Why America Failed to Beat Covid-19 in One Word: Trump

The myth of American exceptionalism drives me to distraction.  Almost every nation sees itself as exceptional in some ways and history is littered with former empires and so-called great powers that disappeared or seen their glory days fade away.  Now, in the age of a worldwide pandemic, America has shown itself to be exceptional in the worse way possible: the pandemic is out of control in many states and Americans are banned from traveling to most parts of the world. Europe, Canada, Mexico, most of the Caribbean region, including the Bahamas, will not allow Americans to visit.  America finds itself somewhere between a laughing stock and an object of pity.  How did this happen?  One word - actually, one name - explains it all: Trump.  A column in the New York Times compares the US response to that of Italy, a country often viewed by many as dysfunctional, especially its bureaucracy, and the comparison is damning.   Of course, besides Trump, America has another huge negative working against it: the fake news outlets of the far right and "conservatives" who reject science and knowledge and blindly support the con-artist in the White House.  Here are column highlights:

A few days ago The Times published a long, damning article about how the Trump administration managed to fail so completely in responding to the coronavirus. Much of the content confirmed what anyone following the debacle suspected. One thing I didn’t see coming, however, was the apparently central role played by Italy’s experience.

Italy, you see, was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track.

We didn’t. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy’s success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy’s current death rate is less than a 10th of America’s.

Donald Trump keeps boasting that we’ve had the best coronavirus response in the world, and some credulous supporters may actually believe him, my guess is that many people are aware that our handling of the virus has fallen tragically short compared with, say, that of Germany. It may not seem surprising, however, that German discipline and competence have paid off (although we used to think that we were better prepared than anyone else to deal with a pandemic). But how can America be doing so much worse than Italy?

For all its problems, Italy is a serious and sophisticated country, not a comic-opera stage set. Still, Italy entered this pandemic with major disadvantages compared with the United States.

Unfavorable demography and economic troubles are also major Italian disadvantages. The ratio of seniors to working-age adults is the highest in the Western world. Italy’s growth record is deeply disappointing: Per capita G.D.P. has stagnated for two decades.

When it came to dealing with Covid-19, however, all these Italian disadvantages were outweighed by one huge advantage: Italy wasn’t burdened with America’s disastrous leadership.

Italy quickly moved to do what was necessary to deal with the coronavirus. It instituted a very severe lockdown, and kept to it. Government aid helped sustain workers and businesses through the lockdown. The safety net had holes in it, but top officials tried to make it work; in a supreme case of non-Trumpism, the prime minister even apologized for delays in aid.

And, crucially, Italy crushed the curve: It kept the lockdown in place until cases were relatively few, and it was cautious about reopening.

America could have followed the same path. . . . But the Trump administration and its allies pushed for rapid reopening, ignoring warnings from epidemiologists. Because we didn’t do what Italy did, we didn’t crush the curve; quite the opposite. Matters were made worse by pathological opposition to things like wearing masks, the way even obvious precautions became battlegrounds in the culture wars.

So cases and then deaths surged. Even the promised economic payoff from rapid, what-me-worry reopening was a mirage

Incredibly, Trump and his allies seem to have given no thought at all about what to do if the overwhelming view of experts was right, and their gamble on ignoring the coronavirus didn’t pan out. A miraculous boom was Plan A; there was no Plan B.

[T]ens of millions of workers are about to lose crucial unemployment benefits, and Republicans haven’t even settled on a bad response. On Wednesday Senate Republicans floated the idea of reducing supplemental benefits from $600 a week to just $100, which would spell disaster for many families.

For someone like Trump, all this must be humiliating — or would be if anyone dared tell him about it. After three and a half years of Making America Great Again, we’ve become a pathetic figure on the world stage, a cautionary tale about pride going before a fall.

These days Americans can only envy Italy’s success in weathering the coronavirus, its rapid return to a kind of normalcy that is a distant dream in a nation that used to congratulate itself for its can-do culture. Italy is often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”; what does that make us?

Do Americans Understand How Badly They’re Doing?

