Tag: American Exceptionalism

Saturday Soother – April 22, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Rainbow, Blue Ridge Parkway, VA – April 2023 photo by Tim Lewis

American carnage is real, my friend. Just not in the way that Trump stated in his inaugural rant. The American carnage Wrongo speaks of is the gun attacks made on others by angry or fearful lone American gunmen. From Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

“Ringing the wrong doorbell, making a wrong turn, getting in the wrong car, and an errant basketball. A wounded teenager, a dead young woman, cheerleaders in critical condition, and a 6-year-old girl and her father shot.”

The Indiana man who shot a 16-year-old boy for knocking on his door is described by his grandson as a conspiracy theorist and avid consumer of right-wing media: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I feel like a lot of people of that generation are caught up in this 24 hour news cycle of fear and paranoia perpetuated by some…news stations. And he was fully into that, sitting and watching Fox News all day, every day blaring in his living room…..that doesn’t necessarily lead people to be racist, but it reinforces and galvanizes racist people. And their beliefs.”

Right wing propaganda is about fear. And some people bathe in it for hours a day. So, while the rest of us enjoy walks in the park or a trip to the market, they’re terrified of every swarthy stranger at the Publix or Home Depot.

Add this level of fear to the implicit permission given gun owners by “stand your ground” laws, and you have the elements of an environment of violence.  Vox provides background:

“Some of these shootings took place in states with so-called “stand your ground” laws, which offer expansive legal protections for people who use deadly force against others out of self-defense….and experts have noted that the laws can bolster a “shoot first, ask later” mentality.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Under such laws — which exist in some form in 38 states — people can use lethal force if they reasonably believe their life is under threat, and they don’t have to take steps to retreat or avoid the confrontation first. That’s a stark change from prior laws….In the past, the “castle doctrine,” which has been adopted by most states, allowed people to use deadly force if a person entered their home.

Stand your ground laws take that idea one step further, with some making such allowances no matter where a person is, whether that’s a public place, their vehicle or their office.”

Add pervasive fear and permission to stand your ground to the proliferation of guns in America (aided by the Supreme Court’s expansive reading of the Second Amendment) and the US has come undone. From Umair Haque: (emphasis by Haque)

“Did you know that America isn’t just the most violent nation in the industrialized world — but an off the charts extreme outlier? Iceland is the world’s most peaceful society. Canada is the world’s 12th most peaceful society. America is the
 129th.”

That’s 129 out of 163 countries tracked. Further evidence is in the recent TSA statistics about intercepting guns about to be carried on to planes:

“Officers with the Transportation Security Administration confiscated more than 1,500 guns at airport security checkpoints in the US during the first quarter of the year, more than 93% of which were loaded. The 1,508 firearms equate to an average of 16.8 intercepted each day during the first three months of the year…”

The gun gives its owner the power of life and death. No training needed. The power of God right there in your hand. It’s very attractive to a certain type of person. And we cultivate that type of personality in America.

We have no safety nets, no social bonds, no norms of decency. That means we ask each other to bear the unbearable.

We don’t invest enough in safety nets, insurance, public goods, healthcare, education, and, in most states, gun laws. According to Haque, it’s all justified by politicians saying, “I can bear the unbearable — why can’t they?” But we can’t do that forever. Someone will snap, and the frustration of bearing the unbearable pours out as rage that’s visited on whomever is nearest, or easiest to hurt. That’s American Exceptionalism at work. America’s extreme violence, caused in large part by the twisted ideology that asks Americans to bear unbearable things.

Enough about guns and people snapping. It’s time for our Saturday Soother! Here on the Fields of Wrong, our crabapple trees are in bloom. They’re being visited by both birds and bees, each looking for high calorie snacks. The bees for the flowers, the birds for the buds. Our spring clean-up is lagging, so there’s still much to do.

