Whence Came Covid-19?

Until just today, or yesterday, my take on where the deadly coronavirus came from conformed to the standard one: it originated in the wild animal market in Wuhan, probably by transferring naturally from bats to pangolins or some such exotic animal prized by the Chinese for food and medical purposes. But a few articles, and then a search of several more, have opened me to the possibility that perhaps the virus did originate in a lab—not intentionally released as a bioweapon, necessarily, but perhaps accidentally released by a careless worker at a viral research lab in Wuhan, of which there are two. But first, it is important to know about the kind of research that could be key to the origin of the pandemic. 

            Viral researchers have long been interested in investigating how dangerous, flu-type viruses could pass from avian species to mammals; that is, which genetic sequence might have made this possible, and particularly how this ‘transmission capability’ could be either naturally enhanced or even engineered in the laboratory. Indeed, in 2009, the U.S. government initiated a program to look for viruses that can cross from animals to humans, and funded this project it called PREDICT to work with labs in some thirty-one countries, all under the auspices of USAID—the U.S. Agency for International Development. A major breakthrough came in 2011 or so, when Ron Fouchier, a researcher at Erasmus University in Holland, wondering about what would be required for a bird virus to mutate into a plague virus for humans, developed a technique to infect ferrets with an avian flu virus, and then pass it through other ferrets. Why ferrets? Because they respond much like humans: if a virus could jump between ferrets, it was likely to be able to jump between humans as well. Fouchier passed the virus through ten ferrets, the virus slightly mutating each time, until he noticed that ferrets in nearby cells were becoming infected, even without close contact. He drew the immediate conclusion: the virus had become highly capable of transmission in ferrets (and thereby in humans)—precisely the quality needed for a pandemic. The research process became known as “animal passage,” and it was increasingly used after that in labs far and wide. The common term for this type of virus-mutation work became gain-of-function (GOF)—in this case, the virus gaining the new function of being capable of rapid transmission in mammals.

            Now the stage was set for increased work in labs to find out everything that could be known about viruses, how they become contagious, and how they jump from animals to humans,  and then from one human to another—all valuable in possibly heading off future viruses and pandemics, and, it was hoped, in creating vaccines. Security agencies were also keenly interested in knowing what nefarious regimes might be doing to weaponize viruses. But this research set off alarm bells as well. In fact, soon after Fouchier’s work was published in 2011, Obama administration officials worried that a dangerously-enhanced virus might leak from one of these labs and set off the very pandemic the research was seeking to prevent; and so, they urged that government agencies place a moratorium on such research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did just that in October of 2014, mandating a funding pause on any such research that could make flu, SARS, or MERS more transmissible, and thereby more dangerous. In the debates pro- and con-GOF that ensued, one of the most outspoken critics of such research was epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, who wrote in Nature in 2015 that the work pioneered by Fouchier entails a unique risk that a laboratory accident could spark a pandemic, killing millions (cited in Newsweek, 4.27.20). 

Despite such criticism, the moratorium was not to last. The NIH eventually sided with Fouchier, and in 2017 lifted its restrictions on GOF research. It reasoned that the risks were worth the potential gain in the preparation of anti-viral medications and preventing pandemics, and in surveillance of what potential enemies might do. This meant that after 2017, countless labs sprung up, doing the animal-passage experiments that Fouchier had pioneered to create “gain-of-function” or GOF—the mutation that would enhance the ability of deadly viruses to spread through a human population, i.e. their transmissibility. In Wuhan, the Institute of Virology was one of the labs to receive PREDICT funding from USAID for this kind of research. These labs engaged in this research in spite of the many mishaps that had already occurred, literally hundreds of them, including a release of anthrax from a U.S. lab in 2014 that exposed 84 people, and the release of a SARS virus from a lab in Bejing in 2004 that resulted in four infections and one death. Indeed, the U.S. embassy warned in January 2018 that the lab in Wuhan had serious deficiencies in trained personnel and could be primed for just such an accident. Nonetheless, the funded research in Wuhan went on, its researchers focusing especially on bats and the viruses they carry, especially in their feces, which were routinely collected and tested in the lab. In 2015, for example, the lab worked on a GOF experiment precisely designed to insert a SARS-type RNA snippet of natural virus into another coronavirus to make it capable of infecting human cells.  It is precisely this kind of research that many experts had warned about. Richard Enbright of Rutgers University, put his warning in another way, alleging that since the PREDICT program “had produced no results” useful for preventing or even combatting outbreaks, it was essentially playing with fire for no good reason. 

Still, in spite of all these warnings, the research was allowed, and also encouraged to go on. And it did. Now we have a pandemic which has taken over 200,000 lives and infected more than 3 million humans, with no end in sight. And the majority opinion among scientists seems to be that the lethal coronavirus evolved naturally, and made the transition from bats to humans via a natural mutation. This was the conclusion of both the WHO and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in January, when they originally investigated. However, in a revised report, the DIA on March 27 has now judged that the origins of the outbreak remain unknown, and now admit the possibility that the outbreak could have occurred due to an “accidental” release from the Wuhan lab, whose practices are described as “unsafe.” Still, the report dismisses the idea that the disease was genetically engineered, and the related, but by no means synonymous, idea that it was intentionally released as a bioweapon. So the DIA now admits what many critics have warned about all along—the possibility of an accidental release—but still denies the theory that Covid-19 was genetically engineered. 

This becomes a critical point. The origin of the deadly virus that is Covid-19, that is, though it could have come from the Wuhan lab, is said to have most likely originated and mutated naturally in animals. The WHO report takes this position. So does a report by Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, which performed a genetic analysis of the virus, reported March 17 in Nature Medicine. Looking for signs of “manipulation,” Andersen and his colleagues  concluded that the signs indicated it was most likely the product of “natural selection,” i.e., not from a lab. But strong objections have been raised to this point. The aforementioned infectious-disease expert Richard Enbright maintains that Andersen’s analysis does not rule out a human-manipulated “animal-passage” as the origin of the Covid-19 virus. Jonathan Eisen, evolutionary biologist at UC Davis, though he believes that the evidence favors the theory that the virus evolved from nature, admits that there is “wiggle room” for the theory that it was created in the lab using ‘animal-passage’ techniques. More telling, perhaps, is the recent opinion voiced by Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Dr. Luc Montagnier. Montagnier won the Nobel for his discovery of the HIV virus. He is firm in his opinion that the coronavirus was created in a lab by molecular biologists, and he cites evidence that the virus actually contains “genetic elements of HIV,” with which he is obviously familiar. On April 27, he said, “There’s a part which is obviously the classic virus, and there’s another mainly coming from the bat, but that part has added sequences particularly from HIV—the AIDS virus” (Dr-rath-foundation .org, 4/27/20). He added that such an addition could not have arisen naturally. He also noted that an Indian research group had, in late January, come to a similar conclusion about virus parts that had “uncanny similarities” to HIV. That research paper was then retracted, he noted, apparently due to government pressure. 

