned out to be the last debate between
two Democratic Presidential candidates this year. He said, essentially, that
when your house is burning down it’s not the time to talk about how you could
make it better. He had a point, but in promising federal health coverage only for people actually diagnosed with COVID-19 he
missed the point that millions of Americans in marginal jobs or unemployed
altogether will stay away from health care for fear that if their sickness isn’t COVID-19, they may be stuck with thousands of
dollars worth of medical bills and every dollar they manage to scrape together
will be seized from them by medical collection agencies.
When your house
is burning down, the immediate need is
to put the fire out — but once it’s out, you ought to take some time to consider how the house was designed in the
first place. You should be asking whether rebuilding it exactly the way it was
is just going to put you at risk of another devastating fire. SARS-CoV-2 is not
only shutting down society and the economy, it’s also highlighting the continued
danger Americans are in from a privately funded, profit-driven health care
system that costs more than that in any other advanced country and consistently
delivers worse outcomes — shorter life expectancies, more infant mortality,
higher rates of chronic disease.
Boiling a Frog
The principal
public response to SARS-CoV-2 from governments in most nations and U.S. states
has been to issue so-called “stay-at-home orders” that, as I wrote two months
ago in these pages, basically declare normal public life illegal. Workers have
been told to isolate themselves in their homes and do their jobs from home, via
the Internet, if they can. If they can’t — and it’s generally the people who
were already working the most arduous low-paying, low-status, health-threatening
jobs in the first place — they’re either being thrown out of work altogether,
with no way to pay their rent or put food on their tables, or increasingly, as
governors and President Trump talk about “reopening the economy,” they’re being
threatened with a Hobson’s choice: either go back to work under hazardous
conditions that maximize their chances of exposure to SARS-CoV-2, or lose
access to unemployment benefits and risk ending up homeless and starving.
My husband
Charles and I have both been relatively lucky so far through the pandemic.
First, we have each other — and the moral support from a significant other in
my life has been so powerful I thank whatever powers there may be in the
universe that I don’t have to face this as a single man. Second, we both have
our jobs; I’m an in-home caregiver for sick and disabled people, and he’s a
grocery clerk. That means we’re both in so-called “essential occupations.”
We’ve been going to work, doing our jobs and getting paid for them just as we
were before the pandemic broke, and we’re still paying our rent and bills and
buying food. We’re even well provisioned with the most elusive commodity of
all, toilet paper, thanks to the sheer good luck that I’d picked up a large
package of it at Costco just before the
pandemic hit and wiped the shelves clean of it.
What we have had to deal with is a series of escalating
regulations that I’ve compared to the classic recipe for cooking boiled frog.
You take a live frog and stick it in a big pot of cold water. Frogs are amphibians,
used to living in or on water, so they’re fine with that. Then you turn on the
heat. The water gets warmer and warmer, the frog gets weaker and weaker, and by
the time it dawns on its little frog brain that it’s in mortal danger, it’s too
weak to get out of the pot and save its life. The ever-escalating regulations
people have been ordered to live by — none of them actually debated and voted on either by the people as a whole
or their elected representatives — strike me as the political equivalent of
boiling a frog. The point is to weaken us slowly over time until we meekly
follow orders and don’t resist until it’s too late.
Charles and I
both rely on public transit to get to our jobs. At first we were able to ride
San Diego’s buses normally: we got on at the front door, tapped our monthly
passes on the reader for them, the computer system registered that we’d paid
for our rides and we were good to go. Then, one morning, without any warning,
the entire front section of each local bus was roped off and we were told to
get on through the back door. The first day they did that we didn’t have to
show passes at all — making the bus system essentially free — but after that we
were required to show our passes to the
driver (who was obliged to look at them through his rear-view mirror while
still attempting to drive the bus!), even though the driver would have no way
of knowing whether they were valid or not.
Starting May 1,
we were treated to recorded announcements on the buses that due to an order
from the County of San Diego — an order,
mind you, as if governments at all levels had decided to abandon even the pretense of democracy and issue proclamations like a piss-ant
dictatorship in a bad movie about an occupied country — that from now on we
were permitted to use the buses only for “essential trips.” (“Essential” — a
word that’s been thrown around a lot during this crisis — is, of course, very
much in the mind of the beholder.) What’s more, we were told through that
authoritarian voice on the buses’ P.A. systems (which are usually used only to
announce where the bus is going and what its next stop will be) that all bus riders in San Diego County are now required to
wear face coverings. Indeed, you’re supposed to have your face covered whenever
you step out of your home.
The piss-ant
regulations don’t stop with public transit. One of the clients I do home care
for lives in a seniors’ building, and — freaked out, I suspect, by the fact
that the first mass break-out of COVID-19 in the U.S. occurred in a nursing
home in Washington state — the people running the place, both the on-site
managers in San Diego and the bosses in Pasadena they answer to, have really gone hog-wild regulating the residents’ lives. They
cancelled all public events in
the building and boarded up the common areas, including the library where the
one computer available to the residents was located. Thus people in the
building who want to enroll in social programs they need now more than ever
can’t do it.
