He speaks truth so rarely that when you hear it from his own mouth—March 29, 2020—it has the force of revelation: “I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death.”
Well, maybe not the whole, unvarnished truth. The first clause was neither true nor false: it described only a desire. A desire which, when I heard it—and found its bleating echo in myself—I’ll admit I weighed in my hand, for a moment, like a shiny apple. It sounded like a decent “wartime” wish, war being the analogy he’s chosen to use. But no one in 1945 wished to return to the “old life,” to return to 1939—except to resurrect the dead. Disaster demanded a new dawn. Only new thinking can lead to a new dawn. We know that. Yet as he said it—“I wish we could have our old life back”—he caught his audience in a moment of weakness: in their dressing gowns, weeping, or on a work call, or with a baby on their hip and a work call, or putting on a homemade hazmat suit to brave the subway, on the way to work that cannot be done at home, while millions of bored children climbed the walls from coast to coast. And, yes, in that brittle context, “the old life” had a comforting sound, if only rhetorically, like “once upon a time” or “but I love him!” The second clause brought me back to my senses. Snake oil, snake oil, snake oil. The devil is consistent, if nothing else. I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms.
Then he spoke the truth: we didn’t have death.
Reading the various stories of the impact of the spread of coronavirus on black and brown communities for the past few days, this story at France 24 on anti-black racism in China due to COVID-19 positively frightened me.
China says it has largely curbed its Covid-19 outbreak but a recent cluster of cases linked to the Nigerian community in Guangzhou sparked the alleged discrimination by locals and virus prevention officials.
Local authorities in the industrial centre of 15 million said at least eight people diagnosed with the illness had spent time in the city's Yuexiu district, known as "Little Africa".
Five were Nigerian nationals who faced widespread anger after reports surfaced that they had broken a mandatory quarantine and been to eight restaurants and other public places instead of staying home.
As a result, nearly 2,000 people they came into contact with had to be tested for Covid-19 or undergo quarantine, state media said.
Guangzhou had confirmed 114 imported coronavirus cases as of Thursday – 16 of which were Africans. The rest were returning Chinese nationals.
It has led to Africans becoming targets of suspicion, distrust and racism in China.
Several Africans told AFP they had been forcibly evicted from their homes and turned away by hotels.
I’ve been low-key following the story of the ~80,000 African students that were stranded in China at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in late December/early January; many African students were in Wuhan at that time. Some were left stranded by their government. Some chose to stay in China so as not to be a burden on the health care systems of their home countries (health care systems which are still recovering from the effects of the Ebola virus). Some chose to stay because of the better health care in China. Many have gone back to their countries now and, as this story indicates, many have not.
Don’t think that the same thing happening in China can’t happen here. Because it already is.
Plus I have over 400 years of American history receipts to back me up.
Of course, racism isn’t being directed only at African Americans in the course of this pandemic, as Cathy Park Hong notes for the New York Times Magazine.
I never would have thought that the word “Chink” would have a resurgence in 2020. The word was supposed to be as outdated as those sinister little Chinamen saltshakers I saw in thrift shops. It still thrived among bottom feeders on the internet, but I hadn’t heard it directed at me since I was in my 20s. But now I was encountering that word every time I read about an anti-Asian incident or hearing about its use from friends. I couldn’t process the fact that Americans were hurling that slur at us so openly and with such raw hate. In the past, I had a habit of minimizing anti-Asian racism because it had been drilled into me early on that racism against Asians didn’t exist. Anytime that I raised concerns about a racial comment, I was told that it wasn’t racial. Anytime I brought up an anti-Asian incident, a white person interjected that it was a distraction from the more important issue (and there was always a more important issue). I’ve been conditioned to think my second-class citizenry was low on the scale of oppression and therefore not worth bringing up even though every single Asian-American I know has stories of being emasculated, fetishized, humiliated, underpaid, fired or demoted because of our racial identities.
Zack Beauchamp at Vox looks at the reasons that Bernie Sanders ultimately failed to win the Democratic nomination for POTUS.
Sanders had success in shifting the Democratic Party in his direction on policy. But the strategy for winning power embraced by his partisans depended on a mythologized and out-of-date theory of blue-collar political behavior, one that assumes that a portion of the electorate is crying out for socialism on the basis of their class interest. Identity, in all its complexities, appears to be far more powerful in shaping voters’ behaviors than the material interests given pride of place in Marxist theory.
Class conflict doesn’t dominate the American political scene, and Sanders’s campaign couldn’t make it so. Under these conditions, the Sanders campaign looked to the wrong segment of the electorate for salvation.
