Short, and hopefully sweet today in celebration of a beautiful, sunny Sunday in New York.

Briefly, though, some less than sweet news: COVID-19 is spreading in Bombay’s jails; the Delhi government is underreporting COVID-19 deaths (even as Arundhati Roy calls for “accontability” and an end to “the cheap tricks” in India’s COVID-19 response); the Mexican government has ignored a “Wave of Coronavirus Deaths in [the] Capital” where “three times as many people may have died […] than federal statistics show”; Rick Bright’s damning whistleblower account sheds further light on the failures of the US Administration in DC to heed warnings or take even the most basic actions (eg, acquiring N95 masks) to protect residents of the United States; in New Orleans, imprisoned people are being used to replace striking garbage workers; in New York State, employment of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 has been suspended after an NEJM study found no clinical benefit to the drug’s use; also in New York State, Governor Cuomo continues to misrepresent data to serve his own political ends, while in New York City, Mayor de Blasio – having already colossally bungled the City’s COVID-19 response, in large part through ignoring the advice of the City’s world-class public health experts – continues to work to sideline those same experts for his own narrow political reasons; in the Bronx, Lincoln Hospital is investigating a nurse for sharing footage with The Intercept; and, above it all, JetBlue brought “the Clap […] to the skies” over New York City with “a three aircraft, low altitude flyover salute” on Thursday.

Cities of the world are under siege from the venality and incompetence of their own negligent governments.

Sometimes, it’s truly hard to conceive of the stupidity, brutality, and banality of the world in which we live, and yet, very often, those of us who dream of and work towards a different and better future find ourselves caricatured and smeared in popular media and  consciousness. For example, so often had I heard Julian Assange painted as a vicious, dishonest criminal that I came to accept that characterization for a time, and yet, over and over again, I’ve heard people whose work I respect and who know Assange personally speak of his gentleness and generosity of spirit. I don’t know Assange personally, so can only say that it is deeply troubling to reflect on the gulf between the substance of a life and what can be made of it through the power and reach of propagandists.

Coming back to the sweetness though, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott were live on Insta last night. It was nice, to say the least (and meta, and funny, and strange), and I send thanks to my friend Darren for the heads up. The Nina Simone lyric which gives this piece its title always makes me laugh. It’s nice too. The butterflies aren’t having fun, of course, but the idea that they are – an anthropomorphization – speaks to a very human urge to which I think we can all relate these days.

I’ve been thinking about the documentary For Sama lately. My partner and I watched it not so long before the pandemic hit New York, and without getting into the film’s merits as a political artifact, I keep circling back to the twinned and yet radically divergent subjectivities that come with city-wide quarantine and aerial bombardment. In both instances, isolation, privation, and fear of death become constitutive elements of daily life for much of the population, and perhaps that is where the similarity ends, for – while in Aleppo – people lived in constant fear that their buildings might be bombed – while they ate, while they slept – in New York, fighter jets and commercial airliners fly overhead to reassure us: Our military is strong. Capitalism is working. Everything is still okay.

I read Linda Backiel’s poem, “And then, I think about war,” in the current Monthly Review, and her words resonated with me:

We are tired of this. The disaster.
It repeats itself. Each time,
the panic comes a little faster,
we sink deeper into it.
Trauma, stress, syndrome.
I think I am learning to understand.

[…]

[About war] we thought we knew,
but we were far away […]

It helps to keep perspective. It helps to see and feel the sun shine, and to be able to without fear of destruction.

The Indy has a wonderful tribute up to the recently deceased Donald Paneth, and – drawing on the short (~6-minute long) video – I’ll give the late “Maverick Journalist” the last word – in particular:

The New York Times will not print the truth of what the events mean. What they mean. Not what they are. The Times will record what the event is on that particular day, but they won’t put it together so that […] the events are analyzed deeply enough and truthfully enough so that people can understand what the events themselves mean.

And in general: “The US mass media cannot and will not: Tell. The. Truth.”

Well said, Donald. Rest in power.

It’s up to the rest of us – the singers, poets, film-makers, journalists, and others – to tell the truth, make sense of what it means, and act accordingly to build a better tomorrow.

 

You remember Andrew Cuomo? You know, everyone’s best friend, the Governor of New York State? The man who, the New York Times gushed in mid-March, “Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now” (before pivoting, at least momentarily, in early April to point out how “Delays” and “Warnings” “Unheeded” by Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio had “Hindered New York’s Virus Fight”)? The man about whom Radio Open Source host Christopher Lydon – like many in the liberal media – fell all over himself in praise just a few weeks ago? The man who engages in light-hearted sibling banter with his brother – the MSNBC anchor – against the backdrop of pandemic? Who has many good liberal folks Tweeting #CuomoForPresident? Who has inspired the neologism Cuomosexual? In short, the man who – having colossally bungled New York’s COVID-19 response, in the process costing tens of thousands of lives – now has New York City and New York State in the palm of his hand?

