1.
I had hoped that four essays chronicling the Coronavirus pandemic would be sufficient. But, as I write, numbers of the infected in Minnesota have reached a plateau that is not declining. In fact, where I live, the virus has penetrated the work force at the meat packing plants and, if anything, numbers of the infected are increasing rapidly. For much of the country, the peak of the pandemic will not occur until around the 4th of July (I am writing in mid-June 2020) or, even, August. Furthermore, there are reports that the virus is now active in Beijing and that there will likely be a second peak of infections in China later this Summer. Needless to say, no virus exists. Therapy for those dangerously ill has improved. Those who succumb to the virus die as a result of “cytokine storm’ – that is, the body’s immune system is triggered into hyperactivity and, in effect, cellular mechanisms for defense end up aggressively attacking physiological processes necessary to sustain life; this leads to multi-organ systemic failure and death. My brother, who works as a Hospitalist in southern Minnesota, has been involved in treating people who are seriously ill with this viral infection. He has developed protocols for treatment that have been largely successful – the key is to use steroids to reduce inflammation just as the point where the body’s own defenses have successfully contained the infection. This avoids the worst of the “cytokine storm” and saves lives. It is evident, however, that the virus still controls human activity to a large part in the United States, that social distancing, and wearing masks remains obligatory, and that we are long way from eliminating the hazard.
At this moment in history, writing about the Coronavirus requires consideration of American race relations. This is because the two themes are inextricably linked. After the televised murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, vast numbers of people took to the streets to protest his killing at the hands of the police. These demonstrations proceeded contrary to medical recommendations promoted hourly by the media – at a time when people could not enter restaurants to eat a meal, a hundred-thousand protesters paraded in the dense phalanxes down the streets of American cities. This was not decried by the media – in the eyes of pundits, there is, apparently, a hierarchy of values: mass protest of police brutality was valorized as heroic and necessary while going to gymnasium to exercise or entering a tavern were denounced as selfish and irresponsible. Quick to observe this inarguable double-standard, Trump’s political team scheduled a mass campaign rally for Tulsa, Oklahoma, claiming, in effect, that if its allowed to assemble to denounce the police, then, people should be authorized to gather to praise the President. Since the Covid virus disproportionately attacks, and kills, African-Americans, the debate about civil unrest in the face of police violence is, now, inextricably entangled with questions about the destiny and infectious spread of this illness. The Nation is confronting a witch’s brew of toxins – in fact, one of the favorite metaphors used by media is that American racism is virus that is now rampant and spreading. The trope is, more or less, idiotic –racism is a moral failing and as the German gay film-maker reminded us during the AIDS plague, ein Virus kennt keine Moral – that is, “a virus knows no morals.” And, no less a Leftist intellectual as Susan Sontag has reminded us, also with respect to AIDS and the cancer that killed her, illnesses “are not metaphors.” Nonetheless, media expediency has made the Coronavirus, more or less, synonymous with racial injustice and it is difficult to write about one without writing about the other.
2.
A cytokine storm” is a kind of perverse over-reaction to infection. I shall now blithely violate my own observations that illnesses are “not metaphors” written above. The reaction of horror and pain to the video of Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd in real time has now provoked an over-reaction that threatens to destroy the body of legitimate protest arising from this killing. The stages of this overreaction are obvious: first, George Floyd, no doubt an avuncular fellow in some contexts, has been canonized: this is to elevate a rather ordinary man who dabbled in criminality to the status of a saint – the hagiography associated with Mr. Floyd is destructive to social justice because it is a palpably false narrative. Large protests have produced unruly crowds that have vandalized and torn down monuments to Confederate generals and politicians and, even, figures like Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus. This is a mistake about categories: monuments commemorate figures and events, but, very quickly, become features of the urban landscape to which we are habituated and that define the space around them in ways quite irrelevant to their original meaning. It’s a conservative principle best argued by Edmund Burke – we displace traditional symbols only at our hazard. This is not to say that monuments should be sacrosanct – it simply means that their displacement should be a matter of deliberation and public debate, not the result of what can only be described as frenzied mob violence. In large part, the wholesale, and unthinking, destruction of these monuments is a radical and destructive simplification of history, and will ultimately lead to an equally vehement and destructive reaction. Finally, outrage over Floyd’s death has led to various quixotic proposals to “defund the police”, some of them actually enacted, at least, in theory, by local City councils. But police forces are necessary to urban societies and a movement aimed at “defunding” and, therefore, eliminating the police will necessarily fail and, indeed, provoke a violent backlash.
George Floyd’s posthumous canonization, the massacre of monuments (mainly only tangentially relevant to the protester’s concerns) and the proposals to “defund” police and eliminate urban policing are all examples of a “cytokine storm” reacting to police brutality with its own savage and destructive illogic.
3.
History is complex. In fact, it may be rationally debated whether the complexity of past events can be reduced to a “story” as implied by the word we use for the discipline. All history is selective and eliminates or ignores certain elements of causality or certain complications in human affairs to narrate a tale that is always tendentious. The chief defect in history is teleological – that is, the fallacy that past events lead to our present. Past events lead to an infinity of possible presents, one of which we inhabit – events don’t have a telos: they are just events.
The idea of cash-reparations for slavery, for instance, arises as a result of a massive and fundamentally flawed simplification of history. Similarly, the rage that destroys monuments without invoking democratic institutions also arises from a sinister simplification of history. The problem, of course, is that history is instrumental – it can be used for any number of purposes. I am myself an advocate that Confederate monuments (including the battle flag) be removed from public places – I held this view long before it’s current popularity. But one must also understand the history of the Confederacy or slavery or anarchist movements in the United States or capitalism, for that matter, is, like all accounts of human affairs, inevitably complex, polysemous, and capable of being subsumed in any number of conflicting, even irreconcilably conflicting, narratives.
4.
It is a simple, but inconvenient, fact that policing is always, more or less, brutal. This is because policing is by necessity pitiless. The proper reaction to George Floyd’s conduct just before he was killed should not have been rage or, even, judgement – it should have been pity. George Floyd was in a pitiable condition before the cops murdered him. But police have to armor themselves against reactions of pity. Otherwise, their own feelings would prevent them from responding professionally to the heartbreaking and miserable circumstances upon which they must attend. Doctors, I suppose, must control their natural response of pity or they would be unable to manage their patients – many of whom present in piteous circumstances. Even lawyers, for that matter, confronted with a parade of human greed and misfortune have to control natural human responses to pity those whom they professionally encounter. Emotions are like integers – one powerful emotion is indivisible and tolerates conflicting emotions only with a great deal of cognitive dissonance. This is particular true when the situation calls for immediate reflex action upon which due deliberation must be deferred.
