Essay: COVID-19 and the School Reopening Crisis

“For schools, COVID-19 is a new crisis stacked on top of a very old one. Funding for public education has dropped precipitously since the Great Recession: In 2015 more than half of states were spending less per student than they did in 2008. Many of the equity issues that [Donald] Trump and [Secretary of Education Betsy] DeVos cite in their push to reopen schools are long-standing, exacerbated by funding schemes that tie school resources to the local tax base and by segregation. Both are political choices; neither will be resolved simply by reopening schools this fall. Other choices loom on the horizon as the virus decimates state revenues. The pandemic may have reminded Americans of how much they need schools and teachers. It’s also made it clear that the country is a long way from making them a priority.”— Zoe Carpenter, “Back to School? We’ve Squandered Our Chance to Reopen Safely,” The Nation, Sept. 7/14, 2020

A teacher friend of mine from the Midwest told me several weeks ago that, though schools refer to “remote” or “distance” learning, the correct phrase might be “crisis education.” I don’t envy the task that she and her colleagues face this year.

As with so much else that has happened in 2020, COVID-19 has created one more burden on a society buckling under the strain. It has not only magnified issues of inequality long latent in U.S. public schools, but has now put the safety of teachers at cross-purposes to lower-wage service workers who lack the luxury of supervising their children’s online learning while working remotely themselves.

Politicians blew their chance of extricating America from Stage 1 of the pandemic, so we are now seriously contemplating putting in harm’s way thousands of teachers nationwide that we profess to value.

My teacher friend will face a different half of her students each day. That was supposed to decrease children’s exposure to the virus, anyway, if not teachers’, but the plan doesn’t look like it’s working. It’s only a week into the school year, and already half a dozen students have tested positive for the virus at both the elementary and secondary levels.

Anyone pressing for an immediate school reopening should remember this: according to a U.S. News and World Report article from this past May, nearly one-third of U.S. public school teachers are over 50—the demographic group that in our educational institutions, by virtue of the “co-morbidities” of this age segment, will run the greatest risk of severe infection.

Imagine that: parents oblivious to the possibility of America’s most experienced educators being decimated by a new disease whose after-effects are still not completely known. If you ask me, that’s a new form of age discrimination. Is that really the best way to run our schools?

Adult advocates of reopening are also ignoring an enduring, age-old reality: youths’ propensity for risky behavior. Are they forgetting what they were like as teenagers? Do they really think that their children will magically stop drinking, taking drugs, or congregating in mass groups—the type of misbehavior most likely to spread the virus?

We are already seeing the consequences of hasty school reopenings. As of when I wrote this post,  this map and database maintained by the National Education Association and volunteers shows that 3,615 American schools and campuses had reported COVID-19 cases from July 16 to September 18, resulting in 11,712 cases, 1,246 possible outbreaks—and 43 deaths.

Americans have long prided themselves on being an exceptional people. But this year, we are an object of pity and fear to the rest of the world on the spiraling consequences when ignorance and orneriness replace reason and calm in public debates. They are the kind of “substitutes” we should never allow in schools.

Essay: Trump Off His Meds, Out of Therapy?

During George W. Bush’s first term, Richard Armitage, an aide to Colin Powell at the State Department, came to the defense of his boss with a wisecrack lobbed gleefully at Newt Gingrich. In attacking Powell, Armitage observed, the former Speaker of the House had gone “off his meds and out of therapy."

That remark, long since ensconced in the hall of fame for political insults, might have been even better applied these last few weeks of the summer to another publicity-hungry GOP leader, albeit one as powerful as Gingrich only wished he could have been: Donald Trump. 

In a recent Facebook exchange, a conservative (he prefers “libertarian”) friend of mine predicted that Trump would win in 2020, though he admitted the President used Twitter too much and was, in his words, “a blowhard.” 

I think my friend’s description was imprecise. Another phrase is far more appropriate: “mentally ill.”

 

Even to a Washington seemingly immune by now to daily shocks to the system and offenses against formal and informal laws, the President’s statements and misbehavior in the last few weeks left its denizens with their jaws agape. 

Clearly, something weird was going on with Trump, who engaged in a pattern of behavior unusually frantic and bizarre even for him. 

Consider the following events, rolling out one after another:

*He wondered about American Jews who voted Democratic, questioning their “loyalty.”

*He levied a stiffer tariff on China, raising prospects for a trade war.

*He called his own appointee to head the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, a “bigger enemy” to the U.S. than China.

