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Covid State of Things
It is important to stop every once in awhile and sum up where things are, to lay down some breadcrumbs to refer back to when someone asks “How did we end up here?”
In many ways, the story is the same story. The message of 9/11 was give up freedom for safety, trust the government, and treat your neighbors as potential threats. Now 20 years later, you realize you went along with it because you were scared. The message of Covid is to give up more freedom for safety, trust the government, and treat your neighbors as potential threats. Fear is infectious and now we’re here.
As a young David Petraeus asked early in the Iraq War, tell me how this ends. What is the Covid endgame? Victory was once defined as making testing available to all. Then lock downs to free up ventilators. Then vaccinations available to all. No one knows anymore what the goal is but some sort of return-to-normal with 100 percent vaccination and 0 percent infection is as real as a democratic Afghanistan once seemed.
What started as “two weeks to flatten the curve” has metastasized into 18 months of lockdowns, masks mandates, and vax passports. Most of what has already happened was dismissed as conspiracy theories less than a year ago. Our society — work, education, shopping, entertainment, socialization — has been fundamentally changed by decree, emergency powers taken by government not given by the people. Each of the 50 states is its own world now, with its own rules.
We are still somewhat free to move from one to another, though flight may soon be only for the vaccinated. Hawaii has previously closed its borders, then opened them only to people who vaxxed or tested. It became the first state to prohibit Americans from visiting a part of America. The state is looking at publishing the names of those who should be in quarantine so that their neighbors can inform on them. Hawaii also became the first state to arrest American citizens for traveling inside America. Two men are currently locked up for trying to enter the state unvaxxed and untested. Their sentence was 10 days in jail, literal quarantine at gunpoint. The understood right of Americans to travel freely among the states has stood the tests of time, war, and economic crisis, only to stumble on a virus. Such horizontal federalism threatens to stop the Constitution at certain state borders.
Hawaii is just one state. However, the new Biden travel regulations will soon require American citizens returning from abroad to undergo some sort of vax and testing regime. For the first time, Americans will need to demonstrate something other than citizenship to exercise the right to return to their own country. Biden’s plan tasks the airlines with determining overseas who can get on a plane to America, citizen or not. That move is a critical departure. The right to travel has been long understood to be a part of the 5A liberty of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process. Existing quarantine laws (some of which date, ironically, to leprosy scares from when Hawaii was a U.S. territory) required the decision to admit a (sick) American to be made at a U.S. port of entry by a U.S. government official, assuring some modicum of due process. By out sourcing enforcement to an airline clerk in Paris, as with outsourcing censorship to Twitter, Biden disposes of Constitutional protections.
Those who ask to see the science behind decrees (why 50 percent capacity at bars and not 63 percent or 41?) are canceled, shunned, and mocked. How was it determined six feet of social distancing, not four or 12, is best? No one seems to know. And why doesn’t the size of the room and its airflow matter? Can’t talk about that. Oppose some new rule however absurd and be labeled a child killer by your neighbors. The acts of violence connected with masks and duct taping passengers on airplanes are considered ends that justify the means and are growing. One progressive voice advocates treating the unvaccinated last at the hospital (the writer, a gay man, isn’t old enough to remember when people demanded gays not get AIDS treatment because they chose sodomy.) Are masks effective? It doesn’t matter, because it was never just about how effective masks are against the virus. What matters are masks are very effective as a entry-level test of compliance, then later as a symbol, you know, like armbands.
The sad thing is how quickly thinking ended. Our society leaves no space for people who choose to get vaccinated while at the same time worry about the increasing government control. Many people opposed to masks are not anti-science, they are opposed to politically-charged public policy. There is no chance to look into additional virus care without it ending up as a Maddow piece about slack jawed yokels eating horse suppositories. Something can by itself be a life-saving medicine and an instrument of social control depending on how it is used. When rational thinking is frowned upon and everything becomes fodder for frightened zealots the pitchforks are not far away.If you’ve ever been conned, you know the feeling. That tickle in your stomach when you realize the guy who took your money is not coming back from just around the corner with your knock-off Rolex. You wait around a while, but at some point you get it. You’ve been taken. That’s where we are. There is no ambiguity. This is all happened. It took only months without a shot being fired. The Nazis were amateurs.Given how what were dismissed as conspiracy theories only months ago are now policy, it is tempting to take a self-righteous victory lap. We were right. But all that has been finally made clear is the what. The most important question is always why. Cui bono, who benefits?