The energy of human emotion required to pity must not be transformed into fear or hate. Policing, however, generally results in pity being suppressed in favor of action-activating emotions like fear and anger – emotions that result in a violent catharsis that wounds or kills someone who should be pitied. Police are accustomed to feeling rage and terror – they control these emotional responses with a facade of iron indifference. (It was this indifference that Officer Derek Chauvin feigned when he put his hand in his pocket while killing George Floyd.) Until these factors are well-understood, can be articulated by police, and objectively controlled, police violence will not cease.
The media and protesters naturally assumed, on some subconscious level, that the egregiously vicious police murder of George Floyd would immediately change things. (The subconscious doesn’t recognize patience as a virtue – this is because the subconscious exists in an immediate present.) But, instead, the killing only created a “moving spotlight”, flickering here and there to highlight other murders and beatings. Thus, the ongoing outrage that despite the killing of George Floyd and the world’s outcry, people continue to be killed because police have a deficit of pity toward them.
5.
The confluence of the Covid virus and reactions to racial injustice is exemplified by events in Tulsa. Trump wanted a rally. Oklahoma is a largely benighted State, full of rednecks and racists and poorly educated rural voters. Accordingly, Trump decided to preach to his base in Tulsa. Trump’s simple-minded, but effective, understanding of publicity is that the one big event sucks the oxygen out of the space so that other events can’t breathe and fail. This is how Reality TV and advertising works – I create something so compelling that you can’t look anywhere else; human attention is finite and limited. Trump intuitively recognizes that protests against police brutality are protests against the sort of power that he seeks to wield – that is, protests against him. Therefore, his original plan was to coopt Juneteenth celebrations in Tulsa by staging his own rally on the same day. Inevitably, the Juneteenth commemoration would slip into anti-Police and anti-racist demonstration – Trump’s idea was to cancel out the Juneteenth African-American celebration by staging his own counter-celebration at the BOK hockey rink in downtown Tulsa, a venue eight-tenths of a mile from the Juneteenth rallies.
Trump didn’t know, because he is incredibly ignorant, that Tulsa had been the site of a horrific massacre of African-Americans who had aspired to bourgeois commerce in the Greenwood part of town, an event that occurred in 1921. (He could have become aware of this by viewing Watchmen on HBO, a celebrated show, but apparently he doesn’t use TV except for the News.) Trump’s Tulsa rally which was supposed to celebrate his presidency and heroically defy media (and medical) declarations as to mask-wearing and social-distancing was also intended as an implied rebuke to Juneteenth commemorations. But the media pointed out that the rally was also disrespectful to the memory of the Tulsa massacre, an event also occurring in April 101 years ago. This created a quotient of chaotic provocation too extreme even for Trump (or, most likely, his advisors since Trump seems to regard all provocation as good and the more extreme the better). Therefore, Trump moved his rally back one day so it would not overtly conflict with Juneteenth celebrations nearby.
The rally is supposed to demonstrate the President’s courage and the fortitude of his followers with respect to the Covid virus. This doesn’t make any objective sense, because Trump denies that the virus is a credible threat and has argued, sporadically, that the risk of infection is a “hoax” or overblown – it’s hard to be bold in the face of a non-existent threat. Nonetheless, Trump (as well as Leftist media) have politicized the virus and responses to it. Wearing a mask is a sign of opposition to Trump; not wearing a mask signifies courageous defense of constitutional freedoms.
All of these crosscurrents came to a boil in a CNN segment that I saw on June 19th. Trump supporters have been gathering for four days, camped outside the BOK arena. It’s a hillbilly crowd sitting on aluminum-framed folding chairs under tent awnings protecting the people in line from the sun. The line of folks on the sidewalk seems to extend for several blocks and, probably, represents several hundred supporters. A CNN newscaster reporting on the Covid risk posed by the rally walked along this queue, wearing a mask. As he moved, he ran a gauntlet of Trump supporters howling and braying at him with undisguised hatred. One man trotted behind the newscaster bearing a crudely lettered, but clearly legible, sign that said: Fake News – the Enemy of the People. The rage openly displayed on camera was disconcerting, even frightening to behold – I can only imagine what it would have been like to be present on the hot concrete with these people. Violence, it seemed, was only scarcely checked – at any point, this highly focused rage could have boiled over into assault.
Here is the sinister thing – Trump is encouraging street-fighting. This was an old Nazi tool of distraction and intimidation. Trump has asked the mayor of Tulsa, who supports him, to lift curfews that were earlier proposed and, even, declared. The concept is simple and obvious: Trump wants his supporters to clash with Black Lives Matter counter-protesters. He wants to distract from the failures of his regime by soliciting violence on the streets. This is manifest in his tweet warning protesters that if they object to his presence publicly, they will “not be so gently treated” as in New York or Seattle or Minneapolis, presumably bastions of Leftist authority. There’s nothing subtle about this strategy. Polls show that Trump is losing to Joe Biden, a remarkably weak candidate somehow selected by the Democrats and only marginally better than the despised Hilary Clinton. Therefore, Trump’s plan is to solicit streetfighting, make some martyrs on the sidewalks of Tulsa to compete with George Floyd, and, then, capitalize on revulsion to this violence to appeal to the increasingly de minimis share of independent voters in the electorate.
6.
Trump’s rally in Tulsa was a bust. The hockey rink amphitheater was half empty. Estimates vary but the number of people attending was reported at 6200 – my guess is that about 10,000 fans were in the arena. But the place holds 19,000 and so the optics were bad for the President – in the upper tiers, a sea of blue empty seats.
Trump ranted on his familiar idees fixe for about two hours. Some sectors of the crowd were visibly bored. An outdoor event proclaimed as a rally for 50,000 people didn’t materialize and the big stage was quietly dismantled as the President was speaking.
Trump is an exhausting figure. Many explanations have been proposed for the low turn-out in Tulsa but my guess is that many people, even if they support the President, are simply exhausted by the petulant histrionics that he offers.