*He tried to purchase Greenland—then, when that proposal was predictably rejected by Denmark’s Prime Minister, the President, annoyed by this (stop me if you’ve heard this description before!) “nasty” woman, canceled his trip to Denmark.

*He hinted that he would like to change the Constitution through executive order (an action which, by itself, would be unconstitutional).

*He called himself (looking up to Heaven) “The Chosen One.”

*He got into a Twitter war with Debra Messing, an actress with zero political influence.

*He urged science advisers to look into the possibility of averting future hurricanes by detonating nuclear weapons against them.

*He told reporters that he had never heard of a Category 5 hurricane before Dorian—even though that was the fourth since he became President.

*He feuded with politicians on Puerto Rico as Dorian threatened the area.

*He argued with the media for a week over his inaccurate claim that Hurricane Dorian was bearing down on Alabama—not only sending out 12 tweets and counting vainly claiming he was right at the start, even brandishing a map with an area encompassed by a Sharpie, but also leaning on aides to get the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to disavow a tweet that corrected the misinformation spread by the President.

*He joked about giving himself the Medal of Honor—a form of humor doubly dubious not only because he managed to use the excuse of bone spurs to get out of serving in the Vietnam War, but also because he unleashes hatred by egging on crowds.

*He fired John Bolton, his latest National Security Adviser—his fourth in less than a full term—after disagreeing about him on virtually everything, leading observers to wonder why the appointment was made in the first place.

*He invited the Taliban—who sheltered the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center on 9/11—to Camp David for an agreement withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan, only to be forced to rescind the invitation after U.S. forces were attacked.

*He called out at the Group of Seven (G7) summit, when Egyptian President bdel-Fattah el-Sisi had not yet appeared, “Where's my favorite dictator?”—reducing the rest of the room (including Egyptian dignitaries and Trump’s own advisers) to uncomfortable silence.

*He joked, on the eve of 9/11, about serving a third term, which would violate the 22^nd Amendment (legislation, be it noted, that postwar Republicans pushed through as revenge after Franklin Roosevelt had died after being elected to a fourth term).

*He referred to his Veep of the past three years as “Mike Pounce.”

*He referred to his son Barron as his wife’s son, in a kind of syntax I can’t imagine ever being taught in any of the President’s English classes: “We can’t have our youth be so affected [by vaping], and I’m hearing it, and that’s how the First Lady got involved. She’s got a son, together, that’s a beautiful young man, and she feels very, very strongly about it.”

*He referred again, for no apparent reason, to an earlier description of himself, tweeting “ ‘A Very Stable Genius.’ Thank you.”

Okay, I may have missed one or even more such statements—but after all, I’m only one man, and Trump is to these head-scratchers what Niagara is to water.

These are more than disquieting statements—they are disqualifying ones as to Trump’s capacity to act as leader of this country and of the Free World. 

In the months before the release of the Mueller Report, Trump exhibited much of the same hysteria. This time, the goading factor may have been reports that the economy, courtesy of uncertainty over his trade policies, might be moving toward a recession.

But what exactly Trump's actions signify, as to the nature of his psychological condition, is far more complex.

Alzheimer’s? Not So Fast

Two years ago, the normally genial New York Times columnist David Brooks reported that a congressional GOP delegation, after an Oval Office meeting, considered whether the President was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. That speculation has continued to grow.

It’s not just Democrats, or disgruntled former Republicans like Joe Scarborough, who are pushing this theory. In April, psychologist John Gartner urged, in a piece for USA Today, that the President be administered a more thorough cognitive test than the one he’d been administered, pointing to possible speech disorders and tangential logic in Trump’s stump addresses. 

Other mental health professionals have argued similarly, with even less evidence. Relatively recent history points towards the dangers of making such claims.

Psychiatrists’ responses to a 1964 poll questioning Barry Goldwater’s mental fitness for the Presidency led the American Psychiatric Association to adopt “The Goldwater Rule,” which holds it unethical to offer a professional opinion about a candidate that one has not personally examined. Despite what they may think are the best intentions, many practitioners are making that same mistake now with Trump.

Trump, despite a family history of Alzheimer’s (his father had the disease), does not seem especially forgetful, even for a man his age. If he has trouble remembering anything, it is all the falsehoods he propagates. 

But who can blame him? He may be the most prodigious liar in the history of the Oval Office—which, given several of its postwar occupants (Lyndon Johnson—nicknamed “Bull Johnson” in his college days for his serial prevarication, Richard “I Am Not a Crook” Nixon, and Bill “I Did Not Have Sex With That Woman” Clinton), inspires onlookers with equal amounts of astonishment and disgust.