What’s more, the
residents are not allowed to have anyone
over to their homes except caregivers and delivery people. They are
specifically not allowed to have
their adult children come over. If a family member wants to visit them, they
have to meet outside the
building. At least they can do that; relatives of nursing home residents have
been forced to stand outside the building and look in at their loved ones, and
sometimes they’ve “touched” each other through window panes of glass like
couples in a 1930’s gangster movie in which one is in prison and the other is
behind a wire-mesh screen, unable to touch each other.
Even when the
on-site managers tried to do something sensible — like keeping the community
restroom on the ground floor open to make it easier for the residents to wash
their hands, as we’re incessantly being told we have to do to keep from getting
SARS-CoV-2 — their bosses in Pasadena overruled them and ordered the restroom
closed. There are a lot of incontinent people in the building who need that restroom open in order to be able to go out at
all.
These weird and
often silly measures to attempt to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 have also
affected the ways businesses that are
allowed to remain open can conduct themselves. One of the regulations from the
state of California (again, merely proclaimed as law by the governor and never actually voted on by the people or their
“democratic” representatives) says that only a certain number of people can be
in a certain space at once. Thus a lot of grocery stores have had to set up
checkpoints at their entrances in which you have to wait in line just for the
privilege of being admitted to
shop, and because of the ironclad “social distancing” (a horrible phrase that
will probably, like a lot of the
social changes brought on by SARS-CoV-2, linger long after the immediate need
for it is passed), the lines to the checkout stands now wind their way through
at least half the length of the store and often people still shopping for items
find people waiting to check out are in their way.
Indeed, I’ve
been in at least two grocery stores that have barricaded off their checkstands
and forced all their customers to wait in one line — like the U.S. Postal Service or the rides at the now-shuttered
Disneyland. The first time I encountered this was at the North Park Smart &
Final at University and Mississippi. I thought the system was an outrageous
imposition and said so to my husband when he got home from work that night —
and he startled me by replying that he thought that was a great idea and wished his store would do it.
When I shopped
for one of my home-care clients at the downtown Grocery Outlet at 11th
and Market two days before Mother’s Day, they’d not only adopted the system of
barricading the checkstands and forcing every customer to wait in just one very long line, they’d formed the barricade out of the
stands of cut flowers they’d ordered to sell as Mother’s Day bouquets. This
gave the uncanny impression that they were holding a funeral in the store —
which, given that the stated reason for doing this was to keep their customers
from getting a fatal disease, seemed macabrely appropriate to me.
My Slave Collar
At least for me
and my husband, the inconveniences wrought in our daily lives by SARS-CoV-2 and
the regulations proclaimed by governments at all levels to attempt to stop its
spread are just that: inconveniences. They are annoying, arbitrary and for some
reason keep getting ratcheted up in little installments. But they’re not
utterly destroying our ordinary lives like the massive shutdowns of businesses,
the rising unemployment level (from 3.5 percent in February to 14.7 percent in
April, the highest level seen since the peak of the Great Depression from 1929
to 1933) and the threat to millions of Americans that the loss of their jobs
also means their loss of access to health care at precisely the time they most
need it.
For me, the most
irksome regulation has been the increasing demands on people to wear face masks
when outdoors at all times. When I first
started people wearing masks on the bus — back in February, before the
so-called “stay-at-home orders” and the virtual shutdown of normal life in
obeisance to the Great God SARS-CoV-2 — I thought they were being silly. The
reason I thought they were being silly was that I knew from my previous
research that the ordinary face masks that used to be available readily in drug
stores like CVS did not protect
against viral transmission.
They do protect against bacteria, and also particulates that
result from mass fires (before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic the last time our
household had bought masks was during the big San Diego wildfires of 2007). But
because viruses are so small, they can pass right through the pores in the material the masks are made of.
That’s why such a big to-do is being made right now about making sure doctors,
nurses and other workers in hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities
have the so-called “N-95” or “KN-95” masks, which are made of a much less
porous material and therefore do
stop the transmission of free virus particles in the air.
But as the
SARS-CoV-2 pandemic heated up and the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths
zoomed upwards, I started to read phrases like “droplet contamination” and
“aerosol contamination” as the reasons why health authorities thought masking
was a good idea even though the common masks available (sometimes, at least) to
ordinary citizens — or the makeshift ones people who can’t buy masks are
obliged to make themselves from scarves, bandanas, old T-shirts or what have
you — don’t block free-floating viruses. Apparently every time you cough,
sneeze, talk or even breathe, you emit bits of water containing, among other
things, potential infectious agents.
If you already
have SARS-CoV-2, you can infect someone else via viruses hiding out in those droplets
or aerosols. So, even if your ordinary non-medical-grade face mask is too
porous to block the transmission of a virus on its own, it can block the transmission of those deadly droplets or
aerosols which appear to be the principal ways this virus is spread. So I’ve
grudgingly accepted the idea that the masks may be doing some good, and I’ve been following the
order the County of San Diego and its public transit system have been issuing
since May 1 that everybody who uses public transportation must be wearing a face mask at all times. I’ve also
followed the order that I’m not allowed to enter a grocery store — including
the one my husband works at — without wearing a mask.
