Dysfunction and Decline: An Impersonal Essay

I was driving back from a Bernie rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in February of last year when President Trump came on the radio breezily predicting that the Covid outbreak, then consisting of 15 identified cases, was “completely under control” and would soon be history. This sounded overconfident even with the little we knew at the time. But what struck me was the former president’s hypnotically persuasive style. His worldview was so carefree, self-assured, and emphatic that it felt almost churlish to resist his imperious optimism.

Six hundred-plus thousand deaths later, the former chief executive would have no problem revarnishing that moment if confronted with his own words, perhaps by casting the blame far and wide for what went wrong or maybe by shifting the discussion to his (quite real) successes with the vaccine rollout. In fact, the pivot in public identification of the vaccine as a Trumpian triumph to an oppressive Biden-led power grab is one of the many bizarre manifestations of life in Covidland.

In the highly charged political atmosphere surrounding everything Covid—indeed everything about everything—we all have our favored punching bags, our designated bad guys. Some of us have identified heroes or heroines as well, voices in the wilderness whose warnings we believe clearly were vindicated by subsequent events. That’s not especially troubling in itself; people will disagree about things. However, the idea that we could have a meeting of the minds of any sort around what has happened, is happening, or should happen is frankly inconceivable—that is problematic. The point of public life today is that everything is their fault, whoever “they” happens to be for each. The idea of joint action as a nation around Covid or anything else is fast becoming a taboo; those in charge should be worried at this sign of chronic, organic dysfunction.

Despite what we’ve learned at such painful cost, a future outbreak isn’t likely to be handled much better. In this I dissent from Michael Lewis’s conclusion as aired on “60 Minutes” a few days ago in a segment on his recent book, The Premonition. Lewis, also the author of The Big Short about the great financial meltdown of 2008, spins a series of fascinating secondary tales in the new book about the seemingly endless pandemic.

Lewis is a highly successful commercial author, and you don’t get there by being a Debbie Downer. In the film version of The Big Short, the Christian Bale character sees the future and walks away with a cool billion, a sort of happy ending if you’re Christian Bale rather than a newly homeless lady in Baltimore. In The Premonition, Lewis stays upbeat by concluding that the unsung champions of the Covid debacle, the ones whom Trump, the CDC, and most state governors ignored, have showed us how to do it better next time. No doubt they have, but so what? We still agree on nothing, including that. 

One half of the country considers Trump’s eerie capacity to redraw the parameters of reality for his tens of millions of followers as a worrisome legacy of his scattershot presidency. An important corollary implicitly held by the other half is that there is a more real reality in there or out there somewhere, if we could just get to it, find it, agree on it, and from there settle on how to act upon it. This is Pollyannish, misguided, and equally delusional. It presumes that Trump introduced fantasy to our polity and ruined functional governing structures that, without his malign presence, would have let us do things right.

We’ve seen this Manichean mindset play out repeatedly over the course of the pandemic. For example, the CDC’s Nancy Messonnier drew Trump’s wrath early on when she finally blurted out that Americans should prepare for “when” rather than “if” coronavirus would bring mass illness and death to the country. Trump had a cow over that, and promptly Messonnier became a symbol of courage and sobriety as an apostle of The Science. Instead, as Lewis’s book shows, she was part of a sputtering, wheezing CDC bureaucracy that had been burying its head in the sand for weeks while medical providers and local public health officials tried to sound the alarm. One wag quoted in the book renames the CDC the Center for Disease Monitoring and Observation that couldn’t “control” a disease outbreak if it happened in the office next door.

The dysfunction goes far beyond Messonnier’s personal qualities or qualifications. The agency was politicized way back during the Reagan era when its head was made a presidential appointee rather than a protected, career civil servant (like Fauci, whom Trump could not axe). It had already lost ground due to the swine flu vaccine debacle of 1976, the last time the CDC responded energetically to a possible problem—that never materialized. On that occasion, CDC leaders saw a potential epidemic unfolding and acted on the precautionary principle. In other words, they did what a public health authority should do, and a sane polity would have appreciated the protective caution after grumbling and venting about the inconvenience and collateral harm. But because we have no capacity as a nation for social solidarity or sacrifice, the epidemic-that-wasn’t quickly became another club in the arsenal against all things governmental, and the stage was set for Reagan, the anti-government warrior par excellence, to then make sure that a real epidemic—AIDS—was ignored.

So much for the CDC, but the problem goes even deeper. What institution now commands enough general credibility in the nation that its leaders could call upon us to sacrifice or put up with discomforts and burdens in the spirit of shared social goals or, to cast it in archaic language, to “promote the general welfare”? New York’s subway and bus workers have a shockingly low vaccination rate, according to The City. When asked why they are reluctant, many of the employees—half of whom are minorities—said they didn’t trust their bosses at the MTA, reminding the reporter that no one did anything to get them protective equipment at the height of the epidemic when hundreds of their colleagues died. I think they’re being short-sighted, but they’re not irrational.

We’re #1 

One of the most peculiar aspects of this sustained display of national incapacity is that, despite it, we retain our assumptions about the place our country occupies. We remain stuck in the triumphal post-WW2 moment and cannot recognize that things have fundamentally changed. Our political class insists, and we nod along out of habit, that the USA remains preeminent, the essential nation, the standard-setter, the rule-maker, the final authority. We still expect to explain to everyone how people should live and to be the model of what others should strive for and emulate.