But what if Trump’s increasing use of simpler, repetition-heavy speeches is not a sign of cognitive loss, but rather his recognition that such rhetoric, combined with fear-laden appeals, works wonders with audiences particularly receptive to the end point of propaganda: The Big Lie?

Ongoing Sociopathology? Far More Likely

There is another problem with pointing to Trump’s cognitive issues as a clue to Alzheimer’s: How long can critics continue to say he is declining before he reaches point zero? And who will make that determination?

There is another possibility for what ails Trump that has nothing to do with Alzheimer’s. He exhibits multiple traits that collectively demonstrate sociopathology, in plain sight of the electorate:

*Narcissism

*Grandiosity

*Arrogance

*Impulsiveness

*Unnecessary risk-taking

*Inability to feel guilt

*Inability to abide external criticism or extended internal dissent

*Escalation of anger

*Brazen, delusional falsehoods

According to legend, the ancient Roman emperor Caligula was so mad that he almost appointed his favorite horse a consul. I suppose it's a good thing that Trump displays little similar fondness for an animal. Who knows? He might appoint the beast to a Supreme Court vacancy. 

All of this unsettles the economy, confuses allies and foes, teaches the young that bullying pays, and makes this nation a source of international embarrassment and ridicule.

Over a year and a half ago, Peggy Noonan---Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal columnist, former speechwriter, and observer of multiple Presidents and politics—presciently pointed out the peril posed by Trump's bizarre behavior, even without a foreign crisis or economic downturn in view at the time:

“Everything you’ve learned from life as a leader in whatever sphere—business, local public service—tells you this: Crazy doesn’t last. Crazy doesn’t go the distance. Crazy is an unstable element that when let loose in an unstable environment, explodes. 

“And so your disquiet…. If the president is the way he is on a good day, what will he be like on a bad day? It all feels so dangerous.”

Essay: The Parallel Transatlantic Crises

“I’ve so far resisted these comparisons, but now Britain’s political crisis [i.e., Boris Johnson 'proroguing' Parliament for more than a month, in an unprecedented move to short-circuit discussion of his 'no-deal' Brexit] really does resemble the parallel crisis in the United States. A ruthless executive is pushing the outer bounds of what is constitutionally possible in order to achieve unpopular outcomes. A ruling party that is afraid for its own electoral future is shamefacedly supporting him. A divided opposition seeks to block him but doesn’t have a popular leader itself. A conservative party is using populist slogans that undermine national institutions. Old precedents and customs are being abandoned at great speed, leaving only a vacuum in their wake.”—Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2019

There are even more parallels not mentioned by Ms. Applebaum between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump: 

*Both are tonsorially challenged clowns with neither executive ability nor respect for truth, perpetrating breakdowns in their country’s essential legislative function.

*Both Trump and Johnson lead a base worried by deteriorating order and challenges to traditional values, despite these "populists" own extremely untidy personal lives.

*Both came to power by emerging from the socioeconomic flotsam of the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis, exploiting the fears of foreigners left in its wake.

*Both found their causes aided by trolls and bots associated with Russia (yes, the British are investigating how Putin propaganda aided the Brexit campaign, according to this NPR interview with Jane Mayer; as for Trump, not one of the President’s most raucous defenders can explain the extraordinary coincidence of Russia releasing the Wikileaks files on Hillary Clinton less than 24 hours after The Donald urged it to do so).

*Both are calling for stronger trade ties between their countries, as a seeming counter-move against the Economic Union (EU)--a strategy that plays into Putin's hopes of undermining economic and military alliances. 

*Both the Trump and Brexit campaigns used Steve Bannon as their scurvy strategist.

*Both leaders have created a ruckus over border security: Trump, by squawking about a wall with Mexico (and even transferring Defense Dept. money for other projects to try to speed its construction); Johnson, by ignoring concerns that lack of a EU “backstop” would doom the fragile tranquility prevailing in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement two decades ago.

*Both have crashed through unwritten rules of law and conduct that restrained predecessors in their countries’ highest office.

*Both have a penchant for insult: Johnson derided opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn as “you great big girl's blouse," while Trump has insulted someone on Twitter pretty close to every day.

*Both now pose a fundamental threat not just to the economy and governance of their countries, but to the faith that other nations place in the U.K. and U.S. as birthplaces of liberty.

