Mitch's Blog

How to Survive a Plague

It’s quite possible that by the end of all this, almost every American will know of someone who has died. A relative, a friend, an old high-school classmate … the names will pop up and migrate through Facebook as the weeks go by, and in a year’s time, Facebook will duly remind you of the grief or shock you experienced. The names of the sick will appear to be randomly selected — the ones you expected and the ones you really didn’t, the famous and the obscure, the vile and the virtuous. And you will feel the same pang of shock each time someone you know turns out to have fallen ill.

You’ll wake up each morning and check to see if you have a persistent cough, or a headache, or a tightness in the lungs. This is plague living: witnessing the sickness and death of others, knowing that you too could be next, even as you feel fine. The distancing things we reflexively do — “oh, well, he was a smoker”; “she was diabetic, you know”; “they were in Italy in February” — become a little bit harder as time goes by, and the numbers mount, and the randomness of it all sinks in. No, this is not under control. And no, we are not in control. Because we never are.

And this will change us. It must. All plagues change society and culture, reversing some trends while accelerating others, shifting consciousness far and wide, with consequences we won’t discover for years or decades. The one thing we know about epidemics is that at some point they will end. The one thing we don’t know is who we will be then.

I know that I was a different man at the end of the plague of AIDS than I was at the beginning,

Sullivan says: The epidemic could bring out the best in us, and we could create a more fair and humane society. Or it could bring out our worst, and make us more socially isolated, xenophobic, and authoritarian.

I suspect that those who think COVID-19 all but kills Donald Trump’s reelection prospects are being, as usual, too optimistic. National crises, even when handled at this level of incompetence and deceit, can, over time, galvanize public support for a national leader. As Trump instinctually finds a way to identify the virus as “foreign,” he will draw on these lizard-brain impulses, and in a time of fear, offer the balm of certainty to his cult and beyond. It’s the final bonding: blind support for the leader even at the risk of your own sickness and death. And in emergencies, quibbling, persistent political opposition is always on the defense, and often unpopular. It requires pointing out bad news in desperate times; and that, though essential, is rarely popular.

Watching Fox News operate in real time in ways Orwell described so brilliantly in Nineteen Eighty-Four — compare “We had always been at war with Eastasia” with “I’ve felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” — you’d be a fool not to see the potential for the Republican right to use this plague for whatever end they want. If Trump moves to the left of the Democrats in handing out big non-means-tested cash payments, and provides a stimulus far bigger than Obama’s, no Republican will cavil. And since no sane person wants the war on COVID-19 to fail, we will have to wish that the president succeed. Pulling this off as an opposition party, while winning back the White House, will require a political deftness I don’t exactly see in abundance among today’s Democrats.

On the other hand, even further incompetence or failure on Trump’s part could finally, maybe, puncture the cult, and deliver the White House to Biden and the Congress to the Democrats. And the huge sums now being proposed by even the GOP to shore up the economy and the stock market at a time of massive debt, as well as the stark failures of our public-health planning, could make an activist government agenda much more politically palatable to Americans.

A far-right rallying cry: Older Americans should volunteer to work

This article compares current conservative calls to sacrifice older Americans against the Obamacare “death panel” scare. But that’s rubbish because the death panels never existed, whereas this kill-the-olds movement is real.

Hillary was right. A good percentage of Trump supporters really are deplorable.

We do not sacrifice the weak and old to protect society. The reason we have society is to protect the weak and old.

He urged saving the economy over protecting those who are ‘not productive’ from the coronavirus. Then he faced America’s wrath. - The Washington Post

Attorney Scott McMillan brought the wrath of the internet on himself when he tweeted: “The fundamental problem is whether we are going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population which is (1) generally expensive to maintain, and (2) not productive.”

Yes, it’s wrong and appalling but so what? Cut him some slack.

Internet shaming and death threats are never the answer.

I have a special interest in this because McMillan is in La Mesa, the San Diego, CA suburb where we live.

His statement is wrong and appalling because we do not measure the value of people by their productivity.

And the flood of deaths that will follow ending the quarantine prematurely, like Trump and McMillan suggest, will be a million times worst for the economy than extended quarantine.

Also, McMillan says he doesn’t want the younger generation to be like the generation that grew up in the Depression. That generation includes my parents. They turned out fine. They went without as kids, but sacrificing their grandparents’ generation would not have made them better off.

If people have to die to support the economy, then fuck the economy.

Gig workers for companies like Uber, Lyft would get unemployment benefits under $2 trillion Senate stimulus bill www.cnbc.com/2020/03/2…

Good news.

But Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is looking for a “third way” to classify workers, apart from employees or contractors. This sounds like self-serving rubbish to me. How are Uber drivers not employees?

The thesis of the new book is that “the ‘laws’ of economics are actually policies, created to ‘justify a society’s inequalities,’ providing a rationale to convince poor people not to start building guillotines.”

pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…

My $0.02: You see this in one of the main conservative and so-called moderate Democrat arguments against Medicaire-for-All: That we can’t afford it.

If society can’t afford to save lives, then we can’t afford to have that society.

There are other arguments against M4A, namely that it might suck. I do not necessarily share those arguments, but they are reasonable.

Cory:

The elites' indifference to working people is grounded in an alliance between the Brahmin Left (educated, well-paid liberals) and the Merchant Right (the finance sector). Notionally leftist parties, like the Democrats, are dominated by the Brahmin Left.

Me: This is one of the leading Republican criticisms of the national Democratic Party. And it has a lot of merit to it.

But more than any other, Macron epitomizes this alliance: proclaiming his liberal values while slashing taxes on the wealthy — punishing poor people for driving cars, exempting private jets from his “climate” bill.

Life in a “meritocracy” is especially cruel for poor people, because meritocracies, uniquely among ideologies, blame poor people for poverty. It’s right there in the name. French kings didn’t think God was punishing peons, rather, that the Lord had put them there to serve.