thenation--2020-05-22--Recovery Will Take More Than Money

Recovery Will Take More Than Money

Until the pandemic arrived , I had been spending about four days a month in southern Ohio .
It ’ s a rural area roughly 100 by 100 miles , bounded by the Ohio River on the south , the Indiana line on the west , Chillicothe to the north , and Athens to the west—home to 350,000 residents .
For someone like me , Chicago-born and -bred , who has lived and worked in Baltimore , Philadelphia , New York , Washington , and points in between for the past 40 years , driving from town to town and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 60 miles apart , was an entirely new experience .
I began this effort because I had long thought that the kind of organizing that my colleagues in the Industrial Areas Foundation and I practiced , begun by Saul Alinsky in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago , had settled into urban and metropolitan areas , but had largely avoided rural communities .
This was not a conscious decision or a conscious strategy .
It was a drift .
But the drift worried me .
I kept looking at electoral maps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the center of the country , in Ohio counties like Ross and Scioto and Gallia counties that once had been home to the United Mine Workers union and that had been mixed politically , but that now leaned strongly to the right .
I hadn ’ t concluded , as some progressives had , that these counties were so conservative , so reactionary , so racist , that they weren ’ t worth thinking about .
How would they know ?
Most hadn ’ t spent 10 seconds there .
I hadn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As I was fretting about the IAF ’ s lack of presence in rural America , I read Sam Quinones ’ s remarkable book , Dreamland and , a bit later , Beth Macy ’ s excellent account of the opioid crisis , Dopesick .
Quinones starts his book with a description of the community pool that was once the center of civic life in Portsmouth , Ohio .
So , about three years ago , I flew into John and Annie Glenn Airport in Columbus , found Portsmouth on a map , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ south to pay my first visit .
I have to admit that I was apprehensive about how an older Alinsky organizer from Chicago and New York would be received in places that voted at least two to one—and often three to one—for Trump .
Three hundred meetings later—meetings with clergy , journalists , bankers , librarians , businesspeople , addiction recovery specialists , local elected officials , retirees , young professionals , teachers , and more—I can report that Donald Trump almost never came up .
Early on , at a coffee hour @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an elderly parishioner came up to me and said , “ When the rector said some organizer was coming from New York , I said , ‘ Oh boy , here comes another liberal from the big city to tell us what to think and do ’ ” —she paused— “ but you don ’ t talk like a liberal.
” I said , “ No ma ’ am , I grew up in Cook County .
So I have no regard for either party.
” And she said , “ Then you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ She was right .
People have been gracious and , after some initial caution , open .
They have been willing to tell me what they do think and care about , so long as I practice what we teach good organizers to do—ask real questions , shut up , and listen , listen hard .
Almost every person I ’ ve met will at some point in the meeting mention a family member or dear friend or neighbor who has been affected by the plague of opioids that began nearly 20 years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ library in Ironton has on his crowded desk a picture of his teenage son , dead of an overdose .
After he lost his boy , this man started a church for the addicted , which attracts about 150 members .
“ You should come sometime , but you better be able to stand cigarette smoke.
” This is the fellow who , after our first meeting , said , “ You look like a busy man.
” I said I guess I was .
“ Then you aren ’ t coming back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come back.
” I ’ ve been back several times now .
A teacher talked about her son , serving out a lengthy sentence in the prison at Lucasville , just up the road from Portsmouth , caught selling drugs in his late teen years .
A librarian describes finding men unconscious in the restroom after overdosing .
A pastor who just returned from attending a middle school graduation tells me how many students had lost one parent to an overdose death or a prison term but that he paid special attention to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both of her parents to overdoses .
The sister of an EMT responder worries about the burnout she sees in him and his colleagues .
The billboards on the main roads often advertise recovery programs and counseling services .
One , just south of Waverly , has the faces of eight family members—massacred in what everyone believes to have been a drug-related hit—and asks for information , which has not been forthcoming .
When I first visited Waverly , where hardened coal miners once lived , the first thing I saw was two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drug deal in a parking lot .
In this rolling , hilly , sometimes picturesque region , the opioid virus has penetrated every corner , no matter how remote , how lightly occupied , and has killed people up and down the income and social scales .
As I drove around and met more people , it occurred to me that this area had been visited by a plague long before the current pandemic—the first vectors being an army of salespeople pushing millions of opioids on rural pharmacies and supplying pill-pushing doctors with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ marketing and sales hooked thousands in these counties .
Once hooked , they were fair game for the second wave of this pandemic—triggered by the arrival of scores of drug peddlers from the Mexican state of Nayarit , who flooded the market with cheap black-tar heroin .
This second set of vectors further institutionalized the dynamic of drug peddling , petty crime , and chronic addiction that has been part of this region ’ s life for a generation .
In 2018 , 46,802 Americans died of opioid overdoses , 3,237 people in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counties I was visiting .
These dreadful numbers are slightly down from the previous two years .
That plague , after 20 years , might have peaked , or plateaued , but no one is scheduling a victory celebration .
And people fear that some new synthetic variant , or a resurgence of methamphetamines , will simply fill the vacuum as those struggling with addiction seek alternatives .
People here don ’ t just talk about opioids ; and they are more , much more , than victims .
But there are questions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sometimes hinted at , sometimes prompted when I recount what others in the area have mentioned .
How could this have happened ?
How could it have lasted so long ?
Where were both political parties during the fatal early years of the opioid pandemic ?
And where are they now ?
Where were the police and sheriffs as these trends were expanding ?
They reminded me of the people I met when I first began organizing in East Brooklyn in the fall of 1980 .
If you recall that period , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to say the least .
It had just barely avoided bankruptcy in the late 1970s .
The population was plummeting .
The Bronx , as sportscaster Howard Cosell famously observed , was burning .
But so were Upper and Lower Manhattan and eastern and central Brooklyn .
The establishment was breezily tossing around terms like “ benign neglect ” and “ planned shrinkage ” —a form of mental redlining on a very large scale—as responses to this crisis .
As I met hundreds , then thousands of eastern Brooklyn residents , I heard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drug dealers running the lobbies of housing projects , arson by building owners , cops who either under-policed ( never showing up ) or over-policed ( coming in droves and breaking heads ) , teens at risk , schools in chaos .
And yet , as in southern Ohio , that ’ s not all I heard .
People talked about what they had tried to do to address these challenges .
They identified remarkable but unrecognized leaders in the community whom they respected and trusted .
They understood that real change would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” as the progressives like to call it .
It would take time and preparation .
It would require an attention to detail that those habitually attracted to the next mobilization or next charismatic savior or next election either lacked or derided .
In short , they expressed a willingness to organize—to build a base , to train leaders , to raise their own money and pay their own dues , to do in-depth research and sophisticated power analysis , and to figure out what was possible in the shorter term and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them .
They were skeptical , having seen so many efforts founder .
But they still had hope—which we believe is a muscle , not a sentiment , something that only exists by exertion and that grows with regular exercise .
In the 40 years since then , they have exercised that muscle relentlessly—and rebuilt and revived their community .
Many of the leaders I ’ ve met in southern Ohio have that same muscle and grit and seem poised to organize once the coronavirus pandemic passes .
But why hadn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Washington , someone , noticed ?
One clue was provided by my Avis representative in Columbus .
When he asked me where I was going , I said , “ Heading south , to Portsmouth , Chillicothe , Ironton.
” He frowned and tried to give me some advice .
“ Why you going there ?
That ’ s not Ohio.
” So even the more prosperous middle of the state itself had written off the portions of Ohio most affected by the opioid plague—perhaps blocking out the fact that the Columbus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and long-term addictions .
A few months later , a veteran Democratic operative said the same thing : “ Thirty years ago , we figured we could carry the state by concentrating on the half from Columbus north—the bigger cities and surrounding suburbs , so we mostly ignored the rest.
” What my rental car friend and many others were playing out was the gospel according to Margaret Thatcher , who famously preached , “ There is no such thing as society .
There are individual men and women and there are families.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ronald Reagan equally famously added , “ Government is not the solution to the problem .
Government is the problem.
” A Tale of Two Cities in the Grips of the Opioid Crisis This proved to be a devastating one-two punch .
The first time I can recall hearing these two pithy doctrines paired was in the late Tony Judt ’ s last public lecture in 2009 .
Judt spoke at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU on a beautiful October evening .
When the curtain opened to a packed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wife Sheila and me , there was Judt , in his wheelchair , on a ventilator , with the rise and fall of his assisted breathing audible for the first few minutes .
Then he began to speak , first citing the “ elephant in the room ” —his struggle with advanced stages of ALS , Lou Gehrig ’ s Disease—and then launching into a 45-minute tour de force .
