newrepublic--2020-04-30--Dylan vs. Beyoncé: Quarantine Showdown

Dylan vs. Beyoncé: Quarantine Showdown

Two music titans—one old , one young—snuck out new songs in the past month .
In headline form , the news is that Bob Dylan is writing songs about dying and Beyoncé is consolidating her credibility as a rapper .
Upon longer listen , however , Dylan ’ s “ Murder Most Foul ” turns out to be a sprawling reminiscence of twentieth-century culture , with him and JFK in the middle .
Meanwhile , Beyoncé appears as a guest artist on a remix of Megan Thee Stallion ’ s song “ Savage ” and reveals herself to be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In late March , Dylan ( or some tech-savvy young assistant , probably ) posted “ Murder Most Foul ” to his website with the message , “ This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting .
Stay safe , stay observant , and may God be with you.
” “ Murder Most Foul ” is a hair under 17 minutes long .
It features Dylan singing well over soft piano , strings , and barely-there percussion .
If you ’ re not in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little like being trapped in a movie theater while the credits for a weepy movie play .
The surface plot of the song covers the assassination of John F. Kennedy while he was being driven down a Dallas street in a big Lincoln Continental in 1963 .
Odd choice for a song , perhaps .
But what else happened in 1963 ?
A certain Robert from Duluth had released The Freewheelin ’ Bob Dylan and created for himself a new identity .
Bob Dylan performed “ Blowin ’ in the Wind ” live @ @ @ @ @ @ @ died in late November .

Play “St. James Infirmary” and “The Port of King James”
If you want to remember, you better write down the names
Play Etta James, too
Play “I’d Rather Go Blind”
Play it for the man with the telepathic mind
Play John Lee Hooker
Play “Scratch My Back”
Play it for that strip club owner named Jack
Guitar Slim going down slow
Play it for me and for Marilyn Monroe.
That “strip club owner” was Jack Ruby, the guy who shot Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in police custody. These acts of violence, which Dylan seems to be naming as a kind of root trauma or influence for him, mix with the songs—“St. James Infirmary” et al—that built an alternative historical canon, this time of emotion. Of which is Dylan a star? It’s a question that nags him as he roams the rich territory of time gone by, all while nearing the end of his own road. It’s a sentimental piece, but then these are sentimental times.
In 2017, Sheldon Pierce wrote a great analysis of Beyoncé’s early rap work stretching all the way back to the Destiny’s Child predecessor Girl’s Tyme and her recitative-rap in the 2001 movie Carmen. The rap alter ego she calls “B” has a distinctive style, flickering between staccato-clean enunciation and long swoops up and down her vocal range.
Her appearance on “Savage” is no disappointment. Beyoncé in swagger mode is intoxicating, and here she’s badder than ever: “Can’t argue with these lazy bitches,” she raps, “I just raised my price.” Her lighter voice decorates Megan’s more solid tones, and the mixture is just right.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--The Federal Reserve Is Accelerating the Climate Crisis

“ Climate change , ” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told the Joint Economic Committee last November , “ is an important issue but not principally for the Fed .
We ’ re not going to be the ones to decide society ’ s response .
That is for elected officials , not us.
” As of yesterday , however , it ’ s clearer than ever that the Federal Reserve is very much in the business of deciding how society navigates a warming world .
On Thursday , the Fed announced several expansions of its $ 600 billion Main @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country respond to the economic fallout of the coronavirus and ensuing shutdowns .
The new changes will come as welcome news to fossil fuel companies previously unable to take advantage of stimulus funds allocated by the Coronavirus Aid , Relief , and Economic Security ( CARES ) Act as a result of several now-nixed restrictions .
As Bharat Ramamurti—a member of the Congressional Oversight Committee for the CARES Act—tweeted Thursday , several of these new changes closely mirror requests the oil and gas industry made over the last several weeks .
Companies applying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to refinance their existing debts , a change the Independent Petroleum Association of America explicitly requested of Powell in an April 15 letter .
Companies can also now receive loans of up to $ 200 million , an expansion over the previous $ 150 million limit urged by Energy Secretary and fossil fuel industry ally Dan Brouillette .
Firms with heavier debt loads—American shale oil companies are notoriously debt-heavy—are also now eligible for Fed support , as Texas Senator Ted Cruz requested in an April 24 letter to Powell and Treasury Secretary Steve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Fed ’ s new lending programs .
“ The Administration should not be picking winners and losers among different energy sources , ” Cruz wrote , “ but President Trump has rightly committed not to allow financial institutions to discriminate against the oil and gas industry and use this crisis to make politically-driven equity calls that force the bankruptcy of American producers.
” Per industry and Republican requests , companies newly able to take advantage of stimulus funds also won ’ t be under any obligation to keep workers on their payrolls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve let go .
Cruz ’ s letter also stated that it would be “ too restrictive ” for oil and gas companies to have to keep them around .
The Treasury and Fed “ should be transparent about why they made these changes today—and rejected others that were focused on trying to keep workers employed or get them back on payroll , ” Ramamurti tweeted in the same thread on Thursday .
In a follow-up email to me , Ramamurti noted that stimulus funds weren ’ t supposed to be used to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Covid-19 , and called it “ discouraging ” that the money was being furnished without protections for workers .

“The path to an oil and gas bailout runs through the Fed, and they want an entirely separate set of rules,” Lukas Ross of the environmental nongovernmental organization Friends of the Earth told me. “What happened this morning is really just one tiny piece in this overarching effort from the oil industry to get a hold of as much of the stimulus money as possible. Even though it would be unprecedented and dangerous for an oil and gas program to divert needed money from communities, there is really nothing from stopping that right now.”
That the fossil fuel industry has deep and lucrative ties to the GOP isn’t exactly breaking news: For the last decade at least, the Republican Party has functionally operated as the political arm of coal, oil, and gas companies. The Fed is officially an independent central bank, although yesterday’s announcements show that it’s hardly immune to political and industry pressures. Its decision earlier in April to purchase high-yield junk bonds—many of them issued by oil and gas companies—was another, slightly more subtle lifeline to the industry, which has consistently asked that the government relax the terms of lending facilities so as to expand its access to stimulus funds. So far, it’s getting its wish.
While indulging the fossil fuel industry with handouts, the Fed can’t meaningfully claim to be a neutral actor when it comes to climate policy. Led largely by Mark Carney at the Bank of England, there was an ongoing conversation among central banks around the world about their role in a climate-changed world, first convened as the Network for Greening the Financial System, in 2017. While the U.S. Federal Reserve System hasn’t joined up, the San Francisco Fed did host a conference on climate change last November.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--Imagining a Real “Right to Work”

Imagining a Real “Right to Work”

The best way to fix an economy devastated by a pandemic , the president and other conservatives insisted from the start , was simply to send workers back into the fray .
And now , a little more than a month after the first statewide stay-at-home order was issued in California—with more than one million reported coronavirus cases in the United States and a death toll of over 60,000—several governors have decided they ’ ve waited long enough .
Last week , Governor Brian Kemp opened restaurants , gyms , and hair salons in Georgia ; early this week , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ South Carolina followed suit and loosened restrictions on businesses .
Yet more states , whose stay-at-home orders expire at the end of April , could start opening by May 1 .
The right , for its part , has shrouded this willful disregard for public health in the language of freedom .
Earlier this month , seemingly in support of a handful of protests against statewide coronavirus lockdowns , Trump tweeted “ LIBERATE MINNESOTA , ” followed by “ LIBERATE MICHIGAN ” and “ LIBERATE VIRGINIA.
” Fox News ’ s Laura Ingraham @ @ @ @ @ @ @ orders constituted a violation of liberty .
“ Give me your best guidance on protocols , but we can not deny our people their basic freedoms any longer , ” she said last week .
On his radio show , Sean Hannity marveled at the passion of the anti-lockdown demonstrators .
“ It ’ s amazing how much people want to get to work , they ’ re dying to get back to work , ” he said , the bleak accuracy of his wording probably not intended .
It ’ s true @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 26 million currently unemployed workers may hope to return to their jobs , even if doing so comes at great personal risk .
But that , of course , is mostly out of sheer necessity .
“ Capitalism begins not with the offer of work , but with the imperative to earn a living , ” the historian Michael Denning once wrote .
Since the vast majority of people have to work to survive—and because the country ’ s threadbare social safety net , including its onerous unemployment system , offers only the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ income—the choice of returning to work in a pandemic is less a triumph of freedom than it is a gamble on one of two bad options .
In the states that have begun to scale back shutdown orders , consumers will be free to decide whether getting a haircut or dining out is worth the risk ; the employees at those establishments , on the other hand , won ’ t have much say in the matter .
The grotesque distortion of the notion of freedom when it comes to employment is perhaps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concept of “ right-to-work , ” the neologism for a type of union-busting legislation that allow workers to opt out of union dues and subsequently undermines the strength and financial resources of organized labor .
But in this moment of conservatives braying for freedom to return to the workplace , particularly with spiking unemployment and no clear end to the pandemic , there ’ s also a chance to envision a new kind of right to work that meaningfully expands the freedom of workers—bringing real autonomy , better conditions , and more ease @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come .