The 4th of July holiday is just past us and many Americans remain  lost in the myth of American exceptionalism as the much of the nation remains in the grip of a pandemic that other nations appear to have brought under control.  Yes, America is exceptional alright, but not in a good way.  Meanwhile I see some Facebook friends struggle to continue close their eyes to the reality that the occupant of the White House has failed them miserably - as have boot-licking Republican governors.  These individuals seemingly refuse to believe that their leaders are not acting in the interests of citizens, but rather out of narcissism in the case of Trump, and fear in the case of self-prostituting Republicans.  One friend posted recently about how great powers have fallen over the centuries and then wondered if the United States was following this path. My response back would be, yes it is and that Trump, rather than "making America great again" has accelerated the nation's decline.  One has to wonder when the majority of Americans will open their eyes to this unpleasant reality.  A piece in The Atlantic by an American living in France looks at this question.  Here are article excerpts:

I returned to Paris with my family three months after President Emmanuel Macron had ordered one of the world’s most aggressive national quarantines, and one month after France had begun to ease itself out of it. When we exited the Gare Montparnasse into the late-spring glare, after a season tucked away in a rural village with more cows than people as neighbors, it was jarring to be thrust back into the world as we’d previously known it, to see those café terraces overflowing again with smiling faces.

The city had been culled of its tourists, though it was bustling with inhabitants basking in their reclaimed freedom. Half at most wore masks; the other half evinced indifference. We were in the midst of a crisis, I complained to my wife. Why were so many people unable to maintain even minimal discipline?

Glued as I am to the news from the U.S.—where I was born and grew up and travel frequently— I couldn’t shake the feeling that France was also opening up recklessly early. But I was wrong to worry. As Donald Trump’s America continues to shatter records for daily infections, France, like most other developed nations and even some undeveloped ones, seems to have beat back the virus.

The numbers are not ambiguous. From a peak of 7,581 new cases across the country on March 31, and with a death toll now just below 30,000—at one point the world’s fourth highest—there were just 526 new cases on June 13, the day we masked ourselves and took the train back to Paris. The caseload continues to be small and manageable.

America, however, is an utter disaster. Texas, Florida, and Arizona are the newest hubs of contagion, having apparently learned nothing from the other countries and states that previously experienced surges in cases. I stared at my phone in disbelief when the musician Rosanne Cash wrote on Twitter that her daughter had been called a “liberal pussy!” in Nashville for wearing a mask to buy groceries.

That insult succinctly conveys the crux of the problem. American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound.

On June 26, a day when the U.S. notched some 45,000 new cases—how’s that for “American carnage”?—the European Union announced that it would loosen some travel restrictions but extend its ban on visitors from the United States and other hot-spot nations. On Tuesday, it confirmed that remarkable and deeply humiliating decision, a clear message that in pandemic management, the EU believes that the United States is no better than Russia and Brazil—autocrat-run public-health disasters—and that American tourists would pose a dire threat to the hard-won stability our lockdown has earned us. So much for the myth that the American political system and way of life are a model for the world.

We didn’t stay long in the city. Although the chance of contagion in Paris is minimal, the thought of unnecessary risk unnerved me, and so we left again for another round of self-imposed confinement. But this was a choice. I think of my mother and father trapped in New Jersey, in their 70s and 80s, respectively, and at the mercy of a society that is failing extravagantly to protect them. And it is failing to protect them not from some omnipotent enemy—as we believed in March and perhaps even as late as April—but from a tough and dangerous foe that many other societies have wrestled into submission.

I am infuriated. I am also reminded once again of the degree to which so many other countries deliver what is, in real terms, a palpably higher quality of life by any number of self-evident measures.

America is my home, and I have not emigrated. I have always found the truest expression of my situation in James Baldwin’s label of “transatlantic commuter.” I have lived in France off and on since the early 2000s, and it has been instructive over the decades to glimpse America’s stature reflected back to me through the eyes of a quasi-foreigner. If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?

London: Dinner and "Tina" the Musical

With Hurricane Florence seemingly no longer a major threat to Hampton Roads our mood in London has been a bit more cheery.  This evening we met friends who reside in London part of the year who joined us and our travel companions for dinner at The Delauney - a beautiful old style restaurant and then saw the musical "Tina" based on the life of Tina Turner at the Aldwych Theater.  Dinner was wonderful and it was nice catching up with our London friends.  As for the show Tina, we thought it was wonderful. It will be headed to Broadway shortly.  We highly recommend both the restaurant and the show.

PS. Of added intrest, the lead actress in the show, Adrienne Warren, is from Hampton Roads and attended the Governor's School for the Performing Arts. 

Terrorism Makes Foreign Travel an Imperative not a Luxury

Paris - 2015.