But first, let’s relax for a few minutes. Grab a comfy chair near a big window and watch and listen to Valentina Lisitsa, a Ukrainian-American pianist, play “Rustle of Spring”, a solo piano piece written by Norwegian composer Christian Sinding in 1896:

If you are interested in amazing piano technique, watch Lisitsa perform Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

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We Kill More People With Cars

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, with Mt. Hood in background, Vancouver, WA – November 2022 photo by Sanman Photography

The NYT has an article showing how the US tolerates a high number of auto-related deaths:

“The US has diverged over the past decade from other comparably developed countries, where traffic fatalities have been falling….In 2020, as car travel plummeted around the world, traffic fatalities broadly fell as well. But in the US, the opposite happened. Travel declined, and deaths still went up. Preliminary federal data suggests road fatalities rose again in 2021.”

They helpfully include a chart that shows America’s relative ranking vs. other developed countries since the start of the pandemic in 2020:

(chart is truncated for viewing purposes)

More from the NYT:

“Safety advocates and government officials lament that so many deaths are…tolerated in America as an unavoidable cost of mass mobility. But…Americans die….in rising numbers even as roads around the world grow safer.”

In 2021, nearly 43,000 people died on American roads. The recent rise in fatalities has been highest among those the government classifies as most vulnerable — cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians, even though miles traveled have fallen:

The NYT says that the explanation for America’s road safety record lies with a transportation system designed to move cars quickly, not to move people safely. They quote Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board:

“Motor vehicles are first, highways are first, and everything else is an afterthought…”

To fix this means we must solve both infrastructural and cultural problems at the same time.

This year in our northwestern Connecticut town, we’re seeing an average of 3 accidents per day compared with 2.2 per day last year. Our population is growing, but certainly not as fast as our accident rate.

The explanation for the increases both locally and nationally isn’t simple to explain.

  • Vehicles have grown significantly bigger and thus deadlier when they hit people.
  • Some states curb the ability of local governments to set lower speed limits.
  • The five-star federal safety rating that consumers can look for when buying a car today doesn’t take into consideration what that car might do to pedestrians.
  • As cars grew safer for the people inside of them, we didn’t prioritize the safety of people outside of them.

The average car sold in the US is larger, taller, and heavier than in other developed countries. Many of these SUVs and trucks can weigh up to 9,000 pounds, like the latest Rivian and the electric Hummer. Their batteries alone weigh 3,000 pounds, the weight of the average car in the 1990s!

The larger size offsets the advancements in safety technology. Add in growing distracted driving: texting, work calls, difficult to navigate infotainment systems that lack physical buttons. And deaths are up in America.

In the 1990s, per capita roadway fatalities across developed countries were significantly higher than they are today. Back then, the US had fewer than South Korea, New Zealand, and Belgium. But other countries started to take pedestrian and cyclist injuries seriously in the 2000s. They made them a priority in both vehicle design and street design in a way that the US has never committed to.

In America, we prioritize straighter, smoother roads. We prioritize traveling long distances by car as fast as possible. Our culture and our infrastructure are designed to allow us to go faster on better roads. That has made us number one in road vehicle-caused deaths since the pandemic.

More American Exceptionalism! And given our exceptionalism in firearm fatalities, it’s hard to see how or why Americans would be willing to stop being exceptional in vehicle deaths either.

Biden’s infrastructure bill, passed last year, takes baby steps toward changing this. There’s more federal money for pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. And states are now required to analyze fatalities and serious injuries among “vulnerable road users” (people outside of cars) to identify the most dangerous traffic corridors and the potential ways to fix them.

States where vulnerable road users make up at least 15% of fatalities must spend at least 15% of their federal safety funds on improvements prioritizing those vulnerable users. Today, 32 states, plus Puerto Rico and DC, will have to meet this mandate.

Here in our CT town, Wrongo serves on the Municipal Roads Committee. We talk endlessly about how, once a road is repaired, speeds immediately go up. It took several years and much public disagreement to build a roundabout as a traffic calming measure on one accident-prone road.

