thenation--2020-12-29--Covid-19 and the Nightmare of Food Insecurity

As autumn fades and winter looms , the dire predictions public health experts made about Covid-19 have , unfortunately , proven all too accurate .
On October 27 , 74,379 people were infected in the United States ; less than a month and a half later , on December 9 , that number had soared to 218,677 , while the 2020 total has just surpassed 15 million , a number no other country , not even India , which has a population three times that of the United States , has surpassed .
And now , it seems , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As recently as late October , the embattled Dr. Anthony Fauci , the nation ’ s leading infectious disease expert , warned that “ we are in for a whole lot of hurt ” and that infections could reach 100,000 a day .
As it happens , he was wildly optimistic .
A little more than a month later , there were more than twice that many .
Is it possible , however , that the current surge is due in part to increased testing , as President Trump and others have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problem .
Even if that theory were true , it can ’ t account for the spiraling death toll , which is now more than 300,000 and could hit 450,000 by February , according to Robert Redfield , the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
Nor can it explain the daily Covid-19 hospitalizations , the first round of which peaked at 59,712 on July 23 , dropped pretty steadily to a low of 28,606 on September 20 , and then started to soar , reaching 106,671 on December 9 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help us grasp the staggering magnitude of our current public health crisis , what they don ’ t reveal is the searing effects it ’ s had on the lives of millions of Americans , even those who have managed to evade the virus or haven ’ t seen friends or family fall ill or die from Covid-19 .
The pandemic has been especially hard for those on the front lines : doctors , nurses , and other hospital workers who experience battle fatigue and despair while besieged by suffering and deaths , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In society at large , precautions—lockdowns , social distancing , limits on festive gatherings—necessary to keep Covid-19 at bay have increased loneliness and social isolation .
Contrary to early expectations , reports of abuse and violence within families haven ’ t actually spiraled , but experts suggest that may be because the victims , confined to their homes alongside their tormentors , are finding it harder to seek help and fear reporting what ’ s happening to them .
As for children , teachers are no longer seeing their pupils in person as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spot the typical warning signs of mistreatment .
Thankfully , the pandemic has yet to increase this country ’ s already alarming suicide rate , but the same can ’ t be said for levels of stress and depression , both of which have risen noticeably .
School closures and the move to online learning have forced parents , particularly women , to scramble for child care and to work less , even though many of them were barely getting by while working full-time , or stop working altogether , often a genuine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , people who have been laid off or had their work hours reduced have fallen behind on their mortgage and rent payments .
Although various federal and state moratoriums on such payments , as well as on evictions and foreclosures , were enacted , such protections will eventually end .
And the moratoriums don ’ t negate renters ’ or homeowners ’ obligations to settle accounts with their bankers and landlords somewhere down the line ( which for many Americans may , in the end , prove an impossibility ) .
Apart from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perhaps the most poignant consequence of Covid-19 has been the way it ’ s increased what ’ s called “ food insecurity ” across the United States .
That ungainly term doesn ’ t refer to the chronic food scarcity and undernourishment , which afflicts more than 800 million people in poor countries , but rather to the disruption of people ’ s typical food-consumption patterns .
The US Department of Agriculture ( USDA ) distinguishes between what it calls low food security ( “ reduced quality , variability , or desirability of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ version of the same ( “ multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake ” ) .
Surveys by the USDA and the Census Bureau show that both variants have risen steeply during the pandemic .
Just before the coronavirus struck , 35 million Americans , 11 million of them children , experienced food insecurity , the lowest figure in two decades .
This year , those numbers are projected to reach 54 million and 18 million respectively .
In 2018 , 4 percent of American adults reported that at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have enough to eat ; by July 2020 , that figure had hit 11 percent , according to a study by Northwestern University ’ s Food Research and Action Center , and will only increase as the pandemic worsens .
Income supplements provided by the $ 2.2 trillion CARES Act that Congress passed in March in response to the economic problems created by Covid-19 , increases in the government ’ s Supplementary Nutritional Program ( SNAP ) , and the Pandemic Electronic Benefit ( P-EBT ) , which helps parents whose children no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , have made a difference—but not enough to make up for lost or reduced income , lost homes , and other disasters of this moment .
And sadly , any follow-up to the CARES Act , assuming Congress reaches some kind of agreement on its terms before the current legislation expires at the end of December , will almost certainly be far less generous than the original law .
The SNAP increases already excluded the poorest seven million households that were then receiving the maximum amount , and the new increases now under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one dollar to a four-person family ’ s maximum daily benefit .
P-EBT expired in most states at the end of September , in some as early as July .
That food insecurity has “ skyrocketed , ” as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities puts it , during the pandemic despite government assistance shouldn ’ t come as a surprise .
Millions of people have lost their jobs .
Some have seen their earnings diminished because of furloughs , wage cuts , freezes , or reduced working hours .
Others have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ given up ( but aren ’ t included in official unemployment statistics ) .
Millions of adults have children who no longer receive those free or subsidized lunches because of the switch , in whole or part , to online teaching .
Worse yet , as pandemic-induced firings , layoffs , and wage cuts have reduced incomes , and so consumer purchasing power , food prices , especially for meat , fish , and eggs , have only risen .
Such costs have increased for other reasons as well .
The pandemic has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Leery consumers , anticipating shortages or seeking to reduce trips to grocery stores to avoid being infected by Covid-19 , have also resorted to panic buying and the stockpiling of food and other necessities .
Who You Are and Where You Live Matters Most Of course , not everyone has been hit with equal force by rising food prices .
Americans high on the income ladder can absorb such extra costs easily enough and , in any case , spend a substantially smaller portion of their income on groceries .
According to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the top fifth of society spent 8 percent of their income on food last year ; for the bottom fifth , it was 36 percent .
The first group also obviously has a lot more money available to stock up on food than that bottom fifth , so many of whom have also become jobless or seen their paychecks diminish since the pandemic started .
In March , for example , 39 percent of those making less than $ 40,000 had already lost their jobs or had their paychecks reduced , but only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 100,000 or more , and that gap continued into the fall .
Not surprisingly , then , the bigger the hit people took from the Covid-19 recession , the more likely they were to experience food insecurity , which is why aggregate statistics on the phenomenon and other societal problems attributable to the pandemic can be misleading .
They tend to mask the reality that its effects have been felt primarily by the most vulnerable , while the others have been touched much more lightly , or not at all .
The variations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well as income level ( and the three tend to be closely linked ) .
A USDA report classified 19 percent of Black households and 16 percent of Hispanic households as food insecure in 2019 , compared to 8 percent of their white counterparts .
By this summer , food insecurity had increased significantly across the board , afflicting 36 percent of Black , 32 percent of Hispanic , and 18 percent of white households .
While the pandemic has certainly made matters worse , African Americans had the highest rate among those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This was especially true of counties—the United States has more than 3,000 of them—in which they were in the majority .
In 2016 , those particular counties accounted for a mere 3 percent of the national total , but 96 percent of them had “ high food insecurity , ” as the Department of Agriculture defines it , as well as a poverty rate more than twice the national average ( 12.7 percent that year ) .
Native Americans have had the worst of it , however , since many of their families @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( 58 per 1,000 households compared to three per 1,000 for whites ) .
Nearly 75 percent of Native Americans must travel more than a mile to reach a supermarket , compared to 40 percent of the population as a whole , and the disruption of supply chains has only diminished their food security further relative to other ethnic communities .
Even prior to the pandemic , counties in which they ( or Native Alaskans ) constituted a majority were among those with the highest levels of food insecurity .
Not coincidentally , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nearly 70 percent of Native American-majority counties averaged a whopping 37 percent .
In other words , while every group has suffered in this pandemic year , race matters—a lot—when it comes to the degree of suffering .
So does income .
In coronavirus-stricken America , only 1 percent of adults with an annual income exceeding $ 100,000 surveyed by the Census Bureau this summer responded that , during the preceding week , their household “ sometimes or often did not have enough to eat.
” Compare that to 16 percent of those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of those earning less than $ 25,000 .
Finally , food insecurity during the pandemic has varied by location as well .
