Dissolving Trump’s Sand Castle of Lies

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As Covid-19 resurges, fewer people will be enjoying summer making sand castles in the surf. So it’s a good time to consider how Donald Trump guards his hold on political power with sand castles of lies, falsehoods and misleading statements. As of April 14, 2020, there were 18,000 of them, according to the Washington Post.

Trump can get away with this for three reasons. First, we have the First Amendment. Anyone can say anything, subject only to the law of defamation, which has little bite, especially in politics. Second, he’s the President of the United States. As the Nazis discovered when they invented the “Big Lie,” authority figures can get the public to believe lies if only they repeat them often enough. Our country has no higher authority figure than “POTUS,” the President of the United States.

This president’s inconsistency and frequent reversals and back-pedaling can dilute the effects of some of his lies. But like any merchant of cheap wares, he makes up for his low level of “quality” in volume.

Third and most important, were not in your mother’s media environment. Enormous numbers of people get their “news” from media that have no professional journalists and therefore no professionalism, let alone editing or quality control. Our so-called “social media” provide “many-to-many” communications platforms that are unique in human history. They’ve existed for less than a single generation.

What’s different about social media is not just that they’re private businesses, but that they use unprecedented many-to-many communications protocols. Anyone can post “news” on them, including “fake news,” made-up incidents and outrages, and wholly invented facts. And the corporate publisher—the social media platform—can escape any liability for these lies under our law.

Why is this so? Well, our First Amendment lets anyone say virtually anything. It protects everyone, including private corporations like Twitter and Facebook. It restricts only government—including the president in his official capacity—from censoring or restricting others’ speech. It does not inhibit what the president himself can say or write.

As Laurence Tribe, the foremost single professorial authority on our Constitution, recently wrote, the First Amendment does not restrict the activities of private parties at all. Our Constitution lets them pick and choose what they wish to say, write and publish—or not—at will. Only lesser laws, such as the law of defamation, encourage their honesty.

The last piece of our dismal puzzle is a thing called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (“CDA”). I’ve written a long post on it, including a suggested amendment. But the bottom line is simple: Section 230(c)(1) wipes out any responsibility for falsehood—including the entire law of defamation—for lies published on social media, insofar as the media platforms are concerned. If you want to stop or punish the lies, you have to find and pursue the individuals who created and posted them. Good luck with that, especially if the original poster is a secret political troll hiding behind a virtual network and a bogus IP address, let alone a tech-savvy Russian or Chinese troll or spook!

This Catch 22 is particularly Kafkaesque where the president is concerned. As president, he can also exploit an age-old legal doctrine called “sovereign immunity,” aka “The King can do no wrong.” He can be sued but not prosecuted while in office. And as we know from the cases now before the Supreme Court, he can stall, delay and stonewall any attempt to use subpoenas to get evidence on which to sue him.

So insofar as presidential lies are concerned, our law completely wipes out responsibility for everyone. Until/unless the Supreme Court rules otherwise, the president walks by virtue of his sovereign immunity and his power as chief executive to suppress evidence. Facebook, Twitter and their ilk walk by virtue of CDA Section 230(c)(1). And the author of these particular lies walks because he is the president. So literally no one can be held legally responsible for presidential lies!

Now do you begin to understand why this president lies so often? He bears no cost or legal responsibility for his lies. Nor does anyone else involved. Our laws practically invite this president, and anyone else who might follow him, to govern like Adolf Hitler through Big Lies.

So why has Twitter begun sticking its neck out by putting little, discreet notices warning against a few of Trump’s most recent and most outrageous lies? If you’re an idealist, you might think this corporate change of heart springs from decency or patriotism. But there are more cynical and less noble reasons.

Lately there have been more vigorous calls, including my own, to take away the legal immunity that Section 230(c)(1) gives social media. As the president’s lies grow more and more numerous and more and more vicious, and as our society succumbs to an inability to distinguish truth from lies and loses all touch with what we used to call “reality”, those calls are getting louder and gaining more political traction. Before the pandemic really started to bite, even our head-in-sand Senate held hearings on the topic.

As is so often true in our fundamentally corrupt, “monetizing” society, it’s all about money. Take away Section 230(c)(1), and Twitter and Facebook might suffer an avalanche of lawsuits. That would hurt their bottom lines. So would the expense of identifying and blocking made-up “facts” and defending their doing so in the courts of public opinion and (only occasionally) law.

Decency and patriotism might whimper, but money talks. In theory, it ought to help that a noted authority on constitutional law has said that the First Amendment imposes no restraint on private social media for censoring what they consider false, let alone for daintily suggesting “alternative facts” through discreet notices and hyperlinks. So there’s no legal impediment to doing the right thing, only a corrupt monetary one.

Thus the fate of our Republic—not to mention our people’s ability to believe in any objective reality at all—now lies in the hands of private, profit seeking social-media firms. Most prominently it lies in the hands Twitter and Facebook and their respective CEOs, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, for his part, has reportedly agreed to accept lies in paid political advertising, so we know what’s in his heart.

Congress could nudge these men to do the right thing by doing more than opening feckless hearings on amendments to Section 230(c)(1). Our legislators could start making serious moves to repeal it altogether. That single-sentence subsection, which removes platforms’ liability, was snuck into our law in a so-called “midnight” amendment, whose subtitle doesn’t even match the whole section’s.

Can the rest of us also do something? I deleted Facebook about two years ago, after finding there was nothing I couldn’t do more easily and more quickly, with less “noise,” on other platforms. I’ve never had a Twitter account because I don’t believe you can post anything but slogans or insults in 240 characters. What about you?

