179. Covid News

I’ve been writing these notes on the Pandemic for two years.  At the beginning it was sometimes a daily thing, as Covid dominated our lives. Now Covid takes its place in daily news with Ukraine and fire in New Mexico. Some days it’s not in the news at all—although, as President Biden reminded us yesterday, it is the only news in some American homes. 

 

He said that there were over a million empty chairs at American tables because of Covid deaths, that it is not over, that people are still dying every day. He asked Congress for money for more vaccines and remedies to cure the sick. Flags will fly at half-staff in memory of the million.

 

Commentators were quick to point out that the real death count is probably more, taking account of the indirect Covid deaths caused by crowded health care facilities, staffing shortages, delayed treatments for other things. And the people in poor places and anti-vax surroundings who we didn’t learn about or who didn’t want us to know.

 

Dr. Fauci, who hasn’t made the evening news for some time, came on last night to tell us that he had once predicted 200,000 deaths as a possibility—and people thought he was grandstanding. He said that a quarter of the million deaths—250,000—would have been avoided if people would have taken advantage of the vaccines. 

 

We’ll be picking at the entrails of Covid now, saying what we should have done, missing those we’ve lost, getting “boosted” or not, arguing still and inexplicably about the reality of it. But Covid is part of our landscape, like war and fire, elections, Supreme Court decisions and climate change. 

 

If I wrote daily about Covid now people would think me obsessed. I think about the few who wrestled with the 1918 virus for decades, and those now who labor away in labs and pore over medical, demographic, ethnic, and economic statistics in efforts to understand, to trace its path, to prepare us for the next pandemic. 

 

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178. Between two “truths"

Between Two “Truths”

 

It strikes me, sitting here in the Republic of Turkey in the middle of Anatolia, that we in the United States see ourselves as divided between two “truths”: Covid 19 is a dangerous epidemical disease—Covid is a hoax; the election was fair—the election was fraudulent; January 6 was an attack on Democracy—January 6 was a legitimate protest; we should defund the police—we should fund more police; Public Television provides accurate news information—Fox News has the truth.

 

I could go on, but the important thing is that our belief systems precede and shape our “truths.” These belief systems are shaped over years with the mentoring of family, community, religion and peers. Facts occur to us as pictures through our eyes—directly or from photos or paintings or screens; words from pages, newscasts, social media, movies, and those spoken directly; sounds—from mouths and screens, tubes and tubas, wind, water, and weather; from touch and smell and taste. But they have to make it through the belief barrio for interpretation. Difficult: a vegetarian will gurgle at meat, cowboys I know hate the smell of sheep, and Bedouins wear layers against the sun that white Westerners meet with sunscreen. 

 

I believe that we grow into our beliefs as we grow into the clothes that we eventually find comfortable. There are many who love to change clothes frequently, or at least experiment with new ones, but all of us to some extent are prisoners to the garb—and the belief systems—that we’ve grown comfortable with.

 

Is it a stretch to think that whole countries behave similarly? Or that at the least the leaders of countries, whether elected, appointed, or having gained purchase by force, wear the countries they lead like garments, shake and hunker in them at new “facts” until they find comfort, looking to neighbors to see and hear and feel approval and disapproval?  

 

When Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine and its bombs hit Ukrainian cities, the world stepped up—almost in unison—to condemn Russia and support Ukraine. We—the world—reacted to the first images, the pictures and the sounds of war being waged by one powerful country onto a much smaller neighboring country.

 

But now the world’s nations—more accurately, the leaders of nations—are looking and listening past the initial images, and some number are finding that Russia’s truths are a more soothing fit to their worlds than are those of America and Western Europe and the Ukrainians under Russia’s boot.

 

How can we live together in a country in which belief-clothes are so different, and in a world where countries vary so much? How can we find some common truths? 

177. The Hangover

It struck me today, as I watched yet another news broadcast with horrible photos of the War in Ukraine, that, reeling from a long Covid-induced drunk, we’re bleary-eyed with the morning. As things have eased in recent weeks with shots and boosters and the immunization provided by the disease itself, we look back on a two-year long binge drunk. And we are hung over. 

 

Numbers of us sobered up from time to time, many with Covid, some of whom died and are still dying—although in smaller numbers. The easy ones, the old drinkers with little resistance—those with age and asthma and other health issues working against them—went first, with the grieving of a relative looking in the nursing home window. A few loud-mouthed braggarts who thought they could drink forever, without masks and shots, went down.  

