My grandfather, the oldest of six children, grew up in a tenement (subsequently destroyed to make way for the construction of Robert Moses’s Lincoln Center) on Manhattan’s west side, and started working as a young teen after the death of his mother. From butcher boy, to stock runner, to tax collector, life eventually led him into the US Army where – recognizing that the US would likely enter the war – he applied for Officer Candidate School in the late 1930s. He served in the Transportation Corps for much of the Second World War in what is now Iran. Thankfully, he did not die there.

My father, born in New York City but raised in Westchester, served as a chaplain in the US Air Force as a young man at a time when he was still considering entering – as had his two uncles, for whom I’m named – the Roman Catholic priesthood and the US was in the process of withdrawing from Vietnam. He also survived his time in the Service.

Unlike my father and grandfather – who shared a name – or my two great uncles, for whom I’m named, I had no urge or obligation to join the military, and discovered no vocation for religious life. As the beneficiary of various of their choices, sacrifices, and privileges, far be it from me to pass judgment on their life paths, and yet, it can be helpful to situate our own lives and families historical lest we stumble through the world with undue blindness to its hard truths.

As a settler-colonial project, the British colonies in North America and later the United States which grew out of them were founded on slavery and genocide. The scorched earth style of warfare that the US military employed in genocidal campaigns against the indigenous people of what came to be the contemporary United States were adapted, as the US began to shift its colonial and imperial gaze beyond North America, for wars of conquest and campaigns of counterinsurgency from the Philippines to Cuba and across much of the Western Hemisphere.

Post-World War II, as the US emerged as the new global hegemon, its propagandists understandably preferred to focus on the “good wars” that had been fought “in defense of democracy” rather than on brutal campaigns of torture, extermination, and internment in concentration camps of resistance fighters and civilians alike. Now is not the time to dig into the scholarship of inter-imperialist struggle, nor to re-hash the information politics of the Cold War, but it is worth noting that – while the historic evil of Nazism, especially, is beyond any denial (which has not prevented active movements of just such detail from taking root in this country, as elsewhere) – the versions of World War I and II history which prevail in the United States, and can be found repeated on corporate media and in history classrooms around the country ad nauseam, are mostly self-serving lies. This is not, and never has been, a country that excels at self-reflection.

I say this because readers might be inclined to find, in the Vietnam War, a divergence from the historic norm of US warfighting (as exemplified by the aforementioned “wars for democracy”), and yet, viewed through any honest and comprehensive lens, that undeclared war on the people of a country on the actual other side of the world (which many residents of the United States would, today, no doubt still struggle to identify on a map) was far more in keeping with the pattern of exterminationism that has characterized the distinctive British-settler-colonial/US style of making war since the earliest massacres of Powhatans and Pequots. The world wars – not the genocidal, imperialist, and white supremacist campaigns – were the anomalies.

Why write this now? I’m seeing a lot of tributes today connecting the US war dead of years, decades, and centuries past with the loss of the 100,000+ people who have already died of COVID-19 in this country. It’s unsurprising that this connection should be made on Memorial Day, and yet, it does force the question: Why?

I’ve been critical, from the outset, of the militaristic imagery that has been employed – in this country, as elsewhere – in characterizing struggles against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since 9/11, in this country, we’ve seen a steady (further) militarization of every aspect of our lives in the name of security (and freedom, and justice, and counter-terrorism). One can hardly watch a professional sporting event or have even a simple conversation these days without finding the imagery and language of war and our military thrust front of mind and center stage. I invite you: Stop and think every time you use a military metaphor. If you’re like me, I except you’ll find it striking how fully the language of bombs and guns, planes and murder has come to structure our lives.

