“Gone with the Wind”: The Racial, Sexual and Artistic Issues of a Great but Flawed Film

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“Just like a flame,

Love burned brightly, then became

An empty smoke dream that is gone with the wind.”

— Herb Magidson and Allie Wrubel, “Gone with the Wind” (1937 song)

I’ll say one thing right off: I am hugely opposed to censorship in any way, shape or form. I’m a First Amendment absolutist who thinks the remedy for bad speech is good speech, not speech suppression. That’s why I was horrified when I read the commentary by John Ridley, writer-director of the film 12 Years a Slave, in the June 8 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-08/hbo-max-racism-gone-with-the-wind-movie) demanding that the new HBO Max streaming service pull the 1939 film Gone with the Wind off their site “temporarily” and not restore it without some sort of front-and-back content explaining that the film’s rosy view of the pre-Civil War South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery was nothing like the real deal.

Two other commentators added articles to the Times’ op-ed section. One, Carla Hall (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-10/gone-with-the-wind-hbo), which only appeared on the Times’ Web site, argued (as I would) that Gone with the Wind may be racist, but it should not be suppressed.  Another author, Pamela Jackson (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-12/gone-with-the-wind-hattie-mcdaniel-john-ridley), wrote in a column published June 12 that she didn’t like Gone with the Wind either, but suppressing it would deprive HBO Max viewers of seeing Hattie McDaniel’s acting as Mammy — the first performance by an African-American actor to win an Academy Award. (There wouldn’t be a second until Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field a quarter-century later.)

So on Monday, June 14 I decided to screen Gone with the Wind, all nearly four hours of it, for my husband and I. I ran the movie at least in part as a fuck-you to all the P.C. Thought Police types who want to suppress it “temporarily” and slap on it explanatory content to the effect that the “Southern Way of Life” was based on white people literally owning Black people as slaves. The calls to ban (at least “temporarily,” though such “temporary” censorship has a way of becoming permanent) Gone with the Wind led me to an ire-filled letter to the Los Angeles Times protesting the suppression of an acknowledged American classic film — which they actually printed last Saturday, June 12, along with two other letters defending the suppression. I suspect the defenders of the ban haven’t actually seen Gone with the Wind in years — as I hadn’t either — and their memories, like mine, don’t really match the film Charles and I just watched last night.

Like all major movies, Gone with the Wind involved a huge number of people in its manufacture, but there were two particular individuals who had more than any others to do with creating this film. One was Margaret Mitchell, a Southern woman who had briefly tried her hand at journalism and playwrighting until she married her second husband, John Marsh. Bored with life as a housewife, she started using her spare time to write a book about the tales and legends of the Old South before and during the Civil War. As a girl, she’d been taken by her family to see old Civil War battlefields and monuments, and she’d got such an earful about the so-called “Lost Cause” that for much of her childhood she hadn’t believed that the cause had been lost: it was not until she was 10 that she realized the South had lost the Civil War.

Mitchell spent 10 years, 1926-1936, writing Gone with the Wind. Instead of working on the novel straight through, start to finish, she divided it into chapters, put each chapter in a manila envelope, and filed them in the order in which they would appear. That way she could work on whatever section pleased her fancy instead of writing the story in the order in which it took place. It’s not clear whether she originally intended the novel for publication, but that decision was forced on her when John Marsh invited a vacationing literary agent from New York to dinner at their home in Atlanta. Over dinner, the agent lamented that he hadn’t seen any worthwhile manuscripts in a while and asked Marsh if he knew anyone who was writing. “Well, my wife is working on something,” Marsh said — and the agent got hold of three of Mitchell’s manila envelopes, copied their contents and immediately decided Mitchell’s manuscript had the makings of a blockbuster best-seller and possibly a film adaptation as well.

The other individual primarily responsible for the film Gone with the Wind was producer David O. Selznick. He had begun in the late 1920’s and had risen fast through the movie industry, including stints at Paramount, RKO and MGM before he left in late 1935 to form his own studio, Selznick International. When Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind came out he immediately saw its film possibilities and determined to grab the movie rights, even though he also had doubts about the ability of his independent company to get the money to mount a production of the size and scope that would do justice to the novel. Selznick also did something highly unusual at the time: he hired George Gallup’s survey research film to study movie audiences and find who they wanted to play the principal roles in Gone with the Wind.

The result was an overwhelming vote — about 65 percent — for Clark Gable to play the book’s rakish leading male character, Rhett Buttler. At the time Gable was the leading adult moneymaker in Hollywood (the top star in the business was the little girl with the long curls, Shirley Temple) and the main attraction for Selznick’s father-in-law and former employer, MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer. Regarding the story’s female lead, Scarlett O’Hara, about one-third of Gallup’s respondents wanted Bette Davis to play her — but, as Selznick recalled later, there was just as much opposition as support for Davis in the role. Though Selznick had finished his deal for the movie rights to Gone with the Wind in 1936, he soon learned that Mayer would allow Gable to make Gone with the Wind only if MGM’s parent company, Loew’s Incorporated, released the film. Selznick had a distribution deal with United Artists that didn’t expire until the end of 1938, so he somehow had to maintain audience interest in a story he wouldn’t be able to film for another three years.

Selznick’s strategy was to hire a public relations genius named Russell Birdwell to launch an ongoing publicity stunt called “The Search for Scarlett O’Hara.” Virtually every actress in the U.S., and some from outside it as well, got to read for the role, and Selznick had so many screen tests shot he ended up with 24 hours’ worth of them. A number of actresses more or less impressed Selznick, but it wasn’t until December 21, 1938 that he found the woman he finally cast. His brother, agent Myron Selznick, had signed a young British actress named Vivien Leigh as a client, and on that fateful day he took her to the fire on Selznick’s back lot — needing a sequence showing Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burning down Atlanta, David Selznick had decided to gather up all the standing sets on his backlot, pass them off as Atlanta and burn them for real to clear the space for the big sets he needed for Gone with the Wind — and as the flames of the faux Atlanta burned around them, Myron walked up to David and said, “Meet Scarlett O’Hara.”

Gone with the Wind is probably the most documented production in the history of filmmaking, at least partly due to Selznick’s habit of writing down memos to his directors, writers and production staff to make sure they understood what he wanted from them. Selznick’s memos and the other surviving documents and interviews with people involved in the production make it clear that he was deliberately setting out to make not only the greatest movie that had been made to that time but the greatest that would ever be made. He insisted that the film be shot in three-strip Technicolor at a time when making a film in color doubled its production cost. Louis B. Mayer tried to talk him out of using color on the ground that the attractions were Gable and Mitchell’s bestselling book and the film wouldn’t make a dime more in color than it would in black-and-white. “I know, but the story demands color,” Selznick told Mayer — and Selznick was right not only artistically but financially. Gone with the Wind continued to be shown theatrically long after color films had become standard, lasting longer as a commercial property than it would have in black-and-white.