After the event camera crews were stationed all around the arena, cable news hoping for a picturesque riot or, at minimum, clashes between Trump supporters and a much larger group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. But, again, despite the heat and the heat lightning ambience (flashes of copper-colored fire in a stormy night sky), the post-rally violence also didn’t materialize. Trump’s supporters recognizable by their red MAGA hats and red tee-shirts hoofed it away from arena, passing through a gauntlet of cops. Cameras showed a double column of old people, many of them footsore, limping through big crowds of hooting demonstrators. A lot of Trump supporters are fat and they have slumping shoulders due to old age and its fatigues and they staggered away from the arena, eyes fixed on some place a thousand yards ahead of them – it was like a defeated army stumbling away from some awful debacle on the battlefield. A crowd of Trump fans usually seems to have a median age of about 55; there are some kids with impressive side-burns but they are pretty thin on the ground and a contingent of flashy-looking, if rather faded, blonde women wearing sunglasses, the real housewives, as it were of Orange County. The more doctrinaire members of this group will not talk to the media – they regard all television news as fake news. Now and then, one of these people will stand still for an interview, but this is invariably a disaster – Trump supporters, by and large, are very stupid and, to some degree, crazed. The interviewer has the challenge of talking with these people without seeming to condescend to them – something that is well-nigh impossible. In the rally’s aftermath, CNN found one burly fellow willing to be interviewed on camera. The man looked like a rancher from west Oklahoma with a red bloated face. As soon as he began to speak, it was obvious that he was completely mad – he said that he had come late and couldn’t get into the rally and that he was concerned that Trump’s trade tariffs (which he seemed to blame on someone other than Trump) had damaged his business and he wanted those obstacles to trade lifted. But, then, he mysteriously claimed that he had been pepper-sprayed in the Arena lobby. This seemed to alarm the CNN interviewer who tried to change the subject. Pepper-sprayed? Why? By whom? For what purpose?
7.
I was responsible for the care of a very special infant. The baby’s digestive system was fragile. Every time the delicate infant had a bowel movement, I was supposed to place a marker on a star chart. A star chart, in this context, doesn’t refer to constellations. Instead, it is pedagogical device on which elementary-grade teachers place adhesive stars to identify goals met or exceeded. I was a little behind with documenting the baby’s defecation and, so, knew that I had to place two or three stars in the column for the relevant dates. I discovered that my stars were blackish, smelled of cordite, and bulbous. They were no longer shiny nor even shaped like stars. When I stooped to pick up the stars, I found that they were fat rubber bullets of the kind fired by cops at unruly demonstrators.
8.
The George Floyd protests are, in fact, demonstrations against the Coronavirus. Covid now has a face – Derek Chauvin, the cop who kneeled on Floyd’s cervical spine as the man pleaded with him, crying “I can’t breathe.” Covid attacks the respiratory system – it’s victims can’t breathe. In the collective imagination, the police and the virus have become confused with one another. The protests liberate people from the rigors of social distancing and their isolation imposed by fear of contagion. It’s all fusing into one awful spectacle. Protesting police brutality is equivalent to protesting the Covid virus.
9.
Trump would say it’s profoundly unfair: there’s no evidence that the three or four nights of nocturnal protest, interspersed with looting, have caused a spike in Minneapolis covid cases. In fact, to the contrary, the number of new cases, deaths, and hospitalizations has been steadily decreasing over the past couple weeks. By contrast, six of Trump’s advance publicity staff in Tulsa have tested positive for the virus and it may well be (although this is unknown at this time) that the ill-fated Oklahoma rally will result in large numbers of infections, perhaps, even death. Trump argues that an equivalency should be drawn between his mass rallies and the protests in the streets, but this isn’t warranted – as is typically the case, the science is against him.
Update: the liberal media claims that a steep rise in Tulsa covid infections may be traced to Trump’s rally. Trump supporters deny this contention.
10.
It’s depressing to have nothing worthwhile to read, particularly when reading (and watching TV) is just about the only thing that cheers me up during this protracted siege. In June, I find myself reading James Agee’s Let us now praise famous men, short stories and essays by Tomasso Landolfi, and Roberto Calasso’s The Celestial Hunter. I’ve also come within hailing distance of completing Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahren oder der Entsagender. All of these these books have disappointed me. Let us now praise famous men is puerile and morally questionable: the book purports to be about tenant farmers (sharecroppers) in the American South, but it is, at least, one-quarter over-written and callow bullshit, condescending and blinkered – about every ten pages, Agee manages something brilliant and, I suppose, this is a higher quotient of excellence than most writer’s achieve, but the reporting’s arrogant overtones and self-righteousness poison the whole enterprise. Goethe’s novel is a hodge-podge of casually assembled trifles from the poet’s old age – the aging writer can’t even be troubled to keep the narrative voice consistent (on two occasions, he inexplicably switches from first-person “I” to the third person “he”.) The book is pedantic and over-written. Sometimes, Goethe embeds stories in the narrative and, then, has the characters in those stories, suddenly invade the frame narrative – it’s as if I cited Don Quixote at length in a novel and, then, had Don Quixote appear at a cocktail party and attempt to seduce one of the other characters in the book. In principle, this sounds like a charming meta-fictional technique – something that a writer like Calvino or Borges might attempt. The problem is that Goethe is so sloppy and writes in such a confusing manner that I can’t tell whether he intends this effect or just forgot that the character appearing in the outer narrative was originally a fictional figure in an embedded anecdote. In some ways, Goethe’s book reminds me of some of Jacques Rivette’s films – there’s all sorts of eldritch conspiracy, secret societies, and mysteries on the order of Scottish Rite Masonry and, in theory, this should be interesting, but the technique is so pedantic and fussy that this stuff just becomes tedious. Tommaso Landolfi is a minor talent, an eccentric sensibility on the order of Robert Walser in German literature – he’s sometimes amusing and always perverse, but some of his interests (for instance an obsession with gambling) are unfortunate. The problem with Walser is that he’s a minor league author in a genre dominated by Kafka – if you’ve got Kafka, who is often tedious in his own right, then, why would you waste time with Walser? Landolfi was a translator of Russian literature and a particular fan of Gogol. His best writing is authentically similar to Gogol – but it’s the same problem: if you have Gogol, why would you waste time with an imitator. The problem for me is that once I begin a project I feel like I have to finish it – hence, I will waste my time completing my study of Landolfi, will finish out the Goethe novel, and also read Let us now praise famous men to its last post script, coda, final chorus, and notes (Agee can’t figure out how to end the thing.) Time is running out for me and I don’t know that this adherence to principle – that is, finishing books that I don’t really enjoy -- serves me well.
The Calasso book The Celestial Hunter, is the ninth in a series of volumes by Calasso that encompass the mythologies that govern human thought. Calasso began the series of book more than thirty-five years ago with The Ruin of Kasch, a volume ostensibly about Talleyrand, but, in fact, a study of Enlightenment thought. This was followed by Calasso’s most famous book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a remarkable and exuberant treatise on Greek mythology. Other books in the series address Kafka and the painter, Tiepolo, as well as Baudelaire – the three imagined as inventors of modern mythologies. Calasso has written on Vedic thought and his book The Celestial Hunter follows on his analysis of the mythology of India, particularly with respect to the issue of sacrifice. Why is the notion of sacrifice central to religious thinking? Calasso sees mythology as providing the framework of oppositions and likenesses that later develops into organized religion. Thus, his theories as to the origin of religious sacrifice underlie the entire scheme (or central narrative) at the heart of his series of nine books.
