It's been a long while since I've blogged, not because of a lack of material nor even a lack of things to say, but it's been a soul crushing three years and counting. In 2016, the people of the United States decided that a conman and liar, who also happened to be a really bad businessman and very possibly enmeshed in myriad deals of dubious legality, was the best option to run the country, over a woman whose resume included being First Lady, US Senator and Secretary of State. It is at this point quite worthless to go back into what drove nearly half the country to choose certain ineptitude over proven skills, but enough people in enough places did so, and so this country will forever have Donald Trump in their history books as the forty fifth president of the republic.
The bigger question is whether time has led to a change in viewpoints, and strangely enough it appears that a very significant, perhaps even an overwhelming majority of his original supporters have not changed their minds at all and have simply doubled down on their support despite a long litany of failed promises and dismal incompetence, always playing out against a backdrop of corruption and pettiness. Through it all, the core supporters of the Republican Party have stood staunchly behind Trump and in doing so, ensured that no GOP representative or senator should feel a sudden twinge of duty to the country they pledged to serve. They stood shoulder to shoulder through the generally pointless trade wars - many of them may believe that the US is winning the trade deals, and it is unlikely that facts would sway them. They've not even blinked at the policies enacted or embraced by this administration that are polar opposites of what was promised by Trump while campaigning. They've been unfazed by insults and worse heaped upon uniformed military officers by a man who claims to be the biggest supporter of those same soldiers, not to mention their glee at the insults directed at all other perceived opponents, which basically means everyone who does not kiss the ring their leader. The principals of democracy have been undermined at every turn, and like Senator Mitch McConnell, they care not whit. But worst of all, they've shrugged at the continuous loss of trained professionals from every department of government.
Sadly, the GOP for the last forty years, starting at least with Reagan, have distrusted people who are experts in their field. This has allowed blowhards and conspiracy theorists to rule supreme in the non- elected circles that exert such massive influence over the party. Such disdain naturally extends to all people of science and this party would rather believe in miracles and magical ideas than embrace reason. So much so that any scientific position that disagrees with their established worldview is suspect, and scientific theories backed by mountains of emperical evidence are treated at best as no better than articles of religious faith - never mind that one does not "believe" in science, one understands it or one doesn't - and far more often, science is held to levels of proof and scrutiny that none of their preferred claims ever do.
Now we are seeing what happens when a modern government purges its ranks of all apolitical experts who refuse to bend to the injudicious and sometimes unethical, even illegal, whims of a president woefully unequal to the challenge of the office he holds and surrounded by a cabinet of spineless yes-men. Scientists and professional administrators have been forced out and not been replaced, their expertise lost forever and dismissed with a wave of the hand by the president. For three years, we dodged disaster mostly by luck, but the COVID-19 pandemic has left us with nowhere to run, with no fig leaf to shelter behind.
It didn't have to be this way. To be sure, few countries have covered themselves in glory through this pandemic. It's true that the World Health Organization has made mistakes and stumbled quite badly, and only time will tell if their early mistakes were coerced by China in part, or just an honest oversight. But the US was supposed to have it's own premier organizations that would either reinforce or critically examine WHO guidance and act as an additional line of defense. The teams that were set up specifically to study pandemics and identify them before they became too big to handle were disbanded or shunted aside; whether they were ignored or incapable of identifying the problem remains a question to answered in the future, but it appears that well before the wave of the epidemic hit American shores, there were warnings from the intelligence community. One has to wonder if a more independent cabinet might have insisting of engaging the president if he was dismissive of the threat, or if a more mentally acute and engaged president might have recognized the magnitude of the threat gathering on the horizon. It is tempting to believe that former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, would have been more aware, not only because they are more intelligent, more engaged in the world beyond their immediate family business and would have certainly listened to their intelligence briefing attentively (not to mention that their briefing would have been more detailed by their choice).