Kara Swisher Agrees

Today Kara Swisher—the erstwhile Silicon Valley reporter and now New York Times columnist—coincidentally published a must-read op-ed explaining her decision to deactivate her own Facebook account. She compares it to trying to bring up her 16-year-old son the right way. Who would want a son whose “brilliant” creation profits and grows by disseminating the most vile hate and lies worldwide, while he hides sanctimoniously behind the banners of “freedom,” “communication” and technological advance? Does Zuck even read what his platform publishes? Call it great minds thinking alike. Call it an idea whose time has come. But if you passively accept, and therefore advance, a business that profits from the global destruction of truth, decency and respect (for both science and people) online, isn’t that even worse that not voting at all in 2020? And if good people feel so locked in or bamboozled as to fail to opt out on their own, should repeal of CDA Section 230(c)(1) be far behind?

Footnote: For two reasons, the law of defamation provides only a weak brake on lies. First, when the lies concern “public figures,” including politicians like Trump’s Democratic opponents, the law requires more than just proof of falsehood. It requires even more than mere negligence, which is Trump’s way of life. Instead, it requires a state of mind of “reckless disregard” for the truth, which must be proved by hard evidence. That kind of evidence is hard to get, especially in today’s political world, where “truthiness,” i.e., plausibility to the duped, has replaced reality and facts.

More important, the law of defamation arose to protect the reputations of individuals, not truthful and honest public discourse. So a lawsuit or prosecution for defamation requires a complaining individual or identifiable group. Then that individual or group must prove injury to reputation, caused by the alleged falsehood.

Many of Trump’s lies have no identifiable injured party. When Trump says his sparse inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s, for example, who’s injured? Obama is no longer president; he’s a private citizen. So what would be his injury? The real injury is to the truth, history, and the American people. Those abstract concepts are too diffuse a “group” to qualify as plaintiffs under defamation law.

What about when Trump falsely claimed that anyone who wanted one could get a Covid-19 test? Who was injured then? The people who wasted time trying vainly to find a test can’t prove that the lie caused their injury because their own false hope was an intervening cause. Even people who suffered, and the survivors of those who died, can’t prove that Trump’s lie caused their suffering. The virus did.

On the other hand, it’s no accident that Twitter’s lonely attempt to refute Trump’s lies came in a case with a clearly injured single individual. The lies claiming that a long-dead woman had been murdered by one of Trump’s many media gadflies affected the dead woman’s husband and his peace of mind. If nothing else, Twitter’s belated but unusual response in that case proves that monetary disincentives for promulgating lies, arising from legal liability, really do work.

Tabloids know this well; that’s why they take care in publishing dubious claims about the celebrities they cover. Most celebrities have the wherewithal to sue.

Defamation law grew up out of the law’s desire to stop personal affronts and the personal duels they used to cause in an earlier age. Defamation law was never intended to stop a wholesale assault on the very idea of “truth”—an assault that modern social media make possible.

If corporate platforms have no monetary incentive to control lies, then their users, including foreign spooks and trolls and our own president, will push our voters to believe that there’s no such thing as “truth” or “facts,” just competing lies. Then our democracy will degenerate into power plays based on lies and insults, just as it’s doing right now. The threat that unrestrained social-media platforms pose to any democratic republic, including ours, is really that simple, and that grave.

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Workers are not Things

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Carlos Ingram Lopez, R.I.P.

Today the New York Times blared front-page news of yet another police killing of a minority person while in custody. In this case, the victim was a Latino man, Carlos Ingram Lopez. Held naked and bound by a mesh spit guard, he complained repeatedly that he couldn’t breathe and needed water. His grandmother also appealed for mercy. But the cops kept grinding Lopez into the floor on his belly—a posture known to risk death by asphyxiation. In a cruel irony, the grandma herself had called police because her grandson was having a mental health crisis, apparently while under the influence of cocaine. She called for help but instead got her grandson’s murder. In an equally cruel irony, Lopez lived in Tucson, AZ, whose population is 43% Latino. It’s supposed to have a “progressive” police department, which had banned chokeholds some time ago. This killing didn’t happen despite the vast national awakening after the murder of George Floyd. It happened two months ago. The Tucson police had withheld the appalling video until recently, ostensibly to insure a fair investigation. I’ve pledged to contribute, until the November election, an additional $100 each to five progressive causes for every non-white person killed by police while in custody. I consider Lopez’ killing one of those atrocities. Like trees falling in the forest that no one hears, these horrors can’t be known and protested until reported. The media and those who supervise police thus have a responsibility to the public. My five causes were: (1) Joe Biden’s Victory Fund, (2) Amy McGrath’s push to unseat Mitch McConnell, (3) Black Voters Matter, (4) Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, and (5) Nse Ufot’s New Georgia Project. At the moment, Charles Booker is leading McGrath in the Democratic primary race to challenge Mitch McConnell, and we won’t know the outcome until at least June 30. If Booker wins, I will switch my support to him, as I hope McGrath’s campaign will do also. My last three causes are all voter-empowerment organizations. They seek to convince eligible citizens—especially those who vote rarely or who have never voted before—to vote as a way to improve their lives and gain power in society. All three of these organizations are run by and mainly for African-Americans. So I’m now looking to add a sixth and maybe a seventh donee, which focus on empowering Latino voters, especially in the Southwest. After all, I live about half-time in New Mexico. I would be grateful to any commenter who could suggest organizations that do for Latinos what Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight Action, and the New Georgia Project are doing so well for African-Americans. Trump’s abysmally corrupt misrule, our catastrophic failure to arrest the pandemic, the popular awakening against systemic racism, and our nascent economic depression—all are combining in a “perfect storm” of moral resurgence. Together they give us a unique chance to take our country back at the polls. But it’s only a chance. To take it, progressive whites like me and every minority must unite to throw the bums out and put good people in. If we work together, we can do that this fall. But the clock is ticking. I fear that Latinos, who are so numerous and prominent throughout the Southwest, but who still have so little real power, are behind in their organizing efforts. So I’d like to help as much as I can. Joe Arpaio is finally out, but Ted Cruz and others like him remain. It’s long past time to throw them all out and replace them with pols more sympathetic to their constituencies and to the difficulties of newcomers to America. For newcomers are what have always made us thrive.

