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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: What if Trump gave a Grand Reopening party — and nobody came?
By
Published: Apr 11, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
CAPTION:Thousands of vehicles lined up before dawn Thursday to seek aid from the San Antonio Food Bank. The agency fed about 10,000 households — the largest single-day distribution in the nonprofit’s 40-year history.
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What if Trump reopened the country?
That’s his plan. He announced it this week:
“In four days, we had the biggest market increase, stock market increase that we’ve had in 50 years. That tells you that there’s a pent up demand … they want to get back. There’s something good going to happen, I really believe that … We have to get back.”
Wait! He didn’t have the power to shut it down, but now he has the power to open it up? Well, he thinks he does. And some may believe him. What they don’t understand: Trump is about to be impeached again. This time, by Nature. He can huff and puff, he can tell himself he has divine power, he can brag he’ll part the Red Sea. No matter. This time he’ll be convicted.
He’ll be convicted because the cliché is true: Nature bats last. Of course Trump can’t accept this. So he claims that doctors and elected officials say on CNN that they don’t have enough materials because they know they won’t get on TV unless they say it. (Twitter went nuts: “Yes, doctors spend years in school, owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, and put their lives on the line every day just so they can occasionally get a spot on CNN during a once every century pandemic.”)
Nope, he knows best:
“I’m going to have to make a decision, and I hope to God it’s the right decision. I would say without question it’s the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”
Asked what metrics he would use in deciding, Trump pointed to his head.
(In fact, others are largely doing the thinking for him: They’re pushing responsibility down — to the states. And the states are screwed: Washington is distributing kits that can administer 100 tests… per state. All of Illinois got supplies for 120 tests. But it doesn’t matter. Testing? We don’t need no stinking testing — this plague is over!)
In Trump’s cheerleading for the return of the old America, here’s someone who will go unheard:
Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which has created a model for Covid-19 deaths, told CNN that the latest data suggested caution was the right course.
He predicted that a premature lifting of social distancing restrictions — which Mr. Trump seems eager to approve, perhaps by May 1 — could cause infections and deaths to surge.
“If we were to stop at the national level May 1,” Dr. Murray said, “we’re seeing a return to almost where we are now sometime in July.”
Where we are now? Sweet Jesus! But as we all know: Trump’s re-election is more important than your life.
And yet…everything he wants to do endangers his re-election. Like this…
HE’S GOING TO MURDER HIS BASE
Start with Easter services:
In Kansas — where Republican lawmakers overturned an executive order blocking such gatherings by the state’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly — worshipers are also free to go to church. Ms. Kelly called the decision to permit gatherings of more than 10 people “shockingly irresponsible.”
Now look down the road a month or two:
From the Times:
About 44 percent of likely voters in the United States see the coronavirus pandemic and economic meltdown as either a wake-up call to faith, a sign of God’s coming judgment or both, according to a poll commissioned by the Joshua Fund, an evangelical group run by Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes about the end of the world, and conducted last week by McLaughlin & Associates, pollsters for President Trump and other Republicans.
44 per cent! “A wake-up call to faith, a sign of God’s coming judgment or both!” Many of these people live in the red states. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” — the sequel.
TO SUPPRESS THE VOTE, HE’S GOING TO SCREW THE POSTAL SERVICE
From the Times:
Mail volume is down by nearly a third compared with the same time last year and dropping quickly, as businesses drastically cut back on solicitations, advertisements and all kinds of letters that make up the bulk of the mail service’s bottom line.
As a result, the Postal Service is projecting a $13 billion revenue shortfall this fiscal year because of the pandemic and another $54 billion in losses over 10 years.
Democrats have been pressing for weeks to give the Postal Service most of what it is asking for. But Mr. Trump has resisted, saying the agency could solve its woes simply by raising prices on packages delivered for big online retailers like Amazon. And his administration wants to attach strings to any government help the service receives.
Even with an increase in online shopping and package delivery to Americans cooped up at home, the agency could see a 50 percent reduction in total mail volume by the end of June, compared with the same period last year. The projected shortfall this fall could throw regular mail delivery into doubt.
One way to achieve voter suppression: make it difficult or impossible for voters to participate with mail-in ballots. No mail, no votes.
But here’s how stupid Trump is: By June he may be desperate for the billions that a private buyer would pay to own the postal service. And who might that buyer be? Think about it for zero seconds and you’ve got the answer: Jeff Bezos, who needs USPS to deliver your one-clicks.
