Trump's Plan for Federal Buildings: Make America Old Again
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53778"><span class="small">Jean H. Baker, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Monday, 23 March 2020 08:25
Baker writes: "Somewhere in the White House, a draft executive order entitled 'Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again' is circulating."
'But do we want the federal government to determine our taste and create a uniform architectural environment? Isn't that what happened in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union?' (photo: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images)
Trump's Plan for Federal Buildings: Make America Old Again
By Jean H. Baker, The Daily Beast
23 March 20
While superficially bowing to the past, Trump’s draft proposal for regulating federal architecture would undo two centuries of precedent going back to Benjamin Latrobe.
omewhere in the White House, a draft executive order entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” is circulating. Given a title replete with the bravado of this administration, the contents of the order would overturn over two centuries of precedent establishing the proper relationship of the federal government to public architecture.
In 1962 Daniel Moynihan, at the time an official in the Labor Department, wrote a report that has set the framework for government building ever since. Earlier there had been casual attention given to individual federal buildings, mainly the U.S. Capitol. But there had been little interest in establishing a federal policy. Moynihan’s “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture,” more philosophy than directive, did so in 500 words. Under threat today, these guidelines established three basic points: architects, not the government, must determine designs for federal buildings; the development of an official style must be avoided; and architectural design must “embody the finest contemporary American Architecture.”
The new proposal, written by a private group which supports classical architecture, would require that all federal buildings costing more than $50 million be built in a uniform style. It reads “In the national capital region and for all Federal courthouses the classical architecture style shall be the preferred and default style.”
A President’s Committee for the Rebeautification of Federal Architecture would then draft new regulations establishing good design practices, and these requirements would as well affect renovations of federal buildings to make them conform to the mandated federal look. According to the Architectural Record, the draft order, while overturning the guidelines set up in the 1962 Moynihan report, nevertheless repeats as mantras the four pillars of its guidelines: federal buildings “must provide dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability.”
But who is to say when a building expresses dignity or stability, much less enterprise and vigor? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; taste is an individual expression. Harry Truman despised the Eisenhower Executive Office Building; the draft refers to that building as “beautiful and beloved.” Clearly, the folks behind the draft have set their sights on modern buildings, taking aim at two specific styles—deconstructivism and the Brutalist style of the mid- 20th century.
But do we want the federal government to determine our taste and create a uniform architectural environment? Isn’t that what happened in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union? The designs of modern architects should not be ostracized; rather they represent the prized innovation and diversity of our nation.
What is jarring for one generation becomes acceptable, even admired, in the next. An observation of the public buildings on Capitol Hill proves as much. The variety of design is visually absorbing—from the authentic classical expression of the U.S. Capitol to the Library of Congress, with its display of three generations of buildings: the Beaux Arts Jefferson, the Art Deco Adams and the eclectic, classical touches of the Madison. To this diverse display, the U.S. Supreme Court, built in the 1930s in the neoclassical style, seems no more than an embarrassing cliché.
In the draft, the General Services Administration would organize public panels to provide commentary on design proposals—no experts permitted. Excluded are “artists, architects, engineers, art or architectural critics and members of the building industry.” Included, one suspects, would be Trumpian lackeys who would now have the power to dictate the civic space of our nation. And the whole enterprise would be promoted as the people against the elites. Beware a future of faux classical structures, glinty gold trim, and Louis X1V-type flourishes.
Expertise, innovation, and professionalism mattered in the past. Under the admired Design Excellence Program with its system of peer review, outstanding federal structures have been built, for example, the Boston and Miami courthouses.
Two hundred and twenty years ago, Benjamin Latrobe, an émigré from England and the nation’s first professionally trained architect and engineer, installed those principles. Latrobe was not always successful, but he set the course of our built space with his neoclassical buildings and his fervent conviction of the importance of architecture to the future of the republic.
He also established the basic philosophy that the building of federal buildings must be sheltered from government dictation. He was in every sense a founder of the republic—not of political ideas but of the neoclassical buildings and substantial improvements that expressed those ideas.
Born in 1764 in Fulneck, England, Latrobe was educated in a Moravian community. Despite his family’s expectations that he follow them into the ministry, he rebelled against his Moravian heritage. He moved to London where he studied architecture and engineering before emigrating to the United States in 1796. There he found a nation with unlimited opportunities for both public and private building.
