I feel obliged to begin by reiterating my abiding view that, to fight this virus, our political leaders did not have to
- destroy the global economy;
- undermine millions of good-paying jobs; and
- hunker down billions of people in their homes, indefinitely.
It’s only a matter of time before we look back on this period of mass hysteria and exclaim, ‘Duh. What the hell were they thinking?
Instead, at March 20 below, I endorsed a four-point plan they could have executed, which includes blanket testing, contact tracing, mass producing PPEs, and fast-tracking vaccines.
Leaders in Singapore, South Korea, and Sweden are executing this plan to enviable effect. But here is what vindicates it while exposing the folly of the three-point lockdown plan above:
- Experts are already warning that this virus will become a recurring, seasonal pandemic.
But are you prepared to suffer every season 75, 50, 25, or even just 10 percent of the lockdown and isolation madness you’re experiencing this season? Because, for what they’re putting us through today to make any sense at all, that’s what COVID-19 becoming seasonal has to mean.
Meanwhile, some leaders are clearly using this virus as a pretext to impose draconian restrictions – even betraying fetishistic zeal as they do so. Only this explains the rush to inform the world that they are the first to order this or that closing; the first to extend a stay-at-home order; the first to deploy military forces; or the first to require all residents to wear masks (as the mayor of Los Angeles made a clownish show of doing on earlier this week).
But I’d be remiss not to note one variant strain of this leadership. Because nothing is more perverse than British Prime Minister Boris Johnson looking like a shaggy dog – who was just caught eating up the sofa – as he informed the world that he had become the first leader to test positive for coronavirus.
In any event, I wrote again only yesterday about the “creeping authoritarianism” afoot. Therefore, I shan’t belabor the point. Instead, I urge you to consider the following – as your stay at home begins creeping from urgency into normalcy:
- Power grabs – from Adolf Hitler’s to Vladimir Putin’s – have shown that, once a democratically elected leader gets a little dictatorial power, his all-consuming ambition becomes the acquisition of a lot … for life!
And, if you think I’m exaggerating this prospect, consider that some of your neighbors are encouraging such dictatorial ambitions by behaving like they already live in a police state:
Snitches are emerging as enthusiastic allies as cities, states and countries work to enforce directives meant to limit person-to-person contact amid the virus pandemic that has claimed tens of thousands of lives worldwide. …
In New Zealand, a police website set up for the public to report violators crashed after too many people tried to access it at once.
(The Associated Press, April 2, 2020)
With that, there’s little else to say about this crisis. Truth be told, what I said weeks ago about the Groundhog-Day nature of much of what passes for news and press conferences remains true today.
That’s because the only real news of any day is the body count, or the political infighting and bungling that are doing so little to control it. But I’ve already denounced the media and far too many people’s macabre fascination with this.
Because news channels serve no public interest by permanently displaying coronavirus stats. Doing so is utterly without any socially redeeming value as it appeals only to morbid interests. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking that CNN is using death stats to keep viewers hooked the way ESPN uses sports stats to do the same.
In that vein, I was going to end this fed–up commentary with an overview of the COVID-19 state of play in a number of countries. But, in reading about the vast majority of them, two things turned me off the idea:
- Shutdown (of all non-essential businesses) and stay-at-home orders are playing out much the same in every country, so much so that it would take a real political junkie to read about goings on in more than 10 of them.
- I soon found that only someone who gets off on a coupling of anxiety and misery porn could continue. No doubt you’ve seen enough images coming out of places like India, South Africa, and Ecuador to appreciate my dismay.
Therefore, I’ve decided to take parting shots at just a few countries that can take it.
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China
Unsurprisingly, China led the world in shutting down businesses and enforcing stay-at-home orders. In fact, it has kept Wuhan, the initial epicenter of this virus, under official quarantine for nearly four months.
What is surprising, however, is that Western countries cited this sick, totalitarian hammer as a reasonable precedent for their own shutdowns and stay-at-home orders. But here’s the rub:
- Every public-health official says that China has done the best job of executing the best strategies for combating this virus.
- Every politician outside China says that it is under reporting both the cases of coronavirus (at just under 82,500) and deaths (at just over 3,300) caused by it. Credible reports cite Wuhan residents claiming that over 30,000 people have died in their province alone.
- No expert or politician seems willing to stop for a second to explain what this means … or portends.
How’s that for monkey see, monkey do…?
Meanwhile, China saw forebodings when it eased restrictions in Wuhan a few weeks ago. Because people began protesting in the streets – not only making a mockery of months of self-isolation and social-distancing indoctrination, but acting as if they had morphed over time into pro-democracy Hong Kongers.
But here is why China and other countries may come to rue the day they thought locking hundreds of millions of people up for months was the best thing for their health:
Large-scale protests could break out in Wuhan, the epicenter of China’s coronavirus epidemic, when a lockdown on the city ends next month, as residents unhappy with unprecedented restrictions on their movements vent their pent-up frustrations, a Beijing-based think tank warned Wednesday.
The private research institute, which is close to the Communist Party and central government, sounded the alarm in a report recently submitted to the leadership.
