David K. Shipler's Blog, page 12

America Without Heroes

By David K. Shipler
Nobody believes in anything.--Katya Polikanov, age 17Moscow, 1978
                The trouble with statues is that they are carved in stone or cast in bronze, unyielding to the fluid shifts in surrounding sentiment. They cannot easily be revised. So they are erected in one time and toppled in another, and neither their creation nor their demise carries the nuances and contradictions of the real world. Statues that are celebratory and monumental represent myths, not true history.                Some national myths are useful as long as they set high standards that the nation aspires to achieve. These include the founding myth of equality and liberty, the myth of racial acceptance, the myth of the American Dream’s promise that hard work brings prosperity, the myth of blind justice holding impartial scales. The distance between the myth and the reality is a gap we should seek to overcome.Therefore, as Americans rally to tear down and deface the offensive symbols of a shameful past, it is worth considering what vacuums will be opened and how they will be filled. A country without heroes, which is what the United States is becoming, can be a land adrift, susceptible to demagoguery and absolutism. The challenge is to make the empty pedestals into foundations of conscience and self-correction. If destruction is the only result, trouble looms.                 Most historical figures are complicated, not one-dimensional. Statues, on the other hand, are rarely complicated. They honor and revere, nothing more. And they can perpetuate perverse notions of virtue. The Confederacy was not a noble enterprise, unbecoming as an expression of pride in Southern identity and culture. Surely there is more to the traditions of the South than treason, slavery, and a lost and bloody cause that left scars on America. Heroic sculptures of anti-heroes, and military bases named after them, have no place in an honest society.   But they are part of history, it is argued. Yes indeed, and history should not be erased. Dictatorships do that with abandon to suit momentary political doctrine. But neither should history be sanitized and distorted. Let the Confederacy be taught by scholars who parse the competing impulses of its leaders. Let museums educate in context. If Confederate figures are retained in public squares, let them be accompanied by their opposites: abolitionists, slaves who joined the Union Army, memorials to all the useless deaths of that war. If Jefferson Davis must have a statue, stand Abraham Lincoln beside him.The risk comes not from cleansing the countryside of abhorrent characters but by the spreading outrage of iconoclasts who want to obliterate too widely. President Teddy Roosevelt is coming down from before the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, despite his legacy of national parks—one of the country’s finest treasures. The problem is the demeaning portrayals of an African American and a Native American by his side. You can’t edit bronze. As Bret Stephens suggests, a new statue would be appropriate for a president who “busted trusts, championed conservation, and caused a scandal by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with his family in the White House.”Francis Scott Key and Ulysses S. Grant were deposed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Key owned slaves and defended slavery. Grant, however, had a foot on each side of the divide. He came from an abolitionist father and married a Southern woman whose slave-owning father gave him a man named William Jones. Grant, then a struggling farmer in Missouri, also employed freed blacks, and he freed Jones before the Civil War, then led the Union army in its defeat of the South. As President, he supported blacks’ rights during Reconstruction, ordered his newly formed Justice Department to go after the Ku Klux Klan, and endorsed the 15th Amendment giving the vote to African Americans. But his policies on Native Americans were mixed. He wanted citizenship for them, and he tried to negotiate peace, but met fierce resistance from Congress and the Board of Indian Commissioners. Ultimately he sent the army into a series of bloody battles with tribes, enough to cost his monuments their justification.Since real human beings are never perfect, it might be legitimate to regard certain statues as monuments to ideas rather than to people. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a womanizer, unfaithful to his wife but instrumental in raising the conscience of the nation. Should his name be scrubbed from streets and schools, his statues removed because of his philandering? Of course not. As of 2020, at least, King’s statues are safe, as they should be.George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were walking contradictions, both slaveholders but central to the democratic values that ultimately made the country freer and more inclusive than they could have imagined. Protesters took down Washington’s statue in Portland, Oregon, then spray-painted it with “1619,” the year the first enslaved Africans landed on the continent. But what if Washington were cancelled out of our history? Would the American Revolution have succeeded? Would the disparate states have relinquished autonomy to form a union? Without Washington as the presumed president, would a consensus for the Constitution have been possible?These were flawed leaders who transcended their limitations at a crucial juncture of history. Their ideas have proved larger than themselves. If we see them clearly—Jefferson in particular—we see ourselves vividly, in the ongoing clash between our faults and our principles.Jefferson was a patriarch of the American idea. His declarations on individual liberty still serve as a moral and political compass, yet his belief in the racial inferiority of blacks also endures, embedded in the stereotypes that afflict African Americans today. He abhorred slavery as a “fatal stain” but never abolished it, not as governor, not as president, not as plantation owner. He owned enslaved people inherited from his father and his father-in-law, including Sally Hemings, with whom he had at least one child, DNA tests have shown, and probably five others.His draft of the Declaration of Independence included an excoriation of slavery as a “cruel war against human nature, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” He called it “piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidelpowers” and accused England of engaging in “execrable commerce.” He was pained when the Continental Congress deleted this denunciation. Yet in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia , he describes white skin as “preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers the emotions.” He asserts that blacks “secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.”He sees less ability than whites to anticipate consequences. “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome,” he writes. “But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.”He portrays blacks as primitive in sexuality, emotional capacity, and creative powers. “They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient.  . . . Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. . . . Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” And so on.Do we cancel Jefferson because of this? If we do, then we cancel ourselves, for alongside his prejudices, he nurtured momentous concepts of liberty. They remain alive, essential to the progress that the nation craves.Countries without proud histories suffer. When Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, just seven years after the teenager quoted above assessed her society as lacking in belief, he tried to open the door to historical condemnation—only partway. It was suddenly permissible again to criticize Stalin, as Nikita Khrushchev had allowed in the 1950s. In the bold second chapter of de-Stalinization under Gorbachev, the press was mostly freed to spread the dictator’s crimes before the public, which heard from officials and ordinary citizens who had been witnesses, victims, or even perpetrators. Capricious arrest and exile, mass execution, famine, and even Stalin’s failures in World War II were under scrutiny. It was a heady time.The delight was hardly unanimous. Many conservative, antidemocratic citizens were uneasy and resentful that their history was being trashed, especially when other Russians took the denunciations farther than Gorbachev intended. They expanded back in time, condemning all that had been revered from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution on. An ecstasy of revisionist truth-telling swept the country, bringing down statues of Lenin and his henchmen, revising the names of streets and other public places. Leningrad reverted to St. Petersburg, as under the czars, whose era of reign became a font of nostalgia.Lenin’s mausoleum remains in Red Square, but the November 7 anniversary of his revolution is no longer observed. With the exception of the victory against Germany in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, the reverence for modern Russian history has been practically extinguished.No sensible argument can be made to preserve it, given the monstrous nature of the Communist Soviet Union. But the psychological effects were instructive. In the vacuum, a kind of chaos developed—economic and political primarily, but also spiritual. A weightlessness was felt, with nothing much to grab for steadiness. Where in this exhilarating change could you get a foothold to find solid ground again? I asked Russians at the time. There were no good answers. Who are your heroes? I asked them. There were no good answers. Instead, they have settled on a strong hand at the top, abandoning—at least for a while—their search for pluralistic democracy.The United States is not at all like the Soviet Union, obviously. But we have no heroes, either. We are not divinely ordained to be a pluralistic democracy, either. And if we discard those whose ideas we rightfully revere as pedestals of that democracy, because they were not also saintly human beings, we lose more than the statues.