Selznick scoured the studios of Hollywood for the best actors to cast in the other roles as well. He got British free-lancer Leslie Howard to play Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett’s unrequited love interest, even though the 40-something Howard had already been savaged by critics for playing Romeo in MGM’s 1936 film of Romeo and Juliet and was reluctant to play another character so much younger than he was for real. He borrowed Olivia de Havilland from Warner Bros. to play Melanie Hamilton, Scarlett’s friend and the woman Ashley finally marries and stays with through the rest of the story. He cast veteran character actors Thomas Mitchell and Barbara O’Neil as Scarlett’s parents, and for the principal Black role of the O’Haras’ house slave Mammy, he got Hattie McDaniel, whose authority and power throughout the film made her a worthy choice even in a stereotypical role. McDaniel was often criticized for playing maids, to which she replied, “I have a choice — I can make $500 a week playing a maid or $5 a day being one.”

Selznick also relentlessly platooned people in and out of the behind-the-camera roles. For the three years of preparation and the opening weeks of shooting he used George Cukor as director — until, under pressure from Clark Gable, who thought the Gay Cukor would turn the film into a “women’s picture,” Selznick fired Cukor and replaced him with Gable’s friend and hunting buddy Victor Fleming. Later, when Fleming had a nervous breakdown and was out for a couple of weeks, Selznick hired Sam Wood — and when Fleming recovered he kept Wood on and had two separate units shooting scenes for the film with different actors at the same time. Though the first writer Selznick hired to adapt the book, Sidney Howard, got sole screen credit, he put many other writers to tweak the script — including Oliver H. P. Garrett, Jo Swerling, John Van Druten, Ben Hecht (who wrote the fustian title cards that gave the audience important information about the progress of the Civil War) and, briefly, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Selznick also fired his initial director of photography, Lee Garmes, and borrowed Bette Davis’s favorite cinematographer, Ernest Haller, from Warner Bros. to replace him, largely because he didn’t think the colors in Garmes’ work were bright enough.

When Gone with the Wind was finally released it broke all box-office records, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time and retaining that status until the release of The Sound of Music in 1965. Indeed, if you simply count the number of times people have paid to see it instead of trying to count how much they paid and then adjust for inflation (a particularly difficult way to measure a film like Gone with the Wind which has had many theatrical re-releases in widely varying economic contexts), Gone with the Wind is still the most popular film of all time. It is a movie that set standards for what a mainstream Hollywood production could be, and for decades after it was made was held up as a sort of gold standard for artistic excellence as well as commercial appeal. But it was also a film that bought into a lot of the mythmaking Southern whites created about the Civil War in their efforts to reverse their military defeat and return Southern Blacks to the status of a permanent servant class, which they did successfully until the explosion of Black civil-rights activism in the 1960’s. And it’s that mythmaking that is at the heart of the current demand to suppress Gone with the Wind.

The Soft Racism of the “Lost Cause”

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South … Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow … Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave … Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind … ”

— Ben Hecht, opening title card, Gone with the Wind

To understand the racial politics of Gone with the Wind it’s important to understand both what they are and what they are not. In 1915 pioneering filmmaker D. W. Griffith had made an even more openly and blatantly racist depiction of the Civil War and its aftermath than Gone with the Wind. It was called The Birth of a Nation and is an even bigger problem for film scholars than Gone with the Wind because it was a pioneering work, an indispensable subject for film students because it was the first feature-length film of real artistic integrity and power. It was the film in which Griffith brought together all the experimental techniques he’d been working on in his previous shorts — close-ups, panoramic shots, dramatic intercutting to show two events happening in different locales at the same time — and he established the basic grammar of film its directors have used ever since.

The Birth of a Nation was also a politically disgusting piece of racist propaganda in which Black characters were shown getting elected to Southern state legislatures (as part of a plot instigated by Northern white “carpetbaggers”) and rolling their eyes, playing craps and devouring watermelons on the legislative floors. When they’re not doing that, their main preoccupation is chasing after virginal, innocent white Southern women with rape (and worse) in their eyes. To add injury to insult, Griffith cast all his “Black” characters with white actors in hideously unconvincing blackface. The heroes of The Birth of a Nation are the Ku Klux Klan, who not only force the Blacks to give up their guns and their votes but ride to the rescue of white womanhood in an exciting climax that, though the film was silent, Griffith stipulated be accompanied by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Though the NAACP and other civil rights groups protested The Birth of a Nation from its release (and even before that they’d picketed the same story, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, when it was done on stage as a play), Virginia-born President Woodrow Wilson praised it as “history written in lightning” and added, “And the worst thing is it is all so terribly true.” Not only was Wilson the President, he had previously been a professor of American history and political science, so his praise gave The Birth of a Nation an historical imprimatur that was reflected in the literature of the time. Had anyone in 1915 seen The Birth of a Nation or heard about the controversy surrounding it, and wondered, “Is it historically accurate?,” the books available in public libraries at the time would have said it was.

Indeed, The Birth of a Nation directly inspired a revival of the Ku Klux Klan that became more powerful and influential than the original had been — and not just in the South, either. By 1924 the Klan had elected so many officials in Indiana they had essentially seized control of its government. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention a resolution to denounce the Klan failed by one vote. In 1927 the Klan staged a protest against racial equality in New York City and seven people were arrested. One of the Klansmen taken into custody that day was Fred Trump, father of the current President, which sheds an interesting light on Donald Trump’s calls for “law and order” and for the military to “dominate the streets” of American cities during an era of mass protests for racial equality and justice.

Gone with the Wind is not The Birth of a Nation. David O. Selznick worked hard to soften the racism of the original material. He’d experienced the controversy over The Birth of a Nation firsthand because his father had been one of its distributors, and he said in one of his copious memos during the making of Gone with the Wind that he’d been offered the remake rights to The Birth of a Nation but had turned them down because he didn’t want to reawaken the controversy over a story that openly glorified the Ku Klux Klan. The most problematic scene in Gone with the Wind is the one in which Scarlett drives her carriage through a low-brow area at night and is assaulted by both white and Black miscreants. She is rescued by her old Black foreman Sam (Everett Brown) and then avenged by a raiding party organized in a so-called “political meeting” led by her then-husband, Frank Kennedy (Carroll Nye), who gets conveniently killed. In Mitchell’s book that mysterious “political meeting” was a Klan meeting.