Ten states ( and the District of Columbia ) had the highest rates , ranging from Mississippi ( 33.5 percent ) , which stood atop this group , to Alabama ( 27 percent ) , which had the lowest .
In between , in descending order , were Washington , D.C. ; Nevada ; Louisiana ; New York ; New Mexico ; Florida ; Tennessee ; and North Carolina .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Front Lines The other day , a close friend described to me the daily scene at a food distribution center in New York City ’ s Harlem neighborhood .
Well before trucks laden with food pulled up early in the morning , he said , the lines had already started forming , hundreds of people waiting patiently in a queue that encircled the block .
And that ’ s just one of many neighborhoods in New York where this is all too typical these days .
In Queens , for instance , one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that lines can extend for eight blocks .
Try to imagine what the waiting time must be .
All told , 1.5 million people in the city , unable to buy the groceries they need , rely on food pantries , and New York is anything but unusual .
Photographs abound of cars lined up by the hundreds , even thousands , at food pantries in major cities around the country .
Feeding America , a non-profit organization that supports 200 food storage centers and 60,000 pantries nationwide , reports that the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ equivalent of more than 4.2 billion meals since March , a 50 percent increase compared to a year ago and 40 percent of the people who come to such pantries are first-time visitors .
A Consumer Reports survey of grocery shoppers found that nearly a fifth of them had turned to a food pantry since the pandemic began ( half of whom hadn ’ t sought such help at all in 2019 ) .
In March , before the first wave of Covid-19 began to peak , 18 million Americans already used food @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had climbed to 22 million , even though an additional 6.2 million people had received benefits from SNAP ( the food-stamp program in common parlance ) between March and May alone .
By early July , 37.4 million people had signed up for SNAP compared to 35.7 million for all of last year .
Little wonder , then , that food banks , facing a tsunami of demand , have struggled to stay stocked amid rising prices , shortages , reduced donations from big-chain supermarkets , and disrupted supply chains .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to raise the money they need to operate .
Not a few have buckled under the strain and many have been forced to shut down .
Pantries have also had a hard time mustering volunteers , in part because seniors , particularly vulnerable to the virus , made up a significant segment of such helpers .
Not surprisingly , then , food banks and pantries have battled to function or simply survive in these months , while also having to implement an array of cumbersome and costly safety measures to keep volunteers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their heroic role , such food banks and pantries are the equivalent of the proverbial finger in the dike .
For Covid-induced food insecurity and hunger to decline significantly , the third wave of infections will have to subside and Congress will have to offer more effective aid .
The Trump administration ’ s recent proposal , blessed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell , to provide a one-shot $ 600 check to all adults ( whether they ’ re unemployed or not ) certainly isn ’ t .
At the same time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in sufficient quantities and distributed rapidly .
( We are far from ready on that front . )
All this in a country where striking numbers of people look askance at vaccination—in a December survey only 63 percent of Americans said they would be willing to get vaccinated against Covid-19—and are also drawn to conspiracy mongers whose appeal has grown , thanks in part to social media .
Once the virus is vanquished or at least brought under reasonable control , the economy can be reopened .
Then , many of the nearly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have a shot at working again or having their employers end reduced hours and cut wages .
Here ’ s hoping that these various stars align by summer 2021 .
We can then revert to pre-pandemic normalcy , even though that state of affairs was marked by substantial poverty—34 million people last year—and rising inequality .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
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As autumn fades and winter looms, the dire predictions public health experts made about Covid-19 have, unfortunately, proven all too accurate. On October 27, 74,379 people were infected in the United States; less than a month and a half later, on December 9, that number had soared to 218,677, while the 2020 total has just surpassed 15 million, a number no other country, not even India, which has a population three times that of the United States, has surpassed.
And now, it seems, the third wave of the virus has arrived. As recently as late October, the embattled Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, warned that “we are in for a whole lot of hurt” and that infections could reach 100,000 a day. As it happens, he was wildly optimistic. A little more than a month later, there were more than twice that many. Is it possible, however, that the current surge is due in part to increased testing, as President Trump and others have regularly claimed? Here’s the problem. Even if that theory were true, it can’t account for the spiraling death toll, which is now more than 300,000 and could hit 450,000 by February, according to Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nor can it explain the daily Covid-19 hospitalizations, the first round of which peaked at 59,712 on July 23, dropped pretty steadily to a low of 28,606 on September 20, and then started to soar, reaching 106,671 on December 9.
Though big-picture statistics like these should help us grasp the staggering magnitude of our current public health crisis, what they don’t reveal is the searing effects it’s had on the lives of millions of Americans, even those who have managed to evade the virus or haven’t seen friends or family fall ill or die from Covid-19. The pandemic has been especially hard for those on the front lines: doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers who experience battle fatigue and despair while besieged by suffering and deaths, visceral reminders of their own vulnerability. 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
In society at large, precautions—lockdowns, social distancing, limits on festive gatherings—necessary to keep Covid-19 at bay have increased loneliness and social isolation. Contrary to early expectations, reports of abuse and violence within families haven’t actually spiraled, but experts suggest that may be because the victims, confined to their homes alongside their tormentors, are finding it harder to seek help and fear reporting what’s happening to them. As for children, teachers are no longer seeing their pupils in person as regularly and so are less able to spot the typical warning signs of mistreatment.
Thankfully, the pandemic has yet to increase this country’s already alarming suicide rate, but the same can’t be said for levels of stress and depression, both of which have risen noticeably. School closures and the move to online learning have forced parents, particularly women, to scramble for child care and to work less, even though many of them were barely getting by while working full-time, or stop working altogether, often a genuine disaster in poor families.
Not surprisingly, people who have been laid off or had their work hours reduced have fallen behind on their mortgage and rent payments. Although various federal and state moratoriums on such payments, as well as on evictions and foreclosures, were enacted, such protections will eventually end. And the moratoriums don’t negate renters’ or homeowners’ obligations to settle accounts with their bankers and landlords somewhere down the line (which for many Americans may, in the end, prove an impossibility).
Food and the Pandemic
Apart from the illness and death it causes, perhaps the most poignant consequence of Covid-19 has been the way it’s increased what’s called “food insecurity” across the United States. That ungainly term doesn’t refer to the chronic food scarcity and undernourishment, which afflicts more than 800 million people in poor countries, but rather to the disruption of people’s typical food-consumption patterns. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) distinguishes between what it calls low food security (“reduced quality, variability, or desirability of diet”) and the very low version of the same (“multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake”). Current Issue View our current issue
Surveys by the USDA and the Census Bureau show that both variants have risen steeply during the pandemic. Just before the coronavirus struck, 35 million Americans, 11 million of them children, experienced food insecurity, the lowest figure in two decades. This year, those numbers are projected to reach 54 million and 18 million respectively. In 2018, 4 percent of American adults reported that at least some members of their family did not have enough to eat; by July 2020, that figure had hit 11 percent, according to a study by Northwestern University’s Food Research and Action Center, and will only increase as the pandemic worsens.
Income supplements provided by the $2.2 trillion CARES Act that Congress passed in March in response to the economic problems created by Covid-19, increases in the government’s Supplementary Nutritional Program (SNAP), and the Pandemic Electronic Benefit (P-EBT), which helps parents whose children no longer get free or subsidized school lunches, have made a difference—but not enough to make up for lost or reduced income, lost homes, and other disasters of this moment. And sadly, any follow-up to the CARES Act, assuming Congress reaches some kind of agreement on its terms before the current legislation expires at the end of December, will almost certainly be far less generous than the original law. The SNAP increases already excluded the poorest seven million households that were then receiving the maximum amount, and the new increases now under discussion in Congress would add less than one dollar to a four-person family’s maximum daily benefit. P-EBT expired in most states at the end of September, in some as early as July.
