newrepublic--2020-03-23--Coronavirus in a Time of Conspicuous Consumption

Fighting climate change does not mean we all have to live in monastic deprivation , eating crickets and weeds .
But it will mean some changes to our lives .
A just transition to a greener world will mean proportionately more disruption to the better-off ; globally speaking , this means middle-class Americans , too .
The current mode of global capitalism is to produce more than can be consumed , to always ensure an adequate supply of whatever those with the means to purchase it could ever imagine , never mind the waste or human toll of this process @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the conditions of warehouse workers and delivery drivers ; it means products shipped from around the world available to those who can afford them , from fruit to furniture .
It means walking into a grocery store and seeing more red peppers and shiny apples piled high than customers could ever hope to buy , leading to certain waste ( and the wasted time and labor of those who pick them ) .
A silver lining of this crisis would be if the upper-middle class of this country whose peacetime lives are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live a little more simply .
This is not to say that being trapped at home is some sort of pleasant vacation for most .
The ramifications of social isolation are likely to be devastating .
Those trapped in abusive domestic situations , who have lost service jobs due to shutdowns , or who are elderly and already lonely—and untold others—will suffer because of this .
They will suffer even more without proactive efforts from their government and their local communities .
We have hit pause on society to an unprecedented degree—but one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ persist is the danger and precarity faced by those with lower incomes .
The urgent need to level the playing field applies both to how we protect each other from the coronavirus and how we stave off climate disasters .
The rich have already begun to explore the ways in which their privileged position and wealth can protect them from the trouble facing the rest of the country .
They have fled to their upstate homes or to actual bunkers , or procured tests ; some have even attempted to secure personal ventilators @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how to operate ) .
Many have warned for years that this is what the rich will do when climate change , too , threatens their way of life : retreat to fortified bunkers , with no apologies to the rest left behind .
The only way to ensure that this does not happen is to dramatically lessen the gap between the rich and poor .
Focusing on personal consumption habits alone can not and will not avert climate change , not least because organizing sufficiently large quantities of people to go vegan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pressure corporations to stop farming cattle and producing automobiles would be impossible .
No amount of bean-buying can stop climate change .
But the panicked bourgeoisie who might be inclined to fear the measures needed to fight climate change would do well to focus on the simpler pleasures of life under lockdown—a life that is undoubtedly far more restricted than what we would have to do to slow or halt global warming .
And the sudden and violent nature of the coronavirus crisis can be remembered in years to come as a time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for climate change—which can be resisted with less disruptive , more pleasant adjustments to our lives .

This is not to say that being trapped at home is some sort of pleasant vacation for most. The ramifications of social isolation are likely to be devastating. Those trapped in abusive domestic situations, who have lost service jobs due to shutdowns, or who are elderly and already lonely—and untold others—will suffer because of this. They will suffer even more without proactive efforts from their government and their local communities. We have hit pause on society to an unprecedented degree—but one feature of American society that will certainly persist is the danger and precarity faced by those with lower incomes.
The urgent need to level the playing field applies both to how we protect each other from the coronavirus and how we stave off climate disasters. The rich have already begun to explore the ways in which their privileged position and wealth can protect them from the trouble facing the rest of the country. They have fled to their upstate homes or to actual bunkers, or procured tests; some have even attempted to secure personal ventilators (that they undoubtedly do not know how to operate). Many have warned for years that this is what the rich will do when climate change, too, threatens their way of life: retreat to fortified bunkers, with no apologies to the rest left behind. The only way to ensure that this does not happen is to dramatically lessen the gap between the rich and poor.
Focusing on personal consumption habits alone cannot and will not avert climate change, not least because organizing sufficiently large quantities of people to go vegan and ditch their cars in order to pressure corporations to stop farming cattle and producing automobiles would be impossible. No amount of bean-buying can stop climate change. But the panicked bourgeoisie who might be inclined to fear the measures needed to fight climate change would do well to focus on the simpler pleasures of life under lockdown—a life that is undoubtedly far more restricted than what we would have to do to slow or halt global warming. And the sudden and violent nature of the coronavirus crisis can be remembered in years to come as a time of much greater sacrifice as we prepare for climate change—which can be resisted with less disruptive, more pleasant adjustments to our lives.


newrepublic--2020-03-23--Fear of an Invisible Threat

Fear of an Invisible Threat

Since he could say the word , my son has been obsessed with the subject of microbes .
At his insistence we have a library of children ’ s literature on the subject , books such as Meet Bacteria !
, Inside Your Insides , and a particularly unsettling work about parasites called What ’ s Eating You ?
The fact remains that at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night I do not want to read about microbes .
I want to read the story about a beached whale that is a metaphor for loss and death .
“ No @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he is a child enamored of precision , “ read me Tiny Creatures : The World of Microbes.
” So I do .
“ All over the earth , ” I read , “ all the time , tiny microbes are eating and eating , and splitting and splitting , changing one thing into another.
” He refuses to interrogate his obsession ( being five ) , so I can only speculate as to why this might be captivating .
Children ’ s lives are full of imagined worlds , but this one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He is blanketed in tiny animals no one can see , creatures more diverse than all the plants and animals in the visible world , protecting his skin and digesting his dinner and making a home of his inner ear .
Access to this secret world blows his little mind , but only so long as it is secret .
He is only interested in biology up to the point of visibility .
You have never seen a small child so bored at the zoo .
All my life I have been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It has been easy not to see .
It takes intention to think that a vote could translate into , say , hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths because these deaths happen outside our borders , and as most Americans know , what happens outside of our borders is not real .
It is not real when an Italian family puts on hazmat gear to get a last look at a dying parent through a glass window .
It is not real when China transforms work spaces into quarantine camps .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happens in Seattle ( so long as you ’ re not actually in Seattle ) .
In January a spiked sphere multiplied itself using the cells of people from China to South Korea and Thailand and the Northwest of the United States .
After Wuhan was walled , after the World Health Organization declared an emergency , we continued to go to conferences and boarded cruise ships and not think about the harmless spherical Staphylococcus aureus we exhaled in vibrant microbial clouds .
Four hundred of my Iowan neighbors and I packed into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic nominee and did not try to imagine the rods of Propionibacterium slithering around on our shared pens .
By March it was inevitable that many Americans would simply lose the ability to breathe , and the man in charge said we should change nothing about the way we live .
There are not nearly enough tests or beds or masks , which means that this time , we will not have to work to see that we have been careless .
“ Inside you , ” I read , “ where they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ split and split and split until just a few germs have turned into thousands , then millions .
”

In January a spiked sphere multiplied itself using the cells of people from China to South Korea and Thailand and the Northwest of the United States. After Wuhan was walled, after the World Health Organization declared an emergency, we continued to go to conferences and boarded cruise ships and not think about the harmless spherical Staphylococcus aureus we exhaled in vibrant microbial clouds. Four hundred of my Iowan neighbors and I packed into a high school auditorium to debate the Democratic nominee and did not try to imagine the rods of Propionibacterium slithering around on our shared pens. By March it was inevitable that many Americans would simply lose the ability to breathe, and the man in charge said we should change nothing about the way we live. There are not nearly enough tests or beds or masks, which means that this time, we will not have to work to see that we have been careless. “Inside you,” I read, “where they are warm and well fed, they split and split and split until just a few germs have turned into thousands, then millions.”
It’s not as if grifters will not ask us, in other domains, to see what isn’t there. In the void of information surrounding our intelligence agencies, they project a deep state. Into a maelstrom of economic disruption, they project Mexicans. But isn’t this true story the story of which a xenophobic demagogue dreams? Covid-19 is literally a foreign invader that threatens the elderly, his dependable voting base. It renders the openness of liberalism a liability; Chicago is now just as dangerous as rural Republicans have long wanted to believe it to be. In June, the president was criticized for using the verb “infest” to describe immigration. We castigated this man for building a dumb, useless wall until we begged him to advise us to make fortresses of our homes. This is not how I thought any of this would happen, but you will never predict the future by projecting ideological consistency.