Soon , we didn ’ t notice the sound of the ventilator as he laid out his understanding of how the world had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ democracy and somewhat restrained capitalism , which had lasted for three decades , from 1945 to the late 1970s , to the era defined by Thatcher and Reagan .
Judt ’ s words and analysis , later published as an essay in The New York Review of Books and then as a short book , Ill Fares The Land , like Lincoln ’ s Message to Congress in 1861 , the cautionary writings of Isaiah Berlin , and so many of Marilynne Robinson ’ s wonderful essays , have echoed in my thinking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such thing as society , and if government is the problem , then all that remains is the market .
If there is no such thing as society and if government is the problem , then no one and no sector is responsible for what Angus Deaton and Anne Case have dubbed “ the deaths of despair ” taking place in America , largely due to drug abuse .
If there is no such thing as society and if government is the problem , then those with mental illness don ’ t merit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be cared for by their families ( which assumes they have families—with the means and training to provide mental health care ) .
And , if not , then they are on their own .
The rental car agent ’ s remark echoes : “ Those aren ’ t part of any community I recognize ; they aren ’ t part of my reality .
They are ‘ homeless ’ or ‘ convicts.
’ ” They are simply removed from the larger mental map of a shrinking picture of America .
This neglect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not planned .
If there is no such thing as society , and if government is the problem , then there ’ s no point in preparing for a pandemic to save lives , no point in coordinating a collective national response , no point in using the lessons of the current crisis to prevent future ones .
In fact , trying to address long-term conditions leads to heresy—a possible rejection or upending of the Thatcher-Reagan belief system .
If there is no such thing as society , and if government is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to think about or talk about the 60-year-period of job loss in southern Ohio triggered by the close of the coal mines , or the 50-year decline of our inner cities , or the 40-year betrayal of those challenged by mental illness , or the 30-year defunding of public housing , or the 20-year-period of opioid and heroin penetration and devastation .
As Judt said and then wrote , 11 years ago , “ Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society ?
Why is it beyond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of arrangements to our common advantage ?
Are we doomed indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional ‘ free market ’ and the much-advertised horrors of ‘ socialism ’ ?
Our disability is discursive : we simply do not know how to talk about these things anymore.
” The pandemic has shocked our nation into at least talking about these things once more .
And there is new and convincing evidence , from the unlikeliest of sources , that there is such a thing as society and that government is something more than the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ market sector .
The corporations that have been staggered by the pandemic did not begin picking up the phone and calling individuals and families for help .
They sent their lobbyists to Washington and begged the state for trillions in relief .
Of course , I was already reasonably confident there was such a thing as society .
That ’ s where my colleagues and I have lived and worked .
Over the past four decades , our organizations have been able to crack what many declared to be intractable problems .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ renovated homes and apartments affordable to the people who already lived there .
They first invented and then implemented a young adult option to a family ’ s health insurance policy .
They designed and initiated new small public schools better able to relate to students and help them achieve .
They learned from pioneers like Judge Stephen Leifman of Miami and Leon Evans of Texas how to divert those with mental illness from jail or prison or crowded ERs , creating institutions and programs that help them stabilize and get well .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soglin in Illinois and the late incomparable Larry Hanley of the Amalgamated Transit Union to rebuild union locals whose members were fully engaged and which , during the anti-union campaigns of recent years , grew in strength .
This history , which I ’ ve written about recently , remains largely untold , hidden in the shadow of other super stories .
I hear the Avis fellow echoed here , “ That ’ s not Ohio .
That ’ s not real.
” Shut Up and Play , or Shut Up and Die @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nurses Overseas to Fight Covid-19 Trump Has No Secret Intel on the Coronavirus ’ s Origins More in this series What people mean is that these stories of important , but limited , civic and social improvement do not fit the ideologies of the left or the right .
They involve different mixes of market , governmental , and , most importantly , third sector or civic engagement .
These mixes vary from issue to issue and period to period .
They are never easy , never smooth , and never without tension @ @ @ @ @ @ @ charismatic or celebrity leadership cults .
In just two Jersey City sites , a collective of religious and community leaders won , after a 25-year effort , $ 1 billion for environmental cleanup from PPG and Honeywell—four times the size of the Erin Brockovich settlement .
Most people know about Julia Roberts ’ s portrayal of Brockovich ’ s estimable effort .
Almost no one knows the names of the Jersey City leaders : Reverend Willard Ashley , Mrs. Ellen Wright , Fr .
Geoff Curtiss , Joe Morris , and others .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ without constant vigilance .
And yet , this is how tangible progress eventually gets made .
A full and lasting recovery from this pandemic will in part depend on a rejection of the idolatry of the market , demonization of the state , and co-option or minimization of the role of the third sector .
This is not a call for socialism—an option , as Tony Judt recognized , buried with the many millions of those who were tortured and killed in socialism ’ s name in the last century and in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Central Europe .
Modern American socialism may be different , but right now we have more important tasks than rehabilitating a label many of our citizens rightly consider toxic .
Instead , it ’ s a call for a kind of remarriage of an updated version of social democracy with the more patient capitalism that thrived for the three decades between the end of World War II and the Reagan era .
The wreckage created by that divorce is all around us now .
Those in Silicon Valley who urged everyone to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ succeeded beyond their wildest dreams .
They and their libertarian friends broke , literally , everything .
Their silence is deafening .
Perhaps they have begun to realize that you can ’ t bring an app to a pandemic .
Or perhaps they are just too busy pursuing their predatory instincts , squeezing every last trillion from their buddies in DC .
Mike Davis : Is the Coronavirus Ushering in a New World Order ?
I ’ m not claiming that this 30-year postwar period of relative stability and prosperity and predictability was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decades , the nation and the planet continued to ignore several profound “ underlying conditions.
” Environmental degradation didn ’ t just continue ; it accelerated .
Deindustrializing cities decayed and imploded .
Racial and ethnic and social tensions simmered and stewed , occasionally erupting but never improving .
Block busting—buying low from frightened white ethnics like my parents and selling high to African Americans seeking a better life—and racist redlining ruined neighborhood after neighborhood , city after city , undermining social and civic institutions , replacing slowly growing equity with rapidly increasing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one West Side Chicago community , Lawndale , is estimated at more than $ 3 billion .
Existential threats—locusts to North Africa , catastrophic fires in Australia , species after species facing extinction—multiplied and were either aggravated or ignored .
The socially democratic part of this relationship will drive the far right crazy .
The patient capitalist part of it may drive the far left and impatient young socialists crazy .
So be it .
All of us desperately need a new and expanded vision of what “ prosperity ” and “ stability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ socially and politically .
I worry that Americans won ’ t ever agree on common goals—recovery plus resilience—unless we respect the role that capitalism still can play : the bursts of energy generated by rebounding and new businesses of all kinds and the extraordinary innovations waiting to be imagined and tested .
That respect is also a form of recognition for the scores of millions of decent moderate and conservative Americans who value business and enterprise .
But the recovery also must respect the role that government needs to play , in designing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , county , region , state—and then acting as a bloc to apply local remedies where possible and to demand federal assistance where needed .
That respect in turn recognizes the instincts and values of scores of millions of decent moderate and progressive Americans , who value the ability of the state to perform functions that the market can ’ t or won ’ t fulfill .
Yet even that recovery will falter , unless the third sector—the civic sector , the sphere of organized citizens—builds and asserts its own power and injects @ @ @ @ @ @ @ knowledge into the mix , nudging the other sectors , supporting them at times , exposing them at times , and holding them accountable at all times .
How will all this look ?
What will a resurgent society have to tackle going forward ?
Elder care will need to be decentralized , rooted in homes that are equipped with basic medical tools and renovated to enable the infirm and those suffering from Alzheimers to live safely , cared for by capable home health aides paid a decent wage .
Broadband connectivity needs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into an on-the-ground reality for every American .
Those suffering with mental illness should be diverted from prisons and emergency rooms into facilities and programs equipped to stabilize them and help them get well .
Counties crippled by opioids and other drugs will need to see a rapid expansion of medically assisted treatment and living-wage jobs for those who recover .
Existing jails and prisons need to be downsized and right-sized—so that enough space exists to ward off the next viral plague .
The lead and mold still poisoning and harming the young @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finally removed from our housing stock .
Energy efficiency upgrades should be installed in the nation ’ s schools and congregations and apartment buildings .
And large stretches of our inner cities and rural communities , now mostly vacant and abandoned , should be rebuilt in the way that East Brooklyn Congregations has transformed the devastated acres of that borough—with new , affordable Nehemiah homes , that help families rebuild equity and avoid corrosive debt .