That food insecurity has “skyrocketed,” as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities puts it, during the pandemic despite government assistance shouldn’t come as a surprise. Millions of people have lost their jobs. Some have seen their earnings diminished because of furloughs, wage cuts, freezes, or reduced working hours. Others have looked for jobs in vain and finally given up (but aren’t included in official unemployment statistics). Millions of adults have children who no longer receive those free or subsidized lunches because of the switch, in whole or part, to online teaching. Worse yet, as pandemic-induced firings, layoffs, and wage cuts have reduced incomes, and so consumer purchasing power, food prices, especially for meat, fish, and eggs, have only risen. Such costs have increased for other reasons as well. The pandemic has disrupted supply networks, national and international. Leery consumers, anticipating shortages or seeking to reduce trips to grocery stores to avoid being infected by Covid-19, have also resorted to panic buying and the stockpiling of food and other necessities.
Who You Are and Where You Live Matters Most
Of course, not everyone has been hit with equal force by rising food prices. Americans high on the income ladder can absorb such extra costs easily enough and, in any case, spend a substantially smaller portion of their income on groceries. According to the USDA, adults with incomes in the top fifth of society spent 8 percent of their income on food last year; for the bottom fifth, it was 36 percent. The first group also obviously has a lot more money available to stock up on food than that bottom fifth, so many of whom have also become jobless or seen their paychecks diminish since the pandemic started. In March, for example, 39 percent of those making less than $40,000 had already lost their jobs or had their paychecks reduced, but only 13 percent of those who earned $100,000 or more, and that gap continued into the fall.
Not surprisingly, then, the bigger the hit people took from the Covid-19 recession, the more likely they were to experience food insecurity, which is why aggregate statistics on the phenomenon and other societal problems attributable to the pandemic can be misleading. They tend to mask the reality that its effects have been felt primarily by the most vulnerable, while the others have been touched much more lightly, or not at all.
The variations are rooted in ethnicity and location as well as income level (and the three tend to be closely linked). A USDA report classified 19 percent of Black households and 16 percent of Hispanic households as food insecure in 2019, compared to 8 percent of their white counterparts. By this summer, food insecurity had increased significantly across the board, afflicting 36 percent of Black, 32 percent of Hispanic, and 18 percent of white households. While the pandemic has certainly made matters worse, African Americans had the highest rate among those three groups even before it started. This was especially true of counties—the United States has more than 3,000 of them—in which they were in the majority. In 2016, those particular counties accounted for a mere 3 percent of the national total, but 96 percent of them had “high food insecurity,” as the Department of Agriculture defines it, as well as a poverty rate more than twice the national average (12.7 percent that year).
Native Americans have had the worst of it, however, since many of their families lack access to running water and plumbing (58 per 1,000 households compared to three per 1,000 for whites). Nearly 75 percent of Native Americans must travel more than a mile to reach a supermarket, compared to 40 percent of the population as a whole, and the disruption of supply chains has only diminished their food security further relative to other ethnic communities. Even prior to the pandemic, counties in which they (or Native Alaskans) constituted a majority were among those with the highest levels of food insecurity. Not coincidentally, in 2016, the poverty rate in nearly 70 percent of Native American-majority counties averaged a whopping 37 percent.
In other words, while every group has suffered in this pandemic year, race matters—a lot—when it comes to the degree of suffering.
So does income. In coronavirus-stricken America, only 1 percent of adults with an annual income exceeding $100,000 surveyed by the Census Bureau this summer responded that, during the preceding week, their household “sometimes or often did not have enough to eat.” Compare that to 16 percent of those making $25,000–$35,000 and 28 percent of those earning less than $25,000.
Finally, food insecurity during the pandemic has varied by location as well. Ten states (and the District of Columbia) had the highest rates, ranging from Mississippi (33.5 percent), which stood atop this group, to Alabama (27 percent), which had the lowest. In between, in descending order, were Washington, D.C.; Nevada; Louisiana; New York; New Mexico; Florida; Tennessee; and North Carolina.
Food Banks and Pantries: On The Front Lines
The other day, a close friend described to me the daily scene at a food distribution center in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. Well before trucks laden with food pulled up early in the morning, he said, the lines had already started forming, hundreds of people waiting patiently in a queue that encircled the block. And that’s just one of many neighborhoods in New York where this is all too typical these days. In Queens, for instance, one pantry regularly faces a demand so steep that lines can extend for eight blocks. Try to imagine what the waiting time must be. All told, 1.5 million people in the city, unable to buy the groceries they need, rely on food pantries, and New York is anything but unusual. Photographs abound of cars lined up by the hundreds, even thousands, at food pantries in major cities around the country.
Feeding America, a non-profit organization that supports 200 food storage centers and 60,000 pantries nationwide, reports that the country’s food banks have provided the equivalent of more than 4.2 billion meals since March, a 50 percent increase compared to a year ago and 40 percent of the people who come to such pantries are first-time visitors. A Consumer Reports survey of grocery shoppers found that nearly a fifth of them had turned to a food pantry since the pandemic began (half of whom hadn’t sought such help at all in 2019). In March, before the first wave of Covid-19 began to peak, 18 million Americans already used food pantries; by August, that number had climbed to 22 million, even though an additional 6.2 million people had received benefits from SNAP (the food-stamp program in common parlance) between March and May alone. By early July, 37.4 million people had signed up for SNAP compared to 35.7 million for all of last year.
Little wonder, then, that food banks, facing a tsunami of demand, have struggled to stay stocked amid rising prices, shortages, reduced donations from big-chain supermarkets, and disrupted supply chains. It’s also become even harder for them to raise the money they need to operate. Not a few have buckled under the strain and many have been forced to shut down. Pantries have also had a hard time mustering volunteers, in part because seniors, particularly vulnerable to the virus, made up a significant segment of such helpers. Not surprisingly, then, food banks and pantries have battled to function or simply survive in these months, while also having to implement an array of cumbersome and costly safety measures to keep volunteers, staff, and clients infection-free.
Despite their heroic role, such food banks and pantries are the equivalent of the proverbial finger in the dike. For Covid-induced food insecurity and hunger to decline significantly, the third wave of infections will have to subside and Congress will have to offer more effective aid. The Trump administration’s recent proposal, blessed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, to provide a one-shot $600 check to all adults (whether they’re unemployed or not) certainly isn’t. At the same time, vaccines will have to be produced in sufficient quantities and distributed rapidly. (We are far from ready on that front.) All this in a country where striking numbers of people look askance at vaccination—in a December survey only 63 percent of Americans said they would be willing to get vaccinated against Covid-19—and are also drawn to conspiracy mongers whose appeal has grown, thanks in part to social media.
Once the virus is vanquished or at least brought under reasonable control, the economy can be reopened. Then, many of the nearly 11 million people presently unemployed will perhaps have a shot at working again or having their employers end reduced hours and cut wages.
Here’s hoping that these various stars align by summer 2021. We can then revert to pre-pandemic normalcy, even though that state of affairs was marked by substantial poverty—34 million people last year—and rising inequality.


thenation--2020-12-29--Trump’s Covid Aid Shenanigans Were All About Me Me Me

Betting that things can ’ t get worse with Donald Trump has always been a losing proposition , and never more so than in these dying days of 2020 .
That ’ s the final , unambiguous , Signal of 2020 .
Last week , Trump pardoned a who ’ s who of venal politicians ( including ex-Representative Duncan Hunter and his wife ) , corrupt advisers ( Paul Manafort and Roger Stone ) , relatives ( Jared Kushner ’ s odious father ) , and child-killing mercenaries convicted of a massacre in Iraq .
There ’ s no “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump has bypassed Department of Justice protocols , arrogating to himself regal-like powers to reward cronies and ( in Manafort ’ s case in particular ) make good on his promise to protect those who went to the wall to protect him from potential criminal liability .
There is talk that Trump will issue pardons-in-advance to his children and to close advisers such as Rudy Giuliani .
There is talk that Trump will try to pardon himself for any federal wrongdoing he might be accused of when he leaves office .
There is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pardons in secret—magic , get-out-of-jail-free cards to be revealed by an indicted Trumpite , should they need a little extra help down the road .
Trump Is Guilty of Sedition and Must Be Brought to Justice Is a Civil War Brewing Within the GOP ?
None of this is about furthering the cause of justice or righting wrongs committed by overzealous prosecutors .
Instead , it ’ s a game of transactional , strong-arm politics at its most infamous .
Meanwhile , thousands of Americans are dying of Covid-19 each day .