Grim Reapers

As viral testing finally rolled out on a minute scale in the first week of March , the American public learned of pockets of community transmission of the disease all over the country—especially near Seattle and New York City .
Stock markets continued their steep slide .
Some institutions , such as schools and nursing homes , shut down ; the National Guard was dispatched to help enforce quarantine conditions in the viral hot spot of New Rochelle , N.Y .
It was clear that little was being done at the federal level to quell the spread of the virus—and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their own limited resources to contend with the specter of a long-term , lethal pandemic .
By the time of Trump ’ s March 12 special address to the nation , much of the American public already knew the awful truth : that the entire Trump administration strategy for protecting them from Covid-19 , which rested on airport controls to keep the virus out of the country , was a nonstarter .
The virus was already all over America .
Desperate to keep “ the numbers where they are , ” as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the CDC , the White House seemed determined to draw from the Xi Jinping playbook—censoring data , and clamping down on concern and dissent within the administration .
And just as politics has largely dictated the woefully inadequate American response to the coronavirus threat , so will politics shape our reactions to this colossal governing failure .
Our political system , together with the media ecosystem that relies on it , has grown notoriously polarized .
The nation is facing a heated presidential election , and the coronavirus threat has supplied charged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sides .
Until the first reports emerged of community-acquired Covid-19 cases within U.S. borders , America seemed satisfied to act as a collective epidemic voyeur , watching horror unfold in China and elsewhere overseas without anticipating its arrival domestically .
As outbreaks exploded in South Korea , Iran , Japan , and Italy , anxiety rose in financial markets , fretting about quarantine conditions and supply-chain disruptions poised to extend well beyond the already collapsed production and distribution networks in China .
As longtime China-watcher Bill Bishop wrote for his website Sinocism , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ] first global recession caused by [ Chinese Communist Party ] mismanagement .
Previous manmade disasters in China since 1949 never really spread outside the PRC ’ s borders in meaningful ways .
This time looks to be different , and being the proximate cause of a global recession may not be helpful to the PRC ’ s global image and aspirations.
” Chinese leaders clearly heeded this threat .
China rolled out a propaganda campaign , accusing the United States of responsibility for the pandemic , and complaining that other world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Inside China , meanwhile , Xi waged a propaganda effort to shore up his damaged image as a great leader , visiting factories and hospitals .
After one such visit , the state-run media issued this glowing report : “ The inspection tour by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Wuhan , Central China ’ s Hubei province , has greatly inspired Chinese society .
People interpret the visit in their own simple way , and optimism has blended with the atmosphere of spring.
” Eager to get his economy back on track @ @ @ @ @ @ @ centers reopened—only to have some efforts backfire .
On March 11 , as the South China Morning News described it , “ At 8.30am the government of Qianjiang—which lies about 150 km ( 90 miles ) east of Wuhan , the capital of Hubei province—said that all restrictions on the movement of people and traffic would be lifted at 10am .
They were .
“ Then , at 10.30am , they were reinstated .
“ ‘ The city will continue its restrictions on the movement of traffic and residents , ’ the government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ previously , well-known Chinese author Fang Fang wrote a tough essay , labeling the epidemic ( not the virus ) “ man-made ” and insisting , “ Now is the best time for reflecting on what happened and investigating who is responsible.
” Pointedly , she rejected CCP claims that the people should thank the party for stopping Covid-19 .
“ A word that crops up frequently in conversation these days is ‘ gratitude.
’ High-level officials in Wuhan demand that the people show they ’ re grateful to the Communist Party and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of thinking very strange .
Our government is supposed to be a people ’ s government ; it exists solely to serve the people .
Government officials work for us , not the other way around .
I don ’ t understand why our leaders seem to draw exactly the opposite conclusion.
” Outside the country , China waged a two-pronged effort : one showing its willingness to help the rest of the world , the other leveling accusations and blame .
At the forefront of this PR offensive is the country ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In a March 10 letter to all 192 member-states of the United Nations , Zhang wrote , “ The spread of the epidemic has been basically contained in Hubei and Wuhan .
We are ready to strengthen solidarity with the rest of the international community to jointly fight the epidemic.
” CCP leadership noted that the “ comprehensive , thorough and rigorous ” measures China took to bring its epidemic to a halt could be shared with the rest of the world .
And in the process , the CCP said , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ international institutions would be improved .
That ’ s the polite side of China ’ s campaign .
Beijing has instructed its ambassadors all over the world to raise doubts about the origin of the virus , calling it “ the Italian virus , ” or the “ Japanese virus , ” suggesting that it might even have been man-made .
In a perverse mirror image of xenophobic anti-China conspiracy theories on the American right , Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian suggested the virus came out of an American laboratory .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cover-ups and incompetence .
He also has tweeted and given speeches claiming that U.S. Army representatives brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019 .
“ The US has finally acknowledged that among those who had died of the influenza previously were cases of the coronavirus .
The true source of the virus was the US !
” one commentator said in response to Zhao ’ s postings .
“ The US owes the world , especially China , an apology , ” another commentator said , and some on social media @ @ @ @ @ @ @ State-run media accused the United States of denigrating China ’ s fight , while castigating the many genuine failures of U.S. planning and policy execution in the face of the crisis : “ They have misused the time China bought for them by blaming China for so-called ‘ delays ’ during the initial stage of the outbreak .
A full month after the beginning of the out-break in China , the US still has not yet equipped itself with sufficient and reliable testing kits , missing the opportunity to identify cases and curbing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public events and rallies are still being held in the US , despite the risk of mass infection ... .
After accusing China of providing ‘ imperfect ’ data , the US is being far from transparent.
” White House National Security Adviser Robert O ’ Brien counterpunched , charging that China ’ s handling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan “ probably cost the world community two months to respond and those two months , if we ’ d had those [ and ] been able to sequence the virus and had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had a WHO team been on the ground , had a CDC team , which we had offered , been on the ground , I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what ’ s now happening across the world.
” Similarly , Secretary of State Mike Pompeo consistently refers to “ the Wuhan virus , ” enraging China .
Pompeo also eagerly took up O ’ Brien ’ s line of attack , charging that the early cover-up efforts in Wuhan damaged the rest of the world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ putting the U.S. behind the curve.
” The State Department summoned China ’ s ambassador to the United States , dressing him down for waging a “ blatant ” disinformation campaign .
Pompeo went further , undermining negotiations over a G7 statement responding to Covid-19 by insisting all official communiques refer to the “ Wuhan Virus ” —and the president pointedly and repeatedly has called Covid-19 the “ China Virus ” or “ Chinese Virus.
” Trump campaign supporter Charlie Kirk , head of the Koch-funded right-wing advocacy group Turning Point USA , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” adding that the United States could still contain its spread , “ if we can control … our borders.
” President Trump piled on that tweet , writing , “ Going up fast .
We need the Wall more than ever !
” One recent study claims 66 percent of the global burden of Covid-19 would have been eliminated if China had acted faster , closing down Wuhan weeks earlier .
But the same study credits China ’ s eventual actions for preventing a catastrophic pandemic that would have been 67 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a host of conservative talk show pundits and politicians have taken to China-bashing , accusing Beijing of deliberately imperiling the world , and of deceiving the president , thus rationalizing America ’ s slow response to Covid-19 .
Both China and the United States have expelled journalists hailing from their rival nation , claiming the reporters spread falsehoods .
President Trump seemed genuinely bewildered when Congress rejected his request for $ 2.5 billion in emergency funds to fight the epidemic , much of it stripped from prior moneys committed to Ebola preparedness .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the White House request woefully small , authorizing instead a bill funded for $ 8.3 billion .
In remarks to Sean Hannity on Fox News , Trump also seemed to dismiss , yet again , the likely severity of the Covid-19 threat , calling it the “ coronaflu.
” He observed further that , much like seasonal influenza , the coronavirus would be something that made a few people very sick but for most was so mild that they could go to work , as usual .
Seemingly unable to grasp how monumental @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continued to address crowded rallies of supporters and shake hands on the campaign trail .
He ’ s also socialized with Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz , who has since been quarantined for coronavirus exposure , and Fábio Wajngarten , communications chief for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro , who ’ s been diagnosed with Covid-19 , apparently acquired during a visit to Mar-a-Lago , the president ’ s Florida retreat .
Nothing seemed capable of shaking Trump ’ s faith in border closures and travel bans—the core of his Covid-19 control campaign .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ first three weeks of airport screening only one potential Covid-19 case was discovered out of 46,016 examined .
And two graphics told the tale of America ’ s vulnerability by mid-March .
The first tracks outbreaks all over the world , indicating that the United States was running in tandem with Italy , lagging about 10 days behind the overwhelmed nation .
The second damning comparative chart , produced by the Council on Foreign Relations , tracked the rise of cases in countries with , and without , travel bans , indicating the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that made travel bans the key element of their coronavirus policies—one of them , the United States of America .
Such are the risks incurred by dangerously uninformed demagogues in the rounds of their daily political life .
For the rest of us , the stakes of the coronavirus pandemic are much higher .
In a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill in early March , congressional physician Brian Monahan told staffers that roughly a third of all Americans , perhaps up to 150 million , will be infected with the coronavirus this year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ China ’ s leadership seemed eager to soften tensions , trying to disclaim prior allegations that Covid-19 was manufactured in a U.S. military laboratory .
But real damage has been done to the Sino-American relationship , and it may not be easily reparable .
It is tragic and perverse that animosities between two egotistical leaders and their sycophantic circles of advisers have placed the entire world in grave peril .
Trade disputes between Washington and Beijing were already producing widespread global fallout before the emergence of Covid-19 .
True , conventional diplomatic initiatives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s also the case that no reasonable dialogue between the United States and China can transpire unless both sides are willing to start the conversation based on valid science .
Neither Beijing nor Washington seems remotely inclined to take on this humbling challenge to the actual legacies of their respective Covid-19 programs .
President Donald Trump refuses to grasp scientific principles , on any topic , and openly contradicts his leading public health and scientific research advisers .
For his part , President Xi Jinping remains determined to change the conversation regarding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ references to its linkage to Wuhan .
Going forward , there is one hope for humanity , and for the Sino-American relationship : the development of an effective coronavirus vaccine .
Several nations , including China and the United States , are racing to create a vaccine , and to push prototypes of one into large clinical trials .
With luck , one of those products can stop Covid-19 ’ s spread , without difficult side effects .
But that may well lay the groundwork for additional high-stakes battles .
In past global @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two terrible outcomes : patent disputes , and a fully unjust distribution of lifesaving innovations worldwide .
In 2009 , for example , the H1N1 swine flu spread globally in less than six months , but viable vaccines weren ’ t available for most countries until the epidemic had passed .
Poor countries never did receive supplies of the vaccine that were sufficient to put a dent in their outbreaks .
Fortunately , the H1N1 virus was relatively benign , and the failure to distribute a global vaccine had no significant mortality outcome @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counter such profit-motive failures in the vaccines markets , drawing their funding mostly from the Gates Foundation and the foreign aid budgets of a handful of wealthy countries .
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations ( CEPI ) , which grew out of the World Economic Forum , offers financial support for vaccine invention .
Gavi , the Vaccine Alliance , makes bulk purchases of childhood vaccines and helps ensure their distribution in poor countries .
The Global Fund underwrites some health system costs for poor countries , primarily in sub-Saharan Africa .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ infrastructure for global immunization .
But Covid-19 won ’ t simply disappear if the wealthy world is left to its own devices , manufacturing costly vaccines that are only affordable to fully insured residents of the 30 richest nations on Earth .
What we collectively face is the need to execute the largest mass immunization program in world history , deploying teams of vaccinators to every nook and cranny of the planet , rich or poor .
The last time any such gargantuan feat was attempted was following a Soviet and American 1966 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ WHO .
Thousands of vaccinating teams deployed all over the world , eventually in 1977 vanquishing the virus that killed more human beings in the twentieth century than all wars combined .
As totemic as smallpox eradication is in the annals of global public health , it was accomplished at a time when three billion fewer people lived on the planet , and many of them lived in countries that conducted routine childhood immunization .
This meant that the immunization initiative undertaken from 1966 to 1977 targeted about one billion people .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its targets will include almost eight billion human beings , with nearly three-quarters of a billion living in conditions of extreme poverty , according to World Bank figures .
Eliminating the coronavirus scourge will require mobilization of tens of thousands of immunization teams , armed with affordably priced vaccines .
It is likely that both China and the United States , based on their initial human tests of candidate vaccines , will lead global manufacturing—and that both countries will face the moral and economic pressures of balancing global needs against company profits .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Presidents Xi and Trump can rise to this epochal challenge , and see their way clear to formalize an agreement to execute the largest humanitarian effort in world history to arrest the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus .
And in that long-shot scenario , we might even see these two power-mad egomaniacs share a Nobel Peace Prize .