Six months after his arrival, this tall, self-confident Englishman was dining with George Washington. Privately Latrobe described the president’s home, Mount Vernon, as “good and neat but of no striking appearance.” It was no better, he wrote, than that of a plain English gentleman’s home. But that was the point in this developing democracy.
Latrobe quickly established himself as the nation’s premier architect. His first venture into civic architecture resulted in the massive Virginia State Penitentiary, a building with what Latrobe aspired to create—character. The design, from the exterior building material to the interior spaces, revealed its dual purposes of intimidation and rehabilitation.
By 1800 Latrobe was living in Philadelphia, a city displaced that year by Washington as the capital of the United States. Here he designed his famous Bank of Pennsylvania. The building became a landmark of the neoclassical style that Latrobe introduced into the United States. Its exterior was that of an antique temple, capped by a dome and cupola and two Greek Ionic porticos of six columns, front and back. For the exterior he used marble, a more permanent material than brick, the colonial favorite.
In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson appointed Latrobe surveyor of the public buildings. Now this English émigré was in charge of the two most important buildings in the United States, the Capitol and the President’s House. One wing of the multi-authored Capitol was already partially completed when Latrobe arrived to stamp the physical center of American democracy with classical features.
In 1814 when the British burned the federal buildings in Washington, Latrobe redesigned parts of the Capitol. Responding to changes in the United States, he relied on more practical, efficient designs of half circles for its assembly rooms. Ever an advocate for the use of American materials, he used an extraordinary local stone found along the shores of the Potomac River called breccia or calico rock. We still see Latrobe’s breccia columns on the evening news.
Latrobe proclaimed the Capitol a Temple of Liberty, connecting his architecture to Greece and Rome. Those who had made a successful revolution against a monarchy found their antecedents in these ancient republics. Latrobe’s classical design appealed to imitators who used variations on the courthouses and state capitols proliferating in the United States.
But Latrobe never insisted on a monolithic classical style. He often gave clients choices for different designs including some with Gothic features. Throughout his life he fought lonely battles against any interference by federal officials including presidents. When Jefferson argued for cheaper, wooden columns at the Capitol, Latrobe successfully made his case against federal meddling, even by an American president. When a Monroe appointee challenged his design, Latrobe resigned.
Throughout his career, he insisted that architecture be valued as a profession, with established procedures for payment. His scorn for amateurs, whether carpenters or dilettantes, was endless. Architecture, in his view, was for experts.
How ironic that his style of building would be held up today to establish uniformity. What made sense in a post-revolutionary society is an anachronism today. Karl Marx once said that he was no longer a Marxist. Benjamin Latrobe, confronted with today’s making federal buildings beautiful program, would surely protest its efforts to create 21st century knockoffs of his neoclassical buildings. He would oppose the interference by the federal government and untrained citizens over public buildings. He would no longer be a Latrobean.
The Coronavirus Crisis Is a Monster Fueled by Capitalism
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53774"><span class="small">Mike Davis, In These Times</span></a>
Sunday, 22 March 2020 13:15
Davis writes: "A year from now we may look back in admiration at China's success in containing the pandemic but in horror at the United States' failure. The inability of our institutions to keep Pandora's Box closed, of course, is hardly a surprise. Since at least 2000 we've repeatedly seen breakdowns in frontline healthcare."
Coronavirus shows that capitalist globalization is biologically unsustainable. (photo: Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP/Getty Images)
The Coronavirus Crisis Is a Monster Fueled by Capitalism
By Mike Davis, In These Times
22 March 20 PM
Pandora’s Box is open, and our ruthless economic system is making everything far worse.
oronavirus is the old movie that we’ve been watching over and over again since Richard Preston’s 1995 book The Hot Zone introduced us to the exterminating demon, born in a mysterious bat cave in Central Africa, known as Ebola. It was only the first in a succession of new diseases erupting in the ‘virgin field’ (that’s the proper term) of humanity’s inexperienced immune systems. Ebola was soon followed by avian influenza, which jumped to humans in 1997, and SARS which emerged at the end of 2002. Both cases appeared first in Guangdong, the world’s manufacturing hub.
Hollywood, of course, lustfully embraced these outbreaks and produced a score of films to titillate and scare us. (Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, released in 2011, stands out for its accurate science and eerie anticipation of the current chaos.) In addition to the films and innumerable lurid novels, hundreds of serious books and thousands of scientific articles have responded to each outbreak, many emphasizing the appalling state of global preparedness to detect and respond to such novel diseases.