But that doesn’t
mean I have to like it! When I put on the mask, more often as not I call it “my
slave collar.” My skepticism about masks — and in particular about the
effectiveness of requiring people to
wear them — only got fueled when I ordered and read a copy of a book that’s
been on my bucket list of things I’d want to read someday for years: Alfred W.
Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic, his 1976 history of the 1918-1919 flu. Needless to say, Crosby’s book
zoomed to the top of my reading list as I became determined to read what he had
to say about the pandemic 102 years ago and note the comparisons — and the
differences — between then and now. And one of the most powerful chapters of
his book was a withering condemnation of San Francisco’s response to the
1918-1919 pandemic and its reliance on masking as their principal weapon to
stop its spread.
San Francisco,
as a major port, was inevitably going to be an epicenter of a pandemic like the
1918-1919 flu that spread most powerfully via ships, many of them packed with
servicemembers either on their way to or returning home from World War I. The
city’s public health officer, Dr. William Hassler, already had enormous
prestige there because many people had predicted San Francisco would suffer an
epidemic of bubonic plague after the destruction of much of its infrastructure
by the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. That didn’t happen, and Dr.
Hassler was given much of the credit for that.
Dr. Hassler was
convinced that the way to stop the
spread of the 1918 flu was to require everyone in the city to wear face masks at all times. He got
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to enact the requirement by unanimous
vote. (It’s interesting that, unlike today, there was a public hearing and an
on-the-record vote by an elected body — not merely a dictatorial proclamation.)
The masking law went into effect, and the number of cases dropped. Then public
resistance set in, more and more San Franciscans broke the law, and the number
of cases rose.
Needless to say,
Dr. Hassler felt that had proved his point. Then some enterprising reporters
looked at case data from other Bay Area cities and found that the same pattern
of rising, falling and re-rising cases had occurred there whether those
cities had had masking ordinances or not.
It had to do with the overall course of the pandemic — particularly the fact
that it occurred in three waves: a first wave in spring and early summer 1918;
a second, far more deadly, wave in late fall and winter 1918; and a third wave,
more deadly than the first but less than the second, in spring 1919. (This is
one of the reasons public health experts in the current pandemic are warning
that American states and cities should not lift the stay-at-home orders and
reopen businesses and public places too soon; relaxing our guard now could
easily trigger a more severe second wave of COVID-19.)
The final word
on masking requirements Crosby quoted in his book came from Dr. Edwin Jordan,
who in 1927 produced a history of the pandemic for the American Medical
Association. He wrote, “[T]he practical difficulties in the way of mask wearing
by the general public seem insuperable, and render this measure one for
individual rather than general prophylaxis.” In other words, wearing a mask may
keep you safe, but it’s going to do
little or nothing to slow the general spread of a pandemic virus. This seems to
be news to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), who like Dr. Hassler 102
years ago seem to regard mask requirements as a sine qua non for stopping SARS-CoV-2, but it makes sense to me.
I must say that
my husband Charles strongly disagrees with me on that one. He’s really tired of
hearing me call my mask “my slave collar,” and in one of his rare bursts of
anger (he’s generally a quite calm person who, if we disagree about something,
is more likely to express himself politely rather than angrily) he told me that
the only things that are keeping him confident that he won’t catch the virus
from a grocery-store customer are the mask he’s required to wear on duty and
the big Plexiglas covers between him and his customers. “Don’t you be the guy I have to have thrown out of the store
for not wearing a mask!” he told me.
Indeed, as I was
writing this article Charles came home from a work shift literally screaming at the number of customers he’d had during the last
three hours of his May 13 work shift who’d refused to wear masks and given him
piss-ant excuses for not doing so. One woman said she couldn’t wear a mask
because she has chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), which prompted
Charles to tell me when he got home he intends to look up a Web site on COPD
and find out for himself whether that condition means you can’t wear a mask.
According to the Web site I found, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-and-copd,
COPD patients should wear a mask
in public during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic because they “have a higher risk of
more severe illness from COVID-19 due to their existing lung problems.”
The National Rorschach —
Again
One of the most
fascinating aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is the extent to which it’s
become politicized. I’ve written in these pages before that under Donald Trump
the U.S. has essentially been taking a national Rorschach test; like the
Rorschach inkblots, just about every news event for the last four years has
evoked profoundly different responses from the American people. The U.S. has
divided itself into two widely and seemingly irreconcilably separated political
camps: the 40 percent or so of the country who regard Donald Trump as the
nation’s savior and believe virtually everything he says; and the roughly equal
but slightly larger percentage who can’t stand him and believe he’s dragging
the country down the road to authoritarianism and the arbitrary rule of one man
— and one man of bizarre whims and a dubious hold on sanity, at that.
Part of that
division has come about due to the rise of two separate and distinct media
parties in the U.S. Left-leaning media critics tend to focus on how so many
ostensibly separate media outlets are owned by a handful of companies with
similar class interests. But just as the U.S. has long been dominated by two
political parties, Republicans and Democrats, both totally committed to
protecting and extending the power of big-corporate capitalism but with
profound and significant differences on how
to do that, so there are two big pro-corporate U.S. media parties. America’s
center-Right media party consists of the major newspapers — particularly the New
York Times, Washington Post and Los
Angeles Times — along with the big TV
networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS) and such cable channels as CNN and MS-NBC.