The Tarnished Badge

By David K. Shipler
Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife.--A white Los Angles policeman, in a 1990s computer message.
                Within the array of stereotypes inflicted upon blacks in America over many generations, the image of violence stands out. From slavery on, blacks have been seen as dirty, ugly, stupid, immoral, alien, and dangerous. These fictions become more or less prominent with time and circumstance, but they never quite die away. Even when they are not translated into law or practice, they can lurk as “implicit bias” that contaminates behavior. The label “dangerous” is especially pernicious.                Much of the brutal policing now being protested appears driven by the expectation that blacks will be violent. That supposed trait appears regularly in surveys and simulations. It is an old prejudice ingrained in American society, readily activated by stress and triggering an officer’s split-second fear, which sometimes leads to a shooting, but more often to warrantless frisks and auto searches, handcuffing, and non-lethal physical force.                The role of racial thinking is difficult to measure precisely. Thoughts and actions do not inevitably coincide, and official statistics record end results, not causes. During traffic stops producing no arrests over a thirteen-month period in 2013-14, for example, police in Oakland, CA handcuffed 1,466 African-Americans but only 72 whites, Stanford psychologists reported. While 72 percent of the department’s officers had handcuffed a black who wasn’t arrested, 74 percent had never done so to a white. Handcuffing blacks was “a script for what is supposed to happen,” the study concluded, a routine presumably based on the violent stereotype but maintained as standard practice. “Norms are a significant driver of behavior,” the psychologists observed. Other experts have seen that rules issued from on high cannot readily overcome a police department’s culture.                Where the stereotype of violence exists, it can be reinforced by the slice of society the police usually encounter—the criminal suspect, not the upstanding citizen. That daily experience becomes a filter through which a world of hostility and risk passes into perceptions, corrupting context and distorting reality. A 2019 study of 100 million traffic stops nationwide found blacks more likely than whites to be stopped, but less so after dark when an officer couldn’t see a driver’s race. Blacks who were pulled over were more likely than whites to be searched. A 2016 examinationof files and mug shots determined that “the Whiter one appears, the more the suspect will be protected from police force.”Off-duty officers of color trying to stop crimes are more at risk of being shot by fellow officers than their white counterparts—comprising 10 of the 14 killed between 1995 and 2010, according to a nationwide study commissioned by the New York governor’s office. “Inherent or unconscious racial bias plays a role in ‘shoot/don’t-shoot’ decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities,” the study declared.The words, “all races and ethnicities” deserve attention. When a group of psychologists examinedfatal shootings from 2015, they discovered that “black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were,” said Joseph Cesario of Michigan State University. The report put it another way: “As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.” But it added a possible reason: White victims were more prevalent because more whites than blacks were mentally ill, and some whites were actually trying to get shot, committing “suicide by cop.” Furthermore, black-on-black shootings rise when more black officers are assigned to black neighborhoods, as they frequently are in big cities.A question is whether black officers are as quick as some whites to shoot unarmed blacks, and whether they share anti-black stereotypes. “People can have biases against their own demographic groups,” saidLorie Fridell, a criminologist at the University of South Florida. “Women can have biases about women. Blacks can have biases about blacks.” But while minority group members often internalize stereotypes held by the majority, how those figure in the mix of motives for violence by black police is far from clear. Class is probably a factor. Some poor inner city residents resent black officers and let them know it. Some black officers return the contempt.Others can reduce tensions. I saw this while researching books on civil liberties. When I spent nights reporting on an undercover narcotics unit in Washington, D.C., I watched anger build among white cops as hostile black residents hassled and berated them for arresting drug dealers. As tempers reached a pitch, one black officer intervened skillfully to talk both sides down. The unit called him “the reverend.”The vast majority of police officers are white males with less than a college degree, the cohort that voted strongly for Donald Trump, who was endorsed by their union, the Fraternal Order of Police. They generally hold views on race typical of the country’s white conservatives, according to a 2016 surveyof 8,000 officers by the Pew Research Center.White cops were nearly unanimous (92 percent) in believing that the country had made the changes needed to guarantee equal rights for blacks; only 6 percent thought that continued change was needed. Their black colleagues said the opposite: only 29 percent saw adequate change and 69 percent  wanted more. A similar divide existed on whether fatal encounters between blacks and police were isolated incidents (72 percent of white officers, 43 of blacks) or part of a broader problem (27 percent of whites, 57 percent of blacks).Only 11 percent of law enforcement academies overall require trainers to have four-year college degrees, according to President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The qualification is required in just 7 percent of state police academies, 4 percent of academies for municipal police, and none of those for sheriff’s deputies.The militarization of police, both in training and equipment, has been a major concern of reformers. Officers’ military backgrounds are correlated with the use of force. About 6 percent of the country’s population has served in the military, but 19 percent of the police. Indeed, policing is the third most popular job following active duty, after driving trucks and the general category of managing.Dallas officers who had been deployed overseas with the military fired their weapons 2.9 times more than cops with no military service, and those who hadn’t been deployed were 1.94 times as likely, the University of Texas School of Public Health reportedin 2018. In 2017, the Marshall Project foundthat use-of-force complaints were more common against Boston and Miami police who’d been in the military. In Albuquerque, one-third of the fatal police shootings from January 2010 to April 2014 were by cops with military backgrounds.  Attempts to quantify racial bias using simulations have produced contradictory results. Joshua Correll, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, has run testssince 2000 with a video game showing images of black and white young men, some holding guns, others cellphones or soda cans. Participants tended to shoot armed blacks more often and sooner than they did armed whites, and to decide more quickly to refrain from shooting unarmed men if they were white. In a later study, police officers reacted most quickly, and correctly, to armed blacks and unarmed whites—that is, they shot the blacks and did not shoot the whites. Further simulations showed more racial bias in the shooting decisions by officers of special units who had contact with minority gang members. Training failed to diminish bias.However, other studies have failed to document a correlation between bias and action. Even when officers hold the stereotype of blacks as violent, they don’t always behave accordingly, at least in the simulations. Two experiments in police simulators recorded brain waves and physiological signs of a heightened threat perception when black “suspects” were pictured. But neither that study nor a more intricate simulationfound that racial bias translated into faster, more frequent shootings of blacks.The simulation, in 2012-13 by Washington State University, enlisted 80 officers in Spokane, 76 of whom were white, who were paid to participate in uniform and with infrared guns that looked like actual weapons—an attempt to get as close to reality as possible. The cops took written and oral exams designed to document prejudice, including the Harvard Implicit Association Test, which documents participants’ propensity to link pictures of black and white faces with weapons. Ninety-six percent of the officers registered implicit racial bias; 78 percent associated blacks with weapons, none associated whites.In four sessions with six scenarios each, the officers were shown videos of actors playing people in similar situations and clothing. The cops were more careful with blacks. They were three times less likely to shoot unarmed blacks than unarmed whites. (The ratio was corrected for the smaller number of black scenarios; in the raw numbers, 54 unarmed whites and two unarmed blacks were shot.) The cops also took about two-tenths of a second longer to decide to shoot armed blacks than armed whites, a delay that researchers regarded as significant.This was called “a counter bias” by Lois James, one of the investigators. The report was ultimately titled “The Reverse Racism Effect.” She postulated that the hesitation to shoot blacks grew out of “people’s concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial group…paired with the awareness of media backlash that follows an officer shooting a minority suspect.” She might be right, but a simulation is hardly reality. It contains no danger, no risk of death, no adrenalin flowing, no actual fear.In the Navy I attended a survival school that concluded with being “captured,” crammed uncomfortably into a wooden box, and “interrogated” with the threat of “torture.” It was the final lesson of the last day of training, so I was extremely brave and recited only my name, rank and serial number. The simulation’s results do not coincide with the Washington Post’s databaseof fatal shootings by police, who have killed unarmed blacks since 2015 at a rate two to three times the African-American representation in the country at large. African-Americans constitute 13 percent of the population but between 25 and 40 percent of the unarmed citizens shot to death by police.