And why would it be any other way? We are, as Arthur Kroker put it, the “bunkered-down populations of the empire,” and declining though the hegemon that is the United States may be, for now, it still constitutes the richest and most powerful empire the world has ever known. Hundreds (perhaps approaching a thousand, for the secrecy of the Pentagon makes it hard to truly know) military bases spread across every continent. An annual budget which – counting the uncounted military allotments for intelligence, or that are channeled through Departments of State, Energy, or Interior – likely exceeds $1 trillion (which, even in this time of unprecedentedly large “relief” bills, is still a lot of money). Nuclear and conventional armaments sufficient to leave the entire world in ruins and to trigger nuclear winter multiple times over. This is our military, and yet, “bunkered-down” as we are, those of us not from communities or populations touched by the US military either through service or through invasion, drone bombing, or any of the other direct and indirect violence by which our military extends and enforces our national power globally, enjoy the luxury of largely forgetting that this world-defining institution – the United States military – exists.

Like white privilege, male privilege – really any form of identity privilege – the privilege of being a citizen or resident of the United States, though especially of being such and of a certain class, is the privilege of not having to think about the US military very much, and the further privilege that, when you do think about it, it mostly makes you feel good. Strong. Like you could break out at any moment in that terrifyingly ubiquitous chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” In Iraq, as in Puerto Rico, as across the vast majority of the world’s nations and communities, I think it’s safe to say that most people do not enjoy such a privilege or have such a feeling about the US military.

This piece could prove very long if I persist, but it’s nice and sunny out today and I want to go lay on my roof and not think about the US military either, so I will try to wrap this expeditiously by sharing a few resources. Although there is a four-century long through thread to the logic and style of warfighting in which our military still specializes, I agree, for the most part, with President Eisenhower’s oft-referenced assessment from his “Farewell Speech” that:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

There were, of course, arms manufacturers in the US prior to the world wars, but what emerged in their aftermath was something qualitatively new in US (and perhaps world) history. (For people interested in a primer on all this, Eugene Jarecki’s 2005 film, Why We Fight – which shares a title with the Frank Capra propaganda films – still offers an excellent point of entry.) Jeffrey Sachs – who has his own Shock Therapy legacy for which to answer – makes the case in this piece for the American Prospect that it was Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to fund both Great Society social welfare spending and the US War on Vietnam that led to the collapse of post-War Keynesianism in this country, and while the dynamics at play – including those between labor and capital – are highly complex, we’ve witnessed in this century the catastrophic domestic, international, and global consequences of US imperialism and the trade-offs it entails. The Costs of War Project now puts the total (monetary) cost of “U.S. War on Terror spending” – spending chiefly directed towards the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – at $6.4 trillion. Again, that’s still a lot of money.

In fact, $6.4 trillion is roughly 1.5x the entire US federal budget for 2019, and roughly 4x the “discretionary outlays” in that budget, and roughly 10x the non-defense, non-interest outlays in that budget. Put another way, we basically threw away ten years of spending to wage wars premised on lies, that have caused untold harm, and that have redounded not at all to the benefit of the United States.

Imagine if that money had been put into mass transit, renewable energy, healthcare and public health, education, etc., etc. instead of into attempting to destroy a great civilization, killing millions of civilians, and immiserating tens of millions more while, in the process, enriching a lot of politically-connected military contractors. Imagine. We’d be well on our way to a Green New Deal by now; we might have had a functioning public health apparatus and a funded pandemic preparedness plan in place around January of this year; Iraq wouldn’t have been destroyed; there would be no ISIS…

Plenty of problems would have persisted, but fewer of them would have been directly of our making, and we might even have directed some of that money and energy towards good instead of evil in the process.

I honor our war dead, as I honor our military living, as I honor the victims of our military. I don’t particularly blame our service members for the actions of the US military – in fact, for reasons of class and nationality, I think it would be deeply hypocritical of me to do so – but I do celebrate the many courageous acts of resistance to US militarism that have been taken by US military veterans, and respect the leadership of organizations and efforts past and present such as: Winter Soldier, Veterans for Peace, and About Face.