That Andrew Cuomo. You know the guy. The one who’s currently in the process of selling out our futures to the highest bidder.

As Akash Mehta wrote for Jacobin in late March – “Even in a Pandemic, Andrew Cuomo Is Not Your Friend” – and followed up in early April – “We’re in a Plague — Yet Andrew Cuomo Just Passed an Absolutely Brutal Austerity Budget” – under the cover of COVID-19 ravaging New York City, Cuomo has been very effectively waging class war from Albany, the Javits Center, or the howling guts of the helicopter in which he then finds himself.

I’ve been hammering away myself, mostly to no avail, at Cuomo’s mishandling and abuse of the crisis – in early and mid-March, on his bungling; in late March and early April on his austerity politics and lies about COVID-19 data; and steadily since, right up to the present. On the phone the other day, my friend Milo pointed out that Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State does not get the credit he deserves for his decades of climate work. Similarly, Inslee is not getting the credit he now deserves for having averted a New York-style COVID-19 crisis in Washington, but so desperate are people in this country for a hero, a savior, a crisis daddy, and above all, an outwardly competent politician, that they’ll sooner celebrate a man who cost tens of thousands of lives, than lift up one who took timely action and saved them.

Coming to the point, Naomi Klein has a long piece out this morning in The Intercept which I encourage you to read. I’d been watching with concern as Cuomo tapped first Michael Bloomberg, then the Gates Foundation, then Eric Schmidt for roles in “recovery” planning, but – as is often the case with respect to political issues North American – Klein has pithily summed up the state of affairs even as it is still taking shape. To quote from her article, wittily entitled “Screen New Deal” (and with the subtitle, “Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia”):

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.

We need look no further than post-Katrina New Orleans (where the entire education system was privatized) or post-invasion Iraq (where the riches of an ancient society were pilfered and despoiled by US-based private contractors) to understand the type of money-making bonanza that certain individuals and corporations now perceive in our present state of chaos and collapse. Why is the Governor turning to all these (white, male) billionaires? Probably for the same reason that he’s refusing to tax people like them, and why he’s packed the Financial Control Board with individuals demographically much the same.

We are in the process of very rapidly getting fooled again. For those who are interested, you can find the full text of my email (of September 10th, 2018) endorsing the problematic and ultimately doomed gubernatorial run of Cynthia Nixon below in which I lay out the case against Cuomo. In the year and a half that has passed, not all that much has changed (and apologies for the formatting, WordPress is making it hard to both keep the links and match the size):

Please forgive me for the political email. I’m sure many of you share my feeling that we are at once in an energizing and deeply frightening political moment in this country, and I’ve been trying to do my small part to help move the electoral needle. Volunteering for and supporting the [primary] campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez certainly inspired me, and while – truth be told – I can’t support Cynthia Nixon (and Jumaane Williams) with the same wholeheartedness, I’d nonetheless love to see both of them win in the Democratic primary this Thursday, September 13th.

Here’s why:

In eight years, Gov. Cuomo has starved our public schools of funds; badly underfunded SUNY and CUNY; promised to make NYS a leader in renewable energy generation while simultaneously supporting the build-out of massive fracked gas infrastructure (that is in the process of “locking” us into 40 to 50 more years of fossil-fuel dependency) and undercutting the viability of distributed solar generation in New York; peremptorily shut down an investigation that threatened to reveal his own corruption; had an aide (who was like a “third son” to his father) convicted of taking $300,000 in bribes to facilitate the permitting of a fracked gas power plant; and enabled the rogue Independent Democratic Caucus (or IDC; it’s a nice sounding name, but they caucus with the Republicans) to give effective control of the New York State Senate to the Republicans, stymieing progressive action in what should be one of the most progressive states in the nation.

I could go on, but will trust that you are doing your own homework. Doesn’t Gov. Cuomo have some substantial accomplishments though?

– He banned fracking in NYS in 2014, only to turn around and enable the aforementioned massive buildout of fracked gas infrastructure and the piping into and through NYS of fracked gas from Pennsylvania’s devastated Marcellus Shale region.

– He backed marriage equality, though I think can fairly be said to have led from the back on that effort.