We remain convinced that everyone wants to be us, failing that, to be like us. Despite our creeping recognition that not all is well here, we have been successfully brainwashed to believe that American “interests” extend to all corners of the globe where American influence or perhaps control should, as a matter of course, be accepted as right, fitting, and necessary. These postulates survive through another form of hypnotic insistence, and it has nothing to do with Trumpian hyperbole. (In fact, Trump was dismissive of many aspects of empire, especially anything that got in the way of his businesses.)

Our leaders regularly gulp their own Kool-Aid and seem not to notice its lack of nutritious components. Hardly anyone pays much attention to U.S. diplomatic activity unless it’s a media-led focus on some enemy du jour, like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, or China. We should. Trump’s foreign policy apparatus was a clown-show amateur hour, but Biden’s is not much of an improvement. Both teams operated under the assumption that the U.S. is in charge, lectures others what they’re doing wrong, and expects them to behave or face retaliation. A good recent example was Wendy Sherman, Biden’s No. 2 at State, embarrassing us in China by playing schoolmarm with the Chinese foreign minister; her boss Anthony Blinken bombed in Anchorage several months ago trying to do the same thing.

Sherman, who has no experience in Asia, has never lived there, speaks no Asian language, and doesn’t know diddly-squat about the continent, wormed her into an inappropriate meeting with the Chinese foreign minister (she’s not his equal in rank) and proceeded to trot out Beltway talking points as if her audience were pimply congressional interns in a summer program at the Atlantic Council. The Scrum‘s Patrick Lawrence summarized her bizarre performance: “We want to knee you in the groin on questions of this that, and the other, those things that are useful for our propaganda ops as we wage a new cold war against you, but we want to cooperate on climate change and other sorts of virtue-signaling matters. 

Lawrence opined: “Berating the Chinese as just enumerated is not a China policy: it is an admission the Biden regime cannot figure out anything that would even resemble a China policy.” It was also, he adds, a telltale sign of weakness.

The Chinese had something to say in reply two days later:

“The United States always wants to exert pressure on other countries by virtue of its own strength, thinking that it is superior to others. If the United States has not learned to get along with other countries on an equal footing by now, then it is our responsibility, together with the international community, to give the U.S. a good tutorial in this regard.”

If we’re not taken aback by the idea of a Chinese “tutorial” coming along soon, we should be. The entire Washington establishment seems dangerously lost in its own propaganda bubble and has not recognized that 2021 is not 1945 nor 1990. Like Sherman, our diplomats as a matter of course insult their counterparts, convinced that America is the only game in town and that no one remembers how the U.S. (with Biden’s full backing) played first century Roman emperor by trying to conquer Iraq.  

Speaking of Roman emperors, how else can we understand the temple complex underway in Chicago to glorify the reign of a former monarch? Like Trajan’s Column or the Arch of Titus, the Obama Presidential Center (NOT “Library”—an important distinction) will arise on 20 privatized acres of public parkland and will be owned by the Obama Foundation, not the National Archives. Trump should float his own project to build something similar on 20 acres of repurposed Central Park territory—I think it would fit nicely in Sheep’s Meadow. Chicago gave the Obama Foundation a tax-free, 99-year lease on the parkland for $10 while the OPC will charge fees for entry, parking, and third-party use with the profits to go to the Obama Foundation. All hail.

We are headed to a very rude awakening that could well happen, like bankruptcy, “little by little and then all at once.” The overconfident Americans continue to go off half-cocked into ill-considered diplomatic, political, and military adventures, and it’s only a matter of time until they get their asses handed to them. Meanwhile, nowhere are seen any adults in the room, any sober realists tugging at the emperor’s sleeve to suggest that perhaps the legions might not win this time. America is #1, has always been #1, and will remain #1.  

American spokespeople insist that democracy is stronger and more adaptable than authoritarian alternatives while we proceed to provide evidence to the contrary. Depending on who is up and who is down, policy zigzags unpredictably; the country appears run by competing warlords (a scenario the Chinese know well). When the truth finally cannot be ignored any longer, the traumatic shock will make our various Covid neuroses feel like a mosquito bite. From all appearances, then and only then will we be tempted to see each other as fellow citizens.

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Creeping dementia of the medico-financial complex

["The Charlatan," Pietro Longhi, 1757] 

An act of madness occurred in Washington last week when the Food and Drug Administration metaphorically stripped itself naked and stood before us as the proud sex toy of the pharmaceutical industry.

At least this full-frontal view of its swollen, ulcerous pudenda allows us to confirm the appropriate pronouns to be applied to it: me, ours, mine-all-mine. 

On June 7, the FDA approved a new medication for Alzheimer’s disease named aducanumab, branded as Aduhelm. The approval came as a shock to its expert panel, which had voted 8 to 1 (with 2 abstentions) against it based on the lack of evidence that it does anything. That didn’t seem to bother the top brass at the FDA, which had huddled with Biogen, the drug’s peddler, to see whether the data could be resliced and diced to demonstrate some sort of vague utility.

It’s hard to know where to begin to dismember this appalling decision given the multiple forms of horribleness that it embodies. To start, it offers what will probably be false hope to desperate families dealing with the agonizing impact of dementia in a loved one. The FDA was created in 1906 precisely to put an end to the unscrupulous exploitation of sick people and their relatives casting about for a ray of hope in the face of untreatable ailments. Snake-oil salesmen used to be able to bottle up any old concoction and push it onto the panicked and gullible—now they can again.