The far-Right media party consists largely of AM talk radio
(as music broadcasting retreated to the better-sounding FM band in the 1970’s
Right-wing talk shows grabbed control of virtually the whole AM band, and the
decision of President Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission [FCC] to
eliminate the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” paved the way for these stations to
broadcast Right-wing propaganda virtually 24/7) and, since 1996, the
consistently highest-rated cable news network, Fox. These outlets carefully
cultivated an audience of disaffected people — mostly, though not exclusively,
working-class white males — disgusted by the social changes that began in the
1960’s, particularly the civil-rights struggles of people of color, women and
Queers.
For years the
far-Right audience built up by talk radio and Fox News yearned for a President
who not only bought into their sense of grievance but actually sounded like
them and the on-air personalities they had come to revere. Ronald Reagan and
the two George Bushes delivered on a lot of the Right-wing policy agenda but
didn’t really grab the talk-radio and Fox News electorate the way Donald Trump
has.
Trump not only
talks like a Right-wing talk-radio host —the same unremitting
self-righteousness and the same tactic of belittling and sneering anyone with a
contrary view, and saying the only reason anyone disagrees with him is they have a sinister, malevolent, conspiratorial
motivation to keep him from “making America great again” — he’s thrown
government policy into reverse on civil rights, environmental protection,
foreign engagement and all the other bogeymen hosts on talk radio and Fox News
have been railing against for decades. Indeed, on a number of issues Trump has
even let talk-show and Fox News hosts dictate policy — including obeying Tucker
Carlson’s demand that the National Institutes of Health de-fund a program in
which U.S. and Chinese health experts were coordinating responses to
SARS-CoV-2. (This was reported on 60 Minutes May 10: see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-cancelled-coronavirus-research-grant-60-minutes-2020-05-10/.)
As Los
Angeles Times columnist Virginia Heffernan
wrote in a May 8 article defending face-mask requirements against ideologically
driven Right-wing opposition (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-08/coronavirus-mask-mke-pence-donald-trump),
“I’m trying to avoid thinking of the mask as a crucifix necklace or an
Affliction-brand face tattoo, something that marks me as part of one fight club
and not another. Because of course there are those who don’t and won’t wear
masks. And it’s going to be a long, terrible summer if, as the coronavirus
death toll mounts, the United States erupts in Sharks-Jets street fights over
who masks and who doesn’t. … Mask-rejecters are flouting
public-health guidelines the way chain-smokers used to, grounding
their individuality in their defiance of nanny-state edicts and in their outlaw
freedom to trash their own health and endanger others. …
“The battle over
masks maps closely onto the dangerously inflamed red-blue divide,” Heffernan
continued. “MS-NBC field reporter Craig Melvin wears one. Fox News host Laura
Ingraham, citing masks as advertisements for ‘fear and intimidation,’ does not.
President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Rand
Paul (R-Ky.) have refused masks; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-San Francisco) has a drawerful of handsome, practical cloth face coverings.
This daft showdown wouldn’t matter if we didn’t live in the political tinderbox
that is Trump’s America.” (There are
reason-based arguments to be made against requiring face masks — I’ve made some
of them above — but the Trump-Fox-talk radio crowd aren’t bothering with them.)
One of the hallmarks
of a totalitarian state — which the U.S. is already dangerously close to
becoming and will probably complete the process if (as I expect) Trump is
re-elected in November 2020 against Joe Biden, the hapless bozo-brain the
Democrats are suicidally determined to nominate against him — is that everything is political. Trump is a totalitarian not only in
his determination to take total control of the U.S. government and fire or
drive out anyone who contradicts his point of view, but in his view that every
event in the U.S. must be viewed and responded to according to whether it helps
or hurts him economically or politically.
When the
SARS-CoV-2 crisis began in earnest in February, Trump regarded it as more a
personal insult than anything else. How dare this little piss-ant virus break out — in China, one of the countries
Trump loves to hate (particularly because so many U.S. companies have exported
manufacturing jobs there) even while he admires and envies its dictator, Xi
Jinping — and start throwing its weight around. How dare it screw up the
American economy just as it was racking up record-high stock market averages
and record-low unemployment figures and thus ensuring his re-election.
Throughout the crisis Trump’s focus has remained resolutely on what the virus
is doing to him rather than what
it’s doing to the country — and the world.
Trump is and has
always been a man who divided humanity into two groups: those who are with him
and those who are against him. He’s also someone who sees everything that happens in the U.S., no matter how far removed
from politics, as grist for the revenge-driven mill of his Twitter feed.
Whether attacking professional athletes for kneeling during the national anthem
at games as a protest against police brutality or denouncing Meryl Streep (the
most Academy Award-nominated actress in movie history) as “overrated” because
she issued a veiled criticism of him on the Golden Globes, Trump regards any
social, cultural or political opposition to him as a threat to America itself.