A new monster
So Corona walks through the front door as a familiar monster. Sequencing its genome (very similar to its well-studied sister SARS) was a piece of cake, yet much information is still missing. As researchers work night and day to characterize the outbreak they are faced with three major challenges. First, the continuing shortage of test kits, especially in the United States and Africa, has prevented accurate estimates of key parameters such as reproduction rate, size of infected population and number of benign infections. The result has been a chaos of numbers.
Second, like annual influenzas, this virus is mutating as it courses through populations with different age compositions and health conditions. The variety that Americans are most likely to contract is already slightly different from that of the original outbreak in Wuhan. Further mutation could be benign or could alter the current distribution of virulence which spikes sharply after age 50. The coronavirus is at minimum a mortal danger to Americans who are elderly, have weak immune systems, or chronic respiratory problems.
Third, even if the virus remains stable and little mutated, its impact on younger age cohorts could differ radically in poor countries and amongst high poverty groups. Consider the global experience of the Spanish flu in 1918-19 which is estimated to have killed 1 to 3% of humanity. In the United States and Western Europe, H1N1 was most deadly to young adults. This has usually been explained as a result of their relatively stronger immune systems which overreacted to the infection by attacking lung cells, leading to pneumonia and septic shock.
In any event, the influenza found a favored niche in army camps and battlefield trenches where it scythed down young soldiers by the tens of thousands. This became a major factor in the battle of empires. The collapse of the great German spring offensive of 1918, and thus the outcome of the war, has been attributed by some to the fact that the Allies, in contrast to their enemy, could replenish their sick armies with newly arrived American troops.
But the Spanish flu in poorer countries had a different profile. It’s rarely appreciated that a major proportion of global mortality occurred in the Punjab, Bombay and other parts of Western India where grain exports to Britain and brutal requisitioning practices coincided with a major drought. Resultant food shortages drove scores of poor people to the edge of starvation. They became victims of a sinister synergy between malnutrition—which suppressed their immune response to infection and produced rampant bacterial—as well as viral pneumonia.
This history—especially the unknown consequences of interactions with malnutrition and existing infections—should warn us that COVID-19 might take a different and more deadly path in the dense, sickly slums of Africa and South Asia. With cases now appearing in Lagos, Kigali, Addis Ababa and Kinshasa, no one knows (and won’t know for a long time because of the absence of testing) how it may interact with local health conditions and diseases. Some have claimed that because the urban population of Africa is the world’s youngest, the pandemic will only have a mild impact. In light of the 1918 experience, this is a foolish extrapolation. As is the assumption that the pandemic, like seasonal flu, will recede with warmer weather.
The legacy of austerity
A year from now we may look back in admiration at China’s success in containing the pandemic but in horror at the United States’ failure. The inability of our institutions to keep Pandora’s Box closed, of course, is hardly a surprise. Since at least 2000 we’ve repeatedly seen breakdowns in frontline healthcare.
Both the 2009 and 2018 flu seasons, for instance, overwhelmed hospitals across the country, exposing the shocking shortage of hospital beds after years of profit-driven cutbacks of in-patient capacity. The crisis dates back to the corporate offensive that brought Ronald Reagan to power and converted leading Democrats into its neoliberal mouthpieces. According to the American Hospital Association, the number of in-patient hospital beds declined by an extraordinary 39% between 1981 and 1999. The purpose was to raise profits by increasing ‘census’ (the number of occupied beds). But management’s goal of 90% occupancy meant that hospitals no longer had the capacity to absorb patient influx during epidemics and medical emergencies.
In the new century, emergency medicine has continued to be downsized in the private sector by the ‘shareholder value’ imperative of increasing short-term dividends and profits, and in the public sector by fiscal austerity and reductions in state and federal preparedness budgets. As a result, there are only 45,000 ICU beds available to deal with the projected flood of serious and critical Corona cases. (By comparison, South Koreans have more than three times more beds available per thousand people than Americans.) According to an investigation by USA Today “only eight states would have enough hospital beds to treat the 1 million Americans 60 and over who could become ill with COVID-19.”
At the same time, Republicans have repulsed all efforts to rebuild safety nets shredded by the 2008 recession budget cuts. Local and state health departments—the vital first line of defense—have 25% less staff today than they did before Black Monday twelve years ago. Over the last decade, moreover, the CDC’s budget has fallen 10% in real terms. Under Trump, the fiscal shortfalls have only been exacerbated. The New York Times recently reported that “21 percent of local health departments reported reductions in budgets for the 2017 fiscal year.” Trump also closed the White House pandemic office, a directorate established by Obama after the 2014 Ebola outbreak to ensure a rapid and well-coordinated national response to new epidemics.