The Birth of a Nation can be described as a “hard” racist film and Gone with the Wind as a “soft” racist film. Gone with the Wind doesn’t contain the scenes of maniacal, slavering Blacks just itching to rape Southern white women that weighed down The Birth of a Nation. It also doesn’t present the Ku Klux Klan at all, much less depict them as heroes. What it does do is soft-pedal the fundamental injustice of slavery. Indeed, it barely mentions slavery at all; though Hecht’s written prologue, quoted above, uses the S-word, the opening credits euphemistically list the characters the film’s Black actors play as “servants.”

There are a few explicit references to the slave status of the Black characters — like when Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) threatens Prissy (Butterfly McQueen, whose voice I had always assumed was a “trick” one she’d created for the character until she was interviewed in a 1980’s making-of documentary and she sounded exactly the same) with being “sold South.” It was a common threat owners made to rebellious or insubordinate slaves to sell them from their plantations in Virginia or the Carolinas or the so-called “border states” (the ones that had slavery but didn’t secede) like Maryland to the presumably even harsher and nastier conditions in the Deep South, though given that Gone with the Wind is set in Georgia it’s something of a mystery how much farther south Scarlett could sell her. There’s also a curious scene taking place between the end of the Civil War in April 1865 and the death of Scarlett’s father that December in which he tells her she’s being too nice to the Black characters and needs to treat them more harshly to maintain their subservience.

Gone with the Wind is certainly a racist movie, but the racism in it is “soft,” the sort of “Lost Cause” retrospective glorification and whitewashing of slavery as a beneficent, paternal institution begun by Southern journalist Edward Pollard in an 1866 book he actually called The Lost Cause, in which he wrote:

We shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest a doubt here whether that odious term “slavery” which has been so long imposed, by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgment and sympathies of the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South, which was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system, bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.

It’s not like we didn’t know better. The evils of American slavery had been documented decades before in accounts by Northern researchers and activists and at least one white Southerner, Angelina Grimke. She was the daughter of a Southern planter and slaveowner whose religious convictions led her to reject the “Peculiar Institution.” In 1838 she published a book called American Slavery As It Is which documented, among other things, how often recalcitrant or rebellious slaves were punished by being starved, beaten or whipped. The realities of slavery were exposed in books by former slaves, including the most famous one, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845 with the provocative words “Written by Himself” on the title page — a challenge to the whole idea that Black people were inferior to whites and therefore deserved and even benefited from slavery. How, Douglass’s title page said, can you justify enslaving a whole race when at least one of them can write a book?

The most famous anti-slavery book written before the Civil War was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She started publishing it as a newspaper serial in 1851 and brought it out as a book in 1852. The first edition sold 300,000 copies — more than any other novel to that time — and was so influential that when Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in the White House in 1862 he told her, “So you’re the little lady whose book started this Great War?” Though later generations of Black people regarded Stowe’s slave characters as themselves stereotypical and insulting, Uncle Tom’s Cabin set the template for anti-slavery stories — including naming the white overseers, who directly supervised the slaves and ordered the whippings and other punishments, as the real villains of slavery.

There’s an interesting reflection of the villainous-overseer stereotype in Gone with the Wind. The overseer on the O’Haras’ plantation, Tara, is Jonas Wilkerson (Victor Jory), a Northern transplant who runs the plantation and essentially gives the O’Haras plausible deniability for anything bad that happens to their slaves. He disappears during the Civil War and later returns during Reconstruction as a Northern carpetbagger who tries to take a leading role in the government of Georgia. Wilkerson even engineers a $300 tax increase on Tara in the hope that Scarlett will default on the tax bill and he will be able to buy Tara at auction.

Certainly Gone with the Wind is part of the “Lost Cause” mythology that, among other things, put up all those statues of Robert E. Lee and other “heroes” of the Confederate rebellion that are now being fought over and toppled — legally or otherwise — today. They were meant to send a message to Black Southerners, “We may have lost the war, but we won the peace. You’re back where you belong; you are our workforce and we are your masters, and that’s as it should be.” Belaboring the racial politics of a movie that is far more about the romantic and business intrigues of its white characters than the condition of its Black ones is somewhat beside the point — though it’s occurred to me that the current descendants of Hattie McDaniel’s “Mammy” role are the Black urban professionals in Lifetime movies, who may have careers and responsibilities but are still there to try to talk the white characters out of the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all.

Yes, Gone with the Wind is a problematic film, Certainly, as I conceded in my Los Angeles Times letter opposing HBO Max’s censorship, it “portrays slavery in a benign light, and it could not be remade today without a major rewrite to dramatize the horrors of slavery and include multidimensional Black characters.” It shouldn’t be taken as a serious piece of Civil War historiography, even in a fictional context. It should be acknowledged as a work of its time. But it also should not be censored, especially since it is a landmark in film history and, though artistically as well as politically flawed, a worthy piece of entertainment and the kind of thematically broad epic, appealing to many different kinds of audience, today’s movie business seems to have forgotten how to make.

Feminist Heroine or Rape-Culture Victim?

In the 20 to 30 years (I can’t remember which) since the last time I’d seen Gone with the Wind I’d remembered it as a feminist parable whose progressive gender politics had at least partly made up for its terrible racial ones. Indeed, in my Los Angeles Times letter defending the film I had written that Gone with the Wind “presents a heroine who grows from a shallow schemer into a woman of strength and power.” Now, however, I’m not so sure; though Scarlett O’Hara has a fascinating character arc — spoiled rich bitch who toys with men loses her wealth and social standing as her side loses a war, then gains it all back again through her own grit and determination — the gender politics of Gone with the Wind, though nowhere nearly as problematic as its racial politics, still mark it as a work of its time and have some unpleasantly sexist resonances when seen today.

Scarlett O’Hara is introduced (in a scene that was actually the last one Vivien Leigh shot for the film, since after five previous tries producer Selznick still hadn’t seen what he wanted from it) toying with a couple of suitors called the Tarleton twins, who are so interchangeable the movie’s credits have them backwards. It’s actually George Reeves (future TV Superman whose mysterious death was the subject of Allen Coulter’s film Hollywoodland, featuring Ben Affleck in his finest performance) as Stuart Tarleton and Fred Crane as his twin brother Brent. “Fiddle-de-dee,” she says — and keeps saying throughout most of the first half of the movie, when she isn’t putting off her dilemmas (including fending off most of the men who want to marry her in her futile pursuit of Ashley Wilkes, who’s engaged to marry his cousin Melanie for no better apparent reason than all the Wilkeses marry their cousins) by saying, “Tomorrow is another day.”