Hospitals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s second-largest city , along with the rest of Southern California , are so swamped with patients that ambulances with critically ill patients are having to circle for hours before finding one that will admit them .
Some hospitals are reporting that they are running low on oxygen supplies .
How has America ’ s president responded to this escalating crisis ?
After decamping to Mar-a-Lago for the holiday weekend , Trump launched a Twitter barrage against the Supreme Court , Congress , Democrats , and the Justice Department , as he sought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the November 3 election .
And he continued to position himself as an insurrectionist leader rather than a president , urging his supporters to protest in D.C. on January 6 against congressional ratification of the Electoral College vote .
When he wasn ’ t fascist-tweeting , he was playing golf .
And when he wasn ’ t playing golf , Trump was going out of his way to sabotage the painstakingly negotiated Covid relief package .
On Christmas Eve , he pulled the rug out from under Congress , after huge , bipartisan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ authorizing $ 900 billion in spending to counter the ongoing economic impact of the pandemic .
With no warning , he suddenly announced that the legislation didn ’ t pass muster and that he wasn ’ t going to sign it .
And until Sunday late evening , he didn ’ t .
As of Saturday night , because of Trump ’ s inaction , millions of Americans—especially independent contractors who have qualified for unemployment insurance since March—who were relying on expanded benefits to tide them over into the new year were without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ belatedly signed the bill , the delay guarantees at least a temporary break in unemployment payments for those Americans whose benefits ran out on the 26th .
Merry Christmas , America .
It wasn ’ t only the unemployed who were held hostage to Trump ’ s tantrums this past weekend .
The Covid relief package includes $ 20 billion for vaccine distribution , eviction protections , moneys for public transit systems and arts institutions , aid to imperiled school districts , loans and grants to small businesses , and so on .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ limbo by Trump ’ s shenanigans .
This isn ’ t governing in any recognizable sense .
It is , pure and simple , hostage-taking .
Trump , in a fit of rage over his having lost the election , is now trying to take the country down with him .
He is corrupting the justice system , ginning up violent conflict in the nation ’ s capital , and—in withholding his signature for several days on legislation vital to the survival of countless small businesses and the well-being of tens of millions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ll go to stay in the spotlight .
For Trump , it ’ s all about being center-stage , all the time .
And if millions of people see a pause in their unemployment benefits as a consequence , well , that ’ s just the price that must be paid to keep the headlines focused on No .
45 .

Betting that things can’t get worse with Donald Trump has always been a losing proposition, and never more so than in these dying days of 2020. That’s the final, unambiguous, Signal of 2020.
Last week, Trump pardoned a who’s who of venal politicians (including ex-Representative Duncan Hunter and his wife), corrupt advisers (Paul Manafort and Roger Stone), relatives (Jared Kushner’s odious father), and child-killing mercenaries convicted of a massacre in Iraq.
There’s no “process” to this pardoning spree. Trump has bypassed Department of Justice protocols, arrogating to himself regal-like powers to reward cronies and (in Manafort’s case in particular) make good on his promise to protect those who went to the wall to protect him from potential criminal liability.
There is talk that Trump will issue pardons-in-advance to his children and to close advisers such as Rudy Giuliani. There is talk that Trump will try to pardon himself for any federal wrongdoing he might be accused of when he leaves office. There is also talk that he might issue these pardons in secret—magic, get-out-of-jail-free cards to be revealed by an indicted Trumpite, should they need a little extra help down the road. More Signal:Noise Trump Is Guilty of Sedition and Must Be Brought to Justice Sasha Abramsky Is a Civil War Brewing Within the GOP? Sasha Abramsky
None of this is about furthering the cause of justice or righting wrongs committed by overzealous prosecutors. Instead, it’s a game of transactional, strong-arm politics at its most infamous.
Meanwhile, thousands of Americans are dying of Covid-19 each day. Hospitals in Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest city, along with the rest of Southern California, are so swamped with patients that ambulances with critically ill patients are having to circle for hours before finding one that will admit them. Some hospitals are reporting that they are running low on oxygen supplies.
How has America’s president responded to this escalating crisis? Current Issue View our current issue
After decamping to Mar-a-Lago for the holiday weekend, Trump launched a Twitter barrage against the Supreme Court, Congress, Democrats, and the Justice Department, as he sought to maintain the fiction that he won the November 3 election. And he continued to position himself as an insurrectionist leader rather than a president, urging his supporters to protest in D.C. on January 6 against congressional ratification of the Electoral College vote.
When he wasn’t fascist-tweeting, he was playing golf.
And when he wasn’t playing golf, Trump was going out of his way to sabotage the painstakingly negotiated Covid relief package. On Christmas Eve, he pulled the rug out from under Congress, after huge, bipartisan majorities in both houses passed the bills authorizing $900 billion in spending to counter the ongoing economic impact of the pandemic. With no warning, he suddenly announced that the legislation didn’t pass muster and that he wasn’t going to sign it. And until Sunday late evening, he didn’t. As of Saturday night, because of Trump’s inaction, millions of Americans—especially independent contractors who have qualified for unemployment insurance since March—who were relying on expanded benefits to tide them over into the new year were without financial assistance. And even though Trump belatedly signed the bill, the delay guarantees at least a temporary break in unemployment payments for those Americans whose benefits ran out on the 26th. Merry Christmas, America.
It wasn’t only the unemployed who were held hostage to Trump’s tantrums this past weekend. The Covid relief package includes $20 billion for vaccine distribution, eviction protections, moneys for public transit systems and arts institutions, aid to imperiled school districts, loans and grants to small businesses, and so on. All of that assistance was put into limbo by Trump’s shenanigans.
This isn’t governing in any recognizable sense. It is, pure and simple, hostage-taking. Trump, in a fit of rage over his having lost the election, is now trying to take the country down with him. He is corrupting the justice system, ginning up violent conflict in the nation’s capital, and—in withholding his signature for several days on legislation vital to the survival of countless small businesses and the well-being of tens of millions of citizens—showing just how far he’ll go to stay in the spotlight.
For Trump, it’s all about being center-stage, all the time. And if millions of people see a pause in their unemployment benefits as a consequence, well, that’s just the price that must be paid to keep the headlines focused on No. 45.


thenation--2020-12-30--Sniffing Our Way Back Home

Sniffing Our Way Back Home

ade ity , la.—The last time I kissed a man was almost a year ago , just before the virus closed the country .
The gentleman caller standing outside my trailer had been giving me that look over the previous few days in the pool that serves as a gathering spot at our winter gay campground .
On the day before I was to leave for the trip back north , this handsome chap mustered the courage to knock at my door .
Since I would be gone before the gossip at the pool would undoubtedly identify me as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advances .
I am no virgin , but when he touched me , I felt like Madonna descending those tiny aluminum steps .
Then he laid into me with one of those enveloping kisses , the kind where your foot magically rises upward to the sun .
I mostly remember his Juicy Fruit taste and musky smell .
There I was back to my roots with that primal move .
It was the calling that began 50 years ago for me when I joined the Gay Liberation Front .
Although hardly anyone in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the desire to have sex without police , state , and church interference had brought us together in the first place , and the GLF was a consciously left group that saw ending this thousands-of-years-old oppression of same-sexers as part of the big radical project for self-determination .
We certainly were not aiming to ape heterosexual marriage or collect a lover ’ s Social Security ( though I wouldn ’ t mind a few reparations thrown my way for my suffering ) .
We wanted to change the world .
Many of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was from that kiss , I managed to climb into my three-quarter-ton truck pulling the trailer back home to Vermont .
On the Interstate , the radio began crackling out the horror .
Shelter at home !
… Stay six feet apart… Wash your hands… Don ’ t eat out… The death toll today is 300… Experts say 100,000 will die by April .
The Most Vital Transition Is Ours What I Learned Moving Cross-Country Twice in 4 Months More in this series How ironic that Covid attacks the ultimate tools we have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also for the human , political connections we need to rebuild the left .
By the time I got to the farm in Vermont , it was clear that 2020 would interrupt a 45-year tradition of hosting gangs of people who ’ ve dreamed freedom dreams .
