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Nina Burleigh, Pandemic Anti-Rights Syndrome

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This country is increasingly unmasked in hell. After all, the wealthiest nation on Earth has just hit one million deaths from Covid-19 (and the real number could be higher yet). Meanwhile, globally, according to the World Health Organization, the pandemic death toll has now reached at least 15 million and it isn’t over yet. Not faintly. New variants of Covid-19 continue to arise and there could be more (and possibly worse) to come. In fact, in the U.S., for the first time in a while, the numbers for Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are once again increasing as the latest subvariant of the disease, BA.2, spreads across a country that’s neither vaccinated nor boosted enough and is now unmasking in a major way.

I live in New York City where case numbers are rising rapidly and yet — though this old guy continues to mask — every day in stores, on the subway, wherever I go, I see ever fewer masked people around me. And mind you, on the subject of masking, New Yorkers are relatively good. A friend of mine who recently returned from Texas told me that just about nobody where he went was masked anymore.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. As an NPR analysis showed last December, almost three times as many people died from Covid-19 in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump as in those that did so for Joe Biden (and the higher the Trump vote, the worse those numbers got). That should tell you plenty about the subject TomDispatch regular Nina Burleigh, author of Virus, a superb book on the pandemic, faces today: how the Trumpist right-wing has used masking — think: Covid exhaustion — and other pandemic issues to promote its extremist views.  (Of course, the recent White House Correspondents Association Dinner, where 2,600 journalists, celebrities, and political types, including the president, packed unmasked into a ballroom in what became a pandemic super-spreader, shows that you don’t have to love Donald Trump to act stupidly.)

As Burleigh suggests, we’re all Covid-exhausted by now, but what a shame if that were to lead not just to the deaths of ever more Americans but of a political system, too. Tom

America Unmasked

Did the Long Pandemic Spawn a New Kind of Repression?

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Last month, not long after Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the transportation mask mandate was illegal, I flew from New York City to Miami. Videos of airplane passengers in midflight ripping off their masks and cheering with joy had already gone viral following the judge’s ruling.

I've traveled domestically and internationally many times since the start of the pandemic and I hate the mask as much as anyone. It makes me sneeze and it tickles. After 10 hours on long hauls, I can indeed feel like I'm suffocating. It can be almost unbearable. But after two years of obediently masking up to enter airports and planes around the world, I found my first unmasked travel experience jarring indeed, even though I kept mine on. I was not the only masked person on that American Airlines flight, but I was definitely in the minority.

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Karen Greenberg, A Justice System in Peril

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The proof is in the pudding, as they say. In this case, the pudding was very distinctly mixed up by Donald Trump with a nice little hand from Mitch McConnell. Thanks to them, the “justice” system in this country has been remarkably politicized. Thanks to them, the Supremes are no longer the legal equivalent of a popular singing group, but symbols of an ever more divisive system. As TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, makes clear today, it’s one that seems capable of holding only pregnant women “responsible” for anything. (Certainly, the same shouldn’t be true for presidents, especially not The Donald!)

Thanks to a leaked draft opinion written by extreme Supreme Samuel Alito, we now know that, in a case likely to be announced soon, that court’s nearly half-century-old Roe v. Wade decision is almost certain to be overruled. In short, America’s ultimate court is at the edge of the sort of decision not seen since perhaps the Dred Scott case of 1857, a stepping stone to this country’s civil war.  The route to such supreme injustice hasn’t been a short one.  As Greenberg points out, in this century ever more Americans with clout, starting with George W. Bush and crew, were held ever less responsible for their ever more criminal acts.  Sadly, while presidents have gone free, so many women in states in which abortion will no longer be legal are likely to find themselves again, as a half-century ago, in back alleys looking for ways not to have babies they can’t afford or support or deal with.  (In some states, including Mississippi, whose abortion case is now before the Supreme Court, it won’t even matter if your pregnancy results from rape or incest.)

