Good morning, everyone!
I could not agree more with Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald in that America seems to be suffering from not one but two pandemics: the coronavirus and...The Stupid.
Someday, I’m going to die.
This, I grudgingly accept. I have no idea how it’s going to happen. Maybe I will die of having a tree fall on me, of eating tainted shellfish, or of being struck by lightning. But this much I guarantee. I will not die of having wagered my life that TV carnival barkers, political halfwits and MAGA-hat-wearing geniuses know more than experts with R.N.s, M.D.s, and Ph.D.s after their names.
In other words, I will not die of stupid.
Not that there aren’t plenty of opportunities to do so. Indeed, in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and the question of when and how the nation’s economy should be reopened, we seem to have tapped the U.S. Strategic Stupid Reserve. The result has been a truly awe-inspiring display of America’s matchless capacity for mental mediocrity.
Surveys show, for instance, that a solid majority of Americans (63 percent according to a CBS News poll) are more worried about re-opening the country too fast and worsening the pandemic than opening it too slowly and worsening the economy. Yet a noisy minority of protesters is furious at government for trying to keep them healthy. They demand their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of acute respiratory distress.
The primary source of “The Stupid,” of course” emanates from the Oval Office and, as Daniel Lippman indicates in Politico, remains unchanged.
It’s a pattern that has repeated itself throughout Trump’s presidency in which Trump grasps for new ideas (often by what he sees on television), shortcuts and anything that can deliver hope and high ratings as the clock nears six months to the election. And those who know the president best say that even a crisis that has devastated American families and brought the economy to a standstill has hardly changed him at all.
“He continues to lead by floating trial balloons, gauging how those trial balloons are being received and then adjusting along the way,” said a person close to the White House. “He launches the trial balloons as he sees fit and then the adjustment comes after everyone starts chiming in after being sort of blindsided by the original trial balloon.”
Another frequent motif in Trump’s presidency has returned with a vengeance: blaming others. Under fire for mishandling the outbreak, Trump has lashed out at China, the Obama administration, the “fake news,” the World Health Organization, governors and even his own scientists.
“I think we are seeing that pattern reemerge throughout this crisis,” said David Lapan, a former senior Homeland Security Department official in the Trump administration, “with the president not taking responsibility and trying to again shift blame elsewhere.”
In the abstract, of course, I have nothing against the “power of positive thinking” or, to be more precise, optimism. However, The Damn Fool continues to throw pot after pot of severely undercooked Stupid Spaghetti up against a wall knowing damn well that it can’t be made to stick. Well, at least not by reality-based people.
And now The Damn Fool suggests that Americans mainline bleach and Lysol and UV rays into their bodies.
The reality that we were to be faced with arrived via intelligence reports about a viral outbreak in Wuhan, China in November 2019. That reality arrived on the American West Coast in late-December 2019 or (more likely) early- January 2020. Many of the preparations for such a pandemic event were dismantled; nevertheless, we had the heads-up from intelligence sources and the national resources to deal with the reality as it was presented.
Resources and methods like some of the items that German Lopez over at Vox lists: social distancing, ramped up COVID-19 testing, contact tracing.
Testing gives officials the means to isolate sick people, track and quarantine the people whom those verified to be sick came into close contact with (a.k.a. “contact tracing”), and deploy community-wide efforts if a new cluster of cases is too large and uncontrolled otherwise. Without it, the only way to deal with the outbreak is more social distancing, which further hurts the economy, or letting the disease run its course — at the cost of potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of live
The continued shortfall rebukes President Donald Trump’s claim that US testing numbers are fine. Earlier this week, Trump claimed that America has done more tests than every other country combined; in reality, the US makes up roughly a fifth of all reported tests.
America’s testing rates also fall behind Germany, Italy, and Canada when controlling for population. Germany alone, widely praised for its quick response to Covid-19, has tested at nearly double the rates as the US.