One of Gone with the Wind’s most interesting and least spoken-of film antecedents is the 1931 MGM production A Free Soul. Though A Free Soul has nothing to do with slavery, the South and the Civil War, it is a two-men-one-woman romantic triangle with Clark Gable and Leslie Howard as the two men. In A Free Soul Norma Shearer stars as a young upper-class woman whose attorney father (Lionel Barrymore) has just returned to practice following a stint in rehab for alcoholism. (They didn’t call it “rehab” then — they called it “drying out” — but the principle was the same.) Howard is her effete upper-class boyfriend and Gable is the gangster she meets and falls for out of attraction to his sheer roughness. In the end Howard shoots and kills Gable — obviously we’re supposed to “get” that he’s “grown a pair,” as it were — and attorney Barrymore wins his acquittal but drops dead in court of a heart attack just after finishing his closing argument to the jury.

A Free Soul was one of the key films that helped make Clark Gable a star, and set the template for a lot of his future vehicles: the macho stud who confronts the female lead, takes her down several social pegs, and ultimately overpowers her into submission. Though at least one of his frequent co-stars, Jean Harlow, was a powerful enough screen presence to fight him back, he made most of his films opposite either Shearer or Joan Crawford, who were easy prey for him. Rhett Butler fits the pattern of Gable’s previous roles so well it’s not surprising 64 percent of the respondents in Gallup’s poll waned Gable in the role.

He delivers the goods, skewering the pretensions of his fellow Southerners in the early scene in which he warns them that the North’s much greater industrial base and more extensive railroads are advantages all the gallantry and honor in the world won’t be able to overcome. When he approaches Scarlett, it’s in the same Taming of the Shrew manner with which he approached his other co-stars, especially in films like It Happened One Night and this one in which the woman has more money and a higher social status than he. And for all his skepticism about the Southern cause, Rhett supports it first as a blockade runner (“for money,” he insists), delivering supplies to the South and racking up huge profits he stores in a bank in Liverpool, and then by volunteering for the Confederate army just when it’s dawning on everyone else that the South’s cause is lost.

It’s a measure of Margaret Mitchell’s peculiar skill as a writer that she managed to convince readers both in the 1930’s and since that Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler are living one of the great fictional love affairs when the scenes between them are highly combative and frequently quite nasty. Rhett opens by telling Scarlett that “you need to be kissed, quite often, and by someone who knows how to do it.” He shocks the crowd at a benefit dance for the Confederate cause by paying money for a dance with Scarlett (which at least one crowd member denounces as a “slave auction,” a bizarre bit of irony given that the whole point of Southern secession was to preserve an economy that depended on the buying, holding and selling of human beings as property!) when she’s supposed to be in mourning for her first husband, Melanie’s brother Charles, whom she married just to spite Melanie and who got measles and pneumonia at the front, dying a most unheroic death.

Rhett keeps turning up in Scarlett’s life, returning after the war when Scarlett is looking for anyone who can give her the $300 tax money she needs to save Tara. She finds him in a Union prison camp, and he tells her he’s broke because his fortune is tied up in England and if he tried to reclaim any of it, his captors would notice and seize it all. After Frank Kennedy, Scarlett’s second husband and a successful merchant she married because he could pay off the tax bill on Tara, conveniently gets killed in the raid after that mysterious “political meeting,” Rhett returns again and ultimately proposes marriage to her. She accepts and they have a modicum of happiness, but they still do a lot of sniping at each other.

They have a daughter, whom Rhett names “Bonnie Blue Butler” after the Confederate battle anthem “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” but she dies in a fall from her pony in a riding accident. Even before that, Scarlett has stopped having sex with Rhett because having one child already spoiled her figure and made it virtually impossible for Mammy to get her into the 18 ½-inch corset she wore before her pregnancy, and she doesn’t want to risk her figure with another child. So one night Rhett literally sweeps her off her feet, carries her to their bedroom and … thanks to the Production Code enforced on Hollywood between 1934 and 1966, the scene can’t get too graphic but it’s clear Rhett rapes her. When she realizes that he’s impregnated her again, she throws herself down the great staircase of Tara to induce an abortion and ensure that, to paraphrase her line from the end of the film’s first half that “as God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again,” she’ll never get pregnant again.

Margaret Mitchell managed in her novel to create two leading couples, the aristocratic but ultimately weak Ashley and Melanie — who stay together for life and whose son lives, or at least is still alive at the end — and Scarlett and Rhett, who snipe at each other through most of the story. Scarlett and Rhett are the most strong-willed characters in the tale, and they’re obviously at least superficially “right” for each other, but they’re also so strong-willed that neither of them will make the compromises needed to hold their relationship together. And after Rhett blows off Scarlett and leaves her with his famous kiss-off line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” — a word Selznick had to fight with the Production Code Administration to get to use in the film at all — Scarlett is left alone (except for all the faithful-to-a-fault Black ex-slaves who for some reason are still working for her) with her precious plantation. Only her final thoughts aren’t the goodbye-and-good-riddance-to-him-and-all-men ones a true feminist heroine would be uttering; they’re a promise to herself to win Rhett back, no matter how much she has to scheme to do it, because, “After all — tomorrow is another day!”

The Artistic Issues

So if Gone with the Wind is racially problematic (to say the least) and isn’t exactly the feminist tale that might make amends for its racial stereotyping and whitewashed view of slavery, does it at least hold up as a movie? Yes and no. Producer Selznick threw the entire armamentarium of mature Hollywood at it; if The Birth of a Nation is really the birth of movies as an artistic medium, Gone with the Wind is the full flowering of the innovations of Griffith and others and the creation of the well-oiled machine of classic Hollywood storytelling as they stood on the eve of World War II.

Gone with the Wind is very much a film of its moment. While the novel had been published in 1936, at a time when the U.S. was working its way out of the Great Depression and what was going on in those weirdly named countries in Europe and Asia was a matter of profound disinterest to most Americans, the film came out three years later, just as World War II was beginning and many Americans feared we would get dragged into it as we had been during World War I. As a film set on the home front during wartime, Gone with the Wind avoids any depiction of actual combat but brings home the horrors of war through the scenes of anxious Southerners awaiting the arrival of the printed casualty lists, frantically scanning them to see if their relatives are on them; and in the famous scene in which Scarlett, a volunteer nurse in a wartime hospital, loses it completely and wanders through an entire street full of wounded men. Selznick and cinematographer Haller had to rent a construction crane to shoot that sequence because no camera crane in Hollywood was long enough, or rose tall enough, to film it.

The connections between Gone with the Wind and World War II continued after the film was released and after the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941. Clark Gable enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps after his wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash in January 1942 while returning from a public-appearance tour selling war bonds. The corps originally wanted to use him only for training missions and propaganda films, but Gable insisted on flying in actual combat and, according to one member of his unit, volunteered for the most dangerous missions because “I think he wants to be with his wife.” At least Gable survived the war; Leslie Howard didn’t. He was killed in 1943 on a commercial airliner flying from Lisbon, Portugal to Bristol, England through an area the Germans considered a war zone. German gunners shot down Howard’s plane, and some accounts claimed they did so because they mistakenly thought British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was on it.