– He introduced a “free college” plan for students attending SUNY and CUNY schools. Sadly, although the Governor’s office has bandied around the phrase “one million families” in characterizing the impact, in truth, fewer than 25,000 students (out of a total state-wide student body of ~900,000) are currently receiving the Excelsior Scholarship, and the majority of students who have applied for it have been declined, not for lack of need or merit, but owing to the fine print that has disqualified the vast majority of low-income students, most of whom balance school with significant work and family responsibilities.

– He claims to stand in defense of undocumented people, but hasn’t supported something as simple as Green Light NY.

While it is probably incorrect (though apocryphally ubiquitous) that Albany is the “most corrupt” state capital in the country, it is certainly extremely corrupt and seems to have grown more so under Cuomo. As I wrote above, I’m not able to back Cynthia Nixon with the same enthusiasm that I backed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or that I back Julia Salazar  for those of you living in North Brooklyn!), but setting aside her television career, she does have a long track record of progressive activism, especially around education, and she has been outspoken on issues of racial, economic, and environmental and climate justice. She more than held her own in the lone Democratic gubernatorial debate; she’s been endorsed by the scrappy and rapidly-growing DSA; and she clearly has Cuomo scared. As was widely reported last week, Cuomo’s campaign spent $8.5 million in the three weeks prior (~$400,000 per day) in spite of the fact that polls show him with a “commanding” 60% to 20% lead. Bit hard to figure out exactly how much money Nixon’s campaign has raised to date, but it no doubt remains a small fraction of what has flowed into and out of the Governor’s “war chest,” and she is not accepting corporate donations and has relied largely on “small” donors. Meanwhile, Cuomo rakes in massive donations from the real estate industry.

There are, of course, real questions to be asked about Cynthia Nixon (though if what she says she stands for is among your questions, please go have a look at her website): Could she effectively govern? Would she follow through on her promises? Does she stand any chance upstate? Might she lose a state-wide election to a Republican, leaving us in an even worse bind? In truth, I don’t have any easy answers here, but, as recent upsets have shown, when enough people believe something is possible and vote their consciences, we can start to shift the political discourse away from terms centered on fear and inevitability. Cuomo has done a bad job; he has not served the interests of the vast majority of New Yorkers; he’s presided over extreme corruption in Albany (and, I forgot to mention, bears significant blame for the state of our beloved and beleaguered MTA, no matter how much he tries to dodge and equivocate); and we would be well-served to see him gone.

Here’s A Guide to the NY Democratic Primaries from the Indypendent that may help answer some of your questions about races down ballot from governor, and remember, in 2014, ~11% of registered Democrats voted in the NYS gubernatorial primary, and Zephyr Teachout startled manyone (myself included) by polling 34% to Cuomo’s 62%. She lost badly, but was expected to be in like the single digits. This is why the Governor is spending so big right now. He knows that a majority of New York progressives are sick of his corruption and fake progressivism (he’s called “PAndrew” for a reason), and that he is extremely vulnerable in this primary. If 20-30% of NYC Dems show up to vote, I suspect he’ll lose.

I was obviously very wrong about the outcome of that primary election. Turnout was in the range for which I called, and yet Nixon still got crushed. Thankfully, with the voting out of six of the eight IDC legislators, and the progressive wave in Albany and at City Hall, we’ve seen progress on a number of the issues I highlighted in the email. How Nixon would’ve fared in the face of the pandemic is anyone’s guess, but what use Cuomo is making of it is plan for all to see.

In linking, on Wednesday, to Sujatha Gidla’s moving op-ed – about being “a New York City subway conductor who had Covid-19” and “going back to work” in the wake of having lost multiple beloved colleagues to the disease – I started to reference her memoir, Ants Among Elephants. According to her publisher, the book is “The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary.” I’m not entirely sure about that sentence – including it’s use of the outmoded term “untouchable” – but its content should be enough to illuminate my hesitation and ultimate, temporary side-stepping of her biography and identity.

But then last night over dinner, my partner cut to the heart of the matter. “I read Sujatha Gidla’s editorial. It was powerful,” she said, and then paused. “She must have referenced caste and then the Times edited it out.”

We talked about this at some length before I volunteered that I was going to write this piece today, and while I can’t say what any editors may or may not have done, it remains striking that an op-ed on COVID-19 disparities in a time of social distancing, an op-ed which references Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow as the point of connection between “a woman from India” and the “black co-worker [she] used to see every day” – a coworker with whom she became friendly enough that “whenever [they] ran into each other [they] hugged and cheek-kissed” and who, in recent weeks, died of COVID-19 – that an op-ed at root about injustice should elide caste.