There is no legal magic wand, as labor attorney Julian Gonzalez once put it, that will automatically rescue the labor movement from its current predicament, and workers have always organized and participated in pickets and strikes regardless of the legality of those actions. The period of mass strikes that preceded the passing of the NLRA, for instance, also coincided with some of the most restrictive labor laws in the country’s history. Yet, as workers in low-wage sectors now risk their health and their livelihoods to undertake wildcat actions across the country, we can also sketch a policy blueprint for strengthening worker power. Call it a real right to work.
That might start with the elimination of at-will employment, or the practice that grants employers the right to fire employees for any—or no—reason whenever they wish. As the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argued in her book Private Government, the at-will arrangement gives bosses immense power over workers that, in some cases, exceeds even the authority of the state. “Under the employment-at-will baseline,” Anderson wrote, “workers, in effect, cede all of their rights to their employers, except those specifically guaranteed to them by law, for the duration of the employment relationship.” A different kind of right to work, then, would protect workers from termination without just cause—which, incidentally, is already the standard in a number of European countries—and from the surveillance and abuse of employers.
As the pandemic subsides, a federal jobs guarantee could function as another component of a worker-first right to work, particularly with the country sinking further into a recession. The demand for full employment, a plank of left movements throughout parts of the twentieth century, was revived more recently by a handful of former presidential candidates, including Bernie Sanders. Proponents of a jobs guarantee have argued that such a program would shift power to workers by tightening the labor market and reducing the ability of employers to use the threat of firing to discipline employees. And as my colleague Kate Aronoff wrote in March, a green federal jobs program has the potential not only to build the kind of sustainable infrastructure the country needs in the face of accelerating climate change, but could also set new labor standards for private sector jobs through the creation of a wage floor or a shorter workweek.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--The Cancer in the Camera Lens

The Cancer in the Camera Lens

In close up , on television , at a glance , with the volume down , Donald Trump can from time to time look like a president .
That effect becomes less convincing the more you pay attention , though .
Even under professional lighting , Trump reliably looks like a photographic negative of himself ; on his worse and wetter days he has the tone and texture of those lacquered roast ducks that hang from hooks in Chinatown restaurant windows .
The passing presidentiality of the man dissipates utterly in longer shots , where Trump can be seen standing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jumper in midair , or mincing forward to bum-rush an expert ’ s inconvenient answer with an incoherent one of his own , or just making faces intended to signal that he is listening very strongly to what someone else is saying .
( These slapdash performances of executive seriousness tend to have the effect , as the comedian Stewart Lee once said of James Corden , of making Trump look like “ a dog listening to classical music.
” ) Seen from this long-shot vantage , the man at the podium is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about various things that he can ’ t quite understand or express .
Of course , it all gets much worse with the sound on ; very few things about Trump have ever improved—have not instantly unraveled into a tangle of fragrant grifty waste—upon closer examination .
Still , the combination of those familiar close shots , the years of inherited cultural reflex and unconscious media conditioning can make the illusion work for fleeting moments .
Since Trump himself has both measured and lived his singularly episodic life in just those kinds of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ s been happy to make .
Trump knows what people see when they encounter an older white man standing behind a podium with a certain seal emblazoned upon it , which is The President Of The United States Of America .
He imagined that he might be that man , and now he is .
This is all a guess insofar as anything about What Trump Really Thinks is invariably and inherently a guess , but if there was anything about the job that truly appealed to him when he set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own , this sure feels like it .
As a lifelong acolyte and addict of television , he could imagine himself in those shots , in that space , doing ... whatever a president does .
It seems much less likely that Trump imagined the part where he brutally duffs the response to a pandemic that is now killing thousands of Americans every day and exposing the fragility of the gilded and precarious economy on which he ’ d staked his political future and personal legacy .
That ’ s not the sort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years of his presidency happening more or less as someone as vain and lazy as him might dream it—spend all day watching TV and chasing feuds , watch the big numbers go up and up , bask in the adoration of devoted fans who roar with laughter at every garbled punchline—he has proven himself wholly unprepared for the realities of this very difficult job .
He only really has so many moves , and because there ’ s no room within him to learn or care or adapt , he can only hit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work this time .
Being there is the point .
And being there , in those contextually flattering close shots but also those other ones where he appears to be falling asleep while hanging from an invisible parachute , is why Donald Trump has continued to fight off attempts by the various cynics and masochists to manage him in order to continue claiming the few hours of free daily television exposure that those briefings afford him .
So Trump goes up there and does his weird fey bullying thing in response to questions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the CEO ’ s of various companies and accepts their thanks , and breaks in to deliver luxurious adjectival filigrees and wheedling requests for credit and weird obvious lies as promotional addenda to the answers given by the handful of experts also on hand to acknowledge the raging , destructive course of the present crisis .
Periodically , Trump veers from his usual riffy emcee-in-chief tone to note how tragic it is that more than 60,000 Americans ( as of yesterday ) have died in the pandemic he ’ s so persistently chosen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s never long before he returns to what matters to him—his numbers , his grievances , himself .
“ I ’ m seeing it , ” Trump said Wednesday of his belief that an economic recovery will be swift .
“ I feel it .
I ’ ve felt a lot of things over the years , including , ‘ gee , I think I can win for president.
’ You know ?
”

Trump’s internal polling has shown that getting up there every day and acting like this isn’t helping him. That, indeed, is why his campaign people have tried to get him to stop—everything he has done in response to this pandemic has made it worse, and everything he says makes clear that he is never going to do any better. Trump’s people tell him what those polls say, because it’s their job to do that—but also because it’s the only thing he’ll listen to. Trump then yells at them about his flagging poll numbers, because that is what he thinks it means to be someone’s boss. CNN recently reported that Trump reamed out campaign manager Brad Parscale in this mode on a phone call and then threatened to sue him. (On Wednesday night, Trump dispatched a Tweet denying that he’d ever shouted at Parscale, adding, “have no intention to do so.”) That was last week, the day after Trump appeared to direct government scientists to look into injecting disinfectant—and, more confusingly, sunlight—“into the lungs” to fight Covid-19 and two days after his political team advised a more focused and less combative approach to his daily briefings. “Aides are unsure whether the new approach will stick,” wrote CNN’s Jeremy Diamond.
It is axiomatic, where Trump is concerned, that nothing ever sticks. Things do not stick to the man as a matter of course, but perhaps more to the point, he is playing a different game, one in which the whole idea of sticking is irrelevant. Trump’s people tell him that Americans are scared of losing their livelihoods or dying in a pandemic and need to hear from the people who might prevent that from happening—they tell him, even, that the stock market that he reads as a real-time register of his success responds to those experts and those experts alone—and Trump grouses bitterly that he made those experts “stars” and that “the least [they] could do is give me a little credit.” He hears that people trust The Experts, and so, being Donald Trump, he just calls himself one.
“I like this stuff,” Trump said at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back in early March. He was expansive that day, very much in Winner Mode as the disease spread through communities across the country. “I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” Similarly, when Trump appears to suggest that ingesting bleach might help fight the pandemic that keeps ruining his daily TV appearances, he is not signaling support to the (jarringly large) global community of bleach-drinking conspiracy aficionados. He is misunderstanding something he just saw projected on a PowerPoint and then just talking about it because that is what he likes to do and what he believes experts do when he’s not around.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--How Vivian Gornick Reinvigorated Political Writing

Vivian Gornick specializes in personal narrative .
Sometimes this means artful memoir : Her most admired book is 1987 ’ s Fierce Attachments , about her relationship with her mother , and she sat for The Paris Review ’ s second-ever “ Art of Memoir ” interview in 2014 .
But over the course of her long career—she ’ s now 84—Gornick has applied her personal method to reportage , literary criticism , biography , and even oral history .
In warm , intimate prose , she has addressed questions of selfhood , writing , and politics from many angles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This year sees the release of two very different examples of her approach .
In her new essay collection , Unfinished Business : Notes of a Chronic Re-reader , she retells and reinterprets much of her own life story—her feminist awakening , her discovery of her vocation as a writer , her initiation into psychoanalysis , her embrace of her identity as an “ odd woman ” living alone—by revisiting favorite works of literature .
In her newly reissued oral history , The Romance of American Communism , first published in 1977 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Communist Party members are bookended by Gornick ’ s own disillusionment , first with socialism and then , in the 1970s , with the women ’ s liberation movement .
The result is a kind of collective memoir of falling in and out of love with a political movement , of losing faith in the vindicating power of ideology .
Unfinished Business and Romance are an apt pair , since Romance is itself an example of the changes in reception a book can go through over time .
Widely criticized upon its appearance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ badly written ) and accused of excessive sympathy for the disgraced Communists , Romance fell out of print for many years .
The book has recently found a new currency , anticipated in The Cut and New Yorker profiles of Gornick and warmly endorsed by political theorist Corey Robin as “ the best book ever written ” about the inner life of socialists on a “ Best Books for Understanding Socialism ” list on New York magazine ’ s shopping vertical .
( These are strange times . )
Romance holds a fresh @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a post–Cold War world in which socialism has lost much of its stigma , and who perceive a newly urgent connection between ideology and inner life .
Gornick is mystified by this enthusiasm .
“ I don ’ t know why they want to read it , ” she told New York earlier this year .
Indeed , she ’ s a surprising choice of socialist icon .
Though she ’ s sympathetic to the longing for equality , she ’ s skeptical of movements , because of the way they threaten @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One of the primary themes in her work has been the insufficiency of love and sex as governing motivations , whether in fiction or in life .
The central contention of her 1997 set of essays , The End of the Novel of Love , was that love ’ s promise to “ put us at the center of our own experience ” is an illusion .
The “ romance ” of communism is , for Gornick , just as misleading as romantic love , just as likely to delude and trap you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drama of the self ” lies in individual effort , however wrenching that may be .