Certainly the fact that Gone with the Wind was made about a major war on the eve of another, even more major war gave it even more emotional resonance than it might otherwise have had. But it’s also a powerful story, vividly told, with four principal actors almost perfectly “right” for their parts (five if you count Hattie McDaniel’s role as a principal, which you should) and the virtues of Hollywood’s technological and aesthetic maturity.

The problem with Gone with the Wind as a work of art is it really doesn’t extend itself beyond the virtues of Hollywood’s technological and aesthetic maturity. The use of the expensive and elaborate three-strip Technicolor process helped the film’s appeal — especially after color productions became standard and Gone with the Wind could therefore still be shown in theatres after audiences expected all films to be in color — though the currently available DVD Charles and I watched has had its color toned down to the more burnished brown-and-green look common to a modern color film instead of the vivid, sometimes overly garish hues for which three-strip Technicolor was known. Indeed, the first feature film shot entirely in three-strip had been made four years earlier — Becky Sharp, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a book that had strongly, shall we say, “influenced” Margaret Mitchell when she wrote Gone with the Wind.

The biggest problem with Gone with the Wind was aptly described by F. Scott Fitzgerald during his short stint as a screenwriter on it. He wrote David Selznick a memo saying, “I still think it’s dull and false for one character to describe another.” The characters in Gone with the Wind describe each other to each other at great length — indeed, it’s largely through their descriptions of each other to each other that Mitchell and the filmmakers let us know how they want us to feel about them. Gone with the Wind is also one of the most obviously “planted” films of all time. “Planting” was a highly valued skill among 1930’s screenwriters; it meant dropping a hint early on in the action that suggested, and gave an audience forewarning of, a major plot development later on. Done well, it could give a powerful sense of unity to a film’s story. Done poorly or too obviously, it just seemed like arbitrary coincidence-mongering.

The most obvious and outrageous example of “planting” in Gone with the Wind is the sequence in which the dipsomaniac Gerald O’Hara, adjusting (or failing to adjust) to life after the North has won the Civil War, its soldiers have laid waste to Tara and Scarlett and his other two daughters have been reduced to picking cotton themselves to keep the plantation going, takes his favorite horse out on the grounds of Tara, tries to make a difficult jump over a fence and falls to his death. Almost two hours of running time later Gerald’s granddaughter Bonnie Blue Butler takes out her pony for her first attempt at a sidesaddle ride (since Scarlett has been told it isn’t “lady-like” to let her daughter use a man’s saddle), attempts the same jump … and just to make sure we get the point, we get a closeup of an increasingly frantic Scarlett as she says, “Just like Paw … just like Paw!” before, you guessed it, Bonnie takes the same jump her granddad had, with the same fatal result.

One other element in Gone with the Wind that seems really bothersome today is Max Steiner’s overwrought musical score. He usually worked at Warner Bros., where studio head Jack Warner told his music people, “I want the music to start when it says ‘Warner Bros. Present’ and not stop until it says ‘The End.’” Even here, in a non-Warner film (though it now bears the Warner Bros. logo since Ted Turner acquired MGM’s film library and then Warner Bros. acquired Turner’s media company), Steiner all too faithfully followed instructions.

His music not only almost never stops, it comments directly on the action and mirrors the visuals so closely it was sometimes derisively referred to as “Mickey-Mousing.” (The term originated out of Walt Disney’s belief that audiences wouldn’t accept a sound cartoon unless picture and sound were kept very closely in synch, and it became applied to live-action movies that also had an especially tight coordination between the visuals and the soundtrack.) Steiner’s music is so relentless that when we finally get a scene in which he shuts up — Rhett’s actual marriage proposal to Scarlett — the scene oddly seems more powerful from the absence of Steiner’s music.

When Gone with the Wind was new it got the reaction David Selznick wanted: not only enormous success at the box office but critical acclaim as the greatest movie that had ever been or would ever be made. More modern critics have soured on it; though Dwight Macdonald applauded it on its 1961 reissue (deliberately timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Civil War) as “adult entertainment” because of the complexity of its characters, in 1973 Richard Schickel slammed it for many of the same reasons anti-racist writers attack it today: “Frankly, my dear, I didn’t (and still don’t) give a damn about the South’s yokel notion that it once supported a new age of chivalry and grace. … I never could join Miss Mitchell in mourning the era gone with her wind, which seemed to me far from an ill wind.” He also dismissed it as romantic kitsch typical of Selznick’s overall output. (https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/73mar/schick.htm)

I still like Gone with the Wind, though its soft-racist depiction of American slavery is pretty off-putting and how I ache to see a self-actualizing Black character in the film. (I once had the fantasy that Selznick and his writers had had one of the slaves at Tara teach himself to read and write, get whipped for that transgression, ultimately escape and then return as a Reconstruction politician humiliating the O’Haras by forcing them to take orders from a man they’d once owned. I even wished that Paul Robeson could have played this part.) But I’m not even sure it deserved the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1939; though it has its own set of problems, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a much nervier film, audaciously blending Right- and Left-wing political sensibilities (Capra was a Republican and his writer, Sidney Buchman, was a Communist) and featuring a star, James Stewart, who stretched himself beyond his usual range instead of neatly fitting into his comfortable groove the way Clark Gable did in Gone with the Wind.

Beyond George Floyd: Rethinking Police and “Crime”

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“Well, we don’t understand why he called in the National Guard/

When Uncle Sam is the one who belongs in the exercise yard.”

— Kevin Godley, Graham Gouldman and Lol Creme,

“Robber Bullets,” song by British rock band 10 c.c., 1973

Who would have thought that the Big Story that would drive the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic from the lead slots on TV news and the front pages of whatever newspapers are left would be a rerun of a story that’s been told too often already? An unarmed African-American is killed by a white police officer after either showing signs of mental illness, being suspected of a nonviolent crime or just being out and Living While Black. People protest in the streets, mostly calmly, respectfully and nonviolently. But a few demonstrators smash windows and spray-paint storefronts, somehow thinking they’re striking a blow for the Revolution, and apolitical looters take advantage of the police being distracted to steal and enrich themselves.