The principal post follows:

“[A]lthough we criticized Japan for an inflexible labor market, there are some benefits to this system.” — Naohiko Baba, chief Japan economist at Goldman Sachs.

We Americans don’t think much about Japan. If we think about it at all, we see it as a fierce but defeated enemy, now a vital ally—in short, a helpful vassal state. We give it a close look when its allegiance falters, when we need its help in international affairs, or when (as in the eighties) its high-quality, highly productive industries threaten the fading global predominance of our own.

But Japan is an extraordinary society. In a world flattened by the Internet, globalism, the tyranny of international capital—and now the pandemic—Japan is unique. In its culture, human relations, language and customs, Japan is like no other nation on Earth. It deserves study, respect and even emulation, and not just because its allegiance is the linchpin of a now-waning American hegemony in Asia.

Before focusing on labor, the subject of this post, let me briefly recount a few points of Japan’s uniqueness. First, it borrowed most of its written language—its kanji characters—from the Chinese. But it also has two alphabets unique to Japan: one (hirgana) for writing Japanese words phonetically, which children learn before they learn kanji, and the other (katakana) for writing foreign words phonetically. Can you think of any other nation that has its own special alphabet just for writing foreign words? I can’t.

Today’s Japan has an outward-looking and accepting culture that strikes you when you ride its world-class modern subways. Computer monitors in every car show the last station, the upcoming station, and the next station in four languages: Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English. We Americans sometimes display both English and Spanish, and the Canadians English and French. But four languages, three foreign? Without speaking a word of Japanese, people from Japan’s closest neighbors, and anyone who can read humanity’s favorite second language, can get around Tokyo, Osaka and Japan’s other major cities with nothing more than a subway map.

When you walk Japan’s crowded city streets, you find something else extraordinary. There’s none of that jockeying for position that you feel in the West. Nobody pretends not to see you so you’ll get out of the way first. Japan’s pedestrians get out of your way, reliably and instinctively, without even thinking about it. You could be blind and deaf—or blind drunk—stumbling along a crowded sidewalk, and Japan’s vast and intimidating flow of pedestrian traffic would part for you like the Red Sea for Moses.

Once you get used to this surprising custom, you begin to conform to it, too. It only takes a day or two to ken that things go better when people look out for each other, instead of looking away.

That’s one reason why Japan, despite a relatively slow start on tracing and lockdown, is doing far better than the United States in containing Covid-19. Like most Asians, Japanese have the custom of wearing masks whenever they feel the slightest bit ill, not to protect themselves, but to protect others. “Freedom,” in Japan, does not include the “right” to put others at risk, at least not when it’s so easy to avoid doing so.

I could write about a fellow passenger on a shinkansen, who emerged from our car briefly just to hand me my dropped wallet, after I had already left the car and just noticed its loss. I could laud the hotel employee who, having broken my thermos trying to help me get some ice in, insisted that I wait while he literally ran across the street to a department store to buy me a brand-new and better one. I could recall a small-store proprietor explaining to me, in good English, that all those colorful, fringed envelopes that you see in Japan are for sending large amounts of cash though the mail, so postal workers will notice and take special care of them.

I could write about my Japanese law-professor colleagues, whom Japan’s government (MITI) hired to evaluate trade-secret laws after the US pressured Japan to adopt one. They went on months-long hegiras around the world, collecting copies of relevant laws from Europe, the US, Asia and Latin America. Then they filled their small offices with boxes of foreign documents, reviewed them in translation and wrote comprehensive reports, from which the Ministry of Trade and Industry prepared draft laws for the Diet’s consideration.

By now, you get the idea. There is much, much more to Japan than a fierce wartime foe, vanquished with nuclear fire, now become a staunch ally in Asia.

And so we come to the main subject of this post: labor. From the time in the eighties when I began studying Japan as a professor of law in Hawaii, I learned that Japan has its unique style there, too.

At that time, Japan’s consumer-electronics and car companies were beginning to conquer global markets and threaten American supremacy. Partly in recognition of Japan’s importance as a market, and partly to “redress” a negative balance of payments, we were pushing the Japanese to accept our “big-box” stores and make their distribution systems more “efficient.” But the Japanese were having none of it.

Everyone who knew Japan understood why. Japan had, and still has, a unique system for distributing consumer goods. It’s as different from our Walmart and Amazon.com as you could imagine.

When you walk out the door of your abode in a Japanese city, you are never more than fifty meters from a small place to eat. You are seldom more than a quarter mile from a convenience store, stationery store, sundries store, gift store and/or liquor and (unfortunately) tobacco store. All these stores are built to human scale, and most are run by families. They are Japan’s equivalent to our “mom and pop” stores, but Japan has many, many more than we do.