Belle was the daughter of Max Rothman: cigar-maker and Communist. (Oh, these Communist women and their fathers!) Max looked like Trotsky, only better. Max thought like Lenin, only not quite so good. The passion of Max’s life was Communism. The passion of Belle’s life was Max.
Here we encounter one of the weaknesses of Romance: Gornick’s insistence that she understands her subjects better than they do, that she can expose their false consciousness. “She hardly knows,” Gornick writes pityingly of Belle, “that the ‘we’ of her speech is not her husband and herself but her father and herself. Max and the Communist Party: that piercing, glowing rapture from which she would never recover and whose sources she would never uncover. Like Teresa penetrated by her angel’s arrow, Belle penetrated by Papa’s revolution.” Belle is cheated of the opportunity to be judged on her own words; a more skillful oral historian could have made insight about Belle’s daddy issues available without indulging in such clumsy editorializing. Here and elsewhere in Romance, Gornick’s intrusive narrative approach reminded me of a heavy-handed psychoanalyst who brings everything, relentlessly, back to the Freudian menu, denying the possibility—the freedom—of speaking about big ideas without relating them to the specifics of childhood. Sometimes a cigar-maker is just a cigar-maker.
Romance shows that psychoanalysis and political history don’t always mix well. The psychoanalytic focus on drives tends to empty the content from political commitment. Gornick suggests that Marxism was to Communists what Helen was to Paris, awakening an all-consuming passion, setting in motion “the most intense longings, longings buried in the unknowing self, longings that pierced to the mysterious, vulnerable heart at the center of that incoherent life within us, longings that had to do with the need to live a life of meaning.” Personal relationships certainly do play a substantial role in political commitment, and the search for meaning is a crucial part of the story, but it’s unfair to reduce political convictions to inchoate longings. Misguided though the Communist Party of the USA may have been, communism was a complex ideology with roots in substantive criticisms of capitalism. Besides, Paris’s longing was not mysterious: He wanted the most beautiful woman in the world.
At first, Communism gave ideas, inspiration, purpose, community, redemption. But Gornick’s subjects also detail everything they feel communism took from them: intimate relationships free of party influence, the pursuit of artistic vocations, daily work suited to their talents, fulfilling marriages, self-knowledge, and the ability to think and speak independently. In many cases, Gornick suggests, Communist ardor filled a hole in the lives of people who were unable or unwilling to engage in emotional self-examination and expression. Here I was a little skeptical. Plenty of people marry the wrong person and stay too long in bad relationships without party coercion, lots of talented people fail to realize their artistic dreams, and true self-knowledge is rare.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden

Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden

Based on how the Biden campaign has responded to the allegations so far , and on what they have asked the most principled and loyal Democratic partisans to do or even , to think , a Biden victory in November could be nearly as demoralizing ( if not as existentially dangerous ) as a Biden defeat .
His campaign is run by some of the most cynical people in the Democratic Party apparatus , and unless today marks some sea change in the way they view these allegations , they will continue to believe that they can ignore and dismiss @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may well be right .
And if you are comfortable with that , there ’ s not much else to say .
But no one is under any obligation to adopt that cynical argument and use it to excuse anything .
They would like you to believe that the choice before you is All In With Biden or another four years of Trump .
That is not remotely the case .
The alternative scenario is not some outlandish , unprecedented piece of political-junkie fan-fiction , in which backroom deals at a virtual convention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The elections already on the calendar would simply continue with an existing slate of perfectly qualified candidates .
That is possible .
It ’ s not even unreasonable , nor would it necessarily hand the election to Trump .
Barack Obama became the presumptive nominee in June of 2008 .
He had plenty of time to unify the party , introduce himself to the rest of the nation , and win the November election .
But just because Biden could step aside and allow the primaries to continue without him doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is worth reflecting on why that is .
Democratic leadership would panic , obviously , at the thought of changing horses in what they already view as the middle of the stream .
But they also seem to believe their die-hards won ’ t care , and the people most vocal about wishing to change things won ’ t demand a reckoning .
They are relying on people already fully invested in a Joe Biden campaign—not just the campaign operatives and donors and elected officials , but the outside organizations and the professional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the media personalities , and even people who seem to do nothing but Post all day—to entertain no possibility of disinvestment .
But with months to go before the convention , there is plenty of time for people with power and platforms to use them .

But (among the commentariat, at least), there are more left-of-center voices responding with hopelessness or helplessness. I can’t believe male politicians, and the political establishment, are making me do this again threatens to become a common refrain. That reaction would be understandable if the bulk of the corroborating evidence had emerged in October (there is suggestive evidence that right-wing groups had had the Larry King Show tape filed away for just such time; suspiciously, they had it ready to post almost as soon as The Intercept published its story). But it is not October. It is May. Joe Biden is not the nominee. The primaries are still happening. It is within your power to demand an alternative.
The organizations that wasted weeks drafting a letter urging the Biden campaign to come up with an acceptable response to all this could now draft one instead urging Biden to step aside and let the primaries continue. Barack Obama could gently suggest that Biden do what he knows is right. Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Amy Klobuchar could unsuspend their campaigns. Or some of them could choose, just as they chose to throw their support to Biden, to endorse a well-qualified also-ran they believe deserves another shot, such as Jay Inslee or Julián Castro. And then the Democratic voters could decide. That’s how the system is supposed to work: Neither the Constitution nor the bylaws of the Democratic National Committee require that the guy leading the delegate count on May 1 win the nomination. If Biden left now, on his own terms, perhaps with some polite fiction about his health or stamina, the rest of the primaries could play out as designed, in a civil, well-managed continuation of the contests, and the eventual Democratic nominee could emerge without being seriously wounded.
Based on how the Biden campaign has responded to the allegations so far, and on what they have asked the most principled and loyal Democratic partisans to do, or even to think, a Biden victory in November could be nearly as demoralizing (if not as existentially dangerous) as a Biden defeat. His campaign is run by some of the most cynical people in the Democratic Party apparatus, and unless today marks some sea change in the way they view these allegations, they will continue to believe that they can ignore and dismiss this story and still win. They may well be right. And if you are comfortable with that, there’s not much else to say. But no one is under any obligation to adopt that cynical argument and use it to excuse anything. They would like you to believe that the choice before you is All In With Biden or another four years of Trump. That is not remotely the case.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--Hollywood Keeps Trying to Rewrite Its History

On August 6 , 1969 , the actress Sharon Tate was found dead in her home on Cielo Drive , Los Angeles , eight months pregnant and so bloodied that her patterned underwear appeared red to the investigating officers .
She ’ d been stabbed 16 times .
In 2019 , at the bidding of the writer , director , and foot-fetishist Quentin Tarantino , history rewound itself and replayed the scene differently , the bloody full stop at the end of Hollywood ’ s decade of free love reworked into a more promising ellipsis .
Once Upon a Time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and potentially his second-to-last feature film , sees Tate escape her brutal murder , her would-be attackers slashed and burned by two heroic doofuses : one an actor , one a stuntman .
Whether or not you agree with Tarantino ’ s readjustment of the narrative , the central metaphor is clear : Old Hollywood , with its magic and its misogyny , its razzamatazz and racism , has triumphed over the encroaching psychic darkness of the 1970s .
The dinosaurs have dodged the meteor .
Hollywood , the latest in a continuing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , tries the same trick from a very different angle : It imagines a fantasy-science-fiction version of the Golden Age in which Hollywood becomes less exclusionary , less discriminatory , and less the sole terrain of great white men .
Its primary cast of characters includes a gay black screenwriter named Archie ( Jeremy Pope ) ; a young black actress with a contract at a major studio , Camille ( Laura Harrier ) ; a half-Filipino director , Raymond ( Darren Criss ) ; and a number of real figures from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Picking ) and Anna May Wong ( Michelle Krusiec ) .
Together , they begin work on what they hope will be a film capable of changing Hollywood forever : one whose screenplay is initially about Peg Entwistle , the actress who committed suicide by leaping from the Hollywood sign in September 1932 .
Eventually , the film they ’ re making metamorphoses into a different project , an examination of the cruelty of the system , with—somewhat incongruously—a happy ending .
In spite of the show purportedly being about the need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way into Hollywood ’ s story is a straight , white , blue-eyed man with a standard-issue jawline : Jack Castello ( David Corenswet ) , who is first seen gazing wide-eyed at a cinema screen as if he ’ s delighted to be puzzling out a very , very tricky piece of algebra .
Unable to find acting work , he is making ends meet as a full-time sex worker at a garage frequented by the lonely wives and closeted gay men of Hollywood .
( The password for its clientele ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ He decides to enlist Archie , the screenwriter , as a way of fending off eager male clients , and Archie ends up being hired by a pre-stardom Rock Hudson , who later becomes his boyfriend .
Archie , who wrote the script for the film about Peg Entwistle , is also working with the up-and-coming Raymond , who is married to Camille .
Most of the action , once Jack gives up sex work , plays out at Ace , a fictionalized studio meant to stand in for Paramount or MGM .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Robert Reiner ) , is married to Avis Amberg ( Patti LuPone ) , who once hired Jack for sex when he still worked at the garage .
Structurally , at least , the show resembles Hollywood the industry : incestuous , byzantine , powered by lucky breaks and manufactured , wholly unbelievable coincidences .
Ryan Murphy ’ s soapiness—by which I mean his love of melodrama that is too straight-faced to work as kitsch but too inelegant to be legitimately moving—is in some ways his Achilles ’ heel , a stumbling block @ @ @ @ @ @ @ best work .
Almost always , he is better with material that allows characters to bitch , to be waspishly funny , or to further a vendetta .
( “ If you can ’ t walk into that shed and lend a helping hand to national treasure Cole Porter , ” a furious pimp tells Jake , delivering the show ’ s best line , “ you better find me someone who can !
” When Jake returns home and his wife spurns his advances , she tells him that his dinner ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cold wiener.
” ) Here , when characters face romantic or professional rejection , a score that resembles something from Twin Peaks swells in the background , as if daring them to cry like Donna Hayward .
They react to infidelity by having spontaneous near-miscarriages , and they experience sudden heart attacks merely in order to advance the plot .
Older white people with power turn out , nine times out of 10 , to be good liberals with a yen for elevating those who face discrimination , a development that might seem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the series did not also play out in a world still inhabited by the Klan .