Black All  Black  Unarmed Unarmed Share 2015 38 94 40.4% 2016 19 51 37.3% 2017 22 70 31.4% 2018 23 58 39.7% 2019 14 55 25.5% 2020 7 24 29.2%
              The fitful start of a tentative downward trend is visible, both in absolute numbers and percentages. But it’s too early for optimism. The table above shows deaths recorded to June 11, 2020, and this year’s numbers are already on track to match or exceed last year’s. Furthermore, they do not include deaths that don’t involve firearms, hence George Floyd is not in the figures. Nor is Freddie Gray, who died in a Baltimore police van in 2015 from injuries to his spinal cord. How many others have escaped the database is unknown.
What is known is the resilience of racial stereotyping, conscious and unconscious, which corrupts society until, as in the civil rights movement, it mobilizes enough Americans to act.

Protecting Public Health and Civil Liberties

By David K. Shipler
                The novel coronavirus is giving rise to novel surveillance tools. They can help contain the sweep of COVID-19, which is an urgent need, but the monitoring and categorization of citizens could also survive the pandemic with undue invasions of privacy. Legal safeguards are necessary to make sure that doesn’t happen.                 Innovative hardware and software, some rushed into production by profiteers, are aimed at recording and storing peoples’ physiological functions, locations, and immunity levels. As in any new technology, error rates are high, and the consequences of mistakes will be magnified if used to require quarantine or exclude non-immune people from jobs, housing, courthouses, and public transportation. Furthermore, unless information is automatically erased or sequestered, medical records could be combined in databases of extensive personal files accessible to law enforcement and immigration authorities.The virtue of monitoring is self-evident during the crisis; less obvious are the longer term dangers of doing so. With no treatment or vaccine, self-quarantine and social distance are primary means of curtailing the spread. If people don’t know they’re sick—and neither do their fellow workers, diners, shoppers, passengers, theatergoers, sunbathers, gym users, and the like—the disease cannot be contained as public spaces reopen.This is a matter of security, and as seen after 9/11, public acceptance of extraordinary measures soars in the moment, then persists long after the need abates. The Patriot Act, which Congress passed hastily in 2001, created exceptions to legal protections that had been enacted in the 1970s. Government agencies had been violating the Fourth Amendment by spying on antiwar campaigners, civil rights leaders, and other political activists. But it’s been nearly two decades since the 9/11 attacks, and Congress has applied only minor patches to the holes the Patriot Act tore in the fabric of civil liberties.The same thing could happen now. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred particular interest in three areas of data collection: 1) temperature-taking before admitting people to certain places, 2) testing them for the virus and tracing their contacts, and 3) testing them for antibodies to issue “immunity passports,” a prospect raised by officials in the U.S., Germany, and the U.K.                There are pluses and minuses in each of these areas, according to a series of carefully drawn white papers by the American Civil Liberties Union. They are sensibly balanced and worth summarizing. (Full disclosure: I donate to the ACLU.)1) Temperature checks as a price of admission might pick up infected individuals, but also generate false positives and false negatives. Many with the virus don’t have a fever, and many who do, don’t have the virus. As Jay Stanley of the ACLU observes, skin temperature can be elevated by sunburn, exercise, menopause, cancer, and other non-COVID conditions. And readings from the skin are less accurate than core body temperature taken by oral, anal, or ear thermometers.Furthermore, heat emanating from skin can’t be reliably determined unless the measuring device is repeatedly calibrated and held close to a person who stays still. Stand-off sensors and drones, which are being advertised as unobtrusive means of checking heart and breathing rates as well as temperature, do not work well when surveying groups of moving individuals, Stanley says. He notes that the Transportation Security Administration considered, then suspended, a plan called Project Hostile Intent designed to identify potential terrorists by checking temperatures, heart rates, eye movement, and facial movements. Something of the kind could be revived under the guise of COVID screening, which risks being what he calls “public health theater.”2) Contact tracing by real human beings can work, but automated systems use cell phone locations that are imprecise. They also threaten privacy if their location logs are kept in a central database, according to Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s senior legislative counsel. She urges that any such tools be voluntary and their use transparent. The information, already collected by some companies, can reveal where a person goes to church, shops, works, attends meetings, visits medical facilities, or has late-night visits with someone outside the home. The results can be so extensive that the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that under the Fourth Amendment, police need a warrant first. But the Fourth Amendment generally applies only to government, not private companies.Since the CDC recommends at least six-foot distances from someone who might be infected, most phone data are inadequate. Connections with cell towers can determine an area or a direction of movement but not a precise location. A phone’s GPS receiver can fix a position within six feet only with strong signals from multiple satellites; a more common margin of error is fifteen to fifty feet. Nor can signals usually be picked up inside, so it’s no good for contact tracing if you’re in a store, office, or theater.China has begun using QR codes that citizens must scan with their phones to get into buses, taxis, subways, and some buildings. That tells authorities when someone enters but not who is close by unless combined with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections.The most promising method so far appears to be the Exposure Notification API (application programming interface) developed by Apple and Google to allow state health authorities to offer people an app that would tell them if they came close to an infected person. Use is purely voluntary, according to Jason Cross, writing in Macworld. You would request the state’s app and could disable it at will. People testing positive would take the initiative to register through the app, but with no identifying information.If you’re not ill and you sign up, and you get close to a virus carrier who’s also in the system, your Bluetooth connections will trigger a text giving the date and length of your encounter, but not its location. Cross reports that the information is anonymized—only a phone’s Bluetooth code, which changes every several minutes, would be uploaded to a database, with no personal identification. Once a person tests positive, she could authorize the disclosure of her proximity information from the previous fourteen days. Again, no names and no locations. Cross writes that three states so far—Alabama, South Carolina, and North Dakota—have decided to try the system. Others might prefer one that identifies participants so health authorities can follow up.One flaw, the ACLU notes, is that safe contact might be flagged. Guliani reports that in Israel, where security services have used location data to enforce quarantines, a woman who merely waved at her infected boyfriend from the street was told to stay home. If Bluetooth penetrated walls, neighbors in an apartment building might be falsely alerted. So might drivers near pedestrians, although the Apple-Google system would report the duration’s brevity.   This would work only with widespread enrollment. Yet about 40 percent of Americans over 65 and 30 percent of those earning under $30,000 a year do not have smartphones, Guliani says. And reliance on voluntary cooperation is both bad and good: bad because most people probably won’t participate, good because an alternative of “coercive health tactics often backfire,” she notes. Individualistic, anti-government impulses run strongly through American society. Witness those protesting stay-at-home orders.Nevertheless, what seems voluntary can easily become required if landlords, employers, or government officials demand testing or enrollment before renting, hiring, or granting benefits. Current laws probably don’t prevent such compulsion.3. Immunity Passports would be highly problematic for similar reasons. Esha Bhandari, an ACLU senior staff attorney, argues that since antibodies’ true level of protection from COVID-19 is not yet known, relying on positive tests could produce complacency, endangering both individuals and institutions. Requiring an immunity certification for work might divide populations between the haves and have-nots—those with antibodies and those without. It could exacerbate racial disparities, Bhandari says, since low-wage employees in jobs that can’t be done at home are disproportionately black and Latino. The non-immune “might never be eligible for a given job short of contracting and surviving COVID-19 if an immune worker is available to take the slot.”Therefore, immunity passports could also “create perverse incentives to contract COVID-19 for people who are the most economically insecure,” Bhandari argues. This is not as fanciful as it sounds. It happened in New Orleans during a yellow fever epidemic in 1847.  “Without immunity to yellow fever,” writesSarah Zhang in The Atlantic, “newcomers would have difficulty finding a place to live, a job, a bank loan, and a wife. Employers were loath to train an employee who might succumb to an outbreak. Fathers were hesitant to marry their daughters to husbands who might die.” Slaves who had acquired immunity were worth 25 percent more, she says.Finally, the ACLU worries—as it always does—that personal information collected in a good cause will be aggregated by corporations and government, in this case forming what Bhandari calls a “health surveillance infrastructure that endangers privacy rights.” Existing laws probably don’t prevent data sharing by private firms, so opportunities are legion for intense discrimination in work, housing, travel, immigration applications, and other areas.A good deal of legislation is needed to channel data and set limits. Otherwise, once the pandemic passes, Jay Stanley argues, “routine and suspicionless collection” could make physiological surveillance the norm. “We don’t want to wake up to a post-COVID world where companies and government agencies think they can gather temperature or other health data about people whenever they want.”
Previously published by The Washington Monthly