If facts have any meaning the sudden sell-off by several GOP congresspersons who heard classified intelligence briefing of looming stock market weakness must count as one of the more amazing coincidences of modern history. Yet the US government did nothing to prepare for the real problem and even when the virus had begun to spread within the country, the government reacted with nonchalance and bluster, led by the president himself who likened it to the normal flu and insisted that it would vanish in a week or two. Perhaps the real revelation in Trump's statement that the fifteen cases in the US at the time of his infamous statement would soon resolve to zero is that it shows how little he understood of the nature of the problem - he either didn't know or didn't understand that we had not tested people who had been in contact with the infected patients and that there was no way to realistically predict that the cases would immediately reduce. Of course, this president has never cared for reality and his supporters have rewarded his lies with blind belief - from claims that the testing shortage had been solved long before it was (even now we don't have the ability to do contact tracing and have pretty much abandoned that approach) to claims that Russia and Saudi Arabia were about to make a deal to save the oil industry (Russia rather cavalierly denied any talks had even started), Trump has lied casually about any and every issue. But while his lies may comfort his supporters, reality has finally broken past is wall of denial and while he may use the power of his position to petulantly to uncomfortable questions or profess total ignorance about the problems plaguing ever more cities across the country, the reality confront the country can no longer be really ignored. That initial denial of reality was all the way back in late January, when we had a dozen cases or so. The US did not cross a thousand cases till nearly mid-March, six weeks time during which we watched South Korea and Taiwan implement successful counter-programs, while Italy showed us the dangers of poor preparation and inadequate reaction. This was a time when we could have mobilized to to be ready. We would have still faced thousand of cases - the US is too big and too open a country, to factitious to marshal the same way as was done in Taiwan or South Korea. But we could have been prepared a lot better and maybe we would not have gone from one thousand to three hundred thousand in barely three weeks.
This a failure of massive proportions, and Trump is not solely responsible, just as he is not solely responsible for the racism and xenophobia now running rampant in the country. But just as he pulled away the curtain and released those forces into the open, and acted as cheerleader for them, in the same way he presided over a weakening of the government, he tore down the institutions that informed the country and raised himself as the sole voice of government and whether he declares that he is not responsible for any failure (though he is quick to claim credit even when none is due and he is the only one offering himself plaudits), history will judge him far less kindly and will lay the eight thousand deaths (and counting) and the massive wrecking ball taken to our lives and economy squarely upon him. Would that the country had been spared this by seeing the inevitable in 2016 but we can only hope that we emerge from this nightmare in 2020 with a renewed understanding of the importance of science, intelligence, expertise and above all, empathy.
The bigger question is whether time has led to a change in viewpoints, and strangely enough it appears that a very significant, perhaps even an overwhelming majority of his original supporters have not changed their minds at all and have simply doubled down on their support despite a long litany of failed promises and dismal incompetence, always playing out against a backdrop of corruption and pettiness. Through it all, the core supporters of the Republican Party have stood staunchly behind Trump and in doing so, ensured that no GOP representative or senator should feel a sudden twinge of duty to the country they pledged to serve. They stood shoulder to shoulder through the generally pointless trade wars - many of them may believe that the US is winning the trade deals, and it is unlikely that facts would sway them. They've not even blinked at the policies enacted or embraced by this administration that are polar opposites of what was promised by Trump while campaigning. They've been unfazed by insults and worse heaped upon uniformed military officers by a man who claims to be the biggest supporter of those same soldiers, not to mention their glee at the insults directed at all other perceived opponents, which basically means everyone who does not kiss the ring their leader. The principals of democracy have been undermined at every turn, and like Senator Mitch McConnell, they care not whit. But worst of all, they've shrugged at the continuous loss of trained professionals from every department of government.
Sadly, the GOP for the last forty years, starting at least with Reagan, have distrusted people who are experts in their field. This has allowed blowhards and conspiracy theorists to rule supreme in the non- elected circles that exert such massive influence over the party. Such disdain naturally extends to all people of science and this party would rather believe in miracles and magical ideas than embrace reason. So much so that any scientific position that disagrees with their established worldview is suspect, and scientific theories backed by mountains of emperical evidence are treated at best as no better than articles of religious faith - never mind that one does not "believe" in science, one understands it or one doesn't - and far more often, science is held to levels of proof and scrutiny that none of their preferred claims ever do.