In Europe, you see plenty of “traffic calming” measures. Chicanes, roundabouts, and narrower lanes bring vehicle-pedestrian fatalities down, in part by making drivers pay more attention. Therefore, driving becomes a bit more nerve-wracking, and people go slower.

Making that happen here would require Americans and politicians to buy into the idea that streets aren’t exclusively for cars.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 22, 2021

On October 19, 2001, 38 days after the WTC was bombed, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Missouri’s Whiteman AFB as they prepared to fly across the world to inflict American vengeance on Afghanistan. He told them:

“We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

And here we are: After dropping over 81,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years, we’ve failed to change the way they live. So maybe, as Rumsfeld said, we should change the way we live. Maybe we start with less military meddling.

Maybe start by reining in our Exceptionalism and our “war is the answer” reflexes. Maybe that would be an appropriate response to our defeat in Afghanistan. Maybe we should do this before we’re dragged into more wars. On to cartoons.

There’s more than one withdrawal going on:

Sadly true:

Sam gives his usual exit advice, gets it back:

The real strategic mistake:

Old vs new Talibs:

Bush famously painted us in the corner of both Iraq and Afghanistan:

 

Nothing changes when you’re walking an infinite loop:

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We’re Done in Afghanistan

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Atlantic Beach, FL August 2021 photo by Razvan Balotescu

The finger pointing has already begun, but it was always going to end badly. Should we be surprised? Sure, Biden has made mistakes, the same kind as those of his predecessors. He believed what he was told by the CIA and the military, neither of which should be trusted about anything they say regarding Afghanistan.

The foreign policy and military establishment are now doing everything they can to blame Biden, but the bottom line remains that Afghanistan is a massive failure on their part. They continued telling him the same bullshit they told Bush II, Obama, and Trump.

The images coming from Afghanistan are disturbing, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. We spent $2 trillion to prop up the government that failed, and to train and equip the Afghan military over the past 20 years. And they fell in a week. (Full disclosure: Wrongo owns shares in a defense contractor that trained the Afghan military.)

From the WaPo: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into {Kabul]… Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

The deals…were…described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a US official.

Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.”

It’s almost like the Taliban were familiar with Afghan culture and society! It’s clear that the US Military and Government sure as hell were not. Former Vice-President Cheney of Halliburton will probably need yet another heart transplant when he hears that Kabul fell without a shot fired.

It’s difficult to know whether the CIA, military, and neo-con foreign policy types involved in criticizing Biden are liars or are deluded. Do they think that America just needed a little more time on the ground in Afghanistan? Or do they know the only real alternative here was an indefinite, colonial occupation, something they know shouldn’t be politically or morally acceptable?

Inside the beltway, there are people who have devoted most of their adult lives to war in the greater Middle East. Obviously, they are going to oppose pulling out. It’s like setting their entire life’s work on fire. No one willingly admits their life’s work is a failure.

The idea that we need to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely has nothing to do with a coherent policy. It’s the neo-con ideology of American Exceptionalism: America is awesome, America kicks ass, America can’t fail, it can only be failed by Biden.

In this case, our “Exceptionalism” as practiced by neo-cons like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Fred Kagan, has two parts: First, our mission is to save the world. Second, the Afghans are the reason we couldn’t save the world. Both are opposite sides of the same imperialistic coin of exceptionalism. Why are the Afghans responsible for the unraveling of our illusions? And, isn’t Afghanistan a part of our illusion?

Charlie Pierce says of the neo-cons:

“None of those people have produced an adequate answer to the question of what the hell we were doing there, and what the hell we would do there for the next 10, 20, or 50 years. Sooner or later, we have to learn the lessons of history, because we’ve been deaf to them for so long. In Vietnam, we should’ve learned that the only people who really want the places in which we choose to make war are the people who live there.”

We’ve made a long series of bad decisions. First, we should have left Afghanistan after we helped the Northern Alliance beat the (then unpopular) Taliban. Instead, Bush II experimented with nation-building, drafting a constitution that created a strong central government in a country that is ruled locally. We then installed a puppet regime.