This list goes on and on .
Each offers a useful social opportunity .
Each opens the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a recovery wage .
Each invites entrepreneurs and innovators to create new products and remedies .
Each depends on deep and disciplined work by organized citizens and organized workers—more and better power organizations , revitalized or new labor unions , congregations retrofitted for the formidable challenges of the next several decades .
Each will be resisted fiercely by the entrenched powers that benefit from the failed status quo : the for-profit nursing home lobby , or corrections unions fearful of losing prison jobs , or counseling companies that worry that medically assisted treatment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Each would require a period of transition that allows workers to move from one role to a new role .
But each would leave our nation in better health—physically , economically , and socially .
Only a revaluing of the notion of society and a rebalancing of the roles of the state , the market , and the civic sector can set the stage for a defense against the next phase of the current crisis—or the next new pandemic .
And only those realigned sectors can design and implement an offense—ways to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rise and thrive , to build a future not merely safer but more promising and exciting for our children and our grandchildren .

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Until the pandemic arrived, I had been spending about four days a month in southern Ohio. It’s a rural area roughly 100 by 100 miles, bounded by the Ohio River on the south, the Indiana line on the west, Chillicothe to the north, and Athens to the west—home to 350,000 residents. For someone like me, Chicago-born and -bred, who has lived and worked in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, and points in between for the past 40 years, driving from town to town and hamlet to hamlet, with appointments often 60 miles apart, was an entirely new experience.
I began this effort because I had long thought that the kind of organizing that my colleagues in the Industrial Areas Foundation and I practiced, begun by Saul Alinsky in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago, had settled into urban and metropolitan areas, but had largely avoided rural communities. This was not a conscious decision or a conscious strategy. It was a drift. But the drift worried me. I kept looking at electoral maps and seeing a sea of red in the center of the country, in Ohio counties like Ross and Scioto and Gallia counties that once had been home to the United Mine Workers union and that had been mixed politically, but that now leaned strongly to the right.
I hadn’t concluded, as some progressives had, that these counties were so conservative, so reactionary, so racist, that they weren’t worth thinking about. How would they know? Most hadn’t spent 10 seconds there. I hadn’t spent 10 seconds there either. As I was fretting about the IAF’s lack of presence in rural America, I read Sam Quinones’s remarkable book, Dreamland and, a bit later, Beth Macy’s excellent account of the opioid crisis, Dopesick. Quinones starts his book with a description of the community pool that was once the center of civic life in Portsmouth, Ohio. So, about three years ago, I flew into John and Annie Glenn Airport in Columbus, found Portsmouth on a map, and drove the 100 miles or so south to pay my first visit.
I have to admit that I was apprehensive about how an older Alinsky organizer from Chicago and New York would be received in places that voted at least two to one—and often three to one—for Trump. Three hundred meetings later—meetings with clergy, journalists, bankers, librarians, businesspeople, addiction recovery specialists, local elected officials, retirees, young professionals, teachers, and more—I can report that Donald Trump almost never came up. Early on, at a coffee hour in an Episcopal church in Portsmouth, an elderly parishioner came up to me and said, “When the rector said some organizer was coming from New York, I said, ‘Oh boy, here comes another liberal from the big city to tell us what to think and do’”—she paused—“but you don’t talk like a liberal.” I said, “No ma’am, I grew up in Cook County. So I have no regard for either party.” And she said, “Then you might do all right down here.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
She was right. People have been gracious and, after some initial caution, open. They have been willing to tell me what they do think and care about, so long as I practice what we teach good organizers to do—ask real questions, shut up, and listen, listen hard. Almost every person I’ve met will at some point in the meeting mention a family member or dear friend or neighbor who has been affected by the plague of opioids that began nearly 20 years ago. An IT professional in a library in Ironton has on his crowded desk a picture of his teenage son, dead of an overdose. After he lost his boy, this man started a church for the addicted, which attracts about 150 members. “You should come sometime, but you better be able to stand cigarette smoke.” This is the fellow who, after our first meeting, said, “You look like a busy man.” I said I guess I was. “Then you aren’t coming back here. Busy people don’t come back.” I’ve been back several times now. Current Issue View our current issue
A teacher talked about her son, serving out a lengthy sentence in the prison at Lucasville, just up the road from Portsmouth, caught selling drugs in his late teen years. A librarian describes finding men unconscious in the restroom after overdosing. A pastor who just returned from attending a middle school graduation tells me how many students had lost one parent to an overdose death or a prison term but that he paid special attention to a young girl who had already lost both of her parents to overdoses. The sister of an EMT responder worries about the burnout she sees in him and his colleagues. The billboards on the main roads often advertise recovery programs and counseling services. One, just south of Waverly, has the faces of eight family members—massacred in what everyone believes to have been a drug-related hit—and asks for information, which has not been forthcoming. When I first visited Waverly, where hardened coal miners once lived, the first thing I saw was two scrawny fellows in their 20s concluding a drug deal in a parking lot. In this rolling, hilly, sometimes picturesque region, the opioid virus has penetrated every corner, no matter how remote, how lightly occupied, and has killed people up and down the income and social scales.
As I drove around and met more people, it occurred to me that this area had been visited by a plague long before the current pandemic—the first vectors being an army of salespeople pushing millions of opioids on rural pharmacies and supplying pill-pushing doctors with an endless supply. Years of aggressive marketing and sales hooked thousands in these counties. Once hooked, they were fair game for the second wave of this pandemic—triggered by the arrival of scores of drug peddlers from the Mexican state of Nayarit, who flooded the market with cheap black-tar heroin. This second set of vectors further institutionalized the dynamic of drug peddling, petty crime, and chronic addiction that has been part of this region’s life for a generation.
In 2018, 46,802 Americans died of opioid overdoses, 3,237 people in Ohio, many of them in the counties I was visiting. These dreadful numbers are slightly down from the previous two years. That plague, after 20 years, might have peaked, or plateaued, but no one is scheduling a victory celebration. And people fear that some new synthetic variant, or a resurgence of methamphetamines, will simply fill the vacuum as those struggling with addiction seek alternatives.
People here don’t just talk about opioids; and they are more, much more, than victims. But there are questions in the air, sometimes spoken, sometimes hinted at, sometimes prompted when I recount what others in the area have mentioned. How could this have happened? How could it have lasted so long? Where were both political parties during the fatal early years of the opioid pandemic? And where are they now? Where were the police and sheriffs as these trends were expanding?
They reminded me of the people I met when I first began organizing in East Brooklyn in the fall of 1980. If you recall that period, the condition of the city was grim, to say the least. It had just barely avoided bankruptcy in the late 1970s. The population was plummeting. The Bronx, as sportscaster Howard Cosell famously observed, was burning. But so were Upper and Lower Manhattan and eastern and central Brooklyn. The establishment was breezily tossing around terms like “benign neglect” and “planned shrinkage”—a form of mental redlining on a very large scale—as responses to this crisis. As I met hundreds, then thousands of eastern Brooklyn residents, I heard about every challenge they faced—violent crime, drug dealers running the lobbies of housing projects, arson by building owners, cops who either under-policed (never showing up) or over-policed (coming in droves and breaking heads), teens at risk, schools in chaos.
And yet, as in southern Ohio, that’s not all I heard. People talked about what they had tried to do to address these challenges. They identified remarkable but unrecognized leaders in the community whom they respected and trusted. They understood that real change would not be immediate or “transformational,” as the progressives like to call it. It would take time and preparation. It would require an attention to detail that those habitually attracted to the next mobilization or next charismatic savior or next election either lacked or derided. In short, they expressed a willingness to organize—to build a base, to train leaders, to raise their own money and pay their own dues, to do in-depth research and sophisticated power analysis, and to figure out what was possible in the shorter term and the longer term—in spite of the odds against them. They were skeptical, having seen so many efforts founder. But they still had hope—which we believe is a muscle, not a sentiment, something that only exists by exertion and that grows with regular exercise. In the 40 years since then, they have exercised that muscle relentlessly—and rebuilt and revived their community. Many of the leaders I’ve met in southern Ohio have that same muscle and grit and seem poised to organize once the coronavirus pandemic passes.
But why hadn’t the larger world, the Ohio establishment, Washington, someone, noticed? One clue was provided by my Avis representative in Columbus. When he asked me where I was going, I said, “Heading south, to Portsmouth, Chillicothe, Ironton.” He frowned and tried to give me some advice. “Why you going there? That’s not Ohio.” So even the more prosperous middle of the state itself had written off the portions of Ohio most affected by the opioid plague—perhaps blocking out the fact that the Columbus suburbs had seen their share of deaths and long-term addictions. A few months later, a veteran Democratic operative said the same thing: “Thirty years ago, we figured we could carry the state by concentrating on the half from Columbus north—the bigger cities and surrounding suburbs, so we mostly ignored the rest.”