So it’s no
surprise that Trump’s response to SARS-CoV-2 has been full of his usual
invective — and his attempt to blame someone else for anything that goes wrong.
He’s blamed former President Obama for the U.S. not having a viable COVID-19
test in the early days of the pandemic — even after it was Trump, not Obama,
who closed down all the federal offices
that were supposed to coordinate with other governments to give us early
warnings of evolving viruses that could cause pandemics. He’s blamed China and
endorsed Congressmember Matt Gaetz’ [R-Florida] bonkers conspiracy theory that
the Wuhan Institute of Virology genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2 and loosed it
on the world as a bioweapon.
He’s blamed
Democrats and alleged that they want to ruin the country and cause mass deaths
just to make him look bad — while public-health experts are futilely trying to
warn him that restarting the American economy too soon risks mass annihilation
from a second wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In a further example of Trump’s determination
to purge the American government of anyone who disagrees with him and replace
them with people whose sole qualification is personal loyalty to Trump (the
process Adolf Hitler called Gleichschaltung
— literally “coordination” or “rectification”), he not only canceled EcoHealth
Alliance’s grant to study emerging viruses in association with similar labs
worldwide (referenced above in the May 10 60 Minutes report), he fired CDC vaccine researcher Dr. Rick
Bright for not going along with Trump’s hailing of hydroxychloroquine (a
crucial drug for the treatment of lupus but totally untested for COVID-19) as a
miracle cure.
(For information
on the Bright firing, see https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-firing-of-a-top-infectious-disease-expert-endangers-us-all?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_042320&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd67def24c17c104802d859&cndid=48795007&hasha=7211a88f055bd17bdb282abe13bcaec5&hashb=1b1fd81444c3a076b11a0dfd4976a1cfbff930c4&hashc=b3ad2cd7ada4a3e0189edc794b80d6e9a213d883989556b06506edd545e9490a&esrc=AUTO_OTHER&utm_term=TNY_Daily.
A more recent commentary on President Trump’s attack on Bright as “disgruntled”
is at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-14/trump-bright-disgruntled-whistleblower-coronavirus.)
During the 2016
campaign, Donald Trump famously proclaimed, “I know more about ISIS than the
generals.” It’s obvious he thinks he knows more about SARS-CoV-2 than the
doctors. There’s certainly no love lost between me and Anthony Fauci — not when
he was a key part of the government’s terrible handling of the AIDS crisis and
helped kill tens of thousands of my Gay brothers — and I get sick to my stomach
when I hear him referred to as some godlike oracle on how to deal with
infectious disease. But right now — especially when he’s warning of a potential
second wave of the pandemic and trying to put the brakes on the rush to reopen
businesses and force workers in unsafe jobs like meat-packing back to work, or
else — he’s making a lot of sense.
But then the
entire SARS-CoV-2 response has become embroiled in America’s ongoing partisan
divide, as Los Angeles Times reporter
Melissa Etehad wrote on May 14 (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-14/coronavirus-democratic-republican-battle-over-reopenings).
A partisan 4-3 Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court just
overruled the state’s Democratic governor Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order — and
at least some Wisconsinites responded by flocking to the bars and celebrating
their new-found ability to put themselves in viral harm’s way. Michigan
governor Gretchen Whitmer, another Democrat, is facing pushback from Republican
legislators and a recall campaign to throw her out of office.
Pennsylvania
governor Tom Wolf, another Democrat facing a Republican legislature (thanks to
the GOP’s success in gerrymandering legislative districts so state voters get
Republican control even when overwhelming majorities of them vote for Democrats
— one more reason we should abandon single-member districts and winner-take-all
elections and replace them with Germany’s system of proportional
representation), is being threatened with defiance from county governments in
conservative areas of the state. ““We’re trying to get things moving in a safe
and responsible manner because this thing is turning into a pressure cooker,”
said Republican Representative Dan Moul from Adams County. “This thing is going
to blow up if [Wolf] doesn’t make a move soon.”
Donald Trump,
being Donald Trump, has thrown fuel on these fires with his all-caps tweets to
“LIBERATE” states like Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia from stay-at-home
orders — even though no U.S. state has
met the criteria put forth by the CDC for when it’s safe to reopen. His
administration ordered the CDC to take down its carefully considered reopening
plan, and one White House official boasted that it “would never see the light
of day.” (Fortunately, it did
because someone leaked it.) Pollsters keep saying that three out of every four
Americans want the lockdown orders to continue. An April 2 survey by the Washington
Post and Ipsos (cited by Los
Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik at https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-05-14/economy-shut-down#)
nearly three-fourths of all respondents said “the worst is yet to come.”
In the fight
against SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 disease it causes, Donald Trump’s
scattershot leadership style has made things worse, not better. His constant
demands for flattery have turned most of government into his cheering section.
His insistence that states fight with each other, and with federal agencies,
for testing supplies, ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE) for health-care
personnel and all the other tools needed to fight the pandemic is the way he’s always run his businesses. Trump was the sort of boss who
hired people without giving them a clear idea of what he wanted them to do, and
let them fight it out to win his favor. That’s how he’s run the government as
well, and it’s the incredibly destructive way he’s running the SARS-CoV-2
response.