“Then, at 10.30am, they were reinstated.
“‘The city will continue its restrictions on the movement of traffic and residents,’ the government said, without elaborating.”
Two days previously, well-known Chinese author Fang Fang wrote a tough essay, labeling the epidemic (not the virus) “man-made” and insisting, “Now is the best time for reflecting on what happened and investigating who is responsible.” Pointedly, she rejected CCP claims that the people should thank the party for stopping Covid-19. “A word that crops up frequently in conversation these days is ‘gratitude.’ High-level officials in Wuhan demand that the people show they’re grateful to the Communist Party and the country. I find this way of thinking very strange. Our government is supposed to be a people’s government; it exists solely to serve the people. Government officials work for us, not the other way around. I don’t understand why our leaders seem to draw exactly the opposite conclusion.”
Outside the country, China waged a two-pronged effort: one showing its willingness to help the rest of the world, the other leveling accusations and blame. At the forefront of this PR offensive is the country’s United Nations Ambassador Zhang Jun. In a March 10 letter to all 192 member-states of the United Nations, Zhang wrote, “The spread of the epidemic has been basically contained in Hubei and Wuhan. We are ready to strengthen solidarity with the rest of the international community to jointly fight the epidemic.”
CCP leadership noted that the “comprehensive, thorough and rigorous” measures China took to bring its epidemic to a halt could be shared with the rest of the world. And in the process, the CCP said, the governance of the United Nations and other international institutions would be improved.
That’s the polite side of China’s campaign. Beijing has instructed its ambassadors all over the world to raise doubts about the origin of the virus, calling it “the Italian virus,” or the “Japanese virus,” suggesting that it might even have been man-made. In a perverse mirror image of xenophobic anti-China conspiracy theories on the American right, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian suggested the virus came out of an American laboratory. The White House responded with accusations about Chinese cover-ups and incompetence.
He also has tweeted and given speeches claiming that U.S. Army representatives brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019.
“The US has finally acknowledged that among those who had died of the influenza previously were cases of the coronavirus. The true source of the virus was the US!” one commentator said in response to Zhao’s postings. “The US owes the world, especially China, an apology,” another commentator said, and some on social media referred to the “American coronavirus.”
State-run media accused the United States of denigrating China’s fight, while castigating the many genuine failures of U.S. planning and policy execution in the face of the crisis: “They have misused the time China bought for them by blaming China for so-called ‘delays’ during the initial stage of the outbreak. A full month after the beginning of the out-break in China, the US still has not yet equipped itself with sufficient and reliable testing kits, missing the opportunity to identify cases and curbing the spread of the virus. Large public events and rallies are still being held in the US, despite the risk of mass infection.... After accusing China of providing ‘imperfect’ data, the US is being far from transparent.”
White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien counterpunched, charging that China’s handling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan “probably cost the world community two months to respond and those two months, if we’d had those [and] been able to sequence the virus and had the cooperation necessary from the Chinese, had a WHO team been on the ground, had a CDC team, which we had offered, been on the ground, I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what’s now happening across the world.”
Similarly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo consistently refers to “the Wuhan virus,” enraging China. Pompeo also eagerly took up O’Brien’s line of attack, charging that the early cover-up efforts in Wuhan damaged the rest of the world’s ability to prepare, “putting the U.S. behind the curve.” The State Department summoned China’s ambassador to the United States, dressing him down for waging a “blatant” disinformation campaign. Pompeo went further, undermining negotiations over a G7 statement responding to Covid-19 by insisting all official communiques refer to the “Wuhan Virus”—and the president pointedly and repeatedly has called Covid-19 the “China Virus” or “Chinese Virus.”
Trump campaign supporter Charlie Kirk, head of the Koch-funded right-wing advocacy group Turning Point USA, tweeted reference to the “China Virus,” adding that the United States could still contain its spread, “if we can control … our borders.” President Trump piled on that tweet, writing, “Going up fast. We need the Wall more than ever!”
One recent study claims 66 percent of the global burden of Covid-19 would have been eliminated if China had acted faster, closing down Wuhan weeks earlier. But the same study credits China’s eventual actions for preventing a catastrophic pandemic that would have been 67 times worse without them. Nevertheless, a host of conservative talk show pundits and politicians have taken to China-bashing, accusing Beijing of deliberately imperiling the world, and of deceiving the president, thus rationalizing America’s slow response to Covid-19. Both China and the United States have expelled journalists hailing from their rival nation, claiming the reporters spread falsehoods.
President Trump seemed genuinely bewildered when Congress rejected his request for $2.5 billion in emergency funds to fight the epidemic, much of it stripped from prior moneys committed to Ebola preparedness. A bipartisan vote in both houses found the White House request woefully small, authorizing instead a bill funded for $8.3 billion. In remarks to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump also seemed to dismiss, yet again, the likely severity of the Covid-19 threat, calling it the “coronaflu.” He observed further that, much like seasonal influenza, the coronavirus would be something that made a few people very sick but for most was so mild that they could go to work, as usual.
Seemingly unable to grasp how monumental the pandemic battle would be, Trump continued to address crowded rallies of supporters and shake hands on the campaign trail. He’s also socialized with Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, who has since been quarantined for coronavirus exposure, and Fábio Wajngarten, communications chief for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who’s been diagnosed with Covid-19, apparently acquired during a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida retreat.
Nothing seemed capable of shaking Trump’s faith in border closures and travel bans—the core of his Covid-19 control campaign. But the CDC acknowledged that during the first three weeks of airport screening only one potential Covid-19 case was discovered out of 46,016 examined. And two graphics told the tale of America’s vulnerability by mid-March. The first tracks outbreaks all over the world, indicating that the United States was running in tandem with Italy, lagging about 10 days behind the overwhelmed nation.
The second damning comparative chart, produced by the Council on Foreign Relations, tracked the rise of cases in countries with, and without, travel bans, indicating the four fastest-growing epidemics were all in nations that made travel bans the key element of their coronavirus policies—one of them, the United States of America.
Such are the risks incurred by dangerously uninformed demagogues in the rounds of their daily political life. For the rest of us, the stakes of the coronavirus pandemic are much higher. In a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill in early March, congressional physician Brian Monahan told staffers that roughly a third of all Americans, perhaps up to 150 million, will be infected with the coronavirus this year.
As April approached, some in China’s leadership seemed eager to soften tensions, trying to disclaim prior allegations that Covid-19 was manufactured in a U.S. military laboratory. But real damage has been done to the Sino-American relationship, and it may not be easily reparable.
It is tragic and perverse that animosities between two egotistical leaders and their sycophantic circles of advisers have placed the entire world in grave peril. Trade disputes between Washington and Beijing were already producing widespread global fallout before the emergence of Covid-19.
True, conventional diplomatic initiatives can control some of this damage—but it’s also the case that no reasonable dialogue between the United States and China can transpire unless both sides are willing to start the conversation based on valid science. Neither Beijing nor Washington seems remotely inclined to take on this humbling challenge to the actual legacies of their respective Covid-19 programs. President Donald Trump refuses to grasp scientific principles, on any topic, and openly contradicts his leading public health and scientific research advisers. For his part, President Xi Jinping remains determined to change the conversation regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, removing all references to its linkage to Wuhan.
Going forward, there is one hope for humanity, and for the Sino-American relationship: the development of an effective coronavirus vaccine. Several nations, including China and the United States, are racing to create a vaccine, and to push prototypes of one into large clinical trials. With luck, one of those products can stop Covid-19’s spread, without difficult side effects.
But that may well lay the groundwork for additional high-stakes battles. In past global epidemics, such discoveries have led to two terrible outcomes: patent disputes, and a fully unjust distribution of lifesaving innovations worldwide. In 2009, for example, the H1N1 swine flu spread globally in less than six months, but viable vaccines weren’t available for most countries until the epidemic had passed. Poor countries never did receive supplies of the vaccine that were sufficient to put a dent in their outbreaks. Fortunately, the H1N1 virus was relatively benign, and the failure to distribute a global vaccine had no significant mortality outcome.
President Trump refuses to grasp scientific principles, on any topic, and openly contradicts his leading public health and scientific research advisers.
International agencies are now poised to counter such profit-motive failures in the vaccines markets, drawing their funding mostly from the Gates Foundation and the foreign aid budgets of a handful of wealthy countries. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which grew out of the World Economic Forum, offers financial support for vaccine invention. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, makes bulk purchases of childhood vaccines and helps ensure their distribution in poor countries. The Global Fund underwrites some health system costs for poor countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Together, they represent a fledgling international infrastructure for global immunization.
But Covid-19 won’t simply disappear if the wealthy world is left to its own devices, manufacturing costly vaccines that are only affordable to fully insured residents of the 30 richest nations on Earth. What we collectively face is the need to execute the largest mass immunization program in world history, deploying teams of vaccinators to every nook and cranny of the planet, rich or poor.
The last time any such gargantuan feat was attempted was following a Soviet and American 1966 call for smallpox eradication, led by WHO. Thousands of vaccinating teams deployed all over the world, eventually in 1977 vanquishing the virus that killed more human beings in the twentieth century than all wars combined. As totemic as smallpox eradication is in the annals of global public health, it was accomplished at a time when three billion fewer people lived on the planet, and many of them lived in countries that conducted routine childhood immunization. This meant that the immunization initiative undertaken from 1966 to 1977 targeted about one billion people.
If an effective Covid-19 vaccine is developed, its targets will include almost eight billion human beings, with nearly three-quarters of a billion living in conditions of extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. Eliminating the coronavirus scourge will require mobilization of tens of thousands of immunization teams, armed with affordably priced vaccines. It is likely that both China and the United States, based on their initial human tests of candidate vaccines, will lead global manufacturing—and that both countries will face the moral and economic pressures of balancing global needs against company profits.
In the best of all possible worlds, Presidents Xi and Trump can rise to this epochal challenge, and see their way clear to formalize an agreement to execute the largest humanitarian effort in world history to arrest the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And in that long-shot scenario, we might even see these two power-mad egomaniacs share a Nobel Peace Prize.