The Democrats clearly surfed Covid fear to beat Trump. But Biden shows no real interest in following through, assuming the role of tyrant, squeezing Covid for every grand plan he has on his list, as Bush did with playing 9/11 into invading everywhere. Joe’s crimes against liberty add up to something significant, but they have been implemented haphazardly. He never created, for example, a massive overgrinding Covid Security Agency like TSA. Biden and the Dems just wanted to ride a successful vax summer into the upcoming midterms. Other small thinkers like Andrew Cuomo, who wanted to use his new public image as the Trump Covid Slayer into a White House bid were taken care of as needed, much like Bernie was disappeared.
The flow has all been one direction, more control and less liberty. If the threat is so obvious, why has this needed to be so coercive? So here comes the theory we’ll look back on to judge in full: there are powerful forces at work, by design or by luck when a door opened. Covid has not been about small political moves, it has always been about massive societal change.
Education, the absolute only route for advancement out of the 99 percent (albeit not guaranteed) ceased to exist for many, who either stopped attending or merely suffered through thrown together online “classes.” The average IQ of American children fell 22 points during the pandemic and suicide rates exploded. As the pandemic took hold, more than a million children did not enroll in school. Many of them were the most vulnerable: five-year-olds in low-income neighborhoods. Think lack of diversity is a problem? Try ignorance.
Many more were among those tricked into joining Darwin’s club by refusing vaccinations for the dumbest reasons. Large numbers of blacks were convinced the Covid vaccine was a massive medical experiment with them as the guinea pigs (70 percent of black New Yorkers and over half of Latinos aren’t vaxxed; BLM plans an “uprising” against vax mandates) Rural whites were convinced the vaccines contain tracking microchips or were otherwise toxic. Liberals were blunted by Kamala Harris’ claim she would never trust a vaccine developed under Trump. Large swatches of the less useful in society (“deplorables”) are either dead, dying, or effectively mandated off the playing field forever. Someone else now controls who works, who gets educated, who lives.
Economic disparity and homelessness increased. If you are allowed to work (from home) you assume more of the costs of hiring you, like providing office space. More and more people are dependent on debt, with their noses held just above water (i.e., they can make minimum payments) by government money: stimulus checks, unemployment, the whole A-Z of benefits. What little the wealthy pay in taxes is recycled through the poor back upward. Pathetically in the world’s last superpower, the majority of young people now say YouTuber or influencer are their top job choices (true.) Start a GoFundMe and make one frozen burrito last two meals are their budget strategies (kidding, sort of.) The police don’t create safety as much as they manages the results of the inequality by force.
Can’t travel. Can’t work. Can’t go to school. Can’t make medical decisions. Can’t interact with neighbors (they’re dangerous.) Can’t walk into places without government permission (you’re dangerous.) Can’t depend on Constitutional protections in an emergency. Meanwhile the very wealthiest own spaceships. Naw, can’t be.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Corporate Censorship Brought Us the America I Always Feared
When I was in Iran earlier this year, the government there blocked Twitter, deciding for a whole nation what they can not see. In America, Twitter purges users, deciding for a whole nation what they can not see. It matters little whose hand is on the switch, the end result is the same. This is the America I always feared I’d see.
Speech in America is an unalienable right, and goes as deep into the concept of a free society as any idea can. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the right flowing from his notion of a Creator, not from government. Jefferson’s 18th century invocation is understood now as less that free speech is heaven-sent and more that it is something existing above government. And so the argument the First Amendment applies only to government and not to all public speaking (including private platforms like Twitter) is thus both true and irrelevant, and the latter is more important.
The government remains a terrifying threat to free speech. An Espionage Act prosecution against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange will create precedent for use against any mainstream journalist. The war on whistleblowers which started under Obama continues under Trump. Media are forced to register as propaganda agents. Universities restrict controversial speakers. The Trump administration no doubt will break the record (77%) for redacting or denying access to government files under the Freedom of Information Act.