We are in the early stages of a medical version of Hurricane Katrina. After disinvesting in emergency medical preparedness at the same time that all expert opinion has recommended a major expansion of capacity, we lack basic low-tech supplies as well as respirators and emergency beds. National and regional stockpiles have been maintained at levels far below what is indicated by epidemic models. So the test kit debacle has coincided with a critical shortage of protective equipment for health workers. Militant nurses, our national social conscience, are making sure that we all understand the grave dangers created by inadequate stockpiles of protective supplies like N95 face masks. They also remind us that hospitals have become greenhouses for antibiotic-resistant superbugs such as S.aureus and C. difficile which may become major secondary killers in overcrowded hospital wards.
An unequal crisis
The outbreak has instantly exposed the stark class divide in American healthcare. Those with good health plans who can also work or teach from home are comfortably isolated provided they follow prudent safeguards. Public employees and other groups of unionized workers with decent coverage will have to make difficult choices between income and protection. Meanwhile, millions of low-wage service workers, farm employees, the unemployed and the homeless are being thrown to the wolves.
As we all know, universal coverage in any meaningful sense requires universal provision for paid sick days. A full 45% of the workforce is currently denied that right and virtually compelled to either transmit the infection or set an empty plate. Likewise, 14 states have refused to enact the provision of the Affordable Care Act that expands Medicaid to the working poor. That’s why nearly one in five Texans, for instance, lacks coverage.
The deadly contradictions of private healthcare in a time of plague are most visible in the for-profit nursing home industry which warehouses 1.5 million elderly Americans, most of them on Medicare. It is a highly competitive industry capitalized on low wages, understaffing and illegal cost-cutting. Tens of thousands die every year from long-term care facilities’ neglect of basic infection control procedures and from governments’ failure to hold management accountable for what can only be described as deliberate manslaughter. Many of these homes find it cheaper to pay fines for sanitary violations than to hire additional staff and provide them with proper training.
It's not surprising that the first epicenter of community transmission was the Life Care Center, a nursing home in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland. I spoke to Jim Straub, an old friend who is a union organizer in Seattle area nursing homes. He characterized the facility as “one of the worst staffed in the state” and the entire Washington nursing home system “as the most underfunded in the country—an absurd oasis of austere suffering in a sea of tech money.”
Straub pointed out that public health officials were overlooking the crucial factor that explains the rapid transmission of the disease from Life Care Center to nine other nearby nursing homes: “Nursing home workers in the priciest rental market in America universally work multiple jobs, usually at multiple nursing homes.” He says that authorities failed to find out the names and locations of these second jobs and thus lost all control over the spread of COVID-19.
Across the country, many more nursing homes will become coronavirus hotspots. Many workers will eventually choose the food bank over working under such conditions and stay home. In this case, the system could collapse—and we shouldn’t expect the National Guard to empty bedpans.
The way forward
The pandemic illustrates the case for universal health coverage and paid leave with every step of its deadly advance. While Joe Biden will likely face off against Trump in the general election, progressives must unite, as Bernie Sanders proposes, to win Medicare for All. The combined Sanders and Warren delegates have one role to play at the Milwaukee Democratic National Convention in July, but the rest of us have an equally important role in the streets, starting now with the fights against evictions, layoffs, and employers who refuse compensation to workers on leave.
But universal coverage and associated demands are only a first step. It’s disappointing that in the primary debates neither Sanders nor Warren highlighted Big Pharma’s abdication of the research and development of new antibiotics and antivirals. Of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies, 15 have totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers and treatments for male impotence are profit leaders, not the defenses against hospital infections, emergent diseases and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza—that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus’s surface proteins—has been a possibility for decades, but never deemed profitable enough to be a priority.
As the antibiotic revolution is rolled back, old diseases will reappear alongside novel infections and hospitals will become charnel houses. Even Trump can opportunistically rail against absurd prescription costs, but we need a bolder vision that looks to break up the drug monopolies and provide for the public production of lifeline medicines. (This used to be the case: during World War Two, Jonas Salk and other researchers were enlisted to develop the first flu vaccine.) As I wrote fifteen years ago in my book The Monster at Our Door—The Global Threat of Avian Flu:
Access to lifeline medicines, including vaccines, antibiotics, and antivirals, should be a human right, universally available at no cost. If markets can’t provide incentives to cheaply produce such drugs, then governments and non-profits should take responsibility for their manufacture and distribution. The survival of the poor must at all times be accounted a higher priority than the profits of Big Pharma.