newrepublic--2020-04-02--Learning to Love the Mask

Learning to Love the Mask

So strapping on the mask has joined the other routines—social distancing , video-chatting , homeschooling , constant hand-washing , constant cooking—that have quickly made the old contours of everyday life a distant memory .
I make a near-daily journey to a cramped neighborhood grocery store in Brooklyn , which increasingly feels like some irradiated zone hostile to life that I must negotiate as speedily as possible , like the poor volunteer who ventures alone outside the safety of the spaceship , where the alien awaits , to make a vital repair .
On these fraught journeys , I wear the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bought from a bodega that had a box of the things under the counter .
It takes a little getting used to , this humid tent over my nose and lips that seeps fog onto my glasses .
But the greatest adjustment , the greatest surprise , is how good it feels to wear it—mentally , emotionally , spiritually even .
There is the sense of security that the mask provides , the extra layer against the microbes that lie in ambush on every surface and in every puff of breath .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What I mean is that I can lock eyes with the masked guy at the store stacking coffee and beans on the shelves , a stone in a river of possibly infected people swirling around him all day long , and we can silently communicate that we at least have both taken precautions to take care of one another .
What it means is that though I can not smile at the passerby who is standing six feet away from me on the sidewalk , can not reassure her that I don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hazard to me and mine , can not convey that I still remember the niceties that kept the old civilization together , I can reassure her that there is at least a paper-thin barrier between the possibly deadly disease that I , like everyone else , am possibly carrying within me .
It is an unfamiliar sensation : to subsume what makes me an individual , to wipe him out , in the interest of the whole .
It is no small thing , to be faceless .
The face is where the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the window where we expose our deepest feelings , no matter how hard we try to hide them ; where we read how others think and feel ; where we see ourselves reflected in society ’ s mirror , and thus learn how to behave , how to make jokes , how to fit in .
As such , perhaps the fad for masks will be short-lived , unsuitable as they are to the Western way of life .
Michael Brendan Dougherty , a friend and former colleague , wrote in National Review @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ‘ regular ’ feature of life in the West .
People will tolerate them for a short while , but quickly feel that masks are ridiculous , menacing , or an imposition on life , then conclude they must be temporary.
” When the pandemic has been contained , this line of thinking goes , we ’ ll put the masks away and hold our bare faces to the sun , unafraid .

There is the sense of security that the mask provides, the extra layer against the microbes that lie in ambush on every surface and in every puff of breath. But that is not what I mean. What I mean is that I can lock eyes with the masked guy at the store stacking coffee and beans on the shelves, a stone in a river of possibly infected people swirling around him all day long, and we can silently communicate that we at least have both taken precautions to take care of one another. What it means is that though I cannot smile at the passerby who is standing six feet away from me on the sidewalk, cannot reassure her that I don’t see her merely as a potential hazard to me and mine, cannot convey that I still remember the niceties that kept the old civilization together, I can reassure her that there is at least a paper-thin barrier protecting her from the possibly deadly disease that I, like everyone else, am possibly carrying within me.
It is an unfamiliar sensation: to subsume what makes me an individual, to wipe him out, in the interest of the whole. It is no small thing, to be faceless. The face is where the individual meets the world. It is the window where we expose our deepest feelings, no matter how hard we try to hide them; where we read how others think and feel; where we see ourselves reflected in society’s mirror, and thus learn how to behave, how to make jokes, how to fit in.
And so perhaps the fad for masks will be short-lived, unsuitable as they are to the Western way of life. Michael Brendan Dougherty, a friend and former colleague, wrote in National Review that “mask-wearing cannot become a ‘regular’ feature of life in the West. People will tolerate them for a short while, but quickly feel that masks are ridiculous, menacing, or an imposition on life, then conclude they must be temporary.” When the pandemic has been contained, this line of thinking goes, we’ll put the masks away and hold our bare faces to the sun, unafraid.


newrepublic--2020-04-02--A Fragmented Novel for the End of the World

I know a lot of people who think we are teetering on the edge of an apocalypse .
This possibility feels so close , in fact , that many of the jokes about it have already worn thin from overuse .
When is the meteor coming ?
people say .
Or , The season finale of America is really wild .
The one I keep telling is about moving to California .
I came here , I said , because when the Big One hits , I want to fall into the sea right away .
I have no interest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ portion of the proceedings .
I do not want to find myself sorting through caches of tin cans and testing them for botulism , I tell people .
You can see how quickly this sort of joke spins into depression .
The modern condition is to float above despair about climate change , political turmoil , and impending recessions because we have to , but also because the nature of our predicament—and here , by “ our , ” I mean those of us who live in and around the United States in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waiting for the fatal blow .
We live in the penumbra of the Big One , whatever it is , whatever it will be , and we are all like rabbits in a field , sniffing the air because there is the scent of lightning in the distance , but we can ’ t be sure how far away it truly is , or when it will hit us .
We have to remain mobile , for now .
Jenny Offill ’ s aptly titled Weather is a dispatch from this realm of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , almost always living in the space between both .
But , though concerned with topical matters , it is not exactly what was once called a social novel .
There ’ s neither much plot nor much character to speak of : A woman named Lizzie works as a librarian in Brooklyn , a job she holds although she does not have the proper credentials .
Lizzie ’ s brother is depressed , but her marriage is solid , and her private , concrete troubles are few .
She takes a gig @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who runs a podcast for an audience obsessed with potential Armageddons .
She answers Sylvia ’ s mail , which is filled with questions like , “ How is the goodness of God manifested even in the clothing of birds and beasts ?
” or , “ Do angels need sleep ?
” That ’ s about all there is to say about the premise and plot—like most high-literary fiction of the 2010s , this novel is propelled by voice , not machinery .
The narrator ’ s mood is , in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is full of anxiety , but she arrives at such a beautifully laconic mode of expression that the effect is lulling rather than unsettling .
“ Maybe I can stop having that dream now , ” she ’ ll muse .
“ The one where my brother shows up to my apartment and says , Lizzie , can I die here ?
” There is an elegance even in her more depressing insights , like the following questions , offered early in the book , which I kept thinking about for days , @ @ @ @ @

