The Virus Will Win

The Virus Will Win (The Atlantic)
Image: Timothy Mulcare
[ed. Of course it will. Human nature. See also: Coronavirus 2nd Wave? Nope, The U.S. Is Still Stuck In The 1st One (NPR).]

Cops

In 1989, a new show came on TV that felt like nothing that had come before it. For 30 minutes, viewers got to ride along with real police officers and watch – in verité style – as they broke up drunken fistfights, chased speeding motorcycles across highways, and went undercover for drug busts. It was thrilling. It was visceral. And it was a hit. (...)

This week, after more than 1,000 episodes on air and just a day after its 33rd season was scheduled to premiere, Cops was cancelled by the Paramount network. It happened amid protests across the world responding to racist and violent policing in America, and reflects the work of many people, including concerted efforts by civil rights group Color of Change. While cancelling Cops is barely a starting point when it comes to creating a more fair and equitable criminal justice system, this small step is more meaningful than you might think.

I know this because I spent 18 months investigating the show, as part of a six-part documentary podcast that came out last year called Running From Cops, hosted by Dan Taberski. We learned that Cops (and other reality policing shows like it) has a huge impact on how Americans view policing, and how police officers view themselves. Just ask any of the dozens of officers on the show who profess that watching Cops is what made them want to become a cop in the first place.

We watched and analyzed 846 episodes of the show, collecting over 68,000 data points. We catalogued the types of crimes (violent, narcotics, sex work, traffic stops, chases, etc); whether the segment ended in arrest; whether the suspect was on drugs or alcohol at the time; and the race and gender of all officers, suspects and victims. We then compared this data to data available from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

What we discovered was that, contrary to early press reactions, the world portrayed on Cops is not like the real world. There are about four times more violent crimes in Cops than in reality. And three times more drug arrests. And about 10 times more arrests for sex work. The cops on the show are also, statistically speaking, extremely good at their jobs. Segments on the show end in arrest 84.4% of the time. (That number reflects a change over time, from 61% back in 1990 to 95% in the most recent season.) In Cops world, law enforcement officers are so effective, it’s basically a given that a crime will end in an arrest.

The tactics the show’s producers use to get this footage are also questionable at best, and disturbing at worst. We were told that they never air a segment without a signed consent form from the suspect in question. In the course of our reporting, we spoke to 11 suspects who had appeared on the show. All but one said that they had not given their consent, or they were too inebriated at the time to legally give consent. Others told us they were confused by the relationship between the show’s producers and the law enforcement agents with whom they were working side-by-side. We even found a case in Gwinnett county, Georgia, where a young woman was denied a bail bond until she signed the form giving Cops permission to air her arrest for possession of cocaine. Subsequent testing showed that the substance was not cocaine at all, though this was never aired on the show. Instead, the producers aired her arrest, and continued to air it in reruns.

Perhaps the most insidious takeaway we had from watching hundreds of hours of the show was not quantitative, but qualitative. Over and over, Cops shows officers acting in violent, abusive, racist and potentially unconstitutional ways. This can include anything from repeatedly tasing suspects who are in custody, to prying open a suspect’s mouth with a flashlight in search of drugs. Rather than critiquing this sort of behavior, or even presenting it neutrally, Cops portrays it as good policing.

The police departments featured on the show have no problem with this portrayal. In fact, in exchange for access, the producers would give every department they work with “final cut” – the right to edit out any actions caught on camera that might portray them in a bad light. Those departments chose to leave all of those incidents in.

Until a few days ago, Cops was on TV almost constantly. In a single week, it could air as many as 69 times in syndication. It also led to Live PD, which we investigated for Running From Cops as well. In 2016, this new reality policing show arrived and became even more popular than the show that inspired it. It was the live version of Cops, cutting back and forth between active crime scenes being filmed across the country as they happen, while a team of law enforcement vets act as commentators in the show’s New York studio. Picture the NFL’s Red Zone, but with police. Unsurprisingly, it contained many of the same ethical problems as Cops, many of which were exacerbated by the fact that it was broadcast live. In our reporting, we heard from multiple people that police officers would show up to their homes at all hours of the day and night, production crew in tow, hoping to catch them doing something illegal and camera-worthy. LivePD, which aired on A&E, quickly became the most popular cable program in its time slot. It ran in long, multi-day marathon blocks, taking up a significant portion of the network’s weekly schedule. There were six spinoffs. (...)

Does the violence we’ve seen committed by police officers over the last two weeks – and the protests in the face of that violence – have any connection to these show’s long run? I can’t say for sure. Or rather, I can’t say how much. I can say that for 31 years Cops and more recently Live PD depicted a world full of violence and crime, in which the bad and often demonstrably illegal behavior of the cops on camera was held up as good policing. The shows helped to normalize injustice. And we know that in the real world, that type of injustice is disproportionately inflicted upon black people. We also know that dozens of officers who appear in the later seasons of the show profess that watching Cops was the reason they themselves became cops.

This show shaped them, and it has shaped the way millions of Americans, for more than three decades, perceived the supposed “reality” of policing.

by Henry Molofsky, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. I've never seen a single episode (not being a fan of cops or crime shows), but my god...it's been on since 1989?]

On the Future, Americans Can Agree: It Doesn’t Look Good

On the Future, Americans Can Agree: It Doesn’t Look Good (NY Times)

[ed. Beyond depressing. Enjoy.] Here are a couple of comments:

I'm still an optimist. Things are not fabulous now but I think our future holds great promise. Not tomorrow or anytime soon but, in a few years, I believe, we will begin to see significant change. I am greatly encouraged by the strength and size of the protest that's taking place. The involvement of multiple generations in calling for fundamental societal change and the likelihood that they will vote in November could be the first indication of real and hopefully sustained progress toward the ideal set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 

There will be institutional resistance. It has happened before, it is happening now and it will continue grow to meet the ground swell for societal justice of all forms.