The current pandemic expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare.
This requires an independent socialist design for human survival that includes—but goes beyond—a Second New Deal. Since the days of Occupy, progressives have successfully placed the struggle against income and wealth inequality on page one—a great achievement. But now socialists must take the next step and, with the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries as immediate targets, advocate social ownership and the democratization of economic power.
We must also make an honest evaluation of our political and moral weaknesses. The leftward evolution of a new generation and the return of the word ‘socialism’ to political discourse cheers us all, but there’s a disturbing element of national solipsism in the progressive movement that is symmetrical with the new nationalism. We talk only about the American working class and America’s radical history (perhaps forgetting that Eugene V. Debs was an internationalist to the core).
In addressing the pandemic, socialists should find every occasion to remind others of the urgency of international solidarity. Concretely we need to agitate our progressive friends and their political idols to demand a massive scaling up of the production of test kits, protective supplies and lifeline drugs for free distribution to poor countries. It’s up to us to ensure that ensuring universal, high-quality healthcare becomes foreign as well as domestic policy.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53773"><span class="small">Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone</span></a>
Sunday, 22 March 2020 13:13
Sheffield writes: "Kenny Rogers always knew when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away, when to run. The beloved country-pop stud died Friday night at 81, after a career full of hits that defined his silver-fox mystique."
Kenny Roger. (photo: Andre Csillag/Shutterstock)
Farewell, Kenny Rogers
By Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
22 March 20 PM
Rob Sheffield salutes the grizzled genius of the silver fox
enny Rogers always knew when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away, when to run. The beloved country-pop stud died Friday night at 81, after a career full of hits that defined his silver-fox mystique. Kenny was barely north of 40 when he sang his signature song, “The Gambler” in 1978, but he came on like a grizzled old sage who’d seen it all. His hits were full of sensually growled wisdom: walk away from trouble when you can, don’t fall in love with a dreamer, never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. At a bleak moment for the world, Kenny’s career stands as a reminder of how pop music’s communal pleasures can be a light in dark times. He truly decorated our lives.
It’s tough to choose just one highlight of K-Hova’s great career, but you have to go for his 1983 duet with Dolly Parton “Islands in the Stream,” written by the Bee Gees. It’s the ultimate in middle-aged chemistry, a couple of frisky seniors who can’t keep their paws off each other and don’t care who knows it. The way they purr those “ah haaah”’s. The way Kenny leers the weirdly erotic metaphor: “I set out to get you with a fine-tooth comb.” Last fall, I saw two friends karaoke it minutes after their wedding, and “Islands in the Stream” felt like the ritual that made the marriage official. No wonder Eighties kids presumed these two must be a couple. Nope — just pals. As he told Rolling Stone in 2014, “We just flirted with each other and loved every minute of it.”
Kenny’s career has a load of surprising parallels with Leonard Cohen: They both aged so well because they never really sounded young. Kenny wasn’t quite convincing as a Sixties hippie, despite his psychedelic bubblegum hit “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” He didn’t become a bona fide star — the Kenny Rogers we all knew and loved — until his 1977 breakthrough “Lucille.” It was a shock to hear “Lucille” on Top 40 radio at the time — this was a gruff adult, not a kid, and this was no romantic love ballad. Kenny picks up a woman at a sleazy Toledo bar, right in front of her husband, who sings the chorus: “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille / With four hungry children and a crop in the field.”
Kenny shrugs it off, orders more whiskey, takes Lucille to a motel, but finds he can’t, ah, perform because he’s haunted by her ex’s words. This grim little tale did not resemble anything else on the radio at the time, and it was a sensation. I was surprised my parents liked it; they were surprised I liked it. My sisters and I spent countless hours arguing whether it was “four hundred children.” This guy had been around — his current album was called Ten Years of Gold — but as far as the pop audience was concerned, “Lucille” was a debut from a new voice.