Calasso’s thinking on this subject is flawed by his failure to consider the mythologies and philosophical theses embodied in Meso-American cultures. He doesn’t seem to know anything about the Mayans or the Aztecs, cultures that were most integrally informed by all kinds of blood sacrifice. Calasso, if better educated on this subject, wouldn’t have to delve into prehistoric sources to explore blood sacrifice – after all, the Aztecs built an entire regime on this foundation and the Spaniards encountered these people, and reported on them, in the sixteenth century anno domine. You don’t have to look for sources in Hesiod and Pindar – Cortez saw human sacrifices and destroyed an entire civilization that was based on that premise.
The Meso-Americans thought that sacrifice was a cosmic necessity, a duty imposed on priests to preserve the equipoise or balance of existence. This is contrary to Calasso’s rather laboriously developed theories, citing ancient Sanskrit texts, for the notion that sacrifice arises out of the guilt that early people felt in killing and eating their peers – that is, animals. I don’t think this thesis could be supported in the context of American sacrifice, a practice that is about restoring balance, not atoning for our carnivorous predilections. The Olmecs, the mother civilization in the Americas, created bizarre and mysterious figurines showing half-human half-jaguar infants – the first rulers are depicted as cradling these grinning “jaguar-babies” in their arms, playing with them like human infants. The Olmecs, who practiced human sacrifice (and passed this on to their successors), seem to regard, at least, the ruling class as half-jaguar and, therefore, dangerously carnivorous. Their priests aren’t atoning for anything, but rather expressing something that is prevalent and central to human nature itself.
(Update: I've now finished most of Calasso's book and his chapters on Plato's Laws and Plotinus are very absorbing. The more the book strays from its ostensible theme involving sacrifice, the better it is.)
The reason that I am considering this subject is that the death of George Floyd, an event that has come to somehow embody the covid-virus as well, may be conceived as a human sacrifice. Our society is dangerously out of balance – we have sinned against nature and nature is now striking back, attempting, it seems, to destroy us. George Floyd died as a sacrificial victim to our racism, something that is encoded in our DNA exactly the way that jaguar blood flowed in the veins of Olmec priests. To bring the world back into balance a blood sacrifice is required.
11.
I haven’t had my hair cut for a quarter of a year. Some of it has turned grey. My hair has grown down so that some tendrils are almost shoulder length.
If my hair grows into my ears, it will seal them with a thick probing tentacle of fiber – perhaps, the air is already growing into my brain and affecting my thoughts with wooly, disheveled influences.
12.
Events occur twice, someone once said: First as a tragedy and, then, as farce. The Covid pandemic is proving this to be true. When the virus attacked the intrepid New Yorkers, the news was desperate, melancholy, and portentous – thousands were dying, brave “front line workers” hurled themselves into the fray to perish in “beautiful” deaths as proclaimed by the President, hospital shift changes were heralded by symphony orchestra musicians playing from balconies and rooftops, corpses were stacked in corridors and refrigerated trucks and hospital beds were set up in Central Park. Of course, the Media is headquartered in New York City and, so, was poised to dramatize the entire crisis as a vast and consequential tragedy.
Then, people recovered in the big Apple and the virus moved to other less glamorous places. It’s now raging in Texas, Arizona, and Florida, as well as most of California (really a nation not a State). These States disdaining the Sturm und Drang in New York opened up about the time that the curve flattened in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. This made no sense, except in terms of media coverage – and, indeed, has turned out to be lethal. Seeing restrictions on work and access to public places lifted in New York City caused everyone else to follow suit – even though the disease takes wholly different trajectories in different places.
So now death rates are spiraling out of control in about 18 states, notably in the South and Southwest where Trump-supporting governors have pooh-poohed the pandemic from its start and a major vector for infection has turned out to be taverns. Trump likes to characterize the virus as the “Kung Flu” to emphasize that this misfortune is alien to the United States, an affliction that has come to our shores with hoards of unwashed and criminal immigrants. In fact, the infection should now be called the “Whiskey flu” or the “Bar virus” – the sickness is scything through young people who frequent taverns as an important part of their social life. If it weren’t deadly, the situation would be comical.
Similarly, the official Trump reaction to all this is baffling – officials stand in front of graphics showing steeply increasing rates of infection and levels of mortality and solemnly tell the public that everything is under control, that the infection rates are due solely to increased testing, and that all is well. There is a total disconnect between what is happening in Texas, Florida, and California and what the disease control officials under obligation to the Administration are saying. Here is the syllogism: testing shows more cases of Covid infection, more cases of Covid infection are bad, therefore, testing is bad. This is surreal. One of the TV commentators brought back to mind a famous figure from the second war with Iraq, the infamous Baghdad Bob. Poor Baghdad Bob was Saddam Hussein’s minister of information and, at one point, he appeared on State media to declare that Iraq was winning the war and that American troops had perished in an inferno of explosions and flame. As he declared victory, American tanks were visible in the background, rolling through the streets of Baghdad unopposed by any Iraqi forces at all. Something similar is occurring with regard to the Trump administration’s response to the virus in June 2020.
12.
There’s a particularly dismal mood of failure around me. I can’t attribute it to the Covid virus, because this rot preceded the pandemic. But aspects of the landscape, viewed from the perspective that the virus induces, can fill you with nagging fear and desolation.
An alleyway pierces the block next to my law office and, sometimes, I use that thoroughfare to drive between the McDonald’s (and the tiny strip mall with an African grocery and a decrepit-looking laundromat flanked by an ethnic hair and nails parlor) and my building. The surface of the alley is pockmarked with pot holes like abscesses and efforts to repair the roadbed have failed so that the tar has fissured and is scaling off. I have to drive slowly, veering a little between the bigger pits. To the west, the block is occupied by a nursery enclosed in a high chain-link fence and the place conserves water by using timed jets to spray the plants at twilight or dawn. Early in the morning, one of the nozzles is twisted toward the alley way so that there is a bright jet of water geysering over the chain-links and wetting the tortured asphalt alley. The east side of the block is occupied by another laundromat with a dry-cleaner service that has been shut-down now for twenty years at least, a squat concrete block building with windowless walls and facade all nailed down with plywood boards, carbuncle-like steel and tin ventilators on the roof and a faint floral odor of carbon tetrachloride still poisoning the air. A car-wash shaped like a doubled peaked tent made from some kind of stretched metal is located in the center of the east side of the block. This place, likewise, has been closed-up for two decades or more. The space between the shuttered car-wash and the alley running along the backside of the nursery is heaped with disorderly piles of wood pallets, many of them marked with a name and the words “Turf Farm” – this is detritus discarded by the lawn and garden business. A shabby convenience store with its pumps now almost always masked with bags duct-taped around the nozzles (to signify that they can’t be used) sits beside the car wash. Part of the C-store sells booze and, on the featureless concrete block wall, of that enterprise, someone has written the words “GOON SQUAD” in elegant-looking calligraphic letters, neatly cursive with the phrase three-feet high and 18 feet long. The two “o’s” in GOON outline, like goggles, the eyes of a figure with a long nose hunched under the lettering – this slogan and the figure of the goon have been emblazoned on the wall for about five years now. On the filthy loading dock at the back of the C-store, sometimes, a weary clerk stands in the opening to the business, smoking a cigarette. An iron dumpster stinks with discarded food from the deli in the C-Store. The place sells broasted chicken, a product advertised by an 8-foot tall concrete rooster chained to a light-pole so that no one can steal it – although dragging away the rooster would require ingenuity and effort that no one around here could muster.
