Will Surviving a Plague End Trumpism?

No living native Americans have ever lived through an experience like the nation now faces. 9-11 was a national trauma, but its impacts were short term for most of the country save New York City first and foremost, and around the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to a lesser extent.  The questions that some are asking are (i) will this change America's divided state, and (ii) will it end Trumpism and its focus on an "us versus them" mentality.   A piece in Politico looks at these questions as does a column in New York Magazine by Andrew Sullivan.  Here is a taste from the optimistic piece in Politico piece: 

[N]o matter how the coronavirus pandemic passes, or how quickly, there is likely in these strange housebound weeks a new political epoch being born.

Trumpism as a style is defined not just by boasting and bluster; his triumphalism depends on projecting certitude. The president early on acted as if he could indeed create reality by proclamation, when he assured the public that U.S. infections would soon be down to zero.

Only in recent days, as the possibility of widespread domestic disease mounts, has Trump acknowledged imprecision—the fragmentary nature of our understanding of how far the virus has spread, how effective efforts to blunt its impact will be, or when these efforts will be deemed sufficient.

The coronavirus pandemic does not remotely have the cataclysmic shock and violence of 9/11. For many people, however, the virus’ actual day-in, day-out impact will be more pervasive. 9-11 was followed by a period, which turned out to be short-lived, of national connection and goodwill. Trump, who has made mockery and castigation of opponents his signature, surely did not conjure fuzzy feelings from many quarters with his appeal at the White House on Wednesday that, “We are all in this together.”

Yet the pandemic has a logic that transcends politics and personal feeling. Never mind how one feels about Trump. Never mind how we feel about one another. The reality of a dangerous virus is that we are all in this together.

Andrew Sullivan's piece is lengthier and notes among other things that much of America's medical supplies come from China - the nation Trump is seeking to blame for his administrations failure to prepare for a pandemic.  It also looks at how the pandemic could either strengthen Trump - especially among his cult followers - or be his undoing.  It might also force Americans to reassess where American society had descended.  Which direction will prevail is yet to be seen.  Here are column highlights:

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, just as so many gay men and many others were. You come face-to-face with mortality and the randomness of fate, and you are changed. You have a choice: to submit to fear and go under, or to live with the virus and do what you can. And the living with it, while fighting it, is what changes you over time; it requires more than a little nerve and more than a little steel. Plague living dispenses with the unnecessary, lays bare whom you can trust and whom you can’t, and also reveals what matters. Plagues destroy so much — but through the devastation, they can also rebuild and renew. . . . . Like wars, plagues can make us see where we are, shake us into a new understanding of the world, reshape our priorities, and help us judge what really matters and what actually doesn’t. Testing kits matter. Twitter not so much. Politically, who knows? Much will depend on the skills of the politicians grasping this moment for their various ends. But a lot is at stake, and 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. 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. 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. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel once put it. And if a public-health catastrophe doesn’t bring home the need for effective universal health care, what could? This virus is also an opportunity for the left to move away from its unpopular woke identity obsessions toward a case for structural economic change fitting for the scale of the epidemic. For the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be spending much, much more time at home, or communicating entirely virtually. There will abruptly be less work to do, and less money coming in, and marriages under the acute stress of unending cohabitation. We will retreat into our online worlds, where viruses only affect computers, and withdraw from our neighbors when we could do with coming together. Good will happen too. Surely it will. The silence in the streets portends something new. The other day, I realized I’d been texting a lot less and calling a lot more. I wanted to make sure my friends and family were okay, and I needed to see their faces and hear their voices to be reassured. As we withdraw from each other in the flesh, we may begin to appreciate better what we had until so recently: friendship and love made manifest by being together, simple gifts like a shared joint, a head resting on your shoulder, a hand squeezed, a toast raised. These weeks of confinement can be seen also, it seems to me, as weeks of a national retreat, a chance to reset and rethink our lives, to ponder their fragility. I learned one thing in my 20s and 30s in the AIDS epidemic: Living in a plague is just an intensified way of living. It merely unveils the radical uncertainty of life that is already here, and puts it into far sharper focus. The trick, as the great religions teach us, is counterintuitive: not to seize control, but to gain some balance and even serenity in absorbing what you can’t. . . . There may be moments in this great public silence when we learn and relearn this lesson.