Live in a neighborhood for a while, and the proprietors and employees will get to know you. They’ll greet you by name, anticipate your needs, and treat you with kindness. They do this even with foreigners that they know they’ll never see again. One shopkeeper spent ten minutes, during a busy day, helping me select just the right adapter for Japan’s electrical plugs.

This is Japan’s distribution “system.” It consists of tens of thousands of mom-and-pop stores, which get to know you and treat you like family. They make life pleasant and human and employ many people in productive, enjoyable jobs.

But they have a price. Distribution of small things in Japan is less “efficient” than in the US, and so retail prices are higher. There are few Walmarts and Amazon.com warehouses to convert independent people selling directly to the public into regimented minimum-wage cashiers, shelf-stockers and worker bees in warehouses.

The Japanese have been willing to pay the higher prices that their far more human distribution system requires. Apparently they still are. They value “people” and “human relations” (ningen kankei) over faceless and indifferent economic “efficiency.”

And so it is with “labor” generally. Back in the fifties and early sixties, the great industrial corporations worked pretty much the same way in Japan and the US. They offered workers lifetime employment in secure jobs, with a secure retirement and corporate pensions, in exchange for loyalty and no job hopping. That system still exists in Japan today, although it’s now faltering under the pressure of American-influenced “globalization.”

But here in America, that secure-employment system has virtually vanished. Large corporations have broken their pension promises, quite legally, in corporate bankruptcy. They’ve replaced (at a discount) what workers bargained for over decades with obligations of the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. We now have a “wild-west” market in “labor,” with nearly a million “gig” workers having no pension, no health benefits and no recourse but unemployment in any economic reversal, whether due to bad corporate planning, a financial panic like the Crash of 2008, or the present pandemic.

Our system is quite resilient—for corporations and their investors. They can shed “redundant” or unneeded employees just as airplanes in trouble dump their excess fuel. But the results are rampant employment insecurity, rampant “food insecurity” (aka “hunger”), and rampant dissatisfaction and unrest among workers, especially in hard times like the present.

These stark differences between Japan and the United States just got notice in the New York Times. In the US, post-pandemic unemployment peaked at 15% and recently dropped to 13.3%, as compared to 3.5% in February. In Japan, unemployment has risen only a fifth of a point, from 2.4% in February to 2.6% today. The difference is that most Japanese workers made “redundant” by the pandemic have been merely “furloughed,” not fired or laid off. Japanese law requires them to be paid 60% of their normal wages.

Nothing about these stark differences has anything to do with the false dichotomy between “capitalism” and “socialism.” Japan has been resolutely capitalist since before Admiral Perry and his gunships opened it up to Western exploitation in the late nineteenth century. Unlike China and Russia, Japan has never flirted with socialism (let alone Communism) or any other top-down abstract recipe for organizing an economy.

Japan focuses on the group, rather than individuals. Its foundational myth is worlds away from the individual heroism of Hector, Achilles, Odysseus and John Paul Jones. Instead, the Japanese revere the “Tales of Genji,” which tout advancement of and loyalty to the group and its success. Even in Hawaii—a US state permeated with Japanese culture—a common proverb asserts, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

The modesty and politesse of Mr. Baba’s assertion in the headpiece exemplifies the diplomacy characteristic of Japanese culture. Obama himself could not have better understated the relevant truth.

After all the last century’s Sturm und Drang, “Capitalism” today is just a bumper-sticker. There are many different kinds. There was the laissez-faire “capitalism” of the 19th century, against whose atrocious treatment of workers Marx and Engels rightly inveighed, although they failed to provide a practical or durable solution. There was the highly regulated and constrained “capitalism” of FDR’s New Deal. It helped create the most egalitarian consumer society in human history, prioritizing collective bargaining, economic equality, and social justice.

Then there is today’s version of winner-take-all “capitalism.” Under it, Facebook and Twitter are duopolizing and controlling the media, and Walmart and Amazon retail sales, while the 1% grow ever richer and most workers suffer.

The fact that these three systems and their consequences for workers were so starkly different, as are the US’ and Japan’s “capitalism” today, shows just how useless and superfluous, for both analysis and policy, is the abstract term itself. In the final analysis, the “contrast” between “capitalism” and “socialism” is just another way for demagogues to keep the money flowing to the 1% and the workers squeezed, sometimes literally to death, as in this pandemic.

The right way to evaluate economic systems is how they treat people. Unfortunately, today’s so-called economists focus on the inanimate. They obsess about abstractions like GDP, profit, prices, and costs, or on abstract “inputs” to production like land, labor, and capital. But of all these things, only one stands out as different. Only “labor” means living people.

Under the influence, if not the spell, of our mechanistic economists, we treat workers as disposable commodities, at best as an abstract economic variable. Japan treats them as people, worthy of dignity, respect and good treatment even in buying or selling a trifle. That just about sums up our national differences.

In so doing, the Japanese have created an economy that deserves and receives worldwide respect. Its products are world class. It cities are world class, crowded yet remarkably liveable, even to people, like me, who normally live in our least-populated and most rural states. Because of its focus on people and the group, Japan has fought off the pandemic more successfully and is proving more resilient to it than we.

That this is so ought to teach us something. Maybe workers, as people, are not mere things or an inanimate abstraction after all. Maybe if we treat them as people, with all the complexity and empathy thus implied, things would get better for all of us. Maybe this dismal time will allow that treatment to evolve naturally, without revolution, if only we just let all workers vote.