How could the FDA approve a drug without solid evidence that it has at least some minimum impact on the course of Alzheimer’s? The answer lies in that old saw about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Biostatistics is a highly developed science aimed at answering one key question: do the results of a given trial (such as testing a new drug) constitute meaningful evidence for a causal effect—i.e., does it work? Or are superficially promising outcomes merely random artifacts, chance events that only appear to mean something, like flipping a coin and getting heads 8 times in a row? The logic involved is worth pausing to consider.

Statistical science originated, not surprisingly, with gambling. If we flip a coin 100 times, we can calculate the exact likelihood of getting heads 50 times, 60 times, or 99 times, assuming the coin is perfectly balanced and the flip is performed in an exactly uniform manner each time. By the law of large numbers, more data points will provide greater evidence: for example, getting heads 9 times out of 10 is unusual but plausibly random while getting heads 90 times out of 100 suggests that there is something wrong with the coin—meaning that we are should look beyond chance for some other more likely cause.

Researchers conducting a trial of a new drug will recruit thousands of patients and assign them to either a treatment or a placebo arm, then follow both carefully to see what happens. If the treated patients improve, they can claim success (depending on how much improvement is observed). But one can immediately think of dozens of ways to introduce bias and distortion into the procedures and thus the outcomes, which good researchers try their best to be aware of and avoid.

Given the billions of dollars that are at stake if a drug is shown to work, pharmaceutical companies have built-in incentives to game the system by engineering favorable data. To avoid corrupting the science, data reviewers have to be extremely rigorous and skeptical—which the reviewers of Aduhelm were.

One way to guard against manipulation of data is to set the parameters of what will constitute persuasive evidence at the outset and not change the rules later to fit the desired conclusions. But that is exactly what the purveyors of Aduhelm did: they jettisoned the unfavorable results of one study while highlighting the one in which their drug performed better. They also hypothesized that one of the study arms in the favored study had a disproportionate number of patients whose disease had already progressed beyond the point of being helped by their medication. The FDA went along with all these mid-stream changes.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), three physicians laid out the case against Aduhelm. Two of them (Emerson and Kesselheim) were on the expert FDA panel assigned to review the data—and resigned in protest after their counsel was ignored. They write: “Any treatment will appear to be more effective if individuals in whom it works least are removed from the analysis.”

In addition, one of the two criteria utilized for demonstrating efficacy of Aduhelm was improved scores on a provider-administered observational test of things like memory, problem-solving, and personal care. According to co-authors Emerson and Kesselheim,  Alzheimer’s researchers normally look for an improvement of 1 or 2 points on the 0 to 18 scale as a test of efficacy; even after all the data massaging, Aduhelm demonstrated only a gain of 0.39.

The other test was a reduction in Beta-amyloid clusters in the brain—a mostly discredited theory  about the causation of Alzheimer’s.

The consequences of the FDA’s corrupt behavior are quite dire for the health of Medicare and for the Alzheimer’s field generally. Some of the defenders of this disastrous decision apparently think that tossing vast sums of public money at Biogen for its probably useless elixir will incentivize others to do further R&D and find something better. Dana Goldman & Darius Lakdawalla wrote an article in STAT entitled, “FDA’s approval of aducanumab paves the way for ‘more momentous’ Alzheimer’s breakthroughs,” a broad hint that the approved drug is mediocre at best. (The authors also acknowledge being in the pay of Biogen.)  

Patients’ families will also rush to demand access to the new drug, especially once we start seeing the predictable tsunami of televised ads showing smiling granddads bouncing children on their knees and helping them sail kites. As with every disease in every age, people will desperately try anything that offers a glimmer of hope for alleviating their agony under the presumption that there is nothing to lose.

Unfortunately, there is a whole lot to lose, starting with side effects: “In two clinical trials, about 40% of clinical trial patients who got the approved dose of Aduhelm developed painful brain swelling, headache, dizziness, visual disturbances, nausea, and vomiting; about 17% to 18% of patients had microhemorrhages.” Will lawsuits follow? Will Biogen care once the bosses in its C-suite make off with gazillions from the public purse? Will the company even exist when it’s time to compensate those harmed?

Then there’s the vast billions that Medicare could be forced to pony up to sustain this travesty. Even though the drug was tested only on patients at certain stages of Alzheimer’s-related impairment, the FDA did not limit who will be eligible for Aduhelm treatment. Because Medicare is prohibited by statute from negotiating drug prices, Biogen can just say the stuff costs $56,000, so there. The price tag for Medicare for just 500,000 patients taking Aduhelm will be $29 billion a year.

Caitlin Owens at Axios estimated that the new drug could “blow up health spending.” “If half of the newly eligible Americans in a year began treatment with Aduhelm, the cost would be $14 billion—roughly equivalent to Medicare Part B spending in 2019 on the next 8 products combined.” Vast numbers of new patients enter the Alzheimer’s lists every year. In short, Aduhelm is Pharma’s dream drug: an insanely expensive product targeted at a huge percentage of the population who can live sick for years.

Bob Herman, also at Axios, adds that if the drug triggers Medicare’s “significant cost” policy, Medicare Advantage plans would be liberated from paying Aduhelm claims; that is, once people on MA plans start costing real money, they can be sent back to traditional Medicare to be covered on the government dime. 

Most experts were dumbfounded at the gross twisting of scientific criteria to pander to patient advocates and line the pockets of yet another pharmaceutical company. (Stand by for news of which FDA employee has decamped to Biogen as Vice President for Government Affairs in the next 12 months.) “Science took a back seat.” “Sham.” “This decision does more than bend standards—it shatters them.” “Unconscionable.” “I won’t prescribe it.” “$56,000 for a sugar pill.” 