A Mayor as President?

By David K. Shipler
                American voters have never sent a city mayor directly to the White House. They have never regarded being mayor as sufficient qualification. It’s OK to be a corrupt businessman, a mediocre governor, or a senator who hasn’t managed anything more than his own staff. But to work at gritty levels where ordinary folks meet the schools, police, and other essential services? To navigate the intricacies of race? To witness the intimate impact of government callousness or compassion? All that is deemed irrelevant by the political professionals and the electorate. As America burns, maybe it’s time for some rethinking.Some mayors in this crisis have found the right tone of passionate eloquence to voice the country’s widespread revulsion at Officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They have touched the chords of historical outrage over deprivation and oppression. They have mixed moving pleas for peace with scathing condemnations of those whose violence, arson, and looting have sullied the noble purpose of the protests.The fine words have not always worked. Being mayor is a tough job, and mayors across the country have been exercising tough love. They’re not all good at it, and ingrained cultures of both police and citizens impede progress even by the most enlightened. But they’ve had actual experience at the grass roots, never a bad thing in governing, especially from the highest post in the land. That experience has not proved persuasive to voters. Grover Cleveland was mayor of Buffalo, but his stepping stone to the presidency was as governor of New York State. Calvin Coolidge was the small-town mayor of Northampton, Mass., but before and after that, he served in the state legislature, from which he was elected vice president; he became president when Warren Harding died.Modern candidates have not gained much traction from their mayoral backgrounds. Vice President Hubert Humphrey had been mayor of Minneapolis before becoming a U.S. Senator, but the Minneapolis job didn’t figure prominently in his political reputation.New York Mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, got nowhere after he switched parties and tried for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made a fleeting effort last year. Pete Buttigieg was still mayor of South Bend, Ind. when he launched his bid for this year’s Democratic presidential nomination, and despite his obvious ability to learn from that role—including hard lessons about policing and race—those qualifications failed to draw sufficient votes. Julian Castro had been mayor of San Antonio, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration. His years as mayor informed his positions but were rarely cited in his run for the nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt., but again, he didn’t talk about it much.    Perhaps the credential will mean more now that we’re seeing how vital local government is to addressing the pandemic and improving police-community relations. Not that being a mayor necessarily makes you fit to be president. In 1928, Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson was foiled in his run for the Republican nomination, in part because he opposed Prohibition and took financing from Al Capone. In 1972, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, a red-baiter who inflamed police brutality against blacks, tried for the Democratic nomination and won only six percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. And Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York during 9/11, whose support for abortion rights torpedoed him with Republicans, tarnished himself with his work as President Trump’s personal lawyer and backdoor emissary to Ukraine; an exemplary president he would not be. Plenty of good presidents haven’t been mayors. Think of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama. And while mayors lack the foreign policy experience valuable in the White House, most of those presidents did as well.You can study foreign policy. You can hire good experts. But from the pinnacle of the White House, you can’t absorb the people’s pain. You can’t detect the layers of hardship and the crosscurrents of concerns. In the last week, mayors have risen above the flames to walk a delicate line of hurt and warning. Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, who is white, fired the four officers involved, requested the national guard, and gave voice to the “anger and sadness that has been ingrained in our black community, not just because of five minutes of horror, but four hundred years.” He also denounced the looting as “unacceptable. Our communities cannot and will not tolerate it.” For displaying his strength of character, Frey was denounced by Trump as “weak.”His neighboring mayor, Melvin Carter of St. Paul, who is black, managed to touch every important note. He also placed Floyd’s killing in the long landscape of history, “not just over the past decade as camera phones have become the norm, but over the past decades and generations and centuries in our  country.” Then he went on: “That anger is real, and I share it with you. So today we’re asking our community for peace, but I want to be very clear, we are not asking you for patience. . . . I am not asking you to sit to the side and patiently wait while we slowly and incrementally stem the bloody tide of African-American men killed by law enforcement. We’re asking you to take that energy, that energy . . . that can either destroy us or it could bring us together and build us up in a way that we have never been together before as a country. We’re asking you to take that energy and use it not to destroy our neighborhoods but to destroy the historic culture, to destroy the systemic racism, to destroy . . . the laws, the legal precedents, the police union contracts, all of the things that make it so difficult to hold someone accountable when a life like George Floyd’s is so wrongfully taken.”Indeed, as Carter and other mayors know so well, police don’t change easily. Their unions are mostly devoted to defending officers, not to correcting them and their departments. Where contracts require arbitration to rule on dismissals, many officers fired return to their jobs. It’s a good bet that the vast majority of police officers were as revolted by the video of Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck as other Americans; many police chiefs said as much, and some cops prayed and marched with protesters. Yet police departments are among the country’s most racist institutions, and reformist mayors such as Frey have found them practically impervious to reform.One mayor worth hearing at length is Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, who is black. She excoriated the violent among the peaceful protesters:“I am a mother. I am a mother to four black children in America, one of whom is eighteen years old. And when I saw the murder of George Floyd, I hurt like a mother would hurt. And yesterday I heard there were rumors about violent protests in Atlanta, I did what a mother would do. I called my son and I said, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘I cannot protect you, and black boys should not be out today.’“So you’re not gonna out-concern me and out-care about where we are in America. I wear this each and every day and I pray over my children each and every day. So what I see happening on the streets of Atlanta is not Atlanta. This is not a protest. This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos. A protest has purpose. When Dr. King was assassinated, we didn’t do this to our city. So if you love this city, this city that has had a legacy of black mayors and black police chiefs and people who care about this city, where more than 50 percent of the business owners in Metro Atlanta are minority business owners, if you care about this city, then go home. . . .“You’re not honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. You’re not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands breaking windows in this city. . . . If you want change in America, go and register to vote. Show up at the polls on June ninth. Do it in November. That is the change we need in this city. You are disgracing this city. . . . We are better than this as a city. We are better than this as a country. Go home. Go home. In the same way I couldn’t protect my son yesterday, I cannot protect you out in those streets.”Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., also black, had a few choice words for Trump. “I call upon our city and our nation to exercise great restraint, even while our president tries to divide us,” she declared. “We are grieving hundreds of years of institutional racism, systems that require black Americans to prove our humanity just for it to be disregarded. . . . We need leaders who recognize this pain and in times of great turmoil and despair can provide us a sense of calm and a sense of hope. Instead, what we’ve got in the last two days from the White House is the glorification of violence against American citizens. What used to be heard in dog whistles we now hear from a bull horn. So to everyone hurting and doing our part to move this country forward, we will look to ourselves and our own communities for this leadership and this hope.”That statement came before Trump fanned the flames again Monday by telling governors that they were “weak” and urging tougher police measures. Even if the governors reject the president’s call for police violence, many rank and file officers will surely heed it.