Older white people with power turn out, nine times out of 10, to be good liberals with a yen for elevating those who face discrimination.
Ryan Murphy’s soapiness—by which I mean his love of melodrama that is too straight-faced to work as kitsch but too inelegant to be legitimately moving—is in some ways his Achilles’ heel, a stumbling block that can prevent him from creating his best work. Almost always, he is better with material that allows characters to bitch, to be waspishly funny, or to further a vendetta. (“If you can’t walk into that shed and lend a helping hand to national treasure Cole Porter,” a furious pimp tells Jake, delivering the show’s best line, “you better find me someone who can!” When Jake returns home and his wife spurns his advances, she tells him that his dinner’s on the table: “a cold wiener.”) Here, when characters face romantic or professional rejection, a score that resembles something from Twin Peaks swells in the background, as if daring them to cry like Donna Hayward. They react to infidelity by having spontaneous near-miscarriages, and they experience sudden heart attacks merely in order to advance the plot. Older white people with power turn out, nine times out of 10, to be good liberals with a yen for elevating those who face discrimination, a development that might seem less tonally jarring if the events of the series did not also play out in a world still inhabited by the Klan.
Hollywood is, in other words, too toothless, too airily bloodless, and too nice to leave much of an impression. It is difficult to write a full critique when the one plot development that proves definitively that the show is too pat, not to mention too indelicate in its approach to social change, is the one held under embargo. It seems fair to say that certain problems are too large to be solved with the magic of the silver screen and that suggesting that to do so might be possible appears, to me, to be a little patronizing to those still experiencing all the same systemic discrimination circa 2020. The show’s underlying notion that unity might have been within reach if we’d only tried a little harder—if the general public had seen more black and brown faces on the screen or more men holding hands on Hollywood red carpets—might seem less deplorably ham-fisted if the series were more elegantly written, making it a more plausible exercise in wish fulfillment.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--The Post-Pandemic Future of Work

The Post-Pandemic Future of Work

The empty refrain around “ heroes ” in “ essential ” jobs—the people expected to continue to show up to work , from health care to grocery retail and sanitation , while everyone else shelters in place—has by now become familiar .
But increasingly so has its counter : One thing I ’ ve heard over and over since the coronavirus lockdown first started has been , They say I ’ m an essential worker , but they don ’ t treat me like one .
I ’ ve heard it from fast-food workers on strike in North Carolina and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; from grocery store workers in West Virginia and nurses—so many nurses—who are tired of being called “ heroes ” and would like some basic protective equipment , please .
“ We ’ re nobody when it ’ s not essential .
We ’ re just workers .
They could care less about us if this virus wasn ’ t out here , ” Bertha Bradley , a 60-year-old food service worker from Durham , North Carolina , told me .
“ I don ’ t get health benefits .
I don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t get paid vacations .
I don ’ t get a living wage .
So what do they want from me ?
What more would they do ?
If I die right now , their business is still going to go.
” Calling workers “ essential , ” after all , is just another way of saying you can ’ t stop .
Health care workers and teachers have long known the particular pressures of being “ essential ” even as their work is devalued : Dare to make demands for yourself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back up those demands , and be demonized to the world by the same politicians who ’ ve slashed your budget .
But now more and more workers are being subjected to that double bind of being told that they are invaluable , even as their conditions worsen and grow more dangerous .
The coronavirus crisis is drawing the veil away from the true nature of work .
When going to work every day is touted as an act of heroism on billboards and in politicians ’ announcements and the daily news , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risking .
In this moment , the coercive nature of that work is more obvious—and the fact that we do not have any right to demand people do it is becoming more clear .
As workers in industry after industry strike , protest , and quit rather than put their lives on the line , as previously tolerable jobs become suddenly hazard-laden , we should consider what it really means to have to work in order to live .

The walls close in at home when our jobs, too, take up residence there, when our employer, as philosophy professor Fiona Jenkins wrote, has essentially requisitioned our personal space. The already porous boundaries between work time and nonwork time collapse when “WFH” is the new order of things. (It is strangely evocative that “WFH” also stands for Wages for Housework, a campaign that noted that the home had always been a workplace.) For the laid off, time suddenly stretches out, with nothing to do but click and click and click and wait for the unemployment page to load, if it ever does. Wait for the check, if it ever comes.
But for the “essential” worker right now, perhaps previously accustomed, like Bertha Bradley was, to being told they were easily replaced, the world has perhaps changed the most. The job might have been dangerous before—certainly the essential workers of the food production chain risked injury and illness even before plants like Smithfield Foods became hotspots for the virus. But now serving hot dogs and sodas to drive-up customers, as Bradley does, comes with a side risk of serious illness. Passing prescriptions over the counter, as Travis Boothe does in a Kroger in Beckley, West Virginia, might pass the virus back over. And that’s sparked a new militancy in many of those workers. Kroger, Boothe noted, was raking in profits in the midst of the crisis and conceded to hazard pay at the workers’ demand. “Co-workers who never would’ve thought about the idea of refusing work or potential strike actions have been saying to me, ‘What do we have to lose? They need us. We’re essential, we’re necessary. Their profits don’t exist without us showing up to work,’” he said.
Going to a low-paying job was always done under a veiled threat: of poverty, homelessness, hunger. Go to work or starve, particularly as bipartisan governments of the past four decades have carved away at the welfare state. Our unemployment benefits system was designed to make sure that people worked if any job was offered, rather than to allow them to wait to find something they’d like or that actually paid a decent wage. And even as the social safety net was hacked to shreds, the pressure on workers to like their jobs was ramped up—workers now expected not just to show up on time but to do so with a smile, as if their highest ambition in life is to serve.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker

When the Department of Homeland Security released its criteria for “ Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers ” in March , it included a dizzying array of jobs across a host of industries : the flight attendants who wash their hands 20 times in two hours as they check seat belts and distribute drinks ; the sanitation workers , still making their rounds through infected cities ; and everyone along the food supply chain , from immigrant meatpackers to the grocery store workers , line cooks , and delivery drivers we encounter every day .
Many of the jobs on DHS ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ need paramedics , chaplains , and doctors to care for the sick , loggers and mill workers to make all that toilet paper , and warehouse workers to pack and ship it .
But in an American pandemic , administrators who file health insurance claims are also “ essential.
” So are coffin-makers .
Restaurants can claim they , too , are essential , giving rise to a darkly funny meme started by a Twitter user who posted a photo of himself dressing for work in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone costume with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I an essential worker ?
” He and thousands of others are at work , risking their lives , in part because of the slipperiness of the adjective “ essential.
” It can refer both to what a person or thing is and to what it does , or to what makes it “ indispensably requisite , ” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it .
DHS , in drafting a list of essential workers , had to decide whose work was indispensable , an intrinsically subjective judgment .
The question is not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whom it is essential .
As Kirk Gibbs , an electrician , put it to The New York Times : “ I ’ m essential to the pocketbooks of rich contractors and essential for spreading the virus , but that ’ s about it.
” It is tempting to imagine that Covid-19 , like a biblical plague , will issue just retribution to the pharaohs of our time for undervaluing work that really matters .
But the pandemic ’ s more immediate effect may be to illuminate the routine cruelties of more normal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ immigrant farmworkers have begun carrying a copy of the DHS order identifying them as critical infrastructure workers , in case ICE or local police stop them .
It won ’ t protect them from deportation .
They have long been essential , even as the cruelest elements of state power deem them illegal and disposable ; now , they have the paperwork to prove it .

When the Department of Homeland Security released its criteria for “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers” in March, it included a dizzying array of jobs across a host of industries: the flight attendants who wash their hands 20 times in two hours as they check seat belts and distribute drinks; the sanitation workers, still making their rounds through infected cities; and everyone along the food supply chain, from immigrant meatpackers to the grocery store workers, line cooks, and delivery drivers we encounter every day.
Many of the jobs on DHS’s list make intuitive sense. We need paramedics, chaplains, and doctors to care for the sick, loggers and mill workers to make all that toilet paper, and warehouse workers to pack and ship it. But in an American pandemic, administrators who file health insurance claims are also “essential.” So are coffin-makers. Restaurants can claim they, too, are essential, giving rise to a darkly funny meme started by a Twitter user who posted a photo of himself dressing for work in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone costume with the caption, “How TF am I an essential worker?”


newrepublic--2020-05-01--The Agony and the Ecstasy of Vintage Snooker

Sports usually inject cathartic experiences into their supporters at regular intervals , and the current shortage can ’ t be good for fans ’ health .
As an interim measure , I recommend digging into the video archive of some less celebrated sport—the wallflowers to soccer or basketball ’ s prom queens , if you will—and following the rabbit hole to its end .
My favorite stopgap-sport has been the unfashionable ballet of the green baize , also known as snooker .
As any history of snooker will tell you , its charm lies both in the game itself and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sports ’ best-dressed .
What they can ’ t make you feel—what you have to learn for yourself—is how exquisite good snooker can be and the pitch of tension it can reach .
It ’ s a game of pure skill , and so difficult to play well that a truly outstanding frame ( snooker for “ game ” ) will have you yelling at little colored balls rolling across your laptop screen .
Snooker is an offshoot of a parent sport , billiards , which grew out of the indoor version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ games involve hitting balls with cues , as you probably know from playing pool .
That ’ s because , instead of whacking balls on grass with mallets , in this new rainy-day iteration players pushed them with sticks across green cloth ( a.k.a .
the “ grass ” ) .
Billart is the French word for one of those sticks , hence the name of the grandfather of modern table sport .
An American pool table is small by comparison to a full competition snooker table , which is six-by-12 feet long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Those dimensions make potting 22 balls in a specific order a spectacularly difficult proposition , both mathematically and psychologically .
There are plenty of rules to learn , but the basic objective is this : first pot all 15 red balls , alternating with the six colored balls ( which get returned to the table until the reds are all gone ) , then all the colored balls in a specific sequence .
Miss a ball , and it ’ s your opponent ’ s turn .
Matches consist of a specified @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vary .