 

We moderates minded our Ps and Qs, but are still shaking off the effects of the long-haul binge. We’re hungover, wondering whether we dare take a drink of fresh air, have a glass of wine in a restaurant or drink in a bar. Maybe a little taste—the hair of the dog. 

 

Or, “ah, to hell with it. Give me a Bloody Mary and put that War-thing going on in Ukraine up on the screen.” 

 

The next long drunk? 

176. Murder—up close and at a distance

In 1960, Israeli operatives captured Adolph Eichmann in Argentina, and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. Eichmann had been a Nazi leader in sending millions of European Jews into exile and death camps, and was a major figure in the “final solution”—to rid Germany entirely of Jews. 

 

The 1961 trial was broadcast world-wide, Eichmann testifying and watching from a glass booth. The social historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker Magazine, and in 1963 published the story in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Many Jewish leaders of the day harshly criticized Arendt, herself a Jewish refugee from Germany who had escaped before the War, for being soft on Eichmann, for understanding and explaining him.

 

What I recall—and it has been over 50 years since I read the book—is that the word in the title, “banality,” was used to describe Eichmann as, in many ways, a “normal,” even prototypically normal, human being. The fear she raised is that someone the court psychologists found normal by their measurements, someone who had been a less than stellar student but an outstanding bureaucrat who saw inferior humans as abstractions, had been capable of carrying out the atrocities that we now call the Holocaust. 

 

There were lesser Eichmanns of course, the people who stood Jews—and Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists—up in front of open pits and shot them to bury them; those who filled the gas chambers, who put people on meat hooks into ovens. And there were those who lived “normal” lives in villages within smelling distance of the camps. (After liberation, General Eisenhower took an entire village to a death camp and made them dig graves.)

 

I remember and write this today because of Ukraine. Yes, Putin is responsible for the holocaust that is happening before our screen-glued eyes. But what of the functionaries between Putin and the soldiers on the ground? And what of the soldiers themselves, who tied hands behind backs and shot people, who shot children in the streets? And what of those who launched and continue to launch long-distance missiles at hospitals and schools? 

 

When we consider the bureaucrats and these practitioners of long-range destruction of cities and people in Ukraine, does it come too close for us to leaders who sent soldiers and drone strikes that brought destruction to Afghanistan and Syria?

 

We fear a nuclear holocaust—rightfully so. But we and the world must learn how to stop the killing done by everyday soldiers and mobs—and by bureaucrats following orders and casting destruction from safe distances where the targets are only images on screens. 

 

We must do more than stand by until forced—metaphorically—to dig the graves of the victims. 

175. Two minutes on war--Murder

 Murder—up close and at a distance

 

In 1960, Israeli operatives captured Adolph Eichmann in Argentina, and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. Eichmann had been a Nazi leader in sending millions of European Jews into exile and death camps, and was a major figure in the “final solution”—to rid Germany entirely of Jews. 

 

The 1961 trial was broadcast world-wide, Eichmann testifying and watching from a glass booth. The social historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker Magazine, and in 1963 published the story in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Many Jewish leaders of the day harshly criticized Arendt, herself a Jewish refugee from Germany who had escaped before the War, for being soft on Eichmann, for understanding and explaining him.

 

What I recall—and it has been over 50 years since I read the book—is that the word in the title, “banality,” was used to describe Eichmann as, in many ways, a “normal,” even prototypically normal, human being. The fear she raised is that someone the court psychologists found normal by their measurements, someone who had been a less than stellar student but an outstanding bureaucrat who saw inferior humans as abstractions, had been capable of carrying out the atrocities that we now call the Holocaust. 

 

There were lesser Eichmanns of course, the people who stood Jews—and Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists—up in front of open pits and shot them to bury them; those who filled the gas chambers, who put people on meat hooks into ovens. And there were those who lived “normal” lives in villages within smelling distance of the camps. (After liberation, General Eisenhower took an entire village to a death camp and made them dig graves.)

 

I remember and write this today because of Ukraine. Yes, Putin is responsible for the holocaust that is happening before our screen-glued eyes. But what of the functionaries between Putin and the soldiers on the ground? And what of the soldiers themselves, who tied hands behind backs and shot people, who shot children in the streets? And what of those who launched and continue to launch long-distance missiles at hospitals and schools? 

 

When we consider the bureaucrats and these practitioners of long-range destruction of cities and people in Ukraine, does it come too close for us to leaders who sent soldiers and drone strikes that brought destruction to Afghanistan and Syria?

 

We fear a nuclear holocaust—rightfully so. But we and the world must learn how to stop the killing done by everyday soldiers and mobs—and by bureaucrats following orders and casting destruction from safe distances where the targets are only images on screens. 