Utah Senate Votes 24 to 1 to Repeal Its "No Promo Homo" Law

While most Republican controlled state legislatures are pushing to enact anti-gay legislation, Utah may become an exception.   Back in the midst of the AIDS crisis during the 1980's, many conservative states - and even some liberal states such as California - passed anti-gay laws that sought to limit if not outright ban any positive public school support for LGBT students. California struck down its anti-gay law in 20013, Now, pending the signature of Utah's governor, Utah is set to join the states that have eliminated laws that ban support for LGBT students.  Sadly at least 19 other states continue to have such laws.  The result is more bullying of LGBT students and all of the negatives that come from such bigotry.  Indeed, a spike in student suicides seems to have been the catalyst for action by the Utah legislature despite the general virulent homophobia of the Mormon Church.  (The Salt Lake Tribune has details here) Here are highlights from Salon:

Utah could become the first Republican-dominated state to strike down an anti-LGBT law that prevents teachers from addressing topics related to homosexuality in schools. Last Wednesday the state’s Senate voted 24 to 1 to repeal its “no promo homo” legislation, following a similar 68-to-1 vote in the House of Representatives. Senate Bill 196, the proposal to repeal the old law, now sits on Gov. Gary Herbert’s desk. Despite his opposition to marriage equality and belief that homosexuality is a choice, Herbert is widely expected to sign the bill.

This is the second time in three years that advocates have passed legislation in support of the LGBT community in one of the country’s most conservative states. Both houses of the Utah legislature are controlled by the GOP and more than 85 percent of representatives are Mormon, a religion with a leadership that has claimed homosexuality is a “grievous sin.”

But two years ago conservatives worked with LGBT leaders on the state’s first milestone toward equality: Utah became the only legislature with a Republican majority to pass nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community. That law, enacted in 2015, prevents people from being fired or evicted because of their gender identity or sexual orientation (although a healthy religious exemption remains for faith-based groups). The nondiscrimination effort was backed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and represents the first time that religious group has publicly expressed support for pro-LGBT legislation.

The challenge to the state’s “no promo homo” laws began last year when Equality Utah and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of three students who allege that the legislation prevented them from being treated equally in schools. One student, referred to as “John” in the suit, claimed in court briefings that a classmate “held [his] hand to a hot metal slide” and burned it. “He screamed for help and the boy finally let him go,” according to the documents. The suit asserted that because he was gender nonconforming, his teacher denied him first aid. The teacher allegedly felt that helping this injured student would send a message it was OK to be like him.  John was 5 years old.

Rather than making the school district safer for other students like John, the lawsuit alleges, the district doubled down on discriminating against gender nonconforming students. The boy wanted to go to school dressed as Cinderella for Halloween, and after John’s parents pulled him out of his classes, administrators adopted a regulation saying that no students would be allowed to dress up as someone of the opposite gender for the holiday. If they did, they would face suspension.

Williams noted that these sorts of incidents happen all the time in Utah. “Another one of our plaintiffs was simply holding hands with her girlfriend and was called into detention for public displays of affection, while her straight counterparts hold hands in the hallways all the time,” he said. “Time and again, we’re seeing ways in which queer-identified students are singled out and treated differently.”

“No promo homo” legislation was enacted in the early 1990s in the wake of the AIDS crisis. . . . conservative parts of the country either didn’t teach about homosexuality at all or students would only “learn bad things about it.”

That mindset led to the passage of extremely anti-LGBT legislation in states like Arizona, Louisiana and Mississippi, where “no promo homo” laws remain on the books. For example,  Alabama’s state code declares that “classes must emphasize, in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.” . . . 20 states have anti-LGBT language in their curriculum for kindergarten through grade 12. 

“More than 25 million children — nearly half of all school-aged children in the United States — are attending public schools in these 20 states,” Rosky wrote in the appropriately titled “Anti-Gay Curriculum Laws.” “In half of these states, teachers are affirmatively required to teach anti-gay curricula in all public schools. In the other half, teachers may choose between offering students an anti-gay curriculum or providing no health, sex, or HIV education at all.”