Higgins is a tragic character, but he almost single-handedly drove the craze for snooker that peaked in 1980s Britain (you can see a fascinating snapshot of the sport on the rise in This England, a 1978 ITV Granada documentary). Ever since, big characters and silly nicknames have been bywords for the sport, which contains an odd mix of class signifiers: Pros play competitions in evening dress, and the referees wear white gloves, but public billiards halls are traditionally the domain of teenage boys and working men, not toffs. Jimmy “The Whirlwind” White, for example, came up by practicing in billiard halls when he should have been at school, meaning that he wasn’t so hot on reading at the start of his professional career. He still had to wear a tux.
That odd admixture of cultures is where snooker gets its old-school charm and humor. From the late 1970s through to the late ’80s, when the game got glossy and professional (and less fun), snooker was as much a comedy act as a game. When Jimmy White lost for the millionth time to Stephen Hendry, for example, his first words to the TV interviewer were, “He’s beginning to annoy me.” Snooker champ Ray Reardon used to flash his wonky teeth threateningly at opponents and was known as “Dracula.” Steve “Interesting” Davis revolutionized the sport in the 1980s by practicing snooker every night instead of going out and getting drunk, which nobody had thought of before. Best of all is Dennis Taylor, the adorable champion who chalked all his success up to his habit of wearing his glasses upside-down.
In the few golden years that snooker players were serious celebrities, somebody’s manager had the brilliant idea of putting together a pop song, called “Snooker Loopy,” which uses the click-clack of balls as a percussive motif. It’s catchy, if a little bit silly, and captures the knees-up cheer of pub sports nicely.


newrepublic--2020-05-01--Two Weeks of Democrats’ Pathetic Attempts at Opposition

On Monday , the Democratic contingent of the New York State Board of Elections decided to scuttle its own presidential primary out of concern , it insisted , for voters who might otherwise be exposed to the coronavirus at the polls .
It was a mystifying explanation .
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had , by this time , already promised mail-in absentee ballots for all voters , and state and local primaries were still set to proceed as usual .
The real objective of canceling the presidential primary , it would seem , was to ensure that Bernie Sanders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state where he had won 41 percent of the vote , or more than 820,000 votes , in the prior election .
“ What the Sanders supporters want is essentially a beauty contest that , given the situation with the public health emergency that exists now , seems to be unnecessary and , indeed , frivolous , ” board co-chair Douglas Kellner said .
The likening of democracy to an outdated , vaguely embarrassing institution felt very GOP indeed : Republicans apparently no longer have cornered the market on voter suppression .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there have been many instances in which the traditional lines of separation between the two parties have merged and blurred .
In an election year , this seems like a foolish mistake for Democrats to make ; in a crisis year , it feels like a dangerous one .
And yet this has been the past month ’ s defining political phenomenon .
The week before the New York State primary was needlessly canceled , presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden , who might now be awarded all of New York ’ s 320 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ designed to appeal to the same people voting in New York ’ s presidential primary , which is to say , no one at all .
Despite no discernible public mandate to punish China for the coronavirus , the ad thundered that Trump had “ rolled over for the Chinese ” on the pandemic , in part by being too hesitant to clamp down on Chinese travelers to the United States .
Among those understandably repulsed by such rhetoric were a number of Asian Americans , who have emerged in recent years as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to surveys , one reason Asian American voters have increasingly turned away from Republicans is the GOP ’ s seething xenophobia .
Biden , unfathomably , seemed to be making a compelling case for this constituency to simply stay home on Election Day .
Ah , well : the better to avoid a raging pandemic and a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes .

On Monday, the Democratic contingent of the New York State Board of Elections decided to scuttle its own presidential primary out of concern, it insisted, for voters who might otherwise be exposed to the coronavirus at the polls. It was a mystifying explanation. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had, by this time, already promised mail-in absentee ballots for all voters, and state and local primaries were still set to proceed as usual. The real objective of canceling the presidential primary, it would seem, was to ensure that Bernie Sanders would not collect any delegates in the state where he had won 41 percent of the vote, or more than 820,000 votes, in the prior election. “What the Sanders supporters want is essentially a beauty contest that, given the situation with the public health emergency that exists now, seems to be unnecessary and, indeed, frivolous,” board co-chair Douglas Kellner said.
The likening of democracy to an outdated, vaguely embarrassing institution felt very GOP indeed: Republicans apparently no longer have cornered the market on voter suppression. In fact, over the past fortnight, there have been many instances in which the traditional lines of separation between the two parties have merged and blurred. In an election year, this seems like a foolish mistake for Democrats to make; in a crisis year, it feels like a dangerous one.


newrepublic--2020-05-02--Democrats are Losing at Political Rhetoric

On Thursday , The New York Times Magazine ’ s Jason Zengerle offered the latest lengthy look at the state of Joe Biden ’ s housebound campaign .
Although the technical challenges of getting a camera setup in his home have been surmounted , Biden is still clearly out of his element online , and the ideas his team has invented to provide his virtual campaign with structure remain poor substitutes for ordinary events and interactions with voters .
“ Here , at the dawn of the general-election campaign—a time when he should be barnstorming the country , appearing in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rivals , bringing Democrats together to do battle with Donald Trump in November—he finds himself confined to his basement , ” Zengerle wrote , “ forced to talk to a camera instead of a person , struggling to make the human connections he typically forges and so visibly desires.
” There ’ s no real solution for recovering those in-person connections as long as the demands of social distancing persist .
For the foreseeable future , Biden will have to make do with virtual rope lines and all the rest .
But the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reach voters en masse—a setup that allows Biden to deliver statements , and speeches that can travel widely on the internet and air on television .
The original technical challenge has been supplanted by the challenge of giving Biden interesting things to say .
Six months out from the general election , the Biden campaign has yet to produce a particularly memorable speech or ad , save a spot that vainly and irresponsibly tried to out-tough Donald Trump on Red China .
His best speech , delivered at a victory rally after South @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mostly for the energy with which he delivered it and what the moment meant for his candidacy—you ’ re welcome to try remembering a single word he said .
The line that ’ s come to define his campaign , “ a battle for the soul of the nation , ” is fairly ho-hum and was introduced in the announcement that kicked off his campaign over a year ago .
It ’ s also a line the campaign has evidently from in the wake of the pandemic , as Mother Jones ’ David @ @ @ @ @ @ @ isn ’ t the best communicator .
In the months before he announced his bid , he referred to himself a “ gaffe machine ” and most who have followed his career , and this campaign , would probably agree .
But setting his gaffes entirely aside , Biden also isn ’ t really known for being a compelling translator of political ideas or for offering the kind of messaging that drove the last successful Democratic presidential campaigns .
His infamous plagiarism of a speech by British Labour Leader Neil Kinnock in 1987—and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ background—was a grasping effort at rhetorical highs he couldn ’ t reach on his own .

Among the candidates in this year’s Democratic primary, Cory Booker came closest to replicating this rhetorical style, although Obama didn’t share the New Jersey senator’s gushing excesses (it’s hard to imagine anyone but Booker riffing on “a conspiracy of love”), and his enthusiasm wasn’t as contagious among the Democratic electorate. Beto O’Rourke started not too far from the Obama mode but had moved to a darker, righteously angry place by the end of his bid, speaking more candidly about gun violence, American history, and racism on the right than Obama ever had. None of it worked. While he also bore Obama’s influence, Pete Buttigieg tried out a different rhetorical framework early in his bid, one animated by old anxieties about ceding concepts such as freedom and security to the right. But Democratic voters weren’t particularly taken by it, and he eventually moved on to workaday messaging against Medicare for All and Democratic divisions. Bernie Sanders’s manner of forceful, gruff, and unfussy repetition won support for his policies among voters but failed to allay concerns about his electoral viability. Warren’s more conspicuously wonky and personable brand of progressivism didn’t, either.
As they did in 2016, Democratic voters have chosen a candidate who didn’t have to speak and message his way to wide name recognition and who might have fared worse if he had. Biden’s patina of authority and simple, avuncular charm may well be all he needs to win in November, especially now that we’ve been thrown into a deadly crisis deepened by the president’s buffoonery and loose talk.
Biden’s efforts to demonstrate leadership by communication through the pandemic so far have revolved around offering advice and crafting proposals that he’s not in the position to implement or see through. There are nevertheless other ways he could do some good. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser noted last week that Trump has yet to formally memorialize those who’ve been killed in the pandemic, an extraordinary break from presidential tradition. “Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration amid national tragedy part of the job description,” she wrote. “Have we ever had a President just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically clichéd kind?”