(Kyodo News, March 25, 2020)
That’s what they warned on Wednesday could happen in a totalitarian dictatorship like China. I’m no think tank, but here is what I warned weeks ago (as the third in my four-point plan to fight this virus) could happen in a liberal democracy like the United States:
Tell state and local officials to let the American people get back to work and resume their normal lives. (Not least because I can already smell the smoldering of a French-style revolution in the air during my daily walks. After all, expecting Americans today to stay home and watch nothing on TV except politicians and pundits droning on about a virus is rather like expecting Frenchmen back then to sleep on the streets and eat cake … if they could steal it.)
(“Medics Complain about Lack of Supplies To Fight Coronavirus. Trump Passes the Buck … Again.” The iPINIONS Journal, March 20, 2020)
Can’t say I didn’t warn them …
Italy and Germany
Remarkably, stereotypes abound:
The sheer incompetence that has made stagnation and quagmire mainstays of Italian life has now made it the epicenter of this outbreak. Italy leads the world with the most COVID-19 deaths at nearly 14,000.
The congenital precision that has made innovation and organization mainstays of German life has now made it a health provider of last resort. Not only has Germany managed to limit deaths to under 1200; it has so much capacity to treat COVID-19 patients that it is airlifting sick Italians for treatment in Germany.
North Korea
North Korea insists it does not have a single case of coronavirus, let alone any deaths. When I read this, a gallows thought came to mind about this Hermit Kingdom finally deriving some benefit from being so hermitically sealed from the outside world.
But I knew better. Indeed, that thought was soon followed by the more accurate allusion to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claiming that there is no incidence of HIV in his country because “we don’t have homosexuals.”
In any case, just to remind the world of North Korea’s relevance in this time of corona, Kim hailed the successful testing of another missile with “super large” rocket launchers this week. Such tests used to set the world on edge. That nobody seemed to care this time only proves the point I’ve been making for years in commentaries like “Why do World Leaders Give North Korea’s President the Time of Day,” October 4, 2006.
Iran
Sadly, this coronavirus is taking out more of Iran’s leadership than targeted US strikes could ever hope to do.
At least 17 figures in the Iranian regime have died from coronavirus, and 13 others have been infected since the beginning of the outbreak in the Islamic Republic, according to reports by state media outlets.
As of Monday, 2,640 in Iran have died from coronavirus, and there are 38,309 confirmed cases.
(Al Arabiya, March 30, 2020)
Meanwhile, suspicions are growing and conspiracies are swirling about the fate of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Suffice to know that reports on the way this virus is impacting Iran are no more reliable than those on the way it’s impacting China.
In other words, Iran’s death toll can be as high as 260,000 as surely as the Supreme Leader can be on a ventilator somewhere (in China perhaps) hanging on for dear life.
Hungary
This country deserves dishonorable mention because no democratically elected leader has seized this crisis to wield the kind of dictatorial power I warned about more than Hungarian President Viktor Orban.
The nationalist government in Hungary passed a law Monday granting sweeping emergency powers that Prime Minister Viktor Orban says are necessary to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Those powers include sidelining parliament and giving Orban the power to rule by decree indefinitely. The law would punish those who spread false information about the pandemic with up to five years in prison.
(NPR, March 30, 2020)
Russia
To be fair, President Vladimir Putin did not need any pretext to begin wielding dictatorial power over Russia. He accomplished that feat through a series of “Putinization” maneuvers years ago, all of which I duly commented on in this forum.
No, Putin used this COVID-19 crisis for something of perhaps even greater significance. For it allowed him to pretend on the world stage that he has restored Russia to such Cold War, superpower glory that no less a country than the United States is now begging for humanitarian aid.
Russia has dispatched a cargo plane with masks and medical equipment to the US after Donald Trump accepted an offer of humanitarian aid from Vladimir Putin to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
The plane, a Russian Antonov An-124-100 military transport, left from Chkalovsky airfield outside Moscow on Tuesday. … Footage from the plane broadcast by Russian state television showed stacks of cardboard boxes in the cargo hold.
(The Guardian, April 1, 2020)
You’d be forgiven for thinking this was an April Fools’ Day joke. Because, given the open state of cyberwarfare that exists between our two countries, only a fool of a US president (or a Putin puppet as Hillary pegged him, or a Manchurian candidate as I did ) would fall for such a propaganda coup.
The only other explanation is that, Putin has such compromising information on this reckless buffoon (a.k.a. the infamous kompromat), he simply made Trump an offer he could not refuse.
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That said, you will be treated over the coming weeks to world leaders of all stripes waxing heroic about their derring-do in their self-declared war against this invisible enemy. Yet, as the Chinese precedent shows, no matter their best efforts, hundreds of thousands worldwide will die.
On the other hand, these same leaders could convene a summit next week and agree to fight one of the many visible enemies that kill millions worldwide each year, namely tobacco. And that would not require shutting down the global economy, manufacturing depression-era joblessness, and imprisoning billions of people in their homes.
They will not do that, of course. Because, for some ungodly reason, it makes more sense to them to fight a war they cannot win. Granted, for American presidents, fighting unwinnable wars has become a rite of passage – ahem.
But Trump can win the war against tobacco with little more than the stroke of his pen … to simply ban it. And we all know the show he likes to make of stroking it.
Such a ban, though, would include nicotine in all forms, most notably the diabolically flavored e-cigarettes. What’s more, it would save many more lives than even perfect execution of the best plans in this war can ever hope to.
Stay healthy…and sane.
Related commentaries:
Medics complain…
North Korea…
Coronavirus…
Putinization…
Trump Manchurian candidate…
cigarettes…
e-cigarettes…