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Why I Won’t Fly

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Juneteenth

To judge from my hit count, readers have been disappointed in my failure to mark this year’s Juneteenth. In truth, I knew little specific about the holiday until enlightened by Jamelle Bouie’s column in the New York Times today. Measured against the depths of African-Americans’ four centuries of hardship and suffering, Juneteenth may seem a minor holiday. The practical effect of its emancipation was, after all, limited to Texas. But this year Juneteenth takes on great symbolic significance. It comes amidst the worst presidency in our history, a massive neglect of working people for profit, the worst pandemic in a century (with African-Americans its most frequent victims), and an atrocious spate of police murders and brutality that has left all of us, regardless of race, fed up. Perhaps the hardship to which all of us are now subject has made the majority more empathetic toward Africans and their descendants, who’ve been oppressed by design since our Founding. In elucidating the meaning of Juneteenth, Mr. Bouie focuses on African-Americans’ contributions to their own liberation. But their valiant struggle and its achievements should lead none of us to think they should “take it from here.” The economic and social inequality under which many suffer is still far too great for the rest of us to expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. We did that a century and a half ago, when we denied each just-freed slave family forty acres and a mule. And here we are. I hope and trust that the hardships through which we all are now suffering—if not all in equal measure—will bring about a progressive and egalitarian revolution this fall. But no such revolution will be complete without addressing Juneteenth and its broken promises. It’s far from enough for us to reform our police to stop the brutality and wanton murders. That would be a bare minimum. This moment demands that the white and the wealthy attempt the impossible: to atone for and reverse the consequences of four centuries of near-continuous atrocities unjustly directed at a single group among us. We must make reparation. Not the token, one-time, one-size-fits-all grants for the four-year Japanese Internment. This four centuries of horrors requires something like a domestic Marshall Plan. We need an ongoing program to lift up communities of the descendants of slaves, recognize and nurture their human potential, and overcome the enduring legacies of slavery once and for all. As a people founded on the principle that “all men are created equal,” what can we say if we fail? Can we look at ourselves in the mirror and claim that the last, best hope of mankind has learned anything since the Pharaohs enslaved the Jews? To me, that’s the meaning and the challenge of Juneteenth this year—a year steeped in tragedy, yet also in hope.

Strangers and distancing
Enclosed spaces and air flow
Duration of contact
Masks, gloves and hand washing
Conclusion

One of several sad things about being American today is that it’s hard to escape Donald Trump’s reality distortion field. You may despise the man, as I do, but he’s everywhere. And so are his lies, bottomless ignorance of science and fact, vain hopes and wishful thinking. He’s a skillful purveyor of beguiling falsehoods that push people’s emotional buttons.

Those who work in the federal government can’t escape him. He demands absolute loyalty and fealty to his personal “party line,” even as it changes and often reverses itself. So a universally acknowledged expert like Anthony Fauci must exercise all his advanced people skills and shade his message, just to avoid conflict with the Commander in Chief while still trying to inform the people.

If you want the unvarnished truth, you can’t trust anyone in the federal government to give it to you straight. You have to find real experts who have no official position and nothing to lose by telling the truth.

If you want the truth about Covid-19, you should start by reading this and this. Once you do, you will understand: (1) the vast universe of real and durable scientific ignorance and uncertainty surrounding this totally new virus and (2) the probability that we will not have a safe and effective vaccine that confers real and lasting immunity for years, if ever.

The most likely near-term outcome for this virus is that all Americans (and all humanity) will have to live with it until 60 - 70% of us have caught it and survived. Then we will have “herd immunity” throughout the nation and the globe.

Of course better outcomes are possible. Many, many experts are working on a vaccine with more advanced science, more resources and more knowledge than ever before. But rational people plan based on the most likely outcome, not the best case, don’t they?

With that in mind, I’ve made a personal decision not to get on an airplane again until vaccinated, if ever. My reasons are in part personal, and in part practical and realistic.

I just turned 75, and so I’m in the high-risk group. I’m in good physical shape, bicycle 8-12 miles a few times a week, and do calisthenics on most alternate days. But throughout my life I’ve been especially susceptible to colds and flu, catching bugs easily from travel, plane trips and hotel stays. So when we recently had to stay in a B & B on a 1,100-mile car trip, we took our own pillows, which we plan to disinfect after a waiting period.

These are my personal idiosyncrasies. But there are several universal reasons for refusing to fly during the reign of Covid-19 unless you have to. Here they are:

1. Strangers and distancing. From a contagion point of view, the worst thing about flying is that you never know who’ll be sitting right next to you. Airlines have promised distancing but don’t deliver. They can’t. In a time of rampant and unremitting financial losses, their profit motive is just too strong.

There are constant reports of full or nearly-full flights, as if the pandemic didn’t exist. So take out your mental tape measure and consider. In the three-and-three seating arrangement used on many domestic flights, you’d meet the six-foot rule only if you were in one window seat and the closest passenger were in the other, across the aisle on the other side of the plane.

Then what about longitudinal distancing? To keep the passengers in window seats six-feet apart, you’d have to skip several whole rows.

Of course a computer could probably devise a more “efficient” seating plan and pack a few more passengers in. But the truth is clear. There is absolutely no way that modern, packed-seat airplanes could maintain both six-foot distancing and even a 50% load factor. It’s just not going to happen.