We older folks who took part in the protests of the 1960's had hoped that the changes that occurred due to all our organizing and protestations would lead to continued progress. This was naïve. I don't think that most of us understood or perhaps even saw the sophistication that the institutional establishment could muster to resist changes to the way of life in which they had become so comfortable. 

Many of us got so distracted by and caught up in our own little day to day struggles battling for a place for ourselves that we didn't realize that the forces we were battling were man made with the intention of keeping us compliant.

~Byron, CT

Historians and many who have studied the Trump phenomenon are pretty unanimous in their conclusion in that he is just not a quirk of fate, but actually forty years in the making when Ronald Reagan decided in the early 1980's that government was an impediment rather than an asset to the country and proceeded to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations which started the ball rolling on the path to the worst inequality in over a 100 yrs. Of course during this period those that suffered the worst were working people consisting of all races including minorities and immigrants and every time a crisis of confidence occurred the "corporate masters' stated they were going to do something about it, yet, at the same time were spending tens of millions of dollars lobbying government against minimum wage increases, improved healthcare for all citizens and more affordable education. 

All along Bernie Sanders has stated that the system was "rigged" in favor of those at the top and in order to start seriously dealing with theses issues, significant structural changes had to occur in the system for it to happen. Of course, the establishment and MSM did not want to hear about any of it and here we are. 

My concern is, as happened in 2016 and now, by dismissing Sanders again, America has missed its final opportunity to really deal with the issues and have a President, unencumbered by lobbyists pressure, who was actually focused on doing something about it.

~Deus, Toronto

Tamotsu Onaga — Iso (Rocky Shore), 1960s

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Peter Uka - Refill, 2019
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What Will it Take to Save the Airlines?

Coronavirus has created the greatest challenge the airline industry has ever faced. For the large legacy carriers serving intercontinental markets, the threat is comparable to the meteor that caused massive climate change and drove dinosaurs into extinction. While the industry was clearly viable prior to coronavirus, it faced a number of serious competitive and financial issues that will impede efforts to deal with the impact of the coronavirus meteor.

The industry requires major, painful restructuring. Baring staggering increases in taxpayer subsidies (beyond the $60 billion already pledged in the US), it is unclear how most (perhaps any) of these carriers survive under current ownership in anything like their current form. None of the changes needed to ensure the long-term efficiency and competitiveness of the airline industry are even being discussed at this point, and the processes needed to manage the needed restructuring do not currently exist.

The Financial Devastation Directly Caused by Coronavirus

Airline economics depend critically on extremely high capacity utilization. Small changes have huge profit leverage. US airlines filled 85% of their seats in 2019 (up from 58% when the industry was deregulated and 70% 20 years ago). Once an airline has committed to the costs of operating a given schedule, almost all of the lost revenue from a shortfall of passengers directly reduces the bottom line.

Coronavirus-driven traffic losses have been vastly larger than anyone could have ever imagined. Traffic through TSA checkpoints in US airports was down 96% versus the year before in mid April and 88% in mid-May. While the industry had faced demand shocks in the past (9/11 in the US, various wars, the original SARS outbreak in Asia), none were global in scope, and none were seen as driving permanent declines in demand. Never before has flying on an airplane required accepting serious medical risk. In a recent poll only 23% of US travelers thought flying on an airplane was safe. [FN1]

While no one knows what will happen, this analysis assumes that there is no widely available vaccine and no reliable way to prove individual immunity during 2020. Perhaps infection rates decline gradually and economic activity gradually increases. Perhaps there are new outbreaks and efforts to reopen the economy are put on hold. Perhaps economic activity declines seriously as companies realize that recent losses are unsustainable, and major new waves of layoffs and bankruptcies occur. But the idea of a rapid, “V-shaped” recovery to the January status quo seems wildly improbable.

The revenue losses have been even worse than the drop in passenger counts. Airline profits depend heavily on business travelers paying higher fares. But the gradual increase in domestic traffic appears to be almost exclusively leisure demand, such as pent up desire to visit family members. Corporate travel remains close to zero, [FN2] and the massive short-term substitution of videoconferencing may reduce business travel for years to come.

The profitability of the large US legacy carriers (Delta, United, American) also depends heavily on intercontinental traffic, which has fallen even further than domestic traffic. Cross-border travel bans have been key to slowing the spread of the virus, and the point where the mass market is no longer concerned with the health risks is somewhere in the distant future.

Profitability requires very tightly aligning an airlines’ cost structure with its revenue base. Airlines lock-in to most of their costs (e.g. fleet, airport facilities, IT infrastructure, corporate debt) on lower-cost long-term arrangements because historically they have had very high certainty about future demand. Contracts with labor and suppliers are similarly inflexible, with major penalties if they are suddenly terminated.

In the short-term (3-9 months) airlines might be able to readily shed 10-20% of their costs. Over two years, cost reductions of 30-40% might be possible, depending on the timing of contracts. But revenue can vanish overnight, while cost efficiency plummets and cost per passenger skyrockets. The much smaller demand shocks of the past (the post-dotcom and 2008 financial collapses, fuel prices suddenly exceeding $100/bbl) were highly traumatic, leading to years of major losses. The cost per passenger impact of the coronavirus “meteor striking Earth” magnitude shock is far worse, and (unlike previous crises) there is major risk that it may be many years before demand fully recovers. (...)