Now, we’re surprised that most people don’t like being told what to do by outsiders.

We should have seen that the Afghan government we created would collapse if we left. The particulars, especially just how quickly it ended may be a surprise, but the error can be measured in weeks, not months. And that’s not a big estimation error in a 20-year war.

There’s a lot of hindsight bias among the neo-cons and some Republicans who are saying Biden “lost Afghanistan”. It was lost years ago. The same scenario could have played out whether Bush, Obama or Trump were leading the withdrawal.

What does it say about Afghanistan, if the government and the civilian military we supported with $ trillions would only stay in place if we kept our military there as an occupying force?

The faux outrage at Biden losing Afghanistan needs to be prioritized on the list of what really matters in America today (in no order):

Afghanistan
Our mediocre education system
The Covid pandemic
Fraying social cohesion
Climate change: forest fires/drought
Vote suppression
Domestic terrorism
Economic inequality
Media lies/disinformation
White supremacy and racism

Wrongo knows which one is his lowest priority. What priority is Afghanistan for you?

Now, our mission is clear: hold the Kabul airport as long as possible and get ALL US citizens and as many Afghan partners out as we can. Along with getting out the thousands of troops we sent in the last few days to secure the airport.

The scenes of chaos at the Kabul airport raises a question of whether we should have abandoned the Bagram Air Base on July 1. It’s farther from Kabul and more difficult to defend, but we probably wouldn’t be seeing its runways swarming with Afghans if we were departing from there.

We can debate the rest later.

Lost in the discussion is the pointless tragedy of our soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for what? Listen to Eric B. & Rakim, a hip-hop duo from NYC, perform their 1992 rap, “Casualties Of War”. They were rapping about Desert Storm, but Rakim was also predicting the future:

Sample lyric:

Cause I got a family that waits for my return
To get back home is my main concern
I’ma get back to New York in one piece
but I’m bent in the sand that is hot as the city streets
Sky lights up like fireworks blind me
Bullets, whistlin over my head remind me…
President Bush said attack
Flashback to Nam, I might not make it back
Half of my platoon came home in coffins…buried in the Storm In bits and pieces…ain’t no way I’m going back to war
When I don’t know who or what I’m fighting for

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Deferred Maintenance is America’s Exceptionalism

The Daily Escape:

West Cornwall Covered Bridge, West Cornwall, CT – photo by Juergen Roth Photography. The 172’ bridge spans the Housatonic River.

America runs on deferred maintenance. We won’t do a thing today that can be put off for another day, another year, or several years. The ongoing disaster of the collapsed condo at Champlain Towers South in Florida is a perfect metaphor for America. A quick look at some details is instructive.

The NYT had a story about the conflicts among residents and the Champlain Towers South condo board. A report indicated that major repairs were needed to maintain the structural integrity of the building. But the repairs weren’t popular with the residents: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Steve Rosenthal, 72, a restaurant advertising executive, went to the gym in the building nearly every day. Afterward, he would stop at the pool, where he could see a crack on a third-floor balcony that he described as ‘atrocious.’ But he called the $135,000 assessment [to fix the problems] on his condo, a corner unit with double balconies, a ‘second mortgage’.

‘It’s an upscale building, but it’s not the Ritz or the Four Seasons….The people that live [here]…aren’t Rockefellers or Rothschilds. We’re upper middle class, I guess, and a lot of us are retired’….When a neighbor knocked on his door, 705, with a petition against the assessment, Mr. Rosenthal signed it. The first payment was due on July 1.”

BTW, Rosenthal survived the condo collapse. He was rescued from the intact part of the collapsed building, and he’s staying in a Residence Inn a few blocks away. Worse, Rosenthal has filed a lawsuit against the condo board for negligence and against the property for shoddy construction!