At this date, no one can really prove which of the existing theories about the origins of Covid-19 is true, or which the evidence shows cannot be true: natural origin from bats, through some intermittent carrier animal like the pangolin, or a manipulated virus created in the lab via “animal passage” experiments. One thing is certain, though. Reputable scientists have been warning for years that the GOF research in creating new, more deadly forms of virus in the lab bore the risk of creating an unstoppable pandemic—this through accidental, not intentional release of the newly-created pathogen. That dire scenario has now occurred. And though most of the world’s agencies have tried to discourage the speculation that human interference, albeit for reasons meant to be helpful to humanity, might have caused this pandemic, that awful possibility refuses to disappear. In short, it is clear that tinkering with nature, especially at the genetic level where we can now manipulate deadly pathogens, carries serious risks. These risks no longer remain speculative. They have been realized in one of the deadliest pandemics the world has ever seen. At the least, they suggest that the ‘Cassandras’ among us, experts who had reason to know whereof they spoke, should have been listened to, their counsel for caution heeded. 

They were not, it was not, and the entire world is now paying the price.

Lawrence DiStasi

Truth and Consequences

We are told, from the time we can understand language, that we should always tell the truth. Often the telling is reinforced by varying degrees of punishment for failing to tell the truth. And we are given historical examples—one of the favorites being George Washington admitting to his father that he cut down the cherry tree. ‘The father of our country became great because he told the truth from a young age,’ we are told; and so can you, is the implication. But early on, we also run into experiences that indicate that telling the truth, and being rewarded for it, is not always followed, even by the adults we respect. We see our parents shading the truth, either to get themselves off the hook, or to make a score in business, or to spare a relative’s feelings. And we ourselves see, as I did in about the third grade, that telling the truth doesn’t always work as planned. That third-grade episode stuck with me for a long time. Three of us on our way to school one morning decided to raid a watermelon field we regularly passed. My brother and I and a neighbor all spent half an hour eating watermelon, and then got to school after the bell had rung. Terrified, we all decided to lie and say we had stomach aches, and that was why we got to school late. I dutifully did this, honoring our pact. My teacher didn’t believe me, and assigned me detention. When school let out, I immediately checked with my co-conspirators, who then informed me that, contrary to our pact, they had admitted what we had done, and were let off. I was the only one who had to endure a week’s detention. Truth can thus be confusing. Telling a lie, but being true to our pact, I got punished. For the others, telling the truth, but lying with respect to our pact, got them leniency. 

            “What is truth?” Pontius Pilate replied to Jesus, after the latter had averred “For this reason I was born and have come into the world, to testify to the truth.” (John: 18:38). So here, the Son of God asserts that proclaiming the truth is the very reason He came into this world. A powerful endorsement, about as powerful as it gets. Even so, the truth teller is rare, as Hamlet tells Polonius: “To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” (II, 2). Why? Because almost everything militates against it, as I found out in third grade. We all want to protect ourselves. We’re all always looking for a way out of whatever dilemma we’ve gotten ourselves into. Julian Jaynes, in his classic 1976 work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, actually makes the case that lying and deception are at the heart of human cognitive development. This is because, he maintains, humans are the one species that can carry on long-term deception (many animals can deceive short-term, feigning injury or using camouflage to aid in hunting or hiding). Only we humans can do it because we have consciousness and language to aid memory, to remember what we’re really after and what deceptions (we have to keep them straight) we’ve utilized in that pursuit. 

            So truth is both critical and rare as this world goes. In politics, it’s even rarer; and, I would maintain, more critical in situations like the deadly one we are facing now. When thousands, millions of lives are at stake, being able to rely on the truth is the glue that holds a  culture together, a matter of life and death. Of course, this is the case in other critical situations, like war. But the thing about war is that often, being able to lie, to deceive the enemy about one’s intentions or troop strength or movements becomes more than critical. It becomes, again, a matter of success or failure in battle, of literal life and death. So commanders must know how to deceive, and be ready and willing to do so. The same is true of political leaders. It is part of the job of protecting the nation or state to have the capacity to deceive, which is what much of statecraft is about.  And it is even necessary for leaders to deceive their own people in order to preserve morale; too much truth could lead to despair, and a failure of will. Doctors know this same imperative: surgeons often choose not to reveal the true prognosis or all the details of treatment because many patients would opt to die rather than go through the pain of possible recovery. Truth, then, can be a very squishy concept. But there are degrees.

            We, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, are facing a threat like few in history. In such a situation, knowing the truth about the true danger that exists and about how to cope with it is far more important than usual. It’s all well and good for a leader to lie to obtain tactical advantage in a war. But when whole populations are at risk, and need to know the actual nature of the threat, the truth is critical. The best scientific (and science tries to, and should, always deal in the truth—as far as it can be known. Anything less is a total failure of the scientific enterprise.) evidence should always be foremost in any public presentation. The problem is, we have been led (I use the term loosely) for the past four years by a habitual, a pathological liar. Donald Trump has spent his entire life relying on his ability to flat-out lie, and then pretend, if caught, that it either didn’t matter, or was not what he meant, or insist that his words were meant as a joke, or sarcasm, or some other form of evasion or blame. And he has discovered through a massive body of experience, that he can nearly always get away with this. Enough people will be too lazy or too indifferent or too dismissive of the issue’s importance to give him the margin he needs to slide by with a lie once again. 

With the Covid-19 crisis, though, he has reached a new situation entirely. The problem is that he has not yet, it seems, recognized the novelty of his situation. And so, he has continued to lie, to fudge, to extemporize based on his impulses, and assure the nation that the crisis isn’t really a crisis, that it’s not as serious as his own scientists say it is, that it will soon be over, that it isn’t worth the cost of a plummeting economy, that he’s done everything wonderfully and made supplies available and cut off entry from China, or that he cannot be blamed because it’s someone else’s fault. And each of these lies, though no different from thousands of lies he’s told in the past with no consequences, are suddenly proving to have dire consequences. The death count steadily rises. The clamor for equipment for hospitals and first responders and for testing materials grows louder. The commentators who monitor these things, and who have always been so malleable to his deceptions, are suddenly using harsh language, apocalyptic language to describe his utter failure; his abysmal, unforgiveable failure to do the primary job for which he was elected: protect the nation and, especially, protect the people he has sworn to serve.

            Now, suddenly (as it must have done in Nazi Germany when Hitler’s lies about the genius of invading Russia, and the invincibility of his army were seen, their consequences seen, in massive destruction and death), the lies and the damage attendant on those lies are becoming apparent to anyone with eyes to see. Anyone, that is, can see the death count passing a thousand, then tens of thousands, now fifty thousand and more to come, on their screens. Anyone can see the businesses closed by the thousands, and the unemployed lining up in the millions. Everyone can gasp as this diabolic liar of a president recommends drinking bleach as a possible cure, following which bleach companies have to warn people not ever to believe such a preposterous thing. Everyone can see, and hear, and count the astonishing cost not just in income or prospects but in actual lives lost unnecessarily— unnecessary, that is, because of the absence of a little truth. 