Keeping the Elephants Away

By David K. Shipler
                “I’ll tell you why I’m taking hydroxychloroquine,” Trump told his Cabinet after the press left. “Because you can’t believe the so-called experts. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ll prove it. They laughed at me the last time I was down at Mar-a-Lago—the most beautiful resort in Florida, by the way. No, in the country. In the world! Beautiful. The best. And it has the best grass. The grass is amazing. It’s green. Really, it’s green. So I’m down there and I got worried.”                Eyebrows of worry soared around the table, a condition known as sycophantic supercilium, especially prominent on the otherwise passive face of the Vice President.                “In the middle of the night, when I get most of my brilliant ideas, I suddenly worried about what would happen if elephants came in and tramped on the grass. Can you imagine?” He looked around the table to make sure everybody was imagining. Sure enough, they were all nodding in acute bouts of imagination. “What a mess. Big holes in the fairway, and you know what comes out the back end of an elephant? I won’t say it because Betsy is here.” He nodded respectfully toward the Secretary of Education, who smiled knowingly because she constantly peddled that stuff-which-could-not-be-named.                Everybody in the Cabinet was on the edge of their chairs, which were specially designed to have comfortable edges, where Trump wanted them to sit when he was speaking.“I almost tweeted about it, but then I thought, no, I’ll take action myself. In a bar long ago I heard this story about a guy in some suburb tearing up a newspaper and spreading it on his lawn. I remembered it verbatim, because I have a phenomenal memory, always the best memory in the room. Right? Don’t you think?” Nods of affirmation, a condition known as sycophantic neurocranium.              “So I figured, if it can work for that guy in some suburb, it can work in the most beautiful resort in the world. ‘Get me a newspaper,' I said. 'No, not just any newspaper. Get me the Failing New York Times.’ So I take the Failing New York Times, which finally would be good for something, and I go out onto the grass in front. The grass was green, did I tell you that? So green! No grass anywhere is green like that.                “So I start to rip up the Failing New York Times into long strips, just like that guy I heard about in the bar, and I’m spreading them around on the grass when some expert comes up to me—I don’t know his name. I never met the guy. I never heard of him. Have I fired him yet? I should fire him.“He says, ‘What are you doing, Mr. President?’ I say, ‘I’m keeping the elephants away.’“He says, ‘There aren’t any elephants around here.’“And I say, ‘See? It works!’” Just like that guy in the suburbs.            “What do you think, Mike?”              The Vice President’s beatific look lit up the room with an ethereal glow.
This is satire. It never happened (as far as I know), which is necessary to point out because people tend to get confused by the satirical reality of the Trump era. It also relies on an adaptation of an old joke, authorship unknown.

Covid, Comedy, Music and Other Creativity

By David K. Shipler
                So far, so good in the grassroots creativity department. Undaunted, resilient of spirit, committed to surviving the lockdowns and illnesses as well as possible, people have peppered the online universe with homegrown sarcasm, self-deprecation, dark humor, and uplifting music. Below is a sampling, with links.                This will be an ongoing service of The Shipler Report, so please send additional offerings—links required—so I can add them to this catalogue. It can’t prevent you from getting Covid-19, but hopefully it will help mental health!
LAUGHING AT OURSELVES
                Busy in Quarantine.
                Israeli Mother on Home Schooling.

                Here's What We Should All Be Doing.
                One Day More—a Family’s Rendition.
                Trump’s Candidate to Replace Fauci. and her explanation of her parody.

                Family Lockdown Boogie

                Corona Parody
LAUGHING AT TRUMP
                “I Know More…”
                Clorox Chewables
                Saturday Night Live: Bratt Pitt as Dr. Fauci.
                A Plea to the Tune of Wimoweh.

                Trump Musing
                Lemon Pickers Needed in Florida—Only U.S. Citizens or Legal Immigrants Need Apply                                Sally Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, read an ad in the newspaper for one of the jobs that most Americans are not willing to do, and decided to apply. She submitted an application to a Florida lemon grove, but seemed far too qualified for the job. She has a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from Michigan State University. For a number of years, she had worked as a social worker and also as a school teacher.                                The foreman studied her application, frowned, and said, “I see you are well-educated and have an impressive resume. However, I must ask whether you have any actual experience in picking lemons.”                                “Well, as a matter of fact, I have,” she said. “I’ve been divorced three times, owned two Chryslers, and voted for Trump.”                                She started work yesterday.
MUSIC
                What the World Needs Now, Berklee College of Music Students.
                Rotterdam Philharmonic, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
                The Music Spreads in Nuremberg (from 2014).
                Harvard Bach Society Orchestra, Sibelius’s 5th Symphony.