What to make of this shameless perversion of our research and public health establishment precisely at a time of earnest appeals from these same highly credentialed personages to place our trust in them and bare our biceps for the magic jab? It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the impulse among our governing elites to insert their snouts into the trough of the national treasury has reached stampede proportions. Our society has succumbed to the addictive pursuit of ill-gotten gains to such a pathological extent that the beleaguered brain of the body politic has begun to show clear signs of cognitive deterioration. It is no longer capable of taking care of itself, exercising sober judgment, handling its affairs, or functioning independently—although, as the Clinical Dementia Rating table says for its “mild” score, the patient may “appear normal to casual inspection.” Is it reversible?

Vote Early and Often! A multiple guess test for mayor of New York

 

We are just days away from a big decision: choosing who should govern our city. Outgoing Mayor De Blasio is limited to two terms; he won’t be missed. (Michael Bloomberg did buy himself a third term, but no one else around here has a net worth of $59 billion—a tidy increase from the $25 billion with which he came into office—but I digress.)

There are more candidates than you can shake a stick at though the field has narrowed slightly with dropouts. Sadly, Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party is not running this year despite embodying in his party’s name the one thing probably every New Yorker can agree on. (He once got 40,000 votes.)

You’d think a city of 8 million-plus people could produce at least a few high-calibre candidates from which to choose, including one or two to competently represent and defend each of the extant political tendencies and programmatic visions contending to determine the future of New York. We even have the opportunity, under ranked-choice voting, to support up to five of the candidates in descending order. Instead, many of us are having a hard time finding one whom we truly fancy.

Ranked-choice voting is a neat innovation. It forces the winner to accumulate 50%- plus 1 of the total by means of a computerized elimination of whichever candidate is in last place; that candidate’s votes are then assigned to whomever those voters chose as their No. 2. If no one reaches the magic 50% threshold, the next cellar-dweller is eliminated, and the process is repeated until someone racks up the required majority. It prevents anyone from sliding into office on, say, 18% of the votes ahead of a crowded field. We’ve had endless tutorials on how it works, and we can confidently predict that when people show up to vote, they’ll be completely befuddled and make a hash of it. Luckily, there are 10 days of early voting, which we’ll need.

The deeper problem is that the candidates don’t impress. The most famous/notorious of them is Andrew Yang whom everyone has heard of—already a huge advantage. But Yang is a disaster in a nightmare on the way to a debacle. He has shown himself to be clueless about New York and its residents, admits to never having bothered to vote here until now, has committed gaffe after embarrassing gaffe, and is thoroughly in the tank for the plutocrats who are destroying the city. He also is a billionaire—disqualifying in itself.

Another candidate comes from the banking industry: um, no.

Kathryn Garcia ran the sanitation department under De Blasio and got snow off the streets competently. Does that mean she can run the city? Who knows?

Dianne Morales has good politics and a dubious record. Her staff just went on strike, and her flip-flop on charter schools does not inspire confidence.

Maya Wiley was largely unknown before the race and staked out the “reform” or progressive position. Then she jumped all over the debatable accusations of sexual misconduct against a fellow candidate, demanding that he quit the race based on the allegations of something that occurred 18 years ago. She picked up AOC’s endorsement last week, which should help. But given the city’s sharp uptick in violent crime, her pitch to scale back the city’s insanely bloated police budget probably has only a limited constituency.

Scott Stringer is that candidate beleaguered by two accusations of impropriety, one dating from 1992. He was considered a front-runner and represented a progressive tendency; he even won the endorsement of the Working Families Party (since withdrawn). Stringer is such a classic pol that he sounds machine-generated, always ready with an answer for any policy question. With him out of the picture, the field is wide open for the favored candidates of the city’s two power centers: the Real Estate Board and the cops. I can’t help speculating that there’s a connection with the late-campaign accusations about his personal behavior. Maybe he’s a creep, but the facts of the case(s) are apparently of no general interest—for most people the accusations are enough.

Eric Adams is gleefully receiving real estate cash and must have done their bidding as Brooklyn borough president to make them so happy. But he is a former cop who drew a lot of ire from the top brass during his time there, which makes him interesting as someone who might not be intimidated by them. His record on financial probity is disturbing, but at least he’s not Yang.

Shawn Donovan, housing secretary under Obama, airs ads in which he stands next to the former prez, or, alternatively, Michelle. We are supposed to forget that 8 million people lost their homes to foreclosure under Obama’s presidency while Donovan ran the housing portfolio. Not what I would call an impressive CV.

We’re basically voting the way we would swing at a piñata: blindfolded and hoping to land a blow that results in candies for all. We really have no idea how any of them would perform in office, and maybe it doesn’t matter too much anyway. None of them will dare to challenge the entrenched powers that be unless the populace is suffering enough and up in arms enough to force them to do so. That will mean much more than the complicated levers we will pull on June 22.

May Their Names (and Memories) Be Erased

 

The CBS News show 60 Minutes had a segment Sunday about the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred 100 years ago in the predominantly black Greenwood section of that Oklahoma city, once known as “Black Wall Street” due to the many prosperous black professional families who lived there. After armed black men tried to stop a lynching, white mobs retaliated by destroying the entire community, leaving between 100 and 300 dead and 8000 homeless. No one knows the exact figures because there was no investigation of the crimes afterward and no indictments.

The tale is harrowing enough, but the point of the 60 Minutes report was to explore how the worst incident of racist violence in American history was then completely erased from memory to the point where local people just two generations removed swore it could never have happened. “I went to school here all my life,” said one black resident on camera. “We never heard anything about that, so I was sure it wasn’t true.”