The national numbers also mask massive variation between the states. Rhode Island has tested 39 people per 1,000, and New York, the state hardest hit by the pandemic, has tested about 34 per 1,000 — while Kansas, Virginia, Texas, and Arizona have all reported testing rates below 8 per 1,000.
Instead, Americans continue to be dished out massive plates of “Gaslight” brand Stupid Spaghetti from the Head Chef.
Jennifer Mercieca/Washington Post
Trump’s “sarcasm” ploy is part of a larger rhetorical strategy of outrage, distrust and polarization that he has used successfully since 2015 to attract and keep the nation’s attention and convince his supporters that they’re either with Trump or against him, and that they should believe no one but him.
Trump has used the “sarcasm” excuse before. Most notably, “sarcasm” was his defense against the uproar that occurred after Trump’s July 27, 2016, news conference in which he asked, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
Like other demagogues, Trump relies on deceptive rhetoric to prevent us from holding him accountable for his words and actions. Calling something “sarcasm” when it clearly wasn’t is a way of invoking plausible deniability — it gives Trump and his supporters the wiggle room to believe whatever they want. This time, the line from the White House and Trump-friendly conservative media was that mainstream reporters irresponsibly took him out of context to generate negative headlines. Back in 2016, Trump used the “sarcasm” excuse to explain that he wasn’t really inviting Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails but was only joking.
Claiming he was being sarcastic after the fact also allows him to turn the question back on his critics — “What, can’t you take a joke?” Trump did the same thing in August 2019 when he claimed that he was just being sarcastic when he called himself “the chosen one.” He was “kidding, being sarcastic, and just having fun,” Trump tweeted: “no more trust!”
Jan-Werner Müller, writing for The Guardian, thinks that we should simply refuse to eat this hot mess and decide on something else.
Plenty of people (not least journalists) have for the longest time clung to the hope that somehow the reality TV star would become “presidential”. By contrast, Trump’s detractors have been waiting desperately for some “have you no sense of decency?” moment – something akin to the dramatic live-TV confrontation between lawyer Joseph Welch and Senator Joe McCarthy, which precipitated the downfall of the latter. Others are debating whether the networks and cable channels should carry Trump’s daily briefings at all.
There is an important lesson to be learned here from a very different period in history. I mean the strategies adopted by the central European dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s (which is not to equate authoritarian state socialism with the US today). After the failure of many reform efforts, Adam Michnik and other intellectuals concluded that the oppressive regimes were never going to change. The dissidents stopped talking to state leaders and resolved instead to “talk past them” (as the historian Tony Judt put it), trying to reach as many citizens as possible in spite of restrictions on speech. They also started to create what Václav Benda called a “parallel polis” – a world in which one tried to act as if one was already free. These civil society initiatives undermined the regimes without ever confronting them head-on.
What is the lesson? There is no point talking to Trump, because he will not change; every seemingly sober presidential moment – cheered by centrist observers – is followed by 10 puerile performances of ranting and raving. There will never be a Gotcha moment, because Trump’s “base” is apparently committed to him no matter what; even his diehard fans’ most basic interests – such as not dying (never mind their economic interests) – will apparently not detract from their identification with a figure who, if nothing else, looks like a trustworthy general in the culture war.
If only the MSM waitpersons would stop plating and serving the hot mess…perhaps a large majority of the American people (via opinion polls and the outrage behind last Thursday’s news conference) have forced the mainstream media’s hand.
While my “spaghetti” metaphor might seem mildly clever or vaguely amusing this morning, the sad and maddening reality is that The Damn Fool’s mismanagement and maladministration of the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic has unnecessarily cost American lives that could have been spared; a loss of human life that, as Susan Glassner at The New Yorker points out, has scarcely been acknowledged by the occupant.