I once wrote that I thought this a great book. And yet, in the years since I recorded that reaction, Dept. of Speculation has come to feel slight. Not for the usual reason, that the subject is in any way small. The notion that we don’t take domesticity seriously in fiction became a commonplace assertion in the 2010s, and if what we are talking about is reputational currency, that was utterly true until quite recently. But winds shift. There has been an explosion of novels about subjects once thought flimsy—motherhood, female friendships—and those topics are the heart of groundbreaking work by, just as a few examples, Elena Ferrante, Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, and Susan Choi. These works are not ambivalent about their own importance—they believe they have a right to exist for their own sake.
Dept. of Speculation, by contrast, had a tentative quality, fed by the shortness of those paragraphs, the way observations would be cut off. Every thought was more venture than declaration. In a much-quoted passage, the narrator says she once thought she was meant to be an “art monster,” someone who doesn’t let day-to-day duties get in the way of her work. But “women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” It’s a trenchant observation, a feeling easily recognizable by any woman who has spent her life serving dinner without sitting down herself, wiping children’s noses, picking someone else’s laundry up off the floor. (Perhaps men can sympathize with this more now than they ever did, but it is still, in my experience, a specifically gendered sense of obligation. It’s still the case that many women don’t know who else will do these small tasks if they do not.) But that’s it, that’s all—after the joke about this arrangement under centuries of gender and power hierarchies, we move on. In another context, we’d say we kept scrolling.
This sense of fragmentation is far from new. For more than 100 years now, artists have asserted that modern consciousness is a fractured thing. At first it was industrialization, then war, that was shattering our consciousness, making us feel that the whole continuum for life was a perilous, contingent thing. Big events of consequence called into question the logic and order of existence. Now it feels as if the splintering of a human life comes in smaller pinpricks, the continuous distraction codified by social media companies, each founded by near-children who never realized they were reorganizing the way people thought just by providing a “platform” for jokes and the chronicling of the lives of household pets. Whereas the modernists might have thought fragmentation a shock to the system, now we are trained by all our time online to expect it and to be self-conscious about its effects.


newrepublic--2020-04-02--The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism

Accordingly , when Vermeule writes about using the Constitution to promote the “ common good , ” he means integrating Catholic social and moral doctrine—or at least his interpretation of it—into our secular constitutional law .
What sets Vermeule apart from not only most Americans , but even most American Catholics , is his eagerness to impose these views upon others by force .
“ Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects , if necessary even against the subjects ’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and re-forms them , ” he explains .
Vermeule is something of a newcomer to all of this .
By his own account , he drifted in and out of the Episcopalian tradition in which he was raised before converting to Catholicism in 2016 .
“ I put little stock or hope or faith in law , ” he said in an interview about his religious views at the time .
“ It is a tool that may be put to good uses or bad .
In the long run it will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in which it is embedded .
If that culture sours and curdles , so will the law ; indeed that process is well underway and its tempo is accelerating .
Our hope lies elsewhere.
” Other post-liberals on the right , such as Sohrab Ahmari , have experienced similarly galvanizing changes after conversion .
By the mid-twentieth century , the Catholic Church largely reconciled itself to liberal democracy , especially when faced with the communist alternative to the East .
For Vermeule , however , it is always 1793 and France ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He often describes liberalism as a religion unto itself , with ” its own cruel sacraments—especially the shaming and , where possible , legal punishment of the intolerant or illiberal—and its own liturgy , the Festival of Reason , the ever-repeated overcoming of the darkness of reaction.
” The unsubtle implication is that liberalism and Christianity , or at least the Catholic form of it , are bitter and irreconcilable foes .
This is a familiar shtick for Vermeule : to argue that liberals are what they claim to oppose .
In his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acceptable political views are no different than the authoritarianism that its adherents claim to oppose .
Liberals ’ unwillingness to tolerate what they perceive as intolerance is proof that their claims of tolerance are a sham .
“ Liberalism ’ s dilemma is that its anti-authoritarian ethos of belief , its compulsion to celebrate the overcoming of political rule , is ultimately inconsistent with its own claim to rule , ” he told an audience at Notre Dame University in 2019 .
It is a flawed conception of liberalism that does not survive @ @ @ @ @ @

Accordingly, when Vermeule writes about using the Constitution to promote the “common good,” he means integrating Catholic social and moral doctrine—or at least his interpretation of it—into our secular constitutional law. What sets Vermeule apart from not only most Americans, but even most American Catholics, is his eagerness to impose these views upon others by force. “Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them,” he explains.
Vermeule is something of a newcomer to all of this. By his own account, he drifted in and out of the Episcopalian tradition in which he was raised before converting to Catholicism in 2016. “I put little stock or hope or faith in law,” he said in an interview about his religious views at the time. “It is a tool that may be put to good uses or bad. In the long run it will be no better than the polity and culture in which it is embedded. If that culture sours and curdles, so will the law; indeed that process is well underway and its tempo is accelerating. Our hope lies elsewhere.” Other post-liberals on the right, such as Sohrab Ahmari, have experienced similarly galvanizing changes after conversion.
By the mid-twentieth century, the Catholic Church largely reconciled itself to liberal democracy, especially when faced with the Communist alternative to the East. For Vermeule, however, it is always 1793, and France’s ultra-revolutionaries are always at the gates. He often describes liberalism as a religion unto itself, with “its own cruel sacraments—especially the shaming and, where possible, legal punishment of the intolerant or illiberal—and its own liturgy, the Festival of Reason, the ever-repeated overcoming of the darkness of reaction.” The unsubtle implication is that liberalism and Christianity, or at least the Catholic form of it, are bitter and irreconcilable foes.


newrepublic--2020-04-02--The Next Pandemic Could Be Hiding in the Arctic Permafrost

In the summer of 2016 , a heatwave washed over Europe , thawing permafrost in the north .
In the Arctic soil of Siberia , bacteria began stirring—anthrax , to be specific .
The thawing , shifting ground exposed a reindeer carcass buried and frozen in 1941 .
The anthrax spores from the body found their way into the top layer of soil and the water nearby , before being picked up by thousands of migratory reindeer grazing in the area .
Over two thousand reindeer soon contracted the deadly bacteria and passed it along to the nomadic Nenets peoples @ @ @ @ @ @ @ upon them for food .
By the end of August , a 12-year-old boy had died , and at least 115 others had been hospitalized .
The current coronavirus pandemic , despite likely originating with an animal-to-human crossover far from the Arctic Circle , has come at a particularly weighty moment for infectious disease .
As the Arctic warms twice as fast as the rest of the world , its ground is starting to thaw .
With that thaw , bacteria and viruses once buried in the permafrost could increasingly emerge from a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Arctic is seeing more traffic than ever , with sea routes opening up and natural resource exploitation growing in the region .
As microbes begin reemerging , they have more opportunities than ever to encounter people and animals .
It ’ s not just bacteria like anthrax making a reappearance .
The Arctic is no stranger to deadly viruses , as well .
The bodies of victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic , to which many are now comparing the current coronavirus pandemic , are still buried in the Arctic permafrost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Siberian settlements in the 1890s , the bodies of those buried along the now-eroding Kolyma River have begun resurfacing .
Researchers have also discovered viruses never before recorded , like the recently christened “ pandoraviruses , ” lurking in the permafrost .
Pandoraviruses are a type of giant virus that appear to have been more common about 30,000 years ago .
In 2014 , researchers successfully revived two of these ancient viruses , which were found 100 feet underground in tundra along the coast .
Luckily for us , the viruses can only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But other unknown viruses and bacteria could potentially spread to humans after being preserved for hundreds or even thousands of years within Arctic ice .
Without the immunity our ancestors may have had , both humans and the intermediary animals that can spread diseases could be extremely vulnerable to the revived microbes .