Right here, I’ll stop and say unequivocally that it is Sujatha Gidla’s business, and her business alone what she chooses and chooses not to disclose or discuss about herself; however, given that the Times links, at the op-ed’s bottom, to the book’s official site, it feels reasonable to at least point to yet another failure – not of Gidla’s, for I have no criticism to level at her, and am humbled by the efforts not so much of mythologized “heroes”, but of public sector workers and the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have kept the City running through these crushing weeks and months – but of the Times. I’ve been critiquing the New York Times for years, and although I’d love to simply be done with the publication, it just keeps giving me new opportunities (not that I go looking for them), and it seems likely that I’ll be critiquing our problematic, bourgeois paper of record for years to come. For now, I’ll just point out that for all its coverage of COVID-19 in India, the Times has barely mentioned caste.

Caste is, of course, a minefield, a tragedy, a whole society’s shame, and, above all, a monumental evil and injustice. I’m not the right person to speak to its manifold historical and contemporary complexities – which is why, in approaching it on Wednesday, I eventually decided to avoid the topic altogether. Too explosive, and not my place; however, given the widespread failure of corporate media in the United States (or – from what I’ve observed as a regular Times of India reader/skimmer – in India) to acknowledge the troubling resonances of the virtuous social distancing in which we’re all now expected to engage, and the ancient social stigmas associated with the conceptions of purity and contamination that are coded into caste logic, I’m now feeling duty-bound to make such an acknowledgement myself.

Caste matters, obviously. It’s as confusing to talk about Gidla’s solidarity with her Black colleague in the absence of caste, as it would be to talk about the inspiration that the founders of the Dalit Panthers took from some people in the United States without acknowledging that those people were Black.

(Incidentally, Michelle Alexander herself advances an – in my view troubling – argument that we now have a “racial caste” system in the United States. Obviously, race matters as well, and when Black men are being gunned down on video in cold blood in the street [link is for a Color of Change petition demanding justice for Ahmaud Arbery], and the NYPD is resuscitating stop-and-frisk under cover of social distancing enforcement, far be it from me to detract from the centrality of white supremacy and anti-Blackness to the substance of the United States, but to conflate the two – race and caste – tends towards an erasure of relevant specificities when perhaps an elaboration of the similarities and differences of those specificities is apropos.)

In India, independent media outlet The Wire – the editor of which is currently being subjected to legal harassment at the hands of the government of the most unhinged BJP chief minister in India – has been reporting since March on the connections between caste and social distancing, in pieces like “Social Distancing and the Pandemic of Caste” and “The History of Caste Has Lessons on the Dangers of Social Distancing,” and while I’d qualify that the phrase “Pandemic of Caste” is itself clumsy and misleading, the case remains: What now we do to protect ourselves and each other echoes practices that have long been employed to marginalize, exclude, and destroy Dalits in India.

(The point is too obvious to bear reiterating, but social distancing is, itself a privilege, and the people most subject to caste stigma are also generally those least able to practice social distancing during the pandemic.)

Coming back to Gidla though, I appreciated her powerful memoir, and if the book’s subtitle – “An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India” – hints that its target audience may have been educated US-based readers like myself (FSG published it, after all) that does little to detract from the raw power of her story and that of her remarkable family.

After the brutal gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012 (which, as Rebecca Solnit pointed out – in an essay itself problematic for its use of the term “Manistan” to characterize the space of global rape culture, as if it couldn’t instead have been the “Man-centric States of America” – occurred around the same time as the brutal gang rape of a high school girl in Steubenville, Ohio), a white, female Facebook friend of my partner’s took to that platform to decry the horrible misogyny and violence against women in India (a country which she had never visited) and to express gratitude for all the freedoms she enjoyed in the United States. Again, identity is explosive, and I’ll let this case speak for itself, but what I hope not to see is any (white, US-based) readers largely unfamiliar with the horrors of caste coming away from this piece with an undue sense of self-congratulation or neocolonial moral superiority. We can despise our current President, all he doesn’t stand for, and – chief among his many faults – his long history of committing sexual assault, and still also believe that credible accusations against Joe Biden should be investigated. Something like that. It’s not an either/or; it’s about compassion and justice.

Say you’re interested in better understanding caste, though, since the New York Times will never, ever write anything meaningful or challenging on the subject. You could start by going through the many illuminating blurbs on the Dalit History Month website, taking note that two of the first modern anti-caste activists of note were the couple Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule; then read Arundhati Roy’s polarizing long-form essay “The Doctor and the Saint” on the relationship (and political conflict) between Gandhi and Ambedkar; then read Dr. Ambedkar’s own magnum opus (even considering that he also wrote much/most of the Indian Constitution), The Annihilation of Caste; then read this Equality Labs report on “Caste in the United States” (after which, you might want to peruse the Equality Labs website in detail); and after all that, you’re on your own (though if you practice yoga, you may also want to read my partner’s piece, “The Responsibilities of a Modern Yogi”).