Just as we don’t authentically support healthcare workers by banging pots and pans or wasting tax dollars on flyovers by military jets, we don’t authentically honor US military dead or “support our troops” through uncritically accepting jingoism, hysteria, and lies. I’m enough of a realist to recognize that there are not clean-cut alternatives to US power at the moment; the world is complex and dynamic, and there are forces more malign than our own government also at play in global geopolitics. That’s for another and much longer piece.

In the meantime, the daylight’s waning, so I’ll close.

Yesterday, by coincidence, I read this White House document – entitled “United States Strategic Approach to The People’s Republic of China” – and this Tricontinental newsletter – an “Appeal” which calls for “peoples of the world” to “[s]tand against the warmongering of US imperialism, which seeks to impose dangerous wars on an already fragile planet” – one after the other. To read and understand both tells one a lot about the world, and I encourage you to do just that.

There are, of course, different types of billionaires. Guatam Mukunda offers a helpful look at the “predatory” billionaires – Charles Koch chief among them – who are behind the sociopathic push to prematurely reopen the US economy; however, Mukunda also points out that “not all billionaires are minimizing the danger of the virus” and points to Bill Gates, in particular, as “a prophetic voice warning against the danger of a pandemic.”

Building on my anti-billionaire and Gates-negative piece yesterday, I’ll point to this excellent investigative article by Tim Schwab for The Nation that examines “the moral hazards surrounding the Gates Foundation’s $50 billion charitable enterprise.” Long-short, while Gates, as Mukunda argues, has indeed been outspoken and prescient (if not quite prophetic, given that many prominent public health professionals, historians, intellectuals, and journalists have been warning for decades about the threat of pandemic; Gates gets a lot of credit for his 2015 TED Talk, as well he should, but prophecy it was not) on the pandemic, as a private individual, businessperson/tycoon, and philanthropist, Gates has a spotty record, to say the least, of hypocrisy, conflict of interest, and alignment with regressive, corporatist agendas around the world and across almost every industry/area of activity of the Foundation (with, in many respects, the grants given by the the Foundation and the investments made by its endowment working in direct opposition to the realization of the stated mission of the Foundation to “help all people lead healthy, productive lives”). I’ll let you read the piece for more details, but what Koch and Gates have in common is that they/their foundations both have histories of backing ALEC (the well-known right-wing boilerplate legislation outfit) and the Philanthropy Roundtable (an organization which masquerades as defending the right of the rich to give, but in reality seems geared towards protecting their ability to donate as they see fit rather than pay taxes). After the Panama and Paradise Papers, the fundamental alignment of the interests of the superrich – beneath any superficial partisan differences which might seem to divide them – should come as no surprise.

Yes, Gates has been urging a sane, coherent response to the pandemic while Koch has been funding pro-reopening protests and anti-lockdown Twitter bots, but neither of them pays anywhere near what they should in taxes (as this New York Times graphic nicely illustrates), and the malign influence of concentrated wealth and those who hold and wield it has a dangerous coherence and unifying logic that extend far beyond narrow differences over the pandemic and gravitate toward a neo-feudal organization of global society.

Just as there are different types of billionaires connected both by financial ties and a unifying underlying logic, so too, there are many New York Timeses that – like the Holy Trinity or the diverse states of this country (with its Latin motto) – are made through the alchemy, in this case of capital, one. There is the Times which published the Gates puff piece, and that which put out the helpful taxation infographic, and that which is out this Memorial Day weekend with a moving tribute to the “nearly 100,000 lives lost so far” – although even this act of recognition and mourning is fraught with error, for the Times own worthy investigative work has long since shown that the official death toll reflects a vast undercount of the actual number of dead. We’ve known since April that the actual number of deaths is something like 50% higher than the reported number, so why make a show of remembering 100,000 without immediately pointing out that the actual number dead from COVID-19 in the United States is probably already closer to 150,000? Such are the problems with the many-faced, one-spirited institution that is our paper of record.