                Dancing in the Street



More to come, I hope. Stay well, everyone.

What Makes a "Healthy" Economy?

By David K. Shipler
                Last week, Janet Yellin, former chair of the Federal Reserve, gave an upbeat assessmentof the pre-pandemic US economy. “Very fortunately we started with an economy that was healthy before this hit,” she told the PBS NewsHour.  “The banks were in good shape, the financial system was sound, Americans at least overall on average had relatively low debt burdens.”But how “healthy” was that economy, really? How healthy is an economy whose workers have so little savings that they can’t make the rent after missing just a couple of paychecks? How healthy is an economy whose small businesses have so little cushion that they face almost instant obliteration when their cash flow is disrupted? How healthy is an economy where hourly employees performing many essential services earn so little that they have to go to work sick to keep their jobs? And how healthy is an economy whose housing costs force millions to cram into overcrowded homes in polluted slums replete with high stress, malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, heart problems, and other chronic disease?“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” said Fed chairman Jerome Powell in March. It was “resilient,” he said in February. Yellin concurred, citing the old good news in her hope that the “economy will recover much more speedily than it did from any past downturn.”Recover for whom? The experts look at conventional measurements, which painted a picture of prosperity before COVID-19. The unemployment rate last September hit a fifty-year low, at 3.5 percent, and the rate for people without a high school diploma dropped to a new low of 4.8 percent. The GDP had been growing within the range considered ideal—2 to 3 percent—and Powell reported a rising willingness of employers to hire low-skilled workers and train them.However, alongside the bright figures on unemployment and job creation, consider a competing set of numbers from before the pandemic: The poverty-level wages for those who harvest our vegetables, cut our Christmas trees, wash our cars, cook and serve our food in restaurants, deliver groceries to our doors, clean our offices, and even drive our ambulances. The 14.3 million households (11.1 percent) uncertain that they could afford enough food, and the 5.6 million families (4.3 percent) where at least one person has had to cut back on eating during the year. The 14.3 percent of black children with asthma, double the rate in the population overall. The 20 percent of children living in crowded homes shared with other families or three generations of their own, and the 50 percent of urban children who have lived in those conditions by age nine.A pernicious dynamic of financial stress is the unexpected link between housing costs and malnutrition. For many low-wage families without access to such government subsidies as Section 8 vouchers or affordable housing, rent can soak up 40 to 60 percent of income, which can leave too little for other necessities. You have to pay the rent. You have to pay the electricity, phone, and fuel bills. If you need a car to get to work, which the vast majority of employees do, you have to make the car payments. Those are not optional. The category that can be squeezed is for food, and that’s what many poor families have to do.A result is childhood malnutrition. It sometimes manifests itself in obesity resulting from cheap, bad food, which in turn can promote diabetes. It compromises the immune system. Even more seriously, deprivation of nutrients such as iron during key periods of brain development, both before and after birth, can lead to lifelong cognitive impairment. Studies show that children who suffered iron deficiency as infants, even if they’re fed properly later, still suffer as adolescents, scoring lower in math, written expression, and selective recall. Their teachers see them displaying “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems,” according to a National Academy of Sciences report.So when federal and state governments are stingy with housing subsidies, as they always are, they are effectively, perhaps unwittingly, damaging children’s brain development and life opportunities.The booming economy since the Great Recession of 2008, amplified by Republican tax cuts that gave corporations huge benefits, has begun to raise hourly wages, but not significantly. If median hourly wagesin certain jobs are put next to the official poverty line—currently $25,750 a year for a family of four—it’s clear why so many people are in desperate trouble so soon after the economy’s lockdown. Most poor families have only one wage earner, so assuming a full-time, 40-hour week, that person would have to be paid $12.38 an hour just to reach the poverty line. As of May 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly wage for ambulance drivers and assistants was just $12.45; for workers in retail sails, $11.37 to $12.14; for building cleaners, $12.68; for parking attendants, $12.11; and for fast-food and restaurant cooks and servers (some of whom also get tips), $11.00 to $12.45.The lesson is to look beyond the unemployment rate and number of new jobs and examine how well those jobs pay. The “healthy” economy did little to narrow the wealth gap. The most recent Federal Reserve figures, from before the pandemic, showed the top 10 percent of households with a median net worth of $2,387,500 and the bottom 10 percent with minus $962—that is, they owed more than they owned.Adding assets and subtracting liabilities as of the fourth quarter of 2019, the wealthiest 10 percent had 70 percent ($78.5 trillion) of the country’s total household net worth, and the bottom 50 percent had just 1.5 percent ($1.7 trillion). The top had miniscule debt, and the bottom half had miniscule financial assets alongside huge mortgage and consumer debt.So, Janet Yellin was only partially right when she said that Americans had low debt burdens. Consumer debt reached a record high in 2019 of more than $14 trillion, according to Experian, the credit agency. But it was lower as a portion of income. And defaults and late payments were low enough to drive the average FICO score—a person’s credit rating—to a high of 703, up from 689 in 2010 at the end of the Great Recession. (A perfect score is 850.) Given the high credit card and other debt among the unwealthy, however, delinquency rates can now be expected to soar, pushing credit ratings down.In that prospering economy, then, the glass was either half full or half empty, depending on whether you were looking from the top or from the bottom. There was no need to exaggerate the hardships at the bottom, as some Democratic candidates did with one misstated statistic.Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all saidlast year that 40 percent of Americans could not come up with the money to pay a $400 emergency expense. In fact, the contrary was the case, according to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.”Asked to check all the ways they could pay for a $400 emergency, only 12 percent said they could not pay right now, 45 percent checked “with the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash, and 33 percent said they’d use a credit card and pay it off entirely at the next statement. To a follow-up question, 85 percent said that making the unexpected payment would not prevent their paying other bills.On the other hand, 25 percent told the Federal Reserve that they were just getting by or finding it difficult to get by. That is number troubling enough, one bound to spike as stay-at-home orders continue. The economy was not “healthy” for those folks in the first place, and will not be so for many more.Improvements will come not from the stalemate of left and right, or from their manipulating statistics, but from a new ideology of practical realism that honors the complex facts, without distortion. The free-market system is the one we have, and it can work for virtually everyone if everyone in government and business works for everyone. Too idealistic? Naïve? Probably.

Previously published by Washington Monthly.

