Nor was this the only form of lawless extravagance which owed its origin to the plague. Men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, and not just as they pleased, seeing the rapid transitions produced by persons in prosperity suddenly dying and those who before had nothing succeeding to their property. So they resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none, it was so uncertain whether they would be spared to attain the object; but it was settled that present enjoyment, and all that contributed to it, was both honorable and useful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offences, but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.
Thucydides: History of the Pelopennisian War 2.53
For the past week, as the coronavirus continued to spread and as America continues to “shut it down” by canceling, like, everything, I have been talking to more and more people about COVID-19 and I have been hearing all sorts of wild sh*t; everything from black people can’t get the coronavirus to devil-worshipping to germ warfare being waged by at least 4 different countries (inclcuding the United States itself) to conspiracy theories that have absolutely nothing to do with the spread of COVID-19.
Most of my friends and associates know that I have little to no tolerance for stuff like that but...I let them get it out. I voice my objections, of course, and my friends nod their heads in agreement and say “mmmmm-hmmmm” and I leave the conversations knowing that I have convinced absolutely noone...well...until…
I reminded someone that epidemics and pandemics are far from unusual. I reminded this person (who’s older than me) of some of the epidemics/pandemics that existed in their lifetime and the person remembered some of them (e.g. the Hong Kong flu).
That seemed to get through...but maybe it didn’t.
I will admit that I have struggled a bit with how to cover news and punditry about the coronavirus. I mean, Greg Dworkin (King of All APR) is a medical doctor who does a great job with the science and the dos and the don’ts of these times.
As I’ve noticed the crowded bars today from my space of “social distancing” (in some defiance of many of the suggestions by public officials) I began thinking back to Thucydides account of the Athenian Plague in The History of the Pelopennisian War (and not for the first time) and I think: Our species hasn’t changed one bit, really, has it?
So I’ll leave the medical stuff to Greg and Mark. I’m more interested in noting what this coronavirus pandemic says about us, as a society...and that will be the primary focus of the punditry that I will link and excerpt on this topic.
And no, I haven’t forgotten about the pundits, themselves!
Laurie Penny at Wired writes about the intersection of pandemics and culture (of course, you really can’t separate the two!)
These are strange, scary times, and people are acting scared and strange. My phone is throbbing with messages from family around the world, checking in on each other. One dear friend is flying home to Ireland tonight to care for her sick parents while her brother is in quarantine. Another is sick, struggling to breathe, hasn’t slept in days, and has decided to fixate on the fact that she’s run out of potatoes.
Societies have been shaped by outbreaks for as long as we’ve had societies. “Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning,” writes Frank M. Snowden in Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. “Every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that society’s structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.”
It doesn’t matter whose fault it is that Covid-19 is ravaging the planet. What matters is how we stop it—and stopping an epidemic is never just a fight with nature. It’s also a fight with culture.
As an African American classics major, I instantly recognized the name Frank M. Snowden...and yes, the Frank M. Snowden that Penny mentions is his son and history, culture, and pandemics is one of Professor Snowden’s specialties.
And yes, Professor Snowden has had quite a bit to say about how the coronavirus outbreak has been handled by various nations and organization: his interview with Issac Chotiner in a March 3 interview with The New Yorker, for starters.
What have you made of China’s response to this current coronavirus?
That’s a really interesting question to ask, and it’s one that I think we’re going to need to think about long and hard, because it has a number of aspects to it that are really complicated. The first thing is the strong-arm methods introduced by the Chinese on January 23rd, when they introduced cordon sanitaire, which is a wholesale quarantine by cordoning off with soldiers and policemen whole geographical areas and communities. In this case, in Wuhan, a city of some eleven million, and then the Hubei Province, which has almost sixty million people, they decided to impose a lockdown.
That is something which harkens back to plague measures and that has been repeated over and over, including in the Ebola epidemic. The problem with the cordon sanitaire is that it’s clumsy. It’s a sledgehammer. It arrives too late and it breaks down that fundamental element of public health, which is information. That is to say that, threatened with the lockdown, people don’t coöperate with authorities. Authorities therefore no longer know what’s going on and people take flight, which spreads the epidemic. I was very startled to see that this was the response of the Chinese government at the outset. It differs from the norms of public health, which have developed since the plague years, which stress case findings of individuals, then tracing and isolation.
Read the entire interview, if you haven’t already!
Continuing along those lines, Malka Older in Foreign Policy argues that the “disaster” of the Coronavirus pandemic is actually...all too predictable.
Disaster exceptionalism—this idea that crises are extra-ordinary and demand extra-ordinary answers and laws—is already being applied to the accelerating outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. In his Oval Office speech on Wednesday night, Trump said of the pandemic, “This is just a temporary moment of time,” and continued to frame the virus as both foreign and likely to disappear on its own.
Other Republican politicians have also been singling out the crisis as an unusual moment in health policy. The Huffington Post, in a story about members of the GOP who “seem open to reimbursing hospitals for treating the uninsured,” quotes Republican Rep. Mike Johnson as saying, “I think a pandemic is a distinct issue from the overall health care proposals that have been on the table for a while.” The pandemic, however, isn’t a magical change from the noncrisis health care situation in the United States but a continuation of it. It’s dangerous—and, consciously or otherwise, deceptive—to claim that disasters are special “moments in time,” completely separate from our day-to-day lives.
While I am largely in agreement with Ms. Older’s overall argument, I also thought that it was a thickly veiled argument for universal health care (single payer) perhaps. I might have liked to have seen Ms. Older tackle some of the aspects of what made the Italian response to the COVID-19 pandemic problematic simply because Italy does have universal health care. Just a nitpick, that’s all.
Multiple reporters at the Washington Post say: Yes, the administration’s reaction to the looming coronavirus pandemic is as horrifically bungled as lt looks. Probably even worse than that.