Kenny got the message — after that, his songs were big on plots, big on mid-life drama, big on world-weary perspective. When he sang love ballads, they were about weathered couples: “You Decorated My Life,” “Through the Years,” “Love the World Away.” He made TV movies based on The Gambler and Coward of the County. He also made the 1982 Six Pack, as a stock-car racer who adapts a wacky crew of orphans, including Diane Lane, with one of his best hits, “Love Will Turn You Around.” His 1983 Eyes That See in the Dark — source of “Islands in the Stream” — is an underrated gem; it was clearly a huge influence on Leonard Cohen’s career-changing synth-pop makeover on his 1988, I’m Your Man.
Like everyone else in the Eighties, Prince was a fan; he wrote a song for him, “You’re My Love,” which Kenny sang on his album They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To. Kenny was a hip-hop fan — as he told Rolling Stone in 2001, “Rap is communication. It’s the ultimate story song.” The respect was mutual. Bone Thugs N Harmony turned “The Gambler” into one of 1999’s biggest, best, and weirdest rap hits, “Ghetto Cowboy,” chanting, “You better count your money” over the harmonica loop.
Kenny and Dolly kept it real to the end, as in their excellent 2013 duet “You Can’t Make Old Friends.” He specialized in singing with tough women like Dottie West (“Every Time Two Fools Collide”) or Kim Carnes (“Don’t Fall In Love With A Dreamer”), though even a fan like me has to admit he and Sheena Easton bit off more Bob Seger than they could chew in “We’ve Got Tonight.” But he sounded right in sync with Paul Simon — “life, the greatest gift of aaaall” — in “We Are the World.” “Some of the highlights of my life were the duets,” he told Rolling Stone. “I sing better on duets than I do by myself.”
My personal favorite Kenny moment might be his Song of the Year medley at the 1980 Grammys — a surreal seven-minute duet with Donna Summer. They begin with “Reunited,” then segue into all the nominees: “I Will Survive,” “What a Fool Believes,” Billy Joel’s “Honesty,” Kenny’s own “She Believes in Me.” Donna looks miserable, but Kenny’s having the time of his life. He can’t keep a straight face when he blows the high notes in Earth, Wind and Fire’s “After the Love Is Gone.” But he reaches peak Kenny Smoothness when he croons the yacht-rock soul of the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute.” It sums up everything that made him Kenny Rogers.
His death comes at a strange, scary, and confusing time for the world, when many of us feel trapped in our quarantine isolation chambers. (Hearing Dolly and Kenny sing “this could be the year for the real thing” in 2020 is…a lot.) So it’s the perfect moment to celebrate his career as an example of how pop thrives on shared public joy. Kenny was the epitome of a star who belonged to everyone. Hell, even the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg cited What About Me as one of his favorite albums of 1984.
Despite the sad news of his passing, he inspired the cheeriest group-text conversations I’ve had all week — it turns out everybody in my family has a different favorite Kenny hit. For him to pass right now — he really did pick a fine time to leave — is a salutary reminder of how even the most trivial-seeming pop music can bring people together at times when it’s badly needed. We need that Kenny energy now more than ever. Just like the Gambler, even at the end, Kenny Rogers left us with an ace to keep.
FOCUS: Trump's Coronavirus Reaction Reminds of 'Hunters' Nazi Conspiracy
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38164"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter</span></a>
Sunday, 22 March 2020 12:04
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "The president's blame-the-black-guy rhetoric and foot-dragging behavior have the same result as the Amazon show's gleefully unrepentant Nazis', and his racist failures and lack of leadership will be his legacy."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (photo: Getty Images)
Trump's Coronavirus Reaction Reminds of 'Hunters' Nazi Conspiracy
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter
22 March 20
The president’s blame-the-black-guy rhetoric and foot-dragging behavior have the same result as the Amazon show's gleefully unrepentant Nazis', and his racist failures and lack of leadership will be his legacy.
n Amazon’s enthralling thriller series Hunters, leftover German Nazis from World War II are living the high life in America while planning a Fourth Reich built around a biological attack aimed at killing the poor, particularly people of color. Race- and class-cleansing made easy.
Far-fetched liberal posturing? Not if you’ve followed the Trump administration’s blame-the-black-guy rhetoric and foot-dragging behavior in response to the coronavirus pandemic, The scenes from White House pressers remind of the gleefully unrepentant Nazis in Hunters. Because for almost two months, Trump, like a sneering Bond supervillain, allowed the virus to spread knowing that poor communities and people of color would pay the greatest cost, economically and health-wise. It wasn’t until it started affecting the Mar-a-Lago crowd and their businesses (and, therefore, his re-election chances) that the president started to take it seriously.