So far, only one major difference exists in the ascent to power of Trump and Johnson: In the latter’s first week in office, a coalition of 21 Conservative Party Members of Parliament—including former Cabinet ministers—allied with the opposition to force him to make a Brexit deal or request another extension till early 2020. No such public, principled cohort has emerged to restrain Trump. 

Over the years, I have been critical of much British governmental policy (including its misbegotten colonial legacy), but this week, I have to tip my hat to a legislature that, unlike ours, has enough members who refuse to be bullied into meekly abdicating their time-honored responsibilities.

(Photo of Boris Johnson taken as an MP, July 27, 2016.)

Essay: Conspiracy Theories Leave Democracy in Tatters

“A vast number of conspiracy theories hinge on the existence of a subjugated yet honorable ‘people’ against a corrupt and scheming ‘elite,’ and, as it happens, so does populism. That conspiracism and populism are often found together probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Donald Trump’s supporters in any detail. But it does suggest that fighting conspiracy theories will mean understanding and taking seriously the causes of the rise of populism in the United States and Europe over the last few years. Addressing the conditions that enable conspiracism, rather than the content of the conspiracism itself, points the way toward quashing it.” —J.C. Pan, “When Facts Fail: The Roots of American Conspiracism,” The New Republic, July-August 2019

Pan’s strategy for countering conspiracy theories worldwide makes sense, but in the here and now, how are Americans going to defeat the men responsible for their spread in the United States—particularly when the perpetrators preposterously cast themselves as victims?

Both Donald Trump and the GOP leader who carries water for him on Capitol Hill, Senator Mitch McConnell, have assailed as “McCarthyism” any criticism of their curious inaction regarding Russian meddling in the U.S. 2016 election.

Most observers would regard this characterization as awfully rich—and not just because Trump’s mentor as a rising businessman was Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel in the Army-McCarthy hearings as the Wisconsin Senator tarnished reputations and damaged careers with reckless charges of Communism. Nor is it simply laughable because, with each passing day, it becomes more impossible to explain how Trump could not have benefited from Russian interference in the 2016 election.

No, the charge of McCarthyism is also farcical because the Senator was adept at making spurious accusations involving “a conspiracy so immense,” then throwing out more half-baked charges that the media would promptly chase down a rabbit hole—practices that Trump has embraced with abandon. The charge of “McCarthyism,” in fact, is another instance of Trump’s penchant for projecting his own worst tendencies onto others.

Just as it became a parlor game to argue whether McCarthy was cannily concocting his deceptions or was an alcoholic too slobby to strategize, so speculation centers today on the level of craft that Trump is employing in his falsehoods. The point, though, is that both McCarthy and Trump were indisputably purveyors of what Trump loyalist Kellyanne Conway has helpfully labeled “alternative facts.”

A decade of conspiratorial buncombe

Among the conspiracy theories that Trump has peddled in the last decade or so are that:

*Vaccinations cause autism;

*Barack Obama was not born in the United States;

*The official who released Obama’s birth certificate died in a suspicious plane crash;

*Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower;

*Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the Kennedy assassination;

*The suicide of Clinton friend and aide Vince Foster looked “fishy”;

*TV commentator Joe Scarborough may have been involved in the death of an intern;

*Climate change is a hoax, maybe perpetrated by the Chinese;

*The Democrats planned to steal the election with votes cast by millions of undocumented immigrants;

*The Democrats won New Hampshire in 2016 because of people streaming in “from parts unknown”;

*The “Fake News Media” wants to “crash the economy because they think that will be bad for me and my re-election," he thinks;

*The FBI’s Russia probe is a “deep-state” plot against him;

*Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia might have been murdered.

What rational voter believes all of these theories? Come to think of it, what rational voter believes any of these? But such is the state of American politics that these are run up the flagpole constantly.  

The current American environment for conspiracy theories differs from earlier ones in this respect: a President promotes them openly and daily.

Every American President since George Washington has had enemies bound and determined to run him out of office. At least two—Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—privately complained to aides that some of their enemies were plotting against them.

But never before has a President seen signs of this everywhere he looks, and expressed that belief in public. Trump not only peddles conspiracy theories of his own, but also encourages those of others through retweets or through noticing them at appearances.

Through most of his business career, and all of his political one, Trump has gotten his way not through compromise—the real “art of the deal”—but through conquest. In turn, he dreads that someone else will follow the same path to victory at his expense. Spontaneously, he is gripped by the thought that someone is out to get him. 

El Paso and Epstein: Present and Future Results 

The effects of this conspiracy-mongering are ever more apparent. 