This industry financial crisis extends across the entire airline ecosystem. Airports, distribution providers (Expedia, Booking.com, Sabre, etc) and service contractors have all had revenues largely disappear, without having comparable access to multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies. Those contractors employ staff paid much less than airline employees. Since most have no access to payroll protection subsidies. they have implemented major layoffs. Current obligations to aircraft/engine manufacturers and lessors remain in place but are not sustainable.

by Hubert Horan, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. See also: The Chilling Things Delta Said about the Airline Business, the 90% Collapse in Q2 Revenues, and Why Some Demand Destruction May Be “Permanent” (Wolf Street).]

via:

Qualified Immunity Explained

The death of George Floyd put police violence and accountability in the national spotlight once again. One issue is “qualified immunity,” a legal doctrine developed by the Supreme Court that’s employed by law enforcement to stop civil suits alleging violations of federal law. Since prosecutors have historically been hesitant to bring criminal charges against police officers, the protection from civil suits that qualified immunity confers has left many victims and their families with no means of legal redress.

1. What’s the point of qualified immunity?

It was meant to shield government officials from civil lawsuits that could hobble them in performing their duties. A federal law known as Section 1983, enacted after the Civil War, gave people the right to sue state officials for violating their rights. But in a 1967 decision arising from the arrest of clergy members who staged a sit-in at a segregated bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi, the Supreme Court said the officers involved might be immune from a false-arrest suit if they had acted in “good faith,” or with the intention of following the law. The justices sent the case back to the lower court to make that determination. Qualified immunity was off on its long, winding road to the present, with opponents calling for it to be narrowed or abolished.

2. How does qualified immunity work?

The doctrine isn’t just a shield against liability -- it protects police and other officials from having to go to trial in the first place. Since 1967, the Supreme Court has gone on to say that plaintiffs can’t advance their claims unless they show that officials violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” In practice, they have to find a prior case similar enough to theirs that the officials should have known their conduct was illegal. The high court has even held that trial courts can skip over the question of whether officials violated the law and instead simply find that no previous decision shows that they did.

3. Is it difficult to find such a prior case?

Very. Because the details of the past case often don’t quite match those of the case at hand, officials have gained immunity from allegations that they provided inadequate medical care, stole valuable property during a search or violated a person’s First Amendment rights. One petition to the Supreme Court that bills itself as an “archetypal example” of the doctrine’s excesses involves a plaintiff who had a police dog set on him and was bitten while sitting on the ground with his hands up. The police won immunity because, in the prior case of unlawful police action, the plaintiff had been lying down. Those calling for reform say qualified immunity makes a case against the police almost impossible to pursue.

4. What about in cases involving shootings?

The high court is also considering whether to review a Texas ruling denying qualified immunity to police officers alleged to have shot a 17-year-old without warning and then lied about it.

5. Is qualified immunity ever denied?

Sometimes. In 2017, a federal court in California denied immunity to a sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a 13-year-old boy and said he mistook a toy gun for an AK-47 assault weapon. The Supreme Court declined to review the case.

by Jordan Rubin, Kimberly Robinson, and Porter Wells, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: David Ryder/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Why police can violate your constitutional rights and suffer no consequences in court (Vox).]

Campaign Zero

The advocacy group Campaign Zero has been pushing a series of proposals to police departments that it says can be implemented at little or no cost and will drive down police violence by 72 percent.

But the campaign has been criticized by other activists who say its proposals are not enough and that it’s distracting from more radical reforms. And now Campaign Zero’s founders are apologizing, saying that they acknowledge their “#8cantwait” reform package has “detracted” from the larger conversation about police violence.

“Unfortunately, the rollout of the campaign and the messaging around it were flawed and detracted from the broader, transformative conversation happening at this moment,” wrote Campaign Zero co-founder Samuel Sinyangwe in a statement posted to Twitter Tuesday evening.

“The initiative was rushed, and despite calls from myself and [co-founder] Brittany Packnett Cunningham to slow things down, it went out anyway. It was built, framed, released and managed through processes and by people that I have not worked with before and that did not reflect the way I have done this work to date."

And in a statement posted to Medium on Tuesday, Cunningham said that she left the group last week.

“Fair questions have now been raised about the analysis underlying the #8cantwait initiative,” wrote Cunningham.

“I have listened to the frustrations regarding the rollout generally and the questions raised about the data analysis specifically. My experience is not in data science and these concerns were new to me — but given what I have now become aware of, I chose to resign and to focus on other important work, for and with our most marginalized communities.”

A similar statement posted was to the group’s website: “While we are proud of the impact we were able to make, we at Campaign Zero acknowledge that, even with the best of intentions, the #8CANTWAIT campaign unintentionally detracted from efforts of fellow organizers invested in paradigmatic shifts that are newly possible in this moment. For this we apologize wholeheartedly, and without reservation.”

Campaign Zero had said the #8cantwait proposals are based on science, but the data behind them has drawn criticism.

Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor at Texas A&M University and director of its Justice Tech Lab, wrote, “#8cantwait is not evidence-based. Their recs might be good steps, but please don’t pretend that the ‘data proves’ they work. We do not know if they work yet. Brilliant marketing strategy though, I’ll give them that.”

by Christopher Wilson, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
[ed. Campaign Zero is an apt name for people using this moment as a marketing experiment.]

Woodrow White
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[ed. See also: Police Attacks on Protesters are Rooted in a Violent Ideology of Reactionary Grievance (The Intercept).]

Police abuse of minority communities in the United States is a story stretching back decades and centuries. The militarization of American policing is a much more recent phenomenon though the two phenomena have overlapped and compounded each other. Much of this debate over militarization has focused on the Pentagon’s 1033 Program which charges the Secretary of Defense with donating surplus military hardware to the nation’s thousands of police departments. (The photo above is of an MRAP, a vehicle designed to withstand IEDs and guerrilla ambushes. Numerous US police departments have them.) But there is another dimension of the story that has only partly made its way into the national conversation about policing and violence. The United States has been in a constant state of war since the end of 2001 and in many ways since the Gulf Crisis of 1990. Through numerous channels this has led to a broad militarization of life in the United States. Policing and military hardware is only the most obvious manifestation.