America is filled with assholes like Rosenthal. They’ve taken over – they dominate our politics (I’m talking to you Mitch). They dole out promotions to other assholes. They punish anyone who tries to do the right thing. They tell us how to vote, and who to love. (Hat tip: Jessica Wildfire)

Their attitude that “This seems bad, but if I have to pay to fix it, count me out” is the position of many, many Americans, regardless of what kind of deferred maintenance is being considered. Fixing our roads? Sorry, no gas tax increases. Better school buildings? Property taxes are too damn high. Better Internet? Why? Better health insurance? Socialism!

DC politics is infested with a “we can’t afford this” knee-jerk reaction whenever the subject of dealing with America’s deferred maintenance is on the table. And of course, that’s the thinking that deferred the maintenance in the first place.

It’s particularly bad when the subject is how to deal with climate change. What incentives are there to alter behavior to prevent change that will have most of its effects after 2050? The answer is none, except for an intangible feeling that you’ve done the right thing for posterity.

Current stakeholders (regardless of whether they have a stake in a property, a city, or the entire country), willingly defer maintenance to the next generation of stakeholders, when it will be much, much more expensive. Eventually, the problem can’t be remedied. Like In the Florida condo, that’s when things start collapsing, and people start dying.

Perhaps someone should have said to the condo residents: “You can probably play Russian roulette without dying, but do you really like your odds?”

There was a 1981 ad by Fram Oil Filters  that had the tag line: “pay me now or, pay me later.” Imagine, accountability and wisdom brought to you by Madison Avenue! When we move from car maintenance to the country, the answer is you’ll pay WAY more later. We’ve been blowing off serious repair and replacement of our infrastructure for decades.

We’ve blown off making sure that all Americans have safe bridges and roads.

We’ve blown off making sure that all Americans have basic health insurance.

We’ve blown off immigration reform.

We’ve blown off gun sanity.

We’re blowing off moving from fossil fuels to renewables.

Do you see the parallel in how we respond to these issues? First, there’s a warning, then there’s evidence, followed by denial, delay, and ultimately, disaster. There’s no problem, if there is a problem, it’s too expensive to fix. Maybe we can fix it in a few years, eventually followed by incalculable cost and misery.

We’re the only rich country that kicks the can down the road on anything that’s politically difficult. You know that’s true if you’ve been to an airport in China or Europe. If you’ve taken public transit in Europe or Hong Kong. If you’ve seen the ports in Rotterdam or in Asia.

Time to kill all the assholes.

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Monday Wake Up Call – March 29, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Ranch land near Reno NV – February 2021 photo by Patrick Lanzing

The Conversation has an interesting article by Tony Kevin from Australian National University, that analyzes the Biden administration’s early missteps with both China and Russia. He says that:

“In two dramatic, televised moments, US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have changed the dynamics between their countries perhaps irrevocably.”

Kevin quotes Putin saying the terms of working with the US have changed:

“Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are different people. We have a different genetic, cultural, and moral code. But we know how to defend our own interests. And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.”

Turning to China and the initial meeting disaster, Kevin says that the Chinese feel similarly:

“Putin’s…statement is remarkably similar to the equally firm public statements made by senior Chinese diplomats to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Alaska last week.”

He quotes Yang Jiechi, Chinese Communist Party foreign affairs chief:

“The US does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. The US uses its military force and financial hegemony to carry out long-arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries. It abuses so-called notions of national security to obstruct normal trade exchanges, and to incite some countries to attack China.”

Jiechi said the US had no right to push its own version of democracy when it was dealing with so much discontent and human rights problems at home.

Biden’s campaign pitch was that his leadership would put the adults back in charge of foreign policy. But it’s hard to ignore Biden’s slap at Putin (calling him a killer), followed by the train wreck of the China summit in Alaska. Biden’s team is accomplishing the difficult task of making Trump look… er, not terrible.

Could it be that the world is moving on? That our competitors and friends no longer buy the “America is a force for good” story? After all, we’re showing them the worst of American values, by trying to overturn an election, by curtailing voting rights, and by refusing to do anything about mass shootings or the growing poverty that are endemic in the US.