What my rental car friend and many others were playing out was the gospel according to Margaret Thatcher, who famously preached, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
Then Thatcher’s co-conspirator, Ronald Reagan equally famously added, “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.” Corporations A Tale of Two Cities in the Grips of the Opioid Crisis Maia Szalavitz
This proved to be a devastating one-two punch. The first time I can recall hearing these two pithy doctrines paired was in the late Tony Judt’s last public lecture in 2009. Judt spoke at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU on a beautiful October evening. When the curtain opened to a packed house of 1,000 listeners, including my wife Sheila and me, there was Judt, in his wheelchair, on a ventilator, with the rise and fall of his assisted breathing audible for the first few minutes. Then he began to speak, first citing the “elephant in the room”—his struggle with advanced stages of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease—and then launching into a 45-minute tour de force. Soon, we didn’t notice the sound of the ventilator as he laid out his understanding of how the world had pivoted from the postwar marriage of social democracy and somewhat restrained capitalism, which had lasted for three decades, from 1945 to the late 1970s, to the era defined by Thatcher and Reagan.
Judt’s words and analysis, later published as an essay in The New York Review of Books and then as a short book, Ill Fares The Land, like Lincoln’s Message to Congress in 1861, the cautionary writings of Isaiah Berlin, and so many of Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful essays, have echoed in my thinking ever since.
If there is no such thing as society, and if government is the problem, then all that remains is the market.
If there is no such thing as society and if government is the problem, then no one and no sector is responsible for what Angus Deaton and Anne Case have dubbed “the deaths of despair” taking place in America, largely due to drug abuse.
If there is no such thing as society and if government is the problem, then those with mental illness don’t merit a large-scale institutional solution. They should be cared for by their families (which assumes they have families—with the means and training to provide mental health care). And, if not, then they are on their own. The rental car agent’s remark echoes: “Those aren’t part of any community I recognize; they aren’t part of my reality. They are ‘homeless’ or ‘convicts.’” They are simply removed from the larger mental map of a shrinking picture of America. This neglect is not benign. And this shrinkage is not planned.
If there is no such thing as society, and if government is the problem, then there’s no point in preparing for a pandemic to save lives, no point in coordinating a collective national response, no point in using the lessons of the current crisis to prevent future ones. In fact, trying to address long-term conditions leads to heresy—a possible rejection or upending of the Thatcher-Reagan belief system.
If there is no such thing as society, and if government is the problem, then there is no way to think about or talk about the 60-year-period of job loss in southern Ohio triggered by the close of the coal mines, or the 50-year decline of our inner cities, or the 40-year betrayal of those challenged by mental illness, or the 30-year defunding of public housing, or the 20-year-period of opioid and heroin penetration and devastation.
As Judt said and then wrote, 11 years ago, “Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional ‘free market’ and the much-advertised horrors of ‘socialism’? Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things anymore.”
The pandemic has shocked our nation into at least talking about these things once more. And there is new and convincing evidence, from the unlikeliest of sources, that there is such a thing as society and that government is something more than the problem. That evidence comes from the market sector. The corporations that have been staggered by the pandemic did not begin picking up the phone and calling individuals and families for help. They sent their lobbyists to Washington and begged the state for trillions in relief.
Of course, I was already reasonably confident there was such a thing as society. That’s where my colleagues and I have lived and worked. Over the past four decades, our organizations have been able to crack what many declared to be intractable problems. They have rebuilt entire neighborhoods with new and renovated homes and apartments affordable to the people who already lived there. They first invented and then implemented a young adult option to a family’s health insurance policy. They designed and initiated new small public schools better able to relate to students and help them achieve. They learned from pioneers like Judge Stephen Leifman of Miami and Leon Evans of Texas how to divert those with mental illness from jail or prison or crowded ERs, creating institutions and programs that help them stabilize and get well.
They worked with labor leaders like Audrey Soglin in Illinois and the late incomparable Larry Hanley of the Amalgamated Transit Union to rebuild union locals whose members were fully engaged and which, during the anti-union campaigns of recent years, grew in strength. This history, which I’ve written about recently, remains largely untold, hidden in the shadow of other super stories. I hear the Avis fellow echoed here, “That’s not Ohio. That’s not real.” Coronavirus Amid Partisan Politicking, Revelations on a Covid Origins Article Jimmy Tobias It’s Not “Unreasonable” to Want to Change Our Rotten Health Care System Gregg Gonsalves Covid Has Left Deep Wounds in America’s Rural Communities Anne N. Sosin
What people mean is that these stories of important, but limited, civic and social improvement do not fit the ideologies of the left or the right. They involve different mixes of market, governmental, and, most importantly, third sector or civic engagement. These mixes vary from issue to issue and period to period. They are never easy, never smooth, and never without tension. They do not lend themselves to charismatic or celebrity leadership cults. In just two Jersey City sites, a collective of religious and community leaders won, after a 25-year effort, $1 billion for environmental cleanup from PPG and Honeywell—four times the size of the Erin Brockovich settlement. Most people know about Julia Roberts’s portrayal of Brockovich’s estimable effort. Almost no one knows the names of the Jersey City leaders: Reverend Willard Ashley, Mrs. Ellen Wright, Fr. Geoff Curtiss, Joe Morris, and others. Such victories are never total—and never sustained without constant vigilance. And yet, this is how tangible progress eventually gets made.
A full and lasting recovery from this pandemic will in part depend on a rejection of the idolatry of the market, demonization of the state, and co-option or minimization of the role of the third sector.
This is not a call for socialism—an option, as Tony Judt recognized, buried with the many millions of those who were tortured and killed in socialism’s name in the last century and in the poisoned postindustrial valleys and plains of Eastern and Central Europe. Modern American socialism may be different, but right now we have more important tasks than rehabilitating a label many of our citizens rightly consider toxic.
Instead, it’s a call for a kind of remarriage of an updated version of social democracy with the more patient capitalism that thrived for the three decades between the end of World War II and the Reagan era. The wreckage created by that divorce is all around us now. Those in Silicon Valley who urged everyone to “move fast and break things” succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They and their libertarian friends broke, literally, everything. Their silence is deafening. Perhaps they have begun to realize that you can’t bring an app to a pandemic. Or perhaps they are just too busy pursuing their predatory instincts, squeezing every last trillion from their buddies in DC. New World Order Mike Davis: Is the Coronavirus Ushering in a New World Order? Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
I’m not claiming that this 30-year postwar period of relative stability and prosperity and predictability was without its downsides. All during those decades, the nation and the planet continued to ignore several profound “underlying conditions.” Environmental degradation didn’t just continue; it accelerated. Deindustrializing cities decayed and imploded. Racial and ethnic and social tensions simmered and stewed, occasionally erupting but never improving. Block busting—buying low from frightened white ethnics like my parents and selling high to African Americans seeking a better life—and racist redlining ruined neighborhood after neighborhood, city after city, undermining social and civic institutions, replacing slowly growing equity with rapidly increasing debt. The lost equity in just one West Side Chicago community, Lawndale, is estimated at more than $3 billion. Existential threats—locusts to North Africa, catastrophic fires in Australia, species after species facing extinction—multiplied and were either aggravated or ignored.
The socially democratic part of this relationship will drive the far right crazy. The patient capitalist part of it may drive the far left and impatient young socialists crazy. So be it. All of us desperately need a new and expanded vision of what “prosperity” and “stability” and “predictability” entails—environmentally and socially and politically.
I worry that Americans won’t ever agree on common goals—recovery plus resilience—unless we respect the role that capitalism still can play: the bursts of energy generated by rebounding and new businesses of all kinds and the extraordinary innovations waiting to be imagined and tested. That respect is also a form of recognition for the scores of millions of decent moderate and conservative Americans who value business and enterprise. But the recovery also must respect the role that government needs to play, in designing recovery plans from the ground up—every community, county, region, state—and then acting as a bloc to apply local remedies where possible and to demand federal assistance where needed. That respect in turn recognizes the instincts and values of scores of millions of decent moderate and progressive Americans, who value the ability of the state to perform functions that the market can’t or won’t fulfill.
Yet even that recovery will falter, unless the third sector—the civic sector, the sphere of organized citizens—builds and asserts its own power and injects its own values and insights and social knowledge into the mix, nudging the other sectors, supporting them at times, exposing them at times, and holding them accountable at all times.