~ Josh Marshall via TPM (paywalled)

Minnesota Cops Slash Tires at Protest

After long nights of tear gas and rubber bullets, some protesters, news crews, and medics in Minneapolis last weekend found themselves stranded: The tires of their cars had been slashed.

In a city upended by protests about police brutality after the death of George Floyd, many assumed protesters were to blame. But videos reveal a different culprit: the police.

In the videos, officers puncture tires in a K-Mart parking lot on May 30 and a highway overpass on May 31. Both areas briefly turned into police staging grounds near protest hot spots. (...)

The gray car in the video above was the rental car of Luke Mogelson, a New Yorker writer who typically covers war zones and is now stationed in Minneapolis to write about the protests. As the protest on Sunday evening turned hairy, with law enforcement tear-gassing peaceful groups soon after curfew, Mogelson went to check on his car, showing his press pass to officers along the way. (Media were exempt from the curfew.) One officer took a picture of his press pass and said he would “radio it up the chain so everyone knew that car belonged to the press,” said Mogelson. When he came back later that evening to retrieve his car, officers informed him that the tires were punctured. “They were laughing,” Mogelson recalled. “They had grins on their faces.”

Update, 6/8/20: The Star Tribune has identified the officers puncturing tires as state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office. The officers strategically deflated the tires to “stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement,” said Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bruce Gordon. The troopers reportedly targeted cars that “contained items used to cause harm during violent protests” such as rocks and concrete. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Lt. Andy Knotz said deputies were following directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center.

by Julia Lurie, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: YouTube
[ed. See also: Coronavirus fuels black America’s sense of injustice (FT).]

It’s Time to Archive the Internet Archive

Five of the world's largest publishers sued the Internet Archive, claiming its open-access digital library is a mass infringement on their copyright. The move puts the internet’s most important archive in danger, and has at least got some data hoarders talking about archiving the Internet Archive, and what that would even look like.

Last week, Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Penguin Random House LLC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive and five ‘Doe’ defendants, claiming that the Internet Archive is a piracy site.

In March, the Internet Archive set up a new service for people displaced from library and educational access due to COVID-19, called the "National Emergency Library." Nearly 1.4 million books are available in full for anyone to download and read, without a waitlist, until the end of June or the end of the coronavirus pandemic crisis in the US, according to an announcement on their site.

While damages haven't been set, the publishers could claim up to $150,000 in statutory damages per infringement, for each of the 1.4 million copyright works in the emergency library. They're also demanding a preliminary and permanent injunction of the Internet Archive, and anyone involved with it, from reproducing and distributing more works, and that all current copyrighted copies on the site be destroyed—effectively shutting down the entire library. (...)

The move puts one of the internet’s largest repositories of knowledge in peril. Over on the DataHoarder subreddit, threads have been started about what it would take to archive the archive, which holds dozens of petabytes of data and is constantly growing (there have been attempts to simply understand the sheer amount of data the archive holds). Academics have been saying for years that the Internet Archive must be made more resilient by creating backups of the backups and storing them in other locations. When Donald Trump was elected president, the Internet Archive announced it was making a backup in Canada. Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina once had a backup of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but it has not been updated in years.

by Samantha Cole and Jason Koebler, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
[ed. For background, see also: You Can Now Access 1.4 Million Books for Free Thanks to the Internet Archive (Motherboard).]

Bruce Kaphan

'A reconsideration of the white male cowboy': the rise of ambient country (The Guardian)

Whiplash: The Coronavirus Narrative Changes Overnight

When I reflect back on the extraordinary year of 2020 – from, I hope, some safer, saner vantage – one of the two defining images in my mind will be the surreal figure of the Grim Reaper stalking the blazing Florida shoreline, scythe in hand, warning the sunbathing masses of imminent death and granting interviews to reporters. The other will be a prostrate George Floyd, whose excruciating Memorial Day execution sparked a global protest movement against racism and police violence.

Less than two weeks after Floyd’s killing, the American death toll from the novel coronavirus has surpassed 100,000. Rates of infection, domestically and worldwide, are rising. But one of the few things it seems possible to say without qualification is that the country has indeed reopened. For 13 days straight, in cities across the nation, tens of thousands of men and women have massed in tight-knit proximity, with and without personal protective equipment, often clashing with armed forces, chanting, singing and inevitably increasing the chances of the spread of contagion.

Scenes of outright pandemonium unfold daily. Anyone claiming to have a precise understanding of what is happening, and what the likely risks and consequences may be, should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges’s Aleph. Yet we know very little about what it is we are watching. (...)

After two and a half months of death, confinement, and unemployment figures dwarfing even the Great Depression, we have now entered the stage of competing urgencies where there are zero perfect options. Police brutality is a different if metaphorical epidemic in an America slouching toward authoritarianism. Catalyzed by the spectacle of Floyd’s reprehensible death, it is clear that the emergency in Minneapolis passes my own and many people’s threshold for justifying the risk of contagion. (...)

This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, taking to social media to castigate others for insufficient social distancing or neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe they could maintain some semblance of a normal life during coronavirus. At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.

As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?

“The risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism,” NPR suddenly tells us, citing a letter signed by dozens of American public health and disease experts. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19,” the letter said. One epidemiologist has gone even further, arguing that the public health risks of not protesting for an end to systemic racism “greatly exceed the harms of the virus”.