The Guardian reports that we’ve fallen by 11 points in the latest report by democracy watchdog, Freedom House. We’re now below Argentina and Mongolia, and on a par with  Panama, Romania and Croatia!

Dismounting from our high horse will be difficult for the US, but do we have a choice? The world is suddenly signaling strongly that they’ve had enough of American faux exceptionalism and the belligerence we display when we engage with other nations.

Kevin concludes that we’re in a new kind of Cold War, not based on ideology like the original Cold War, but now it’s a war for international legitimacy. Moreover, Kevin adds:

“The two powers are also showing they are increasingly comfortable working together as close partners, if not yet military allies. They will step up their cooperation in areas where they have mutual interests and the development of alternatives to the Western-dominated trade and payments systems.”

The distribution of global power is changing. What matters now is the growing self-confidence of these two nations, particularly in comparison to what they see as a clearly weakened US. In essence, Russia and China are sending Biden a message:

“Don’t judge us or try to change us. Those days are over.”

Kevin concludes:

“The global balance of power is shifting, and for many nations, the smart money may be moving to Russia and China.”

Time to wake up America! It’s again becoming a multi-polar world. We can’t know what the outcome of this competition will be. But we seem to be at one of those points in history where things can take a very sharp and irreversible turn in a new direction.

These factors have been brewing for years. We’re witnessing a Russia/China strategic alliance which will force us and other countries to make some very hard choices about which side of the fence they’re on. To help you wake up, listen to the Foo Fighters newest, “Waiting on a War”:

Sample Lyrics:

I’ve been waiting on a war since I was young

Since I was a little boy with a toy gun

Never really wanted to be number one

Just wanted to love everyone

Here’s Dave Grohl’s motivation for writing the tune:

“Last fall, as I was driving my daughter to school, she turned to me and asked, ​‘Daddy, is there going to be a war?’ My heart sank as I realized that she was now living under the same dark cloud that I had felt 40 years ago. Every day waiting for the sky to fall. Is there more to this than that? Is there more to this than just waiting on a war? Because I need more. We all do. This song was written for my daughter, Harper, who deserves a future, just as every child does.”

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Monday Wake Up Call – What’s Next Edition

The Daily Escape:

Chamisa plants near Abiquiu, NM – photo by zuzofthewolves

(Publishing of daily COVID-19 data is on hold while Wrongo tries to understand inconsistencies in the data)

Trump isn’t wrong to begin thinking about what comes next. At some point, we will again poke our heads out of our burrows, and feel the warmth of sunlight. We’ll attempt to resume the life we had before the virus struck. There are two risks in this: First, will we be back in the swing of things too soon? And second, what should we demand be different, given what the nation has experienced?

In Trump’s view the answer is simple. He wants most people back to work in time to have a robust economy come Election Day. He’s targeted May 1st as the start date for his governor buddies to begin revitalizing the economy.

Once again, the Trump administration is showing itself to be utterly incapable of dealing with this crisis.

He’s moving the country to re-open, despite warnings from public health officials and from most state governors. Here’s a germane comment on Wrongo’s Saturday’s column by long-time blog reader Terry McKenna:

“We really know so little. To begin with, we don’t know how the virus spreads. We are learning but that’s all. In the beginning, we guessed wrong that it was not spread by healthy (asymptomatic) persons. Doctors disagree over the size of the droplets that carry the virus. So we are almost like we were before we had the germ theory where all we can do it isolate.

Also “test” is a simplistic word. Which test? We need a test that tells a clinician that someone had the virus in his system, and a test with a fast result is essential. But a negative test means little, especially in a healthy (asymptomatic) person, because in the absence of a vaccine, that person could be infected next week or next month. So we need a test of antibodies – but even still, we don’t know how long immunity lasts.

And then we have the notion that the president can order the country back to work. Even if a business reopens, who will come? And yes, I know someone will, but imagine the NY Mets having their opening day May 15. Will anyone show up? And if they do, will we see a spike in sickness a few weeks later?