Not all those elements appear in every version of this tiresome script. The murder — I don’t think that’s too strong a word — of 46-year-old African-American Minneapolis resident George Floyd on Monday, May 25 (by ironic coincidence, also the day the U.S. celebrated Memorial Day) wasn’t committed with a gun. Instead, 44-year-old police officer Derek Chauvin (who shares a last name with a particularly hyper-patriotic official in 18^th century France, after whom the term “chauvinism” was coined) put his knee against Floyd’s neck while Floyd was already on the ground, doing nothing to resist Chauvin and the three other officers on the scene, and held it there for nearly nine minutes while Floyd protested, “I can’t breathe … I can’t breathe,” until Floyd stopped being able to breathe permanently.

The Floyd murder is also unusual in the sheer scope and extent of the protests it engendered. Not since the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, which spawned the “Black Lives Matter” movement, had there been so many protests of such large size in so many cities. And not all the protests were in the United States, either; late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert showed footage of one in Berlin and made a joke about how bizarre it is that Germany, of all countries, should need to lecture us about racism.

And yet the Floyd murder is also playing out in ways that reinforce my perception that America in the era of Donald Trump’s Presidency is taking a giant Rorschach test. There are two huge political camps in the U.S. that seem almost permanently divided not only on how they judge every issue but even on what the facts are. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own set of facts.” That sort of thinking is outdated; people who get their news from Right-wing outlets like Fox News and talk radio have a very different perception of what the news is and what events are important than people who read major newspapers or watch broadcast networks or CNN.

The usual way these issues work out is the police and the protesters pretty quickly line up on opposite sides. That hasn’t always happened here — there’ve been reports of police officials actually talking to protesters and, in some cases, taking off their caps, badges and guns and joining the lines. There apparently are a number of police officers who don’t automatically assume that what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd was appropriate or the kind of police work they want to encourage. Then there are the police departments like Los Angeles’s who are reacting according to their usual playbook, instituting strict curfews and arresting people on the streets after the cops said they can be.

Trump Is a Racist

One person who acted utterly predictably and counterproductively has been President Donald Trump. Nobody should have looked to this lifelong racist — whose father was one of seven Ku Klux Klan members arrested, ironically, at a Klan-sponsored protest in New York City in 1927 — for sympathy with the protesters or the long-standing grievances African-Americans have over how they’ve been policed in the 411 years since they were first brought to the U.S. as slaves to work the tobacco plantations of Virginia.

The Trump family has been racist ever since Donald’s father, Fred Trump, got into the real-estate business in the first place. The Trump Organization has systematically discriminated against African-Americans and other people of color at least since 1950, when folksinger Woody Guthrie moved into a Fred Trump-owned building and then felt forced to move out again when he found the Trumps wouldn’t let Black tenants into their buildings (when racial discrimination in housing was still legal). He responded by adding a new verse to his song “I Ain’t Got No Home,” explaining why he’d had to move and calling out Fred Trump as a racist by name. After racial discrimination in housing was made illegal in 1966, the Trump Organization was sued at least twice by the federal government for breaking that law — once when Fred Trump was still alive, and again in the 1980’s after he’d died and Donald had taken over.

In 1989 Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in all four major New York newspapers, at a reported cost of $85,000, demanding the execution of the so-called “Central Park Five,” five young African-American men who were convicted of raping and assaulting a 26-year-old white woman who was jogging in Central Park. Headlined “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!,” Trump’s ad began, “What has happened to our City over the last ten years? What has happened to law and order, to the neighborhood cop we all trusted to safeguard our homes and families, the cop who had the power under the law to help us in times of danger, keep us safe from those who would prey on innocent lives to fulfill some distorted inner need?” He called on legislators to “unshackle” the police “from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s.”

And in the most ominous part of the ad, especially in explaining Trump’s mind-set on police-community relations in 2020 as well as in 1989, he wrote, “Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” [Emphasis in original.] Ultimately DNA tests revealed that the “Central Park Five” were actually innocent, and in 2001 another man confessed to the crime, but Yusef Salaam, one of the Five, later called Trump “the fire starter” whose pressure campaign led to their wrongful convictions. Salaam said that thanks to Trump’s ad, “common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.” He said his family received death threats after Trump’s ads ran.

Trump’s racism has manifested itself in innumerable ways his entire adult life, especially during his political career. When Barack Obama first ran for President in 2008 Trump became the leading public spokesperson for the so-called “Birther movement,” which argued that Obama was born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be President. Throughout the campaign Obama was forced to respond to Trump and the other “Birthers” by producing document after document proving he’d been born exactly where he’d said he was — Honolulu, Hawai’i. The “Birther” allegation was obvious dog-whistle racism, with Trump and Obama’s other political enemies saying essentially, “He’s not one of us” — highlighting the physical difference between him and the 43 previous Presidents.

Trump has continued his war on Obama even after he succeeded him to the Presidency. He has methodically sought to undo every major accomplishment of Obama’s Presidency — the Affordable Care Act, the Paris agreement on climate change, the nuclear arms deal with Iran and the protection of so-called “Dreamers” (children of undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents, many of whom know no other culture than ours and no other language but English) from deportation. Most recently he refused to participate in the official unveiling of Obama’s portrait in the White House — one more coded message that Trump considers Obama’s presidency to be illegitimate because of Obama’s race.

Not all of Trump’s racist actions have been veiled in code. He began his Presidential campaign in 2015 with a slashing attack on immigrants from Mexico, calling them “murderers,” “rapists” and “drug dealers.” When white supremacists rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12, 2017 and one counter-protester was deliberately run over by a car driven by a white supremacist, Trump caused nationwide controversy by saying there were “very fine people on both sides — on both sides.” A day later Trump backed away from that statement and insisted he condemned violence, but the day after that he held an angry press conference outside Trump Tower in New York City in which he lashed out at the media (one of his favorite targets) and said, ““What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they do.”

So it wasn’t surprising that on June 1, one week after Floyd’s murder, Trump announced that he was “the president of law and order,” called on state governors to call out the National Guard to suppress protests, and said he would order the U.S. military — “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” — to cities where protests were going on. Though Trump paid lip service to the idea that people had the right to protest Floyd’s murder and police abuses in general, he said the actual actions were “not acts of peaceful protest. These are acts of domestic terror.” He initially blamed both the protests and the looting that accompanied some of them on “anarchists” and then attributed them to the loosely organized Left-wing coalition Antifa (short for “anti-fascist”), most of whose members (to the extent it has any) are white college students whose main objectives are blocking Right-wing speakers from appearing on campuses and disrupting their events if they do.

While Trump was making his June 1 speech officials from the U.S. military and the Department of Justice were clearing peaceful demonstrators out of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. so Trump and an entourage — including attorney general William Barr, acting defense secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — could walk over to St. John’s Episcopal Church for a photo-op in which Trump stood in front of the church and held up a Bible. He picked the church because during an earlier protest, someone had set a fire in its basement.

