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Ireland's summing up of the situation. From the Irish Times: April 25, 2020 By Fintan O’Toole THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity. However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful. Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic. As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence. The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV. If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated. Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas? It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways. Abject surrender What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety. Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order. In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”. Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.” This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus. It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right. Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted. The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence. Fertile ground But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it. There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection. Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here. That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality. And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element. As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again. |
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Fintan O'Toole is one of the most read Irish columnists and has won Irish Columnist of the Year on 3 occasions along with many other awards. He is regarded as 'Left of Centre' by Media Bias and the Irish Times is rated High for factual content.
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Thank you for sharing this very interesting and well written article by Fintan O' Toole,
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4/27/2020 8:47 am |
nor do i. i care less the opinions of the left on sff or the soicalist from uk, ireland, etc.
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VERY INTERESTING AND INSIGHTFUL ARTICLE. THANKS FOR POSTING IT.
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Weak,weak response. 1. Fintan O'Toole is one of the most respected political commentators in the world. He is a noted author and columnist. Your attempt to belittle him by referring to only one of his many accomplishments just highlights your ignorance. 2. I see no refutation, simply denial.
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“Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.” ― Sheri S. Tepper, The Visitor
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Diddums. Did the nasty Brit hurt the snowflake's widdle feelings? LOL
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Trying to make this very simple for you to follow. #! HAD the American people NOT practiced distancing, staying safe at home, closed schools, etc. those "unneeded" ventilators would have all been in use AND they would have been looking for more. #2 Trump had knowledge of what was going on in December and failed to act until weeks/months later. Trump was too concerned about the NUMBERS and didn't want them to rise so he downplayed the virus. You can look up his quotes yourself, in fact you can actually view him speaking the words.
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Trying to make this very simple for you to follow. #! HAD the American people NOT practiced distancing, staying safe at home, closed schools, etc. those "unneeded" ventilators would have all been in use AND they would have been looking for more. #2 Trump had knowledge of what was going on in December and failed to act until weeks/months later. Trump was too concerned about the NUMBERS and didn't want them to rise so he downplayed the virus. You can look up his quotes yourself, in fact you can actually view him speaking the words.
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Bigblock is on Team Trump and has proven time and time again that all he really cares about is his team winning.....it's that simple.
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Hilarious......You stamp your foot and demand that people do what you have never done yourself. All you did is copy and paste someone else's thoughts and words.....All you did is go along with Trump and his minions......You took the elevator and demanded others climb the stairs......and somehow, you don't know the difference......
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Now you resort to STRAW MAN arguments. I am not the POTUS - I was not in charge from 20th Jan 2017 so I did not have the opportunity to stockpile PPE and to ensure that there was adequate equipment. I did not sack the head of the pandemic response team or effectively disband the part of that team in China. I was warning anyone who would listen that this was going to be bloody dangerous when Donnie death was telling people it "One day it will disappear...like a miracle" so I think I would have been following the advice of the experts when Donnie death was still faffing about trying to prop up the stock market. You cannot deflect the argument away from the mango moron because it is obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the response from the white house was shambolic, too little , too late and that the message sent out was too confusing.
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"I praise God for what has been done, what has been put in place and what is being worked on."..........Hilarious.....You praise God for the Corona Virus?.....That's crazy-talk, even for you.
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Once again it would appear that you are too bloody thick to work out that you are being ridiculous. You set up your straw man, you asked what I would have done better -- I told you in the simplest of terms but you obviously could not read well enough to comprehend so here it is in BIG letters for you. I WOULD HAVE LISTENED TO THE EXPERTS INSTEAD OF SHOOTING OFF MY MOUTH SAYING STUPID THINGS LIKE "It will just disappear like magic". As a scientist and a realist I would have done what Angela Merkel (a Chemist like me) and Jacinda Ardern (a realist and left wing Labour Party leader) did. Lock down immediately, test everything that moved and trace every contact so that they could be isolated. Similar to what the Chinese did in Hubei province and South Korea did nationwide, what the Germans and the New Zealanders did. NOW DO YOU GET IT? I know I should not shout but I get the impression you are deaf so I am trying to be helpful.
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5/17/2020 11:49 am |
Fintan O'Toole summed it up pretty good. And really … I guess pity is better that hate or disgust. The current problem for Donald J Trump and his rat nest in Congress is how do you steal money from the Treasury and spend it on the Country at the same time.
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