When Lying Becomes Censorship

By David K. Shipler
President Trump’s frequent lies have been disorienting enough during his three years in office, and especially risky during the coronavirus epidemic. Now he is moving more dramatically across the line into censoring skilled professionals in government. This imposes an implicit threat that some who counter his falsehoods with truth could lose their jobs.Sunday, when a reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci about hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for COVID-19, Trump interrupted, stepped forward, blocked Fauci from answering, and let stand his own disjointed and ill-informed answer. Trump did not caution against self-medicating, which has already killed one man in Arizona, and made no reference to the warnings by medical experts that the drug can have deadly side effects in patients with cardiac problems.Last Thursday, Capt. Brett E. Crozier was removed as skipper of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt after sending an urgent, four-page letter to about thirty Navy officials pleading for rapid help in relocating thousands of crew members ashore amid a spreading infection of COVID-19 on the ship. The appeal, leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, might have bypassed Crozier’s immediate superior, a violation of military protocol. But the uniformed Navy wanted a careful investigation, not the summary dismissal executed by Trump’s civilian appointee, acting Navy Secretary, Thomas B. Modly, who tolda colleague, “Breaking news: Trump wants him fired,” according to David Ignatius of The Washington Post.Then late Friday, Trump fired the inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael K. Atkinson, for obeying the law in notifying Congress of the whistleblower’s complaint in the Ukraine case that led to the president’s impeachment. Dozens of inspectors general populate government agencies as supposedly independent watchdogs. Their reports of errors, misdeeds, fraud, and corruption have been key to restricting the malfeasance of powerful officials. And Atkinson was required by statute to provide the notification if he found the complaint credible, which it obviously turned out to be.After his dismissal, Atkinson tried to reassure and encourage potential whistleblowers: “The American people deserve an honest and effective government. They are counting on you to use authorized channels to bravely speak up—there is no disgrace for doing so.” He concluded, “Please do not allow recent events to silence your voices.”But that is exactly what Trump is trying to do, and most of his Republican legislators signed on to the effort when they repeatedly demanded during impeachment hearings that the whistleblower be summoned and identified. This, even after many other witnesses confirmed the anonymous report that Trump had withheld Congressionally appropriated military aid to help Ukraine in its war against Russia, while urging the new Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens—both Hunter Biden, who had profited from a lucrative position with a Ukrainian company, and his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s expected election opponent. Inspector General Atkinson is only the latest in Trump’s purge of officials who testified truthfully on the Ukraine matter. One might disagree that the president’s behavior warranted impeachment and removal from office, but it’s hard to see how citizens who value an open society can stomach Trump’s message in the aftermath: Speak truth to power and get ready to apply for unemployment benefits.Firing people he sees as disloyal is not brand new for Trump. But the latest incidents continue a sequence anathema to pluralistic democracy. First, propagate lies from the top, usually to make situations seem much better than they are. Second, discredit the press as the people’s enemy to undermine its credibility when it corrects the lies and exposes wrongdoing. Third, hire only functionaries who revere and support the leader. Fourth, fire officials who contradict or criticize the leader, even if they are following legal requirements—which in turn undermines the rule of law. Fifth, create anxiety in the ranks to promote self-censorship by officials who want to keep their jobs. That way, no repeated edicts are needed from on high. The system of lies and silence becomes self-sustaining.Thankfully, self-censorship is not the style of Dr. Fauci, the immunologist who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is so dedicated and honorable that he is able to contradict Trump by simply stating facts. “To my knowledge, I haven’t been fired,” he quipped a couple of weeks ago. And the president would unleash a political firestorm if he sacked him now. That’s why Trump had to step to the lectern Sunday to stop Fauci from answering a question about chloroquine. When a reporter asked why Trump didn’t let the science dictate the treatment, and why he was promoting the drug, Trump said, “I’m not. I’m not at all.” Then he went on:“Look, you know what I’m trying to do? I’m trying to save lives. I want them to try it, and it may work and it may not work. But if it doesn’t work, it’s nothing lost by doing it, nothing. . . . We don’t have time to go and say, gee, let’s take a couple of years and test it out. And let’s go and test with the test tubes and the laboratories. We don’t have time. I’d love to do that. But we have people dying today. As we speak, there are people dying. . . . We bought massive amounts, 29 million doses of it. We have it coming for all of the labs.  . . . because in case it does work, we want to have it.”Then, with Fauci at the lectern, a reporter asked, “Would you also weigh in on hydroxychloroquine? What do you think about this?”Fauci prepared to answer, but Trump stepped forward next to him and declared, “How many times have [inaudible] answered that question? Maybe fifteen times.”Reporter: But he’s a doctor.Trump: Fifteen times. Maybe fifteen times. You don’t have to ask that question.Reporter: He’s your medical expert, correct?Trump: He’s answered that question fifteen times.What Fauci would have said was no mystery to the aware public, or apparently to Trump. But with a thin smile of discomfort, the good doctor turned to another reporter. Fauci in this job is critical for the country right now, so he doesn’t have to get into a public fight with a vengeful president. Yet another question hung in the air, unasked. How many other medical experts working for the federal government will dare contradict the president with scientific facts and sound medical advice?As for Captain Crozier, who was cheered by his crew as he left his ship and is now quarantined in Guam with a dry cough, the full story remains to be told. Did he try and fail to get sufficient responses from the Navy to the infections blooming on the Roosevelt? Did his immediate superior, Rear Adm. Stuart P. Baker, react properly, or was he deficient? Evading the chain of command is serious business, but Crozier apparently felt compelled to broadcast his appeal widely enough that it shook the establishment into action. His four-page letter was strong but not hysterical; it outlined a logical, measured, and reasoned approach to minimizing deaths among his nearly 5,000 crew. The details of the episode remain murky, but the intimidating message to others in uniform is clear. The risk Trump poses to the flow of unwelcome information can damage military effectiveness and blind policymakers. As we saw during the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, optimistic falsehoods are often passed up the chain of command to enhance the records of subordinates who fear retribution for failure. I witnessed this myself, though far from Vietnam.As a junior officer on a destroyer in ancient times, 1964-66, I saw my captain and the executive officer try to fake passing scores in a failed gunnery exercise to make the ship—and themselves—look good. And during a big anti-submarine exercise, the captain decided not to report that our sonar was down—a “sitrep,” or situation report, was supposed to be sent straight to the Pentagon—until we were ordered to hunt for a sub and could no longer hide our disability. A destroyer captain, usually the rank of commander, was at a turning point in his career and was unjustifiably held responsible for equipment failures on his ship. (That skipper was later promoted from commander to captain.)These were merely exercises, not the real thing. But truth-telling in government should always be the real thing.