The church’s pastor, Bishop Mariann Budde, was upset that Trump used her church for his action, especially without so much as a courtesy call in advance. “Let me be clear, the president just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” she told CNN. “We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others. And I just can’t believe what my eyes have seen.”

Various commentators have compared Trump’s campaign for re-election to Richard Nixon’s Presidential campaign in 1968. As part of his and Senator Strom Thurmond’s (R-SC) “Southern Strategy” to neutralize the threat of George Wallace’s Right-wing third-party candidacy, Nixon essentially promised racist voters throughout the country that he would be as hard on African-American rioters and demonstrators as Wallace — so racists should vote for him because he, unlike Wallace, could actually be elected. Like Trump, Nixon declared himself the candidate of “law and order” and claimed that he could restore domestic peace after the riots following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the tumult in the streets during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

“It’s a decades-long Republican strategy,” Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, told Los Angeles Times reporter Chris Megerian in a June 3 article (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-02/trump-ran-against-america-carnage-happening-on-his-watch). “Trump is drawing on this tradition. But he’s also making it his own, because he’s the most divisive and inflammatory president we’ve had.” Dallek pointed out that unlike Nixon, who veiled his racist appeals with coded terms like “law and order” and “states’ rights,” Trump is “more willing to say the racist and nativist pieces out loud.” While all the Republicans who’ve won Presidential elections since 1968 — Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes — have appealed to racist voters as part of that “decades-long strategy,” there was always reason to doubt whether they were personally racist themselves. With Trump, there is no doubt: Donald Trump is a racist and a white supremacist.

What Happened to George Floyd?

One of the oddest things about the coverage of the George Floyd murder and the response to it by ordinary citizens, police and politicians is so few people have published the details of just how Floyd attracted the attention of the Minneapolis police in the first place. The initial reports were that Floyd had been apprehended on a charge of “forgery” — a crime that usually isn’t committed on the sort of street corner where he was confronted and ultimately killed — which made me wonder if he had tried to pass a bad check at the convenience store in front of which he was killed. The truth, as revealed in a June 5 Los Angeles Times op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Paul Butler (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-05/george-floyd-arrest-police-killing), was both fascinating in its own right and indicative of how differently white and Black Americans are policed.

The incident began on May 25, when a clerk at the convenience store called police to report that Floyd had bought a pack of cigarettes and paid for it with a $20 bill the clerk thought looked counterfeit. The store’s owner later acknowledged, “Most of the times when patrons give us a counterfeit bill, they don’t even know it’s fake.” Had George Floyd been white, the officers who took the call would first have asked the store clerk how he knew the bill was counterfeit, and then would have taken Floyd aside and asked him where he got that particular piece of cash.

“Instead,” Gertner and Butler wrote, “within minutes of the police officers’ arrival, Floyd was face down on the street, hands tied behind his back, with Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes, while two other cops restrained Floyd by pressing down on his back and legs, and the fourth officer kept distressed passers-by from intervening. Floyd begged for his life, telling them that he couldn’t breathe. Soon, his body went limp and silent. He was declared dead at the hospital.”

George Floyd was yet another victim of a culture of racism that seems to be inbred in every U.S. police department. It is, I suspect, a product of years of social conditioning within the police community that holds that an action which would be considered innocuous if a white person did it — like reaching into one’s pocket to pull out a cell phone — is considered highly dangerous and even life-threatening if done by a Black person, especially a Black male. As Gertner and Butler point out, “African-American men such as George Floyd suffer from a presumption of guilt from the moment they encounter a police officer. Almost 50% of Black men have been arrested by age 23, most often in connection with minor offenses that they don’t commit more frequently than white men. This arrest gap ultimately results in Black men having a one in three chance of going to prison, compared with one in six for Latino men, and one in 17 for white men.”

This social conditioning seems to be a constant in police culture regardless of how much any given police department tries to “reform.” It seems to exist in police officers whether or not they are consciously racist in other aspects of their lives. One could readily imagine a white officer saying, “I’m not a racist! I coach a Black team in the Police Athletic League!” — and still pulling a gun on a Black man who was reaching for a cell phone because his police-community conditioning led him to assume the Black man was reaching for a gun.

It also seems to be impervious to the race of the officials in charge of police departments, or the color of politicians who supposedly control them. George Floyd was murdered by an officer in a police department whose chief at the time was an African-American. Michael Brown, whose killing by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 sparked the Black Lives matter movement in the first place, was killed at a time when the President of the United States was an African-American. It’s tragic to go back and re-read some of the anti-racist literature of the 1970’s and note the hopeful — and overly optimistic — assumption a lot of those writers made that African-Americans and Latino-Americans would be policed fairly once things were run by people who looked like them.

Defund the Police! And End the “War on Drugs”!

When I first heard the demand “Defund the Police!” expressed on protest signs and by African-American commentators on news outlets like MS-NBC, I got scared. It seemed to me that demanding defunding of police would be a sure way to galvanize scared white suburban voters into re-electing Donald Trump, expanding the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate and giving the House of Representatives back to the GOP. “Hey!” I could envision Republican propagandists and Fox News personalities saying. “The Democrats want to get rid of the police so their Black buddies can riot, loot, rape and kill to their hearts’ content!” Visions of a 50-state landslide for Trump were doing the devil’s dance in my head.

Then, the more I thought about it, the idea of defunding existing police departments and radically rethinking just how we maintain social order in this country started to make a lot more sense. Granted that we need some type of police and justice system to keep people from committing crimes against each other’s persons or property, do we really need the kind of police we have? Do we really need a police department consciously modeled on the military, with army-style ranks and chains of command, and equipped not only with guns but, increasingly, with tactical battlefield weapons developed to fight wars and applied on the streets of our communities?

I’ll never forget how shocked I was when I first heard of a SWAT team (the acronym stands for “Special Weapons and Tactics”): in 1974, when the SWAT unit of the Los Angeles Police Department staged a raid on the Los Angeles redoubt of what was left of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst and then brainwashed her into joining them. Since then SWAT actions have become routine and virtually all big-city police departments have SWAT units. SWAT teams are a vivid display of how “special weapons and tactics” originally developed for fighting wars abroad have been brought home — and how American police operating in communities of color see their role more as to dominate and occupy than to “protect and serve.”

The militarization of U.S. police departments really began in 1969, when Richard Nixon took office on a “law and order” platform and immediately announced he was starting a “War on Drugs.” There had been intimations before that America’s drug policy would get tougher — in 1966 New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller got his state to pass what he called “a tough new law that can get addicts off the streets for 15 years” — but things really got nasty when Nixon announced “Operation Intercept” on September 21, 1969. “Operation Intercept” was an attempt to stop all smuggling of marijuana from Mexico to the U.S. According to the Wikipedia page on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Intercept), it “ involved increased surveillance of the border from both air and sea, but the major part of the policy was the individual inspection, mandated to last three minutes, of every vehicle crossing into the United States from Mexico.”