How will all this look? What will a resurgent society have to tackle going forward?
Elder care will need to be decentralized, rooted in homes that are equipped with basic medical tools and renovated to enable the infirm and those suffering from Alzheimers to live safely, cared for by capable home health aides paid a decent wage.
Broadband connectivity needs to transform from a generally agreed-upon interest into an on-the-ground reality for every American.
Those suffering with mental illness should be diverted from prisons and emergency rooms into facilities and programs equipped to stabilize them and help them get well. Labor Hit Hard by Covid, Nursing Home Workers Threatened to Strike—and Won Bryce Covert
Counties crippled by opioids and other drugs will need to see a rapid expansion of medically assisted treatment and living-wage jobs for those who recover.
Existing jails and prisons need to be downsized and right-sized—so that enough space exists to ward off the next viral plague.
The lead and mold still poisoning and harming the young and the old—yet another quiet plague—should be finally removed from our housing stock.
Energy efficiency upgrades should be installed in the nation’s schools and congregations and apartment buildings.
And large stretches of our inner cities and rural communities, now mostly vacant and abandoned, should be rebuilt in the way that East Brooklyn Congregations has transformed the devastated acres of that borough—with new, affordable Nehemiah homes, that help families rebuild equity and avoid corrosive debt.
This list goes on and on. Each offers a useful social opportunity. Each opens the door to massive and sustained employment at a recovery wage. Each invites entrepreneurs and innovators to create new products and remedies. Each depends on deep and disciplined work by organized citizens and organized workers—more and better power organizations, revitalized or new labor unions, congregations retrofitted for the formidable challenges of the next several decades. Each will be resisted fiercely by the entrenched powers that benefit from the failed status quo: the for-profit nursing home lobby, or corrections unions fearful of losing prison jobs, or counseling companies that worry that medically assisted treatment will mean a reduction in their contracts. Each would require a period of transition that allows workers to move from one role to a new role. But each would leave our nation in better health—physically, economically, and socially.
Only a revaluing of the notion of society and a rebalancing of the roles of the state, the market, and the civic sector can set the stage for a defense against the next phase of the current crisis—or the next new pandemic. And only those realigned sectors can design and implement an offense—ways to do more than recover, but to rise and thrive, to build a future not merely safer but more promising and exciting for our children and our grandchildren.


thenation--2020-05-22--The Best Way to Lampoon Trump: His Own Words

Sarah Cooper has become the breakout star of the pandemic by being the first comedian to figure out that Donald Trump ’ s absurd words are best mocked not by exaggeration but by exact replication .
On TikTok videos posted on Twitter , Cooper has invented a new genre of comedy : the lip-sync explication de texte , where the gestural expressiveness of mime is used to bring out the full lunacy of political chatter .
On April 20 , Trump gave his now-notorious press briefing where he floated the idea that ultraviolet light and disinfectants could be used to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in her Brooklyn home , didn ’ t see the briefing , but was told about Trump ’ s comments by her husband .
She thought they were ridiculous enough to serve as a comedy skit .
So in just an hour , while her husband was preparing dinner , Cooper made a 49-second video .
It spread like wildfire on social media , garnering nearly 15 million views as well as praise from Jerry Seinfeld and Ben Stiller .
Trump has often been impersonated , most famously by Alec Baldwin on Saturday @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the mimics who have tried to parody Trump are , they run into the invariable problem that their fun-house version can never match the absurdity of the real thing .
As Cooper herself told The Guardian , “ It is interesting because as a writer you want to heighten how ridiculous things are .
But everything he says is already so ridiculous that it is hard to heighten it.
” Cooper ’ s solution has been not to heighten Trump ’ s ludicrousness but to create a context where the audience pays @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of her comedy is that it counteracts the tendency to normalize Trump ’ s words , to tidy up what he ’ s saying and pretend it is more rational than it really is .
Would You Buy a Used Progressive Agenda From This Man ?
Trump owes his success as a politician to his taking subtext and turning it into text .
Previous Republican politicians stirred up racist animosity by using dog-whistle phrases like “ welfare queen ” or “ inner-city crime.
” Trump won the presidency by being much more explicit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calling for a Muslim ban .
By being so overt , he convinced an intense base of supporters that he was authentic in his bigotry in way that previous politicians weren ’ t .
One fascinating side effect of Trump ’ s crudeness is that it has led his surrogates and many in the media to whitewash Trump ’ s words .
Ever since Trump emerged as a political figure , there ’ s been an abundance of Trump translators , people working full-time to pretend that his vile and just plain bizarre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ literally say .
In 2016 , Trump said he wanted to “ take the oil ” from Iraq and that the United States deserves the “ spoils ” of victory .
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani defended Trump by softening his meaning .
“ He hasn ’ t said we should take it for ourselves , necessarily , ” Giuliani told ABC News .
“ We should secure it so it doesn ’ t get taken by terrorist forces so we can have some say over the distribution.
” Giuliani ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was part of a larger effort to translate Trump ’ s frothing into normal human discourse .
In 2016 , Trump also described former president Barack Obama as the “ founder of Isis.
” Interviewing Trump , conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt suggested that Trump was of course being figurative .
Trump rejected this defense , saying , “ No , I meant that he ’ s the founder of Isis , I do.
” Trump did later walk back the remarks by saying he was being “ sarcastic ” —itself a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s not just the right-wing media or Trump supporters that close their ears to what he is saying .
Mainstream media reports routinely edit Trump ’ s incoherent speeches into something resembling lucidity .
Writing in The Guardian , Australian journalist Lenore Taylor wrote about being flabbergasted by listening to an entire Trump briefing filled with ranting that usually gets edited out of reports .
Taylor claimed that “ the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When Trump gives his grotesque briefings , everyone around him , both his staff and the attendant press , act as if what he is saying is normal and rational .
It ’ s like the parable of the emperor who wore no clothes , except Trump ’ s nakedness has been accepted by mainstream institutions for nearly four years .
The brilliance of Sarah Cooper ’ s comedy is that it gives us Trump ’ s words raw , along with a pantomimic commentary .
If Trump has turned subtext into text @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surtitles on top of the text .
Consider the first video Cooper did .
“ Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it ’ s ultraviolet or just very powerful light , ” Trump said .
In her rendition of this , Cooper captures Trump ’ s smug imperiousness , his unfounded confidence in his own brilliance .
Then Trump turned to Willian N. Bryan , the head of science at the Department of Homeland Security , and asked , “ And I think you said that hasn ’ t been checked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ test it ?
” In the actual video , Bryan is off-camera and presumably keeping a low profile .
In Cooper ’ s rendition , she plays both Trump and Bryan , and as Bryan mouths , “ Who , me ?
” Trump went on to say , “ And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body , which you can do , either through the skin or in some other way.
” Trump had paused before those last few words , which gives Cooper the chance to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finger , to suggest that Trump was perhaps thinking of a needle .
Throughout the video , Cooper uses props like a lamp and household cleaning spray to give visual reality to the words , again with the goal of making the audience pay attention to language .
Trump ended his farrago by saying , “ And I think you said you are going to test that .
Sounds interesting .
And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or almost a cleaning ?
Because you see it gets in the lungs [ here Cooper cups her hands and draws them towards her chest ] and it does a tremendous number on the lungs , so it would be interesting to check that .
So you are going to have to use medical doctors with .
But it sounds interesting to me.
” Cooper-as-Trump looks particularly delighted with the phrase “ medical doctors , ” jabbing her finger in the air .
Again , the comedian ’ s motions make us catch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a quick listen might have glossed over , Trump ’ s relish of his own words when he thinks he ’ s being clever .
Cooper lets Trump write the script but there ’ s more than enough commentary she can provide by using her full body as a tool of exegesis .
Her eyes are especially expressive , capturing as they do Trump ’ s obtuse self-assurance .
Cooper has found a rich vein of comedy .
She continues to mock not just Trump but also figures like Canadian Prime Minister Justin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The recurring theme of her comedy is male arrogance , although Cooper has also done a turn as Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman .
She loves to puncture puffed-up balloons .
The new genre of comedy Cooper has invented could take off .
Another comedian , Maria DeCotis , used this lip-syncing mode to hilariously comment on Andrew Cuomo ’ s embarrassing discussions of his daughter ’ s dating life .
The pandemic is the ideal time for this pantomime mode to flourish .
Comedians don ’ t really have access to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elaborate makeup provided by TV and movie studios .
Now is the moment .
Lip-syncing mimicry is bare-bones comedy , a form of miming perfectly suited to social media .