More Isolated and More
Unequal
What is
America’s — and the world’s — future going to look like after the crisis phase
of SARS-CoV-2 passes? (I say “the crisis phase” because some form or another of
this virus will probably be with us as long as humanity exists; the best we
hope for is it evolves to be less lethal, like the flu.) One thing is certain:
the sheer power of the corporate elites that actually run the world will grow
and grow and grow. The human race has evolved a ruling class of such power,
scope, influence and seeming invulnerability that it will use everything that happens to make the distribution of wealth and
income ever more unequal. We got a good example of that when most of the money
from the first round of the so-called “Paycheck Protection Program,” which was
supposed to help small businesses stay alive during the shutdown, was instead
diverted to giant corporations.
America — and
the world — are also going to become more isolated. The iron demands health
officials are making as the bottom line for controlling SARS-CoV-2 —
particularly the seemingly ironclad “social distancing” rule that everyone must
remain six feet away from everyone else at all times — hit the world at a time when people are already far too isolated, far too “distant,” from each
other. You can see that when you say hello to people as you walk by them on the
street; even before SARS-CoV-2 they would usually just stare blankly at you or
ignore you completely.
One thing I’ve
long believed is that America’s relationship to communications media started to
change dramatically in 1959 with the introduction of the transistor radio. For
the first half of the 20th century, mass communications media were
truly mass. Phonograph records, movies,
radio and TV were centralized messages that transmitted one program to an
audience of many. Beginning with the transistor radio, media became
individualized: you could now use media technology not to become part of a
broader world, but quite the opposite — to isolate yourself, to cut yourself
off from other people and brush off any attempts by others to communicate with
you as distractions.
Since then,
media have become more individualized — more “narrowcast” than “broadcast,” as
they say in the media business. Instead of three or four big TV networks, there
are hundreds of cable and satellite channels serving narrower and narrower
market niches. Instead of watching movies in theatres, more and more people
were watching them at home — first on VHS, then on DVD, now on so-called
“streaming services” that give you access to whatever programs you want for a
monthly subscription fee. Music, too, has changed from something you listened
to on radio (where it came free but with only a limited choice of what to listen to) or on records (of whatever format) to
something that is “streamed,” where for a subscription fee you can have access
to the whole smorgasbord of recorded music and pick out only the items you
want.
The most obvious
and transformative evolution of the transistor radio has been the smartphone.
One of the biggest reasons you get ignored if you try to say hello to a
stranger on the street is they’re plugged into those damned phones and are
using earbuds (just like the original transistor radio users 60 years ago!) to
listen to music or talk and literally block out the rest of the world. I’ve
seen plenty of people at streetlights who are so wrapped up with what they’re
doing with their smartphones they literally
don’t see the traffic signals change, and more than once I’ve told one of these
people, “Hey, the light’s green. You can cross now.” Between the smartphone and
the Internet, it’s now all too easy to block out any opinion, any voice, any stream of information or
even any fact that doesn’t fit in your existing world view.
The increasing
individualization of the media is, I think, the reason why the nature of
extreme political movements have changed. The radical movements of the first
half of the 20th century were collectivist: fascism on the Right, socialism and communism on
the Left. Since the era of the transistor radio and the media “narrowcasting”
it ushered in, the dominant radical political movements have become individualistic: libertarianism on the Right, anarchism on the Left.
Michael Hiltzik’s May 14 Los Angeles Times column at https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-05-14/economy-shut-down#
argues that to succeed in battling SARS-CoV-2, “the American public, resistant
to government regimentation even in a crisis, would have to be shown how shared
action and shared sacrifice would defeat the virus.”
Dream on, Michael;
all too many Americans have become individualistic narcissists whose only
concerns in a crisis are “What’s in it for me?” and “What can it do to me?” In
that regard, Donald Trump — an individualistic narcissist par excellence who so totally lacks concern for anyone else he can’t
even fake it when he tries to —
is the perfect President for the U.S. right now. South Korean immigrant Marie
Myung-Ok Lee published a column in the May 13 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-13/trump-asia-coronavirus-testing-south-korea)
argued that her native country did a better job grabbing hold of the SARS-CoV-2
crisis and responding to it forcefully than her adopted country did:
Dr. Jung
[Eun-Kyeong, head of South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control] was able to
persuade a populace to allow tracking via credit cards, cell-phone GPS and
other methods, including getting a church to give up the records of more than
200,000 members for the purposes of public health — a level of organization and
trust the U.S. cannot match. If a person with COVID-19 leaves isolation, a text
alert is issued, alerting those nearby. Tracing an infected person’s contacts
is so rigorous that a running joke in South Korea is that you can’t even die in
peace from the coronavirus because the government will still track you down.