Repairing the damage from terrible events starts with establishing the facts. Even in “merely” criminal acts, we place great emphasis on the ability of the legal system to set out what exactly took place in the eyes of the public, often in the context of determining the guilt of individual perpetrators. How much more important is it when the crimes are massive and/or social in nature like race-inspired murder, systematic oppression such as Jim Crow or apartheid, secret torture regimes, or genocide?

These are highly political matters, and reactionary nationalists hate things like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee that forced people to look at unpleasant facts, including their own complicity or willful ignorance of what took place and how they reaped benefits from it. To this day, for example, Turkish nationalist politicians threaten anyone who dares to suggest that the well-documented genocide of perhaps 1 million ethnic Armenians by the Ottomans—which was observed by German officers and inspired some aspects of the Holocaust—ever occurred. The events are over 100 years old (1915–1916), but you can still get yourself killed in Turkey for publicly stating that they ever happened. One who dared to do so was journalist HrantDink, [below] assassinated in 2007. Photos of the assassin later surfaced “flanked by smiling Turkish police and gendarmerie, posing with the killer side by side in front of the Turkish flag.” 

Since 2018 it is illegal in Poland to suggest that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” You cannot even use the term “Polish death camps” to describe Auschwitz or Treblinka under threat of a 3-year prison term. (However, it’s okay to blame Ukrainians for it.) Anyone who has seen the devastating Claude Lanzmann film Shoah in which he carefully asks local Poles what happened in front of their eyes and what they thought of it might have a slightly different take on the role of the “Polish Nation” in those events.

Last year, George Floyd's murder caused us to face yet again our own historical revisionism and silence, including a new look at statues of Confederate war leaders and the ongoing use of treasonous generals’ names on a slew of U.S. military bases (Benning, Beauregard, Bragg, Hill, Gordon, Hood, Lee, Pickett, Rucker, Pendleton). The “Lost Cause” rewrite of the Civil War convinced generations of Americans that that conflict wasn’t really about slavery and white supremacy after all but rather a more palatable and vaguer concept, that of “states’ rights,” elegantly interpreted by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Erasure was a key part of sustaining white supremacy up through World War II.

What then shall we make of yimakh shemo (“May their names be erased!”), the rallying cry of Jewish supremacists who chanted it in East Jerusalem while helping their cops displace residents of the territory they covet? I gather it has historical meaning applied to enemies of the Jewish people, of which there certainly is no shortage. But the implications are chilling when applied by a state engaged in a decades-long process of pushing people out of their coveted homes and turning them into an underclass. It suggests that not only will the ethnic cleansing continue, but that once it’s over, we will pretend nothing ever happened—and who will challenge us?   

The foundational fact of Jewish racial supremacy over non-Jews in Israel has long been obscured by the fantasy that two states could eventually come into being as wary neighbors and allowed to work out their differences over time. But recent events have shown that the erasure impulse is much too strong and has grown steadily since the establishment of the ethno-religious state in 1948. Erasing Palestine from the map was only the first step, and it is now clear in retrospect that the Zionist project could never tolerate allowing it back even under the one-sided terms of Oslo. Since erasure is the point, refusing to be erased is the counterpoint, and the George Floyd-inspired movement has clarified the terms on either side: you will bow your head (no we won't), or we will kill you (just try).

The debate about Israel-Palestine, as Norman Finkelstein explains in this interview, is no longer about the occupied territories, the construction of a two-state solution, the acceptance of the Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, of two permanently estranged communities acquiescing in some sort of separate-but-equal fantasy that was tried here in the U.S. and finally demolished as the disingenuous wishful thinking of the privileged class. That was the narrative for decades since the so-called Six-Day War. But we are no longer examining the problem of 1967 but that of 1948, the impulse to declare a land the colonial preserve of a religious group to the exclusion of all others. Occupation, expulsion, and settlement used to be criticized for the 1967 lands while the exact same behaviors of 1948 were accepted as irredeemable facts—even by the Palestinian leadership.

That’s over now. While Israelis have been busy trying to erase Palestine and its inhabitants, they simultaneously have erased the boundaries between the events of those two landmark years. By raising the legality or legitimacy of importing settlers into the West Bank and expelling ancient families from their East Jerusalem homes, we now must examine the same questions about the 1948 expulsions of hundreds of thousands to Lebanon and Jordan and the permanent ghettoization of Gaza. “Let Their Names Be Erased” is Israel’s doomed call to achieve the impossible—short of repeating the historic crime that led to the present impasse.

Here in the U.S., we continue to grapple with segregation and racism, their historical underpinnings, their effects, and their ongoing appeal. One way to challenge the hoarders of the nifty advantages of racial supremacy is through the boycott as was demonstrated by the Baton Rouge bus boycott (1953), the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-56), the Savannah boycott (1960-61), the Natchez (Mississippi) commerce boycott (1965-66), and dozens of others throughout the civil rights movement.

No wonder that BDS, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to halt the movement for Jewish supremacy, has the Israelis’ and their allies’ knickers in such a knot that they have engineered a bunch of state laws to punish advocacy of it. Unfortunately for them, the First Amendment remains part of the U.S. Constitution (for now), and this week another court outlined in clear language that actions to ban speech are not kosher. Forcing someone to sign an anti-BDS pledge, said the judge, is equivalent to “requiring a person to espouse certain political beliefs.” 