The current moment offers few consolations , but at least it has finally given us comedy that moves beyond easy mockery and offers real insight .

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Sarah Cooper has become the breakout star of the pandemic by being the first comedian to figure out that Donald Trump’s absurd words are best mocked not by exaggeration but by exact replication. On TikTok videos posted on Twitter, Cooper has invented a new genre of comedy: the lip-sync explication de texte, where the gestural expressiveness of mime is used to bring out the full lunacy of political chatter.
On April 20, Trump gave his now-notorious press briefing where he floated the idea that ultraviolet light and disinfectants could be used to cure Covid-19. Cooper, locked down in her Brooklyn home, didn’t see the briefing, but was told about Trump’s comments by her husband. She thought they were ridiculous enough to serve as a comedy skit. So in just an hour, while her husband was preparing dinner, Cooper made a 49-second video. It spread like wildfire on social media, garnering nearly 15 million views as well as praise from Jerry Seinfeld and Ben Stiller.
Trump has often been impersonated, most famously by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live. Yet, as talented as the mimics who have tried to parody Trump are, they run into the invariable problem that their fun-house version can never match the absurdity of the real thing. As Cooper herself told The Guardian, “It is interesting because as a writer you want to heighten how ridiculous things are. But everything he says is already so ridiculous that it is hard to heighten it.”
Cooper’s solution has been not to heighten Trump’s ludicrousness but to create a context where the audience pays closer attention to it. The genius of her comedy is that it counteracts the tendency to normalize Trump’s words, to tidy up what he’s saying and pretend it is more rational than it really is. More From Jeet Heer The Indigenous Roots of Robbie Robertson’s Rock and Roll Revolution August 14, 2023 Why Does This Racist Keep Getting Silicon Valley Money? August 11, 2023 When Phallocrats Go Limp August 4, 2023
Trump owes his success as a politician to his taking subtext and turning it into text. Previous Republican politicians stirred up racist animosity by using dog-whistle phrases like “welfare queen” or “inner-city crime.” Trump won the presidency by being much more explicit, decrying “Mexican rapists” and calling for a Muslim ban. By being so overt, he convinced an intense base of supporters that he was authentic in his bigotry in way that previous politicians weren’t.
One fascinating side effect of Trump’s crudeness is that it has led his surrogates and many in the media to whitewash Trump’s words. Ever since Trump emerged as a political figure, there’s been an abundance of Trump translators, people working full-time to pretend that his vile and just plain bizarre comments mean something other than what they literally say. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
In 2016, Trump said he wanted to “take the oil” from Iraq and that the United States deserves the “spoils” of victory. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani defended Trump by softening his meaning. “He hasn’t said we should take it for ourselves, necessarily,” Giuliani told ABC News. “We should secure it so it doesn’t get taken by terrorist forces so we can have some say over the distribution.” Giuliani’s gloss was a complete fabrication, but it was part of a larger effort to translate Trump’s frothing into normal human discourse. Current Issue View our current issue
In 2016, Trump also described former president Barack Obama as the “founder of Isis.” Interviewing Trump, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt suggested that Trump was of course being figurative. Trump rejected this defense, saying, “No, I meant that he’s the founder of Isis, I do.” Trump did later walk back the remarks by saying he was being “sarcastic”—itself a defense that makes no sense.
It’s not just the right-wing media or Trump supporters that close their ears to what he is saying. Mainstream media reports routinely edit Trump’s incoherent speeches into something resembling lucidity. Writing in The Guardian, Australian journalist Lenore Taylor wrote about being flabbergasted by listening to an entire Trump briefing filled with ranting that usually gets edited out of reports.
Taylor claimed that “the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.”
When Trump gives his grotesque briefings, everyone around him, both his staff and the attendant press, act as if what he is saying is normal and rational. It’s like the parable of the emperor who wore no clothes, except Trump’s nakedness has been accepted by mainstream institutions for nearly four years.
The brilliance of Sarah Cooper’s comedy is that it gives us Trump’s words raw, along with a pantomimic commentary. If Trump has turned subtext into text, Cooper has added a layer of surtitles on top of the text.
Consider the first video Cooper did. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said. In her rendition of this, Cooper captures Trump’s smug imperiousness, his unfounded confidence in his own brilliance.
Then Trump turned to Willian N. Bryan, the head of science at the Department of Homeland Security, and asked, “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but we’re going to test it?” In the actual video, Bryan is off-camera and presumably keeping a low profile. In Cooper’s rendition, she plays both Trump and Bryan, and as Bryan mouths, “Who, me?”
Trump went on to say, “And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way.” Trump had paused before those last few words, which gives Cooper the chance to act out jabbing her butt with a finger, to suggest that Trump was perhaps thinking of a needle.
Throughout the video, Cooper uses props like a lamp and household cleaning spray to give visual reality to the words, again with the goal of making the audience pay attention to language.
Trump ended his farrago by saying, “And I think you said you are going to test that. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs [here Cooper cups her hands and draws them towards her chest] and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that. So you are going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds interesting to me.”
Cooper-as-Trump looks particularly delighted with the phrase “medical doctors,” jabbing her finger in the air. Again, the comedian’s motions make us catch something in Trump’s speech that a quick listen might have glossed over, Trump’s relish of his own words when he thinks he’s being clever.
Cooper lets Trump write the script but there’s more than enough commentary she can provide by using her full body as a tool of exegesis. Her eyes are especially expressive, capturing as they do Trump’s obtuse self-assurance.
Cooper has found a rich vein of comedy. She continues to mock not just Trump but also figures like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and tech executive Elon Musk. The recurring theme of her comedy is male arrogance, although Cooper has also done a turn as Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman. She loves to puncture puffed-up balloons.
The new genre of comedy Cooper has invented could take off. Another comedian, Maria DeCotis, used this lip-syncing mode to hilariously comment on Andrew Cuomo’s embarrassing discussions of his daughter’s dating life.
The pandemic is the ideal time for this pantomime mode to flourish. Comedians don’t really have access to the stage right now, nor even the elaborate makeup provided by TV and movie studios. Now is the moment. Lip-syncing mimicry is bare-bones comedy, a form of miming perfectly suited to social media. The current moment offers few consolations, but at least it has finally given us comedy that moves beyond easy mockery and offers real insight.


thenation--2020-05-22--Cuba Has Sent 2,000 Doctors and Nurses Overseas to Fight Covid-19

Havana—As the novel coronavirus encircled the globe , tearing through health care systems , heavily affected countries sent out pleas for doctors .
One small , downtrodden island answered the call .
Cuba has sent more than 2,000 doctors and nurses to 23 countries since the crisis broke .
Emergency medical response teams from the island have touched down in Latin America , Africa , the Middle East , and—for the first time—Europe .
In March , the first batch of 51 Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Lombardy , Italy , at the time the epicenter of the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 28,000 Cuban health professionals who were working in 59 countries prior to Covid-19 .
No other country has sent large numbers of doctors abroad during the pandemic .
The radical intellectual Noam Chomsky last month described the island as the only country to have shown “ genuine internationalism ” during the crisis , and the women-led anti-war organization Code Pink is now leading calls for the island ’ s emergency medical response teams to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .
But these medical brigades have received little media attention in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on at all , coverage is usually negative .
In fact , for the last three years , the Trump administration has described doctors participating in these missions as “ slaves ” and has accused the Cuban government of “ human trafficking.
” At the same time , Trump officials have suggested that tens of thousands of those “ on mission ” are not doctors at all but regime henchmen deployed to “ sow political discord ” and spread the virus of communism .
Cast in this light , Cuban doctors are at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ major media outlets paint a similar picture .
Cuba ’ s medical collaboration is portrayed as Machiavellian , reduced to a PR ruse to deflect attention from Cuba ’ s internal human rights violations , a means of projecting soft power , or a way of meddling in other countries ’ affairs .
And while it is sometimes granted that the medics themselves improve health outcomes in poor countries , the Cuban government is alleged to exploit these doctors by “ pocketing ” most of their earnings .
Such depictions never include the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in these missions .
Over the last couple of months , I ’ ve spoken to dozens of doctors before their departure .
Their words cut sharply against this picture .
“ How can I be a slave if I receive a free education from my country ?
” asked Dr. Leonardo Fernández , who has served in Nicaragua , Pakistan , East Timor , Liberia , and Mozambique .
“ How can I be a slave when my family receives my full salary while I ’ m abroad ?
How can I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rights ?
” Dr. Gracilliano Díaz , a veteran of the campaign against Ebola in Sierra Leone in 2014 , dismissed with Caribbean cool the idea that he is a victim of trafficking .
“ We do this voluntarily , ” he said with a lilt .