The tradition began at the farm in the 1970s with my partner Andrew Kopkind , a brilliant journalist—whom I met in Boston ’ s cruising grounds one happy day in 1971 when the Vice Squad chased us out of the Fens—and continued after his death , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whose participants have been contributing to this series .
There are some things that Zoom just can not replace .
How do you Zoom a tasty meal of garden produce being served around a large table of comrades discussing Black Lives Matter tactics ?
Or extended conversations about works-in-progress , a problem of politics , or any subject that can be only scratched in a workshop ?
How do you Zoom the play of imagination that emerges from among people together ?
Or the fecund aroma of Chinese chestnut blooms begging to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk about ?
Or the sumptuous touch of your new lover slinking into the hot tub as Bruno Mars sings from speakers on the deck : “ If you ’ re freaky , then own it !
” Now , nine months after the beginning of this new plague , there ’ s a baby bust .
As I chugged into our campsite this year , things looked the same , but quickly the changes added up .
Old mates keep their distance , and the bear hugs are gone .
On the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sites , instead of little group trysts one sees the loner , and instead of that look , eyes are filled with caution .
A neighbor who almost died of Covid says that three months after surviving the worst symptoms , he still can ’ t smell or taste ; he fears those senses might never fully return .
The pool has a quota now , and the drag queens at bingo are forced to lip-synch in the outdoor chill .
In a campsite that always celebrated the realm of the senses , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that sends us back into the closet , sexually speaking ?
We ’ ve all seen the attacks on social media about gay folks packed in bars or campsites , with claims that gays are creating spreader events .
Same-sexers have always been high on the list of blame for spreading contagion .
Desire is political—like hunger—and not just because the right has exploited it for strategic gain .
Closeness , sexual or not , is political ; its opposite is alienation .
One of the amazing features of Occupy Wall Street in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to feel , talk , press against another shoulder , hear one ’ s own voice with others echoing , We are… we are… we are… , ” as my dear friend JoAnn Wypijewski wrote here in 2011 .
A young man had told her and Kopkinder Prerna Sampat , “ You know , if you count it up , the average college senior has spent two years of his life playing video games.
” That fellow was 21 .
Like others they spoke with , he was drawn first by curiosity or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so much solitude as a cyberborg , being close to others smelled like freedom .
The Trumpsters brayed that if Biden and Harris won , socialist guerrillas would overrun the government , and Cory Booker would move into your white neighborhood .
To this , I borrow the language of the cyberborgs : LOL .
Sadly , most Democrats are not of the left , certainly not the left of the 1930s , which inspired Social Security and , throughout much of the world , nationalized health care ; or the New Left @ @ @ @ @ @ @ change like civil rights for Blacks , women ’ s rights , gay and lesbian rights , and the sexual revolution .
The left started those movements , and its agenda for peace , international solidarity , and liberation from forms of oppression that are interconnected excited millions toward positive change .
Now begins the era of the vaccine .
Eventually , the new-new left , led by many young LGBT Black folks and their allied comrades in hundreds of radical organizations , who have struggled valiantly in this economic and health crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , smell , taste , and love one another to bring history another step forward .
And I can not wait for my next kiss .
Scenes From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and Kopkind , a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind , who from 1982–94 was the magazine ’ s chief political writer and analyst .
This series of dispatches from Kopkind ’ s far-flung network of participants , advisers , guests , and friends is edited by Nation contributor and Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

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D ade C ity, F la.—The last time I kissed a man was almost a year ago, just before the virus closed the country. The gentleman caller standing outside my trailer had been giving me that look over the previous few days in the pool that serves as a gathering spot at our winter gay campground. On the day before I was to leave for the trip back north, this handsome chap mustered the courage to knock at my door. Since I would be gone before the gossip at the pool would undoubtedly identify me as a slut, I gave in to his advances.
I am no virgin, but when he touched me, I felt like Madonna descending those tiny aluminum steps. Then he laid into me with one of those enveloping kisses, the kind where your foot magically rises upward to the sun. I mostly remember his Juicy Fruit taste and musky smell.
There I was back to my roots with that primal move. It was the calling that began 50 years ago for me when I joined the Gay Liberation Front. Although hardly anyone in the LGBT movement mentions it these days, the desire to have sex without police, state, and church interference had brought us together in the first place, and the GLF was a consciously left group that saw ending this thousands-of-years-old oppression of same-sexers as part of the big radical project for self-determination. We certainly were not aiming to ape heterosexual marriage or collect a lover’s Social Security (though I wouldn’t mind a few reparations thrown my way for my suffering). We wanted to change the world. Many of us still do.
Woozy as I was from that kiss, I managed to climb into my three-quarter-ton truck pulling the trailer back home to Vermont. On the Interstate, the radio began crackling out the horror. Shelter at home!… Stay six feet apart… Wash your hands… Don’t eat out… The death toll today is 300… Experts say 100,000 will die by April. Scenes From a Pandemic Untethered, or The Year of Living Virtually Patricia J. Williams The Art of the Meal Mary Lewis Maybe We Shouldn’t Go Back to Normal Bri M.
How ironic that Covid attacks the ultimate tools we have for intimate connection—smell, taste, closeness—and also for the human, political connections we need to rebuild the left.
By the time I got to the farm in Vermont, it was clear that 2020 would interrupt a 45-year tradition of hosting gangs of people who’ve dreamed freedom dreams. The tradition began at the farm in the 1970s with my partner Andrew Kopkind, a brilliant journalist—whom I met in Boston’s cruising grounds one happy day in 1971 when the Vice Squad chased us out of the Fens—and continued after his death, in 1994, with the living memorial whose participants have been contributing to this series.
There are some things that Zoom just cannot replace. How do you Zoom a tasty meal of garden produce being served around a large table of comrades discussing Black Lives Matter tactics? Or extended conversations about works-in-progress, a problem of politics, or any subject that can be only scratched in a workshop? How do you Zoom the play of imagination that emerges from among people together? Or the fecund aroma of Chinese chestnut blooms begging to be compared to something you shouldn’t talk about? Or the sumptuous touch of your new lover slinking into the hot tub as Bruno Mars sings from speakers on the deck: “If you’re freaky, then own it!” 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Current Issue View our current issue
Now, nine months after the beginning of this new plague, there’s a baby bust. As I chugged into our campsite this year, things looked the same, but quickly the changes added up. Old mates keep their distance, and the bear hugs are gone. On the “trails,” the outdoor cruising sites, instead of little group trysts one sees the loner, and instead of that look, eyes are filled with caution. A neighbor who almost died of Covid says that three months after surviving the worst symptoms, he still can’t smell or taste; he fears those senses might never fully return. The pool has a quota now, and the drag queens at bingo are forced to lip-synch in the outdoor chill. In a campsite that always celebrated the realm of the senses, will this second plague be the one that sends us back into the closet, sexually speaking? We’ve all seen the attacks on social media about gay folks packed in bars or campsites, with claims that gays are creating spreader events. Same-sexers have always been high on the list of blame for spreading contagion.
Desire is political—like hunger—and not just because the right has exploited it for strategic gain. Closeness, sexual or not, is political; its opposite is alienation. One of the amazing features of Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park was this “elation just to feel, talk, press against another shoulder, hear one’s own voice with others echoing, We are… we are… we are…,” as my dear friend JoAnn Wypijewski wrote here in 2011. A young man had told her and Kopkinder Prerna Sampat, “You know, if you count it up, the average college senior has spent two years of his life playing video games.” That fellow was 21. Like others they spoke with, he was drawn first by curiosity or protest, and kept coming because after so much solitude as a cyberborg, being close to others smelled like freedom.
The Trumpsters brayed that if Biden and Harris won, socialist guerrillas would overrun the government, and Cory Booker would move into your white neighborhood. To this, I borrow the language of the cyberborgs: LOL. Sadly, most Democrats are not of the left, certainly not the left of the 1930s, which inspired Social Security and, throughout much of the world, nationalized health care; or the New Left of the 1960s, which drove fundamental change like civil rights for Blacks, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, and the sexual revolution. The left started those movements, and its agenda for peace, international solidarity, and liberation from forms of oppression that are interconnected excited millions toward positive change.
