Sunday, August 22, 2021
The Jewel And The Dragon
Thursday, June 24, 2021
Tying Two to Two
I have been thinking today about a Greek word I encountered a few weeks ago during my daily Bible reading. It is found in Matthew 13 and Mark 4, shortly after the Parable of the Sower, and it is the word συνίημι ("syniemi"), which means literally "to send, bring, or set together." In a metaphorical sense it also means to "put two and two together," that is, to understand the meaning and implications of a thing. The passage in which this word appears reads thus:
But in recent decades, a number of crises have emerged as a result of this thinking. I will consider only two of these today. Let me mention that both crises could have been mitigated or avoided entirely had our society held a more collectivist mindset - that is, had we been the sort of people who value the common good above the unrestrained exercise of individual "liberty". The first crisis is that of manmade climate change. Yes, I said "manmade." Other accurate phrases or terms would include "anthropogenic" or "human-caused." We have known for decades that industrial activity was altering the earth's atmosphere in ways that would alter the climate - yet the defenders of "liberty" have loudly and insistently denied such knowledge. Why? Because to admit the impact of human industrial activity would have forced these people to confront a moral choice. They would have been faced with the choice of "understanding with their hearts." And that choice would have cost either a numbed conscience or possibly lots of money. The Global North does like its money, doesn't it? (The white American Evangelical/Protestant church really loves its money! Must be why so many of its members and leaders can't seem to put two and two together...) And in addition to the numbing of conscience, these nations chose to continue the destructive chasing of economic gain because many of their citizens told themselves that the consequences of their choices would never fall on them. They said, "What do we care about polar bears? Or about poor island people drowning in rising seas? That's so far from us!"
Saturday, March 6, 2021
The Potemkin Doctors
Thursday, November 26, 2020
A Bad Place To Lie
Thursday, October 29, 2020
A Constellation Of Alarm Lights
Tuesday, October 6, 2020
Apologies for a Delay
This past weekend I had fully intended to post my third installment of my commentary and "study guide" for Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy. But last Friday, I allowed my computer to perform an operating system upgrade that broke more things than it fixed. So I spent a number of sleepless hours over the weekend trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally I gave up in disgust and loaded a fresh copy of the latest version of Linux Mint. I like troubleshooting computers almost as much as I like working on cars - which is to say, not very much. At least things work now.
While I was thus occupied, it seems that Donald Trump was hospitalized because of a COVID-19 infection. I just found this out yesterday. Although the situation is still quite fluid, I believe that the study of strategic nonviolent resistance is still relevant for those who are members of oppressed and marginalized peoples. Regardless of what happens to Trump (and I hear that he "released" himself from the hospital yesterday and returned to the White House), we must remember that Trump himself is merely a symptom of a larger disease. Therefore, I will publish that third post this upcoming weekend, God willing.
In the meantime, please check out the following recent posts of mine:
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Causes of Cognitive Dissonance and National Narcissistic Rage
Here's another "quickie" post. And it has to do with White American foreign policy under Donald Trump and the perceptions of other nations which have been created for American consumption by its most powerful media outlets. I want to make one suggestion and one observation. The suggestion: the foreign policy of the United States against China is actually an expression of White supremacist narcissistic rage against China on account of the fact that a nation of over one billion non-White people has made itself an independent success. That was not supposed to happen. Rather, China was supposed to live forever in the thrall of the United States, because China was supposed to be forever dependent on the United States. The United States was supposed to be forever the dominant player, dictating to everyone else on earth what they can and cannot do. China is neatly contradicting that expectation. You may not know this, but China has successfully orbited two space stations and sent a robot probe to the moon, and has launched a robot mission to Mars.
And China is not the only nonwhite, non-European nation to have begun its own exploration of outer space. The United Arab Emirates has also launched a robot probe to Mars. China and the UAE join India in the successful development of demanding technologies for space travel.
But the most pleasantly surprising news is much closer to home. When COVID-19 first broke upon the world scene, many commentators in the Global North expected that the pandemic would decimate the nations of Black Africa, who were seen as perennial "savages" perennially in need of rescue by White "saviors." However, it now appears that the nations of the African continent have done very, very well in containing the pandemic and limiting both infections and deaths. Living on the African continent is becoming safer than living in the United States. This is due to the commonsense approaches of various African governments to the challenge of providing health care for the common good. (For what it's worth, I should also note that according to one source, the nations of Africa have a better airline safety record than Russia.)