Add a post-2022 Republican Congress to the present Supreme Court and then a Trumpist victory in the 2024 elections and this country could be left with the ultimate nightmare, a political system made in hell.  Perhaps that will somehow be avoided, but don’t count on it.

In the meantime, let Greenberg tell you about a justice system that, even before the Alito opinion became public, was headed for the nearest drain. Tom

The Empire’s New Clothes

The Veneer of Accountability Is Wearing Thin in Twenty-First-Century America

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If you watched TV in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, you would undoubtedly have come away with the idea that this country's courts, law enforcement agencies, and the laws they aimed to honor added up to a system in which justice was always served.

In those years, for instance, Perry Mason was a much-loved staple from coast to coast. In each episode, Perry, that intrepid, tall, dark, kindly genius of a defense attorney, would face off against Hamilton Burger, a small-boned, pointy faced, sanctimonious prosecutor -- and justice would always be served. He had what seemed then to be an all-American knack for uncovering exactly the right evidence of misdeeds that would lead justice directly to the doorstep of the true perpetrator of any crime and bring him or her to account. The takeaway caught the mood of the time: the courts and the legal system were powerful platforms for serving justice, sorting out right from wrong, punishing the criminals, and exonerating the innocent.

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William Astore, Must the U.S. Be Involved in Every War?

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Count on one thing: a Congress that can agree on next to nothing Americans might actually want or need will undoubtedly usher through with all due speed President Biden’s recent $33 billion request for arms and other aid for Ukraine.  On that (and little else), Republicans and Democrats seem genuinely capable of agreement.  Oh, and add that sum to last month’s $14 billion aid package and Congress will have anted up an almost instant $47 billion for the Ukrainians in their battle with Vladimir Putin’s desperately messed-up military that’s already lost, it seems, at least 12 generals (thanks in part, ominously enough, to U.S. intelligence), a record for modern warfare).

I mean, we’re talking about a Congress essentially incapable of passing legislation that would levy such sums for climate change, child care, or almost anything else that Americans might actually need here at home.  But weapons for Ukraine?  No big deal, any more than it was a problem when it came to funding this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan or Iraq or its unending global war on terror — or a Pentagon budget that contains almost unimaginable sums for America’s giant weapons makers, whether what they’re making works or not, is needed or not.

In other words, the horrifying war in Ukraine may be a catastrophe for the Ukrainians and, in the end, the Russians, too, but for the U.S. military-industrial complex it’s clearly going to be a heaven on earth.  You can already feel the thrill of it all in President Biden’s pronouncements, in the urge of the secretary of defense to ensure that Russia is “weakened” big time by its invasion, and the commentary provided by Washington Republicans and Democrats alike.  As retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore points out today, when it comes to war, the nightmare in Ukraine is proving to be a thrill and a half in Washington.  After so many years of disfiguring military disaster globally, thanks to Vladimir Putin we’re finally the undisputed good guys on planet Earth again and what more could you ask for? Tom

The Last Good Guys?

Five Reasons Why Washington Can’t Break Its War Addiction

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Why has the United States already become so heavily invested in the Russia-Ukraine war? And why has it so regularly gotten involved, in some fashion, in so many other wars on this planet since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001?  Those with long memories might echo the conclusion reached more than a century ago by radical social critic Randolph Bourne that “war is the health of the state” or recall the ancient warnings of this country's founders like James Madison that democracy dies not in darkness, but in the ghastly light thrown by too many bombs bursting in air for far too long.

In 1985, when I first went on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Ukraine would, of course, have been treated as a civil war between Soviet republics. In the context of the Cold War, the U.S. certainly wouldn’t have risked openly sending billions of dollars in weaponry directly to Ukraine to "weaken" Russia. Back then, such obvious interference in a conflict between the USSR and Ukraine would have simply been an act of war. (Of course, even more ominously, back then, Ukraine also had nuclear weapons on its soil.)

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