This state-by-state COVID-19 reproduction number tracker from the Instagram founders has almost every state’s number below 1 (but shows a handful above 1 and ticking upwards for the first time in weeks), which suggests that things are going relatively well with the country’s pandemic response; however, this report from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team reaches a very different conclusion, suggesting that close to half the states in the US right now have uncontrolled outbreaks. As the authors conclude:

Our estimates suggest that the epidemic is not under control in much of the US […]

We predict that increased mobility following relaxation of social distancing will lead to resurgence of transmission, keeping all else constant. We predict that deaths over the next two-month period could exceed current cumulative deaths by greater than two-fold [and] that factors modulating transmission such as rapid testing, contact tracing and behavioural precautions are crucial to offset the rise of transmission associated with loosening of social distancing.

Overall, we show that while all US states have substantially reduced their reproduction numbers, we find no evidence that any state is approaching herd immunity or that its epidemic is close to over.

Evidently, a majority of the US population across partisan differences takes the pandemic seriously and is opposed to hasty, careless, and haphazard reopening. Recent research suggests that, contrary to self-servingly self-defeating claims from some in the investor class, it is not the shutdowns but the pandemic itself that is causing the vast majority of the economic harm around the world. Will popular good sense be enough to overcome corporate greed and political malfeasance in turning the tide on the pandemic and our response to it? Right now, it looks like the answer, at least in the United States, is probably no, but it is along these lines that we should be organizing and struggling. Against the divide and conquer strategy of the superrich and the politicians and media they control, we should be working to unite the vast majority of the US population who have a good sense respect for science and facts in view of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, already, from this disease, and who are united by common interests and basic decency in a desire to break the stranglehold of oligarchy and monopoly, and to work towards a more sane, just, healthy, and livable future for the country and the world.

Today, the rain is heavy and soothing in New York City. We have lunch plans, of a sort, and so I’ll simply offer some excerpts that have tracked with and shaped my own thoughts.

In early April, Arundhati Roy wrote:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

So far, those in power seem inclined to opt for the former alternative.

Mike Davis opines that “People are not going gently into [the Administration’s] good night. They’re fighting like hell.” But he points out that the struggles of working people against workplace dangers and political austerity are receiving next to no corporate media coverage, even as the astroturfed men with guns besieging Democratic-held state houses dominate news cycles. Davis argues further:

Well, some people seem to believe [the Administration’s response is] all a matter of [the President’s] disorganization, the chaos in his mind, his incompetence. It’s all been bungled.

I don’t think that’s really true. I think, from very early on, in the White House, they’ve embraced this theory that in order to keep the economy open or to quickly reopen it, to rely on herd immunity, let people get infected.

And regarding the global situation:

And one thing we know for sure is that if a vaccine is developed in this country, it won’t be going to Africa, probably won’t be going to South America. I assume it will go to red states first and then maybe trickle down to blue. But it’s not simply abandoning the existing institutions of internationalism. This is a kind of triage of humanity, where wealthy countries have retreated from even the pretense of moral obligations to the poorer countries.

In the first session from this excellent online conference (to which my friend Emily pointed me) from the American Association for the History of Medicine, Charles Rosenberg repeats the common phraseology that COVID-19 – like any epidemic or pandemic – serves as “a stress test” for the stricken societies, while – interviewed on Democracy Now! – barnstorming independent journalist (and founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India), P. Sainath, goes further in claiming:

COVID-19 has presented us — and, I think, much of the world — with a complete and total autopsy of the corpse of neoliberal policy of 28 years in India.

[W]e’ve all accepted […] that healthcare is something to be bought, sold, traded, and that health insurance equals health. This is neoliberalism. We have a country where the maximum amount of the health system is in private hands — I mean, where the maximum expenditure on health is from poor people, from their own pockets. That’s one, on the health [system].

On the education system, now what happens — all the rich schools and the colleges and private universities will switch to “online education.” What happens to the tens of millions of children? What happens to the tens of millions of children in government schools where you’re lucky to have a decent blackboard? What happens to [them]? So the education system is smashed. This was also the pushing of so-called affordable private schools. All this stuff came with neoliberalism. So we’ve been smashed on the hunger front, on the education front, on the health front.