In short, the rest of the world seems to have learned in large measure how to live (and to live well!) without the United States. This will undoubtedly deprive Trump of the narcissistic supply he had hoped to enjoy by withholding access to America and its resources from people whom he deemed to be much more needy than America. Instead of that enjoyment, Trump now finds himself in the position of the evil mother in the Grimm fairy tale Snow White.
Friday, May 22, 2020
I Am Not Going To Church This Sunday
"The president just demanded places of worship reopen for in-person services and he talked about guidelines being issued for “communities of faith”.
He wants them open “for this weekend”. Called upon governors to life quarantine restrictions relating to religious gathering places.
“If they do not do it I will override the governors,” he said.
He then turned on his heel and left the White House press briefing room without taking any questions.
Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany then brought up Deborah Birx, response coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, to the podium for an expert briefing."- Quotes retrieved from the Guardian, 22 May 2020.
I've got news for him: I'm not going to church this Sunday. I will not be celebrating Memorial Day in crowded places. (I will not be celebrating the 4th of July at all.) I will not be going to indoor, sit-down coffee shops (like the Starbucks near my house which opened its doors today for the first time in several weeks). I will not go to restaurants. I will not go to national parks. I will not attend sporting events. I will not join in this idiot's pretense that life is normal. Because it's not. Due to Donald Trump's malignancy and incompetence, we have the following situation:
- A pandemic has dealt (and continues to deal) a crippling blow to our economy.
- The people who to date have borne the brunt of the deaths resulting from that pandemic are people whom Trump and his white Republican murderers have targeted for destruction.
- There is not yet a viable, proven vaccine available for COVID-19. (Yes, I know that a certain American biopharma manufacturer is boasting of optimistic results - but their data have not been rigorously peer-reviewed.)
- There is not yet a viable, proven antiviral drug that is effective against COVID-19. (Yes, I know that the manufacturers of remdesivir have boasted of minor reductions in disease severity and length of hospitalization - but many doctors and scientists have questioned the methodology of the U.S. remdesivir study. (See this and this.) And yes, I know that Donald swears by hydroxychloroquine, but I suspect that not a drop of it has passed through his lips. How might the world look if he did really overdose on some fish tank cleaner!)
- There is not yet any kind of widespread testing available for coronavirus infection. A Washington State-based group that had developed a free, accurate test kit that could be used in people's homes was asked this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to halt the use of their tests. On the other hand, the FDA has granted authorization to a Texas firm to provide in-home test kits - but those who want a kit must jump through a few hoops first. Why am I not surprised? Donald Trump has already made it abundantly clear that he is opposed to widespread testing because of the possibility that the test results will indicate that the United States is experiencing a crisis for which the Republican Party has no answer.
- Those states and regions which have ended social distancing restrictions are now seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases. As a result, there will be further spikes in death rates. Again, not surprising. Throw lit matches into a dry meadow in the middle of summer, and you will have fire.
On another note, I've noticed that Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic is not just an isolated case of insanity. Rather, he is typical of all of the global Far Right leaders who have come to power (many of them with the help of the Russian government) over the last several years. Thus Boris Johnson's Britain became an outlier among those nations which consider themselves in any way European, in that Britain came to have the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any country in that part of the world. And Russia, which has long aspired for a return to greatness, now has its wish for greatness fulfilled in a sense, in that it now has the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any nation on earth except for the United States. (We're still No. 1 - Go, USA! Or let's not!) Moreover, both Putin and Trump seem to be reading from the same playbook in that their national health response to the coronavirus has been characterized by scapegoating of foreigners, political posturing, and chaos. One way in which Putin's government differs from Trump's is that Trump merely bullies and browbeats medical experts who contradict him. Putin, on the other hand, seems to have lost a few dissenting doctors who mysteriously fell from windows over the last few weeks. They didn't slip on their tea, did they?
Update: I need to add another country currently being trashed - er, I mean, ruled - by a far-Right leader: Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro has just earned the dubious distinction of leading his country to overtake Russia in COVID-19 deaths and confirmed cases. That means that Brazil is the new global No. 2. This confirms my hypothesis that everything the Far Right touches turns to used toilet paper.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
The Psychodynamics of Losing
One can see these psychodymanics at work in the conflict between the ruling class (and their propagandists, the false prophets) versus the prophets of God who announced that God was about to destroy the kingdom of Judah. One might call these rulers and their false prophets the revanchists, the "nationalists" and "patriots" of their day, because they represented the hope that Judah might remain as an independent kingdom subservient to no one, and that Judah might one day regain all the lost glory of the kingdom of Solomon. Their desire for a return of lost glory could be viewed as an expression of national narcissism, because this desire for lost glory was not accompanied by a willingness to submit to their God.