Legal action to undermine boycotts has a long, shameful history in the U.S. Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written while he was imprisoned for promoting a boycott and encouraging picket lines to enforce it. It’s no wonder that white supremacist forces should have done everything to stop boycotts and that people would face prison for promoting them. It’s a powerful tool.

BDS is a nonviolent, moral movement to pressure the oppressor into changing course. It makes some people very uncomfortable. I get it. Plenty of my Ohio neighbors in the 1960s hated Martin Luther King and thought he was a troublemaker. Very few Israelis are interested in hearing any criticism because they’ve been enabled in every crime and abuse that occurs to them to commit by the impunity provided by the U.S. umbrella. White Alabamans were furious about Rosa Parks’ seating arrangement, and white Arkansans hated the girls who integrated Little Rock High. Racist privilege dies hard. BDS is the civil rights issue of our age, and we have a clear choice. Qui tacet consentit: “Silence [erasure] gives consent.”

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Playing the victim

 

“As above, so below,” say the mystics, meaning that what we perceive in ourselves has a parallel in the higher realms.

Scaling down a bit from the cosmos, we can see this hoary truth operating in our national psyche and our politics. Victimhood now seems to be a national pastime all along the political spectrum, parallel to the steady message from our leadership that the U.S., with its 800 military bases scattered around the globe, must defend itself against myriad dangers and threats. There is a bit of pathology in the eagerness to squeeze everything that happens in our lives and our world into the terrible you/innocent me paradigm.

Those aggressive Iranians 

But it’s hardly surprising that we default to the martyr/aggressor frame in our daily lives when our leaders paint the world in exactly these terms, no matter what the circumstances. Just days ago, official spokespeople accused “Iranian attack boats” of “harassing” U.S. Coast Guard vessels in the Persian Gulf. Pause and breathe: the shoreline of Iran 7400 miles from Florida is now part of our “coast”?? That needs to be “guarded”?

That is, meanie Iranians keep abusing us by making life difficult for our Navy ships and whatnot tootling around a few miles from their borders. You’d think the Americans were snooping around and plotting to assassinate their national leaders or something nefarious!  But what do you expect from fanatical Muslims in funny outfits who refuse to come to the negotiating table to rewrite the nuclear agreement that the U.S. unilaterally revoked?  

The Iran boogeyman is a remarkable exercise in official victimhood. In this worldview, well-meaning America simply wants everyone to get along peacefully and democratically, as defined by us. Iran “destabilizes” the Middle East, according to the Heritage Foundation and other Beltway clones, by daring to have ballistic missiles and not agreeing to disarm itself and its allies. We are so hard done by.

Those aggressive news media: Derek Chauvin as “lynching” victim

This one is almost too offensive to contemplate, but not for the Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson brigades who whine that Chauvin was declared guilty in the news media long before his trial began. Perhaps that had to do with the availability of a video recording of the murder that anyone who can stomach it is welcome to view—but I digress. By deploying that hyper-laden term, T.S.M. Carlson shifts the metaphorical noose from its historical victims to the necks of the perpetrators. Poor us! he cries. We are so hard done by.

Carlson’s demented rewrite is shocking but not surprising. Any set of profoundly unjust social relations needs a justifying narrative. Any racist or ethno-nationalist system must develop stereotypes, prejudices, and a ready quiver of anecdotal horrors about the inferior and/or dangerous ways of the victimized. Has any genocide in human history ever been launched without a call to “defend” the aggressor ethnicity against an alleged threat from the soon-to-be-massacred Other?

Seeing oneself as the victim of historical events is a comfortable, though not comforting, default position that alleviates the need for any painful self-examination of how one might be not simply the subject of abuse but also a volunteer for it, even a co-instigator. Carlson’s remaining fans will recoil at the suggestion that their blind faith in the police, heroically portrayed in our most popular detective and crime shows, reinforces the carte blanche Derek Chauvin used to kill in front of a dozen bystanders. Their insistence on usurping the victim role is monstrous but hardly unique.

“As above, so below.” Our national leaders live in a like bubble of victimhood that is now so entrenched they probably believe their own propaganda. Its core premise is that the U.S. is the guarantor of proper behavior and the model of everything worthy and necessary. But uncooperative/evil adversaries obstruct our determined efforts to bring about world peace. Evidence to the contrary is rarely addressed because it so infrequently rises into consciousness.

White nationalists famously chanted that “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville, ergo their replacement by workers in Honduras and Bangladesh is the fault of the Elders of Zion, not our capitalist overlords. Similarly, suffering workers in the heartland seem convinced that they would thrive if it were not for those shameless minority groups hustling the government for free stuff. In this way, one’s own behavior requires no examination or revision, such as the support one regularly offers to the authorities running things. Instead, the damage comes exclusively from amoral individuals who have learned how to exploit weaknesses and take advantage of virtuous citizens—like ourselves.

Those aggressive Russians

For liberalish and Demo-leaning sorts, the counterpart to Carlson’s mewling tears of victimhood is Putin and the Russians, who brought us Trump and keep failing to cooperate with American plans for worldwide prosperity. The detail that two years of Mueller’s probe based on the allegations of conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and his Russkie friends failed to find a shred of evidence for it is as quickly forgotten as the role of George Bush in lying us into a war of conquest.  (Bush is now an avuncular friend who gives Michelle candy and dislikes “disinformation.” He wrote in Condoleeza Rice on his 2020 ballot—she of the “mushroom cloud” emanating from Baghdad. But he hates Trump, so all is forgiven.) Also, Russia paid bounty money to Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan—oops, no that was the Chinese or maybe Iran. They hacked the DNC servers to weaken Hillary—except that the FBI has never claimed that to this day. Putin just staged a massive build-up of troops on the Ukraine border—the Ukrainian attempt to provoke a firefight goes unremarked. And so on.