We need time for the science to do its work. We may get lucky, viruses do became less virulent over time (sometimes to re-emerge with vigor).”

A partial re-opening of those portions of the economy that are now shuttered is a risk both to the workers, and to the returning customers. Terry is right to ask if we’ll see a spike in sickness a few weeks later, and if we do, what will be Trump’s plan then?

Broadening out our view, many are starting to think about what needs to be different post-pandemic. As we emerge from this crisis, we have a rare opportunity to focus on change: Do we want a Star Trek, or Blade Runner future? A utopian, or a dystopian one?

As Viet Thanh Nguyen said in the NYT:

“Our real enemy is not the virus but our response to the virus — a response that has been degraded and deformed by the structural inequalities of our society.”

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild for tomorrow. Or will we just prop up the economic and political process that has given us today’s problems? As an example, if we don’t want sick and contagious people trying to go to work, America must have paid sick leave.

During the lead up to passing the CARES Act, Democrats in Congress recognized this, but at the behest of business lobbies, the Act exempted 80% of all workers, including all those working at firms with over 500 employees AND those working at firms with under 50 employees!

Here’s an illuminating chart:

And in America, add $600 for four months for 20% of our workers. This is post-Reagan America. Assistance to the poor and working class is given grudgingly, and with strings attached. The rich and corporations are showered in subsidies since they are too virtuous and important to let fail. MAGA really means “Make Americans Grovel Again”.

What has to die after Covid-19 is the myth that America is the best country on earth. We’re not as healthy as we thought we were. The symptoms — racial and economic inequality, callousness and selfishness, have been covered up by our unquestioned acceptance of American Exceptionalism.

We’ve lost our right to that view, despite the many, many small acts of heroism every day by health workers and all the “essential” hourly workers who face becoming infected every day.

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Saturday Soother – June 17, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Fuji, Japan- photo by Takashi Yasui

The news and the pundits are non-stop in their analysis of the shooting in DC that critically wounded Republican Congressman Steve Scalise and 3 others. Much has been written, but Wrongo likes what Charlie Pierce wrote the best:

Violence doesn’t “intrude” on everyday life in America. Violence is a part of everyday life in America. A little more than a week ago, five people were shot to death in warehouse in Orlando. Is a warehouse in Orlando less innocent than a Virginia ballfield? Is a disgruntled worker taking his mad vengeance less of a demonstration of a country unhinged than a home-inspection specialist who fried his brain over politics? Is somebody who wounds over politics a worse murderer than someone who kills because he got fired? I admire the ability of anyone who can make that measured a moral choice.

On the whole, people shouldn’t get shot. They shouldn’t get shot in the streets. They shouldn’t get shot in school. They shouldn’t get shot in the workplace. They shouldn’t get shot while carrying snack food in the “wrong” neighborhood, and they shouldn’t get shot while they’re trying to surrender. They shouldn’t get shot while dancing in a nightclub. And they shouldn’t get shot on the ballfield on a spring morning.

In the main, one victim is not more “innocent”—and, thus, of more value—than any other one. Their occupation shouldn’t matter. Their politics shouldn’t matter. There is a violence inherent in the country’s history and there is a wildness present in its soul and, on occasion, both of these surface more clearly than is usual. Technology has made the violence more lethal and the wildness more general. The uniquely American conflation of innocence with hubris is a luxury we can no longer afford.

OTOH, according to Heather Digby Parton:

Meanwhile, 93 people on average are shot and killed every day in America, many of them in incidents involving multiple victims. More than 100,000 people are struck by bullets every year. President Donald Trump was right to speak about “carnage” in America in his inaugural address. He just didn’t acknowledge that the carnage is from gun violence. According to the gun safety website The Trace:

Using data from the World Health Organization, researchers found that America accounted for 82 percent of all firearm deaths among 23 comparable nations in 2010. Ninety percent of women killed by guns in the study were in the U.S., as were 91 percent of children under 15.