On the other hand were the true prophets who accurately prophesied that God was about to destroy Judah. This sentence, "God is about to destroy Judah", had three implications:
- that the nation in which the rulers and the people had invested their identity was about to be destroyed;
- that God was the One who would do the destroying;
- and that this destruction was God's commentary, His verdict on the nation, its character and practices, as captured in the following quote: "Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods that you have not known, then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say 'We are delivered!' - that you may do all these abominations?" (Jeremiah 7:9-10)
And this willingness to fight to the death to maintain a cause that is both immoral and losing made me think of other instances in history in which humans have chosen to fight for such causes. There is the obvious case of the second destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, a destruction which resulted from the rebellion of Jewish ethno-nationalists against the Roman Empire. But there is also the case of Nazi Germany from 1942 to 1945, in which the Wehrmacht chose to fight to the death rather than lose an identity which had been carefully constructed for them by the rulers of their society and which made sense only within the context of that society. (Side note: did you know that the motto of the Wehrmacht was "Gott mit uns" - that is, "God with us"?) And there is the example of the last days of both Rome and Byzantium. The fall of the Byzantine empire is noteworthy, as the decline of Byzantium was a long time in the making. The Byzantine emperors had focused for so long on infighting to maintain themselves as the top dogs in their empire that they had failed to notice that the world was changing around them while their empire was weakening. Nearly a century before their final fall, one of their emperors was arrested in Venice for outstanding debts incurred by hiring Crusader mercenaries in an attempt to recapture lost territory. (You might say that he nearly went broke trying to Make Byzantium Great Again.) During its last years, the Byzantine empire could only watch helplessly as its enemies obtained the most advanced military technology of the day - namely, devices capable of shooting large projectiles by means of gunpowder. These devices (cannons, to be precise) were the decisive factor in the fall of Constantinople, in which the last Byzantine emperor fought to the death.
Which brings me to the present day, in which those who cling to the hope of their own supremacy at the expense of everyone else on earth are beginning to fall on hard times. I am thinking particularly of Donald Trump and the regime he represents and of which he is a chief symptom. Consider these facts:
- The United States has lost its place among the top ten most innovative countries in the world. This is due to decades of underinvestment in education at all levels in this country.
- The United States has seriously begun to lose intellectual capital from this country, as smart foreign nationals (and some smart native-born Americans) are choosing either to stay away, or to relocate to other countries. (See this and this.) These are the results of a certain American brand of xenophobia/racism combined with longstanding cuts in funding for basic research. Continued American racism and hostility toward anything Chinese is not helping this trend.
- Speaking of China, by most accounts, Donald Trump has lost the trade war he started. (As an aside, for those members of the global Far Right who were hoping that Russia could return the world to where it was several decades ago, it appears that Russia has lost its recent oil price war with Saudi Arabia. In losing that war, it has lost far more in the process.)
- Because of Trump's blunders and malignant stupidity in his response to the coronavirus threat, the office of the Presidency (and with it the entire Executive Branch of the Federal Government) is losing its relevance in shaping American national life, as governors of states team up with each other to provide leadership for the good of their citizens without consulting Trump. (See this also.)
- Speaking again of coronavirus, the United States has decisively lost its former place as global leader and coordinator of global crisis response, as over twenty nations (including the most powerful nations of Europe) have publicly met via videoconference this past week to begin coordination of a global response to the coronavirus pandemic. (So much, by the way, for Russian hopes of fracturing the world order for its own benefit!) The United States was not invited to the call. (See this also.) Note also that these nations have thrown their full support behind the World Health Organization - counter to the wishes of Mr. Trump. This makes it very likely that effective remedies to the coronavirus pandemic will not be produced by the United States.