On March 5, seven weeks after the first death from the virus in China, Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the Trump administration’s response team, said, “With regard to the cost, let me be very clear: HHS has designated the coronavirus test as an essential health benefit. That means, by definition, it’s covered in the private health insurance of every American, as well as covered by Medicare and Medicaid.” As health experts have pointed out, this statement isn’t “clear” because policies don’t have to cover the testing. When a reporter asked Pence whether the testing would include the uninsured, Pence walked off without answering as his press secretary Katie Miller scolded, “Screaming for the camera isn’t going to get you anywhere!” Tell that to the 30 million uninsured in the U.S.
Testing the poor was not a priority even though they, due to the accompanying health problems resulting from poverty and their reduced access to medical care, are more at risk than the middle- and upper-classes who are prioritized for testing. Nor is staying home from work an option for those who live on hourly wages, who must now choose between earning money for rent and food or possibly getting infected and spreading the disease to loved ones. Add to that the closure of schools, which creates a double burden for lower income families: They lose the benefit of school meals, and they are the group least likely to be able to stay at home to care for their children.
Trump did not only delay public health efforts, he deliberately sabotaged them through his lies and actions. Most egregiously, to save money, in 2018 he eliminated the Pandemic Response Team that President Obama had set up in 2014 to fight the Ebola threat. As government health experts warned the public to not shake hands, Trump deliberately and defiantly shook hands with his supporters. As the death toll around the world rose, on March 9 Trump downplayed the coronavirus with a tweet comparing it to the common flu, which medical experts said is a bad comparison because the coronavirus is 10 times more lethal and we have no vaccine or treatments for it. Also, CDC studies indicate that the common flu has a higher mortality rate among the poor than other economic groups. So, no reason to be alarmed in Trump Tower.
Amid the public outrage over his lack of leadership, Trump began to distribute blame to his usual targets. Non-white people. For Trump, the blame falls directly on a black man, the Chinese and the Mexicans. At his March 13 news conference he declared, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Instead, he pointed the finger at Barack Obama without any evidence. Trump will never get past the fact that Obama was loved because of his intelligence, compassion, humor and humanity. Trump isn’t loved but rather adulated, the way cult members mindlessly follow a stern dictatorial father-figure who tells them what to do and think. Like, well, Nazis. When Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters..” his followers took that as a badge of honor rather than a Mark of Cain to feel shame over. He was proudly describing them as people who would abandon all honor, all morality, even the rule of law that this country stands for just to bask in his orange glow.
The Trump administration and his Republican minions also took to publicly calling the coronavirus the “Chinese flu” or the “Wuhan flu” in an effort to blame nonwhites. At a Feb. 28 rally (yes, despite his own experts recommending that people not gather in large crowds, he held a rally), he touted the border wall as necessary to keep out the virus: “We’ll have 500 miles [of the Southern border fence] built by very early next year some time, so, one of the reasons the numbers are so good” — a reference to why we didn’t have a higher number of cases at that point, which he attributed to the unbuilt wall rather than the fact that we weren’t testing many people. “We will do everything in our power to keep the infection and those carrying the infection from entering our country. … Whether it’s the virus that we’re talking about or many other public health threats. … Now you see it. With the coronavirus, you see it.” So far, no cases of coronavirus in the U.S. have been linked to anyone entering the U.S. from Mexico.
Ironically, it was the NBA, not the USA, that led the way for responsible business practice by suspending its season. Perhaps they were more sensitive to the needs of all Americans because 76 percent of their players are people of color.
Comparing politicians to Nazis has become a favorite pastime in America, to the point that we have diluted the meaning. Everybody can’t be a Nazi just because they disagree with you. They have to exhibit a will to exalt the fortunes of their “people" — based on race, religion, class, political party, etc. — above the welfare of others, even to the point of exterminating all others.
The Nazis in Hunters are powerful people in business and government, devoted to protecting only those they deem worthwhile humans. The government’s early response to coronavirus was not a Nazi conspiracy, but it was "Nazi-adjacent," meaning that the same attitudes regarding race and class were being employed in determining who’s worthy of government protection. Despite the limp efforts of Pence and his administration lackeys to now praise Trump for his mythological early and decisive actions, his actual failure as a leader will forever be Trump’s legacy of shame.