But there is another threat to freedom of speech now, corporate censorship. It is often dressed up with NewSpeak terms like deplatforming, restricting hate speech, or simply applying Terms of Service. Corporations always did what they wanted with speech. Our protection against corporate overreach used to rely on an idea Americans once held dear, enshrined as “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend your right to say it.” The concept was core to a democracy: everyone supports the right of others to throw ideas into the marketplace independent. An informed people would sort through it all, and bad ideas would be pushed away by better ones. That system more or less worked for 240 years.
For lack of a more precise starting point, the election of Donald Trump did away with near-universal agreement on defending the right to speak without defending the content, driven by a belief too much free speech helped Trump get elected. Large numbers of Americans began not just to tolerate, but to demand censorship. They wanted universities to deplatform speakers they did not agree with, giggling over the fact the old-timey 1A didn’t apply and there was nothing “conservatives” could do. They expressed themselves in violence, demanding censorship by “punching Nazis.” Such brownshirt-like violence was endorsed by The Nation, once America’s clearest voice for freedom. The most startling change came within the American Civil Liberties Union, who enshrined the “defend the right, not the speech” concept in the 1970s when it defended the free speech rights of Nazis, and went on to defend the speech rights of white supremacists in Charlottesville.
Not so much anymore. The ACLU now applies a test to the free speech cases it will defend, weighing their impact on other rights (for example, the right to say the N-word versus the rights of POC.) The ACLU in 2018 is siding with those who believe speech can be secondary to other political goals. Censorship has a place, says the ACLU, when it serves what they believe is a greater good.
A growing segment of public opinion isn’t just in favor of this, it demands it. So when years-old tweets clash with 2018 definitions of racism and sexism, companies fire employees. Under public pressure, Amazon removed “Nazi paraphernalia and other far-right junk” from its online store. It was actually just some nasty Halloween gear and Confederate flag merch, but the issue is not the value of the products — that’s part of any free speech debate — it’s corporate censorship being used to stifle debate by literally in this case pulling things out of the marketplace.
Alex Jones’ InfoWars was deplatformed off download sites where it has been available for years, including Apple, YouTube (owned by Google), Spotify, and Amazon, for promoting “hate speech.” Huffington Post wondered why more platforms, such as Instagram, haven’t done away with Jones and his hate speech.
That term, hate speech, clearly not prohibited by the Supreme Court, is an umbrella word now used by censorship advocates for, well, basically anything they don’t want others to be able to listen to or watch. It is very flexible and thus very dangerous. As during the McCarthy-era in the 1950s when one needed only to label something “Communist” to have it banned, so it is today with the new mark of “hate speech.” The parallels are chilling — it was in the McCarthy-era Hollywood created its infamous blacklists, actors and writers who could not work because of their political beliefs.
Twitter is perhaps the most infamous platform to censor its content. The site bans advertising from Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik. Twitter suspends the accounts of those who promote (what it defines as) hate and violence, “shadow bans” others to limit their audience, and tweaks its trending topics to push certain political ideas and downplay others. It regularly purges users and bans “hateful symbols.” There are near-daily demands by increasingly organized groups calling on Twitter to censor specific users, with Trump at the top of that list. The point is always the same: to limit what ideas you can be exposed to and narrow debate.
Part of the 2018 problem is the trust people place in “good companies” like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. Anthropomorphizing them as Jeff, and Zuck, and @jack is popular, along with a focus on their “values.” It seems to make sense, especially now when many of the people making decisions on corporate censorship are the same age and hold the same political views as those demanding they do it.
Of course people age, values shift, what seems good to block today might change. But the main problem is companies exist to make money and will do what they need to do to make money. You can’t count on them past that. Handing over free speech rights to an entity whose core purpose has nothing to do with free speech means they will quash ideas when they conflict with what they are really about. People who gleefully celebrate the fact that @jack who runs Twitter is not held back by the 1A and can censor at will seem to believe he will always yield his power in the way they want him to.
Google has a slogan reading “do no evil.” Yet in China Google will soon deploy Dragonfly, a version of its search engine that will meet Beijing’s demands for censorship by blocking websites on command. Of course in China they don’t call it hate speech, they call it anti-societal speech, and the propaganda Google will block isn’t from Russian bots but from respected global media. In the U.S. Google blocks users from their own documents saved in Drive if the service feels the documents are “abusive.” Backin China Apple removes apps from its store on command of the government in return for market access. Amazon, who agreed to remove hateful merch from its store in the U.S., the same week confirmed it is “unwaveringly committed to the U.S. government and the governments we work with around the world” using its AI and facial recognition technology to spy on their own people. Faced with the loss of billions of dollars, as was the case for Google and Apple in China, what will corporations do in America?