In the summer of 2016, a heatwave washed over Europe, thawing permafrost in the north. In the Arctic soil of Siberia, bacteria began stirring—anthrax, to be specific. The thawing, shifting ground exposed a reindeer carcass buried and frozen in 1941. The anthrax spores from the body found their way into the top layer of soil and the water nearby, before being picked up by thousands of migratory reindeer grazing in the area. Over two thousand reindeer soon contracted the deadly bacteria and passed it along to the nomadic Nenets peoples who travel alongside the reindeer and depend upon them for food. By the end of August, a 12-year-old boy had died, and at least 115 others had been hospitalized.
The current coronavirus pandemic, despite likely originating with an animal-to-human crossover far from the Arctic Circle, has come at a particularly weighty moment for infectious disease. As the Arctic warms twice as fast as the rest of the world, its ground is starting to thaw. With that thaw, bacteria and viruses once buried in the permafrost could increasingly emerge from a long hibernation. At the same time, the Arctic is seeing more traffic than ever, with sea routes opening up and natural resource exploitation growing in the region. As microbes begin reemerging, they have more opportunities than ever to encounter people and animals.


newrepublic--2020-04-02--Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis

Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis

A genuine national emergency has broken out in a presidential election year .
The Trump administration ’ s handling of that emergency has been disastrous , beginning with its glaring failure to track and contain the coronavirus before it spread across the entire nation and continuing to the present , with the president routinely making wildly inaccurate and irresponsible claims on national television , including one that directly led to the death of an American by drug overdose .
Among the current campaigns for the presidency , some see the coronavirus as an opportunity and seek every day to get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ message and demonstrate his leadership .
But only one campaign seems determined not to “ politicize ” the pandemic , as though aggressive criticism of the president would somehow be unseemly .
You may have caught on by now that the campaign refusing to assign blame for this ongoing catastrophe is that of Democrat Joe Biden .
Indeed , his strategy seems to boil down to waiting to see how this crisis plays out .
That , at least , is the impression one is left with after reading stories like this one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus outbreak has “ scrambled ” the presidential election .
Some of the Democrats quoted in the piece almost seemed to want to take the race out of Biden ’ s hands entirely :

A remarkably clear example of that tendency can be found in an ad that won plaudits on Twitter last week for its imagined efficacy. It was the work of the fittingly named pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country. “Crisis comes to every presidency,” the narrator intones over shots of first George H.W. Bush, then Barack Obama in the situation room (with Biden alongside him), and then, for some reason, George W. Bush holding the bullhorn in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, and, finally, Ronald Reagan. “We don’t blame them for that,” the narrator continues. “What matters is how they handle it.”
In its cringing attempt to assign some responsibility to the president without seeming to blame him (or, in other words, to do politics), and in its implied absolution of how Republican presidents going back to Reagan mishandled their own crises, the ad exposes a generation of Democratic timidity. The people who scripted the line “Donald Trump didn’t create coronavirus” are either terrified of fact-checkers or convinced there is a vast swath of the electorate that will reward a campaign for being scrupulously fair in an attack ad. (Likely both.)
The shot of Reagan brought to mind a now largely forgotten moment in the 2016 presidential contest. In an interview at Nancy Reagan’s funeral, Hillary Clinton mentioned the late first lady’s history of medical research advocacy. Completely unprompted, she offered praise for both of the Reagans’ work on the HIV/AIDs epidemic. “Because of both President and Mrs. Reagan, in particular, Mrs. Reagan, we started national conversation when before no one would talk about it, no one wanted to do anything about it,” Clinton claimed, “and that, too, is something that I really appreciated, with her very effective, low-key advocacy.”


newrepublic--2020-04-02--Death Industry Predators Eye the Spoils of a Pandemic

It ’ s hard to look at Robert Waltrip , the 89-year-old founder and chairman emeritus of death-care giant Service Corp International and not see a striking resemblance to Henry Waternoose , the CEO of the fictional “ Monsters , Inc. ” from the Pixar movie of the same name—in terms of looks and the fact that both men ’ s businesses involved profiting from the wailing of the most vulnerable .
Under Waltrip ’ s leadership , SCI snaked its tendrils from its home state of Texas to suction up family-run funeral homes across the country , transforming itself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a quarter of all funeral homes nationwide and that has never been in short supply of accusations of consumer malpractice .
Now , amid a global pandemic that even optimistic prognosticators believe could result in more lives lost and buried than during the Korean and Vietnam wars combined , companies like SCI could be on the verge of something truly monstrous .
After nearly a half-century of regulatory oversight , the Federal Trade Commission ’ s Funeral Rule is up for its 10-year review next month .
That rule had traditionally served @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against the outrageous business practices that are a hallmark of the funeral industry ’ s more predatory firms .
But death-dealers like SCI have spent a tidy fortune lobbying against these consumer safeguards , and with a conservative-leaning FTC board set to decide the rule ’ s fate , it seems likely that the existing regulations will be defanged to their liking .
And it will all go down just as America ’ s pain becomes a rich vein of profit for the industry to tap .
The FTC ’ s Funeral Rule @ @ @ @ @ @ @ egregious price-gouging and hidden fees that funeral industry firms formulated to ambush consumers at their most vulnerable : after the death of a loved one .
Before the rule , funeral homes were notorious for extorting grieving families through a host of shady practices , which included making false statements about the necessity of embalming , hiding prices in every step of the burial and cremation processes , and framing expensive caskets and urns as the most “ modestly priced receptacles.
” By the mid-1980s , the need for reform had already long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ journalist Jessica Mitford wrote The American Way of Death , which chronicled the unconscionable practices that she observed as commonplace in the funeral industry .
In its pages , Mitford warned of how these abuses might escalate as larger , consolidated firms took over the industry .

It’s hard to look at Robert Waltrip, the 89-year-old founder and chairman emeritus of death-care giant Service Corp International and not see a striking resemblance to Henry Waternoose, the CEO of the fictional “Monsters, Inc.” from the Pixar movie of the same name—in terms of looks and the fact that both men’s businesses involved profiting from the wailing of the most vulnerable. Under Waltrip’s leadership, SCI snaked its tendrils from its home state of Texas to suction up family-run funeral homes across the country, transforming itself into a death-industry leviathan that owns close to a quarter of all funeral homes nationwide and that has never been in short supply of accusations of consumer malpractice.
Now, amid a global pandemic that even optimistic prognosticators believe could result in more lives lost and buried than during the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, companies like SCI could be on the verge of something truly monstrous. After nearly a half-century of regulatory oversight, the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule is up for its 10-year review next month. That rule had traditionally served as the main bulwark of consumer protection against the outrageous business practices that are a hallmark of the funeral industry’s more predatory firms. But death-dealers like SCI have spent a tidy fortune lobbying against these consumer safeguards, and with a conservative-leaning FTC board set to decide the rule’s fate, it seems likely that the existing regulations will be defanged to their liking. And it will all go down just as America’s pain becomes a rich vein of profit for the industry to tap.


newrepublic--2020-04-02--Disinvestment Made Our Cities a Powder Keg in a Pandemic

On a sunny Saturday in March , New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was horrified to find people were still gathering in city parks .
“ It ’ s insensitive , it ’ s arrogant , it ’ s self-destructive , it ’ s disrespectful , and it has to stop now , ” he said .
He was right that the packed parks defied social distancing guidelines intended to slow the outbreak of the coronavirus , but the public scolding would have benefited from a little self-awareness : Both state and city responses to the pandemic had dragged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ New York City would be hit especially hard .
Cuomo ’ s stay-at-home order came a day after California ’ s , a state with only a fraction of New York ’ s confirmed coronavirus cases , and it wasn ’ t until this week that New York City playgrounds officially closed .
To date , the rapid spread of the virus has pushed the hospital system to capacity and killed nearly 1,400 people in the city alone .
Even prior to the coronavirus outbreak , New York City—the most densely populated area @ @ @ @ @ @ @ per square mile—often seemed to hang by a thread in terms of its ability to accommodate a population of more than 8.5 million .
The disintegrating subway system , literally held together with zip ties in places , malfunctions almost daily under the strain of an average weekday ridership of 5.4 million people ; rush-hour commuters know well what it ’ s like to let multiple packed trains go by or sardine into an overstuffed car .
Manhattan sidewalks are often so crowded that it ’ s impossible not to brush shoulders with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lived in another place where I had ( or even thought ) to buy movie tickets in advance .
In this constant jostle , it ’ s sometimes tempting to view the city ’ s problems through the lens of overpopulation .
Anti-immigration activists have explicitly tried to stoke that sentiment in the past to rally support for their agenda .
“ Adding more people hurts already severely suffering New Yorkers .
More people mean more competition for jobs , affordable housing , public transportation , quality education , police protection and social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Even Democratic politicians have occasionally skirted such territory : This January , Brooklyn borough president and likely mayoral contender Eric Adams came under fire for remarks that seemed to blame the lack of affordable housing on newcomers rather than public policy .
“ Go back to Iowa , you go back to Ohio , ” Adams said in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech .
“ New York City belongs to the people that were here and made New York City what it is.
” While the city ’ s high @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them , now , how to slow the transmission of a highly contagious disease—its fundamental shortcoming isn ’ t an excess of people so much as it is an infrastructure weakened by decades of disinvestment and a lopsided distribution of resources .
The coronavirus has stretched medical gear , hospital beds , and even the city ’ s 911 system to their limits .
But scarcity , even in the case of a pandemic , isn ’ t inevitable ; it ’ s almost always a condition created at some point through the @ @ @ @ @ @ @