newrepublic--2020-05-03--Death of a Survivor

Death of a Survivor

Many people at Bedford Hills , soon confined to their units for nearly 23 hours a day , began to experience symptoms .
Meanwhile , the policies in place seemed arbitrary and unclear , ever changing .
One day , they were given a ticket if they wore a mask ; the next day , they were given a ticket if they did not .
Long before the virus , the women did not , typically , trust the infirmary to treat them properly .
Now they heard , through the elaborate prison grapevine , that those who became critically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
One woman told me that , after collapsing , she was briefly treated for Covid-19 and then held in a cell without soap or belongings for five days .
She was allowed no contact with her family until a sympathetic guard helped her call her mother—who had been phoning the prison daily , looking for her daughter .
As she began to recover , she recounted , she was placed in a refashioned suicide watch room with nine other sick women ; they took their own temperatures , washed their clothes in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meals .
Another woman told me that her headache and nausea were dismissed for nearly a week , until she was vomiting bile , after which she was admitted to the infirmary , where she stayed for two weeks , delirious and unable to eat .
“ It was a nightmare , ” she wrote .
At least seven women in her unit had the virus , and others were “ not well but don ’ t want to go through what I did , so now no one wants to admit it… @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Lulu kept quiet when she started to feel sick .
She wrote to Melissa that it was “ just a little cold.
” Her friends brought spicy teas to her bedside .
Lulu was a respected elder to many : During normal times , they braided her hair , cooked her food , and carried her bags .
On April 3 , Crystal Whaley noticed that Lulu , a fixture in the common areas , had been absent for days .
She visited Lulu ’ s cell .
“ When she got @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Crystal wrote me .
On April 7 , Crystal insisted that Lulu needed medical care .
She helped dress Lulu , who was taken to the infirmary , then the hospital .
“ I never heard from her again , ” Crystal wrote .
Lulu was admitted to an intensive care unit and placed on a ventilator .
Melissa knew her sister was hospitalized , but she couldn ’ t find the facility .
Penberthy , Lulu ’ s attorney , contacted the prison ’ s doctor to find out her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was steadfast about not giving out that info , citing patient privacy laws , ” she told me .
Penberthy appealed to her local court to have the medical records released , “ but it cost me ten days.
” According to Penberthy , the prison doctor “ knew her condition was serious , and he had tried encouraging applications for her clemency .
”

As of May 1, 1,074 staff members and 375 incarcerated people at New York State prisons are confirmed positive for Covid-19; 10 incarcerated people and two staff members have died. On March 30, a top doctor at New York’s Rikers Island Jail tweeted that, in 12 days, one Covid-19 case had exploded into 200, that the virus was spreading rapidly, and that it was “unlikely” that the jail could “stem the growth.” By April 30, there were 376 cases, an infection rate of nearly 10 percent, compared to the civilian rate of 1.5 percent in the rest of the state. All numbers only reflect those who have been given tests, which are notoriously in short supply. When the Bureau of Prisons, which controls federal facilities, tested 2,700 incarcerated people for Covid-19, 71 percent of the tests came back positive.
A drawing Lulu made in prison (Courtesy of Survived and Punished)
All visitation to Bedford Hills was canceled on March 16. Incarcerated women, civilian workers, guards, and their families fell ill. Lulu wrote to Melissa on March 20, cheerful as usual, grateful for her care package of popcorn and Honey Buns. Hey Sis, How are you doing? Is the sun out up north? I got the stuff you sent me.… Thank you very much for all that you did.… Love you both and tell the kids I said hello and to continuously wash their hands and face. Love LuLu. As the virus circulated, she grew anxious. On March 28, she asked Melissa to “contact people in higher places and let them know.” With her underlying health issues, she added, “I cannot afford to get this virus. It may kill me. Please help.”
Many people at Bedford Hills, soon confined to their units for nearly 23 hours a day, began to experience symptoms. Meanwhile, the policies in place seemed arbitrary and unclear, ever-changing. One day, they were given a ticket if they wore a mask; the next day, they were given a ticket if they did not. Long before the virus, the women did not, typically, trust the infirmary to treat them properly. Now they heard, through the elaborate prison grapevine, that those who became critically ill were secluded without any outside communication.


newrepublic--2020-05-04--When Blackness Is a Preexisting Condition

Ethel Freeman became famous in death , even though no one knew her name .
For months , she was one of the many nameless people who lost their lives in the wake of Hurricane Katrina ’ s deadly intersection of race and class .
Her son , Herbert Freeman Jr. , had successfully rescued the 91-year-old retired school employee from her flooded home , but once they were both sheltered , alongside thousands of other displaced hurricane victims in the New Orleans convention center , he could only assure her that help was coming as he watched her life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a convoy of buses arrived to transport Katrina refugees to other facilities , and Freeman was forced to abandon his mother ’ s blanket-covered corpse in her wheelchair .
He next saw his mother in a heartbreaking photo of the elderly Black woman , alone in death amid the random belongings of the desperate souls who managed to survive the nation ’ s shoddy post-Katrina rescue effort .
Ethel Freeman became a lasting symbol of a government that failed the most basic responsibility to its citizens in the face of cataclysmic harm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and more demographically diverse scale than Katrina did , but we ’ re certain to encounter the stories of other Ethel Freemans : people of color whose chances of survival were handicapped by generations of human-engineered disasters before they found themselves in the path of a natural one .
Their deaths will overtake them silently and without fanfare , unless we are able to speak of common threats in a non–color-blind way that matches the devastating scale of the crisis at hand .
This time around , the tragedy will touch millions of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many of whom may never have dreamed that they , too , might lose their lives as the most lavishly resourced nation on the planet fumbled again and again in its response to the looming disaster .
Some may even awake to the reality that they were never on the “ us ” side of Trumpism ’ s us-versus-them messaging—a lethal combination of white nationalist rhetoric and utter disregard for the material well-being of the base that supports him .
There ’ s certainly irony in the reflection that the unvarnished , controversial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ TV during a post-Katrina benefit show— “ George Bush doesn ’ t care about Black people ” —may take on a prophetic cast for all sorts of people excluded from Trump ’ s small army of swaddled aristocrats .
Yet if the past is prologue , this swelling of the ranks of the newly dispossessed will eschew a politics of targeted interventions in favor of a rhetoric of rising-tide–ism .
“ We ’ re all in this together , ” liberal , progressive , and moderate pundits have regularly intoned since the Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t the time to chart the course of the pandemic ’ s suffering along the coordinates of race , gender , or other characteristics , they will say .

Ethel Freeman became famous in death, even though no one knew her name. For months, she was one of the many nameless people who lost their lives in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s deadly intersection of race and class. Her son, Herbert Freeman Jr., had successfully rescued the 91-year-old retired school employee from her flooded home, but once they were both sheltered, alongside thousands of other displaced hurricane victims in the New Orleans convention center, he could only assure her that help was coming as he watched her life slip away. Nearly four days later, a convoy of buses arrived to transport Katrina refugees to other facilities, and Freeman was forced to abandon his mother’s blanket-covered corpse in her wheelchair. He next saw his mother in a heartbreaking photo of the elderly Black woman, alone in death amid the random belongings of the desperate souls who managed to survive the nation’s shoddy post-Katrina rescue effort. Ethel Freeman became a lasting symbol of a government that failed the most basic responsibility to its citizens in the face of cataclysmic harm.
Covid-19 operates on a much wider and more demographically diverse scale than Katrina did, but we’re certain to encounter the stories of other Ethel Freemans: people of color whose chances of survival were handicapped by generations of human-engineered disasters before they found themselves in the path of a natural one. Their deaths will overtake them silently and without fanfare, unless we are able to speak of common threats in a non–color-blind way that matches the devastating scale of the crisis at hand.


newrepublic--2020-05-04--The Dark Search for a “Silver Lining” to the Coronavirus

In 1798 , as the global population approached one billion , cleric Thomas Robert Malthus anonymously published his bestselling treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population , in which he argued that humanity would soon exhaust its ability to feed itself .
The promised crisis never arrived .
But a certain segment of the population has subscribed to this crude environmentalism ever since .
Malthusian thinkers have advocated some pretty disturbing “ solutions ” to the perceived problem of overpopulation .
Paul Ehrlich , a respected Stanford University conservation biologist and the author of the 1968 book The Population @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hardin developed a theory of “ lifeboat ethics , ” which argued that if the poor must die for the wealthy to stay afloat on a planet with limited resources , so be it .
And modern ecofascists have coalesced around the authoritarian notion that people should sacrifice individual interest for the good of the “ land ” —usually with a dash of ethnonationalism and a genocidal imagination mixed in .
The 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter and the El Paso Walmart shooter he inspired , for example , were driven by the belief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the land .
“ If we can get rid of enough people , then our way of life can become more sustainable , ” the Texas shooter wrote in his manifesto .
But few who espouse population-based environmental rhetoric are actually avowed ecofascists .
They ’ re not even necessarily right-wing ideologues .
Jane Goodall , the widely revered primatologist , declared at the World Economic Forum in January that “ all these things we talk about wouldn ’ t be a problem ” if the world population was still around 500 million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fringe belief but , rather , indulging in what David Wallace Wells has called “ climate brutality ” or what Samuel Miller McDonald has termed “ boring old liberal capitalism ” : In polite society , the most radical solutions for the population problem , like forced sterilization or mass shootings , are shunned , and targeting any individual group is unacceptable .
But the basic premise of Malthusian thought—that humans and , more specifically , their numbers , are problematic—is acceptable across the political spectrum .
It ’ s a way of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may seem a more destabilizing possibility : that the capitalistic lifestyle , not poorer countries ’ population growth , might be what needs to change .
In addition to being morally repugnant , these ideas are also predicated on flawed scientific assumptions .
Earth ’ s carrying capacity—the maximum number of people it can physically hold—is limited .
But researchers—like those at the Future of Food project at Oxford University—have shown the bigger problem is not the number of people on the planet but the lifestyle those people lead and the systems we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ already produces enough calories to feed nine billion people—those calories just aren ’ t evenly distributed .
And though everyone ’ s diet has some environmental impact , wealthy meat-eaters and those who can afford fancy imported goods have a far larger impact on the planet than the poor .
That ’ s the irony of arguments like Goodall ’ s : The crowd at Davos that nods congenially about the population problem consists , as Greta Thunberg pointed out last year , of some of the world ’ s biggest polluters .