“The future of [Bernie’s] agenda lies with young people, but college-educated and suburban voters are increasingly interested in the progressive agenda,” Sean McElwee, co-founder of the left-wing polling outfit Data for Progress, tells me. “Sadly, we [progressives] are about four years behind in reaching out to those voters because people don’t read enough fucking polling data.”
If leftists want to make the leap from influencing the Democratic Party to running it, they need a new theory of victory.
Historian David Blight, writing for the New York Times, reminds us that voter suppression such as we saw in Wisconsin last week is nothing new.
America has a long history of attempts to restrict the right to vote to people with property, with sufficient formal education and, too often, those privileged by gender or race. Political minorities — today’s Republican Party, antebellum slaveholders, Gilded Age oligarchs or rural states empowered disproportionately by the Electoral College — have always feared and suppressed the expansion of both the right and the access to the right to vote. There is no Republican majority in America, except on Election Days.
Mr. Trump’s rhetorical stumble into truth joins a litany of similar expressions in American history. The creation of black male suffrage was the most contested of all the problems of the early new state governments formed during Reconstruction. Most white Southerners were hellbent on trying to restore white supremacy, especially in voting. Appointed by President Andrew Johnson as South Carolina’s governor in 1865, Benjamin F. Perry believed that black suffrage would give political power over to “ignorant, stupid, demi-savage paupers.” In North Carolina, the politician William A. Graham believed enfranchising blacks would “roll back the tide of civilization two centuries at least.”
Here’s a piece that am not certain that I should post or link.
I’ve talked about my fear that I had come down with the coronavirus as my temperature rose to over 100 degrees late Thursday night into Friday morning. I’m fine now but one thing that I really got in touch with was the horror that I might die alone (it was one of the reasons I was determined to write about what I was going through, come what may.)
Friday afternoon I read this Pulitzer-worthy piece at the Wall Street Journal about coronavirus victims that die alone.
Which brings me to Astrid Prange’s essay at Deutsche Welle that continuing to allow dying coronavirus patients to die alone without the presence of loved ones is, on one hand, understandable from an “epidemiological point of view” but is, on the other hand,” utterly inhumane.”
The isolation of the old and ill must end at the deathbed. There must be a way to find compromise between two equally valid needs: Protection against the coronavirus and protection against death in social isolation.
Although German hospitals and nursing homes have granted exceptions for some patients, implementing the policy has been anything but smooth. Moreover, the exception excludes those ill with the coronavirus.
Couldn't a quick test be administered for visitors? Couldn't masks and other personal protective equipment be made available to family and friends?
Granted that Ms. Prange is writing about the situation in German hospitals where I am assuming there may be adequate amounts of PPE such that could be supplied to family members in some cases. American doctors and nurses are dying of COVID-19 here, in large part, because of severe PPE shortages, so I don’t think that anything like what Ms. Prange is proposing is possible in the United States.
Still...it’s is something to think about.
Finally this morning, filmmaker Julio Vincent Gambino writes, for Medium, that we should be prepared for “the ultimate gaslighting’ when we come out of the other side of the pandemic tunnel.
What the trauma has shown us, though, cannot be unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly daily effect on the planet. What’s not fit for a postcard are the other scenes we have witnessed: a health care system that cannot provide basic protective equipment for its frontline; small businesses — and very large ones — that do not have enough cash to pay their rent or workers, sending over 16 million people to seek unemployment benefits; a government that has so severely damaged the credibility of our media that 300 million people don’t know who to listen to for basic facts that can save their lives.
The cat is out of the bag. We, as a nation, have deeply disturbing problems. You’re right. That’s not news. They are problems we ignore every day, not because we’re terrible people or because we don’t care about fixing them, but because we don’t have time. Sorry, we have other shit to do. The plain truth is that no matter our ethnicity, religion, gender, political party (the list goes on), nor even our socioeconomic status, as Americans we share this: We are busy. We’re out and about hustling to make our own lives work. We have goals to meet and meetings to attend and mortgages to pay — all while the phone is ringing and the laptop is pinging. And when we get home, Crate and Barrel and Louis Vuitton and Andy Cohen make us feel just good enough to get up the next day and do it all over again. It is very easy to close your eyes to a problem when you barely have enough time to close them to sleep. The greatest misconception among us, which causes deep and painful social and political tension every day in this country, is that we somehow don’t care about each other. White people don’t care about the problems of black America. Men don’t care about women’s rights. Cops don’t care about the communities they serve. Humans don’t care about the environment. These couldn’t be further from the truth. We do care. We just don’t have the time to do anything about it. Maybe that’s just me. But maybe it’s you, too.
A truly American-style solution for a truly American-style pandemic?
Everyone have a good morning and a safe Easter Sunday!