And we now face a very serious crisis in the coming monsoon crop season, because after 25 years we promoted, like anything, cash crop for exports. If we repeat cash crops in the coming season, you’re going to have starvation, right?

[…]

Each and every node of neoliberalism is now standing naked.

COVID-19 is a portal, a triage, a stress test, an autopsy, an X-ray. Something which sorts and separates, allows us to see, or shows us what – hidden – was already there.

Writing for The Caravan, Vidya Krishnan references the “frustration and dismay” of “several scientists” “at science having to play third fiddle – coming after politics and theatrics – during this public-health crisis,” and goes on to conclude:

The first week of May appears to show that India is on the cusp of a tailspin that will witness an exponential growth in infected cases. It has brought to the surface an issue long ignored in independent India: the need to invest in science, listen to scientists, and allow room for evidence-based policies. Cardiologists, paediatricians and private-hospital entrepreneurs cannot substitute for epidemiologists, scientists and health-policy experts. If the government continues to sideline scientists, while relying on ignorant political and theatrical measures, India will turn into a disastrous incubator for the virus.

The details may vary slightly, but the essence of her assessment could apply equally well in the United States as in (at least) dozens of other countries around the world. We stand at a precipice, or on the threshold of Roy’s portal, or at a beyond-Frostian fork in the road. According to Vijay Prashad, “Half of the world’s population fears going hungry as a result of the pandemic” – and even pre-pandemic, “2.5 billion” people were already underfed as “[measured] by caloric intake” – and yet, a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies suggests that the wealth of US billionaires has increased by $434 billion in just the past two months, even as nearly 40 million people have filed for unemployment insurance in the United States.

Meanwhile, the New York Times advances the notion that “Bill Gates Is the Most Interesting Man in the World.” Does Timothy Egan’s glowing puff piece mention the various disastrously failed efforts at “education reform” of the Gates Foundation? I may never know.

As a friend wrote to me last night in sharing the “Most Interesting” link: “NY Times Op-Ed just jumped the shark. Truly the dumbest of all possible worlds we are living in.”

With the corpse of neoliberalism now festering like ruins all about us, I liked the Panglossian resonance of his conclusion, and replied: “Oh yeah, this just popped up on some feed for me as well. Fucking absurd. Gates is a very smart and accomplished guy, but also a ruthless one, and this fawning obeisance is just obscene.”

To which he replied: “The Gates philanthropy machine is mostly a tax dodge too. I mean I’m jaded about the op-ed section but that’s just straight up trolling or insane. Or just like a secular indulgence a la the robber barons. I really think the centrist galaxy brain is turning to slush atm.”

Now, I don’t know if it’s “mostly a tax dodge,” but there is certainly a tax avoidance component to all this philanthropic giving, and so, as the paper of record, and New York’s beloved Governor, and Wired magazine, and the Federal Reserve, and Congress, and really the entire corporate media and US ruling class give the superrich a free pass and dutifully serve their class interests, let’s remember, today, that billionaires are not our friends. That they are the robber barons, the people who sympathized and collaborated with the Nazis, who worked tirelessly to destroy the New Deal, and who continue, to this day, to assiduously strive to dismantle our miserly social welfare state and with it our democracy. They are the aristocrats, whose iron stranglehold on the lives of the many was centuries or millennia in the breaking, and no matter how much servile media or spineless and captive politicians sing their praises, they are not our friends, our allies, our saviors, or even, necessarily – as we’re constantly told – geniuses, or visionaries, or any of the other inanities we hear so often bandied about in our age of billionaire-ocracy.

We don’t need their charity; we need their fucking tax dollars. We don’t need their self-serving ideas for “rethinking” education and “reimagining” healthcare. We need them to take their feet of the world’s neck, and to stop undermining our democracies and driving planetary civilization into ruin. Out of the corpse of neoliberalism will grow fascism or (democratic) socialism, maggots or flowers, private wealth or public luxury. The choice is ours, but to the extent we choose freedom for the many, and not the few, the billionaires must be stopped.