- According to some reports, the U.S. Dollar is about to lose a significant portion of its value vis-a-vis other currencies over the next several months. This is partly the result of government-mandated corporate bailouts (pushed by Trump and the Republican establishment) that have helped corporations prop up stock prices without creating any new actual value in the American economy.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
The Scapegoating of the Named Patient
Those who have followed my blogging for a long time know that I originally began blogging in order to document and reflect on my experiences in an abusive fringe evangelical church in the United States. That church was founded by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team and their two dysfunctional sons. These four formed the original leadership core of that church (or, to use their terminology, that "Assembly"), and I am convinced that from the very beginning the sons knew fully and accurately just how much of a counterfeit their parents were, and therefore knew fully and accurately just how much of a scam their "Assembly" was. Quite naturally, the dad appointed himself the "head honcho" of that sorry bunch (or as he put it, "the Head Steward of the Work!").
As time passed, the Assemblies grew both in the total number of groups and the total number of members in each group, and this necessitated the promotion of certain ambitious members of each group to places of leadership. Once a person was inducted into a leadership role, he almost always found himself in a select inner circle whose members were allowed to see aspects of our head honcho that were hidden from the rest of us. Those aspects consisted of embezzlement, corruption, hypocrisy, secret malignancy, and exploitation (including sexual sin) - although from time to time, all the rest of us could see the open malignancy, pride, narcissism, and bullying that flashed forth from the leadership and from our head honcho.
The interesting thing that happens to people who exist for a long time in such an environment is that they tend to become like their environment. This means that most of us tended to become jerks (and few things are more annoying than a religious jerk), and because our head honcho was a king-sized jerk, the people closest to him - his deputy leaders - became some of the biggest jerks in our group. Many of us who were not in the inner leadership circle did not recognize the extent to which we were becoming corrupt in our zeal to become like our leaders. When that corruption was pointed out to us by outsiders, we were able to justify it by saying that our gung-ho zeal, and the pushiness of our proselytizing/recruiting of others, and the way we disparaged anyone who had a life outside our group was all actually evidence of our spirituality. (I guess it was! Just not the way we thought.) We also justified our attempts to find people whom we could boss around by claiming that this was an evidence of our desire to "grow in stature." I must say, though, that our inability to recognize the foolishness of the things we were being taught to emulate is no excuse, but rather an evidence of almost criminal stupidity. (And for every finger I point outward, I recognize that there are three pointing back at me.) But the men (and some women) who comprised the inner circle of leadership knew something the rest of us didn't know - that the leading family - the head honcho and his wife and sons - were engaging in criminal behavior, including domestic violence. Yet they became the chief enablers of the head honcho and his family. Not only this, but many of these deputy leaders became petty tyrants and bullies in their own right, causing much distress for the people under their authority.
Although this system was corrupt, it did seem to possess a certain durability, in large part because it had evolved a very efficient means of dealing with any honest, non-corruptible people who were recruited into its midst. Such people usually left soon after being drawn into an Assembly, and when they left, the leaders would tell very convincing lies about how these leavers left because of some hidden "sin." Some of these leavers made the mistake of trying to persuade us "stayers" that they left because they saw holes in the head honcho's doctrine and preaching. Whenever that happened, the leaders would simply say that the leavers left because of "spiritual pride." But the leaders and the head honcho got something more than they could handle when a few of these leavers and some of those in the process of deciding to leave found out about the domestic violence, financial irregularities, and adultery going on with the head honcho and his family. Our "Assemblies" therefore suffered an existential crisis from 2000 to 2003, and it was a crisis which most of our groups did not survive.
Now what is interesting about this crisis is that the vast majority of the members were forced to face the reality that the head honcho we had all been following was a thoroughly corrupt hypocrite. A corollary to this realization was the realization that our deputy leaders had been corrupt enablers of the head honcho. As this additional realization began to be spoken openly among us, the deputy leaders began to try hard to portray themselves as fellow victims with us against the head honcho. Some of them even went as far as trying to say that they tried without success to rein in our head honcho. And all of them condemned the head honcho and tried to wash their hands of him. Based on what I know of some of these leaders, I think their vehement final public rejection of the head honcho was motivated by a desire to pick up the pieces of the small-time religious "empire" which the head honcho had created, so that one or more of these deputy leaders might crown himself the new "head honcho." In other words, by their condemnation of the head honcho, these deputy leaders tried to scapegoat him (as the most obvious target) in order to draw attention away from their own complicity in perpetuating a toxic, abusive system. The thing that thwarted these deputy leaders in their ambition was the fact that the rest of us had by this time awakened to the fact that not only had we all suffered abuse at the hands of the now deposed head honcho, but that we had also suffered abuse from his deputies, and that these men had acted like jerks toward the rest of us. So it was that most of us, me included, walked away completely from that mess.