The climate-change-denying right is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. Yet the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.

by Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Devon Ravine/AP

Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times

Every morning that I’m not hungover, I wake up around 8am, because that is when my two cats start howling for breakfast. I feed them, make coffee, and walk barefoot and unwashed (mug in hand) through my apartment building’s common hallway to the front door, where I pick up my New York Times and my Financial Times.

I then walk back to my apartment, look at the front page of the New York Times for approximately five to eight seconds, and throw the whole thing in the garbage with contempt. I drink my coffee and proceed to read the entirety of the Financial Times, excluding the particularly dense bits of the Companies & Markets section. If it’s the weekend edition, I even read most of House & Home, whose editors seem to have an incredibly generous definition of “real estate,” making room for topics like homelessness and wildlife conservation. I take care to read the kidding-not-kidding op-eds from wealthy people demanding that children be banned from restaurants and art museums.

As a “big S” Socialist, my reading habits often surprise liberals. I’m a writer, though my biggest audience comes from the listenership of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist comedy podcast. This makes me something of a curiosity among my colleagues at traditional media institutions—staffed largely by liberals—so I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.

Compared to the Times, the reporting is usually more in-depth; the reporters generally have more expertise; the coverage is more comprehensive both geographically and substantively; even the op-eds are better (likely because they are far fewer, and they’re not used to pad the paper with “content”—confessionals, puff pieces, listicles—rather than reporting). Most refreshing, the FT does not lose itself in the mire of myopic American culture wars, which very rarely breach the surface of material politics and/or economics. When it does run soft news, it’s higher quality (Rana Foroohar’s “Lunch with the FT” with Rebecca Solnit, for example, transcends the genre of fawning celebrity profile into an understated but scathing critique).

Conversely, the New York Times is the flagship publication for liberal triumphalism; it holds the line of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”—the notion that all serious ideological conflict crashed to a halt with the suspension of the Cold War, with very little at stake in future political disputes beyond regional trade accords and fine-tuning of currency regimes.

Recently, however, Fukuyamism has taken a serious blow. The past presidential election was a shock to nearly everyone whose job it was to predict its outcome, and both the Bernie and Trump upsets prove that we have not, as Fukuyama predicted, reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” The idea of the “End of History” lost credibility with anyone paying attention to skyrocketing wealth inequality and political unrest, and it’s pretty clear that the world remains a raging battle between the haves and have-nots. Karl Marx knew it, your average Detroit autoworker certainly knows it, and Edward Luce of FT knows it. Even Fukuyama himself acknowledges the instability of the American liberal political trajectory, proclaiming, “Socialism ought to come back.” David Brooks, on the other hand. . .

Adding insult to injury, the Gray Lady is suddenly the object of constant scorn from the nation’s highest office. Having spent eight years in the comfortable favor of Barack Obama, a position so secure that they faced zero consequences for such glaring moral and journalistic failings as the endorsement of the Iraq War, the “Failing New York Times” and its fellows now thrash in fury at their sudden irrelevance to these crude new political elites. The Times is unable to conceive of a world in which it was so very wrong, and unable to cope with a political administration that speaks of it with utter contempt. Not only has it lost the king’s ear, it is finding itself entirely incapable of appealing to the peasants; the cynical and transparent hit pieces on Bernie Sanders betray the paper’s general contempt for mass politics.

Were the American media machine accountable to the public, a more self-reflective, penitent assembly of institutions, or at least capable of shame, the Times might have spent a little effort reconsidering its “house style” ideology. And yet it stays the course. But why?

There are psychological factors at play: denial, certainly, which we see in the constant reassurance of the Times’s #resistance readership that this was all a big mistake and that Daddy is coming to save them any day now. But as a good Marxist, I must point out that ideology and its attendant publishing philosophies are largely the product of market forces. Public broadcasting institutions like the BBC can remain dull and informative. FT’s reportage serves a readership that gambles on world events. The New York Times compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated. Just look at the “Trump Bump,” the 66 percent increase in profits the paper enjoyed from exhausting every possible iteration of commentary, speculation, or tirade about The Donald.

Looking further back, the decline of newspaper publishing as an industry has left much of “flyover country” nearly totally ignored by the coastal elites (yes, it’s a fair descriptor) for years now. Smaller papers have far smaller budgets for travel and long-term investigative reporting, and many local papers have been gutted or scrapped for parts entirely. Local coverage has its own weaknesses, of course, and national news is essential to avoid the parochial politics of a highly provincial federalist United States, but if we still had good local papers, might the Times have seen more of the misery and disaffection that paved the way for Donald Trump? Might serious local coverage of the immiserating results of NAFTA and welfare reform—both enacted by Bill Clinton—have made it obvious that Hillary would be less than inspiring for the majority of working-class Americans?

The slight increase in news employment at “digital native” outlets (about 6,000 jobs between 2008 and 2017) has not only failed to replace the lost jobs at news desks, it has also produced less substantive writing. With the rise of internet “content,” major news outlets have now expanded their op-ed and opinion sections into a stupefying ne plus ultra of BuzzFeed-style clickbait. The result is a vast pool of pseudopolitical content, wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle. (Not only is the Times bloated with opinion pieces and op-eds, you will notice they are positioned very prominently, at the very top of the website. Meanwhile, FT sticks them at the bottom.)

Just for example, last spring I noticed not one but two pieces in the Times dedicated to a Twitter tempest in a teapot about whether it was “cultural appropriation” for a white Utah high school student to wear a cheongsam, a dress of Chinese origin, to prom. This is not journalism, cultural commentary, or even, really, a trend piece—it’s an attempt to appear relevant. (But I suppose if you want your small town to get some ink in the Times, you should do something that would infuriate Sarah Lawrence students.) In an effort to survive the internet age, the Times has stooped to tracking tweets, chasing the sound and fury of never-ending online spectacles that rarely mean anything to anyone, save for an online microculture dedicated to “the discourse.”