“What’s the benefit of all this cruelty?” my partner asked as we watched (a recurring theme, I know) yesterday’s episode of Democracy Now! The features had been, respectively, on the suffering of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh who face now, on top of the threats of genocide and pandemic, the challenge of recovering from damage wrought by Cyclone Amphan; the threats to refugees around the world from both the pandemic and its secondary effects; and a new study suggesting that more than a million children, and tens of thousands of mothers, could die over the next six months globally owing to the impacts of COVID-19, but her question, I think, had been regarding, specifically, events in the United States.

I’ll quote a recent post of mine here, because I still don’t have any better answer: “The explanation to which I circle back for the unfathomable cruelty and incompetence issuing from DC centers less on grand plans (though, of course, McConnell and others certainly have those, as the reconvening of the Senate to appoint Federal judges makes clear) and more on opportunism, greed, ignorance, and incompetence. I believe the strategy which has now taken shape among the people in power is to rob and upwardly redistribute to the fullest extent the intersecting crises allow, while making token gestures to the population at large, resting assured that not nearly enough has been given to prevent most working people from being starved, prematurely, back to work. It is a strategy that is already badly backfiring, but has enabled a great deal of wealth transfer, and – from the perspective of people who don’t care at all about mass death of the poor – may yet work out “favorably”.”

It was in the work of Arthur and the late Marilouise Kroker that I first encountered the concept “abuse value,” and while it may not be altogether operative in this instance, just such cruelty as that to which my partner spoke is central to an essay of Arthur’s which I’m in the process of revisiting and from which – regarding ISIS execution videos – I quote:

With fast circulating media imagery as the skin of the planet […] in this scenario of 21st-century cruelty and humiliation […] in the spreading wasteland of the 21st century, it is no longer possible to speak meaningfully of a necessary conjuncture between absolute murder and absolute justice. When murder is put on public display for global media circulation, and when the question of justice itself is reduced to a carefully staged communication […] violence and justice are finally blasted away by the powers of the phantasmagoria. Here, murder and justice have no meaning in themselves, but become [only the] vertiginous flow of the media spectacle.

Their writing isn’t for everyone, but in certain respects, I believe they were prescient, especially in their analyses of digital media culture through the joint lens of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

Anyway, even as we all make our way in confusion through the haze and phantasmagoria of mis- and disinformation and propaganda, still, sometimes, good sense and common decency prevail. Merrill Lynch, of all sources, is reporting that, based on data from Denmark and Sweden (which have pursued radically different approaches in confronting the pandemic):

The paper finds that consumer spending dropped by 25% in Sweden and by 29% in Denmark. The […] difference between the two declines quantifies the cost of lockdown policies. While 4% of consumer spending is not trivial, it is a small share of the total decrease in consumer spending. Therefore the data indicate that most of the slowdown occurred due to voluntary social distancing rather than lockdown policies.

As David Dayen pointed out in yesterday’s Unsanitized newsletter, in the United States, “the public isn’t joining in the optimism of the policymakers [regarding reopening]” which may partially explain (along with incomplete or doctored data) why Georgia hasn’t seen a significant spike in COVID-19 cases post-reopening. This is, of course, a cause for real optimism, and a sign that even the lies and sociopathy of much of the US ruling class has not fully blinded a majority of the population to an obvious truth: The pandemic is dangerous, and, to actually reopen the economy, we have to do the hard work of confronting the pandemic first. (In the meantime, as the Rev. Dr. William Barber put it: “Stay at home, stay alive, organize.”)

Unfortunately, with enhanced unemployment benefits slated to expire at the end of July, and the Congressional relief efforts proving – no doubt, by (Republican) design – insufficient for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the United States – especially in view of the utter failure to (even try to) bring the pandemic under control in this country – it seems likely that economic desperation may yet tip the balance between popular fear and good sense, and elite sadism and greed in favor of the latter and toward renewed explosive spread of COVID-19. (I recommend this interview with Mike Davis on the subject of organizing to resist workplace exploitation.)