And, of course, read Gidla’s searing book.

In closing, I’ll point to incisive scholarly work by the late Sharmila Rege, and ever insightful political commentary from the singular Vijay Prashad.

In analyzing the consumption of Dalit autobiographies by non-Dalit readers, and critiquing the “tokenist addition” of Dalit writing to anthologies, Rege questioned:

Can reading and teaching of dalit autobiographies radicalise the perception of readers? Do readers conveniently consume these narratives as narratives of pain and suffering refusing to engage with the politics and theory of Ambedkarism?

These are profound questions through which readers will have to sort for themselves, but even thoughtful people can’t sort through things they don’t first encounter. Such should be the role of media – to surface and shed light on what matters.

Finally, Vijay Prashad. I’m still concerned about some of his take on China’s handling of the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, and perhaps its wrong to reference a non-Dalit intellectual as this piece concludes, but he’s had a number of nice articles out lately about Kerala’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, and it is from Kerala’s Marxist Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan – quoted in one of Prashad’s articles – that I have borrowed the title of this piece.

To quote Chief Minister Vijjayan: “Physical distance, social unity – that should be our slogan at this time.”

Simple, elegant, and beautifully put. I don’t know if that framing manages to sidestep the disconcerting resonances between the necessary physical distancing of the present, and the persistent caste-based exclusion that is still so central to Indian life – in fact, I’m certain it does not sidestep the un-sidesteppable question of caste – but it is a heartening reframing nonetheless.

Physical distance, social unity. Here’s to that, and to overcoming the pandemic and all its concomitant hardships globally. And if you’re looking to support Equality Labs’ great work, they have a “COVID-19 Community Guide” up in a dozen different Indian/South Asian languages, and are accepting donations to support their continued “fight on behalf of South Asian American religious and cultural minority communities […] against caste and Islamophobia.” We’ve donated regularly, and it would be great if you did, too, if you’re in a position to do so.

Preface: Sorry, this turned out a little long. It may be the best thing you read all day, so I encourage you to go ahead and read the whole piece, but just in case, the tl;dr is roughly: It’s hard work to stop a pandemic. We have no alternative but to actually do the well-understood hard work. The piece is largely about rejecting laziness and apathy in the face of this generational challenge (just as we must in the face of the civilizational challenge of climate crisis), so it would be extra ironic if you lacked the fortitude to read on…

A friend invited me to join him for a socially-distant walk this morning, and I can’t tell you how good it felt to see the river again. More than a month ago, in view of the deepening crisis in the City, and the widespread negligence around social distancing, I left off my daily visits to the water, and since, a particular ache in my heart has been filling the void left by the sound of the estuarial lapping and the expanse of the harbor.

It was also very nice to have my friend’s company, and, on our walk, our conversation revolved, inevitably, around the pandemic. How we and ours have been doing, the headshaking political news, all the rest until, shortly before we parted ways, my friend posed the question – regarding the reopening conundrum, and having pointed out, with understatement only a climate scientist could muster under these circumstances, “It’s a tough problem” – “I mean, what would you do?”

As my recent posts make clear, already this question has been much on my mind (as it’s on the minds of almost all New Yorkers), and its answers appear at once impossible to imagine and yet overwhelming obvious to outline. As has increasingly been my practice of late, I’ll proceed here mostly by way of reference.

Yesterday, I wrote about my belief that New York – having learned tough lessons and now headed by politicians who are taking COVID-19 seriously – will come through the pandemic in better shape than many other cities and states around the US, but that our recovery here is menaced by dangerous policies elsewhere. Today, I’ll start by pointing – somewhat in the reverse direction – to reportage from The New York Times on new research which suggests that nearly two-thirds of all cases across the United States can be traced back to travel from New York City. As the Times piece lays out:

New York City’s […] outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States […] as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country.

And:

Now that infections are dispersed around the country, travel from New York is no longer a main factor shaping the progression of the epidemic […].

But that:

As states around the nation begin to relax their restrictions, the findings demonstrate that it is difficult, if not impossible, to prevent those actions from affecting the rest of the nation.

Here’s me – mentioning in early and mid-April – the extent to which the flight of (rich) New Yorkers from the City must have inevitably spread the disease, and while the research mentioned above encompasses business and recreational travel as well, I think special attention should be paid to the at least tens of thousands of people who vectorized themselves at the peak of infection in NYC by heading off to family or vacation homes all across the country. (To be fair, I know a number of them, and can attest that some people were at pains to relocate in a fashion as conscientious as was possible.) As we’re now menaced in New York by insane, premature, homicidal reopenings elsewhere, I’m not suggesting there’s justice in our current predicament, but it does seem we now risk reaping what we sowed.