Once the Convenience Store was owned by industrious Greek immigrants who erected a neon sign on the corner of the lot, a metal stanchion holding over the avenue a space capsule outlined in bright light in orbit above the word APOLLO. The sign dates the place to the heroic age of American space exploration leading up to the moon-shots and, of course, something that people younger than forty can’t even imagine let alone remember. “Apollo” signified the optimism of the space program, the future, and the swift, bright Greek god as well. The sign, an authentic piece of vernacular art, has been neglected and one of the double “L’s” flickers uneasily in the darkness; half of the outline of a space capsule is also no longer illumined. When the Greeks owned the business, it was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week – you could buy cigarettes there on Christmas morning. But, now, the place is open from six in the morning until 10:00 at night – although I’ve never seen it closed for Holidays.
Even before the Greeks sold the enterprise (I think they retain the buildings), an aura of doom surrounded the place. Terrible things happened to the Greeks, a woman died in a freak accident and one of the kids in the family was horribly mutilated by a lawn mower accident. (My partner, who later became a Judge, uncharitably remarked that “this is what happens to those who sell liquor for a living” suggesting that the catastrophes associated with the place were the result of what was once called “bad karma.”) The Greeks sold the C-store business and the liquor operation to a man who moved to our town, an indefatigable entrepreneur with some sketchy business practices, and he didn’t do as well as he had hoped, selling the business to another local merchant, a man who ran a neighborhood grocery and liquor store on the East Side. The Covid virus enters the story at this point: the merchant from the East Side was overextended (just before the pandemic he had acquired another grocery in Albert Lea, twenty miles away). The virus wrecked these businesses and the other day, I saw the Greeks back in town (they now live in the much more genteel and prosperous Rochester, a thriving city dominated by the Mayo Clinic and IBM). Presumably the contract-for-deed payments are in default and, perhaps, they will have to take back the business. The Greek patriarch stood next to his big Cadillac in earnest conversation with his son – I’ve known the son for most of my career in Austin: he is probably 20 years younger than me and I remember him as a vigorous and handsome young man working behind the counter in the place and, so, I was a little shocked to see that he is now bald although still good-looking. When I came out of the C-store, I nodded to the two men and the younger thanked me for my purchase.
13.
Old people like me look down our noses on the young who are spreading the Covid disease through what we might call “irresponsible” behavior – that is, gathering on beaches or getting drunk together in crowded bars. But, of course, these young people are merely obedient to a biological imperative – that is, the need to find sexual partners so that they can propagate our kind. Kids getting together at drinking parties or on Spring Break or in taverns are responding to this imperative. Despite the ruinous condition of our economy and politics, despite the looming pandemic, young people are still driven to find mates and have children. Biological drives are innately mindless, not “sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought”, and, even, optimistic. The world needs new and fresh victims for its various wars and contagions and sex is the mechanism for producing the cannon fodder that future epidemics and conflicts will require.
14.
There’s a video circulating on the Internet that shows the interior of the Bank of Oklahoma arena where Trump performed at his ill-fated Tulsa rally. Someone had stuck decals on every other seat in the arena urging that the marked seats not be used to create physical distance among those attending. The video purports to show Trump workers pulling off the decals. In the video, the arena’s sound system is blaring a familiar song – a blaze of guitars and a high-pitched voice singing “You are like a hurricane / There’s calm in your eye...” I know this song well and I’m more interested in it than the image which seems to me inconclusive.
I have to look up the song on the Internet. It’s by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I’m surprised that I couldn’t recall who performs this song. It’s a lapse in memory that seems faintly ominous to me. I presume that Neil Young would not be happy about his song providing a soundtrack to Trump’s rally or, at least, the preparations for that rally. (Update: Young’s agents, like the Estate of Tom Petty, have demanded that Trump’s campaign stop using their songs at rallies.)
15.
More and more, it appears that narratives about the covid contagion and civil unrest are converging on the 2020 presidential election. For better or worse, this will be the point of intersection of these different calamities that have now become inextricably entwined. As one might expect, the media has misunderstood the trajectory of these crises. The notion promoted by self-regarding New York-based media was that the Covid virus would climax in the Big Apple with the rest of the country following meekly behind. The civil unrest would flare for a couple of weeks and, then, fade away and the field would then be clear for 24/7 coverage of the presidential horse-race, the sort of breathless reporting on polls and pollsters, attacks and counter-attacks with battalions of talking-head pundits who know literally no more than someone with access to a couple of newspapers. The media, for better or worse, knows how to cover elections to squeeze the maximum controversy and outrage from the story – and, after all, elections are tailor-made for the sort of dispute-oriented coverage in which the media engages: you can always find a Mr. X to denounce Ms. Y who, in turn, can be vehemently criticized by Mr. Z ad infinitum. But this Summer, election-news can’t get traction in the vortex of death and outrage that the convergence of the social justice and covid issues engenders. And the liberal media, at least, has no real program for the coverage of this sort of intensely volatile news. So, we see blunders of the most offensive kind.