Now begins the era of the vaccine. Eventually, the new-new left, led by many young LGBT Black folks and their allied comrades in hundreds of radical organizations, who have struggled valiantly in this economic and health crisis, will gather together, get close, smell, taste, and love one another to bring history another step forward. And I cannot wait for my next kiss.
Scenes From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and Kopkind, a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, who from 1982–94 was the magazine’s chief political writer and analyst. This series of dispatches from Kopkind’s far-flung network of participants, advisers, guests, and friends is edited by Nation contributor and Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski, and appears weekly on thenation.com and kopkind.org.


Out of the Ether

What ’ s that floating along the televisual stream to comfort and amuse us , as this brutal year flows toward its end ?
A much-touted exposé of old-time Hollywood , shot with an old-Hollywood look by David Fincher ; a Steven Soderbergh fable about the literary life , with a Queen Mary 2 setting as posh as the cast and writer ; an adaptation of an August Wilson play , ushered onto the screen with all due ceremony by George C. Wolfe .
If prestigious credentials were the same thing as entertainment , we should all be chortling like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ll get to these fictions—Mank , Let Them All Talk , Ma Rainey ’ s Black Bottom—and also to Minari , a Korean American memory film that ’ s all the more worthy for its modesty .
But before I do , here are notes about two year-end documentaries that truly felt like gifts , even though they ’ re about a Norwegian sow and the utter corruption of Romania .
Let ’ s begin with Romania .
In late 2015 , a fire in a Bucharest nightclub called Colectiv killed 27 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brought down the government .
It was a small matter of the city ’ s having allowed the club to operate with only one exit and no authorization from the fire department .
But that was just the first cause of the outrage .
As the days passed , dozens of survivors died in Bucharest ’ s sole burn ward , not from fire-related trauma but bacterial infections .
The patients ’ families wanted them sent out of Romania , but somehow the transfer orders weren ’ t processed , while the Ministry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the hospital ’ s standard of care was “ as good as in Germany.
” This is the situation at the start of Collective , directed and photographed by Alexander Nanau and cowritten by him and Antoaneta Opris : a film that brings to mind those abysmal medical cases in which the biopsy of a lesion leads to the discovery of stage-four cancer .
Using an observational style almost as strict as Frederick Wiseman ’ s , Collective follows the investigation conducted by journalist Catalin Tolontan and his colleagues at Gazeta Sporturilor—yes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ uncover the truth—as they dig into the rate of in-hospital infections and progressively lay bare massive industrial crime , offshore financial chicanery , the sudden death of a prime suspect in murky circumstances , networks of bribes and kickbacks throughout the medical system , and at last the guiding hand of Romania ’ s political establishment .
Bad spirals down toward a seemingly bottomless worse , while you , appalled moviegoer , get to watch this helix of death from a front-row seat—two of them , actually .
A startlingly candid new official @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ministry of Health while Tolontan is still reporting , and in an astonishing turn of events he too permits the filmmakers to shadow him .
It ’ s as if a documentary crew had been operating in Chicago in the early 1930s , and Eliot Ness had allowed it to tag along .
Now imagine that Al Capone had won , and you ’ ll intuit the force of Collective—a film rescued from despair only by the resoluteness of its truth-seekers , Nanau and his team included .
Documentaries are of course constructions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an impression of naturalness , and even truth , can be rigged into a film if the means of expression are properly restrained .
In Gunda , a remarkably fine meat-is-murder documentary , director Victor Kossakovsky studiously avoids color , music , and quick editing and so pulls you into a world that seems found rather than made—never mind that the cinematography , although black-and-white , is exquisite , the sound , though ambient , is cranked up until it ’ s tactile , and the shots , though patiently held , are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of viewpoint on a rooster can hit you like a plot reversal .
Filmed at sites in Norway , Spain , and the UK where animals are free to roam , Gunda devotes most of its running time to its eponymous sow and her litter , who are first seen , still glistening from the womb , as they tumble one after the other through the doorway of the rough-planked sty where their mother lies grunting .
Kossakovsky devotes a quarter of an hour to an interlude in which roosters stride out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and about 10 minutes to the pasturing of a small herd of fly-pestered cattle .
All the rest is a slow , rapt unfolding of the life of Gunda as she roots in the dirt , wallows , and pushes along the growing piglets with her snout , occasionally plopping over to let them scramble for her teats .
The shots are for the most part taken at ground level .
( I imagine Kossakovsky must have abdominal abrasions from all that sliding over the terrain . )
The attitude is wholly without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ human emotions onto these animals , but Kossakovsky won ’ t let you , insisting by his close observation that you recognize their otherness .
Roosters set down their feet at a pace that suits them , not you ; cows address the troublesome flies by standing side by side and head to rear , as you and a friend would not , to switch each other ’ s faces with their tails ; and Gunda ignores your idea of maternal care by stepping forward and indifferently crushing a newborn under her trotter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Gunda is without feelings .
At the film ’ s climax , humans enter the picture for the first time—still unseen , as are Kossakovsky and his crew , but made manifest by their machinery—after which Gunda is left alone to walk in circles .
Is she puzzled , desperate , bereft , baffled , anguished ?
By this point , you should know better than to fantasize that you understand her .
All you can be sure about is that this pig ’ s emotions are as real as yours and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too , with Kossakovsky ’ s camera silently following her around the deserted yard , and around and around .
I learned from The New York Times Magazine that in the early 1990s , around the time that David Fincher directed Alien3 , he suggested that his father , Jack , try writing a movie about Herman J. Mankiewicz and his work on Citizen Kane .
The elder Fincher , a journalist and film buff , had retired and wanted to turn his hand to screenwriting .
The younger Fincher encouraged him to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Raising Kane , ” published in The New Yorker in 1971 , which famously , or notoriously , sought to prove that Mankiewicz wrote virtually the whole of Citizen Kane and that Orson Welles had unjustly grabbed credit as co-author .
According to Jonah Weiner in the Times Magazine , Fincher asked his father , “ Is there a movie in Mankiewicz pulling this thing out of the ether and laying it out for this movie brat to make ?
” Evidently there was a movie in it , because Fincher ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Why he didn ’ t go all the way and call it Mank !
I don ’ t know , but I find the backstory curious .
By 1992 , the year of Alien3 , Kael ’ s essay had been so thoroughly debunked that Jonathan Rosenbaum could devote an entire section of his editor ’ s notes in This Is Orson Welles to a summary of the evidence .
By 1995 , Welles ’ s most exhausting biographer , Simon Callow , had dutifully accepted in The Road to Xanadu the ample @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Citizen Kane .
Yet in 2003 , when Jack Fincher died , he was still plugging away at the one-author theory in Mank—then in its eighth draft , Weiner says—and it ’ s obvious that still more script writing has been done since , without David Fincher ’ s having backed away from the false premise .
None of this would matter , of course , except that a theme of political lies and mass media is at the heart of Mank .
While the movie ’ s present-tense story takes place in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Victorville , Calif. , where Mankiewicz is holed up writing the Kane screenplay , numerous scrambled flashbacks return the action to Los Angeles in the mid-1930s , and especially to the propaganda campaign that movie studio bosses and William Randolph Hearst mounted against Upton Sinclair ’ s gubernatorial candidacy .
It is a fact that MGM produced and distributed fake newsreels to undermine Sinclair .
I don ’ t know that Mankiewicz , in his nonstop cynical flippancy , was the source of this idea , as Mank would have you believe , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been chastened by its success , saying to a colleague , as Fincher has it , that filmmakers “ have a huge responsibility.
” Very little in Mankiewicz ’ s biography paints him as the responsible type .
But Fincher has already made one movie about the power of media to shape public life , The Social Network ( 2010 ) , and I see no reason why he shouldn ’ t make another , especially after the ascendancy of Trump and his reign of “ alternative facts.
” I just don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by propagating yet another lie .
Not that his image-making powers are so formidable this time .
Although he gives Mank a handsome period look ( more of that exquisite black-and-white cinematography ) and adds a you-are-there thrill by occasionally superimposing typewriter characters over the picture , as if you were seeing a screenplay come to life , the most notable trait of the movie is its corniness .