Now we are seeing what happens when a modern government purges its ranks of all apolitical experts who refuse to bend to the injudicious and sometimes unethical, even illegal, whims of a president woefully unequal to the challenge of the office he holds and surrounded by a cabinet of spineless yes-men. Scientists and professional administrators have been forced out and not been replaced, their expertise lost forever and dismissed with a wave of the hand by the president. For three years, we dodged disaster mostly by luck, but the COVID-19 pandemic has left us with nowhere to run, with no fig leaf to shelter behind.
It didn't have to be this way. To be sure, few countries have covered themselves in glory through this pandemic. It's true that the World Health Organization has made mistakes and stumbled quite badly, and only time will tell if their early mistakes were coerced by China in part, or just an honest oversight. But the US was supposed to have it's own premier organizations that would either reinforce or critically examine WHO guidance and act as an additional line of defense. The teams that were set up specifically to study pandemics and identify them before they became too big to handle were disbanded or shunted aside; whether they were ignored or incapable of identifying the problem remains a question to answered in the future, but it appears that well before the wave of the epidemic hit American shores, there were warnings from the intelligence community. One has to wonder if a more independent cabinet might have insisting of engaging the president if he was dismissive of the threat, or if a more mentally acute and engaged president might have recognized the magnitude of the threat gathering on the horizon. It is tempting to believe that former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, would have been more aware, not only because they are more intelligent, more engaged in the world beyond their immediate family business and would have certainly listened to their intelligence briefing attentively (not to mention that their briefing would have been more detailed by their choice).
If facts have any meaning the sudden sell-off by several GOP congresspersons who heard classified intelligence briefing of looming stock market weakness must count as one of the more amazing coincidences of modern history. Yet the US government did nothing to prepare for the real problem and even when the virus had begun to spread within the country, the government reacted with nonchalance and bluster, led by the president himself who likened it to the normal flu and insisted that it would vanish in a week or two. Perhaps the real revelation in Trump's statement that the fifteen cases in the US at the time of his infamous statement would soon resolve to zero is that it shows how little he understood of the nature of the problem - he either didn't know or didn't understand that we had not tested people who had been in contact with the infected patients and that there was no way to realistically predict that the cases would immediately reduce. Of course, this president has never cared for reality and his supporters have rewarded his lies with blind belief - from claims that the testing shortage had been solved long before it was (even now we don't have the ability to do contact tracing and have pretty much abandoned that approach) to claims that Russia and Saudi Arabia were about to make a deal to save the oil industry (Russia rather cavalierly denied any talks had even started), Trump has lied casually about any and every issue. But while his lies may comfort his supporters, reality has finally broken past is wall of denial and while he may use the power of his position to petulantly to uncomfortable questions or profess total ignorance about the problems plaguing ever more cities across the country, the reality confront the country can no longer be really ignored. That initial denial of reality was all the way back in late January, when we had a dozen cases or so. The US did not cross a thousand cases till nearly mid-March, six weeks time during which we watched South Korea and Taiwan implement successful counter-programs, while Italy showed us the dangers of poor preparation and inadequate reaction. This was a time when we could have mobilized to to be ready. We would have still faced thousand of cases - the US is too big and too open a country, to factitious to marshal the same way as was done in Taiwan or South Korea. But we could have been prepared a lot better and maybe we would not have gone from one thousand to three hundred thousand in barely three weeks.
This a failure of massive proportions, and Trump is not solely responsible, just as he is not solely responsible for the racism and xenophobia now running rampant in the country. But just as he pulled away the curtain and released those forces into the open, and acted as cheerleader for them, in the same way he presided over a weakening of the government, he tore down the institutions that informed the country and raised himself as the sole voice of government and whether he declares that he is not responsible for any failure (though he is quick to claim credit even when none is due and he is the only one offering himself plaudits), history will judge him far less kindly and will lay the eight thousand deaths (and counting) and the massive wrecking ball taken to our lives and economy squarely upon him. Would that the country had been spared this by seeing the inevitable in 2016 but we can only hope that we emerge from this nightmare in 2020 with a renewed understanding of the importance of science, intelligence, expertise and above all, empathy.