            In short, despite what we all know about every human’s capacity to lie at times, about the absolute necessity to lie in some situations, the real consequences of presidential lying have suddenly become crystal clear. Truth really is a precious commodity in a crisis. And lying really is a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. And the difference—being able to discern the difference, and especially being able to know when it is important to lie, and when it is important to tell the truth, no matter what the cost—is an indispensable quality even in our postmodern world. And it is doubly indispensable in a national leader. 

Too bad it has become so difficult, and even impossible for so many Americans—raised as we are on the George Washington myth, but increasingly cynical about its necessity—to tell the difference. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Bolinas Paves the Way

On Wednesday, my son drove me from Berkeley out to Bolinas where I have lived for the past twenty-plus years, to take a Covid-19 test. The test involved two parts: the first drew a blood sample to test for antibodies; the second involved a throat and nasal swab to test for the actual virus (PCR). I would be one of the 1600 residents that organizers hope will be tested, though the tests are not mandatory, but voluntary. 

            It’s remarkable really. How did this tiny out-of-the-way town at the south end of the Point Reyes peninsula manage to become the first community in the nation to manage community-wide testing? The testing was apparently the brainchild of several Bolinas residents—venture capitalist Jyri Engstrom, and biotech exec Cyrus Harmon, as well as Dr. Aenor Sawyer, an orthopedic surgeon with the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF). An initial seed of $100,000. was put up by gaming company founder Mark Pincus, and then Bolinas residents (not all town residents are wealthy, but enough now are to make it work) chipped in some $300,000 through a GoFundMe campaign. The originators used connections to UCSF to make the proposal, and that renowned medical center saw the usefulness of testing a single community to see how transmission occurs, how antibodies work, and so on. The model for testing an entire town came from the Italian town of Vo, population 3,000, in northern Italy. UCSF plans to duplicate its testing effort in the Mission district of San Francisco, a very different community from the isolated community of Bolinas, not only due to population makeup, but also because there is no real border separating the Mission from the rest of San Francisco. UCSF will then have two very different community types to use for data and transmission patterns. This is the kind of data that will be needed to really get a sound grip on how the coronavirus operates, the data that will be necessary before communities can feel reasonably safe. 

            The testing site in Bolinas is similar to other drive-through testing facilities. Tents are set up in a parking area next to the volunteer firehouse, with about four different bays set up for cars to drive through. Beside each testing bay is an enclosed area of the tent where supplies are stored and the completed tests are kept before being transferred to San Francisco for analysis. Hand-printed signs direct one into the lot, kept orderly by several volunteers who direct cars to appropriate bays. A volunteer in a mask comes to each car and asks for identification to check against the pre-registration data. We had already selected Wednesday at 1:30 pm for our test, and our data checked out, so we were given a medical-type mask, and told to proceed to one of  the bays. Two cars preceded us, so we could see the occupants putting their hands out the window for the blood test.  

            In a very short time, we entered the bay (the tents, by the way, were white canvas or plastic, pyramid-shaped, with a point at the top flying flags; almost festive). I was the only one being tested, so I rolled down my window (instructions were to remain in cars at all times) and stuck out my right arm for the blood draw. One quick pin prick and the blood was allowed to flow into a small test tube identified as mine. My only problem was that, being on blood thinners, I had a hard time stemming the blood flow, which went on for some time. Nothing serious though. Then the tester told me to pull up my mask so he could swab my throat, once on each side. Easy. Next came the nose swab, for which I had to pull down my mask so he could push the swab into my nasal cavity and hold it there for ten seconds. Uncomfortable, yes, but not painful. The swab was then put into another identified vial, and I was done. Took maybe ten minutes all told. 

            Now the medics have two samples for each person tested—as of Thursday, 1844 Bolinas residents plus some W. Marin County first responders had been tested. The blood samples will be analyzed for antibodies, to see, ultimately, if the presence of antibodies provides immunity against new infection. This sample can also provide information about which tests are best, and what exactly antibodies mean for this virus. As Dr. Sawyer, who is coordinating the effort, explained,

If you have the antibodies that your body produces in the early stages of the infection, you could actually still be infected and pass the virus along to others. Another type of antibody may indicate you’ve had the infection and fought it off, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re fully immune – we don’t know how long immunity lasts (quoted from The Guardian, 4/22/20). 

The testing protocol also made provision for any residents who are unable, for health reasons, to leave their homes. Trained testers will go to such homes and administer the test in relative safety. Prior to testing time, no one in Bolinas had had any symptoms of the virus. But since some people are asymptomatic even with the infection, no one could conclude anything until all were tested.

            The big issue, of course, is when will one get results? Word is that anyone who tests positive for the virus will hear by phone, probably within 72 hours of the test. Makes sense. If you’ve got it, you’ll want to know so as to get yourself to a hospital or a doctor, and to isolate so as not to pass it on. And perhaps give some tracking information---where you might have picked it up, whom you might have passed it on to, and so on. Once such data is collated, the healthcare facilities will have a better idea of transmission lanes, hot spots, and speed and method of transmission. The results of the antibody test will take somewhat longer. There is a website, bolinastesting.org, where test results, including antibody data, will be made privately available. 

            What strikes me most about this is the fact that such tests, which every respected health care professional maintains are necessary before the nation and the world can really control the spread of Covid-19, can be done (and should have been done long ago) with the proper support from government. Supplies can be gathered, personnel can be trained, and the necessary facilities can be erected in a very short time. Local hospitals or medical schools indicate that they would be willing, as with UCSF, to provide the analysis, once the tests are administered (the UCSF tests were developed in house so as not to use tests and materials needed more urgently elsewhere; materials such as masks and swabs were also sourced locally). Then, and only then, can life be returned to something approaching normalcy. And clearly, the more data that is collected from around the country and the world, the safer we can all begin to be. Indeed, until the federal government stops denying that it has not taken the necessary testing steps to control this pandemic, the sooner we can stop losing lives unnecessarily, and get back to safety as a  nation. And the United States, a nation that pretends to be ‘advanced,’ can start acting truly advanced, instead of passing the buck to individual states and to small communities like Bolinas to do their work for them.

            

Lawrence DiStasi        

Why Do People Make Absurd Choices?

I’ve been thinking of this, to me, baffling problem: what induces people to believe a fraud like Donald Trump who enacts policies that show his contempt for them and actually damages them, and yet refuse to support someone like Bernie Sanders who is offering policies, like Medicare-for-all and action on climate change, that could measurably improve their lives? How do we make sense of this? It is similar to the problem that absorbed Tolstoy in War and Peace: how could someone like Napoleon induce hundreds of thousands of men to move from West to East and risk their lives in brutal wars, and likewise, more hundreds of thousands to follow the lead of Russia’s Emperor Alexander in a mass movement from East to West to war on that same Napoleon? Tolstoy concluded that it was not Napoleon’s so-called “genius” or Alexander’s noble aura that moved millions, but some larger global force that he likened to destiny or spirit. And that “great men” were merely swept along in these global movements. I’m not going to conclude here that a similar global or spiritual force drives Trump’s minions (or those of any other movement), but rather look to what we now know, or think we know, about psychology, culture and/or brain structure for my tentative answer. 