Witness the early scene where Mankiewicz and a gaggle of Paramount writers are summoned to a production conference and cover up for their lack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the spot , relay style .
It ’ s a gag that was old when the Bowery Boys used to pull it , winking at each other and the audience while the supposedly dumb stiffs ( in this case , David Selznick and Jo Sternberg ) helplessly fumfer .
Or consider the moment when Mankiewicz ’ s German nurse , charged with keeping the hopeless drunk from dying of liver failure before he completes Kane , reveals that this supposedly heartless man has paid for an entire village to escape the Third @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a kernel of truth .
Despite a spotty anti-Fascist record ( nowhere near as solid as Welles ’ s , for what that ’ s worth ) , Mankiewicz did help to settle refugees—but did Fincher need to halt the movie and have somebody make a set speech about it , straight to the camera ?
In the role of Mankiewicz , a great-bellied Gary Oldman rumbles and shambles to order , mouthing famous wisecracks and playing up the wounded-genius bathos , while Fincher cuts back and forth between time periods in increasingly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ artificial urgency ; the performance hits all the marks , without being called to deliver the depth and ingenuity with which Oldman can imbue even Gotham ’ s Commissioner Gordon .
Granted , it all looks marvelous , and Amanda Seyfried is appropriately lovely , charming , and sad as Marion Davies .
But questions remain : Why was this vaporous stuff pulled out of the ether in the first place , and which movie brat ’ s interests does it really serve ?
A shipboard romance between a distinguished American writer and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stars Meryl Streep as a novelist sailing to England on the Queen Mary 2 to accept a rare and important literary award , accompanied only by a beloved nephew , two friends summoned after a lapse of many years , an agonizing work-in-progress , and a dark secret .
Other flirtations are in progress as well : between the nephew ( Lucas Hedges ) and the writer ’ s agent , who is in a sense a stowaway ; the openly inimical old friend ( Candice Bergen ) and any man on board @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soderbergh ’ s camera and the ship ’ s decor , which provides as lavish a playground as he ’ s had since the casinos of the Oceans movies .
Add a screenplay by Deborah Eisenberg , herself a distinguished American writer , to structure the proceedings and give Streep ’ s character enough sensitivity to make your teeth ache , and you ’ ve almost got a movie .
I held on through thick but mostly thin for the fun of watching Streep and Hedges play busily off each other ( like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gods ) and for Dianne Wiest ’ s imperturbable performance as the surer , more simmering friend .
And then , just in time , came the closing epiphanies , one after another .
Were they a bit too short-storyish ?
Sure—but if , in retrospect , they didn ’ t requite the love of Streep ’ s character for herself , they let me yield her some love of my own .
Giving what has proved to be his posthumous performance , in Ma Rainey ’ s Black Bottom , Chadwick Boseman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vitality , bobbing , weaving , sometimes even pirouetting through the role of Levee , an ambitious , forward-looking cornet player raging to break loose from the country roots and “ jug band ” feeling of his job accompanying the queen of the blues .
Boseman ’ s got the tragic lead and is running with it for all his magnificent skills are worth , though it ’ s Viola Davis who plays the formidable title role , decked out in a fatsuit while using enough of her own awe-inspiring gravity to bend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rest of the cast is equally excellent .
I just wish George C. Wolfe had directed with a visual flair to match .
More satisfying than any of the above is Lee Isaac Chung ’ s Minari , the autobiographical tale of a 1980s Korean family living in a trailer dropped into a field in Arkansas .
Dad ( Steven Yeun ) , despairing of wage labor in chicken hatcheries , has dragged everyone to this improbable spot because he ’ s determined to win independence as a farmer .
Mom ( Yeri @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wants to return to California .
Grandma ( the raucously entertaining Yuh-jung Youn ) comes to help and be helped but , lacking conventional grandmotherly skills , mostly contributes her saltiness .
That leaves 7-year-old David ( Alan S. Kim ) , the point-of-view character , and his sister ( Noel Cho ) to fling paper airplanes inscribed in crayon “ Don ’ t Fight ” at their parents , and hope for the best .
“ The best ” is not what they get .
The outcome , after difficulties that are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life with one another—grounded , caring , and also open to surprise .
That ’ s how I ’ d describe Chung ’ s filmmaking as well .
Out of an experience that ’ s as alien for his characters as it is for you , he quietly builds something that can serve as home .

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What’s that floating along the televisual stream to comfort and amuse us, as this brutal year flows toward its end? A much-touted exposé of old-time Hollywood, shot with an old-Hollywood look by David Fincher; a Steven Soderbergh fable about the literary life, with a Queen Mary 2 setting as posh as the cast and writer; an adaptation of an August Wilson play, ushered onto the screen with all due ceremony by George C. Wolfe. If prestigious credentials were the same thing as entertainment, we should all be chortling like 5-year-olds tearing at wrapping paper.
I’ll get to these fictions—Mank, Let Them All Talk, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—and also to Minari, a Korean American memory film that’s all the more worthy for its modesty. But before I do, here are notes about two year-end documentaries that truly felt like gifts, even though they’re about a Norwegian sow and the utter corruption of Romania.
Let’s begin with Romania. In late 2015, a fire in a Bucharest nightclub called Colectiv killed 27 young people, leading to protests that brought down the government. It was a small matter of the city’s having allowed the club to operate with only one exit and no authorization from the fire department. But that was just the first cause of the outrage. As the days passed, dozens of survivors died in Bucharest’s sole burn ward, not from fire-related trauma but bacterial infections. The patients’ families wanted them sent out of Romania, but somehow the transfer orders weren’t processed, while the Ministry of Health went on assuring everyone that the hospital’s standard of care was “as good as in Germany.”
This is the situation at the start of Collective, directed and photographed by Alexander Nanau and cowritten by him and Antoaneta Opris: a film that brings to mind those abysmal medical cases in which the biopsy of a lesion leads to the discovery of stage-four cancer. Using an observational style almost as strict as Frederick Wiseman’s, Collective follows the investigation conducted by journalist Catalin Tolontan and his colleagues at Gazeta Sporturilor—yes, it took a daily sports newspaper to uncover the truth—as they dig into the rate of in-hospital infections and progressively lay bare massive industrial crime, offshore financial chicanery, the sudden death of a prime suspect in murky circumstances, networks of bribes and kickbacks throughout the medical system, and at last the guiding hand of Romania’s political establishment.
Bad spirals down toward a seemingly bottomless worse, while you, appalled moviegoer, get to watch this helix of death from a front-row seat—two of them, actually. A startlingly candid new official, Vlad Voiculescu, takes over the Ministry of Health while Tolontan is still reporting, and in an astonishing turn of events he too permits the filmmakers to shadow him. It’s as if a documentary crew had been operating in Chicago in the early 1930s, and Eliot Ness had allowed it to tag along. 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
Now imagine that Al Capone had won, and you’ll intuit the force of Collective—a film rescued from despair only by the resoluteness of its truth-seekers, Nanau and his team included.
Documentaries are of course constructions, not naturally occurring formations; but an impression of naturalness, and even truth, can be rigged into a film if the means of expression are properly restrained. In Gunda, a remarkably fine meat-is-murder documentary, director Victor Kossakovsky studiously avoids color, music, and quick editing and so pulls you into a world that seems found rather than made—never mind that the cinematography, although black-and-white, is exquisite, the sound, though ambient, is cranked up until it’s tactile, and the shots, though patiently held, are chosen so cunningly that a simple change of viewpoint on a rooster can hit you like a plot reversal. Current Issue View our current issue
Filmed at sites in Norway, Spain, and the UK where animals are free to roam, Gunda devotes most of its running time to its eponymous sow and her litter, who are first seen, still glistening from the womb, as they tumble one after the other through the doorway of the rough-planked sty where their mother lies grunting. Kossakovsky devotes a quarter of an hour to an interlude in which roosters stride out of their cage and patrol a woodland, and about 10 minutes to the pasturing of a small herd of fly-pestered cattle. All the rest is a slow, rapt unfolding of the life of Gunda as she roots in the dirt, wallows, and pushes along the growing piglets with her snout, occasionally plopping over to let them scramble for her teats.