For instance, Trump goes to Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills to conduct a rally disguised as a 4th of July celebration. The press and media denounce the trip as unsafe, another vector of contagion like the misbegotten event in Tulsa. The Governor of South Dakota, some kind of former beauty queen, is a noxious fool and she promotes the event as celebration of our liberties – that is, our liberty to not wear masks and not distance (that is, our liberty to catch and spread illness). She looks great but her speech at the event is so egregiously stupid and dull that, even, Fox News cuts away – preferring to feature an interview with a Pyrotechnics contractor wearing a red, white, and blue shirt whose fireworks are likely to set off wild fires that will burn up half of the Hills. South Dakota is a strange state, not so much conservative as Libertarian and it’s a glass jar where the defiant White ranchers and the no-less defiant and bellicose Lakota Sioux nation have been fighting savagely for one-hundred and fifty years. For the time being, the ranchers have the upper-hand but demographics are against them and there are, undoubtedly, more Indians in the barrens of South Dakota than ever lived there during the glory days of the equestrian tribes in the first half of the 19th century. Pretty soon, the tide will turn – the ranchers are probably already in the minority and, unless protected vigorously by racist laws, they will end up being swept away or “rubbed out” to use the phrase favored by Sioux war-chiefs. (The mining interests that once dominated the State are largely played-out.) With her pseudo-Farrah Fawcett head of hair and elaborate cosmetics, the South Dakota governor is an odd apparition on the bunting-draped stage built on a scorching terrace under the monument. It’s hot in the Dakotas, always blazing in the summertime and there’s no shelter to speak of, and one can only observe the Caucasians burning up on the oven of the mountainside with a sort of cautious pity.
The visuals for this event are gorgeous. If your heart isn’t stirred by the vast monument carved into the mountain than you are either not a patriot or immune to the appeal of a great popular work of art. Because whatever its ideology (the monument is Roosevelt’s Depression-era WPA pushed to its apotheosis – not just a mural on your local post office wall but a sculptural display a mile in the sky and stretched across the entire granite face of the peak), Mount Rushmore is a spectacular thing to see. Hitchcock recognized this when he set the final minutes of North by Northwest as a chase across the serenely impassive and indifferent stone masks of the presidents. The thing is stupendous and, accidentally, I suppose, perfectly crafted – the scale of the mighty portrait-heads, the texture of the rock, the setting above a vast talus field, even the awesome ascent to the visitor center viewpoint by road up the steepest grades you can imagine as navigable: all of these things combine to make the monument astonishing in all respects. As an added bonus, the images of Trump arriving on Air Force One have a remarkable beauty. Most shots of Air Force One show the plane touching down at some anonymous utilitarian airport: we see the plane hovering over a nondescript suburb, crowded-looking with warehouses and endless little houses shimmering in the heat. This is not what the approach to Rapid City looks like. In fact, the pictures are so stunningly beautiful that they baffle the New York news anchors. Of course, the media elite wouldn’t be caught dead in a dump like Rapid City – a place to which there is, barring floods or other natural catastrophes, literally no reason to ever go. “That’s a plane,” Ali Velshi says (he’s a Canadian with Middle Eastern background), “But I can’t tell where it is.” He’s looking for the anonymous suburbs, the city skyline, the runways. But it’s Rapid City and there are no suburbs. The plane is aloft above rolling high prairie that appears like grey-blue ocean under the wings of the jet, a vast immensity that is wholly empty of any human presence, the veins of creeks outlined by green in the desert of the plains, badlands glowing pink in the setting sun, the buttes casting enormous violet shadows. This must be baffling to Velshi – where is the city? (To the East of Rapid City, there is an enormous air force base that is largely empty land for hundreds of square miles.) The images of the airplane above this majestic landscape are jaw-dropping. It’s a spectacle worthy of Leni Riefenstahl.
Then, we see the tourist traps at Keystone, the village in the canyon under the monument. The Sioux have deposited some wrecked panel vans in the intersection and they can’t be moved – apparently, someone suspects that they are rigged with bombs, and, so, traffic leading to the mountain is blocked. A couple of Lakota in full powwow regalia are atop a pinnacle of rock waving signs. Protesters and counter-protesters are hurling racist insults at one another on the broiling avenue leading between souvenir shops and motels up to the mountain top. The East Coast anchors on CNN and MSNBC are confused. They keep referring to a 1980 Supreme Court decision in which the Justices declared that the Lakota had been wrongfully ousted from lands guaranteed to them in perpetuity and awarding the Ogallala-Lakota nation one-hundred million dollars in damages. Anyone with even a hint of education in history knows this story – in fact, if you watched the HBO series Deadwood with any attention, you would be aware that the Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux, that they were granted the land in perpetuity in 1868 and, then, disenfranchised in the next few years without even any decent interval of possession because of the discovery of gold in Deadwood canyon – these events led to the annihilation of Custer on the Little Big Horn in 1876. But this is history and TV anchors aren’t good at history – they majored in make-up and fornication in College and are generally glib but stupid. So against this backdrop of spectacular imagery, the liberal cable news shows display their ignorance about the fundamentals of American history time and again and, then, have recruited platoons of African-American professors with grievances to tell us how viciously racist our history is. Of course, I know how viciously racist the country has been – but there’s a time and a place for this sort of hectoring lecture, really a harangue intended to make White people feel guilty and, somehow, the visuals don’t match the bitter tirades disgorged by the commentators. The gist of the commentators, all people of color, is that there is nothing in American history that is not tainted by racism. This may be true but the point, once made, needs to be overcome by some kind of program for the future, some sort of reasonable aspirations. And here is the immense problem for the racial justice movement –they have a legitimate grievance but no idea as to how to redress this grievance: defunding the police won’t work, although it’s a radical position for which I have some sympathy; no one is going to be paid any reparations, at least, not in the foreseeable future just like Lakota aren’t going to be deeded back the Black Hills. So we are left with discordant images of fantastic beauty – the high plains and the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore – and a chorus of talking heads telling us how bad things have been and how bad they are still and that something needs to be done although no one knows what it is that must be done. (The pundits say they want dialogue – but no one wants dialogue; they want to lecture you on your racism while you listen in respectful silence.) It’s as if a social justice movement was told that they had won, accidentally achieved their objectives and that they could have anything they want in redress but there is no coherent response, just cacophony of half-crazed and fruitless proposals. And, in fairness, there really can’t be a coherent response – you can’t change the past and much of this protesting and demonstrating has the quixotic aspect of wishing to undo what can’t be undone. The past can’t be wished away. Removing every single monument to White Supremacy or, even, White leadership, won’t alter one iota of what has happened a hundred or two-hundred years ago. Like all protests aimed at redressing past grievances, the demonstrations founder on the shoal of past facts, a reef of granite that erodes only particle by particle across thousands of years. Tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee (something that I endorse) won’t make Robert E. Lee go away – it just drives him and his cause underground, that is, into the savage realm of the repressed and subconscious.
16.
Someone gunned down Hachalu Hundessa in the suburbs of Addis Ababa. Hundessa was a Oromo protest singer and political activist. The Oromo (there are 25 million of them) are an ethnic minority in Ethiopia. They are mostly Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and have been long oppressed by the ruling parties in their home country, persecution that has resulted in a large diaspora. Apparently, the largest group of Oromo refugees lives in Minneapolis, something of which I was unaware. Other communities exist in London and Aurora, Colorado.