Some fluff could almost be confused for reportage, such as the bizarre amount of space the paper of record devoted to Alan Dershowitz’s alleged travails as a social pariah on Martha’s Vineyard for his support of Trump, but if I wanted gossip I’d read the society pages. The paper’s collective decision to dedicate space—even in the infinite arena of Web content—and resources to such utterly meaningless and unnewsworthy trivialities indicates an editorial commitment not to journalism, but to educated-middle-class dinner party talking points.

The greatest factor in the decline of liberal journalism, however, is the decline of the Left itself. In the absence of labor desks at local papers and a vibrant trade union movement to fund working-class publications, the labor beat goes largely unreported, or merely reported within the confines of an egregiously bourgeois myopia. Take #MeToo, a “movement” to combat the scourge of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. The media obsessively focused on wealthy movie stars and high-profile women in (you guessed it) the media. If readers had zero knowledge of the US and they picked up the Times, they might assume these rich, famous women are the most vulnerable women in the world, and not, as it is, the exact opposite.

by Amber A’Lee Frost, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more:
Image: Sara Wong

Mask Fashion

The Fabric Face Masks Our Editors and Writers Are Wearing (The Strategist)

Image: Retailers

[ed. Surreal... just surreal.]

How We Drink Now

In my apartment in Brooklyn is a blue-and-white china vase. It once held a geranium but is now a receptacle for my wine corks, which overflow onto the lightly worn oak of my kitchen table. I assume it is still there, anyway, the corks lying scattered as they fell, as I haven’t been in that apartment since the beginning of February. For four months, I’ve been on a long and unanticipated hiatus at my mother’s home in Maryland. I came here to help her through cancer treatments, a bag of laundry in the car, anticipating months of back and forth during her long battle. But she was hospitalized three days after I arrived and I had to go on immediate leave from work. The laundry was done and packed in my trunk, where it has been ever since; the pancreatic cancer claimed her life in six short and vicious weeks. When we buried her on March 10th, the country was beginning to shutter. So I stayed, confined to and quarantining in my childhood home, forced to use my time to go through her things, our things, my family’s things, room by room, with many tears. In some ways it’s been helpful, confronting all that grief head-on. In others, it is a hell I can’t escape. (...)

Martinis are really the only cocktail I drink. I am not a cocktail person, and I never make them at home. A martini is a mood—a treat at a bar, ordered on specific nights at specific New York institutions with specific friends; Minetta Tavern, to start the annual holiday dinner with my father; Long Island Bar, with the double-fried fries; Bobby Vans, where they are icy and wildly overpriced and my best friend and I had to kick them back fast once to run away from a stout and over-served Wall Street man.

But I can’t go to any of those places. None of us can. Our bar rituals are part of the Before Time, which for me looks even more starkly different than now—in the Before Time, I had a mother. I’m not the only one who has lost someone; as of writing this, nearly 100,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19. For all of us, the life after this, whenever it comes, will always contain that loss, even as we gain back our rituals.

There is so much we can’t control. The martini, I realized, was something I could. Now, once or twice a week, I get out the shaker and ice, the dwindling handle of Bombay, the comically large and cheap steakhouse-style martini glass I ordered just for this purpose, the olives and the bottled brine—a lifesaver when you’ve already drained your olive jars of their liquid. I dribble in the vermouth and swirl it around the glass, measure the gin and olive juice (2:1), and stir the long cocktail spoon with my middle and ring finger until I feel the metal grow cold. I pour it in a gold-green stream over the olives waiting in the crook of the glass’s V and watch it fog, then take a quick sip to be sure I’ve done it right. I am somehow always surprised that I have; I didn’t mean to acquire this skill.

I can make this martini thanks to the cocktail stylings of my other best friend, Sarah. (Her words and others will follow mine below.) Sarah is a pro home bartender if there ever was one, and often the person I meet to share a martini with in Williamsburg, where I live and she works. Now, we cheers over Zoom, her glass a pretty coupe with a toothpick of olives resting just so on the rim. I’m impatient and will fish out my olives before I’m finished my drink as she neatly pulls hers off with her teeth and we talk about all the things we would talk about in person: Writing, not writing, books, Twitter, partners and exes, small and petty dramas. My mother. Our late-afternoon conversations see more sunlight these days, outside of our usual dark-ish watering hole, and the scarred wood my glass finds is not a bar but the blonde planks of the dependable old kitchen table. We remember to hydrate from our Swell bottles instead of free pints of that sweet New York water, and run through every topic imaginable and more, trying to find a reason to have another round. We don’t want to go home, to leave the bar, to shut the screen and find ourselves back in exactly the same place we have been every single day for months. We text when the call is over: I miss you. That was so much fun.

I mentioned the unusualness of this new routine to her and we agreed that we were supplementing, missing what we can no longer go out to enjoy. And so I wanted to ask other writers about this. Are you, too, changing your routines? Are you wining and dining yourself? What are you drinking? Is it helping? (I did not ask them if they’re writing—we know the answer, and we don’t want to have to say it.) Some of them indulged me, and below, you will read the answers to those questions. We are all going through it right now, all finding ways to soften the sharp edges of reality and the constant ache of grief. I hope these little stories can do that for you too, and perhaps help you feel a little less alone.