Anyway, airline computer systems are not clairvoyant. They can’t predict in advance how many passengers will book a particular flight, especially when flights are much fewer than they were before the pandemic, and bookings can be rare and sporadic. Under those circumstances, the profit motive will keep airlines from programming their computers to enforce proper distancing on many, if not most, flights. And the airlines’ motives will always be diametrically opposed to yours: the more people and less distancing, the greater their profit or the smaller their loss.

Then there’s the whole other question of who’s the person sitting closest to you. Even if the airline requires a mask, will he or she keep it on? Will it ride up over your neighbor’s nose and mouth, where it does no good, so he or she can eat, drink, talk, sleep, snore, or just get some “relief”?

Airlines cannot and will not micromanage the behavior of people who are deniers, scofflaws, selfish, careless, or ignorant, or who just think they know better. So if you want to be realistic, you have to consider the risk that someone not wearing a mask, or wearing it negligently, will cough, sneeze, breathe, sing, shout or talk the virus all over you.

2. Enclosed spaces and air flow. As science slowly comes to grip with this entirely unprecedented virus, one thing is becoming clear. Outdoors is good. Indoors, in enclosed spaces, is bad for contagion.

There are two reasons for this. First, being outdoors allows room for proper distancing, in two and sometimes three dimensions. Second, the outdoor environment generally has winds or air currents that carry virus-laden droplets away. Even on days with little wind, small differences in solar heating create small currents.

As a result, a study of “super-spreader” contagion events in Wuhan, China showed [search for “Wuhan”] only one occurring outdoors. In contrast, the worst contagion events worldwide all have occurred in enclosed spaces: nursing homes, prisons, churches, and indoor funeral services.

It’s hard to imagine a more enclosed and unchanging indoor space than an airplane, in which people sit next to each other for an hour or more, getting up only to stretch or use the toilet.

That said, airline air-moving systems provide some relief. The moving air—which is mostly recirculated but partly fresh—goes through HEPA filters before being returned to the cabin. Those filters remove almost all bacteria and virus particles.

Years before this pandemic came, I exploited these facts for my personal safety. I opened the air vent over my seat full blast and directed it to form a laminar flow around my head. If the seat next to me was vacant, I did the same thing with the vent next to me. (I often had to wear a coat or jacket to keep warm despite this constant airflow.)

In theory, the laminar flow of cleaned air around my head and reduced the amount of pathogens that I would breathe. But there were two caveats. First, I had to maintain my position in the center of the flow by moving the vent every time I changed position. This got harder with newer air-vent systems, which make it harder to direct air streams. Second, my full-blast flow often chilled me and/or annoyed my seatmates, and I had to deal with that.

I did no scientific study, but I have the distinct impression that this precaution cut down the number of colds and flus I got while flying. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t rely on it to protect me from a potentially deadly virus. And I don’t know whether everyone’s using the same technique might cut the general cabin air flow down to the point of uselessness. Finally, recent pandemic-related studies of air flow in cabins suggest that droplets containing viruses (from a sneeze, for example) get circulated the full width of the cabin and several seating rows in each direction. I just don’t know how efficient the laminar flow of cleaned air coming in over my head would be in keeping that general viral circulation away from my head, or how much of it might get entrained in the air I breathe despite the protective laminar flow.

3. Duration of contact. In evaluating the risk of casual contact with strangers, time is obviously a key variable. The longer you are close to someone infected, the greater the chance of a virus-containing droplet being sucked into your airways as you breathe. This truth holds whether or not the infected person is wearing a mask. The risk is at least proportional to duration, but the relationship might be even stronger.

As a professor of law, I had some pre-pandemic experience with this variable. Catching colds and flus from students, both in class and in one-on-one conferences, is an occupational hazard of teachers of all kinds. So we had a rule of thumb—the “seven-minute” rule. If you kept your conferences with apparently sick students to seven or fewer minutes, you had a good chance of emerging unscathed. If longer, your chances of infection grew.

I have no idea what, if any, science lay behind this rule of thumb, but we all believed it. More to the point, the expert epidemiologist’s online interview that sparked this blog post provided generally similar time frames [search for “ten minutes”]. A close encounter for ten minutes with an infected person wearing no mask would likely cause infection, while it might be safe for up to twenty minutes with someone wearing a good mask well.

When you compare those time frames to the duration of airline flights—an hour for a short domestic flight and fourteen hours for trans-Pacific flights—you can quickly see the problem. On a long flight sitting right next to an infected person for hours at a time, escaping uninfected would seem a stroke of extreme good luck.

4. Masks, gloves and hand-washing. In the absence of an effective vaccine or cure, the most practical expedients for personal safety are masks, gloves, and frequent hand washing. Of course you always have control of how, when and how effectively you exploit these precautions. But what about the people around you?

To me, that’s the Achilles Heel of flying. In the age of Covid-19, you just don’t know who’ll be sitting near you, how close they’ll be, how seriously they take the whole risk of contagion, or whether and how effectively they’ll exploit these three basic precautions. Wearing gloves and not touching your face—at any time during the long flight—can avoid infection by contact. But what about the virus-laden airborne droplets from a nearby infected person, who may have no symptoms and may have no clue about his or her infection?

We all have some idea of the risks when we interact with our spouses or partners, our family, our close friends and our co-workers. We know because we know them. If we consider them careless or unreliable, we can take precautions accordingly. If they care about us, they’ll keep their distance or avoid all contact, or at least tell us when they don’t feel well. Then we can cut our contact, keep our distance, or even avoid contact altogether.