“Operation Intercept” actually worked — the flow of marijuana from Mexico to the U.S. virtually ceased — but it also had two unforeseen consequences. First, it stimulated the formation of a major U.S. marijuana industry, as people involved in selling it realized that with the border effectively closed to Mexican pot, they would have to grow their own. Second, it left a lot of drug smugglers potentially unemployed — a problem they solved by switching from marijuana to cocaine. Because cocaine is more compact, it was easier to get past the border guards — and because, as you learn in Economics 101, increasing the supply of something lowers its price, cocaine, previously so expensive it was a rich person’s drug, became democratized and accessible to anyone.

Cocaine became even more readily accessible after 1981, when someone figured out how to change cocaine powder into “rocks” that could easily be smoked in a glass pipe. The resulting substance came to be known as “crack,” and as the Los Angeles Times editorial board noted in a sense-of-the-paper editorial June 10, “it wormed its way into the popular imagination as a fearful substance that threatened to destroy the nation. The anti-crack frenzy preceded the real epidemic, which took off in the middle of the decade when Congress made penalties for possessing the substance 100 times greater than for similar amounts of powder cocaine.” (The bill that did that was, ironically, introduced by an African-American Congressmember, Charles Rangel of New York.)

“Two companion public health disasters followed in quick succession,” the Times editorial explained. “The first was violent crime, as crack profits lured street entrepreneurs and gangs. Competition became deadly. The murder rate for young Black men doubled. The second was the law enforcement response and what later became widely known as mass incarceration. Black communities that for decades had suffered from official neglect suddenly saw astounding investment of public resources — in the form of violent policing.”

As cities, states and the federal government all swelled their police budgets to maintain that violent, coercive response to crack, budgets for other interventions were cut. Public-health programs and outreach efforts to target mentally ill individuals were among the chief victims. Police and prison-guard unions made common cause to lobby legislatures to pass more anti-crime laws and lengthen the sentences for laws already on the books — and they got huge financial support from investors who saw opportunities for building private, for-profit prisons to handle the vast increase in incarcerated people. The result was the U.S. now has the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation in the world — higher than China, North Korea or any other dictatorship.

A widely cited definition of “insanity” is “doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.” Unlike other countries — especially in Europe — the United States has always defined drug use as primarily a criminal-justice issue instead of a public-health issue. The most egregious example is America’s 14-year ignoble experiment with Prohibition, in which the Constitution was actually amended to ban the sale or possession of alcoholic beverages. The result was, among other things, a vast expansion of organized crime in general and the Mafia (which until then had been a relatively minor threat; its main source of income was extortion and its main victims were law-abiding Italian-Americans) in particular. That history repeated itself with the viciously violent drug cartels formed first in Colombia and then in Mexico to provide U.S. “gangstas” with the raw material to make and sell crack.

One way to “defund the police” is to shift resources from highly violent, militarized policing into public-health outreaches and intervention. Another is to remake the police themselves, to strip police departments of their militaristic command-and-control structures and make them more oriented towards community service. But a third element of defunding the police — and I would argue the most important one — is simply to make fewer things illegal.

I would argue that, unless a behavior directly harms another human being besides the doer — unless it poses a direct threat to another person’s life, liberty or property — it should not be a crime. By that token, simple possession of all drugs should be decriminalized. A number of people have compiled statistics of what percentage of U.S. guilty pleas or convictions are for violating the drug laws — but those numbers underestimate how many U.S. criminal cases are drug-related. I learned that when I covered sentencing hearings at the San Diego County Courthouse in the 1990’s and noticed that virtually everyone who was not being sentenced for a drug-law violation was being sentenced for a robbery or burglary they had committed to raise the money to buy drugs.

It’s true that U.S. police abuses against communities of color — particularly African-Americans — pre-date the “War on Drugs” and even the first moves to make drugs illegal in the late 19^th century. A number of “Defund the Police” advocates have argued that the roots of America’s police forces and the quasi-military way they’re organized is in the so-called “slave patrols” that hunted down fugitive slaves. Certainly after the Civil War the former Confederate states seized on the loophole in the 13th Amendment which banned slavery or involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” and enacted so-called “Black Codes” that created new “crimes” for which only Black people were prosecuted and allowed white people to force them into servitude by paying their “fines” for committing these offenses.

But it’s been the various phases of the “War on Drugs” — the initial laws against opiates and cocaine in the 1890’s, Prohibition, the push for laws against marijuana in the 1930’s largely to keep the former Prohibition agents employed, and then the vast expansions in anti-drug laws and the sentences for drug crimes in the 1970’s and 1980’s — that have created what’s been called the “prison-industrial complex” and made the U.S. the world’s number one nation in incarcerating its own citizens. These laws have, not surprisingly, been enforced with especially intense ferocity and venom against African-Americans and other people of color.

In an otherwise reasonable column in the June 10 Los Angeles Times, “Bad Apples? Yes, but It’s the System that Keeps Them on Police Forces” (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-10/black-lives-matter-minneapolis-derek-chauvin-defund-police), Harry Litman opposes “defunding the police” campaign with arguments like this: “Shifting some responsibilities away from police to other specialists is logical and appropriate. … But the experience of the best and most engaged community policing programs suggests that what well-trained officers bring to situations — including the prospect of force — can help keep the peace. Defunding proposals also cut directly against policies that underlie some of the biggest success stories in contemporary policing, where more involved and broadly skilled officers aim to become partners rather than occupying forces in the communities they work in.”

But, as the old saying goes, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If your response to mentally ill individuals “acting out” or instances of domestic violence is to send out people with guns, all too often those guns are going to be used. The quasi-militaristic police culture of today is not an appropriate instrument to deal with issues like drug abuse, domestic violence, mental illness or the experience of being human-trafficked. (There is a police role in going after people who traffic humans or sell drugs — and that include the major opiate pushers like Purdue or Mallinkrodt, who have probably killed more people with their products than the illegal cartels.)

Long-term reform of American policing and an end to the death toll among people of color, especially African-Americans, will, I believe, require fundamental rethinking not only of what we want and expect from our police departments but of how much behavior we define as “criminal.” It will require the immediate end of the “War on Drugs” and the repeal of all laws against the simple possession (as opposed to the sale or distribution) of intoxicating substances. And it will require fundamental retraining and a large-scale purge of existing police officers to get rid of the people — even ones who aren’t openly racist and are otherwise “good cops” — who have been conditioned by the police culture to regard people of color in general, and Black people in particular, as more “threatening” and violence-prone than whites.

Life During Wartime

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

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 11^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.