A similar predicament underlies the New York hospital system, which is now so overwhelmed that emergency makeshift hospital annexes have taken over the Javits Center (before this year, most notably the site of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 election-night party) and even a section of Central Park. A 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship is also currently docked on Manhattan’s West Side. The surge in demand is the result of several factors—the quick spread and deleterious effects of the virus, the difficulty of maintaining six feet of distance in such close quarters, perhaps even too many nonchalant parkgoers flouting social distancing recommendations in the early days of the outbreak (as Cuomo crankily worried, despite his own culpability). Yet it’s also the end point of a cruel calculus that dictated the closures of over a dozen hospitals in the city. Between 2003 and 2017, at least 16 hospitals in New York City shuttered, many as the result of state budget cuts to Medicaid reimbursements. As Ross Barkan wrote in The Nation, Cuomo, who’s been anointed in the press as a kind of anti-Trump pandemic hero, “presided over a decade of hospital closures and consolidations, prioritizing cost savings over keeping popular health care institutions open.”
In predictable New York spirit, a number of those hospitals were demolished and turned into luxury housing following their closures. The former St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center in the West Village is now Greenwich Lane, a luxe complex where Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Jon Bon Jovi own units. Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, which closed in 2013 despite protests by hospital employees and neighborhood residents, was converted by real estate developers into “Brooklyn’s first beaux-arts skyscraper,” a high-end building that includes amenities like a “fitness duplex with yoga atelier” and “rooftop lounge with cabana seating.” (Bill de Blasio, who was running for mayor at the time of the LICH protests and even arrested at one demonstration, initially opposed the closure of the hospital, but ultimately abandoned the fight after taking office.)
That’s all in the context of the city’s ongoing dearth of affordable housing. As businesses and workplaces close and unemployment continues to spike, more and more of New York’s 5.4 million renters—two-thirds of the city’s residents—will be squeezed to make rent payments. Though in March, Cuomo issued a 90-day suspension of evictions, housing advocates worry that such a measure doesn’t grasp the full scope of the problem, which started well before the outbreak and will continue long after. According to a report last year from the comptroller’s office, the cost of housing, food, and transportation rose at nearly twice the rate of average incomes between 2005 and 2017; New York’s rents, currently the second-highest in the nation, are unlikely to decrease after the threat of the coronavirus has subsided.


newrepublic--2020-04-02--The Devastating Clarity of a Pandemic

The Devastating Clarity of a Pandemic

The first of the month has come and gone .
For many people in this country , the anxiety that the day usually brings was compounded by the nationwide pandemic that ’ s upended life as we know it .
Rent , phone , and utility bills , on top of the week ’ s groceries and childcare costs , were already an overwhelming burden .
Now , thanks to the coronavirus , they ’ re an impossibility .
Across the country , landlords and renters alike have been forced to grapple with this new normal , be it by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tenant-led rent strikes .
Parents have been forced into a corner , stuck between reporting for work and paying the bills and ensuring their kids have childcare .
There are no easy answers for the majority of working people , because the system was not built to sustain them but to squeeze them .
With a collapsing economy that is somehow only making some wealthy people wealthier , it is people in poverty or flirting with it , workers across essential industries , and millions of other regular people who are left shouldering @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public-facing institutions has been to embrace and explore this reality rather than gloss over it with smiling human interest stories .
The Today show explained how to apply for unemployment .
USA Today examined how the virus layoffs are disproportionately affecting marginalized communities .
In the political realm , unrelentingly conservative state legislatures like Wisconsin ’ s and North Carolina ’ s are temporarily setting aside their dreams of austerity to quickly get money in the hands of the unemployed .
There is no denying that the current response has not been strong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Congress , but there more or less seems to have been an acceptance that politics as usual will literally kill us .
This then raises the question : Why haven ’ t they always been this diligent ?
Entering the pandemic , roughly 60 percent of the country was a single emergency or missed paycheck away from debt .
Chances are , you knew about the average person ’ s typically thin savings account , how a random $ 500 or $ 1,000 bill would bankrupt the majority of households .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ internet and human interest ether for years now .
And right alongside these same reports about the thin margins so many of us live on sit articles and posts telling us that we should have at least three months of expenses saved up at all times or that we should have a full year ’ s salary in our savings account by the time we ’ re 30 years old .
These , of course , are insane , unreasonable , and nakedly contradictory things—and yet the latter passes for some version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soft focus news pieces on financial responsibility from the same outlets now running how-to ’ s about applying for unemployment .
A savings threshold at that level is wildly out of reach for most people but remains a clear testament to America ’ s desire to brand “ success ” as glossily furnished open-floor-plan houses and upper-six-figure incomes .

Entering the pandemic, roughly 60 percent of the country was a single emergency or missed paycheck away from debt. Chances are, you knew about the average person’s typically thin savings account, how a random $500 or $1,000 bill would bankrupt the majority of households. It’s been floating out in the internet and human interest ether for years now. And right alongside these same reports about the thin margins so many of us live on sit articles and posts telling us that we should have at least three months of expenses saved up at all times or that we should have a full year’s salary in our savings account by the time we’re 30 years old. These, of course, are insane, unreasonable, and nakedly contradictory things—and yet the latter passes for some version of common sense on morning news shows or soft focus news pieces on financial responsibility from the same outlets now running how-to’s about applying for unemployment. A savings threshold at that level is wildly out of reach for most people but remains a clear testament to America’s desire to brand “success” as glossily furnished open-floor-plan houses and upper-six-figure incomes.
There’s plenty of blame to dish out for this inaccessibility—an inadequate governmental safety net and the deregulation of labor standards, for starters—but it’s worth considering, for a moment, why it’s just now that our elected officials and mainstream consensus are beginning to grapple with—however unevenly—how tenuous daily life really was this whole time. It’s taken a pandemic of historical proportions to jar the nation’s senses and remind the lucky few who occupy that tax bracket of the financial ruin that looms over so many. Student debt was a weight on far too many young Americans; rent strikes were being conducted to protest substandard living conditions; daycare was on the brink of becoming a national crisis. The numbers have always been real people—lives lived under a heavy burden and perpetual uncertainty—but we are finally facing what they mean in real time.


newrepublic--2020-04-03--[An iron pan is burning; the witch]

[An iron pan is burning; the witch]

An iron pan is burning ; the witch has left her house .
The children walk hand in hand through @ @ @ @ @ In the subterranean world , bolts of silk , yellow pills and moths the size @ @ @ @ @ said you wish to practice yoga with baby goats ?
The witch is back , @ @ @ @ @ stars can ’ t wait for their sacrifice .

An iron pan is burning; the witch
has left her house. The children
walk hand in hand through a
forest of reagents. In the subterranean
world, bolts of silk, yellow pills
and moths the size of dinner plates.
You said you wish to practice yoga
with baby goats? The witch is back,
pan still burning, the stars
can’t wait for their sacrifice.


newrepublic--2020-04-03--Watching South Park at the End of the World

Writing about South Park , a silly cartoon , in the middle of an eminently predictable and yet entirely unanticipated global pandemic has an uncanny quality , like meeting a time traveler and realizing that he is you .
If I could travel back in time now and meet myself circa , say , 2005 , just a few years out of college and struggling to figure out how to become a writer , and tell that younger me that in 15 years , nearing 40 years old , I ’ d be locked in the house during a plague @ @ @ @ @ @ @ valences of South Park , which would still be on the air , I ’ d have probably gone to business school sooner than I did .
Oh well .
But we are all stuck in the house and watching a lot of television , so perhaps this , too , like a globalized viral outbreak in the age of near-instantaneous air travel , is inevitable .
“ I should have realized , ” murmurs a dour Nick Stahl in Terminator 3 , that “ our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” South Park itself feels like a transmission from what should have been an alternate past , the one that the desperate time traveler from our time went back to , Terminator-style , in order to try to prevent our present from happening , but which , in utter failure , he only managed to cement into place .
Other artifacts from that fin de millénaire epoch—the bad clothes , the last triumphant guffaws of TV laugh tracks , the popular music—have settled into the familiar patterns of cultural ephemera : first kitsch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fashionable revivals that are usually less ironic than they seem .
But South Park , though no less affected by the hyperbalkanization of media than any other entertainment , remains influential .
True , it ’ s far less central to mass culture than it was in the earlier 2000s , when you could still crack up a conference room with a well-timed “ Respect my authorit-ah !
” joke , but it retains a kind of currency .
( I almost wrote relevance , but thought better of it . )
People @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gang of vulgar fourth-grade boys , their families , and the extended , eccentric everytown of South Park , Colorado , is important .
I grew up in small , semirural towns myself , albeit in Appalachian Pennsylvania and not the Mountain West .
I recognize the universal appeal .
I was friends with guys like Stan Marsh , the show ’ s generally kind , usually moral protagonist , and guys like Kenny McCormick , the self-sufficient poor kid whose riotous , unsettled home life we all made fun of , even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guys like Kyle Broflovski , the lone Jewish kid in a sea of uncomprehending gentiles , because I was that kid .
We were even friends with guys like Eric Cartman , an obscene , self-pitying little anti-Semite , for reasons we could not quite articulate or explain .
And beyond these , the show ’ s bestiary of Main Street America , its hapless parents and inept leaders , its weird small businesses and petty local politics , its moral pretensions and amoral vanities do ring true , however exaggerated .
Because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people believe that South Park matters .
And , in a way , it does .