While more and more Americans are traveling abroad and per a relatively recent BBC article indicates that roughly 50% of Americans now have passports, the percentage is far lower than for many Europeans.  In the UK, for example, only 17% of British citizens do not have passports. The consequence, in my view, is that far too many Americans have less empathy for others than their European counterparts.  Indeed, in the age of Trump, his base doesn't even have empathy for broad segments of other Americans, which poisons both the social and political reality in America.  A piece in Salon  argues that today it is more important than ever for Americans and others to travel abroad.  It lessens the "us v. them" mindset so favored by the far right and, in my view, makes one understand that there are equally legitimate other perspectives.  In September, the husband and I will be in Paris - perhaps my favorite city in the world - for a week, followed by a week in London traveling with friends. Both are cities that have suffered terrorist attacks. We will be staying in apartments rather than hotels and will immerse ourselves in experiencing the people as well as the sights. Here are excerpts from Salon: 

As attacks destroy lives around the world in an endless loop it's easy to grow numb. Watching the aftermath of yet another bombing unfold on a little screen, maybe we'll change our Facebook profile photo or join a hashtag movement. But do we feel anything? Maybe sympathy, or, if it's particularly awful by the new and ever steeper scale of such things, we feel a little horror. It's surreal, far away, not related to us. Unless, that is, we've been there.

This probably isn't unusual, but I've been to multiple places that were later attacked by terrorists. First was a restaurant overlooking Marrakech's Djemaa El Fna square. . . . Two years later I saw the news: A bomb attack destroyed the restaurant and killed 15 people, most of them tourists.

Bookending that trip we strolled Las Ramblas in Barcelona. Three years later, men with guns and bombs killed dozens and injured hundreds at the airport. Four years later (nearly to the day), terrorists plowed through crowds in the busy Barcelona promenade, killing more than a dozen people and injuring at least a hundred.

And in the fall of 2015 I sat down to a solo dinner at Le Petit Cambodge in Paris. Paris is the home of my heart, and days after my meal there the news broke: as part of their concerted attacks across the city, terrorists had transformed the bright and happy place into a bloodbath.

Unlike when I hear a news report of a faraway tragedy, these instances — but most especially the one in Paris — struck hard. . . . I could imagine — in vivid color — the men with assault rifles, and the people laughing and eating and loving life one moment and in a waking nightmare the next. Not only because it could have  been me, but because these were people I knew, no matter how fleetingly.

What did I learn? In short: Absolutely, those connections matter. And maybe far less interaction is needed  than we'd ever think. “About all you need is that minute where you're waiting for a bus,” Professor Goodman said.

He offered a brief primer. The foundations of a successful relationship according to social science, he explained, boil down to honesty, acceptance and empathy. And in some situations, those things can happen in moments.

When we travel, Goodman noted, the usual process of forming relationships is often sped up. (Think of the things you may have overshared with a stranger on a plane!) And when you're a “foreigner,” he pointed out, you give yourself permission to ask questions. So at a bus stop or in a restaurant far from home you can form what we could call a micro-relationship.

Why would that little bit of connection that has some of the elements of a long important relationship, why did that stick in your mind? Because it begins to touch on these basic human elements that we need to survive,” Goodman said. Where we don't have answers, he said, is why. “Science doesn't quite know why it's so important to us to have the experience to be understood.”

But the fact remains that it is crucial to us as humans. And while some may urge that we stay home where we're safe (as if that were true), I want to travel more than ever. For every micro-relationship two people from different parts of the globe can form, that's an added dimension to the bond holding all of us together. Maybe a bond as ephemeral as a spiderweb, but maybe as strong, as well. And the more that hate tears us apart, the more of those bonds we need if we're to keep surviving.

As for my horror-overlaid memories of Le Petit Cambodge, I had to rewrite them. In the aftermath of the attacks I vowed I wouldn't travel anywhere else until I could revisit the restaurant. And I didn't. A year and a half later an assignment took me to France, beginning with a night in Paris. . . . . I arrived at  Le Petit Cambodge first. Now, this trip, it was spring and daylight, not fall and dark. Every seat along the sidewalk was taken, every diner as unattainably chic as ever.

The horror didn't disappear, exactly. But it faded to something like the ghost of an imprint left on tracing paper as Agnès and I ate and talked of normal things — well, as normal as buying a castle, as she'd just done, can be. She asked for a to-go container, something I'd never have the nerve to do in Paris, but she wanted leftovers for the chickens at her new place in the country. Her exchange with the waitress was in French, and I don't remember it. I hope she doesn't have to.

It saddens me that so many Americans lack a shred of empathy for others and cannot see beyond the color of one's skin, one's country of origin, one's native language or one's sexual orientation.  In the age of Trump and his pandering to Christofascists, all of us must strive to oppose this toxicity.