“These laws say to students that they are not accepted and that they are invisible.”  This is a concern for people in a state like Utah, where Rosky claimed that the youth suicide rate “has quadrupled” over the past 10 years. Mama Dragons, a support group for LGBT youth, estimated that 32 young people took their lives from November 2015 to January 2016. While no one would claim that the “no promo laws” are solely to blame for this, Rosky said eliminating the legislation would mean there would “no longer be obstacles” to teachers supporting vulnerable LGBT students — empowering them to prevent harassment and treat all students equally, no matter their orientation.

Should Utah successfully repeal its “no promo homo” law, though, with the governor’s approval, it would be the second state to do so. Blue state California, which had passed an anti-LGBT curriculum bill in 1988, struck down its legislation in 2003.  No other states have announced a repeal effort.

RIP: Debbie Reynolds, Early Hollywood AIDS Activist

Like many, I am still reeling from the deaths of Hollywood stars Carrie Fisher - she will always be my Princess Leia - and her mother Debbie Reynolds the following day. I was a dedicated fan of both of these Hollywood stars and will confess that I have seen EVERY Star Wars Movie (some multiple times - Luke Hamill was a secret major crush object) and many of Reynolds' biggest hits.  What many of the reports on Reynolds' passing have failed to reflect is that she was an early AIDS activist and was among the first Hollywood stars to support the cause of the LGBT community as the AIDS crisis progressed.  Blogger friend Karen Ocamb thankfully has a piece that corrects this omission. Here are article highlights:

The LGBT community—reeling from the deaths of icons George Michael and Carrie Fisher and AIDS Project Los Angeles co-founder Matt Redman—was stunned again Wednesday by the news that Fisher’s funny and vivacious mother, Debbie Reynolds, died the day after her daughter. Reynolds’ son Todd told the Associated Press that she died of a broken heart saying “I want to be with Carrie” moments before she died.

Reynolds’ long and tumultuous career includes the gossip scandal of 1958 when pop singer Eddie Fisher, the husband of the “girl next door,” left her for sexy actress Elizabeth Taylor. Reynolds and Taylor later reconciled their ‘50s friendship, even having dinner with her second husband and Taylor and Taylor’s next husband, Richard Burton.

Another interesting note in the less-than-six-degrees-of-separation relationship between Reynolds and Taylor is that Reynolds was an AIDS activist before Taylor. In fact, along with comedienne Joan Rivers, singer/actress Rita Moreno, and actor Robert Guillaume, Reynolds was among the first of the Hollywood celebrities to publicly appear in AIDS fundraisers at a time when HIV/AIDS was still a mysterious killer and gay men with AIDS were labeled lepers.

In 1983, Reynolds performed at an AIDS fundraiser with friend and Hollywood rival Shirley MacLaine. . . . . In his book “And The Band Played On” about the beginning of the AIDS crisis, Randy Shilts wrote about that June 23, 1983 AIDS fundraiser in San Francisco: “The fund-raiser for the National KS/AIDS foundation had all the raciness of a true San Francisco event. When host Debbie Reynolds introduced the surprise guest, actress Shirley MacLaine, with the comment that MacLaine had great legs, MacLaine responded by pulling down the top of her long strapless gown, demonstrating that she had other equipment to match. The crowd cheered enthusiastically: “We love you, Shirley!” Not to be outdone, Reynolds lifted the rear of her slitted gown to reveal her brief black underwear.

On August 28,1983, Reynolds appeared with comic Rip Taylor at the first AIDS benefit in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl.

Though Elizabeth Taylor eclipsed Reynolds in the AIDS activist/fundraising world after the AIDS death of Taylor’s dear friend Rock Hudson, Reynolds was known to always be available, without perks, to lend her name and talent to fighting the AIDS epidemic. And her fondness for the gays never disappeared either, landing the role as Kevin Kline’s mother in the satirical 1997 film “In & Out,” and playing her Emmy-nominated role as Deborah Messing’s eccentric mother in NBC’s “Will & Grace.” Her last role was Liberace’s mother in the 2013 HBO movie “Behind the Candelabra.”

Some "godly folk" and scamvangelists have attacked the memory of both Fisher and Reynolds for their "pursuit of fame and worldliness" but when it came to actually following the Gospel message they and Elizabeth Taylor walked the walk while their critics demonstrated only hate and hypocrisy.  RIP to all of them