Once upon a time an easy solution to corporate censorship was to take one’s business elsewhere. The 2018 problem is with the scale of platforms like Amazon, near global monopolies all. Pretending Amazon, which owns the Washington Post, and with the reach to influence elections, is just another company that sells things is to pretend the role of unfettered debate in a free society is outdated. Yeah, you can for now still go through hoops to download stuff outside the Apple store or Google Play, but those platforms more realistically control access to your device. Censored on Twitter? No problem big guy, go try Myspace, and maybe Bing will notice you. Technology and market dominance changed the nature of censorship so free speech is as much about finding an audience as it is about finding a place to speak. Corporate censorship is at the cutting edge of a reality targeting both speakers (Twitter suspends someone) and listeners (Apple won’t post that person’s videos made off-platform). Ideas need to be discoverable to enter the debate; in 1776 you went to the town square. In 2018 it’s Twitter.
In the run up to the midterm elections, Senator Chris Murphy, ironically in a tweet, demanded social media censor more aggressively for the “survival of our democracy,” implying those companies can act as proxies for those still held back by the First Amendment. We already know the companies involved can censor. The debate is over what happens when they do.
A PERSONAL NOTE: Some readers are aware I have been permanently suspended from Twitter as @wemeantwell. This followed exchanges with several mainstream journalists over their support for America’s wars and unwillingness to challenge government lies. Twitter sent an auto-response saying what I wrote “harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence someone else’s voice.” I don’t think I did any of that, and I wish you didn’t have to accept my word on it. I wish instead you could read what I wrote and decide for yourself. But Twitter won’t allow it. Twitter says you cannot read and make up your own mind. They have in fact eliminated all the things I have ever written there over seven years, disappeared me down the Memory Hole. That’s why all censorship is wrong; it takes the power to decide what is right and wrong away from you and gives it to someone else.
I lost my career at the State Department because I spoke out as a whistleblower against the Iraq War. I’ve now been silenced, again, for speaking out, this time by a corporation. I am living in the America I always feared.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Excerpt from Ghosts of Tom Joad
My current book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percentis a complex novel telling the story of America from the end of World War II through the present day.
You’ll travel through the economic boom years and the rise of a robust middle class, fueled by union wages and industrialization, peaking in the mid-1970s. The decline of all those factors is the second half of the book, the story of how we became a nation defined by the working poor, the 99 percent.
Here’s what one reviewer said:
I wasn’t ready for this one. I guess I was expecting something a little more MSNBC. You know, the kind of book that contains nothing but glowing praise for the Occupy movement and endless tirades about how shopping at Wal-Mart makes you an evil person. The kind of book that you can almost tell was written on an iMac computer over three weeks in a Starbucks café by a dude wearing those thick hipster glasses.
Man, I wasn’t even close. “Ghosts of Tom Joad” is a heartbreaking tale of one man against the world, or rather the world against one man. I don’t think you can call it an epic since it takes place almost entirely within a small town in rust-belt Ohio, but it’s definitely raw, gritty, and painful. The narrator pulls no punches when it comes to describing his downward spiral into underemployment and homelessness, and the novel that results is heartbreakingly authentic.
The beginning of the book shows a simpler time for the main character, Earl. His boyhood is not idyllic, however, and the scene excerpted below foreshadows the problems he will experience in the New Economy.
Excerpt from Ghosts of Tom Joad
Jeff’s old man kept a small boat. It had seen better days, floating as much out of stubbornness any more than anything else. Seats two safely. Rides low in the water. We’d take it out on the river from time to time, drinking beer when we could, horsing around.
It was a heavy, humid Ohio night, still then soft around us. Car sounds far off. The current was light and the river half dry in summer, so we figured loading the four of us into a boat made for two wouldn’t be a problem. Then we met Pam, this girl Tim sort of liked and Tim made us take her along. Tim had it on good authority she had lost her virginity already and was willing to lose it some more. She had a Farrah ’do, as this was the late 1970s.