“ It doesn ’ t matter to us that other countries brand us as slaves .
What matters to us is that we contribute to the world.
” Next to a memorial to Cuban health professionals who have died abroad , I asked Nurse Carlos Armanda @ @ @ @ @ @ @ treat people in Italy .
Looking me in the eye , he told me , “ If you live here , you know why.
” Reporting from Havana for the last seven years , I have gotten to know a lot of doctors .
It ’ s hard to avoid them : Cuba has by far the highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the world .
I ’ ve had check-ups from family doctors in local clinics and CAT scans by neurosurgeons .
I ’ ve chatted to doctors while waiting in line to buy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dominoes with them , and gotten drunk with them .
Last year I helped make a documentary about a friend who , fed up scraping by on his $ 55-per-month salary , left medicine to become a cabbie .
As doctors have shared their stories with me , I ’ ve built up a sense of why they go on the missions .
Alex Carreras spent years working in an AIDS clinic in Botswana .
Treating diseases eradicated in Cuba that he had previously only read about in textbooks was , he said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Doctors want to prove themselves in different environments.
” While in rural Venezuela in 2008 , geneticist Greicy Rodríguez worked with populations that had never previously seen a doctor .
She once revived a baby close to death from dehydration .
“ Her family ended up naming her after me , ” she said .
“ It was a beautiful experience.
” During his time in Northern Brazil , Javier López , a specialist in traditional Chinese medicine , worked closely with indigenous communities , helping them revive plant-based remedies that had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve always had the impetus to help , ” he said .
Some go for the money .
Yanet Rosales , a 36-year-old family doctor , earned $ 900 a month in the small city of Poços de Caldas in Brazil—much less than her Brazilian colleagues , but more than 10 times her salary at home .
“ You earn much more than what you get in Cuba , ” she told me after she ’ d come back from a mission .
“ I always wanted to travel and meet people in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Yanet was paid around 25 percent of the revenue the Cuban government received for her services .
She thought a 50/50 division would have been fairer , but denied that she was a “ modern slave , ” as revenue from the missions pays for free health care in Cuba .
“ When some patients said we were being robbed , we told them this wasn ’ t the case , ” she said .
“ Here in Cuba nobody gets charged for a hip replacement or an MRI scan—but these things @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doctors and nurses working on the Mais Médicos ( More Doctors ) program in Brazil from 2013 to 2018 decided to “ desert ” Cuba—some for economic reasons , some because they fell in love .
Yanet decided to return and use her savings to buy a four-bedroom apartment in Havana .
After I first interviewed her , she gave me a tour of her home , showing me the electric coffee grinder and giant plasma TV she brought back from Brazil .
Over the last decade , the leasing of medical professionals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lucrative export activity .
It generated $ 6.4 billion in 2018 , bringing in more money than rum , sugar , and cigars combined .
This revenue pays for free health care and education through the university level , and to sustain art , music , and culture , and there ’ s no evidence the money is being siphoned off by a corrupt elite .
Corruption at the higher echelons of the Cuban government is low compared to other countries in the region : The NGO Transparency International ranks Cuba as one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ America .
And as petroleum shipments from Venezuela , the island ’ s main ally , decrease , this money is increasingly needed just to keep the lights on .
Some of the revenue subsidizes missions to countries that can ’ t afford to pay for them .
While Cuba charges oil-rich states like Angola for “ professional services , ” it provides thousands of doctors and nurses to low-income Latin American and sub-Saharan countries at cost or for free .
And though it ’ s unknown whether Cuba is charging for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ previously charged for emergency medical response to earthquakes , hurricanes , or epidemics .
The money also helps the Latin American School of Medicine , which has graduated 29,000 doctors from more than 100 countries over the last 20 years .
Medical education is provided for free to people from communities with poor access to health care on condition that upon graduation they return to serve their communities .
Some of these doctors are now dealing with Covid-19 in the United States .
There ’ s also the fact that doctors that go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to most Cubans .
They live in nicer houses , have flashy amenities , and eat more meat .
Today ’ s internacionalistas are Cuba ’ s middle class .
In seven years of conversing with medics in Cuba , I ’ ve never met a doctor or a nurse who said they were forced to work abroad .
Waiting lists are oversubscribed .
And some doctors even pay to cut in line .
John Kirk , an academic at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia , who has spent over a decade studying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ medical staff abroad for many reasons .
“ It generates funding to maintain Cuba ’ s excellent health care system—in many ways on par with those in the Global North .
But there is also a strong element of altruism , of the need to collaborate and share Cuba ’ s impressive human capital—something which is clearly stated in the preamble to the national constitution.
” “ We in the Global North are not used to seeing altruism to this degree , ” he added .
“ But it is in the Cuban @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the US government ’ s decades-long economic war against Cuba , targeting the island ’ s energy supply and tourism industry .
But more recently , both in rhetoric and action , it has weaponized health care , pressuring allies to cancel accords with Cuba .
In Ecuador last year , President Lenin Moreno expelled 382 Cuban doctors , ending nearly three decades of medical cooperation .
The announcement came soon after Ecuador was granted a $ 4.2 billion loan by the International Monetary Fund ( IMF ) .
The United States is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ substantially controls its bureaucracy .
Mauricio Claver-Carone , the Trump administration ’ s point man on Cuba , was acting executive director of the IMF , representing US interests there , when loan negotiations began .
After a US-orchestrated civil-military coup six months ago , one of the first acts of the new regime in Bolivia was to kick out 725 Cuban medical professionals .
A vehicle with US diplomatic plates was photographed outside one of the locations where Cuban doctors were interrogated prior to their expulsion .
Brazil ’ s government needed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s 2018 presidential campaign , right-wing firebrand Jair Bolsonaro threatened to cancel medical collaboration with Cuba , calling Cuban doctors “ slaves ” and “ terrorists.
” Following his inauguration as president , Cuba withdrew its 8,517 Cuban doctors .
With Covid-19 halting tourism , Cuba is more reliant than ever on its international medical program to stay afloat .
Cuban-American hard-liners who run Trump ’ s Latin America policy have sensed their moment and ratcheted up their attacks ; choking off revenue from the medical programs could cripple the Cuban economy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As the coronavirus crisis has pushed more countries to request Cuban medical assistance , Florida Senator Marco Rubio and New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez this month began lobbying for US embassies around the world to “ inform ” governments hosting Cuban doctors about the “ Cuban regime ’ s forced labor practices.
” Though US sanctions blocked a shipment of masks , gloves , and ventilators from reaching the island in April , they have not substantially undermined Cuba ’ s domestic response to Covid-19 .
Through vigorous contact tracing and enforced isolation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ corralled the virus , registering fewer than 2,000 cases , more than 50 times fewer per capita than in the United States .
Those who pay the highest price when the Trump administration wins are people in small towns , indigenous villages , and urban slums .
The withdrawal of Cuban doctors from Brazil , for instance , sharply cut back access to health care for 28 million people .
As a result , according to the Pan American Health Organization ( which is linked to the World Health Organization ) , 37,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next decade .
For Kirk , right-wing regimes like the Trump administration , Bolsonaro ’ s Brazil , and the post-coup government in Bolivia have an ulterior motive .
“ Cuban doctors represented the threat of a good example of what public health could be—and that ’ s why they had to be stopped.
” “ As the Cubans pull out , the people who are being screwed are the people who have had health care for the first time and will now no longer have it .
It ’ s criminal to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Havana—As the novel coronavirus encircled the globe, tearing through health care systems, heavily affected countries sent out pleas for doctors. One small, downtrodden island answered the call.
Cuba has sent more than 2,000 doctors and nurses to 23 countries since the crisis broke.
Emergency medical response teams from the island have touched down in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and—for the first time—Europe. In March, the first batch of 51 Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Lombardy, Italy, at the time the epicenter of the pandemic, to cheering crowds.
They join the 28,000 Cuban health professionals who were working in 59 countries prior to Covid-19. Covid-19 You Can’t Mask Stupid Elie Mystal
No other country has sent large numbers of doctors abroad during the pandemic. The radical intellectual Noam Chomsky last month described the island as the only country to have shown “genuine internationalism” during the crisis, and the women-led anti-war organization Code Pink is now leading calls for the island’s emergency medical response teams to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But these medical brigades have received little media attention in the United States. When they are commented on at all, coverage is usually negative.
In fact, for the last three years, the Trump administration has described doctors participating in these missions as “slaves” and has accused the Cuban government of “human trafficking.” At the same time, Trump officials have suggested that tens of thousands of those “on mission” are not doctors at all but regime henchmen deployed to “sow political discord” and spread the virus of communism. Cast in this light, Cuban doctors are at once victims and oppressors.