Malthusian thinkers have advocated some pretty disturbing “solutions” to the perceived problem of overpopulation.
Malthusian thinkers have advocated some pretty disturbing “solutions” to the perceived problem of overpopulation. Paul Ehrlich, a respected Stanford University conservation biologist and the author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, recommended sterilization. Ecologist Garrett Hardin developed a theory of “lifeboat ethics,” which argued that if the poor must die for the wealthy to stay afloat on a planet with limited resources, so be it. And modern ecofascists have coalesced around the authoritarian notion that people should sacrifice individual interest for the good of the “land”—usually with a dash of ethnonationalism and a genocidal imagination mixed in. The 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter and the El Paso Walmart shooter he inspired, for example, were driven by the belief they were helping to “preserve” the land. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable,” the Texas shooter wrote in his manifesto.
But few who espouse population-based environmental rhetoric are actually avowed ecofascists. They’re not even necessarily right-wing ideologues. Jane Goodall, the widely revered primatologist, declared at the World Economic Forum in January that “all these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem” if the world population was still around 500 million. She wasn’t representing a fringe belief but, rather, indulging in what David Wallace Wells has called “climate brutality” or what Samuel Miller McDonald has termed “boring old liberal capitalism”: In polite society, the most radical solutions for the population problem, like forced sterilization or mass shootings, are shunned, and targeting any individual group is unacceptable. But the basic premise of Malthusian thought—that humans and, more specifically, their numbers, are problematic—is acceptable across the political spectrum. It’s a way of avoiding what, in affluent circles, may seem a more destabilizing possibility: that the capitalistic lifestyle, not poorer countries’ population growth, might be what needs to change.
In addition to being morally repugnant, these ideas are also predicated on flawed scientific assumptions. Earth’s carrying capacity—the maximum number of people it can physically hold—is limited. But researchers—like those at the Future of Food project at Oxford University—have shown the bigger problem is not the number of people on the planet but the lifestyle those people lead and the systems we create to support them. The Earth already produces enough calories to feed nine billion people—those calories just aren’t evenly distributed. And though everyone’s diet has some environmental impact, wealthy meat-eaters and those who can afford fancy imported goods have a far larger impact on the planet than the poor. That’s the irony of arguments like Goodall’s: The crowd at Davos that nods congenially about the population problem consists, as Greta Thunberg pointed out last year, of some of the world’s biggest polluters.


newrepublic--2020-05-04--How Zoom Colonized Our Lives

How Zoom Colonized Our Lives

On March 27 , David “ Doc ” Searls , a technology writer and veteran of the ad industry , posted an entry on his blog about the newly ubiquitous videoconferencing program Zoom , calling it “ creepily chummy ” with the shadowy advertisers who electronically eavesdrop on users .
The blog was shared on Hacker News , the message board that serves as a digital town square for Silicon Valley habitués , and readers took notice .
His blog , which usually got about 50 readers a day , was getting more than 16,000 , and he continued to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its privacy policy left all sorts of room for the company to harvest personal data for ad tracking .
“ Here ’ s the thing , ” he wrote .
“ Zoom doesn ’ t need to be in the advertising business , least of all in the part of it that lives like a vampire off the blood of human data.
” Consumers may be used to shedding personal data as they wander the internet or scroll through social media .
It ’ s common knowledge that Google and Amazon track online @ @ @ @ @ @ @ microphones of its users , and even weather apps and games , such as Words With Friends and FarmVille , are in the business of harvesting user data .
But even so , the notion that personal data could be gathered from an application like Zoom , where we now consult with doctors and catch up with loved ones , was unsettling .
Arvind Narayanan , who leads Princeton ’ s Web Transparency and Accountability Project , had heard chatter about Zoom for some time , but it was only when the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ realized most individuals , including himself , “ no longer had a meaningful choice to opt out , ” he said .
“ That ’ s when it hit me that the privacy and security problems that I ’ d been hearing about were a big deal.
” Throughout March , “ Zoom-bombers ” had been breaking into private conversations , scrawling racial slurs or posting pornography—a practice that soon got the FBI ’ s attention .
By early April , senators had been advised against using the software , and Google had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ company devices .
To Shoshana Zuboff , the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism , Google ’ s ban was particularly telling , since Google was in exactly the right position to “ know just how pernicious these systems are , ” she said in an interview .

This transition brings a welter of online privacy and security issues. As Zuboff has written, there are hidden trade-offs in digital life. We are accustomed to sacrificing privacy to use certain devices and programs, and by forcing millions of users onto new online services, the current emergency could send that dynamic into destructive new territory. But it could also start a conversation about whether relinquishing that privacy is really necessary.
In a heartening twist, in late March, Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, reached out to Searls for a talk. During their conversation, Searls told me, Yuan seemed “blindsided” by how quickly Zoom had exploded. (The company had gone from having 10 million users in December to 200 million in March.) Zoom charges businesses between $14.99 and $19.99 per month per host—for large firms, that can put the cost of a monthly subscription in the thousands; it doesn’t need to be in the business of spying on users at all. And yet it had left the door open to just those practices. An “attention-tracking” feature let the host of a meeting—say, a teacher or work supervisor—see if you clicked away to another window; and, as Searls pointed out, Zoom’s privacy policy had used the same standard, “weaselly” language that apps adopt if they want to gather data.
On April 8, Zoom held its first “Ask Eric Anything” session. Appearing in front of a virtual background of the Golden Gate Bridge, Yuan began by acknowledging that there had been some “missteps.” The company’s business had not just increased, he said; it had changed. Founded in 2011 and launched in 2013, Zoom had been designed for business meetings and webinars—not telemedicine and kindergarten. Yuan said that the “attention-tracking” feature, for example, was appropriate in some business contexts, but for many new consumers, it presented a privacy conflict. “We disabled it entirely,” he said. The company also announced a number of additional changes—from fixing bugs to overhauling its privacy policy and creating a special set of privacy rules for K-12 users. It also ramped up its “bug bounty” program, bringing on a slew of cryptographers to identify any security weaknesses hiding in its code.


newrepublic--2020-05-04--Donald Trump’s Death March

Donald Trump’s Death March

After a beautiful weekend in the nation ’ s capital , where hundreds flocked to the National Mall to watch big planes go zoom , it is hard not to wonder if too many people in power have concluded that it ’ s about time we wrapped up this whole lockdown thing .
Some states are reopening their businesses even as death rates continue to climb , affording people one last chance to go out and get some sun or a haircut before they die ; one state , Ohio , is even taking steps to prevent workers at reopened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all happening at the same time as new governmental figures tell us there is far more horror to come .
A new estimate by the Trump administration predicts that daily deaths will reach 3,000 by June ( which could be low , since the United States saw 2,909 deaths on Friday , according to the World Health Organization ) and 200,000 new cases each day .
As David Wallace-Wells pointed out on Twitter , until now the actual numbers have “ ranged north of the 97th percentile ” in the Center for Disease @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which would mean an actual number of 15,000 dead per day .
So why would the head of this administration , in full possession of these facts , be barreling ahead with this reopening of the country ?
Trump may simply be incapable of processing this information , or refuses to believe what his own experts tell him .
This would be consistent with his behavior for the entirety of his presidency .
But it may also be that the Americans who are dying are not , by and large , the ones @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , would be in keeping with Trump ’ s reign .
Anyone who has been paying attention might wonder why the estimates keep shifting so much .
At first , we were told to expect 100,000 to 200,000 deaths ; then the models were revised , and the predicted death toll plummeted to just 60,000 by August .
Now , with the U.S. passing 69,000 deaths in early May , the deaths predicted by the models clearly must rise again .
There are many reasons why the models appear to have been too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be inherent in this kind of modeling .
And yet , as the models turn grimmer , the administration has not shifted its response .
Even if it made sense to think about loosening the lockdown when we could kid ourselves that things were improving , continuing to pursue the idea of “ reopening America ” while the numbers get worse is pure negligent madness .