Years later, I found myself dealing with other dysfunctional systems, and this pushed me to read a large amount of literature on the dynamics of dysfunctional organizational systems, whether on a household level or on the level of something larger. One of the things I learned is that in dysfunctional systems controlled by an obviously sick, evil, or deranged person - the "named patient" (also known as the "identified patient") - the other members of the system frequently bear significant culpability for the continued survival of that system. Yet it is usually convenient for them to blame all the problems of the system on the "named patient."
So we fast forward to April 2020, and I have to say that a few recent essays in popular online news sources have raised my eyebrows. The essays have all been about the coronavirus pandemic and the completely and utterly dysfunctional response of the Trump White House to the pandemic. And while I agree with the fact that Trump botched things "bigly," what strikes me is that some of these essays have called for Mike Pence to take over the Federal coronavirus response because of Trump's malignant incompetence. The author of one such essay pleaded with Pence to "remove Trump and save us from the coronavirus." Another essayist stated that the coronavirus crisis would not have gotten as far out of hand in the United States had someone else been president - "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else..." I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, but I will agree that we would not be facing what is likely to become an economy-destroying crisis on account of the coronavirus if she had become President in 2017. But what I see in the mention by these essayists of Republicans who might have done a better job than Trump reminds me uncomfortably of the attempts by the deputy leaders of my former abusive church to rehabilitate themselves by means of loud public denunciations of our former head honcho. Except that this time, it seems to be certain members of the Republican Party and the conservative political establishment who are trying to rehabilitate themselves by condemning Trump.
The only problem is, they can't succeed. Not if they're honest with themselves. Just as the former deputy leaders of my former church condemned themselves by condemning our former head honcho, these must realize that they condemn themselves by condemning Trump. Don't get me wrong - Trump needs to be denounced, like my former abusive church head honcho needed to be denounced. But the voices on the right who are condemning Trump must admit that they themselves are the very people whose desire for moral impossibility combined with their ungodly access to concentrated wealth and power to bring us the regime of Trump in the first place. Trump is therefore a symptom of a wider dysfunction. Aren't the Republicans the same people whose narcissism refused to acknowledge that their desire for what they want needed to be tempered by the recognition of the rights of the other peoples who live on the earth? Are not many of these people the same people who paid large amounts of money years ago to create the Tea Party movement? Many operatives from this movement are now loudly demanding that the restrictions on gatherings and businesses imposed by state governors in order to halt the spread of COVID-19 be immediately lifted. And are not many Republican politicians just as insane as Trump? Do you think that a Sarah Palin presidency would look any different by now? Who among these people was protesting during the days of Trump's Muslim travel ban? Which of these people rebuked Trump for stationing U.S. Border Patrol agents and military personnel at the southern border to rip Mexican children out of the arms of their parents and throw them into cages? How many of them approved of the destruction of social safety nets in Wisconsin by former Governor Scott Walker? How many of them have secretly or openly agreed with some of the nutcase statements from Governor Sam Brownback about "God, guts and guns" - especially about his disdain for gun control even after high school students across the nation expressed outrage over the lack of effective gun control in this country? How many of them refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change even to this day? How many of them are trying to disenfranchise voters in states controlled by the Republican Party by refusing to allow mail-in voting during the present pandemic?
These people are infected with the same malignant narcissism which animates Trump. Some of them may not be as far along in their disease as he is, yet they are all moving inexorably in the same direction toward a singularity of moral impossibility in which they demand supremacy at all costs, regardless not only of the rights of others (including both nonwhite and white others), but of physical reality itself (including the actual science of epidemiology and its bearing on the propagation of viruses). Blogger Olga Doroshenko describes this narcissism thus in its effects on Soviet Russia: "During [the Bolsheviks'] 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation." (Emphasis added.) As the United States and its leadership are wholly taken in their own narcissism, our own self-destruction looms as a distinct and unpleasant possibility. We'll see who finally takes the fall for that self-destruction. But if you are a Trump supporter, and you find yourself one day with a mouth full of gravel, don't just blame him. Blame yourself also.
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Playing With Matches In A Paper House
- We now know that of all people who become infected with COVID-19, approximately 80 to 81 percent will develop mild illness and fully recover. However, 19 to 20 percent will develop severe disease, with five percent developing "critical disease" according to this source.