Stories in major media outlets paint a similar picture. Cuba’s medical collaboration is portrayed as Machiavellian, reduced to a PR ruse to deflect attention from Cuba’s internal human rights violations, a means of projecting soft power, or a way of meddling in other countries’ affairs. Current Issue View our current issue
And while it is sometimes granted that the medics themselves improve health outcomes in poor countries, the Cuban government is alleged to exploit these doctors by “pocketing” most of their earnings. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Such depictions never include the voice of the Cuban doctors who work in these missions. Over the last couple of months, I’ve spoken to dozens of doctors before their departure. Their words cut sharply against this picture.
“How can I be a slave if I receive a free education from my country?” asked Dr. Leonardo Fernández, who has served in Nicaragua, Pakistan, East Timor, Liberia, and Mozambique. “How can I be a slave when my family receives my full salary while I’m abroad? How can I be a slave when I have constitutional rights?”
Dr. Gracilliano Díaz, a veteran of the campaign against Ebola in Sierra Leone in 2014, dismissed with Caribbean cool the idea that he is a victim of trafficking. “We do this voluntarily,” he said with a lilt. “It doesn’t matter to us that other countries brand us as slaves. What matters to us is that we contribute to the world.”
Next to a memorial to Cuban health professionals who have died abroad, I asked Nurse Carlos Armanda why he was risking his life to treat people in Italy. Looking me in the eye, he told me, “If you live here, you know why.”
I did.
Reporting from Havana for the last seven years, I have gotten to know a lot of doctors. It’s hard to avoid them: Cuba has by far the highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the world. I’ve had check-ups from family doctors in local clinics and CAT scans by neurosurgeons. I’ve chatted to doctors while waiting in line to buy chicken, cooked for them, played dominoes with them, and gotten drunk with them. Last year I helped make a documentary about a friend who, fed up scraping by on his $55-per-month salary, left medicine to become a cabbie.
As doctors have shared their stories with me, I’ve built up a sense of why they go on the missions. Alex Carreras spent years working in an AIDS clinic in Botswana. Treating diseases eradicated in Cuba that he had previously only read about in textbooks was, he said, a major motivation for going: “Doctors want to prove themselves in different environments.”
While in rural Venezuela in 2008, geneticist Greicy Rodríguez worked with populations that had never previously seen a doctor. She once revived a baby close to death from dehydration. “Her family ended up naming her after me,” she said. “It was a beautiful experience.”
During his time in Northern Brazil, Javier López, a specialist in traditional Chinese medicine, worked closely with indigenous communities, helping them revive plant-based remedies that had been stamped out. “I’ve always had the impetus to help,” he said.
Some go for the money. Yanet Rosales, a 36-year-old family doctor, earned $900 a month in the small city of Poços de Caldas in Brazil—much less than her Brazilian colleagues, but more than 10 times her salary at home. “You earn much more than what you get in Cuba,” she told me after she’d come back from a mission. “I always wanted to travel and meet people in other countries. This was my chance.”
Yanet was paid around 25 percent of the revenue the Cuban government received for her services. She thought a 50/50 division would have been fairer, but denied that she was a “modern slave,” as revenue from the missions pays for free health care in Cuba. “When some patients said we were being robbed, we told them this wasn’t the case,” she said. “Here in Cuba nobody gets charged for a hip replacement or an MRI scan—but these things are expensive.”
More than 1,000 Cuban doctors and nurses working on the Mais Médicos (More Doctors) program in Brazil from 2013 to 2018 decided to “desert” Cuba—some for economic reasons, some because they fell in love. Yanet decided to return and use her savings to buy a four-bedroom apartment in Havana. After I first interviewed her, she gave me a tour of her home, showing me the electric coffee grinder and giant plasma TV she brought back from Brazil.
Over the last decade, the leasing of medical professionals has emerged as Cuba’s most lucrative export activity. It generated $6.4 billion in 2018, bringing in more money than rum, sugar, and cigars combined.
This revenue pays for free health care and education through the university level, and to sustain art, music, and culture, and there’s no evidence the money is being siphoned off by a corrupt elite. Corruption at the higher echelons of the Cuban government is low compared to other countries in the region: The NGO Transparency International ranks Cuba as one of the least corrupt countries in Latin America. And as petroleum shipments from Venezuela, the island’s main ally, decrease, this money is increasingly needed just to keep the lights on.
Some of the revenue subsidizes missions to countries that can’t afford to pay for them. While Cuba charges oil-rich states like Angola for “professional services,” it provides thousands of doctors and nurses to low-income Latin American and sub-Saharan countries at cost or for free. And though it’s unknown whether Cuba is charging for the coronavirus-focused missions, the island has never previously charged for emergency medical response to earthquakes, hurricanes, or epidemics.
The money also helps the Latin American School of Medicine, which has graduated 29,000 doctors from more than 100 countries over the last 20 years. Medical education is provided for free to people from communities with poor access to health care on condition that upon graduation they return to serve their communities. Some of these doctors are now dealing with Covid-19 in the United States.
There’s also the fact that doctors that go on mission come back rich, compared to most Cubans. They live in nicer houses, have flashy amenities, and eat more meat. Today’s internacionalistas are Cuba’s middle class. In seven years of conversing with medics in Cuba, I’ve never met a doctor or a nurse who said they were forced to work abroad. Waiting lists are oversubscribed. And some doctors even pay to cut in line.
John Kirk, an academic at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who has spent over a decade studying Cuban medical internationalism, says Cuba sends medical staff abroad for many reasons. “It generates funding to maintain Cuba’s excellent health care system—in many ways on par with those in the Global North. But there is also a strong element of altruism, of the need to collaborate and share Cuba’s impressive human capital—something which is clearly stated in the preamble to the national constitution.”
“We in the Global North are not used to seeing altruism to this degree,” he added. “But it is in the Cuban DNA.”
The Trump administration has intensified the US government’s decades-long economic war against Cuba, targeting the island’s energy supply and tourism industry. But more recently, both in rhetoric and action, it has weaponized health care, pressuring allies to cancel accords with Cuba.
In Ecuador last year, President Lenin Moreno expelled 382 Cuban doctors, ending nearly three decades of medical cooperation. The announcement came soon after Ecuador was granted a $4.2 billion loan by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The United States is the IMF’s main shareholder and substantially controls its bureaucracy. Mauricio Claver-Carone, the Trump administration’s point man on Cuba, was acting executive director of the IMF, representing US interests there, when loan negotiations began.
After a US-orchestrated civil-military coup six months ago, one of the first acts of the new regime in Bolivia was to kick out 725 Cuban medical professionals. A vehicle with US diplomatic plates was photographed outside one of the locations where Cuban doctors were interrogated prior to their expulsion.
Brazil’s government needed little convincing. Throughout the country’s 2018 presidential campaign, right-wing firebrand Jair Bolsonaro threatened to cancel medical collaboration with Cuba, calling Cuban doctors “slaves” and “terrorists.” Following his inauguration as president, Cuba withdrew its 8,517 Cuban doctors.
With Covid-19 halting tourism, Cuba is more reliant than ever on its international medical program to stay afloat. Cuban-American hard-liners who run Trump’s Latin America policy have sensed their moment and ratcheted up their attacks; choking off revenue from the medical programs could cripple the Cuban economy, paving the way to regime change. As the coronavirus crisis has pushed more countries to request Cuban medical assistance, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez this month began lobbying for US embassies around the world to “inform” governments hosting Cuban doctors about the “Cuban regime’s forced labor practices.”
Though US sanctions blocked a shipment of masks, gloves, and ventilators from reaching the island in April, they have not substantially undermined Cuba’s domestic response to Covid-19. Through vigorous contact tracing and enforced isolation of suspected cases, Cuba has successfully corralled the virus, registering fewer than 2,000 cases, more than 50 times fewer per capita than in the United States.
Those who pay the highest price when the Trump administration wins are people in small towns, indigenous villages, and urban slums. The withdrawal of Cuban doctors from Brazil, for instance, sharply cut back access to health care for 28 million people. As a result, according to the Pan American Health Organization (which is linked to the World Health Organization), 37,000 young Brazilian children may die in the next decade.
For Kirk, right-wing regimes like the Trump administration, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and the post-coup government in Bolivia have an ulterior motive. “Cuban doctors represented the threat of a good example of what public health could be—and that’s why they had to be stopped.”
“As the Cubans pull out, the people who are being screwed are the people who have had health care for the first time and will now no longer have it. It’s criminal to play politics with people’s lives.”