            When I was in the Army reserves many years ago, I was required to go for an annual two-week summer camp for ‘training.’ This one year we were in upstate New York, at a little-used base where the barracks we were housed in were in desperate shape. The latrines were filthy and the floors, covered in a kind of linoleum tile, were dirt-covered and deeply careworn. The sergeant of our barracks, a weekend warrior like the rest of us but rather gung-ho, decided that we should really spruce up those floors and outshine our co-warriors in neighboring barracks. But we had no real spit-polishing supplies. So he decided to take up a collection, and one trooper would be designated to go to town and buy things like wax or mop-&-glow or some such commercial cleaning product, and we’d have the shiniest floors on the base. To raise the necessary funds, everyone would chip in a dollar or less. All were enthusiastic about this chance to rise above our neighbors, and willingly contributed. I alone refused. I explained my reasons: why should we be responsible for buying supplies? If the Army wanted the floors to be shiny, then they should supply us with the goods; the military budget was ridiculous and bloated enough to be able to afford us basic supplies. My stance was met with surprise, dismay, and outright anger. ‘I was not going along with the program. I was not a team player.’ And it was true. I was not. The whole thing seemed like puerile pandering to the “bosses,” a vain attempt to prove how much we valued our training and the spirit of the military—which I did not. 

            Those two positions—obedience to current authority, as opposed to thinking something through and evaluating it—seem to me to mark the poles of this question. When faced with a choice, does a person accede to the constituted authority—be it Napoleon or my sergeant or a boss or some wannabe dictator like Trump—or think things through and come to a decision based on the information and conditions that pertain? How do people decide? What inclines some to go one way and some to go another? What motivated so many Frenchmen to defy authorities and opt for revolution in 1789, even agreeing to cut off the heads of the king and many of his nobles? Why did others refuse to take part? Surely it had to do with more than bread, though starvation must have been a major factor. And I am not here talking about heroics; I am wondering about average people who are either driven to take actions from which there is little hope of returning, or of opting to side with order and authority no matter how battered by that authority they may be. I suppose in the end it is a question of risk. What inclines some people to opt for some action that risks their very lives and way of life, or to refuse the action, fearing to take that risk?

            Social psychology has confronted this question extensively in recent years. The experiments may seem trivial, but they are nonetheless revealing. And they involve, in the classic experiments created by Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, presenting test subjects with a choice: how willing are you to risk $10 on a bet? Would you do it if the odds were even, that is, rewarding you with $10 for a win? Or would you need more potential winnings to risk your $10? The answer is that the majority of subjects required the chance of winning to be 2-1/2 times the chance of losing before they’d take the risk. If they were offered a potential $22.50 return for a $10 bet, most people would go for it. Less than that—say the possibility of winning only $15—and the fear of losing the $10 they already had loomed too large. In other words, average people most fear losing what they have, and will not risk it unless the possible gains are substantially greater than the loss. The pain of losing appears to be greater than the possible exhilaration of winning. This seems relevant to our discussion of people’s choices in a crisis. Many people will be reluctant to take a chance on some candidate like Bernie Sanders who promises revolutionary change—even if that change promises much-needed relief to them and theirs. The fear of losing what they have, or think they have, is much greater than the potential gains offered. By contrast, some of the people attracted to Trump are clearly attracted to his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The promised gain here suggests that the America where they had good jobs, and were in solid control regarding their position in the social hierarchy—that is, as white Americans who were clearly in a superior position to Blacks and Hispanics and immigrants—would be restored, or at least preserved. And it was great enough to move them. There would be no left-wing social leveling with consequences that were unpredictable, if not dire to them. There was a risk—which they are now discovering thanks to a virus—but it must have seemed that the great potential rewards in revived social superiority were worth that risk.

            The notion of control is also an important factor here. Ray Lancaster, in a November 2018 post on quora.com, emphasized three factors—control, connection and consistency—that are crucial psychological needs for most people, relevant to decision making. The first of these, control, looms large both today, and in our evolutionary past. For hunter-gatherers, that is, it was crucial that they could control their access to food. This was not only the case in fair weather, but perhaps moreso in cold months when food was harder to come by. Thus, controlling food so that some was stored for winter would have been crucial to survival, and those who exerted such control would have better survived to pass on their genes (this goes mainly for groups in temperate climates with severe winters; those who live in the Amazon, for example, have been shown to be noticeably casual with food supplies that are almost always available). The fear of loss would operate here, too; those who refused to risk losing their food reserves—e.g. who maintained control of their food supplies—would have had a better chance at survival than those who were profligate with food. 

But for these same ancestors, maintaining connections to others in their group would have been no less important. Connection with others would have been crucial for access to females, always a negotiation where leaders tended to monopolize such access, but also for successful hunting and for finding and maintaining shelter. Connection—here shorthand for social and cooperating skills—thus was, and still is a key development for humans. Maintaining such connections, indeed, is what prompts much of our decision-making discussed above. Why do most people tend to obey authorities, even though they might really want to go off on their own and please themselves? Because they fear to lose that social connection that obedience assures them. They go along to get along. Indeed, many try not to stand out for the same reason: to maintain that social connection by conformity.  And the inhibition on refusing to go along in a social situation—like the one in my army barracks noted above—stems from this same fear of social exclusion. Which is why ostracism was such a dire punishment in ancient cultures like Greece and Rome, and even for Napoleon himself, exiled to Elba. The many eons when ostracism meant certain loss of the protection of the group, and often certain death, still resonates in our psyches. Finally, consistency would have been necessary, to remember what processes had been used to store food, and what to keep doing, not just for food preservation, but also for the relationship between signs and meanings. The rise of a certain phase of the moon, or star, or the appearance of a given plant would be always looked for to maintain the best chance of survival. So would ways of cooking or hunting or eating or a thousand other procedures, all of which become consistent parts of the group’s cultural heritage. And consistently maintaining these would, to a large degree, help ensure individual and group survival. We see this today in the thousands of ways that cultural groups conserve practices or rituals that, to us now, seem useless. We also see it in the reluctance of decision-makers to withdraw their support from a leader like Trump because of new evidence; such a switch of allegiance would make them seem inconsistent, not only to others, but to themselves.

            The above-cited conditions do not exhaust the list of factors that affect risk aversion in choice. Research has shown that three more factors—individualism, masculinity, and power—also seriously matter when it comes to taking risks. People from cultures that privilege the individual—like the United States—over the collective—like many Asian countries—tend to be more risk averse. The reasoning is simple: if your decisions are solely your responsibility, then the burden of that risk, and possible losses, are yours alone to bear. Conversely, if you have a family or group to share that burden, the risk of loss is more likely to be shared, and thus proportionately less onerous for you. All other things being equal, you can afford to take more risks. The relative masculinity of a culture likewise affects risk aversion. People from cultures that privilege masculine values such as aggression, that operate on fear, and which are highly goal-oriented toward wealth and career, also tend to be more risk averse. That is, where these things matter highly or even exclusively in the way people assess an individual’s worth, the loss of any of them figures to be critical to most of its members. The tendency is to be extra reluctant to risk whatever one has accumulated (money, property) because it means a loss of social position as well. On the other hand, those with power tend to be more willing to take risks. The obvious reason is that people with power have more confidence in their ability, and thus are more confident in their ability to win. They are also likely to have more wealth to fall back on, and more education, another factor that has been found to make such people willing to take more risks than those without education. 

We should be cautious in this regard as well, however, for recent research has shown that leaders—presumably those with power—especially if they are men, tend to overvalue their decision-making abilities. Such men tend to be much less reflective, and hence ignore their actual ignorance and the downsides in a given situation (one again thinks of Trump). This means that such leaders often lead their countries or states or companies into highly risky and sometimes disastrous situations. We need only think of Napoleon and his ill-advised invasion of Russia in 1809, or Hitler doing the same thing in WWII. The results for both leaders and their nations was catastrophic: Napoleon lost almost his entire army of 600,000 men, while for Hitler’s forces, the punishing losses they suffered in the Russian winter marked the beginning of their total defeat by the Allies.  

There are certainly other factors that affect risk aversion and choice—such as the relative presence of the neurotransmitter dopamine, so important in the brains of addicts like compulsive gamblers. More dopamine apparently means more willingness to take risks. This does not cancel out the effects of fear—mediated mostly by the amygdala—but it tends to weaken the fear response. But enough said. We can see that numerous factors can affect how given individuals respond to risk in making decisions. Does this tell us anything about how people choose in a political situation? Perhaps not. But perhaps we can see that the dominance of certain factors over others will tend to shape decision-making. And perhaps what seems baffling can make more sense, as we take some of these factors into consideration.

Consider, for example, Trump voters. On the face of it, one might think that people whose lives have been decimated by the transfer of so much American manufacturing to foreign countries, by the ravages of climate change that promise more damage in the future, would be receptive to a political promise of government action and direct help. Such as a higher minimum wage. Or better protections for workers. Or the ‘Green new deal.’ Apparently not. All these were outweighed by Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants said to be “taking American jobs.” But most of those immigrants worked in jobs like farming or meat processing which American workers had abandoned years ago. What sense did that make? But perhaps if we consider that many of these voters come from cultures that place a high value on traditional masculinity, not to mention individualism, we can better understand their tendency to avoid the risk of “liberal” promises in favor of a candidate like Trump who gave them an easily-understood target to vent their anger and frustration upon. And perhaps the image of a confident, authoritarian leader induced them to place their bets on the man who appeared capable of taking charge and implementing policies that would favor white conservatives like themselves, rather than one making “pie-in-the-sky” promises for government action that was characterized as ‘socialism.’ Far better to pledge loyalty and obedience to a Big Daddy figure; and stay with what everyone around one appeared to favor as the cultural choice (action against abortion; action against ‘government handouts’ for those outsiders who ‘can’t take care of themselves.’) Stay within, that is, the collective judgment in their traditional communities. 

So what do we have? Just this. If people can be convinced that their choice will keep them within the protection of their own valued culture, the culture that has been handed down for generations (what’s good enough for my father is good enough for me), they appear willing to take a risk even on someone who resembles them hardly at all, but appears confident and powerful. Someone who inspires obedience to fatherhood and the flag and ‘one nation under (their) God.’ Conversely, they appear unwilling to take a risk on someone who seems to promise what they actually need, but whose credentials appear to align him/her with a central government that seems to favor those who do not deserve their consideration. The poor. The ones of a different color. The ones who fail to conform to what they consider acceptable sexual or social mores. Outsiders. Foreigners. Those who don’t belong. Why take a risk on them? Why risk losing one’s place—the place that one has come to believe one deserves? It makes no sense. Whereas taking a risk on someone who seems to promise to restore what one had and valued above all else, and to suppress those who seem to be eager to take it from you—that seems a risk worth taking. 

And yet, even given all these sound psycho-social reasons, I have to confess that the enduring support for this liar, this philanderer, this huckster and money launderer, this bankrupt several times over, still makes no sense to me. It continues to baffle me that people, no matter how disappointing their lives, no matter how in love with their supposed white supremacy, can be so deceived in their basic ability to evaluate another human being (and themselves). It is as if all their hard-won faculties take a vacation. As if they do not see, or don’t want to see the catastrophe bearing down on them. As if they are not just unconscious of what is happening to them, but actively courting disaster. And there is, in fact, some reason to think that at least some of them—the fundamentalists who believe literally in the biblical prophecy of the end times—really do want the whole society to come crashing down just as they are elevated at last into paradise. That would really ‘make (their) America great again.’ Make it the holy site of the great Rapture* so fervently desired by evangelicals. 

Too bad their choice rather ensures that they’re more likely to find themselves proceeding rapidly in the other direction.

Lawrence DiStasi

* After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever (1 Thessalonians).

Thoughts on Corona and What it Portends

I am suddenly and terrifyingly and depressingly under the influence of this whole Covid-19 thing. I’m not sure how it happened exactly, but just two days ago I was mainly feeling, if not OK, then somewhat comfortable. Feeling, that is, that I’m basically in a safe place, with plenty of food, company via my son and his family with whom I’m recovering, my computer and smartphone to keep me up to date on the latest outrage from our Dear Leader, an outlet via these blogs when I get too overwhelmed by the stupidity out there, and online books to read and keep me occupied. I can also talk to friends and relatives when I choose. So I go for my daily walks, I read and write when I need to, I exercise a bit to recover what I’ve lost during my recent stroke, and consider myself, despite being in the highest-risk group for contracting and dying of this nasty virus, fortunate, or reasonably so. As to the pandemic, I have reassured myself with that old nostrum: “this too shall pass.” 

            Suddenly, though, and it probably stems in part from talking to a wider range of people recently, and also from some segments on the Newshour—an interview with Bill Gates, a piece on the plight of EMTs or emergency medical technicians, a sobering piece on the awful percentage of deaths among people of color—I am feeling as if the apocalypse is imminent. As if the whole world and its culture are about to collapse; and all of us with it. This is not altogether paranoia or alarmism on my part either. The fear expressed by EMTs—those people who are dealing with emergency calls about coronavirus cases daily, hourly, and seeing for themselves how many of those people die—is truly terrifying. One would have to have a heart of stone not to feel empathy for these poorly-paid techs, afraid especially of either contracting the virus themselves, or bringing it home to their families and friends. One would also have to have a stone heart not to bleed for the terrible plight of minority communities, who not only have jobs that force them to keep working in perilous situations (they make up a majority of the hospital and healthcare workforce), but whose longtime-impoverished living conditions as a result of historic racism have guaranteed that their lack of affordable health choices makes them the most vulnerable of our people to the ravages of the virus, which the horrendous statistics (up to 70% of the deaths in places like Chicago) testify to. Finally, Bill Gates, with a frontline seat at the remediation methods frantically going on worldwide, assured us of one hard fact: until the world has a proven vaccine—which will take a year and a half to test and get into the population and assure “herd immunity”—none of us can really feel safe. Oh, we’ll be back to work and shopping and eating and hanging out with our friends, but another outbreak is not only possible but probable until that vaccine and mass immunity are in place. Worldwide.

            Think about that. It will be another year and a half, at least, before we can safely co-mingle again. Touch again. Embrace friends again. And even then. In other words, we humans, the social animal par excellence, have had to alter the very attribute which makes us most unique, most human. Our sociability. Our cooperation. Our brilliant ability to cooperate to hunt, to garden, to make war on our enemies, to love those with whom we grow and speak and learn in ever larger associative groups. All of that has been suspended in order to combat this virus. It is almost as if some evil comic-book villain, envious of our accomplishments, can be heard saying something like: ‘So, smartass humans, you think you can rule the world, take that!’ And zap, we’re all scrambling to get away from each other to save our precious, imperiled lives. 

            That’s really what has happened. When I’m on my walk, people coming the opposite way go out into the street to avoid even minimal contact. At home, all of us keep some distance. No hugs. No sharing of food from one plate to another. No sitting together at meals. And with Easter coming this week, I’m wondering how we will manage that usually festive dinner. I suppose we’ll have to maintain our distance, and know that back home, there will be not even a modest  gathering of the clan this year. It will all have to be virtual—a Zoom call to include everybody flung far and wide. Which has always been tolerable on holidays; but now, even the small groups that are lucky enough to actually be together must keep their distance. It’s incredible, when you think about it. Which I think most people try not to do. But think it or not, everyone, without exception, feels it in their bones. 

            And perhaps what everyone now finally also senses is this very critical fact: We humans are not only social by nature, we’re also, at a deeper level, profoundly connected. Not just with all other humans (the virus has proven that in a most dramatic way), but with all the life on this planet. And that one thought should give us pause. It should persuade more of us—some of us will not be persuaded, even as death sweeps us away—that this connectedness, this “interbeing” as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, must become a primary fact not only in our lives, but also in the new culture that is emerging even now, as the old one dies. We are connected; not separate entities that ‘make our own reality,’ but each one deeply dependent on all else. And that means that we can no longer treat all other life as our plaything, as our garbage heap. It means that we cannot continue to pour our waste into the ground, into the oceans, into the air. We cannot continue to act as if our culture and our being is some special, god-ordained open system with no responsibility for the damage we do outside ourselves—for “externalities” as the corporations like to put it. Like nature, our way of life must be transformed into a closed loop system. Everything must be able to feed into everything else. There can be no plastic that lies undigested for ages; no nuclear waste that lies poisonous and deadly for eons; no garbage dumps that poison our waters and soil for as long as there is water and soil left. No. All has to be so constructed so that it digests and turns to food for all our fellow creatures. Just as that which dies in nature is transformed into necessary food for all else. The loop is closed, as ours was for eons before our industrial system intervened. Nothing is wasted. Nothing can be wasted. (To see what some major thinkers speculate about the coming phase shift, see rebelwisdom.co.uk, whatisemerging.com, the work of Daniel Schmactenberger, and the lectures of John Vervaeke on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.)

            Ah, but you say, the current situation is taking us in exactly the opposite direction. With everyone separated, with each human unit on its own and trying desperately to stay away from every other, and preserving only its own life no matter the cost, no matter who else has to die to ensure that separation, aren’t we going rather toward more selfishness, more isolation, more inclination to hand our destinies over to tyrants and corporations, if only they promise to keep us alive and isolated? Haven’t people proven as recently as the Democratic primary that they fear “revolutionary” change of even the mild kind that Bernie Sanders offered? 

            It’s a critical question. One which I dare say no one has the answer to. The only thing we have to count on is the simple fact that crises nearly always produce something new, some unforeseen truth or pattern that emerges out of chaos—and this is a crisis such as we’ve never seen. And there’s also this one added thing we know: not everyone will die. Some large portion of humanity is going to survive this crisis in the same way it survived all the great bubonic plagues, the Black Death, the 1918 flu, the Depression and Great War that followed, the nuclear confrontation and mutual assured destruction, the AIDS pandemic, and on and on. True, this is different in scale and severity. This is different in that by its very nature it militates against that unique coming together that humans have always relied upon. But it does not, for most of us hopefully, blot out that capacity, deep in all primates, for empathy. For cooperation. For putting aside that drive to elevate oneself above all others, that drive to compete which seems irrepressible—and which the economists tell us is foundational and primary for all humans. And which, in fact, is not.

            And that, it seems to me, provides the only basis for hope. Humans have survived and thrived all these millennia not, we are now informed, because of all-out competition. Humans have survived because of our capacity to cooperate. To empathize with those in our group, and to sacrifice our personal gain for the survival of others, of, ultimately, the whole. There are thousands, millions of humans who are doing just that, right now. Not the oligarchs at the top; not those still desperate to preserve their privileges; but those at or near the bottom, like those EMTs who are risking their lives every hour to try to save others. And their co-workers in hospitals who are doing the same thing. And grocery clerks and drivers and firefighters and farmworkers and thousands of others who are doing the dangerous, unglamorous work necessary to keep us all alive. It is always so. And many many people are aware of it, and are cheering them on. And it is this awareness that we must hope provides the lift, the cultural jiu-jitsu we all need to bring about the great shift that must come. Wherein the culture that has put us in this mess will slowly or suddenly, as now, be seen to be defective, and in urgent need of removal, of replacement so that not just those at the top, but all of us, can survive. Together. 

And here we might paraphrase Benjamin Franklin at the time of our founding, by saying, ‘we must indeed all survive together or we shall not survive at all.’* Amen, Ben. Therein lies the great choice that looms before us, the one that this miniscule, lowly coronavirus is forcing upon us. Will we learn and change so that we survive together? Or will we persist in our folly, and not survive at all? Something tells me we’ll soon find out.

Lawrence DiStasi

*Franklin’s actual words were, “We must indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Slumlord Virus

Jared Kushner has been in the news a lot lately. That’s because Trump, his father-in-law, apparently trusts this family slumlord more than anyone else in the White House. Kushner is, of course, married to Trump’s favorite daughter Ivanka, in a marriage that could be rightly called ‘the marriage from hell.’ That’s because it joined two families whose founders both made their fortunes in New York real estate, and of the shadiest kind. Kushner’s father actually landed in jail because of his illegal activities. That’s when son Jared, whose way into Harvard was purchased by his father’s dirty money, took over as CEO. And as is detailed in the first segment of the Netflix documentary Dirty Money, and in Michele Goldberg’s recent piece in the NY Times, Jared made a bigger mess of things than his father. The documentary, titled “Slumlord Billionaire,” is well worth watching for its detailed account of how these rich slumlords operate (they use every nasty trick to drive tenants out of their buildings so they can either jack up rents beyond rent-control levels, or sell the apartments as high-priced condos—a vicious, nasty business), but Goldberg sums up Jared’s reign pretty nicely:

“Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.” (M. Goldberg, NY Times, “Putting Jared Kushner in Charge is Utter Madness,” 4/2/20.) 

She also points out that even the job where one might have expected Jared to succeed—parlaying the family real estate business into a bigger and better operation—failed: 

Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (ibid).

He also failed at his attempt to buy his way to a better press, purchasing the once-thriving New York Observer and running it, too, into the ground. Perhaps this is another reason why Trump feels such affinity for Jared: both have inherited millions and both have managed to bankrupt themselves over and over. Nothing like bankruptcies to form an affectionate bond between two losers. 

            So when Jared arrogantly decided that he could be the one to craft a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, Trump gave him the portfolio. And after three years of alleged work (no doubt consulting most with his two Mideast buddies, Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted,  and Mohammed Bin Salman, murderer of journalist Jamal Khashoggi), Jared came up with a plan that also failed miserably. Anyone with any experience in this endeavor could’ve told Jared right off, that, with his biases, this would be the result. But Jared plunged ahead, promising that his plan would bring a long-lasting peace if only the Arabs would not sabotage themselves as always. When the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, saw the plan, he rejected it immediately, adding that the Palestinians now would not consult with the US at all. And no wonder. The plan not only calls for the Palestinians to de-militarize, putting themselves totally under Israeli military control, but also essentially endorsed Israel’s hated and illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. In effect, the Kushner plan tried to buy off the Palestinians with promises of economic activity, in exchange for their fully giving up any hope of Palestinian statehood. It’s almost like Kushner’s strategy for evicting tenants from his slum housing. 

            Given all this, who else would Trump be expected make his czar in charge of the Covid-19 pandemic? Why his fellow slumlord and business failure, Jared, of course. And the results have, again, been predictable. Jared had begun, even before his appointment, by assuring his father-in-law that the demands for equipment by New York governor Andrew Cuomo and NY hospitals themselves were “alarmist.” Trump promptly echoed his son-in-law, who claimed that he had “all this data about ICU capacity” and, having done his own ‘projections,’ (this from a man who knows nothing about medicine or hospitals) concluded that “New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” Once Kushner was made virus czar in charge of expediting the supply of medical equipment, including tests, masks, ventilators, and the like, however, he changed his tune, and took off in the direction that a Kushner, naturally, would be comfortable with: the private sector. He allegedly chose this route in order to bypass the bureaucracy that was blamed for the delays (not mentioning that Trump himself was the person responsible for crippling the Pandemic Response team in place when he arrived, and most federal agencies that could have, and should have been prepared for such an emergency). But no matter.  Kushner apparently put together a team that virtually took over FEMA (his authority apparently now exceeds that of Alex Azar, Trump’s HHS Secretary), and set about pursuing his cronies in the private sector to get to work to expand test access, produce much needed medical supplies (the US industry producing such things had depleted most of it supplies by sending millions of dollars worth of masks, gowns, ventilators, etc. to China in January and February when the president was dismissing the severity of the crisis as a “hoax”). And the team did apparently get some companies to ramp up production. They also managed to airlift emergency medical supplies to the U.S. and streamlined other needed measures. But they have also failed to set up a system where all coordinate and know what others are doing. Nor have they been zealous in vetting the private interests of the companies they pick, opening the way for price-gouging. They have thus been dubbed the “slim-suit” crowd by veterans at FEMA, and a “frat party that has invaded the federal government.”

            But perhaps Kushner’s most egregious failure so far (and hospitals and health care workers have never really received the basic supplies that they need, most hospital workers remaining disappointed and fearful about having to limit themselves to one mask and one gown per day—if they are lucky—which means re-using equipment constantly and endangering themselves and their families) has been his mishandling of the national stockpile of PPEs. In a now-notorious April 2 press briefing, Kushner said of “our” Strategic National Stockpile that “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.” But government spokespeople and reporters have contradicted Kushner and criticized him severely for suggesting that states should have built their own stockpiles rather than begging the feds for supplies:

The Strategic National Stockpile describes itself as having "the nation's largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out. When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.” (Catherine Garcia, The Week, 4/3). 

Of course, Kushner’s father-in-law supported him in his lie, having even less respect for the truth than his slumlord relative. He (Trump) tried to describe the investigations into his son-in-law’s  statement as another partisan “witch-hunt,” and then added, 

“By the way, the states should have been building their stockpiles. We’re a backup, we’re not an ordering clerk. Whoever heard of a governor calling up the federal government and saying, ‘Sir, we need a hospital?’”

            And then, to compound the death-dealing falsification of this whole mess, the president* had his minions alter the wording about the Strategic Stockpile on the US Health and Human Services website. It now reads:

The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.

As the Yahoo News article on this skullduggery pointed out, where the official website originally said that the stockpile “ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most,” the new version says that the federal stockpile’s role was only meant to “supplement state and local supplies.”

            So essentially what we have is the most massive sidelining and crippling of federal agencies meant to serve in just such emergencies in history (a Republican project begun in earnest by Ronald Reagan), and their replacement by a presidential in-law whose resumé is marked mostly by failure, and whose instincts dispose him to favor his friends and associates in the private sector. It is also to ridicule and hamstring the state officials, particularly in “blue” states like New York and California, where his father-in-law doesn’t poll so well. The net result is a system that is still failing to get supplies and testing where they are most needed, and to further eviscerate the very agencies that were meant to function in such emergencies—those requiring massive government response. That it has also given new meaning to the word “nepotism” is a mere side effect, but one not without consequences, in this case, life-and-death ones. But do not think that will make a difference to a slumlord. As we have learned over and over again from this president*, the slum business demands having a blind spot when it comes to ‘trivial’ life-and-death issues.

Lawrence DiStasi

Muzzling the Truth

We are all familiar by now with the way The Donald has chastised and muzzled Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s foremost authority on viruses, particularly the one driving the Covid-19 pandemic. In response to Fauci’s having talked on his own to TV interviewers and late-night hosts, Trump has apparently kept him from even showing up at his daily pressers about the virus, which are indeed nothing but political ads for the “great job” his administration is allegedly doing. Fauci, with his realism and truth-telling, is decidedly not contributing to that political dog-and-pony show. In my opinion, the good doctor should have resigned long ago to dramatize the lies and criminal negligence of the president*, but he (and many others) seems to think he can help the nation (as the only real source of medical sense) by swallowing his pride and remaining where he is. But that’s a story for another time. 

            What’s alarming and outraging me now is the way that doctors and nurses, the very ones protecting and caring for us all on the front lines, are now being punished for trying to protect themselves. Nicholas Kristof wrote a recent article in the New York Times specifically addressing this, and it leaves one infuriated. On April 1, he wrote about several cases he’s found of nurses and/or doctors actually being fired for speaking up about the lack of good protective equipment (now known as PPEs, Personal Protective Equipment) in the hospitals in which they toil. This at a time when, as Kristof points out, at least 61 doctors and nurses have died in Italy from the coronavirus, and when in New York city two nurses have already died and “more than 200 workers are reported sick at a single major hospital.” The first punishment case he cites recounts the firing of a doctor in Bellingham, WA:

…an ER doctor, Ming Lin, pleaded on social media for better protections for patients and the staff at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center, where he had worked for 17 years… “I do fear for my staff” Dr. Lin warned. “Morally, I think when you see something wrong, you have to speak out.”

But the hospital CEO, Charles Prosper, fired Lin for his insubordination, and refused to speak to Kristof about this, stating only that he regretted losing (note this cowardly language, as if Lin has somehow been misplaced through no fault of Prosper’s own) “such a longstanding and talented member of our medical staff.” To me, and to Kristof, this is an outrage. It as if the hospitals conduct business from the same playbook as did acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, when he fired the commander of the aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt. Why? Because Commander Brett Crozier had sounded the alarm about a Covid-19 outbreak on his huge ship, and pleaded that 90% of his 3,000 men be removed for their safety. But like Lin, he did it publicly, sending letters outside his chain of command to ask for help; whereupon Modly said, in explaining the firing, that Crozier had “demonstrated extremely poor judgement in the midst of a crisis” (defenseone.com). Modly added that “And that’s what’s frustrating about it: it created the perception that the Navy’s not on the job, and the government’s not on the job” (ibid). And there you have it. In these days where perception –especially in the media---is all, anything that makes the boss look bad or incompetent (even though most of them are) must be punished, and the whistleblower banished, one way or the other. 

            It has gotten so bad, Kristof tells us, that hospitals actually “discourage staffers even from bringing their own protective gear.” You read that right. A Physician at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in NY city, ER doctor Ania Ringwelski, judging that the equipment provided by Weill was not good enough, got her own. The hospital administration not only rejected her initiative, but they sent the doctor home. To demonstrate that the issue is more serious than simple preferences, Kristof points out that at least one ER doctor at this hospital is already fighting to breathe on a ventilator. Another doctor from the same ER, afraid of being fired if he allowed his name to be used, added, “We’re seeing our fellow caregivers getting sick, and we’re stressed out.” Is this total insanity, or what?

            Nor does it end there. In Chicago, nurse Lauri Mazurkiewicz not only warned her co-workers that standard-issue face masks were not good enough to protect them, but purchased her own N95 mask and brought it to work at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She was promptly fired—presumably for her implied criticism of the hospital-distributed masks. Another resident at a New York hospital underscored the same problem, saying (again, not allowing his name to be used for fear of punishment) that “We still don’t have enough masks, we still don’t have enough gowns…Our necks are exposed, our hair is exposed and our colleagues are getting sick.”

            To be sure, it’s not just health care workers who are castigated for pointing out how dire the situation is. In a recent article on Yahoo News, the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, points out why Detroit is facing an imminent crisis. And it will not surprise anyone to learn that the cause is the same, only amplified by the relatively poor health of Detroit’s majority, whose poverty rate is an astonishing 35%. That is, Detroit’s health care workers and also its first responders lack PPEs, personal protective equipment. As much as one-fifth of the police force is already in quarantine, this coming on the heels of the recent deaths if the city’s homicide chief and the jailhouse commander (businessinsider.com). Governor Whitmer also told Trevor Noah that with the poverty—and its attendant ills such as asthma, diabetes, and other problems including poor access to basic healthcare—the population of Detroit was at greater risk than more affluent places and needed help. Of course, as should be expected by now, the Michigan governor, a Democrat, received a tongue-lashing from the president*, who, after she criticized the feds for “not taking the virus pandemic early enough or seriously enough,” told her and other governors that they are on their own when it comes to supplies, singling her out, as is his wont, as the “Failing Michigan governor.” He also called her a “half-whit (sic).” 

            And that gets to the core of the problem here. The president*, who downplayed the pandemic for months, and smarting from the criticisms that hospitals are in dire need of equipment that the federal government, had it acted earlier, should have been able to supply, has viciously attacked the very caregivers that ought to be encouraged and appreciated (which average citizens have been doing.) Nina Golgowski, in an April 2 article on huffpost.com, points out some of the most egregious of Trump’s recent attacks. Raging on his favorite (because he can’t be immediately challenged as in a press conference) medium, Twitter, Trump wrote that hospitals who requested medical supplies to cope with the pandemic were nothing but “complainers” who should have stocked up on their own supplies “long before the crisis hit.” He added that “Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied,” and in another rampage accused individual hospitals and their staffs of hoarding masks and possibly “worse than hoarding” i.e. stealing them.  These are the people on the front lines of what the president* now calls a war. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that this cowardly draft dodger would criticize those actually doing battle. But we are. No matter how often we see evidence of this man’s heartlessness, his utter void where a presumptive compassion gene should be, it still astonishes us that a human being (presumably) could be so zealous to shift blame from himself to anyone lower down on the food chain. Like mere hospitals, mere workers, mere lifesavers. Like the people who actually take responsibility for the lives of others. 

            No. The constant message from this president*, this administration, is always the same: regardless of the problem, don’t make us look bad. And if you do, you’ll be muzzled at best, attacked viciously and/or fired unceremoniously at worst. So is it any wonder that hospital CEOs fired their hirelings for complaining that they lacked the equipment needed to preserve their lives? Is it any wonder that the acting head of the Navy fired a commander for trying to save the lives of his crew? They’re all, these presumptive leaders, following the example of the Chief—who is the perfect exemplar of the whole rotten system; whose fundamental credo is, stamp out negative publicity without mercy. For that is the one thing a capitalist system that has lost its reason for being (to produce goods better than its competitors) cannot tolerate. The products can be shitty. No problem. They can kill people for lack of quality control. No Problem. They can be held back in a crisis until the price can be raised sky high. No problem. But don’t let the word get out about any of it, for that might bring down the whole ship. 

No, the answer is always to blow the public relations horn loud and often, and outshout any negative little shits who want to tell the truth. Bury them. And the ignorant hordes will believe, because they too want to support the blamers. The happy talkers. The ones who reiterate, over and over again (as the president* did recently) their mantra of avoiding culpability and shifting it to the silly underlings who actually do the work: 

“You know, we’re not a shipping clerk. We’ll help out wherever we can.”

Has there ever been such a heartless bastard setting the moral compass for an already morally-challenged nation? 

Lawrence DiStasi