But you can’t do any of that with strangers flying with you on an airplane.

An EMT’s story from Daily Kos is instructive here. An unknown geezer approached him in a supermarket and berated him loudly at close quarters for wearing a mask, thereby increasing the risk of spreading the virus. Sure enough, that same stranger became the EMT’s patient later the same day, being carried in the EMT’s ambulance with an impossibly high blood pressure and heart rate.

The EMT-author chalked it all up to Karma. But I would go further. Emotional denial of unpleasant reality often gets stronger just before it breaks. This stranger probably had premonitions, conscious or subconscious, of coming down with Covid-19. Those premonitions may have made his denial in the supermarket so much more vehement and, through yelling in the EMT’s face, also much more dangerous. How do you know, while seated-belted in an airplane, that you’re not sitting next to someone just like that?

Conclusion

When you think about it, it’s hard to imagine a higher-risk exposure than flying today, except perhaps working in a hospital or nursing home handling Covid-19 patients. Even then, if you’re a caregiver you have a chance to limit your exposure with suitable PPE, or by distancing yourself and limiting the duration of contact. On an airplane, your chances of taking those precautions are limited or non-existent, and always subject to the flight crew’s rules and orders and what your fellow passengers will accept.

Airlines can and do take useful precautions with infected surfaces, sterilizing touch points after every flight and (with bathrooms) maybe after each use. But as scientific knowledge and experience with Covid-19 mounts, we are getting surer and surer that touch is only a minor means of contagion. In terms of unavoidable risk, contact by touch is almost irrelevant, because of the simple precautions you can take by wearing gloves, not touching your face, and washing your hands. The real risk is contaminated air, against which there are no simple, easy and reliable precautions.

So the primary means of contagion, and by far the most dangerous, is breathing. If the air we breathe has droplets containing the virus, they can infect us. And breathing is all the more dangerous when carriers of the disease can be totally asymptomatic or have minor symptoms that casual deniers can shrug off. That’s why Covid-19 is such a scary disease.

Maybe some enterprising firm will develop a disposable, head-only hazmat “suit,” with a clear plastic viewport, an air intake tube containing a thick HEPA filter backed up by closely packed carbon granules, and a total head enclosure with a velcro belt and “weatherstripping” for making an airtight but comfortable closure around the neck. That and rules letting me wear it are all it might take to reduce the risk of airborne contagion to an acceptable level for occasional, voluntary, non-essential travelers like me. But until I have such an helmet, or until I’ve been vaccinated safely and effectively, you won’t find me on an airplane any time while Covid-19 is still pandemic.

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Voting: A Humble Tool with a Long Lever Arm

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For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Rayshard Brooks, R.I.P.

Rayshard Brooks’ death was more complicated and less horrifically documented than George Floyd’s. But two things about it are clear. If the Atlanta police had been trained and required to preserve public safety and human life, Brooks would still be alive today. So would he be if he had just been white. The circumstances of his murder, so well described and analyzed by WaPo Columnist Eugene Robinson, make both points incontrovertible. Two weeks ago, I pledged to give, as long as I can, five political causes each another $100 a month for every “extrajudicial police killing of a nonwhite person while in custody between now and November 3[.]” The five causes are: Biden’s presidential run, Amy McGrath’s quest to retire Mitch McConnell, and three voter empowerment organizations—Fair Fight Action (Stacey Abrams’ group), Black Voters Matter, and Nse Ufot’s New Georgia Project. Arguably Brooks was not killed “while in custody,” as he was running away. But to make that claim would be quibbling. He had been in custody before grabbing a cop’s Taser and running away. Then the cop shot him down from the back, as if flight were a capital offense, or as if a drunken man running in fear presented a mortal threat to the community. You could argue that Brooks was killed for the cop’s own incompetence in letting a drunken man in custody get away. I’m making these contributions for two reasons. First, in a strange way, the worst presidency in our history, the worst pandemic in a century, and a spate of outrageously unjustified and meticulously documented killings of nonwhite people can coalesce to facilitate the most profound electoral change since FDR’s New Deal. All that need happen is for progressive whites, long-oppressed minorities, conservatives (and others) who can’t abide Trump, and citizens of age who’ve never before voted to recognize their common interests and unite. I want to be part of that grand coalition and to do all I can to insure its success. Second, I want to have some skin in the game. I’m tired of trying to imagine what mortal fear nonwhite people feel whenever they see a cop or a police car, and of coming up short. I want to have something at stake besides bare abstractions. I want those of us who can understand to take back America before I die. I don’t expect others to follow me. One commenter to my announcement of my pledge said she felt “invalidated.” My reply to her I reproduce below. All I want to do is what I can to grab this historic chance for profound change, and to be able to feel, for just a moment, the barest shadow of the pain and anxiety that my nonwhite fellow Americans feel every time a “peace” officer murders one of their own. Reply to commenter who felt “invalidated” (in part): As for feeling “invalidated” (I read “intimidated”), please don’t. We all do what we can. Someone like billionaire Michael Bloomberg can give, in one stroke, more that I’ve given to candidates and causes in all my 75 years—even more than I’ve earned in my whole life. I hope he will. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do what I can. (As you can see from these three replies, what I do best is chew on ideas and problems, think and write.) No one, not even Biden, can fix this nation alone. It’s got to be all of us, working together. If you do what you can and “fight in a different way,” you can feel good about yourself and hopeful for our future. This is an “all hands on deck” moment in our national history, and every willing hand is worthy.