Moving along, the indefatigable Sean Petty – “a pediatric emergency room nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and the southern regional director for the New York State Nurses Association” – is quoted in this Indypendent piece as follows on the subject of New York’s reopening:

First and foremost is not opening any part of the non-essential economy until there is full-scale ability for the public health entities to widely test, contact-trace and comfortably isolate and treat individuals who contract COVID. That’s the public health prime directive in my view.

Almost impossible to imagine at scale right now, and yet overwhelmingly obvious. Here’s a snippet from a Washington Post article on “Iceland’s success” which it attributes:

partly […] to its tiny population — just 360,000 people. But it also reflects decisive action by authorities, who used a rigorous policy of testing and tracking to find and isolate infected people, even when they had no symptoms.

Pretty consistent – it seems to boil down to testing, contact tracing, case isolation, and quarantine for those with potential exposure. These methods have been well understood for at last a hundred years, in fact, and no amount of mostly puffy hype around the Apple-Google API (regarding which, see Ali Alkhatib‘s excellent critique which I referenced on Monday) can replace the need to do the fundamental, hard public health work on the ground in our communities. As Dr. Jim Kim opined in this interview (which I also linked to Monday), rolling out a COVID-19 suppression effort across the US would be at once among the largest public health efforts ever undertaken, and likely the only way to bring the disease under control in this country in the foreseeable future.

As my friend the climate scientist pointed out this morning – like with climate crisis, so too with the pandemic – it’s easy to give up on all other forms of action and just wait around for a technological solution – a “tech fix,” he called it, in pointing out that some people seemed resigned to just waiting for a vaccine. On yesterday’s Democracy Now!, Laurie Garrett – whom the Times surfaced yesterday as having “Predicted the Coronavirus,” and whom Democracy Now! featured on February 2nd in a two-part interview in which Garrett explicitly warned that the pandemic was likely to hit the United States and that, if it did, we were utterly unprepared (DN! scooping the Times by three months on anything that actually matters being a regular occurrence) – but yesterday, Garrett predicted that, in a best-case scenario, the virus would be with us, globally, for 36 months, and that the challenge of vaccinating the entire human population of Earth would dwarf any public health undertaking (including the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio) in history.

Okay, so maybe just waiting for a vaccine isn’t such a good idea? But then, that means we actually just have to do the work? It’s an internal negotiation that we’ve all had with ourselves and that any current or former schoolkid understands intimately. Do I cut corners now, and pay the price later? Or do I do the hard work now, and reap the future benefits? (Incidentally, here’s me making more or less the same case on March 11th.)

Steve Randy Waldman has a great piece up (to which I came through David Dayen’s daily COVID-19 newsletter to which I came through Democracy Now!) that preempts, as follows, another problematic and flawed line of reasoning:

Segregation is affluent America’s go to coping mechanism. […] As families –– if we are affluent, especially if we are white — we understand that we are protected by more subtle boundaries. Maybe that’s a sad injustice, maybe it’s because we’ve earned it, choose your poison and your political party. But whatever it is, we are used to it. It’s not surprising, when we read that COVID-19 has hit poorer communities, black communities, immigrant communities disproportionately. It may not be right, but it’s the way of the world, and whatever our political or ethical attitude, affluent Americans tacitly rely upon it. Manhattan, denser but whiter and richer, has less than half the COVID infection rate as the Bronx.

But the segregation that so often protects affluent America this time cannot free it. Remember how herd immunity works? […] But if the population is segmented, segregated, stratified, that won’t be true at all [that herd immunity is evenly distributed throughout the entire population]. Herd immunity might be achieved in the Bronx, but over in Manhattan, most of the privileged will remain immunologically naive. If you want to ride out the epidemic without exposure, it’s not enough to be in the top 25% to 33% of the most diligent isolators in the United States, or even in New York City. You have to be one of the top 25% to 33% of diligent isolators in your own community, among the people you interact with. […] Months or years after the transit workers have taken their punch, your little world could still be ripe for an outbreak, if you all come out to play. So you won’t, not until there’s a vaccine or you are compelled by circumstance. Segregation will have helped to protect you, as it usually does. But this time, it will also imprison you.

Damn. So it’s looking increasingly like we may actually just have to do the hard work?