Keep that
paragraph in mind whenever you hear any public-health official blandly declare
that “contact tracing” — words that seem harmless but actually demand a level
of government intrusion in our daily lives that will appall Right and Left
Americans alike — is necessary to combat and control SARS-CoV-2. I first heard
the words “contact tracing” in the 1980’s as a technique to forestall epidemics
of sexually transmitted disease. Most people know the people who have sex with,
and even if they don’t know the “who” (like the Gay men who in the pre-AIDS era
— and still, to a lesser extent, today — sought casual anonymous sex in
bathhouses, back-room bars, public restrooms and “cruisy” areas in public parks
and piers) they could still give contact tracers a good idea of where, when and
what sorts of sex they’d had.
So when I
started hearing “contact tracing” mentioned as an important tool against
SARS-CoV-2 my initial thought was, “How on earth are you going to do contact tracing for a casually transmissible
virus?” It’s going to take a massive expansion of the government’s surveillance
of ordinary Americans that will dwarf even the “anti-terrorist” surveillance
programs (like the National Security Agency’s surveillance of every e-mail and cell-phone call by an American) put in
place as an emergency response to the 9/11 attacks but still going on nearly 20
years later. “Contact tracing” for SARS-CoV-2 will require either the abolition
or severe restriction on the privacy of people’s health histories, and will be
so people-intensive a number of people have actually said it could be a
full-employment program, like Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps
(CCC) to put unemployed people to work during the Great Depression, that could
help alleviate the economic slump caused by COVID-19 and the great shutdown.
And the public
health experts who are so blandly and blithely calling for massive amounts of
“contact tracing” for SARS-CoV-2 are doing so in a climate in which at least
two generations of Americans have been brainwashed by decades of Right-wing
propaganda (and some Left-wing propaganda, too) to hate the whole idea of collective action through government. As Michael
Hiltzik pointed out in the above-cited article, “The challenges are political
and cultural in a country that has been trained since the Reagan administration
to mistrust the government. That particular chicken has come home to roost. At
a moment when a consistent, humanistic expression of government authority would
save thousands of lives, federal leadership is in the hands of a petulant
egotist whose interest appears to be in using this crisis to divide Americans,
not unite them in a shared cause, and blame everyone else for his own manifest
failure.”
In a culture
that has long celebrated “rugged individualism” and the “pioneer spirit,” and
in which changes in media technology over the last 60 years have left us more atomized — to the point where each side in our
political debate feels entitled not only to its own opinions but its own facts,
and viewers of Fox News have a profoundly different idea of what’s going on in
the world from viewers of CNN or MS-NBC — the SARS-CoV-2 crisis demands we pull
together politically while at the same time it divides us physically.
In a March 23
article in The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-loneliness-from-coronavirus-isolation-takes-its-own-toll?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Daily_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_032320&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd67def24c17c104802d859&cndid=48795007&esrc=&mbid=&utm_term=TNY_Daily),
Robin Wright noted the irony that the instinct of the human species when
confronted with a crisis is to band together. Yet in this crisis, banding together in the conventional ways
people do it — coming together physically, doing bonding rituals, hugging,
touching each other — is one of the biggest things people are told they must not do.
Wright
interviewed Dr. Sue Varma, a New York University official who founded a mental
health program specifically aimed at survivors of the 9/11 attacks in New York
City in 2001. “What’s different today from the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane
Katrina or the tsunami in Japan is that those episodes had finite endings. With
this pandemic, we see no end in sight, so it’s more traumatic,” Dr. Varma told
her. What’s more, Dr. Varma said, loneliness, especially the inability to have
physical contact with other people, produces physical reactions that are
themselves destructive of mental health. “The power of touch releases oxytocin,
which is a natural cuddle hormone. You see it during mother-infant bonding, an
orgasm, and hugs,” Dr. Varma said. She compared prolonged loneliness to smoking
15 cigarettes a day and said it raises your risk for the same diseases
associated with tobacco use: cardiovascular disease and stroke, obesity, or
premature death. It also makes you more susceptible to depression and dementia,
she explained.
Beware of the Interblob!
One of the most
striking phenomena associated with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is it has increased
the already outsized role the Internet is playing in our daily lives — not only
how we inform ourselves and how we shop, but how we entertain ourselves and
even how we learn. In 2013 I published to this blog and the East County
Magazine Web site what I think is one of
the most important pieces I have ever written, “The Interblob” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-interblob.html).
“[L]ike the Blob in the 1958
sci-fi camp-classic film — a huge piece of protoplasmic jelly from outer space
that devoured everything in its path and grew to massive proportions — the
Internet has devoured virtually every competing source of information,
entertainment or culture,” I wrote. “And that’s not all. It’s transformed such
basic functions of modern life as the search for a job or the pursuit of a
relationship. It’s remolding us all into widgets in an increasingly
computerized world in which it’s not altogether clear whether the machines are
serving us or we are serving them.”
The SARS-CoV-2
crisis is accelerating the rise of the Interblob to warp speed. Schools at all
levels, from kindergarten to graduate schools, have closed down physically and
moved their course offerings online. Virtually all stores other than groceries
or pharmacies have been shut down; if you want to buy a book, a record or a
movie, almost your only source for those items is a Web site. Furniture stores
and home remodeling companies have been forced to close down their showrooms
and offer you so-called “virtual tours” of what your home may look like — if everything goes well, which it
usually doesn’t. Even if you need to apply for social-service programs like
food stamps, Medi-Cal or low-cost phone or Internet service, the offices that
usually handle those things are closed to the public and you’re told, “You can
always do that online.”