The West Wing these past few weeks has felt like the early days — brimming with chaos, beset by backbiting, and now populated by return characters. Hope Hicks, the former communications director and Trump confidante, is back, this time as a top aide to Kushner. Hicks has been involved in the coronavirus response, as have Kushner deputy Avi Berkowitz and Adam Boehler, another Kushner ally who is chief executive of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.
Trump is between chiefs of staff — acting chief Mick Mulvaney is transitioning out while Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) prepares to replace him — and the lack of a forceful gatekeeper has led to the president conducting decision-making as he prefers: With upward of a half-dozen aides and advisers in the Oval Office, all scrambling to perform for him as they await his decisions, which sometimes depend on his mood.
“People just show up in the Oval and spout off ideas,” said a former senior administration official briefed on the coronavirus discussions. “He’ll either shoot down ideas or embrace ideas quickly. It’s an ad hoc free-for-all with different advisers just spitballing.”
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic picks it up from there (it seems)
...Only the national government can oversee the response to a national outbreak by coordinating research on the nature of the disease. Only the state can ensure the national regulation and accuracy of testing, and use its fiscal and monetary might to stimulate the economy if the pandemic threatens people’s income and employment.
Throughout the world, the most effective responses to the historic threat of the coronavirus have come from state governments. China imposed a lockdown of tens of millions of people in Wuhan and other cities. In Singapore, the government built an app to inform citizens how to contain the virus and what public spaces to avoid. South Korea opened a number of drive-through centers to accelerate diagnostic testing.
But in the United States, the pandemic has devolved into a kind of grotesque caricature of American federalism. The private sector has taken on quasi-state functions at a time when the executive branch of government—drained of scientific expertise, starved of moral vision—has taken on the qualities of a failed state. In a country where many individuals, companies, institutions, and local governments are making hard decisions for the good of the nation, the most important actor of them all—the Trump administration—has been a shambolic bonanza of incompetence.
Or even so-called “sh*thole countries like Senegal...
Susan Crawford at the Los Angeles Times says that the coronavirus crisis is...and will show us why we need government.
Following the Reagan era and 40 years of steady hollowing-out of government, the very idea that the public sector is relevant to our well-being has become unpopular. Many Americans seem to view government as an impediment to the American dream, an old-fashioned, incompetent extractor of taxes that is to be evaded and ridiculed. In a vicious and largely invisible cycle, popular contempt has led to government agencies not having the money and talent they need to do what needs to be done.
Now the bill is coming due. And although the public health crisis we are living through is top-of-mind today, there are innumerable similar failures all around — perhaps none bigger than our collective blindness to our unavoidable need to adapt to climate change.
Rapidly accelerating sea-level rise, river flooding and extreme heat are affecting communities across the country. Other countries are taking this seriously. Singapore plans to spend $75 billion in short order to ensure it is able to survive rising temperatures and floodwaters. The Dutch are planning decades ahead, even considering having to move east to save their country.
And us? Local governments, at best unsupported and often actively opposed by the federal government, are doing their best to plan for climate change. But they don’t have the resources to pay for protective infrastructure or to build new communities in high, dry, and connected places, where both transit and internet access are high-quality and inexpensive. We are ambling toward an apocalypse with every passing month.
Chile, can you even imagine The Damn Fool talking about invoking the 25th Amendment? Jack Shafer at Politico tries.
At this point, it’s not morbid, just good planning, to say the administration has no excuse not to start making plans for the chance that the virus might incapacitate Trump. The White House has not exactly been transparent about whether Trump has been tested. But his age and his clinical obesity mean that his system would be fighting an infection from a trench: It can put older patients on ventilators, sometimes for four weeks, even if they do recover.
The Constitution has a provision for this, of course: The 25th Amendment allows an orderly transfer of power if the president can’t execute his duties.
The obstacle to such a smooth transition isn’t the system: It’s Trump.
Trump himself never admits weakness. As a businessman and a leader, he resists looking too far ahead, and is known for simply dodging and weaving to keep bad news at bay—a quality that has already served him badly in handling the biggest crisis of his presidency. As for the people around him: He hand-picks his staff for personal loyalty over any particular principles, and replaces them when they fail to exhibit the blind allegiance he desires.
The 25th Amendment has been invoked only a few times, always voluntarily by presidents themselves when they’ve undergone surgery. If it’s hard to imagine Trump himself ceding power for any reason, it’s even harder to imagine the amendment’s powerful Section 4 being invoked, transferring power from the president without his consent. It requires consensus of the people close to him—specifically, “the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide.”
Tonight’s Democratic debate between Senator Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden will be a debate unlike any other, says Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times.
Both men will be auditioning for the presidency amid an unfolding national emergency over the coronavirus; the last candidates to debate in such urgent circumstances were Barack Obama and John McCain during the 2008 financial crisis. Mr. Sanders will be under added pressure to show why he is still running, at a time when people are worried about far more than presidential politics, while Mr. Biden — often uneven in these debate settings — must navigate far more speaking time as he tries to appear capable of uniting the country and leading it through a crisis.
Rarely has a debate been so shaped by palpable anxiety: The event has been relocated from a Phoenix theater to a Washington, D.C., television studio to limit any unnecessary travel. There will be no live audience and no spin room. One moderator who had potentially been exposed to the virus has bowed out to avoid spreading it.
Debates are often unpredictable, but it is especially hard to game out how this debate featuring a moderate standard-bearer and a liberal challenger will unfold and how people will process it. Hundreds of thousands of viewers, if not millions, will have been personally affected by Sunday, as public gathering spaces are shuttered, schools are closed and on Thursday the stock market plunged by the largest percentage in decades (it snapped back upward on Friday).