It gets worse though, because this isn’t just any country; as Childish Gambino has pointed out, “This Is America,” and in this country – which out of respect for the rest of the Western Hemisphere, I’ll call the United States – we have roughly 4% of the world’s population, and roughly 20% of its incarcerated people. As The Intercept lays out in two separate pieces on COVID-19 and mass incarceration in the US, first, carceral facilities are engines of disease transmission:

But mass incarceration is not only causing people to die of Covid-19 behind bars. As corrections facilities become hot spots, the virus is also rapidly spreading into the surrounding communities. A new model released in April by the American Civil Liberties Union [to which I linked last week] suggests that when jails are accounted for, estimates of the death toll are off by at least 100,000. And that’s for jails alone — not prisons or immigration detention facilities.

And second, that the rural United States is particularly menaced by this grim phenomenon:

For the past several decades, rural America’s economic lifeline has been the construction and operation of prisons and immigrant detention centers, both public and for-profit. […] But those lifelines have transformed into vectors for coronavirus, putting rural communities at risk of outbreaks. […] Those jobs that made the [carceral] campuses so attractive to local communities are staffed by people who go in and out each day — and what they bring with them could make all the difference in communities where hospitals were already shutting down, a trend exacerbated by Covid-19.

Very little of what was outlined two weeks ago in this bro-ishly named NEJM piece, “Ten Weeks to Crush the Curve,” has yet been accomplished in this country, but perhaps as “Red State” residents – so potential voters of relevance to the President – start to die in larger numbers, the President will slightly shift focus from the twin pillars of his non-response to date: Denial and cronyism. (Racism should also be on that list.)

Right now, after bungling everything he’s touched to date, the President’s incompetent son-in-law has been given a still larger mandate; the US Postal Service is under siege by privatizers; mega-corporations are using the chaos brought on by the pandemic to assail organized (healthcare) labor; Governor Cuomo seems intent on further undercutting NYC’s public transportation; Mayor de Blasio has cut all funding for composting from the NYC budget; states are striving to force workers back on the job every which way while taking few steps to protect those workers; and immigrants detained in private immigration jails are being pepper sprayed for asking for medical attention, all while no meaningful action happens at the federal level to stop the spread of COVID-19 in the US and states pursue willfully harmful policies that are almost guaranteed to prove self-defeating.

So what do we do now, from the pits of such despair? The hard work, of course. It’s obvious. We know how to do it, and, in fact, here in New York, we even helped lead the world in figuring out how it is done.

So what we do is the hard work. Now. There’s no other option. That’s how we overcome this pandemic, and it’s how we’ll avoid the next one.

Postscript: Oh! And if you’re looking for something more immediate to do than stopping the pandemic through massive, necessary collective and governmental action, please also consider supporting, as we have, two beloved West Village institutions: Casa Magazines and the diner, La Bonbonniere.

The United States has long been known for its exemplary superlatives. From the blonde movie star who crashes through Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, to Irish exasperation at “American use of the word ‘winningest’,” to crowds chanting “U.S.A!” at football games, political rallies, or – in the form of heavily-armed mercenaries – in the streets of a destroyed Baghdad, the US is seen and sees itself as exceptional. (Basically, the US is extra.) So – ignominious as the title may be – perhaps it should come as no surprise that this country, my country, has been crowned “the world leader” in COVID-19 caseload. We already lead the rich countries of the world in maternal mortality, mass shootings, and percentage of population uninsured, so it seems fitting enough we should lead in mass death from pandemic as well.

New York City, too, has its exceptionalism. According to the banners mounted – often half in tatters – on lampposts throughout the Financial District, New York is the global capital of just about everything: Real estate, finance, fashion. They stop short of technology – the banners – but I’m sure there’s one for insurance, and yet, even the skeptics among New Yorkers – myself included – mostly, at heart, love the City’s bombast, if not its booster class.

Anyway, save for the Bronx, New York is also a city of islands, but although we may imagine – and sometimes wish – ourselves apart from the country to which the City is both marginal and central, eccentric and essential, our city of islands, archipelagic metropolis, is no more an island unto itself relative to the greater United States than it is to the world beyond that exceptional country’s borders.

On the subject of interconnection, Rob Wallace and coauthors have a dense, sledge hammer of a piece in the May Monthly Review entitled “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital,” the subtitle of which – “New York to China and Back” – hints at just the sort of un-isolation to which I’m speaking. The whole piece is worth reading, and I encourage you to set aside half an hour for it, but in the meantime, I will quote a few teaser passages here, starting with the following:

Capitalism commodifies everything—Mars exploration here, sleep there, lithium lagoons, ventilator repair, even sustainability itself, and on and on, these many permutations are found well beyond the factory and farm. All the ways nearly everyone everywhere is subjected to the market, which during a time like this is increasingly anthropomorphized by politicians, could not be clearer.