Meanwhile, regarding US-China relations, poor Bill Bishop of Sinocism apologizes [paywalled], “I wish I had something more insightful to write for you but my heard hurts too much from banging it against my desk.” I generally find him insightful all the same, and I learned something from listening, per his link, to this interview of Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) by Mike Green of CSIS. (I recommend skipping over their stroking of each other’s egos and talking about service in the Marines, etc. so to the 26 minute 40 second mark.) Gallagher is an unapologetic advocate for US power whose politics align very little with my own, and yet, as David Dayen writes in today’s Unsanitized, there is an “Emerging Bipartisanship on Supply Chains and China Policy.” On the one hand, some on the left seem at risk of focusing so intently on US misdeeds (colossal and numerous as they are), that they either give China a free pass – as FAIR sometimes seems to – or become outright apologists for the Chinese government – as Vijay Prashad unabashedly has. On the other hand, I agree with Glenn Greenwald that obsession with Chinese misdeeds among US elites (and especially among Republicans suddenly concerned, after decades of the so-called War on Terror, about the suffering of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang) is generally dangerous, self-serving, and disingenuous. Remember all the Bush Administration handwringing about the well being of women in Afghanistan?

History – like that covered in Doug Henwood’s interview with Vincent Bevins regarding “the US-sponsored strategy of mass murder during the Cold War” – reminds us of just how horrific US imperialism continues to be, even after 400+ years, but as a practical matter, the case remains that the US and China have become deeply culturally and economically entangled and that the geo/politics between the two countries will likely be central in shaping the coming decades (and to any hope of confronting the global climate crisis). The greed of US corporations in looking to the Chinese labor market, and the arrogance of US politicians in imagining that they could control China even while facilitating its rise as an economic and political force look now – nearly 20 years after China joined the WTO – highly ironic in view of the growing hysteria in this country about Chinese power and “the Chinese threat.”

Clearly, it’s Yellow Peril-ism all over again, and yet, there is no neutral position from which to survey the scene; caught between superpowers is not a comfortable position for a lone individual. I worry about Hong Kong, as I worried for Aleppo. Going back centuries, if not millennia, cities – even with their filth, inequality, illusions, and phantasmagoria – have been magnets for freethinkers and those seeking opportunity. They have also been sites of extreme exploitation, and destinations for forced migration, so I won’t pretend to tell a single story about cities – especially in our current age of highly unequal urbanization – but just as we only have one planet, we only have so many places on the face of it, and some of them – New York, Hong Kong, Aleppo – offer something rare to find on the face of the Earth. The crushing of the spirit of a great city is a monstrous act, and as we face a century that may soon witness many of our global centers menaced or destroyed by climate crisis-fueled storms, droughts, wildfires, sea level-rise, etc., we should think hard about what it means to resist imperialism, authoritarianism, and fascism coherently, even as we sit, complicit, within countries which are, at present, guilty of some, if not all, of the above.

In the meantime, the COVID-19 “Game of Whack-a-Mole” continues with no evidence, in many countries – like this one, Brazil, Russia – that the governments are even trying, and no immediate end in sight.

For a few weeks in March, as New York City accelerated into its current crisis, but before the enormity of the situation had set in for many of the City’s residents, many affluent New Yorkers seemed stunned about the cancellation of their work trips or the threat to their spring break plans. Sure, the “Polar Vortex” and the “Bomb Cyclone” may have led to travel disruptions, as had, in the past, the occasional thunderstorm, blizzard, nor’easter, or summer spate of mid-continent tornadoes, but rarely did such weather-related delays stretch for more than a day or two.