We got the boat into the water and climbed in well enough. Pam devoted herself to worrying about five people in a boat that might safely hold two. Pam was right, like girls then usually were about those kind of things. The boat drifted along with the current, ending up in the center of the river two beers later. We could see a few lights reflecting off the water, pretty, and I guess that’s what inspired Tim to try and put his arm around Pam, who was less inspired by the romantic scene and shrugged him off a bit too hard. The boat rocked and water came over the shallow sides. I was laughing, and so was Jeff, when the whole thing flipped over, dumping the five of us into the river. I couldn’t touch the bottom, but it was easy enough to doggy paddle over to the far bank. I looked over, laughing, at Tim, Rich and a really unhappy Pam. Her Farrah ’do was ruined. The boat was gone.
So was Jeff.
Tim and Pam went off looking for him down the river bank, thinking maybe he swam off that way. Rich heard him first – Jeff, in the water, shouting for us. I figured he was kidding around like always, pretending to drown in eight feet of warm water, when I saw Rich dive back in. I went right after him, and we reached Jeff in a few wet splashes. Rich grabbed him first, and we pulled him over to the bank. He was crying, snot all down his face, white as Wonder Bread. He had been wearing his heavy work boots, lace-ups, and they’d filled with water, pulling him under. Jeff was a strong kid back then, and was able to claw his way up to the surface and shout, but if Rich had not gone in after him, he’d have drowned that night while we watched.
It was either Jeff’s earlier laughing or Jeff’s recent shouting that brought out the cops. One fat one came up to me and said, “Son, how many kids were in that boat?” And I said, truthfully, “Sir, there were five of us.” Me, Jeff and Rich were right there. Tim and Pam hadn’t come back, likely seeing the cop car lights and running. Five of us, just like I said.
“Don’t worry son, we’ll find your friends.” The cop put me in the back of his car with a blanket, right before that fire truck came and all those men waded into the shallow part of the river. Flashlights were swinging criss-cross over the water and the men would yell for a bit, then tell each other to “Be quiet and just listen for a minute dammit, there’s two kids out there somewhere. We ain’t gonna let them die for no reason –”
I figured out the reason. When the now tomato-faced fat cop came over to see how I was doing, I told him that Tim and Pam probably weren’t coming back. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Not if I can help it, son.” I told him Tim and Pam weren’t in the river. Nobody drowned. Nobody was missing. Tim and Pam had just run away. When he asked me how many in the boat a first, I didn’t want to lie and so I said, “Five officer, honest.”
We heard Tim never got to make out with Pam that night, but he walked her home and she said maybe she’d think about it. It was the first time I realized you could die without getting old first, and that stuck with me.
You can buy Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Ghosts of Tom Joad Now Available for Preorder on Amazon
I’m quite happy to announce that my new book Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent is now available on Amazon for preorder. Click on the book cover to the right, or Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent
As a special thank you to blog readers, if you send me an email at info (at) ghostsoftomjoad.com saying you preordered the book, I will forward to you a bonus essay explaining the origins of the book, some background on the main characters (no spoilers!), other books on similar themes I found informative in my writing and links to additional resources on line. Think of this as a kind of bonus extra, like with Blue-Ray DVDs.
And after you’ve read the book when it is released next year, I will also be happy to schedule a complimentary Skype session with your book club, and/or with your local library or school, for a discussion. Other ideas are also welcome.
Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent is a good story, but with a conscience. Thank you for preordering it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
“We Meant Well” Breaks into Amazon Top 100
My thanks to all of you. We Meant Well just broke into the Amazon Top 100 books, a sort of big deal. Amazon adjusts its ratings minute-by-minute, so this is a fleeting honor, but very, very cool nonetheless.
Check it out for yourself if you like on Amazon.
Thank you!
Peter
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Amazon “Look Inside” Preview Now Online
For those thinking to buy the book, Amazon has now activated the “Look Inside” feature, meaning you can browse the contents of the book, look over the table of contents and more.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Public Service
From an Amazon.com reader:
To the extent that Peter Van Buren’s book brings to light wasteful, ineffective and counterproductive undertakings by the U.S. government in Iraq, it must be regarded as a public service. Surely even the most ardent supporters of ousting Saddam Hussein and establishing democracy in that country would want to know whether we are actually achieving our government’s stated objectives — and if not, why not? Kudos to Mr. Van Buren for having the courage to call it as he saw it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