It wasn’t enough that the white supremacist movement was heartened first by Trump’s notion that Mexican “rapists” were coming to America, or his comment after the rally two years ago in Charlottesville that there were “good people on both sides.” But the President’s constant cries over the last few years about “invasion” by illegal immigrants—echoed endlessly at Fox News—made even more fetid the toxic rhetorical atmosphere absorbed by the El Paso shooter.

That atmosphere has become positively thick enough to gag with Trump’s suggestion—unsupported by any evidence—that Bill and Hillary Clinton were behind the recent death of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The President’s source for this: one Terrence K. Williams, a comedian with no particular law enforcement expertise.

Many people, like myself, not only never heard of Williams before but wonder what purpose he serves in life except to rehash quarter-century-old Clinton murder conspiracy theories. But to Donald Trump, he’s “somebody that’s a very respected conservative pundit.”

Trump openly admits he has “no idea” whether the Clintons played any part in Epstein’s death. At minimum, that is speculation with no documentary, oral or forensic evidence. But there is another term for it that is far more merited than the other news items to which Trump has frequently attached it: “fake news.”

If the examples of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy mean anything, it is that the words of a President have enormous power to move a nation, even beyond the age in which he voices them—to rally the downhearted, to console the grieving, to appeal to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

More so than any President in the last century, Trump has proven himself woefully unsuited to these tasks. By spouting conspiracies at every turn, he has placed a cacophony of crackpots at the center of American discourse, in a tireless attempt to distract and divide.

Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and current conservative columnist for The Washington Post, wrote a hard-hitting piece recently that detailed the damage caused by conspiracy theories such as Trump’s, including that they:

*Sometimes influence behavior (e.g., vaccination rates fall);

*Distract attention from other issues;

*Encourage cynicism and apathy;

*Undermine democratic dialogue; and

*Undermine the search for truth itself.

Grave risks to democracy

All of these are true as they apply to Trump, but his conspiracy theories create even graver risks:

*They undermine the notion of a common body of knowledge for decisionmakers. Facts should be the common ground on which people of different viewpoints can proceed. But how can policies be made when each side has its own “alternative facts”—and the other side is stigmatized as criminal or traitorous?

*They give prominence—and the chance to be believed—to the lunatic fringe of politics. Twitter suspended an account that featured a post Trump had retweeted. The account promoted conspiracy theories. 

*They corrode the credibility of agencies meant to protect American citizens and institutions. For the sake of his immediate political future, Trump has fostered belief in the existence of a “deep state” in a group of voters never previously likely to feel this way: GOP voters. But his success has come at the price of undermining public trust in the CIA and FBI when he might need them later. When he wants to certify to America and the world that Iran is violating arms agreements, for instance, how will he believed without certification by the CIA? 

*They dissipate the moral authority of the Presidency, which remains the indispensable steward of American interests to the wider world. Trump has “decapitated the government of the United States, leaving a distrusted and disrespected void where the head of state should be….In any genuine emergency the nation may face in the next few years, it will be effectively leaderlessess,” David Frum writes in his Trumpocracy:The Corruption of the American Republic.

*They function as a “dirty tricks” operation unseen since the days of Richard Nixon, who at least had enough respect for appearances that he farmed out to operative Donald Segretti the task of spreading baseless allegations about Edmund Muskie, Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey. Trump’s claims about other politicians (including rivals) have no more credibility than those Segretti promoted, and he is striving for what Segretti attained for his boss: the weakest possible Democratic candidate.

 

*They encourage the targeting of specific rivals, opening other candidates to physical harm. Trump may think he is only serving up what Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “boob bait for the bubbas,” but he is wrong. In the current environment, who knows what materials might infect borderline personalities to strike at those they regard as murderers and threats to the republic?

Trump may have encountered only one conspiracy theory he hasn’t promoted: the one about Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential election. Ironically enough, this might be the only conspiracy theory with the greatest possibility of being true, as its exposure has involved sworn grand jury testimony, intelligence intercepts, guilty pleas, and the President’s own inexplicable but unnerving statements supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin—even to the point of siding with him over his own intelligence agencies.

How far Trump’s empty conspiracy-mongering amounts to criminal activity is now up to Congress to decide. But at very least, they testify to a near-bottomless deprivation of character. 

Still craving legitimacy without exhibiting either honesty or dignity, Trump is ever more frantically pulling others down to his level, in the same way a bully drags into the mud a victim unexpectedly getting the better of him.