Fearing Russia and hating on Putin is the version of victimhood for those shuddering in horror at the red-state version and laughing at the QAnons, those whose eyes glisten with tears during Lunchbucket Joe’s speeches. That way, it’s easier to forget that Biden’s Pentagon budget is higher than Trump’s.

As above, so below. We all feel badly used from time to time and resent people who appeared along our life paths to do us dirty. It’s a cozy way to explain why things didn’t go exactly as we hoped and desired, but it leaves out a key element: what part did we ourselves play in it? We’re taught not to ask that question because if we did, we might address the same one to the guys in charge.

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Josephus Bidenus Gracchus

 History never repeats itself, but Mark Twain noticed that it often rhymes.

We are currently distracted by the new Biden government slowly taking shape, and with so much being reported and opined about that process, I haven’t been moved to add yet more verbiage. But after listening to an episode of Mike Duncan’s delightful History of Rome podcast, I saw how a bird’s-eye view of broader structural changes might give us not only important insights into what is taking place around us, but also some relief from the relentlessly divisive pseudo-debates that, in important ways, entirely miss the point. 

Tiberius Gracchus was consul twice during the late Republic (in 177 and 163 BCE) and was a key figure in the first actions that eventually led to its demise and replacement by an absolutist monarchy in all but name. (He is not to be confused with Emperor Tiberius who shows up nearly 200 years later.) Power in Rome had changed hands more or less peacefully and by election for centuries, but within 100 years of Tiberius G, that tradition would crash with the coup by Julius Caesar followed by the civil wars that squeezed the last breath out of the Republic.

TG was a “populist” reformer (and the term rightly applies to him as that’s where it comes from). He promoted land reform and antagonized the hoary elites of Roman society who had grown rich and fat from the empire’s triumphs in North Africa, Spain, and Greece.

That’s where our own reality offers an intriguing parallel: the Romans had remained unified throughout the middle period of the Republic, despite their often deadly internal power struggles, because they had plenty of external enemies to keep them focused. But once settled as the undisputed masters of the Mediterranean, Rome found its domestic stability wrecked by success. The massive import of slaves won in their victories drove free Romans into penury as landowners could reduce labor costs to zero while also buying up—or forcing out—small-holders by using the vast riches gained in foreign conquests. They were, in short, early globalizers albeit not of the neoliberal variety.

The United States enjoyed the bounty of the post-Cold War period as the only game in town and promptly used the advantage to impoverish its own citizens by shifting labor costs onto Chinese, Cambodian, or Mexican quasi-slaves toiling under their respective dictatorships. Any corporate manager who didn’t rush to cash in on the neo-feudal conditions available for exploitation if he dismantled his factories and shipped them to China or wherever would be promptly undersold by the competition who did. Why pay factory workers in Indiana $20 an hour when you can replace them with overseas peons for that much per day?

The political opportunities for an ambitious 2^nd century BCE Roman leader were obvious. The ruined citizens were primed for the rhetoric of a leader promising them relief. As consul, Tiberius forced through a cap on the amount of land a single owner could amass, bypassing the Senate dominated by these very owners of giant estates in their sweaty togas. When the Senate got a tribune to block the measure with a veto—which tribunes could do by law—Tiberius staged a “Stop the Steal” moment that succeeded: he had the offending official physically carried out of the Senate. As consul, Tiberius was immune to prosecution for this breach, but once his consulship ended, he was legally exposed—and so had to get himself re-elected, which was yet another break with tradition.

Tiberius ended badly, Roman-style: when his partisans clashed with opposing mobs, he was clubbed to death. But Rome saw how easily its centuries of tradition could be tossed aside and how useful the suffering masses could be when recruited to anti-elitism. In addition, despite everyone’s fervent rhetoric about respecting the republican traditions and rules, no one really cared all that much about them when pursuing their immediate self-interests, neither the patrician poohbahs defending their estates nor the demagogues whipping up support from people unsure of where they would get their next meal.

The solution, obvious enough in hindsight, would have been to break up the oversized estates, stop driving landless workers into near-slave status, and otherwise adjust to the sudden influx of untold riches to improve everyone’s lot rather than making the fattest cats even fatter. But that would have required a radical overhaul of the Roman economy and its ideological underpinnings.

Instead, the unequal distribution of income and wealth weakened the core foundations of the state, and Rome lumbered into oligarchy. Career-minded citizens always had to have money, but soon leadership would be dictated by wealth at levels of magnitude far greater than ever previously known. The republic could not resist the ruins of an economic polity distorted beyond recognition.

We have left behind our glory days as a powerful industrial capitalist society and now dedicate the bulk of our national income flows to the financier class, the FIRE (Fire, Insurance, Real Estate) sector that extracts rent in the form of housing costs, insurance, pension taxes, and interest on debt while a huge slice of available resources is diverted into the maintenance of the Imperium. Because the cost structure of our economy makes it entirely uncompetitive with the new industrial states of Asia, there is no road back to being a nation that produces goods and provides its workers with the means to purchase them. 

As the master economist Michael Hudson told Consortium News in a recent interview, China has adopted the strategy of the long-gone industrial America: “[The government] funds basic infrastructure. It provides low-cost education. It invests in high-speed railroads and airports, in the building of cities. So, the government bears most of the costs and, that means that employers don’t have to pay workers enough to pay a student loan debt. They don’t have to pay workers enough to pay enormous rent such as you have in the United States.  They don’t have to pay workers to save for a pension fund, to pay the pension later on. And most of all the Chinese economy doesn’t have to pay a banking class because banking is the most important public utility of all. Banking is kept in the hands of government.