— Mickie Meinhardt

It started with red cups, the kind we all drank beers out of when we cut class on the vacant lot across the street from my high school in the Bronx. I’d long left them behind because of ecological reasons, but stocked up in a buying frenzy in early March while staring at empty CVS shelves just before I got sick; they were some of the only things left for sale so I bought them. Then I spent two weeks in bed self-isolating. The solo cups were one of my better moves. (Not stocking up on toilet paper was one of my worst ones.) Our dishwasher broke just as my fever went up and I was paranoid about hand-washing glasses with COVID, so, recycling be damned, it looked like a little keg party had taken place in my room. After I recovered enough that I could walk from our building the three blocks to the park, I’d make myself a G&T with lime in one of those remaining disposable frat-boy cups after work. (My legs still wobbled when I stood up but, you know, it was five o’clock somewhere). There was something steadying about watching that steel gray Hudson River move, and the “mostly gin” helped me to get my shit together before going home. We’re four adults now in a small apartment, my grown-up kids and my husband. Compared to the suffering of our neighbors we’re doing fine, but it is still easy to feel trapped. (Sometimes, in desperation, I go out on the street and sit in our car just to be alone.) Finally, when the weather got warmer, our nearby burger joint reopened and started selling takeout frozen watermelon margaritas and guac and chips. One day, when my daughter and I were curled up on the couch together in a cocoon of shelter-at-home despair, we ordered the whole package, picked it up at the restaurant’s doorway and headed to my spot in the park. The sun was shining, kids were riding their bikes, there were too many people with masks hanging off their chins and not secured on their faces, but we were far enough away to spread out and drink and talk. My daughter started to cry, but not from despair. “It’s the first time I’ve felt normal,” she said. And it was true. We were just hanging out, being ourselves. We were relaxed. Margaritas and chips, the sunset, and then at 7pm all of New York cheering our first responders. Alone together. The “new” magic hour.

--- Helen Schulman

by Mickie Meinhardt, Helen Schulman, others, Guernica | Read more:
Image: via

Liza

For his short film Liza, the French animator Bastien Dupriez aimed to create ‘a kind of visual transcription’ of the George Gershwin song Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away) (1929), as performed by the French musician Jean-Michel Pilc. As the rollicking jazz piano builds, the frame splashes with abstract shapes and colours, as well as hints of human forms. The resulting effect is of visuals built to accompany and respond to the mood of the music, rather than the much more familiar inverse experience. Beyond serving as a mesmerising slice of audiovisual eye candy – and it certainly is that – the piece also provokes a bevy of intriguing questions about our multisensory experience of art.

via: Aeon

Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey

I met that elderly monkey in a small Japanese-style inn in a hot-springs town in Gunma Prefecture, some five years ago. It was a rustic or, more precisely, decrepit inn, barely hanging on, where I just happened to spend a night.

I was travelling around, wherever the spirit led me, and it was already past 7 p.m. when I arrived at the hot-springs town and got off the train. Autumn was nearly over, the sun had long since set, and the place was enveloped in that special navy-blue darkness particular to mountainous areas. A cold, biting wind blew down from the peaks, sending fist-size leaves rustling along the street.

I walked through the center of the town in search of a place to stay, but none of the decent inns would take in guests after the dinner hour had passed. I stopped at five or six places, but they all turned me down flat. Finally, in a deserted area outside town, I came across an inn that would take me. It was a desolate-looking, ramshackle place, almost a flophouse. It had seen a lot of years go by, but it had none of the quaint appeal you might expect in an old inn. Fittings here and there were ever so slightly slanted, as if slapdash repairs had been made that didn’t mesh with the rest of the place. I doubted it would make it through the next earthquake, and I could only hope that no temblor would hit while I was there.

The inn didn’t serve dinner, but breakfast was included, and the rate for one night was incredibly cheap. Inside the entrance was a plain reception desk, behind which sat a completely hairless old man—devoid of even eyebrows—who took my payment for one night in advance. The lack of eyebrows made the old man’s largish eyes seem to glisten bizarrely, glaringly. On a cushion on the floor beside him, a big brown cat, equally ancient, was sacked out, sound asleep. Something must have been wrong with its nose, for it snored louder than any cat I’d ever heard. Occasionally the rhythm of its snores fitfully missed a beat. Everything in this inn seemed to be old and falling apart.

The room I was shown to was cramped, like the storage area where one keeps futon bedding; the ceiling light was dim, and the flooring under the tatami creaked ominously with each step. But it was too late to be particular. I told myself I should be happy to have a roof over my head and a futon to sleep on.

I put my one piece of luggage, a large shoulder bag, down on the floor and set off back to town. (This wasn’t exactly the type of room I wanted to lounge around in.) I went into a nearby soba-noodle shop and had a simple dinner. It was that or nothing, since there were no other restaurants open. I had a beer, some bar snacks, and some hot soba. The soba was mediocre, the soup lukewarm, but, again, I wasn’t about to complain. It beat going to bed on an empty stomach. After I left the soba shop, I thought I’d buy some snacks and a small bottle of whiskey, but I couldn’t find a convenience store. It was after eight, and the only places open were the shooting-gallery game centers typically found in hot-springs towns. So I hoofed it back to the inn, changed into a yukata robe, and went downstairs to take a bath.

Compared with the shabby building and facilities, the hot-springs bath at the inn was surprisingly wonderful. The steaming water was a thick green color, not diluted, the sulfur odor more pungent than anything I’d ever experienced, and I soaked there, warming myself to the bone. There were no other bathers (I had no idea if there were even any other guests at the inn), and I was able to enjoy a long, leisurely bath. After a while, I felt a little light-headed and got out to cool off, then got back into the tub. Maybe this decrepit-looking inn was a good choice after all, I thought. It was certainly more peaceful than bathing with some noisy tour group, the way you do in the larger inns.