This is an
especially cruel irony for people who don’t have computers and aren’t on the
Internet already: they’re given the Catch-22 that in order to be fully a part
of modern life, you have to be on the Internet — but you can only apply for
Internet service if you’re already on the Internet. It’s even worse than it
might be otherwise because the pandemic has closed down virtually all the
routes for Internet access for people who don’t own their own computers — public libraries and computers available to
apartment-building residents.
The increasing
Internetization of life is one trend that was well under way before SARS-CoV-2
reared its ugly little transmission knobs from its lipid coats, but the
pandemic is accelerating it to warp speed. Not only have almost all educational
institutions closed their doors and gone to “online learning,” but there’s no
sign that they’ll return to in-person instruction any time soon — if at all.
Timothy P.
White, chancellor of the California State University system, just announced
that its 23 campuses will remain closed for the 2020 fall semester (though lab
courses and a handful of other hands-on classes will still meet in person, albeit
with far fewer people — he said enrollment in labs will decrease from 20
students per class to five). He appeared on the PBS News Hour and explained that, though online learning is
initially more expensive than in-person instruction because of the initial
investment in hardware and software, it’s so much more “efficient” than clunky
old in-person classrooms he anticipates that after the crisis 70 percent of his system’s instruction
will happen online.
Indeed,
SARS-CoV-2 has moved the entire school system online — and this is going to
exacerbate existing economic and social inequality still further. Already
children from affluent households have enormous educational advantages over
kids from poorer ones — more stable home lives, better nutrition, more books in
the home and a greater appreciation of learning from their parents. The rise of
online education is just going to move us closer to a society of education
haves and education have-nots, as children’s ability to do well in school
increasingly depends on just how good a computer and an Internet connection
their parents can afford.
It’s ironic that
one of the things I complained about in my 2013 “Interblob” article was that
the Los Angeles Times had dropped its
print listing of TV schedules. Not long after I posted the article, I added a
correction that the Times had
restored TV schedules to the print edition — though the new schedule was far
less comprehensive and took much less space. But SARS-CoV-2, and especially the
plummeting ad revenue newspapers are dealing with as so many of their
traditional advertisers are closed “for the duration,” led the TV schedules to
disappear from the Los Angeles Times,
once and quite likely for all. This is especially wrenching since if you’re
stuck at home because your employer has closed, it seems one of the things
you’d most want to know from your
newspaper (assuming you still get one) is what’s on TV that night.
Already we’re
hearing about the shutdown of community newspapers, many of them having
published for longer than 100 years and survived economic depressions and world
wars. Many people won’t immediately miss newspapers — they’re an old-hat
technology in a world in which current events are available via cable TV or,
dare I say it, the Internet — but it’s still the big “legacy” newspapers like
the New York Times, Washington Post and Los
Angeles Times that set the news agenda
because they’re the ones with the money and staff to cover most of the world’s
substantial news stories and give TV crews and online journalists the cues for what to cover.
Without
community newspapers, local governments will be able to run roughshod over
their residents because there won’t be press outlets to hold them to account.
Without a strong press — and particularly a strong press whose product is
available on paper and therefore doesn’t require the substantial investments in
a computer and a monthly Internet service bill — we’ll become a nation of
information haves and information have-nots, just as the increasing
Internetization of education will turn us into a society of knowledge haves and
knowledge have-nots.
And in an age in
which the fastest-growing and most lucrative jobs involve handling information,
America’s already immobile class system will become even worse. Future
Americans, even more than present-day ones (or the Europeans of the past,
including our forebears, many of whom emigrated here in the first place
precisely to get away from a class system in which your birth determined your
entire life and there was virtually no chance for upward mobility), will have
their entire futures determined by who their parents were, how much money they
had and what they did for a living.
This is the kind
of world SARS-CoV-2 is creating (or accelerating the creation of) for our
future: a world of rigid class divides based on your access to information (or
lack thereof) ruled by an elite concerned more about making money than saving
people. If you don’t believe me, look at President Trump’s speech ordering
meat-packing plants to reopen despite the lack of mitigation of the already
cramped working conditions that have made them among America’s biggest focal
points for the spread of SARS-CoV-2. It will also be a world where people are
conditioned to fear each other’s very presence; as I wrote in an earlier post
on the pandemic, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic Gay men still met and
got together for sex, but in the back of their minds they thought, “Is this the
one who will kill me?”
Now everybody who comes within six feet of another person who
isn’t a family member is being told to worry, “Is this the one who will kill me?” It’s hard to imagine a
world more inimical to the best parts of the human psyche: our willingness to
touch each other, to love for each other, to sacrifice for each other. Those
qualities had already become so rare in our society and our culture that we
take time every evening to bang pot lids in honor of the nurses and other
health-care professionals who are
risking their own lives and help others through the horrors of COVID-19. And
they will become even rarer as COVID-19 and the virus that causes it,
SARS-CoV-2, remake the world as a place of inequality, institutionalized
cruelty, paranoia and fear.