Conservatives have been trying to claim South Park as their own since the George W. Bush administration. As early as 2001, conservative blogger (and former New Republic editor) Andrew Sullivan was talking about “South Park Republicans” as a new political alignment combining vaguely libertarian economic ideas with equally laissez-faire attitudes toward sex, homosexuality, abortion, etc. In 2005, Brian C. Anderson, who holds a post at the Manhattan Institute—one of the many conservative “think tanks” that serve as holding pens for otherwise unemployable conservative gadflies—published South Park Conservative: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias. The book’s introduction, subtitled “A New Era,” begins as follows: “CBS’s cancellation in late 2003 of its planned four-hour miniseries The Reagans marked a watershed in America’s culture wars.” Talk about obvious—but probably not deliberate—hyperbole! This was in the flushed triumphalism of Bush’s still-new second term, just five months before the human disaster of Hurricane Katrina, “heckuva job, Brownie,” the deadly expansion of the Iraqi insurgency, and then, two years later, the implosion of the housing market and subsequent economic collapse, which sent Bush into retirement as the least popular president in modern American history.
Put Nixon’s lines in the adenoidal voice of Eric Cartman, and you have an entirely believable snippet of a lost episode of South Park.
The book itself is a hasty, tossed-together tour d’horizon of conservative media in the early 2000s: the Drudge Report, talk radio, Fox News, the “Blogosphere.” It devotes only one chapter to “South Park Anti-Liberals,” and only half of that—about a dozen pages in this barely 150-page book—to South Park itself, before pivoting to talk about the anti-P.C. stylings of past-their-prime comedy-scene fixtures Nick Di Paolo, Colin Quinn, and Dennis Miller. These few pages are in turn padded out by synopses of episodes and long excerpts of “politically incorrect” and otherwise offense-provoking dialogue of which Anderson approves. Insofar as he locates an actual Republican ideology in the show and its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it’s in an old, possibly apocryphal quote from Stone: “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.”
Threadbare as Anderson’s book is, it does contain within it an intimation of a tendency in conservatism that Donald Trump would eventually ride into office: that the animal spirits of popular American conservatism lay not in the corporate libertarianism of the sort that the Manhattan Institute itself has long championed, but in an ethnonationalism that increasingly expressed itself in various forms of jocular oafishness. This was vulgarity deployed not as a fantasy of liberation from sexual and social strictures, as it had been in the hated 1960s, but as a cudgel against a cultural and political leftism that sought to carve out safe spaces (a term that, of course, became a great target of conservative mockery) for various minorities and historically disadvantaged people.


newrepublic--2020-04-03--Confessions of a Demigod

Confessions of a Demigod

You said in your last meeting you figured out the map of the planets .
The lonely orbits .
Cosmic @ @ @ @ @ meeting , a future meeting was discussed .
How to kick out the un-paid children—holes @ @ @ @ @ the shapes of the soul .
Like always , I brought my vag to the @ @ @ @ @ spoke , it was like it breathed .
Echoed me .
Shadowed me .
And @ @ @ @ @ this to soften my presence into something ordinary , like pools of gold syrup sponging @ @ @ @ @ thawed waffle .
Now , all I hear is how I ruined the world .
@ @ @ @ @ , like light .
The seas rose up , and now they ’ ve gone @ @ @ @ @ smell water here & there , like I was .

You said in your last meeting you figured out
the map of the planets. The lonely orbits.
Cosmic dust. In my last meeting, a future
meeting was discussed. How to kick out
the un-paid children—holes thumbed
into sweatshirts—from debates about the shapes
of the soul. Like always, I brought my vag
to the table. And when I spoke,
it was like it breathed. Echoed me.
Shadowed me. And every time,
someone uses this to soften my presence
into something ordinary, like pools of gold
syrup sponging the middle
squares of a thawed waffle.
Now, all I hear is how I ruined the world.
So the world is
hard, like light. The seas rose up,
and now they’ve gone. But you can still
smell water here & there, like I was.


newrepublic--2020-04-03--No One Disagrees With Rebecca Solnit

No One Disagrees With Rebecca Solnit

Solnit grew up in a troubled household in a suburb of San Francisco .
After a brief stint in Paris as a teenager , she returned to northern California where she took the GED at 15 and graduated from San Francisco State University in 1981 at age 20 .
The year before , she moved into an apartment in a predominately African American neighborhood near the city ’ s Panhandle district .
“ Later on I ’ d come to understand gentrification and the role that I likely played as a pale face making the neighborhood more palatable to other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ but I had no sense at the start that things would change and how that worked.
” Solnit would spend the next two decades in this studio apartment , writing near her bay window on a desk gifted to her by a friend who was nearly stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend .
“ Now I wonder , ” she reflects , “ if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing.
” One of the strengths of the book is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as both a weapon and a shield .
In an early chapter , she writes about how she learned the “ art of nonexistence ” as a young teenager , trying to avoid the gaze of older men , including some in her own family .
“ At twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen , I had been pursued and pressured for sex by adult men on the edge of my familial and social circles.
” Throughout her adolescence and young adulthood , Solnit begins looking for ways to exist as little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the point of frailty to becoming constantly aware of exits and escapes : “ I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away , backing off , squirming out of tight situations … at gradually disengaging , or suddenly absenting myself.
” Solnit often writes about her decision to become a writer as a desire to name the various violences that chased her .
It is also possible that the life of an author—tucked away in archives , working quietly in writing nooks—presented a way to live a life physically out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Solnit , as the chapter “ Annihilators ” makes clear .
The 1970s and 1980s saw a spike in the number of serial killers , leading to a general sense of anxiety across the country , one most keenly felt by young women who were their primary targets .
“ It was the era ” Solnit explains “ of the Night Stalker and the middle-aged white man known as the Trailside Killer ( who raped and killed women hikers on the trails I hiked on ) and the Pillow-case Rapist and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Killer and the Ski Mask Rapist and many other men who rampaged up and down the Pacific Coast without nicknames.
” Solnit recalls a harrowing story of walking home following a New Year ’ s Party and being followed closely by a man on a dark , empty street .
While she ultimately finds her way out of the situation , the trauma stays with her ; it is one of the most detailed and specific memories that Solnit recalls from this period in her life .
Solnit is especially attuned to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ culture and belles lettres .
In this way , Recollections of My Nonexistence is often closer to a work of cultural criticism than memoir—though in combining the two , it asks us to think about how much our sense of self-worth and social value is shaped by the cues we get from films , books , and television .
“ In the arts , ” she notes , “ the torture and death of a beautiful woman or a young woman or both was forever being portrayed as erotic , exciting , satisfying.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Alfred Hitchcock , Brian De Palma , and David Lynch , directors whose signature works centered on murdered women ( Psycho , Twin Peaks , etc . )
: “ Legions of women were being killed in movies , in songs , in novels , and in the world , and each death was a little wound , a little weight , a little message that it could have been me.
” For Solnit , the aestheticization of these stories amounts to a kind of delegitimization of the very real fears she harbored @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It “ was a kind of collective gaslighting ” she writes , tantamount to “ [ living ] in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war .
”

One of the strengths of the book is the way Solnit manages to think through nonexistence as both a weapon and a shield. In an early chapter, she writes about how she learned the “art of nonexistence” as a young teenager, trying to avoid the gaze of older men, including some in her own family. “At twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I had been pursued and pressured for sex by adult men on the edge of my familial and social circles.” Throughout her adolescence and young adulthood, Solnit begins looking for ways to exist as little as possible, from turning thin to the point of frailty to becoming constantly aware of exits and escapes: “I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations … at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself.” Solnit often writes about her decision to become a writer as a desire to name the various violences that chased her. It is also possible that the life of an author—tucked away in archives, working quietly in writing nooks—presented a way to live a life physically out of view.
Nonexistence can also be literal for Solnit, as the chapter “Annihilators” makes clear. The 1970s and 1980s saw a spike in the number of serial killers, leading to a general sense of anxiety across the country, one most keenly felt by young women who were their primary targets. “It was the era” Solnit explains “of the Night Stalker and the middle-aged white man known as the Trailside Killer (who raped and killed women hikers on the trails I hiked on) and the Pillow-case Rapist and the Beauty Queen Killer and the Green River Killer and the Ski Mask Rapist and many other men who rampaged up and down the Pacific Coast without nicknames.” Solnit recalls a harrowing story of walking home following a New Year’s Party and being followed closely by a man on a dark, empty street. While she ultimately finds her way out of the situation, the trauma stays with her; it is one of the most detailed and specific memories that Solnit recalls from this period in her life.
Solnit is especially attuned to the normalization of violence against women in popular culture and belles lettres. In this way, Recollections of My Nonexistence is often closer to a work of cultural criticism than memoir—though in combining the two, it asks us to think about how much our sense of self-worth and social value is shaped by the cues we get from films, books, and television. “In the arts,” she notes, “the torture and death of a beautiful woman or a young woman or both was forever being portrayed as erotic, exciting, satisfying.” She alludes to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, and David Lynch, directors whose signature works centered on murdered women (Psycho, Twin Peaks, etc.): “Legions of women were being killed in movies, in songs, in novels, and in the world, and each death was a little wound, a little weight, a little message that it could have been me.” For Solnit, the aestheticization of these stories amounts to a kind of delegitimization of the very real fears she harbored at the time about her safety. It “was a kind of collective gaslighting” she writes, tantamount to “[living] in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war.”