Hachalu Hundessa’s killing hasn’t been solved. The suspicion is that he was targeted by government forces. This has led to massive civil unrest in Ethiopia as well as cities with significant Oromo populations. Modeled a bit uneasily on the George Floyd protests, demonstrators have marched in great numbers, confronted police, and torn down statues of Haile Selassie.
In Minneapolis, a big contingent of Oromo have occupied Interstate 94, the main freeway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. This action imitates the Black Lives Matter protests that closed the freeway after the St. Anthony cops gunned down Philando Castile in 2015. The events are a little incommensurate. Black Lives Matter is an anti-police pro racial justice movement. Race isn’t an issue involved in the murder of Hundessa – it’s rather a matter of ethnic identity with Black government troops oppressing equally Black Oromo over longstanding grievances inexplicable (or, at least, unexplained) to White people living in Minneapolis. On the radio, this morning (July 4, 2020), I heard an Oromo activist saying that she is tired that her people are confused with the Sudanese and Somali immigrants to this country. “We are a separate people,” she proudly declares. But she can’t exactly explain why her people have taken to the streets in Minneapolis and occupied the freeway. (Blocking roads tends to irrationally enrage people – I recall my angst at being unable to reach, of all things, a matinee opera performance of Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten by the BLM protest on the ramps and occupying all lanes of I-94 after the killing of Castile; I had two expensive tickets to an opera that I actually wanted to attend – I like Strauss.) I had never heard of the Oromo. Now, I know something about them. The protester on the radio says: “Now people will know about the Oromo.” This is correct. To me, they are now the people who occupied the freeway and blocked traffic on the basis of a killing that has nothing to do with Minneapolis at all.
17.
Peter Navarro, a spokesman for the White House, appears on CNN. He is interviewed by Jon Berman, an aggressive, if dim-witted East Coast news anchor. Berman triggers a speech from Navarro about how the Chinese Communist party engineered a virus and spread it in the United States. (He also touts an 11 dollar regimen of hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against the disease.) Berman blinks with dismay when Navarro –he’s from LA and looks like a handsome villain in Hollywood movies – rants about China. It’s pretty clear that Berman isn’t prepared for this talking point, an argument so primitive that he can’t quite figure out how to respond to it. He misses an opportunity – if the Chinese Communist party, supported by Donald Trump (who was famously friendly to Chairman Xi) launched a biological attack on the United States, then, this conduct would be tantamount to war. In effect, Navarro is saying that during the Trump administration, the Chinese launched an invasion of the United States and are now winning the war. The same virus was launched, to persist in this paradigm, by the Chinese against France, Germany, Italy, South Korea and others. But those nations fought back and won the war. The United States has remained supine and, now, under the eyes of the President is losing the war to the tune of 130,000 dead and two million wounded. Is this what the Administration wants to convey?
Here is how this argument works:
1. Grant that the flu is a Chinese communist weapon;
2. Ask whether the fight against the flu is a war;
3. If we are in a war with China, then, what should our counter-measures be – should we bomb them?
4. If we are in a war with China, then, why are we losing?
5. What have we done wrong that was done right by Germany, France, etc.?
Obviously, the “Chinese flu” argument is immensely dangerous. The people who are making this argument don’t believe it themselves. People often say things with impunity that they don’t believe. But if one were tease out, as it were, the implications of such an argument, it would be seen that the claim leads to nowhere that the Trump administration would like to go – in fact, the “Chinese flu” argument merely exposes the grotesque weakness of the United States under this President.
18.
Maggie Haberman, the New York Times correspondent who has been remarkably prescient about Trump, says that the sense at the White House is that the President has given up on the November election. He no longer is tailoring his words and behavior to be persuasive in the forthcoming contest. (A good example is a news clip from 2015 showing Trump agreeing, albeit reluctantly, that the Confederate flag should be retired from flying over the South Carolina State House – “take it down,” Trump says. But, in the first week of July 2020, he is now denouncing those who would remove the Confederate battle flag from public display.) Instead of behaving expediently, it seems, that Trump just wants to burn it all down. He wants to leave the White House and the Republic in flames. Trump seems to have concluded that he is too good for the people that he governs.
19.
I’ve figured out that the best way to wear my white surgical mask is with my mouth and nose exposed but my eyes covered. In that way, I don’t have to see the egregious folly and mendacity surrounding me. This is similar to my discovery that the best way to watch television news is with no picture and the sound off.
20.
The Covid virus seems to have long coat-tails. It sweeps up all sorts of other symptoms and, when the crisis is passed, torments its victims with a host of bizarre ailments. No one is really sure how long these symptoms will persist.
Some people report losing their senses of smell and taste for extended periods. Others seem to have suffered miniature strokes that affect their proprioception and balance. Hand-eye coordination becomes affected. People reach for cups and jars and inexplicably miss what they are attempting to pick up. Damaged lungs shed mini-embolisms. Blood clotting is either too aggressive or inadequate. Strange, oppressive nightmares haunt some victims. Others report that when their symptoms were florid, they felt enormous and irresistable cravings for certain kinds of food – even though they could not taste what they were eating. Some victims report gastro-intestinal complaints too indelicate to mention on TV cable news. Many persons who have suffered from the virus are driven by a weird urge to appear on the news and explain their experiences.
21.
On this day, July 9, 2020, 57,000 new cases of Covid-19 infection have been identified in the United States. Death rates are down – something around 1000 a day, but increasing. Deaths follow surges by about 14 days. Covid infections are increasing exponentially in about half of the States in the Union. The particular hot spots are Florida (Broward and Miami-Dade counties), Texas (Houston, San Antonio, Austin) and Arizona (Phoenix). ICU and hospital beds are in short-supply. If the rate of hospitalization continues at this pace, the health care system in many places will be swamped in about four or five days.
The United States has far and way the most infections. But there is a rapid spread of the virus in Latin America, particular Brazil which seems in a race with the United States for the worst possible outcome. (In Brazil, the strong man dictator, Bolsonaro, who has refused to wear a mask and derided the virus as a hoax, is now infected.) Peru has the second worst rate of infection in the Americas.
Testing capacity lags far behind demand, although I’m not sure that testing does anything but verify the proof of our own eyes: the dominion of the disease is increasing by leaps and bounds.