Iwas soaking in the bath for the third time when the monkey slid the glass door open with a clatter and came inside. “Excuse me,” he said in a low voice. It took me a while to realize that he was a monkey. All the thick hot water had left me a bit dazed, and I’d never expected to hear a monkey speak, so I couldn’t immediately make the connection between what I was seeing and the fact that this was an actual monkey. The monkey closed the door behind him, straightened out the little buckets that lay strewn about, and stuck a thermometer into the bath to check the temperature. He gazed intently at the dial on the thermometer, his eyes narrowed, for all the world like a bacteriologist isolating some new strain of pathogen.

“How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.

“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. It sounded almost mythological, not like my own voice but, rather, like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was . . . hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking my language?

“Shall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked, his voice still low. He had the clear, alluring voice of a baritone in a doo-wop group. Not at all what you would expect. But nothing was odd about his voice: if you closed your eyes and listened, you’d think it was an ordinary person speaking.

“Yes, thanks,” I replied. It wasn’t as if I’d been sitting there hoping that someone would come and scrub my back, but if I turned him down I was afraid he might think I was opposed to having a monkey do it. I figured it was a kind offer on his part, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt his feelings. So I slowly got up out of the tub and plunked myself down on a little wooden platform, with my back to the monkey.

The monkey didn’t have any clothes on. Which, of course, is usually the case for a monkey, so it didn’t strike me as odd. He seemed to be fairly old; he had a lot of white in his hair. He brought over a small towel, rubbed soap on it, and with a practiced hand gave my back a good scrubbing.

“It’s got very cold these days, hasn’t it?” the monkey remarked.

“That it has.”

“Before long this place will be covered in snow. And then they’ll have to shovel snow from the roofs, which is no easy task, believe me.”

There was a brief pause, and I jumped in. “So you can speak human language?”

“I can indeed,” the monkey replied briskly. He was probably asked that a lot. “I was raised by humans from an early age, and before I knew it I was able to speak. I lived for quite a long time in Tokyo, in Shinagawa.”

“What part of Shinagawa?”

“Around Gotenyama.”

“That’s a nice area.”

“Yes, as you know, it’s a very pleasant place to live. Nearby is the Gotenyama Garden, and I enjoyed the natural scenery there.”

Our conversation paused at this point. The monkey continued firmly scrubbing my back (which felt great), and all the while I tried to puzzle things out rationally. A monkey raised in Shinagawa? The Gotenyama Garden? And such a fluent speaker? How was that possible? This was a monkey, for goodness’ sake. A monkey, and nothing else.

“I live in Minato-ku,” I said, a basically meaningless statement.

“We were almost neighbors, then,” the monkey said in a friendly tone.

“What kind of person raised you in Shinagawa?” I asked.

“My master was a college professor. He specialized in physics, and held a chair at Tokyo Gakugei University.”

“Quite an intellectual, then.”

“He certainly was. He loved music more than anything, particularly the music of Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Thanks to which, I developed a fondness for that music myself. I heard it all the time. Picked up a knowledge of it without even realizing it, you could say.”

“You enjoy Bruckner?”

“Yes. His Seventh Symphony. I always find the third movement particularly uplifting.”

“I often listen to his Ninth Symphony,” I chimed in. Another pretty meaningless statement.

“Yes, that’s truly lovely music,” the monkey said.

“So that professor taught you language?”

“He did. He didn’t have any children, and, perhaps to compensate for that, he trained me fairly strictly whenever he had time. He was very patient, a person who valued order and regularity above all. He was a serious person whose favorite saying was that the repetition of accurate facts was the true road to wisdom. His wife was a quiet, sweet person, always kind to me. They got along well, and I hesitate to mention this to an outsider, but, believe me, their nighttime activities could be quite intense.”

“Really,” I said.

The monkey finally finished scrubbing my back. “Thanks for your patience,” he said, and bowed his head.

“Thank you,” I said. “It really felt good. So, do you work here at this inn?”

“I do. They’ve been kind enough to let me work here. The larger, more upscale inns would never hire a monkey. But they’re always shorthanded around here and, if you can make yourself useful, they don’t care if you’re a monkey or whatever. For a monkey, the pay is minimal, and they let me work only where I can stay mostly out of sight. Straightening up the bath area, cleaning, things of that sort. Most guests would be shocked if a monkey served them tea and so on. Working in the kitchen is out, too, since I’d run into issues with the food-sanitation law.”

“Have you been working here for a long time?” I asked.

“It’s been about three years.”

“But you must have gone through all sorts of things before you settled down here?”

The monkey gave a quick nod. “Very true.”

I hesitated, but then came out and asked him, “If you don’t mind, could you tell me more about your background?”

The monkey considered this, and then said, “Yes, that would be fine. It might not be as interesting as you expect, but I’m off work at ten and I could stop by your room after that. Would that be convenient?”

“Certainly,” I replied. “I’d be grateful if you could bring some beer then.”

“Understood. Some cold beers it is. Would Sapporo be all right?”

“That would be fine. So, you drink beer?”

“A little bit, yes.”

“Then please bring two large bottles.”

“Of course. If I understand correctly, you are staying in the Araiso Suite, on the second floor?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“It’s a little strange, though, don’t you think?” the monkey said. “An inn in the mountains with a room named araiso—‘rugged shore.’ ” He chuckled. I’d never in my life heard a monkey laugh. But I guess monkeys do laugh, and even cry, at times. It shouldn’t have surprised me, given that he was talking.

“By the way, do you have a name?” I asked.

“No, no name, per se. But everyone calls me the Shinagawa Monkey.”

The monkey slid open the glass door, turned, and gave a polite bow, then slowly closed the door.

by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Hisashi Okawa

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.

No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress.(...)

Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.

The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.

In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.

Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work.

Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind.

All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.

The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.

Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislators—out of an association between political courage and parsimony—respond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms.

How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore.

by Marilynne Robinson, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Doña Ana County, New Mexico, 2017; photograph by Matt Black/Magnum