There is no solution for this that will fly politically in this country. The gun-toter, and the no guns crowds are already spinning their version of the narrative to the crowd that sits in the pews directly in front of them.

America just has to accept that this is perhaps the most concrete way in which America is exceptional, and, it.just.sucks.

It is difficult to get to a soothing place on this Saturday, with all that has happened. Also, my brother died a year ago this week. Back in the late 1970’s he was (very) down on his luck, and each weekend, he would come to visit Ms. Right and me to get fattened up for the coming week. He would walk into the house, grab the album “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and play its opening track, “Funeral for a Friend”. There would be no talking until 11 minutes later when it ended:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 4, 2015

Quite the week. Another mass shooting, Kim Davis said she met the Pope, Russia drops bombs in Syria, and we dodge another government shut-down.

The shooting in Oregon was a huge tragedy, but the Right says the shooter was a member of a “well-regulated militia”, so there is nothing we can do:

COW Moar Gunz

When He heard about the Kim Davis meeting, God tweeted:

Kim Davis meets Pope

Despite the hype by Ms. Davis’ camp, the Vatican said:

The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects…

We avoided the shut-down, but expect to see it again in December:

COW Pavlov's Elephant

Can cooler heads prevail in the GOP? That’s a no-Boehner:

COW No-Boehner

The foreign policy conversation in the US remains fixed on the idea that we can dictate terms to whomever we want, where ever we want, on whatever timetable we want. And we love, love the idea of regime change:

COW Regeime Change

With the Planned Parenthood hearings, the GOP made its real position clear:

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

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Monday Wake-up Call – February 9, 2015

Today’s wake-up is for people in Vermont. Most of us know that Latin is considered to be a dead language, because it is taught in few schools, and very few of those are public schools. Thus, very few people can read it, and, aside from a few Roman Catholic priests, almost one speaks it.

In an interesting cultural study of America’s rural North East, an eighth grader in Vermont thought it would be a good idea for the state to adopt a Latin motto, “Stella quarta decima fulgeat” (“May the fourteenth star shine bright”).

You may not know that Vermont entered the union as the 14th state.

A Vermont Republican state Senator, Joe Benning, introduced legislation recommending that Vermont adopt the eighth grader’s idea as a motto. Things got stupid in a hurry, as indignant Vermonters took to the Twitter machine and the Internets. Here are a few samples:

I thought Vermont was American not Latin? Does any Latin places have American mottos?

ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!! Sick and tired of that crap, they have their own countries

How do you say idiotic senator in Spanish? I’d settle for “deport illegals” in Spanish as a backup motto

Hell No! This is America, not Latin America. When in Rome do as the Romans do!

So if they think Latin is the language of Latinos, what do they think Pig Latin is? The language spoken by Latino police? While it’s safe to say that the number of Vermonters who can’t tell Latin from Latino are a minority, it’s just sad that they feel emboldened to advertise their ignorance online.

The issue isn’t “just” that there are some people who do not know Latin. More disturbing is that people don’t even know there IS a language called Latin, and because of their anger, or their sense of American Exceptionalism, they make extremist, xenophobic statements.

Oh, and have they never heard of “E Pluribus Unum”?

This leads straight to your Monday musical wake-up song, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in The Wall, Pt. 2”, from their album, “The Wall“. PF’s biggest mainstream success, it was written by PF’s lead vocalist, Roger Waters. ABITW Pt. 2 is a protest song against rigid schooling and boarding schools in the UK. It was the band’s only number-one hit in the United Kingdom, and the US. The song talks about how the student had a personal wall separating him from the rest of the world, how the teachers were just another brick in the wall. ABINTW Pt. 2 became a protest song for certain South African students in 1980 during the Apartheid regime, and the song was subsequently banned in South Africa.

Here, for Vermonters who have never heard of the Latin language, is the “We Don’t Need no Education” clip from “Another Brick in The Wall”:

 

 

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