The shots are for the most part taken at ground level. (I imagine Kossakovsky must have abdominal abrasions from all that sliding over the terrain.) The attitude is wholly without sentimentality. You might try to project human emotions onto these animals, but Kossakovsky won’t let you, insisting by his close observation that you recognize their otherness. Roosters set down their feet at a pace that suits them, not you; cows address the troublesome flies by standing side by side and head to rear, as you and a friend would not, to switch each other’s faces with their tails; and Gunda ignores your idea of maternal care by stepping forward and indifferently crushing a newborn under her trotter.
This isn’t to say that Gunda is without feelings. At the film’s climax, humans enter the picture for the first time—still unseen, as are Kossakovsky and his crew, but made manifest by their machinery—after which Gunda is left alone to walk in circles. Is she puzzled, desperate, bereft, baffled, anguished? By this point, you should know better than to fantasize that you understand her. All you can be sure about is that this pig’s emotions are as real as yours and persist minute after minute—as yours do, too, with Kossakovsky’s camera silently following her around the deserted yard, and around and around.
I learned from The New York Times Magazine that in the early 1990s, around the time that David Fincher directed Alien3, he suggested that his father, Jack, try writing a movie about Herman J. Mankiewicz and his work on Citizen Kane. The elder Fincher, a journalist and film buff, had retired and wanted to turn his hand to screenwriting. The younger Fincher encouraged him to reread Pauline Kael’s two-part essay “Raising Kane,” published in The New Yorker in 1971, which famously, or notoriously, sought to prove that Mankiewicz wrote virtually the whole of Citizen Kane and that Orson Welles had unjustly grabbed credit as co-author. According to Jonah Weiner in the Times Magazine, Fincher asked his father, “Is there a movie in Mankiewicz pulling this thing out of the ether and laying it out for this movie brat to make?”
Evidently there was a movie in it, because Fincher’s Mank is now in release. Why he didn’t go all the way and call it Mank! I don’t know, but I find the backstory curious. By 1992, the year of Alien3, Kael’s essay had been so thoroughly debunked that Jonathan Rosenbaum could devote an entire section of his editor’s notes in This Is Orson Welles to a summary of the evidence. By 1995, Welles’s most exhausting biographer, Simon Callow, had dutifully accepted in The Road to Xanadu the ample record of Welles’s writing on Citizen Kane. Yet in 2003, when Jack Fincher died, he was still plugging away at the one-author theory in Mank—then in its eighth draft, Weiner says—and it’s obvious that still more script writing has been done since, without David Fincher’s having backed away from the false premise.
None of this would matter, of course, except that a theme of political lies and mass media is at the heart of Mank. While the movie’s present-tense story takes place in 1940 in the high desert town of Victorville, Calif., where Mankiewicz is holed up writing the Kane screenplay, numerous scrambled flashbacks return the action to Los Angeles in the mid-1930s, and especially to the propaganda campaign that movie studio bosses and William Randolph Hearst mounted against Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial candidacy. It is a fact that MGM produced and distributed fake newsreels to undermine Sinclair. I don’t know that Mankiewicz, in his nonstop cynical flippancy, was the source of this idea, as Mank would have you believe, nor am I aware of his having been chastened by its success, saying to a colleague, as Fincher has it, that filmmakers “have a huge responsibility.” Very little in Mankiewicz’s biography paints him as the responsible type. But Fincher has already made one movie about the power of media to shape public life, The Social Network (2010), and I see no reason why he shouldn’t make another, especially after the ascendancy of Trump and his reign of “alternative facts.” I just don’t think Fincher should tackle this theme by propagating yet another lie.
Not that his image-making powers are so formidable this time. Although he gives Mank a handsome period look (more of that exquisite black-and-white cinematography) and adds a you-are-there thrill by occasionally superimposing typewriter characters over the picture, as if you were seeing a screenplay come to life, the most notable trait of the movie is its corniness. Witness the early scene where Mankiewicz and a gaggle of Paramount writers are summoned to a production conference and cover up for their lack of work by making up a story on the spot, relay style. It’s a gag that was old when the Bowery Boys used to pull it, winking at each other and the audience while the supposedly dumb stiffs (in this case, David Selznick and Jo Sternberg) helplessly fumfer. Or consider the moment when Mankiewicz’s German nurse, charged with keeping the hopeless drunk from dying of liver failure before he completes Kane, reveals that this supposedly heartless man has paid for an entire village to escape the Third Reich. Again, there’s a kernel of truth. Despite a spotty anti-Fascist record (nowhere near as solid as Welles’s, for what that’s worth), Mankiewicz did help to settle refugees—but did Fincher need to halt the movie and have somebody make a set speech about it, straight to the camera?
In the role of Mankiewicz, a great-bellied Gary Oldman rumbles and shambles to order, mouthing famous wisecracks and playing up the wounded-genius bathos, while Fincher cuts back and forth between time periods in increasingly short increments. The rhythm pushes an artificial urgency; the performance hits all the marks, without being called to deliver the depth and ingenuity with which Oldman can imbue even Gotham’s Commissioner Gordon. Granted, it all looks marvelous, and Amanda Seyfried is appropriately lovely, charming, and sad as Marion Davies. But questions remain: Why was this vaporous stuff pulled out of the ether in the first place, and which movie brat’s interests does it really serve?
A shipboard romance between a distinguished American writer and her self-regard, Let Them All Talk stars Meryl Streep as a novelist sailing to England on the Queen Mary 2 to accept a rare and important literary award, accompanied only by a beloved nephew, two friends summoned after a lapse of many years, an agonizing work-in-progress, and a dark secret. Other flirtations are in progress as well: between the nephew (Lucas Hedges) and the writer’s agent, who is in a sense a stowaway; the openly inimical old friend (Candice Bergen) and any man on board who might have money; and Steven Soderbergh’s camera and the ship’s decor, which provides as lavish a playground as he’s had since the casinos of the Oceans movies. Add a screenplay by Deborah Eisenberg, herself a distinguished American writer, to structure the proceedings and give Streep’s character enough sensitivity to make your teeth ache, and you’ve almost got a movie.
I held on through thick but mostly thin for the fun of watching Streep and Hedges play busily off each other (like a tennis match between two many-armed Hindu gods) and for Dianne Wiest’s imperturbable performance as the surer, more simmering friend. And then, just in time, came the closing epiphanies, one after another. Were they a bit too short-storyish? Sure—but if, in retrospect, they didn’t requite the love of Streep’s character for herself, they let me yield her some love of my own.
Giving what has proved to be his posthumous performance, in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Chadwick Boseman looks shockingly thin and performs with electric vitality, bobbing, weaving, sometimes even pirouetting through the role of Levee, an ambitious, forward-looking cornet player raging to break loose from the country roots and “jug band” feeling of his job accompanying the queen of the blues. Boseman’s got the tragic lead and is running with it for all his magnificent skills are worth, though it’s Viola Davis who plays the formidable title role, decked out in a fatsuit while using enough of her own awe-inspiring gravity to bend the passing light of stars. The rest of the cast is equally excellent. I just wish George C. Wolfe had directed with a visual flair to match.
More satisfying than any of the above is Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, the autobiographical tale of a 1980s Korean family living in a trailer dropped into a field in Arkansas. Dad (Steven Yeun), despairing of wage labor in chicken hatcheries, has dragged everyone to this improbable spot because he’s determined to win independence as a farmer. Mom (Yeri Han) hates her newfound isolation and wants to return to California. Grandma (the raucously entertaining Yuh-jung Youn) comes to help and be helped but, lacking conventional grandmotherly skills, mostly contributes her saltiness. That leaves 7-year-old David (Alan S. Kim), the point-of-view character, and his sister (Noel Cho) to fling paper airplanes inscribed in crayon “Don’t Fight” at their parents, and hope for the best.
“The best” is not what they get. The outcome, after difficulties that are not wholly predictable, is simply a life with one another—grounded, caring, and also open to surprise. That’s how I’d describe Chung’s filmmaking as well. Out of an experience that’s as alien for his characters as it is for you, he quietly builds something that can serve as home.