 

We must do more than stand by until forced—metaphorically—to dig the graves of the victims. 

173. Two minutes on the War--Saving Face

When I wrote of my fear that Putin, if hemmed in by economics and resisted successfully by Ukrainian forces for long enough, might lash out with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, a friend wrote back in agreement. And then said “We need to offer him something to save face.”

 

But is there an exit route, something that we can give him or he can take which will result in enough satisfaction that he will stop this horrendous invasion? 

 

Granted, Putin has stepped past many lines. Last night, on “Firing Line,” NYTimes photojournalist Lynsey Addario said that the Russians are now indiscriminately lobbing ordinance into population centers, and deliberately targeting civilians—women, children, old people—who are evacuating. Addario, who has “covered every major conflict and humanitarian crises of her generation, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo,” says that Ukraine is the worst. It took years for three million refugees to flee Syria—and less than a month for that number from Ukraine. 

 

This puts Putin in the company of past bad dictators, including but not limited to Pinochet, Marcos, Khadafi, Saddam Hussein, Riza Shah, Idi Amin, and his own countryman, Josef Stalin. We needn’t get into discussions of who exiled more, who killed more, and who was more dangerous to neighboring countries. All of these men—yes, all men—are noted for their bad deeds. All gripped power and hung onto it by intrigue and corruption. All had cadres of supporters, sometimes idealists who thought, at the beginning, that they were following a man who would benefit their countries. Some fled—most famously Trotsky fleeing Stalin—but always a group stuck by the dictator and became complicit in everything he wanted and directed in his use of power and personal vision for the country. 

 

In retrospect, wealth seems only an adjunct to the crucial commodities of vision and power—restoration of past greatness a common thread from the Shah’s identification with the ancient Persian Peacock Throne to Putin’s Greater Russia. Most pundits discount the direct influence of oligarchs, the toadies who serve Putin but don’t influence him. They are not part of the inner circle, which includes Putin’s old KGB colleagues and others who’ve risen through military and intelligence ranks.

 

Looking at that roster of mostly twentieth century autocrats, their demise almost always came from within, from the inner circle itself, or from a still-standing religious or ethnic power center close-by. Marcos was toppled by a military faction; Idi Amin by exiled Ugandans and his failed war against a neighbor; the Shah by rising forces of democracy and religion; and Stalin died in a pool of his own urine when his guards feared waking him. 

 

All dictators come to their ends, and rarely is it a safe exit provided by outsiders. The outside can, as Ukraine and much of the world are doing now, stress the dictator’s rule, but the collapse comes from within. Look to the military and Kremlin intelligence—or his own health—for Putin’s end.  

172. One minute on the War

It’s true that more people die in plagues, pandemics, and the swarms of infectious diseases that swell and whither in their own times and places around the world than die in wars. A third of Europe died in the plague; fifty to ninety percent in indigenous American tribes fell to smallpox, measles, and other European diseases in the first years of colonization; and an estimated fifty million died world-wide in the 1917-18-19 Influenza epidemic. We’re now at eight million Covid deaths world-wide, and are approaching a million in the US alone. 

But Ukraine is heart-stopping. 

 

Diseases are car accidents and Ukraine is an airplane crash. More of us die in car accidents than in plane crashes, but we have levels of control on the highway that we, as passengers, don’t have on planes. With diseases, we vaccinate, mask, drink clean water and take care of ourselves—or we don’t. Our Covid Pandemic, a stealth invader, works its way through the crowds, picking off one and leaving the next. Most—though not all—of us who take precautions live on. 

 

In the War in Ukraine, personal choices—to flee or to stay, to go to this bomb shelter or that one—are small compared to the power and randomness of Russian artillery and bombs. War in Ukraine is, as one still surviving told a reporter yesterday, a daily lottery for its citizens.

 

Doctors and politicians differ, sometimes mightily, on dealing with the Pandemic, but they drive the buses and we are citizen passengers, mostly listening to their advice, sometimes screaming at them to make the other turn. Or we drive our own cars and disregard the warnings of experienced drivers completely. It might be an at times contentious world, but it is largely predictable.  

 

To stay with my analogy, Putin is the aggrieved pilot of a huge plane loaded with deadly weapons. He also has a yen for ancient glory. And looking at the pictures of Meriupol, the destroyed hospitals and refugee-filled theater, the blocks that were once apartment houses, and remembering the jihadist preparations before and the lottery-like outcomes after 9/11, I fear that his deadly combination of aggrievement and hubris will result in Putin flying his plane into a deadly explosion that will engulf us all.

 

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