“When workers have to go into debt in order to live, they need much higher wages to keep solvent. When they have to pay for their own health insurance, they have to earn more. The same is true of education and student debt. So much of what Americans seem to be earning—more than workers in other countries—goes right through their hands to the FIRE sector. So what seem to be “low wages” in China go a lot further than higher wages in the United States.”

These are the structural forces at work that operate far above the petty squabbles between reds and blues playing out in our national politics. Neither Biden nor his rivals in the Trumpian camp have any intention of taking a lesson from history by whittling the mega-fortunes of today down to size or forcing redistribution onto our senatorial toga-wearers and the plutocrats behind them. As they fight over the spoils, they will recruit partisan plebes to their respective camps and even offer us occasional concrete rewards while emitting hurricanes of patriotic rhetoric. Power may alternate between and among the rivals, but in the long run all are equally likely to prove incapable of dislodging the oligarchic power and will be equally discredited. We should not mourn their loss of legitimacy out of clannish loyalties to red or blue teams.

Instead, we should set our sights on a new social contract, perhaps even a global one, based on a radical rethinking of the role of our species on our planet. The collapse of this or that band of visionless tinkerers should not alarm us unduly, despite the very real possibilities of ugly death throes during the failed imperio-capitalist experiment.

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An Out-Of-The-Body-Politic Experience

 

Experts say repeated exposure to contradictory, abusive, or crazy behavior, especially when one is unable to resist or withdraw, leads to trauma and that the imprint of trauma on the psyche then interferes with healthy functioning. Children experiencing extremes of hostile, hurtful, or simply negligent actions by caregivers may compensate by escaping mentally from the situation and are prime candidates for addiction as adults.

My dear, late friend Miguel had exactly this life trajectory. His overburdened and detached parents were unaware that he was being sexualized at age 9 by an older teen; he described to me how he learned to leave his body and in his 20s developed both a cocaine addiction and unusual psychic abilities. 

The metaphor for our collective experience as Americans over the last four years writes itself. Week after week, month after month, we were relentlessly assaulted with ever-escalating doses of madness and gaslighting. The source, himself permanently intoxicated with the trappings of faux adulation that accompany power, rewrote the script of our tentatively shared reality in such staccato bursts that we could scarcely digest one irrational claim when a dozen more came raining down on us out of the Twittersphere. The effect was the same as that perfected by the CIA in its far-flung empire of dungeons: disassociation and learned helplessness. Some of us self-medicated with news fixations, substances, Russiagate fantasies, or blogposts.

As adults, we could at least step back and apply our analytical tools, see what was happening to us, consult our peers for grounding and reorientation. Yet, the effort involved in the constant struggle to remain standing during this never-ending turdstorm sapped our energies and imbued our cells with stress hormones. Now we know what it’s like to live as an abused minority, fearing for our children and constantly pouring our psychic resources into staying sane and not flying off the handle. When we failed out of exhaustion, we could do no better than to float our beleaguered social souls upward and away from the body politic to a magical inner realm where people behave humanely and resentment and rancor do not rule. Our collective dissociation, while providing needed relief, came at a cost.

Miguel wandered very young into a new life in Argentina and found a boyfriend who introduced him to injection drug use. He relates that when he came back from the doctor with a positive HIV diagnosis, his first thought was, “At least now Charlie cannot leave me.” Nonetheless, Charlie did.

One effect of Miguel’s traumatic life was his ability to pay extra-corporeal visits to anyone he was thinking about. I once heard him relate an entire conversation that had taken place between an ex of his and the ex’s new lover across town, later confirmed in its details. He didn’t develop this ability further nor make anything of it.

Miguel never lamented his fate nor wasted his short time on blaming anyone, including the injecting “friend” who had failed to inform him of his own HIV-positive status before sharing a syringe. In our brief friendship, I only once, late in his illness, heard him say something that hinted that he wished things had turned out differently: “I’m so young!”

The body politic is damaged by what it has been put through. Nonetheless, it has acquired uncanny perceptivities of its own, perhaps not including astral travel but certainly a sharper eye for the aural presentations of public figures. It’s no accident that Bernie’s mittens are attracting nearly as much attention as Biden’s entire 100-days program. Bernie’s now-famous grumpy-uncle photo, known by some as the Jewish yoga posture “Waiting for the Wife Shopping at Loehmann’s,” aptly reflects our crouching, self-protective national spirit, the mittens themselves an offhand populist rebuke to the purpled elites on the elevated platform.

Miguel shook off his cocaine habit though he slipped into unrecognized alcoholism, which killed him. He was a spiritual giant and died a hero. The trauma never embittered him, never distracted him from making the most of his 31 years on earth. He had a vision of better things; everything he had been through he alchemized into wisdom, compassion, and solidarity.

As we emerge from the chaotic mental landscape left behind by the raging id that permanently tasered us these last years, we can and should hold the perpetrators to account. Magnanimity cannot be a cover for impunity. At the same time, we now have a keener sense of the dangerous forces left to seethe just below the surface of our social body and cannot pretend that the millions of people abandoned by the depredations of capitalism have nothing to do with us or our comfortable lives. Perhaps the new body politic can travel to a higher plane; after all, we have new, trauma-enhanced powers. The violent explosion at the Capitol shows us where we are headed if we do not use them to reset and renew.