Even someone so resolutely committed to shaping the world entirely around how it makes him feel might have cause to worry that presiding over thousands more deaths might cause him some political headaches. Last week, CNN reported that Trump flipped out at his campaign manager for the crime of telling the president that his poll numbers against Joe Biden aren’t looking so good. Perhaps his decision to double down is simply attributable to his experience that doubling down always works.
But Trump may feel he can relax again for a much worse reason: His supporters are mostly not the ones who are dying. The disease is primarily killing poor people, black people, residents of underfunded and overburdened nursing homes, prisoners, meatpacking workers, and others who don’t have the luxury of working from home indefinitely. It is killing people who cannot afford to stop going to work, or people who live in cramped houses with many other people. It is killing New Yorkers, people from Detroit, people in Los Angeles—all places that don’t really register as “Real America” to Republicans. We don’t have to worry, then, if the numbers keep going up; after all, these people were going to die early anyway.
Trump may see his dire internal polling and interpret this as a sign that things must be made normal as soon as possible—regardless of whether that normal ends up killing yet more people. He may be aware that the armed, angry men who demand at state capitols that we reopen America are more important to his reelection prospects than the types of people who are dying from Covid-19. This is likely to be a grave miscalculation: The bigger the pandemic gets, the more likely it is that it will reach retired suburbanites crying about their unfertilized lawns. New York may be the country’s worst coronavirus hotspot for now, but if Republican states keep insisting on letting people go to the mall, there is no reason why it won’t happen there, too.


newrepublic--2020-05-05--Can the European Union Survive a Pandemic?

There are two things a quarantined European will reliably find when he goes online for news in this age of the coronavirus : first , the clucking of local pundits at how the Trump administration has managed the epidemic in the United States ; second , unmistakable evidence that every one of the major countries of Western Europe , with the exception of Angela Merkel ’ s Germany , is doing worse .
The coronavirus epidemic has turned Europeans against one another .
In early March , Germany , one of the few countries with the manufacturing capacity to equip @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plans to export protective gear .
This infuriated Italy , which was then at the most desperate stage of its own epidemic .
Italy in turn became the scapegoat in a wave of Spanish newspaper stories—about various Iberian fashionistas who had brought Covid-19 back from Milan ’ s Fashion Week ( also canceled , but too tardily ) ; about Venice ’ s Carnival ( halted , but only once it was underway ) ; and about the Valencia fans who fell sick after traveling to Milan for a Champions League soccer match @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heavily infected Italian city of Bergamo .
In Barcelona , Quim Torra , president of the autonomous ( and nationalist ) government of Catalonia , sought to close off the border between his region and the rest of Spain .
He failed .
Spain ’ s politically vulnerable Socialist prime minister , Pedro Sánchez , sniffing a stratagem for Catalan independence , sought—and got—a centralization of emergency authority in Madrid .
The Catalans were left to grumble that they were heading into a plague yoked to Europe ’ s least competent government .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ assessment of Spain for much of the spring .
By the end of April , its death rate had reached 510 per million .
But then the virus took off in divided , decadent Belgium , paralyzed by its own subnational power structures .
As April turned to May , deaths there reached a world-beating 633 per million , more than three times the American rate .
Meanwhile , almost-forgotten border checkpoints had been reestablished—between France and Germany , Austria and Italy .
Facing their largest challenge since World War II , Europe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Brussels-based European Union , the one institution with a track record of coordinating emergency responses continentwide , has been casting about aimlessly for a strategy .
Right now , Europe needs regulatory harmonization—which is just what Brussels is good at providing .
But Europe also needs leaders who can boost morale and stir up sentiments of shared sacrifice—and these are the specialty of nationalist democracies .
Europe ’ s nations were built on family ties , regional languages , and horrific wars in which everyone shed blood together .
The sense of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its consolidation as a political unit after 1992 , the EU has sought to transcend and abolish that kind of emotional kinship in favor of a politics of global capitalism and expert planning .
Democratically inclined citizens often find this kind of politics frustrating even when global capitalism and expert planning are working splendidly .
Right now , they are not .

And that is assuming Italy wants to remain in the EU. Conte has 66 percent approval—a high number in such a distrustful political culture. But the two most dynamic political movements in the country are both hostile to the EU, and they are nipping at his heels. There is the anti-immigration League of Matteo Salvini, who has dominated Italian politics since 2018. It took every trick in the book for Italy’s political establishment to prevent the elections that would have made him prime minister last summer. But Salvini has struggled to maintain his support during this crisis. The League runs hard-hit Lombardy, where the governor has lurched almost daily between pooh-poohing the crisis and sowing panic, in a way that will remind Americans of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Salvini has lately been eclipsed by the leader of the Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni, a sassy and eloquent orator of the Roman right wing, given to diatribes about the “jackals” of Northern Europe who seek to bankrupt Italy in order to “loot its most precious jewels.” In January, 38 percent of Italians still had faith in Brussels; that number has fallen to 25 percent.
We can be certain that the EU’s leaders will come up with ingenious ideas for managing this crisis. They will have a harder time escaping the nationalism-consolidating logic of the coronavirus. For the past three years, French President Emmanuel Macron has been the most pro-EU and pro-market leader in Europe. Right up until the middle of April, he implacably pursued his agenda of Reaganizing France, even in the face of the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) protests of 2018 and 2019 and last winter’s nationwide transport strikes. And yet in a half-hour address to the nation on April 15, Macron executed an ideological reversal that made citizens’ heads spin. He called for renationalizing much of the French economy and restoring the country’s “economic sovereignty.”
It is unlikely that Macron has lost faith in the Brussels project of open borders and open markets. But even those who have turned away from hard borders for economic reasons are going to have to make their peace with them for epidemiological ones. There will be country-by-country differences in how fast the coronavirus comes under control. Denmark, which earlier in the epidemic appeared to be on the same hellish trajectory as Spain, sealed its borders and limited deaths to 75 per million, making its response one of the most effective in the West, comparable to that of Germany or the United States, outside New York and New Jersey. By late April, Danes felt safe enough to let their children go back to elementary schools. But that reopening will only be uncontroversial so long as Danes remain unworried about potentially infected foreigners crossing their borders.


newrepublic--2020-05-05--Why Conservatives Dismiss the Dangers of the Coronavirus

The conservative media ’ s coverage of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has mutated faster than the virus itself .
One day , Covid-19 is an insidious Chinese weapon , the next a hoax ginned up by the Democrats , before it mysteriously morphs into a historic challenge that President Trump is working day and night to overcome .
But through this dense thicket of self-induced media amnesia , you can still discern one consistent theme : skepticism about whether the social distancing measures scientists have recommended to contain the crisis are necessary .
In early March , as death tolls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Fox News personalities went out of their way to downplay the severity of the disease .
Host Jeanine Pirro likened it to the common flu , Republican operative Matt Schlapp said that it was “ very , very difficult to contract this virus , ” and host Jesse Watters declared that if he got it , he would “ beat it ” with the “ power of positive thinking.
” Even less overtly agitprop-minded conservatives have embraced the same don ’ t-tread-on-me mentality .
A columnist at The Blaze equated governors ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that “ there is no limit to what these politicians might do with their divine right of kings.
” Over at the theocratic magazine First Things , an editor decried Andrew Cuomo ’ s determination to save “ just one life ” as “ sentimentalism.
” And a columnist at National Review wrote that he was grateful to the skeptics who saw the crisis as overblown : “ they at least remind me that we have free men among us.
” An unlicensed dermatologist writing for The Federalist , meanwhile , suggested that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meet up for “ chickenpox parties ” and inoculate themselves through “ controlled voluntary infection.
” It ’ s tempting to see this widespread resistance to public health decrees as wishful thinking on the part of a media ecosystem that remains fiercely loyal to Trump : If the virus were mild enough to beat with positive thinking , the president would have less blood on his hands when the crisis passes .
But in fact , these subversive soothsayers were resisting the dictates of social distancing for another , even more fundamental reason @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The founding principle of the conservative media is its opposition to the elites , to the establishment , to whoever is pushing the conventional wisdom .
Whether a consensus comes from Washington , Hollywood , or the Ivory Tower , outsider personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been quick to poke holes in it .
Although the president now often speaks to Hannity before bed , the people who tune in to his show still rankle at authority .
Thus , Fox and The Federalist have an almost genetic responsibility @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brands were built on the erosion of trust in the government and the wisdom of experts , and they have won a loyal audience by holding firm even when the experts are right .
In the end , this contrarian strategy may prove even more dangerous than Trump ’ s dithering response to the virus : No matter who occupies the Oval Office next , counterfactuals such as these are sure to see a seasonal resurgence .

The conservative media’s coverage of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has mutated faster than the virus itself. One day, Covid-19 is an insidious Chinese weapon, the next a hoax ginned up by the Democrats, before it mysteriously morphs into a historic challenge that President Trump is working day and night to overcome. But through this dense thicket of self-induced media amnesia, you can still discern one consistent theme: skepticism about whether the social distancing measures scientists have recommended to contain the crisis are necessary.
In early March, as death tolls continued to rise in China and Italy, Fox News personalities went out of their way to downplay the severity of the disease. Host Jeanine Pirro likened it to the common flu, Republican operative Matt Schlapp said that it was “very, very difficult to contract this virus,” and host Jesse Watters declared that if he got it, he would “beat it” with the “power of positive thinking.” Even less overtly agitprop-minded conservatives have embraced the same don’t-tread-on-me mentality. A columnist at The Blaze equated governors’ stay-at-home orders to martial law and warned that “there is no limit to what these politicians might do with their divine right of kings.” Over at the theocratic magazine First Things, an editor decried Andrew Cuomo’s determination to save “just one life” as “sentimentalism.” And a columnist at National Review wrote that he was grateful to the skeptics who saw the crisis as overblown: “they at least remind me that we have free men among us.” An unlicensed dermatologist writing for The Federalist, meanwhile, suggested that those who were tired of isolation could meet up for “chickenpox parties” and inoculate themselves through “controlled voluntary infection.”