- We also know that while early reports stated that young people were significantly less likely to develop severe disease than older people, later data has shown that young people are still at significant risk of developing severe disease. This source reports that nearly 40 percent of those hospitalized in the United States for COVID-19 were under 55 years old. The majority of hospitalizations in New York are for people under 50 years old. And there are sources such as this which present the personal stories of strong, accomplished young athletes who have been seriously sickened by COVID-19.
- We know that the death rate as a percentage of total cases of COVID-19 has been climbing in the United States. When the first outbreaks occurred, the U.S. death rate was from 1 to 1.5 percent. However, the latest percentage for New York City is approximately 1.7 percent. (Click this link and then do the math.) What happens when the health care systems of the various states are overwhelmed is another matter. Consider, for instance, what would happen to the 19-to-20 percent of an infected population who develop severe disease, yet who don't have access to health care because their health care systems have been overwhelmed. Then the U.S. death rate might almost certainly exceed 5 percent, and might even go as high as 10 percent.
As I look at the ways in which Trump and his cohort have tried to spin this crisis, I have found myself asking questions, such as, what drives Trump? What are his strategic motivations? What is his long-term thinking? (Sometimes I ask these same questions about either one of my two cats as I see them staring off into space. But they are cool and not sinister, whereas Trump is evil.)
To the extent that he thinks at all, Trump seeks to rebuild White "great power" autarky as it existed over 100 years ago. However, it was never really "autarky", was it? What really happened was that the great colonial powers, after they had exhausted their own resource base, sought to keep themselves great by stealing the bodies, lands, and stuff of all the other peoples on earth, laying claim that "this piece of land which we 'discovered', along with its people, now belongs to this particular Northern nation." This has been the motivation behind American military and economic interventions under Trump, as well as his thwarted desire to build a wall to keep the nonwhite nations of the earth from coming to the United States in search of that which was stolen from them. But it has also been the motivation behind the efforts of the United States and Russia to neutralize and destroy any independent power centers that are not European or Slavic. Hence, Trump has sought to "weaponize" the coronavirus in a soft-power sense by calling it "the Wuhan virus" or "the Chinese virus" in his bid to demonize and other-ize people of Asian descent. Unfortunately, there are knuckleheads in the United States who have followed his lead and perpetrated recent hate crimes against Asian-Americans. But this response is typical of the narcissism which says, "If there's any imperfection among us, it can't possibly be with me! It must belong to someone else!" Such a response is not helpful, because it ignores the fact that white people can transmit the coronavirus just as easily as anyone else. Consider Boris Johnson, Rand Paul, and the flocks of high school and college students who went to beaches in Florida on spring break, got infected by each other, and brought the COVID-19 infection back to their fellows at their home campuses.
But while we can acknowledge the possibility that Trump "thinks" in some sense, it is also true that he "feels" - that is, certain situations produce in him strong visceral reactions. As a narcissist, therefore, he cannot handle having to deal with predicaments that are beyond his control, predicaments which require a collective response shaped by many diverse points of view, a response that patiently takes a long view, a response that acknowledges that there are no quick fixes, a response that is humble and open in the face of difficulty. The current COVID-19 outbreak is just such a difficulty, and Trump has acted like a fish out of water in the face of it. Thus he has tried desperately to spin this crisis into something where he can be seen as decisively in charge, the leader of the cavalry coming over the hill with a promised quick fix. This is what is behind the gaggle of questionable "medical experts" seen on Fox News who have backed Trump's assertions that the coronavirus was no worse than the "seasonal flu" or who have pushed questionable remedies such as chloroquine as a cure.
(Trump's obsession with chloroquine deserves special mention. The only reason he heard about the drug at all in connection with COVID-19 is because of a certain French microbiologist with sketchy credentials and practices, who contacted Fox News and told them that he had successfully treated COVID-19 infected patients with the drug. Note that chloroquine has never been used as an antiviral drug. Note also that the Chinese government ran a study of their own which showed that chloroquine had no effect on the course of COVID-19 in patients. Lastly, it should be mentioned that at least one person has died from trying to self-medicate using a form of chloroquine found in fish tank cleaner.)
