Welcome to the Fourth World

By David K. Shipler

                Americans have a better chance of keeping themselves and others safe by ignoring what President Trump says. He has already contributed to the death of an Arizona man who, along with his wife, took chloroquine (used to clean fish tanks!) the day after Trump misinformed the country about its anti-viral effectiveness. Medical experts criticized the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency authorization for its use, because too much can kill you. In fact, its use against malaria is not necessarily applicable to COVID-19 without careful clinical trials to establish proper dosing. In the wife’s case, it sent her into critical condition. Even doctors who listened to Trump are writing prescriptions to hoard the drug for themselves, depleting supplies for those who really need it for lupus and other ailments.

                This is what the United States has come to. You can’t believe your president, the one who is getting a 55 percent approval rating for the way he is mishandling the pandemic. You shouldn’t have accepted his cavalier assessment that the supposed severity of the virus was just the Democrats’ “new hoax” that would soon disappear. You can’t trust his absurd assurances that sufficient tests and medical equipment are available, or that they’re not really needed in bulk.

You certainly shouldn’t act on his push to fill the churches on Easter and to go back to work—advice he’s now recanted by extending preventive guidelines until April 30. His cavalier, contradictory, self-absorbed briefings have encouraged millions to take the disease less seriously than warranted, which could lead to the collapse of law enforcement, health care, fire departments, infrastructure maintenance, and food supplies as those essential workers drop into sickness.

                Trump is a national security risk. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. He refuses to talk to governors who don’t fawn over him. He claims to have inherited “a broken system.” Yet he has been in office for more than three very long years, during which he has watched TV compulsively, tweeted his grievances and insults, played lots of golf, come to work late in the morning, and governed the way Boris Yeltsin did in Russia as it descended: by simply firing people, as if the federal government were his TV show, The Apprentice.

Suffering Spring

By David K. Shipler

                Daffodils came early this year, deceived by a premature spate of warmth, then slapped with reality by a cold snap. But now the most exquisite season in and around the nation’s capital has begun to take hold. The plum tree in front has blossomed along with the magnolias across the street. The cherry trees are at their peak, their feathery white petals blowing off and descending like snow flurries. The azaleas will not be far behind.

                It is a cruel spring of dissonance. It is like that crystal autumn day, September 11, 2001, whose beauty should not have allowed the terror and the death. It is like wartime Vietnam, whose stunning landscapes should not have made room for combat. This should be a soothing time of annual rebirth, with no place for the discords of illness and fear.

                Like a family in crisis, America and every other nation will learn good and hard lessons about itself. This will weld us or break us. We will find common purpose or deepened fissures. If we summon wisdom, we will discover what matters and what does not, who are heroes and who are not, who are leaders and who are not—regardless of their titles, positions, or pretenses.

                 Human beings rarely resign themselves to powerlessness. To flee from war, crime, or hunger, refugees uproot themselves and journey into risky unknowns. Against suicide bombings, citizens search for a semblance of control. They reach for tricks and tactics that seem rational, hoping to reduce the unwanted probabilities. In Israel when buses were being blown up, drivers tried to avoid stopping near buses at red lights. In Lebanon and Vietnam, canny locals stayed off country roads that felt too quiet. Smart cops in every tough city in the world learn to watch and listen all around them, to read body language, if possible to put an engine block between them and a suspect who might be armed.

                 The habit of staking a claim to some small territory of control is surely embedded in our animal survival instinct. Sometimes our methods are futile, often so against random violence. Sometimes they are illusory, giving us a sense of power more imagined than real. Sometimes they are practical, and therefore comforting, as we wash our hands while singing Happy Birthday twice, stop touching our faces, use gloves or paper towels to handle the gas pump, sterilize our doorknobs and kitchen counters, and look to the health professionals’ steady and factual advice. Thank heavens for Dr. Anthony Fauci!

                But there are limits to human powers, of course.

Trump's Incompetence Goes Viral

By David K. Shipler 

              

               Two days after his inauguration in January 2017, President Trump imposed a hiring freeze on the federal government. Within four months, the Centers for Disease Control had 700 vacancies that handicapped infectious disease prevention and control, and impeded aid to localities for emergency readiness. High-level positions in science and policy went unfilled.

                Since then, every Trump budget has sought to slash the CDC’s budget: by 17 percent for fiscal year 2018, by 20 percent for fiscal year 2019, 20 percent for fiscal 2020, and even now—amid the coronavirus—by 15% for fiscal 2021. This after Trump in 2018 dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security team, which existed to manage precisely the kind of outbreak we are now experiencing.

                This might seem odd for a germaphobe like Trump. But it fits neatly into the destructive agenda of the extreme right-wing radicals who have taken over the Republican Party, who aim for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” in the words of Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

                More aggressively than any other Republican administration, Trump’s has emasculated regulatory departments, moved to shred decades of environmental and worker-safety regulations, shredded enforcement of consumer protection and anti-discrimination laws, and tried to tear bigger holes in the social safety net.

     In addition, Trump, Vice President Pence, and other officials have made sure to plant legions of unqualified political appointees in the upper ranks of multiple agencies, producing a perfect storm of  neglect and incompetence. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by discrediting government as less significant and less effective, which feeds a spiral of discontent and alienation about “Washington” and government in general. The conservative agenda of shrinking the public sector thereby gains public support.

The Art of the Phony Deal

Judging by polls and interviews, a large minority of Americans have been gullible enough to believe President Trump when he has boasted of big breakthroughs in resolving the trade war with China, the hot war with the Taliban, the twilight war between Israel and the Palestinians, the risk of nuclear war with North Korea, and the disadvantageous trade relations with Mexico and Canada. In reality, the “deals” he has touted are either non-existent (North Korea), one-sided and fanciful (Israel), wishful thinking (the Taliban), or marginal adjustments (China, Mexico, and Canada).

                Let’s take them one by one, beginning with the latest.

                The War in Afghanistan. To his credit, Trump has consistently sought to withdraw US troops from the endless war, a politically popular position. And he has tried to do it with dignity. His negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, is a savvy American diplomat of Afghan origin who displayed painstaking persistence in gradually bringing the Taliban along. The heart of the bilateral deal is a U.S. troop withdrawal over 14 months in exchange for a prohibition on the Taliban giving sanctuary to jihadists, as it did to al-Qaeda before 9/11.

But the administration also failed to include the Afghan government in the talks. That would have complicated negotiations, probably pushing them past the American elections. The resulting agreement was fragile and began to shred days after being signed. The Afghan government refused to abide by the provision to release five thousand Taliban prisoners. The Taliban responded by refusing to begin peace talks before the release. The Taliban then attacked an Afghan army checkpoint, and the U.S responded with an air strike on Taliban forces. Far from bringing a settlement to the country, the agreement looks like a fig leaf to cover a U.S. withdrawal for Trump’s political benefit.

Israel and the Palestinians. Here, too, a key player in the conflict was excluded from discussion or consideration, which seems to be a pattern in Trump’s methodology.