You would think that no amount of Trumpian misdirection could disguise the awful fact that America has more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any country in the world, and that many of them might have been prevented by earlier, more decisive government action when the President was denying that the coronavirus even presented a threat to the United States. But Trump is trying his hardest to ignore the COVID-19 deaths. To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without him. Earlier this deadly spring, Trump was briefly scared into a more sombre public presentation by projections that showed hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. deaths if no preventative actions were taken. Now he cites the absence of those worst-case scenarios as proof of his own brilliant handling of the crisis. The numbers of dead citizens he throws about, meanwhile, seem to be abstractions to a President who believes that even the subject of mass death is all about him. “If we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, two million people dead,” he said on Monday. “You would have had ten to twenty to twenty-five times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The fifty thousand is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying that out by twenty or more? It’s not acceptable.” Trump did not pause to offer any sort of regret or sorrow, and instead claimed that the entire death toll in the United States would end up around fifty or sixty thousand as a result of his heroic moves. Of course, this was not true; that is, essentially, how many have already passed away.
A Smithfield Foods worker working at a Smithfield plant in Milan, Missouri tells the Washington Post that she is suing the meat processing company.
At first, the coronavirus seemed so far away. Then we heard that the nearby university had told students not to return from spring break. On March 13, our governor declared a state of emergency. A few days later, the local schools closed, and I had to hire a babysitter. As a parent, that made the seriousness of the virus really sink in.
I didn’t hear anything from Smithfield.
Public officials started talking about what people should be doing to stay safe: maintain distance, use protective equipment, wash our hands regularly, and sanitize the spaces and equipment we come in contact with. But, as my lawsuit says, maintaining distance is almost impossible in our plant. On a regular day, we work shoulder-to-shoulder for hours and only get two 15-minute breaks a day and a half-hour for lunch. We wear the same gloves and masks all day unless they rip, and we don’t have time to wash our hands regularly. The cafeterias and hallways are crowded, and so is the area where we clock in. Most people only wear masks when they’re working on the line, not when they’re in the rest of the plant. The company has started doing temperature checks on workers, but a crowded line forms to get checked.
I don’t believe that Smithfield has provided enough protective equipment or tissues, or spaced out workers on the line, or extended our breaks so we have time to wash our hands. Instead, it has extended our shifts — up to 11 hours — on a faster line, which means we bump into each other more often as we work. We don’t even have time to cover our mouths if we sneeze, because the line is moving so fast.
I first “worked from home” in the mid-1990’s and while I could see some of the benefits of doing so (no phones ringing every five minutes to disturb my concentration!), I was also able to foresee some the dangers in the eroding demarcation lines between work and even the possibilities for abuse that David Atkins touches on at Washington Monthly.
One of the many unknowns in this unprecedented COVID-19 era is just how dramatically the nature of work will change, particularly for those whose jobs allow for telecommuting and working from home. Potential pressure on jobs from automation is ranges from mild to potentially catastrophic depending on whom you talk to, but in the immediate future we may begin to see a significant amount of work done remotely that used to take place in person, now that companies are beginning to both realize it can be done and explore new ways to do it.
Many observers had viewed this as a positive development on many fronts: parents can spend more time with their children, carbon emissions from travel and commuting can be reduced, and other related inefficiencies for the employer and inconveniences for the employee can be eliminated. Hours could in theory be reduced as happier workers could focus on their work only when they intended to work, rather than be stuck in an office for 8-10 hours, a majority of which tend to be spent neither pleasantly nor productively.
But as with so much of modern life in which efficiencies that should lead to a more utopian lifestyle actually lead to a dystopian crunch of overwork, the COVID-19 era is turning out to be a nightmare for telecommuters. People working from home find themselves not only having to juggle the pressures of home life without the release valves of school, babysitters, gyms, coffee shops, bars and movie theaters, they are also working longer hours than ever before:
There’s still no word on all of the rumors concerning North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un but that looks like the least of Vox reporter Alex Ward’s problems.
UPDATED: CK 1:51 pm cst
Finally, this morning...spoken into existence!
Everyone gave a good morning!