Welcome to the Fourth World

By David K. Shipler
                Americans have a better chance of keeping themselves and others safe by ignoring what President Trump says. He has already contributed to the death of an Arizona man who, along with his wife, took chloroquine (used to clean fish tanks!) the day after Trump misinformed the country about its anti-viral effectiveness. Medical experts criticized the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency authorization for its use, because too much can kill you. In fact, its use against malaria is not necessarily applicable to COVID-19 without careful clinical trials to establish proper dosing. In the wife’s case, it sent her into critical condition. Even doctors who listened to Trump are writing prescriptions to hoardthe drug for themselves, depleting supplies for those who really need it for lupus and other ailments.                This is what the United States has come to. You can’t believe your president, the one who is getting a 55 percent approval rating for the way he is mishandling the pandemic. You shouldn’t have accepted his cavalier assessment that the supposed severity of the virus was just the Democrats’ “new hoax” that would soon disappear. You can’t trust his absurd assurances that sufficient tests and medical equipment are available, or that they’re not really needed in bulk.You certainly shouldn’t act on his push to fill the churches on Easter and to go back to work—advice he’s now recanted by extending preventive guidelines until April 30. His cavalier, contradictory, self-absorbed briefings have encouraged millions to take the disease less seriously than warranted, which could lead to the collapse of law enforcement, health care, fire departments, infrastructure maintenance, and food supplies as those essential workers drop into sickness.                 Trump is a national security risk. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. He refuses to talk to governors who don’t fawn over him. He claims to have inherited “a broken system.” Yet he has been in office for more than three very long years, during which he has watched TV compulsively, tweeted his grievances and insults, played lots of golf, come to work late in the morning, and governed the way Boris Yeltsin did in Russia as it descended: by simply firing people, as if the federal government were his TV show, The Apprentice.                The cost is now apparent. An excellent analysisby Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs in The New York Times documents the handicaps created by the widespread vacancies in key federal positions, the massive departures of top scientists and specialists in emergency management, and the colossal inexperience of political lackeys Trump has appointed. It’s a reminder of the Soviet Union in its final years, as political orthodoxy mattered more than expertise.                There is a reminder of another kind. Anyone who has been in a Third World country, whether in deep poverty or in wartime, knows the familiarity of harrowing accounts we are now receiving from American hospitals. In Cambodia, too, patients waited for hours or days in hallways. There, too, doctors and nurses were overwhelmed and often helpless in the face of insufficient methods of treatment. People died when decent medical care could have saved them.                We are now in a Fourth World, “a new category of nations: those once mighty and noble that are falling into frailty and disrepute.” Those words are from a piece I wrote the day before Trump was inaugurated. It was entitled, “America Enters a Fourth World.” My apologies for quoting myself, which puts me off when writers do it. But I’ll continue shamelessly, and you can read the whole essay hereto see how obvious Trump’s defects were even before he took office as “the most childish, reckless, and truthless president in modern American history.”                The Fourth World “is a place of undoing. It is a place where moral values of the common good are picked apart, strand by strand, until only the shreds of caring and justice remain. It is where progress is dismantled: progress—albeit fitful and incomplete—in mobilizing the society through government to protect the impoverished from utter ruin, the innocent from false imprisonment, minorities from tyranny, children from hunger, families from dangerous foods and medicines and polluted air and water, and the earth from the end-stage of catastrophic global warming.                “There is nothing divinely ordained about America’s greatness. Once Trump and the radicals who will populate most of his cabinet finish their efforts to destroy what has been painstakingly constructed over decades, it will take a generation to recover. That is the actual time when it will be appropriate to plead, ‘Make America Great Again!’”                The term “Third World,” coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, evolved into the optimistic label “developing countries.” But in the meantime it spawned the category “First World” to mean the industrialized capitalist countries, and the “Second World,” the industrialized communist countries. Only “Third World” survived for a while as common shorthand.                Welcome now to the Fourth World. “In Trump’s vicinity, truth dies,” I wrote the day before his inauguration. “He facilitates the erosion of shared reality in a polarized society more infatuated with opinion than fact—or, rather, that believes opinion is fact.”                Three years and two months later, he is still fooling millions of Americans. His misleading, self-serving opinions interact with a credulous public to produce a toxin. “Don’t believe anything that the president says,” advised the Arizona woman whose husband died. In other words, we need to observe social distancing—from the President and his babbling.

             Previously published by the Washington Monthly.
          

Suffering Spring

By David K. Shipler
                Daffodils came early this year, deceived by a premature spate of warmth, then slapped with reality by a cold snap. But now the most exquisite season in and around the nation’s capital has begun to take hold. The plum tree in front has blossomed along with the magnolias across the street. The cherry trees are at their peak, their feathery white petals blowing off and descending like snow flurries. The azaleas will not be far behind.                It is a cruel spring of dissonance. It is like that crystal autumn day, September 11, 2001, whose beauty should not have allowed the terror and the death. It is like wartime Vietnam, whose stunning landscapes should not have made room for combat. This should be a soothing time of annual rebirth, with no place for the discords of illness and fear.                Like a family in crisis, America and every other nation will learn good and hard lessons about itself. This will weld us or break us. We will find common purpose or deepened fissures. If we summon wisdom, we will discover what matters and what does not, who are heroes and who are not, who are leaders and who are not—regardless of their titles, positions, or pretenses.                 Human beings rarely resign themselves to powerlessness. To flee from war, crime, or hunger, refugees uproot themselves and journey into risky unknowns. Against suicide bombings, citizens search for a semblance of control. They reach for tricks and tactics that seem rational, hoping to reduce the unwanted probabilities. In Israel when buses were being blown up, drivers tried to avoid stopping near buses at red lights. In Lebanon and Vietnam, canny locals stayed off country roads that felt too quiet. Smart cops in every tough city in the world learn to watch and listen all around them, to read body language, if possible to put an engine block between them and a suspect who might be armed.                 The habit of staking a claim to some small territory of control is surely embedded in our animal survival instinct. Sometimes our methods are futile, often so against random violence. Sometimes they are illusory, giving us a sense of power more imagined than real. Sometimes they are practical, and therefore comforting, as we wash our hands while singing Happy Birthday twice, stop touching our faces, use gloves or paper towels to handle the gas pump, sterilize our doorknobs and kitchen counters, and look to the health professionals’ steady and factual advice. Thank heavens for Dr. Anthony Fauci!                But there are limits to human powers, of course. In the spreading virus and the falling stock market, we are confronted by microbes and microchips: the infinitesimal enemy and the computer-programmed selling triggered by downward spirals in prices. Both spin out of control and magnify the harm. There is a reason why a malicious computer program is called a virus.                Then, too, we have enhanced and restricted our own powers by the ways in which we have programmed computers, developed policies, drawn up budgets, and elected governments. Globally, we have advanced science remarkably and have elevated superb minds to guide us and to research remedies. Simultaneously, we have indulged in anti-scientific myths about vaccinations and cures, and in the United States have elected a president who dismisses scientific expertise, spouts dangerously false assertions, and cannot seem to remember and repeat a simple fact. In an ordinary citizen, his mental disabilities would be cause for sympathy.                Through our voting, we Americans have also decided against sufficiently robust funding for health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control. We have decided on a short-sighted government that does not prepare, even after its own simulation reveals startling gaps in medical supplies and interagency coordination. We prefer spats with China to cooperation. We send to Congress a Republican Party more determined to help the rich than the poor, even in an emergency. We adore and detest our president, unable to agree on whether he is a savior or a threat. We appear poised to follow the historical pattern in which a crisis raises a leader’s approval rating, as Pearl Harbor did Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s and 9/11 did George W. Bush’s. And the coming of spring, at this writing, has not cloaked the partisan rancor in our nation’s capital.                The hope lies in the neighborhoods. Among the plum, magnolia, and cherry trees where I live, generous young neighbors offer to shop for the elderly, strollers greet each other cheerfully from a distance, old friends talk more now by phone and FaceTime, and that deep American tradition of caring thrives. To paraphrase Dickens: It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.