FOCUS: The Media Must Stop Live-Broadcasting Trump's Dangerous, Destructive Coronavirus Briefings
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43579"><span class="small">Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post</span></a>
Sunday, 22 March 2020 11:02
Sullivan writes: "More and more each day, President Trump is using his daily briefings as a substitute for the campaign rallies that have been forced into extinction by the spread of the novel coronavirus."
Supporters react as Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
The Media Must Stop Live-Broadcasting Trump's Dangerous, Destructive Coronavirus Briefings
By Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post
22 March 20
ore and more each day, President Trump is using his daily briefings as a substitute for the campaign rallies that have been forced into extinction by the spread of the novel coronavirus.
These White House sessions — ostensibly meant to give the public critical and truthful information about this frightening crisis — are in fact working against that end.
Rather, they have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members. They come in search of life-or-death information, but here’s what they get from him instead:
? Self-aggrandizement. When asked how he would grade his response to the crisis, the president said, “I’d rate it a 10.” Absurd on its face, of course, but effective enough as blatant propaganda
? Media-bashing. When NBC News’s Peter Alexander lobbed him a softball question in Friday’s briefing — “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” — Trump went on a bizarre attack. “I say, you’re a terrible reporter,” the president said, launching into one of his trademark “fake news” rants bashing Alexander’s employer. (Meanwhile, he has also found time during these news briefings to lavish praise on sycophantic pro-Trump media like One America News Network, whose staffer — I can’t call her a reporter — invited him to justify his xenophobic talk of a “Chinese virus” by asking rhetorically if he considers the phrase “Chinese food” racist.)
? Exaggeration and outright lies. Trump has claimed that there are plenty of tests available (there aren’t); that Google is “very quickly” rolling out a nationwide website to help manage coronavirus treatment (the tech giant was blindsided by the premature claim); that the drug chloroquine, approved to treat malaria, is a promising cure for the virus and “we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.” (It hasn’t been approved for this use, and there is no evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness in fighting the virus.)
Trump is doing harm and spreading misinformation while working for his own partisan political benefit — a naked attempt to portray himself as a wartime president bravely leading the nation through a tumultuous time, the FDR of the 21st century.
The press — if it defines its purpose as getting truthful, useful, non-harmful information to the public, as opposed to merely juicing its own ratings and profits — must recognize what is happening and adjust accordingly. (And that, granted, is a very big “if.”)
Business as usual simply doesn’t cut it. Minor accommodations, like fact-checking the president’s statements afterward, don’t go nearly far enough to counter the serious damage this man is doing to the public’s well-being.
Radical change is necessary: The cable networks and other news organizations that are taking the president’s briefings as live feeds should stop doing so.
Should they cover the news that’s produced in them? Of course. Thoroughly and relentlessly — with context and fact-checking built in to every step and at every stage.
“There is a very real possibility that in broadcasting these press conferences live or in quickly publishing and blasting out his words in mobile alerts, we are actively misinforming our audience,” Alex Koppelman, managing editor of CNN Business, wrote in an email for the network’s Reliable Sources newsletter.
Koppelman stopped short of overtly calling for the radical solution. That’s not so for Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who wrote on his PressThink blog that the media needs to switch into “emergency mode”for covering Trump and clearly communicate that change to its readers and viewers.
“We are not obliged to assist him in misinforming the American public about the spread of the virus, and what is actually being done by his government,” Rosen wrote.
Rather than covering Trump live, he recommended, among other things, that the media should “attend carefully to what he says” and subject it to verification before blasting it out to the public.
It’s important to remember how much Trump’s tune has changed on the coronavirus, from blithely dismissive to self-importantly serious.
This is what he was saying about the virus in public as recently as Feb. 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
Will people remember the depths of his mendacity and hold him accountable?
“I’m worried about our collective memory when it comes to this,” Charlie Warzel of the New York Times wrote on Saturday. It is this initial lack of action that will cost lives months down the road, he noted. Therefore, “accountability will mean not giving into recency bias when this ends and remembering how it got so bad in the first place.”
There’s a strong counter-argument to be made, of course: that the press shouldn’t be in the business of shielding the public from the president’s statements — no matter how misleading, xenophobic or damaging.
It’s a persuasive argument, and one I wish I could still believe in.
But Trump has proved, time after time, that he doesn’t care about truth, that he puts his financial and political self-interest above that of the public, and that he has no understanding of the role of the press in a democracy. And now lives are on the line.
The news media, at this dangerous and unprecedented moment in world history, must put the highest priority on getting truthful information to the public.
Taking Trump’s press conferences as a live feed works against that core purpose.
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