And now, Trump has already long since tired of trying to act "presidential" in the face of a crisis which does not offer quick fixes. (He and his friends are also tired of losing money to a crisis which they let get out of hand.) Hence, he wants the United States to return to being "open for business" by Easter, with no restrictions on travel or gatherings (or, most importantly, shopping!). That brings up some interesting possibilities. Right now, his approval rating is hovering around 50 percent. Say that represents 150 million Americans. Say that they also do what he says and return to "life as normal" starting on Easter. This means abandoning social distancing and self-isolation. Say also that 70 percent of these people wind up becoming infected with COVID-19. That would equate to 105 million people. To make the numbers easier to deal with, let's say 100 million. Out of these 100 million, 20 million will get sick enough to require hospitalization. But long before we reach the 20 million mark, the health care systems throughout much of the United States will be overwhelmed. That means that between 5 and 10 million could die.
The COVID-19 outbreak will cause an inevitable contraction of the American economy. If the people of the United States do the right thing and continue to aggressively self-quarantine and self-isolate, the only thing we will lose is money - and we will be taking the shortest route to recovery in the process. If we try to push our re-opening too soon, our economy will contract for another reason - the economic and social disruption that results from millions of us dying. In seeking to re-open the country for business by Easter, Trump is playing with matches in a paper house.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Of Houses, Storms, Sand and Bedrock
- those who understand as the Proverbs say, that a king's glory is his people, and that the king had therefore better provide for the common good of his people so that his kingdom can be strong;
- and those who cannibalize their people in order to enrich themselves.
The current storm, however, is exposing a lot of shoddy workmanship, bad carpentry, and substandard building materials in these "houses". Consider that Angela Merkel's Germany is weathering the coronavirus storm much better than the United States right now, because of two factors: a robust public health system, and a chancellor who tells the straight-up truth. Consider also the robust, clear-eyed responses of South Korea and Singapore to the current crisis. And lastly, consider the response of China, which after initially fumbling, took such steps as making testing free, removing all payment requirements for new patients seeking care, and enforcing of self-quarantine. As a result, new cases of COVID-19 are now declining in China. Compare that with the response of a certain Mr. Donald Trump, which can only be described as one long, continuous fumble. As a result of Trump's fumbling, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today below the level it held on the day when President Barack Obama left office. And coronavirus cases in the United States continue to climb.
Trump's initial response - namely to downplay the severity of the crisis while doing nothing to help the people of the United States - is remarkably similar to the response of Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of Britain, whose government decided that the best way to protect Britain was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up "herd immunity" among Britons. ("God save the Queen," you say?! How about "God help Britain!" With friends like these, who needs enemies?) Political pressure forced him to abandon this plan, but its replacement still looks a lot like "doing nothing."
Russia, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a different approach. According to the World Health Organization, Russia has only 199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection as of the time of this writing, with no confirmed deaths. Russia is therefore nearly perfect, the very thing every narcissist wants to be...except that a large number of Russian doctors are now saying that the Putin government is forcing them to under-report cases of COVID-19, and that the Russian medical system is so decrepit that accurate assessments of the current situation in Russia are impossible. They are also pointing out the extremely limited number of test kits available, the inaccuracy of these kits, and the fact that they are all made by one Russian monopoly. There also seems to be a sharp spike in cases of "community-acquired pneumonia" and "community-acquired influenza", with entire hospital wards being emptied of other patients in order to accommodate the new cases. Maybe Putin's government doesn't know the difference between COVID-19 and other viruses, but it does know how to try, at least, to capitalize on an opportunity to weaken nations that are better than Russia - as witnessed by an EU report stating that pro-Russian media outlets are sowing disinformation about the current pandemic in order to try to aggravate the public health crisis in the West. Nice to see what Putin's priorities actually are.
But it's not just heads of nations whose work is being tested by this storm. It's individuals and families as well. I am thinking of what our responses to a crisis say about our individual character. Of particular note is the extent to which each of us is addicted to mass media, including social media with its news feeds. And I am thinking of the mindset which I encountered when I was first exposed to the concepts of peak oil and resource depletion - the mindset which at the time was called prepping, but which I now call hoarding. It is a particularly dysfunctional kind of hoarding which makes people go to Winco and buy out all the Top Ramen, toilet paper, and beans they can get their hands on. And four times within the last nine months this behavior has appeared. The first three times, it was because the weather reporters on the news predicted heavy snow. Now, note - this happened in 2019 and early 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Yet people seem to forget that in 2008 it snowed for two weeks, and everyone managed to live without resorting to hoarding. People can be such...people...sometimes... Is it possible that many of us have built our lives on a set of poisonous assumptions and bad moral choices? How is your house holding up in all this rain?