I like the idea, especially, of the market “anthropomorphized,” although immediately upon imagining it so, I see it also transmogrified – but to quote further, giving a glimpse into Wallace et al.’s analysis of the linkages between agribusiness and pandemic:

Such [ecological] ideals are more than matters of the utopian. In doing so, we converge on immediate solutions. We protect the forest complexity that keeps deadly pathogens from lining up hosts for a straight shot onto the world’s travel network. We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in virulence and geographic extent. We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time. Big picture, we stop treating nature and community, so full of all we need to survive, as just another competitor to be run off by the market.

As they opine, in short, “agribusiness is at war with public health. And public health is losing.” To start winning, they conclude, questioningly, that:

The way out is nothing short of birthing a world (or perhaps more along the lines of returning back to Earth). It will also help solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. None of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse, mourning our dead, want to go through such an outbreak again. Yes, infectious diseases, for most of human history our greatest source of premature mortality, will remain a threat. But given the bestiary of pathogens now in circulation, the worst spilling over now almost annually, we are likely facing another deadly pandemic in far shorter time than the hundred-year lull since 1918. Can we fundamentally adjust the modes by which we appropriate nature and arrive at more of a truce with these infections?

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo shared these helpful graphs showing that – minus data for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut – there has been, as yet, no downward trend in either new confirmed COVID-19 cases, or in confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the US, and – as the Administration in DC doubles down on denialism, with Axios reporting that the President “and some top aides question [the] accuracy of [the] virus death toll” and that the President is likely “to begin publicly questioning the death toll as it closes in on his predictions for the final death count and damages him politically” (even as ample data shows that these same death tolls drastically underestimate the actual mortality) at the same time that leaked memos leave no doubt that the President and those around him know full well the consequences of their various actions (chief among them, pushing for premature “reopenings” in the absence of any meaningful preparation for the same) and inactions – whistleblower and former head of BARDA, Dr. Rick Bright, declared yesterday in a teleconference:

Time after time, I was pressured to ignore or dismiss expert and scientific recommendations, and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections. In other words, I was pressured to let politics and cronyism drive decisions, over the opinions of the best scientists we have in government.

Damning stuff, at this point, sadly, utterly predictable.

I’ve been of the opinion for some time that New York would come out of this in better shape than many other parts of this country, and – even with the threat of looming municipal receivership/insolvency; the cratering economy; the immense human suffering and trauma this pandemic has brought to our City; and the idiocy/callous indifference of a not-insignificant fraction of the City’s population – I’m still of that opinion. What I did not, necessarily, expect though, was that it would be truly sociopathic policies from DC and many state houses that would ensure such an outcome.

Writing on April 2nd, I overstated the case in guessing “it’s highly likely that the months of April and May will witness New York-style crises […] unfolding simultaneously across much of the United States,” and yet – through the horrifying interventions of our President and a number of governors – I may yet be proven correct.

Coming full circle, New York is islands, but it is not an island, and if the US further melts down (the irony of the usage being, of course, all those predictions from nationalistic pundits back in February that the outbreak in Wuhan would prove to be the Communist Party of China’s Chernobyl – although, perhaps they actually meant Chernobyl, so fully has our capacity for thought been corrupted by media), even with all our resources and relatively sound leadership – at least so far as reopening strategy is concerned – I struggle to see how we, here in New York, will be able to insulate ourselves while still getting on with our lives in any real fashion.

One struggles to find metaphors for what we’re witnessing/experiencing at the national level: It’s like losing the knife game (and in the process a finger), and then, with the blood still gushing and your friends rushing to apply a tourniquet, deciding instead to simply slit your own wrists. It’s like losing Russian roulette, but surviving the bullet, only to load all the pistol’s chambers intent on once again turning the gun upon yourself and pulling the trigger.

It’s idiotic. It’s suicidal. It’s omnicidal.

In short, it’s of a piece with how our country has been run for some time, and there are reasons to question whether the United States will ever properly recover, although, of course, after a fashion, it will. Maybe as fascist. Likely deeply attenuated. At best, chastened, humbled, and perhaps to some extent demonopolized and demilitarized.

We can dream, after all. But right now, I’m mostly afraid, which is a hard way to feel about the present.

Sujatha Gidla – “an M.T.A. conductor and author” whose life epitomizes so much of what is beautiful about this City – has a moving op-ed in the Times today about going back to work after her own harrowing bout with COVID-19, and in the wake of losing a number of beloved colleagues to the disease, but so as not to end with the NYT, which I mostly abhor, I encourage everyone to go listen to another powerful episode of Intercepted, this one on “The Politics of Sexual Misconduct.”

Doozy of a summer we are heading into, to put it lightly, and my strength and care go out to all the people of conscience around this country as I hope yours comes back to me.