The Principal Post follows:

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” — Archimedes

“I don’t ask you to die for your country, to bleed or shed tears for it. All I ask is that you sweat a little.” — Loose paraphrase of quote from the mouth of a noble Spanish knight in the movie El Cid, who fought for the reconquista of Spain from the Moors and later helped unify it.

Most politicians live by individual or group loyalty and vague, abstract ideologies. Republicans want “smaller government,” less regulation, and more “freedom.” Leave aside the fact that this sort of “freedom” usually empowers the already rich and powerful. What exactly do those terms mean? Smaller, less and more than what? When do you know you’ve achieved these goals? When anarchy is rampant?

Democrats are not much different. They want “justice,” “fairness,” “diversity” and “equality.” But what exactly do those words mean? We live in what is probably the most diverse nation on Earth. The problem is not diversity; it’s the needless rivalry among our groups and their undeserved domination by whites.

Stacey Abrams is different. She thinks like a scientist or an engineer. She rarely uses abstract nostrums. Instead, she focuses on how to make things work and what really matters. She knows which end of the proverbial screwdriver to pick up because she understands cause and effect.

To see how and why, read her recent New York Times op-ed about getting disenfranchised people to vote. The problem, she says, is not just voter suppression, although that’s getting more real and flagrant with every passing day.

The deeper problem is that many people don’t vote because they don’t see any connection between voting and their own lives. Abrams describes precisely how to make that connection, voter by voter, starting with elections for city council and mayor. Like former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, she seems to recognize that “all politics is local.” She connects local consequences to the national and presidential elections. Thus she motivates people who’ve never voted and now fear their votes won’t be counted or won’t matter.

It’s become cliché that this will be a “base” election. Trump seems to be making no attempt to attract the undecided. And why should he? After three years of his misrule, you either buy his lies, ineptness and vulgar showmanship, or you despise him. (Individual voters don’t have to worry, like Trump’s Republican lackeys, that their jobs depend on their personal loyalty to the worst president in our history.)

There’s not much middle ground. If you haven’t heard much about Trump, you’ve not been paying attention. Trump is one of the most gifted exploiters of available media in human history, and media profiteers like the Murdochs, Zuckerberg and Dorsey feed his rise for money.

In short, the notion that there are a lot of undecided white workers in the upper Midwest, where the Dems lost the 2016 election, seems pure fantasy. What there are—in a nation in which 60% is a high turnout in a presidential election and 35% in the off-years—is a lot of people who can and should vote but don’t. Many of them are women, members of minorities or both. They don’t vote because they despair of being allowed to vote or of having their votes make a difference. And they have lots and lots of history by which to rationalize their despair.

Enter Stacey Abrams. She knows how to reach these voters and inspire them. She didn’t win the Georgia governorship in 2018, due to massive and systematic voter suppression, including by her own opponent as Georgia’s Secretary of State. But even so she lost by only 1.4%. She did so as an African-American and a woman in a state that had never elected either as governor. That was an extraordinary achievement and the reflection of her unique talent.

In the movie El Cid, the Spanish knights need to move a huge cannon, stuck in the mud, to breach the walls of the Moors’ castle. They need more manpower to do so. The leader makes his speech to a group of peasants untrained in war. Once they understand that they wouldn’t personally be under fire, just pulling a cannon, they rise up. The cannon gets where it needs to be, the castle walls are breached, and the rest is history.

Just so in our time, street demonstrations won’t win the day. They show passion and solidarity, but they also expose good people to Covid-19, arrest and police mayhem. They may be shows of personal courage for principle, but historically they have had little effect.

Just as after the protests of Dr. King’s martyrdom, Rodney King’s beating and the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin, the current demonstrations likely will accomplish little more than greater justice in the individual case. What we need is broad, systemic reform. That requires a profound change in government, which will come only when and if people who’ve never voted do. Republicans see this fact clearly: that’s why they are openly touting voter suppression under the pretext of voter fraud.

Enter Stacey Abrams. She’s a threefer. She’s an African-American, and she’s a woman. So her very identity gives hope to others like her. How many times have white male pols promised African-Americans and women changes they would like but failed to deliver? Isn’t it only natural that one from their own ranks could inspire where others have not? And does race and gender even matter to others as long as a candidate is smart and competent, which Abrams self-evidently is?

Abrams’ third—and decisive—advantage is that she knows how. She’s practical, non-ideological and skilled in explaining to people how voting can change their lives. No one else has done as well as she under such adverse circumstances.

So we find ourselves in an El Cid situation. The people don’t need to march and demonstrate and risk infection, arrest and police brutality. We don’t need a second civil war. All we need is for people who’ve never voted before—who now think that their voting won’t matter—to reconsider and vote.

The tragedy of our time is that political operatives in both parties obsessively focus on the white “majority.” But it’s fading. By 2043, just over a generation away, it will be history. It’s history even today if you add to in sympathetic whites, progressives in solidarity, and lifelong conservatives who just can’t stand Trump.

For powerful historical reasons, the weakest link in this chain of solidarity is minorities and women who’ve never seen their votes produce any light—except for the brief candle of Barack Obama and the chance that Hillary Clinton lost. If you can think of anyone else better situated by identity, experience, mindset and skill to urge them than Stacey Abrams, please let Joe Biden know. Because his success in the coming election, and the survival of our democracy, will hang on her skill in winning votes. Joe Biden alone simply cannot inspire enough women and minorities who’ve never voted to do so.

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