The role of the media in all of this is to gin up controversy and hysteria. The President has ordered that all schools in the United States open up for classes immediately – he may not be entirely aware that it is Summer and most children would be on holiday in any event right now. Mike Pence, the Vice-President, seems to be on qualuudes – he has the sad eyes of an abused Labrador Retriever and seems to be processing information in slow motion. Pence and his task force don’t like Federal CDC guidelines for reopening schools – they are “too tough”, Trump has said – and, so, the Administration has pressured the CDC to dilute its recommendations. Trump, as always, pours kerosene on the controversy about re-opening the schools by threatening to cut off federal funding to districts that don’t comply with his mandate. What Trump doesn’t understand, of course, is that local School Boards control their districts and these bodies are famously (or infamously) resistant to Federal authority – there are hillbilly precincts in the country that won’t teach evolution for instance or that promote school curriculum that instructs that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, a benign institution, but, instead, was all about State’s rights. School Boards are too independent to bow to State pressure, let alone the remote Federal government which really has no role in the intensely local business of running schools. Furthermore, the reopening mandate is a flashpoint, pitting powerful and well-funded teacher’s unions against administrators. The administrators can demand that teachers return to work but there is, certainly, no assurance that anyone would heed that order. (Trump seems unaware of how schools work – probably, because neither he nor anyone in his family has ever attended a public school; he also seems to have no idea that there are such things as teacher’s unions. His model for all institutions is that a strong man, brooking no dissent, dictates policy from the top.)
The Trump mandate that school’s reopen isn’t without a sort of logic. When the schools were closed, students were offered what are euphemistically called “remote learning” opportunities. This means essentially that kids were supposed to use their home computers to access educational programs. But this notion of “remote learning” has proven to be exceedingly problematic. First, notwithstanding the arrogance of Silicon Valley, not everyone has a computer. (And a lot of people who own computers don’t know how to use them.) Second, poor families of color are much less likely to have computers or access to expensive internet systems than White children. Third, middle-class White mothers are willing (and able) to spend hours supervising their children’s “remote learning”. Although poor Black mothers, undoubtedly, are equally committed to their children’s education, they don’t have the resources to superintend hours of “remote learning.” The result is like everything else in the Land of the Free, the poor just keep getting poorer and more damaged, while the rich and the middle-class do much, much better. Some of this achievement gap has now been exacerbated by “remote learning”. Therefore, it probably is imperative to reopen schools as soon as possible. It must also be remembered that schools provide valuable day-care and food assistance in poor neighborhoods, services that have also been severely impaired by the Coronavirus.
This is the context for an interview conducted by Alison Camerata on CNN with a man named Alberto Calvarho, the superintendent of Miami-Dade schools, one of the largest public school districts in the country. Calvarho, probably a second generation Cuban-American, is a slender mahogany-colored man with silver hair, wearing a beautiful light-grey silk tie. School superintendents, by nature, are conservative as are ethnic Cuban Floridians. So the Superintendent seems skeptical of the premises behind Camerata’s question, all intended to cast the Trump administration in the worst possible light. The news anchor tendentiously quotes Trump’s tweet demanding that school’s re-open. She also points to language in a Florida mandate from the governor that all schools reopen in “brick and mortar form” for five days of instruction per week. The saturnine Superintendent has read the actual orders and knows that, in fact, contrary to media reporting, a fair degree of flexibility is built into these decrees. In fact, if a local district deems reopening unsafe, the district does not have to open its doors. “The order says you must reopen,” she says. “Are you going to do so?” Calvarho says that he has read the order and that it provides flexibility and that he is not going to reopen schools in the middle of pandemic that has its epicenter in Miami-Dade counties. “What about being defunded as the President threatens?” He says that this is not a concern because he has read the actual order from the governor in his State and that the language is clear that no one is obligated to re-open if this would pose serious health risks. Camerata is non-plussed and adopts a condescending tone. Thwarted in her effort to get the Superintendent to say something bad about Trump, she shifts gears to the CDC guidelines that the administration is apparently planning to dilute. Again, this avenue of inquiry leads nowhere: “We are developing our own guidelines,” he says, “and will implement those.” Disappointed, Camerata ends the interview.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. But the media’s role in this crisis has been simple enough – focus on disputes (or potential disputes – no schools are yet re-opened) and, then, amplify controversy until it is deafening.
(As an update – about an hour after writing this note, the Center for Disease Control, chaffing under criticism that it was abandoning science to kowtow to the Trump administration, announced that it would not be revising its recommendations for reopening businesses and schools.)
22.
The scandal du jour is that the Federal bail-out of businesses affected by the virus has been just another engine for social inequality. Mom-and-pop shops didn’t know how to fill out the onerous paperwork necessary to secure interest-free and, in fact, fully forgivable loans from the federal government. So small businesses mostly received no money. But large cash-rich enterprises applied-for and received large sums of money. So, as always, the bail-out has largely benefitted those who didn’t need the money. Funds were not paid to the small businesses smashed by the virus and the raison d’etre for the cash disbursements.
After some litigation, a fully searchable list of enterprises paid more than $150,000 by the government has been published. All the usual suspects appear on those ledgers. Trump family businesses, of course, received several million dollars. A number of prosperous law firms were paid between three and five million dollars. (Full disclosure: my firm was applied for some money and received a loan, but proceeds paid to us were less than $150,000.) Applications for these loans have been conspicuously non-partisan – Nancy Pelosi’s husband’s consulting firm, for instance, received enough money to be scheduled on the public disclosure. But, then, greed has always been non-partisan.
Even more interesting, it seems that significant amounts of money were paid-out on the basis of fraudulent applications. In Austin, there is an old truck stop on the west end of town, next to the freeway. The truck stop failed fifteen years ago and has been completely shuttered for that time – it’s a vacant ghost with tanks and a ruinous café turned to face the State Highway near a low-rent trailer court and another vacant building once occupied by a Bridgeman’s Ice Cream store (closed now for thirty years at least). When my partner reviewed the ledger of businesses in Austin paid federal covid loans, he discovered that a sizeable amount of money was paid to an investment firm claiming as it headquarters the old truck stop. Further study shows that the investment firm is owned by Liberian emigrant who has previously been charged with felony theft. Since applications for federal loan money required that applicants not be convicted felons, record show that the investment corporation was transferred to the incorporator’s mother before the procceds were paid. Even more bizarre, the State Bank issuing the “loan” is located in Kensington, Minnesota – a town of less than 250 people. (As one of my partners remarked, Kensington is no stranger to fraud – this is the place near which the famed Kensington Runestone was found, a rock tablet purporting to record a Viking expedition to Minnesota in the 11th century. It’s generally accepted that the runestone was made by Norwegian farmer with the help of local schoolteacher around the turn of the 20th century.) If fraud on this order is obvious in my small town, one can imagine the scale of theft on a national level.
22.
Here’s a current joke: When Trump came into office, he promised that within four years, he would send a man to Mars. In the fourth year of his term, we can’t even go to Los Angeles or Miami, let alone Europe.
July 9, 2020
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