To be fair, New York has also come through both the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the devastation of Superstorm Sandy in the past 20 years, so you’d think we’d be more well equipped to process the monumentally atypical, and yet, right up to Governor’s very-belated promulgation of a stay-at-home order/New York’s PAUSE, people continued speaking about their April vacations, their May weddings. And who could fault them? The signs – some of which are still up – reading things like, “Out of an abundance of caution, we will be closed for the weekend,” and “[Blank] will reopen on March 29th” now seem equal parts tragic and quaint. And just as business owners could hardly have been expected, en masse, to initially make sense of the – if not quite unprecedented, certainly extraordinary – circumstances, so too the City’s residents can be forgiven for having expected that there lives would go on as usual (though, of course, words like “usual” and “normal” have now become quite suspect).

As I’ve written before, I think even many of us who rejected the post-Cold War US triumphalism encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s now infamous title, “The End of History,” nonetheless deeply internalized its logic, just as many of us who are, or see ourselves, as staunchly anti-neoliberal yet have a deep streak of Reaganism in our souls. How could we not? It’s been the water we swim in, the air we breathe for nearly half a century.

So it was with respect that I listened as Kambale Musavuli of Friends of the Congo fielded Carolyn Baker’s question about Congolese in the United States during the pandemic, and gently flipped it on its head. There’s not a transcript for the interview, and I lack the time to go searching, so I’ll roughly paraphrase Musavuli’s words as follows: I imagine you’re asking about Congolese who are in the US as migrants under the current immigration paradigm, but of course, something like 25% of all African Americans are of Congolese descent. One felt history telescoping back out from the deceptive compression to which it is often subjected by our awful politics. Here was a person with the courage and vision to actually live in the world as it is.

I’ll juxtapose Musavuli’s intellectual courage with the fear and confusion on display in this conversation, on the always uneven Radio Open Source, between host Christopher Lydon and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen who, to again paraphrase, in speaking to his thoughts regarding the current state of the world, with an emphasis on press freedom and democracy in the US, declared roughly: My intellectual vision is in ruins.

I think of Jimi Hendrix’s version of Castles Made of Sand. We have a real opportunity before us, to remake the world in the name of justice and sanity, to recognize – in overcoming the crisis of the pandemic – the fundamental flaws and failures of our dying status quo, and to carry these lessons forward into the epochal work of confronting the once-in-a-civilization crisis of global climate disruption. Part of seizing that opportunity is re/discovering our own courage and vision, recognizing that the world is bigger than our vacations, and that the meaning of life is more than consumption.

The odds are, frankly, badly stacked against us. The Intercept reports that “has ramped up security and police-related spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic”; the President and his Administration continue, apace, in aggressively pursuing their omnicidal deregulatory agenda; major US-based corporations are seizing the opportunity of the pandemic to wage (further) war on their workers; just as major world powers including the US – through its sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba – and China – which is deepening its assault on the autonomy of Hong Kong – are capitalizing on the global crises to pursue their own imperialist/anti-democratic geopolitical agendas. As undocumented people in this country are in crisis, others in the US are worried about their lawns (which are driving insect die-offs). Much has been made of the fact that “carbon dioxide [emissions] suddenly plunged by as much as 17 percent globally in early April as the world responded to the covid-19 pandemic.” The same Grist article from which this quote is drawn predicts that the staggering drop in emissions will have a “Tiny Effect on Global Temperature” and that the annual decrease in carbon dioxide emissions will fall in the mid-single digit range, which – if we maintained such an annual level of decrease going forward for the rest of the decade – might be enough for the world to hit the very modest (and arguably insufficient) Paris goals. Might.

It can be hard to keep perspective, but keep perspective is exactly what we must do if we hope to live lives of meaning in confronting, as it is, and, ideally, reshaping the world. As ever more research continues to demonstrate, denial has already cost tens of thousands of lives in the US alone during the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate denial – which is really just an extreme form of the life denialism, the history denialism, the world denialism that leads even good-hearted people (like Jay Rosen) into intellectual and spiritual ruin and bankruptcy – can easily cost exponentially more lives in the years and decades to come, and may yet drive the world into a state of collapse that will make us long for the days of lockdown, even if we take commensurate action, but most certainly if we don’t.