TRUMP IS USING RACISM THAT LOOKS A LOT LIKE MURDER TO REDUCE THE VOTE
From the Intercept:
The death rate from Covid-19 for black and Latino New Yorkers is roughly twice that of white New Yorkers, according to the latest city data. The death rate among Latino New Yorkers is 22.8 for every 100,000 people. Among African Americans, it is 19.8. In contrast, 10.2 of every 100,000 white New Yorkers has died from the new coronavirus.
The numbers, which were released on Wednesday, are based on 63 percent of confirmed Covid-19 deaths in New York City. They are consistent with reporting from Louisiana, Illinois , Louisiana and Michigan, as well as preliminary national data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which show that black people are dying in greater numbers from the virus.
In starker terms: In Michigan, where the coronavirus hit early and hard, African-Americans make up just 14 percent of the state’s population but 40 per cent of the dead.
WHAT THIS MEANS: DON’T ACCEPT THE INVITATION TO TRUMP’S GRAND RE-OPENING PARTY
This is by Walter Scheidel, a professor of classics and history at Stanford University, is the author of “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.”
In the fall of 1347, rat fleas carrying bubonic plague entered Italy on a few ships from the Black Sea. Over the next four years, a pandemic tore through Europe and the Middle East. Panic spread, as the lymph nodes in victims’ armpits and groins swelled into buboes, black blisters covered their bodies, fevers soared and organs failed. Perhaps a third of Europe’s people perished.
And yet this was only the beginning. The plague returned a mere decade later and periodic flare-ups continued for a century and a half, thinning out several generations in a row. Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.”
The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.
But as successive waves of plague shrunk the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”
As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades. According to tax records that have survived in the archives of many Italian towns, wealth inequality in most of these places plummeted. In England, workers ate and drank better than they did before the plague and even wore fancy furs that used to be reserved for their betters. At the same time, higher wages and lower rents squeezed landlords, many of whom failed to hold on to their inherited privilege. Before long, there were fewer lords and knights, endowed with smaller fortunes, than there had been when the plague first struck.
OK, IT DIDN’T LAST…
None of these stories had a happy ending for the masses. When population numbers recovered after the plague of Justinian, the Black Death and the American pandemics, wages slid downward and elites were firmly back in control.
But for now: If you can stay home… stay home. Consider it a vote. Against.
TODAY’S QUOTE
J. R. R. Tolkien: “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
TODAY’S POEM
A fragment from Randall Jarrell:
While you are, how am I alone?
Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon;
When, starting from my sleep, I groan to you,
May your “I love you” send me back to sleep.
At morning bring me, grayer for its mirroring,
The heavens’ sun perfected in your eyes.
JUST SAYING
I read an interview this week with a person in my business who has made a nice donation to a charity benefitting booksellers. There was a nice, smiling photograph, taken in the Old Days, of this person reading a book on the deck of a house in the Hamptons. No mention, by interviewer or interviewee, of the source of this person’s money. Am I glad this person made the donation? Thrilled. But yesterday I read that this person’s father is one of the executives who has called Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to press for “a return to normalcy.” The net worth of this person’s father: $17.5 billion. Jeff Bezos, a fellow billionaire, gave $100 million to Feeding America. Perhaps this person could put a word in Dad’s ear?
TOPIC CHANGE: A PERSONAL FAVOR
In mid-January, I published a novel, JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story. There was a flurry of publicity, and it sold briskly, and there was an online review in the Times in February which was really, really good, and then, just as there was going to be an effort to get Netflix/Hulu/etc. to option the book for a series — not a great leap of the imagination; it’s a diary, it reads like a screenplay — the virus arrived, and the book went into the past, which I don’t look at. But this weekend, the Sunday Times Book Review is re-publishing the review. Online, yes, but also in the paper. Which still gets delivered. And, because of circumstances, will be read by many more people than usually open the Book Review. I am advised that the best way to get a project going now is to have a star attached — in this case, an actress who can play 42 year-old, blonde, socialite/artist Mary Meyer. Problem: my TV hasn’t been on for 5 years, I don’t stream. If you have a suggestion: HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com
ESSENTIALS AND DISPATCHES: everything, all in one place. Click here.
TODAY’S MUSIC
Arcade Fire, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”
They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days my life, I feel it has no purpose
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They’re calling at me, come and find your kind
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl
