1.
We’re in the bank:
I’d tell you a coronavirus joke, a customer said way too loud,
but you wouldn’t get it.
And I didn’t get it – not at first –
but others smiled.
No one laughed.
2.
How did this come to be –
a virus fog
shrouding the lungs of its host?
We look to leadership*
and find rumor,
infodemic,
one hand not knowing where the other hand is,
people less important than money.
3.
On Chicago’s southside,
my son tells me we are all going to be infected,
some worse than others –
and then he tells us of a baby refused treatment –
a hospital overwhelmed –
how his wife babysat the child –
his family at risk –
should we get tested? he asks.
I don’t know.
4.
In a small city in Colorado,
my daughter gives birth to a strong baby girl,
her husband at her side,
and though everything is proper,
we’re sorry, they are told,
but you will have to remain another day.
There’s a virus out there, you know,
and you are among the healthy.
_______________
* Rep. Griffin, State of Missouri: “One of the things we are doing about the coronavirus is we are going on recess a week early.”
President Donald Trump in January: “No, not at all. We have it [the pandemic – Coronavirus 19] totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. [after senators were briefed about the spread of coronavirus and some of them dumped their stocks ahead of the market crash]: “We’re better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats.”
And let’s not forget our President’s other comments on how the virus is “fake news,” “a conspiracy,” another way to undermine his presidency.
| Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
From April 25 Irish Times article “ Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again ,” by Fintan O’Toole:
ReplyDeleteOver more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
....
[O’Toole illustrates] the pompous, self righteous hubris of Europeans like [himself] who absolutely don't understand America and its complexity. Nor do they care since it's such ready fodder for a 'story' about how stupid and incompetent we are.
DeleteThere is no doubt that the Trump administration made a mess of the response to the virus. How well did the European countries do, including Ireland? So much better per capita?
This is not a news story but rather a deeply angry rant fueled by Europeans' underlying resentment of America's wealth and their dependence on us for their security. Bleeding us for 75 years since we had to come and rescue them from their fascism.
This rant implies that Trump somehow managed the crisis "willfully, malevolently, vindictively..., actively spread a malicious virus... with deliberate and homicidal stupidity". That Republican governors in states with low infection rates acted irresponsibly in attempting to minimize the severe economic impact on their states. That distrust of the Federal Government is somehow new and doesn't have it's roots in Jefferson and the earliest days of the Revolution, before there was a Republic.
Mr O'toole should bend his talents to figuring out how Ireland can get over it's religious and political intolerance and become one country. But this is so easy and sells the Irish Times and he looks so clever. Arrogant twit.
More of Mr. O’Toole’s “rant” is applicable to our American morass:
DeleteAbject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Mr. O’Toole concludes:
DeleteFertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
Not that it matters, but I just looked at the IHME [Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation] stats. Ireland and Alabama have the same population: 4,900,000. Ireland has 1,300 deaths today and Alabama has 274.
DeleteNow, I wouldn't stoop to make a comparison of the relative success of their governments' in dealing with the situation. That would actually take some real science and investigation, which O'Toole can't be bothered with.
This article is a quintessential example of what's wrong with modern journalism and sadly why it can't be trusted. This dates to the means and methods of the Yellow Journalism of William Randolph Hearst. Sell the story, true or false, the more outrageous and angry the better. Journalistic balance and information just get in the way of cooking up a story. Salesmanship and show business.
Only now the new yellow journalism dominates every venue and medium. Can you really say the Atlantic, NYT, WP, WSJ, PBS, Financial Times is really less yellow, hysterical and irresponsible than Fox and Murdoch? The bias is definitely different, as is the audience, but really balanced, sober and trustworthy?
Not that I can see.
O'Toole writes this (l wouldn't it dignify by calling it anything but new era Yellow Journalism) with the clear and self-serving intention of getting a mindless visceral reaction from the likes of us. And it works!! It appeals to all our elitist biases, social and political anxiety and fear of those evil science deniers who fear us. The same thing Trump and Murdoch do with our fellow citizens who, for good reason, don't trust the power elite and everything it's selling to them, from NAFTA, to science, to climate change and Obama Care. And the Elite's hysteria about Covid – big surprise. Once you lose trust in the system, why would you believe anything?
Another reference point: New Zealand population is 4,600,000--just slightly less than Ireland and Alabama, and was hit with coronavirus within days of the first U.S. case. They locked down immediately...and have only 20 deaths. That's not even 10% the death rate in Alabama, and is barely measurable compared to Ireland, much less the U.S. as a whole.
DeleteHow has New Zealand basically eliminated coronavirus, while other countries will probably be battling it for months or years? Decisive, progressive leadership by someone the people trust--Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern--instead of indecisive, regressive leadership by someone the people don't trust.
Michael, very nice work, capturing the essence of our times, in such a brief, thought provoking fashion.
DeleteMichael, please forgive me for the long aside sequence that your poem put me in mind of after I read the Fintan O'Toole article in an email kaffeeklatsch I participate in. The person in that group who brought O'Toole's article to our attention introduced it with the subject heading: "This guy just about says it all."
ReplyDeleteI hoped that Neil Hoffmann's criticisms of the article in the kaffeeklatsch might stimulate some discussion here. Or not. It's okay, either way. I myself am comfortable with O'Toole's article, which is very well written and shows no color yellow to my own eyes. I also, perhaps obviously, share the point of view of your poem.
Thanks for the comments. Thanks also for the great discussion. Open minds create great conversations/
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on the new grandchild. Hope your son and his family are doing well. Powerful piece. We will get through this-leaderless or with leaders.
ReplyDeleteThese lines are priceless:
How did this come to be –
a virus fog
shrouding the lungs of its host?
Thanks, Michael, for sharing.