Mobilizing to Fight the Pandemic

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There’s an old saying about the military. It goes something like this: politicians and glad-handers rise during peacetime; doers rise to the top only in war, and then only out of necessity.

Our civilian sector, including many of the non-military parts of government, could tell a similar story. For at least the last forty years, three recognizable types of “leaders” have dominated it.

In politics and large parts of the private sector, it’s the advocates: politicians, lawyers, PR folk and advertisers. Their primary job is to dupe the rubes. They begin with a fixed position, handed them by their party or their bosses. Then they justify and propagate it cleverly against all opposition. For them it’s all an abstract verbal game. The simpler the story, and the more mindless and simplistic the abstractions, the better to dupe the rubes.

The second class is the “bean counters” and spreadsheet makers, aka MBAs. All they really know is how to choose the more immediately profitable among a small number of options presented (often, but not always) by people who actually know what they are doing. That’s why we had to bail out GM after the Crash of 2008. That’s why we had a second “total death” crash of the 737 Max, when any competent pre-war industrial leader would have grounded the plane the first time, found the flaw, and fixed it. Boing is still trying to do that.

The third class is the traders, including brokers, financiers, market manipulators, and international dealers in goods and services. In the last several decades this class has metastasized explosively in both numbers and obscene wealth.

For these folks, everything is a commodity, to be “monetized,” bought and sold. This class includes people like Mark Zuckerberg, who learned to monetize, buy and sell billions of people’s private information.

Our media gush over their Internet financial gimmicks as “marvelous innovation.” Meanwhile, real discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology, quantum computing, nanotechnology and even medicine increasingly migrate East to China and Japan. Or they migrate back to Europe, whence many of the last century’s great discoveries in science came to us, after the Nazis drove their makers out.

Not one of these three long-dominant American “professions” will be of any use in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is not intelligent. You can’t dupe it and you can’t “spin” it, although of course our president has tried and failed to do that to us, the people.

There’s no profit in the Covid-19 pandemic, nor in abating it. It’s a cost center, not a profit center. The goal of fighting it is not profit, but reducing death and suffering and insuring human survival. It’s probably going to be the biggest cost center in our species’ history, at least until global warming really starts to bite.

Finally, there’s nothing about the pandemic that can be usefully monetized, except in the crudest and most skullduggerous way—as did that Tennessee yahoo trying to corner the market in hand sanitizers and toilet paper in his little part of the world. In the past, we had a word for people who try to “monetize” suffering and death or the risk of them: criminals.

World War II was our last serious challenge as a nation. The Cold War was a bit of mutual Russian-American insanity that sort of ended by itself. No one really “won” it. As for the Crash of 2008, it was a totally gratuitous crisis caused by members of our own financial class, resolved by bailing them out. No wonder the New York Times opined in a must-read editorial that our nation has faced nothing as daunting as the Covid-19 pandemic since World War II.

Now that we must face it, we need people of imagination, experience and daring. We need people who can seize opportunities and avoid risks on the spur of the moment, and who can organize teams and whole industries to do so. You can’t do that by spinning lies and half-truths, working a spreadsheet, or trading monetized commodities like a barterer in a souk. You have to have the brains and skill of people like FDR, Harry Hopkins, Generals Eisenhower, MacArthur and Marshall, and (from the modern era) Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, David Packard, and Jonas Salk. (The fact that many readers will have to look up some of these names shows just how far we’ve degenerated from a nation of doers and achievers into a gigantic fan club for celebrities, including our president.)

None of the three great classes of self-indulgent lightweights who’ve risen to the top of our society since Reagan can help us. We need people who can figure out how to turn production lines for vacuum cleaners, air conditioners and refrigerators into factories for ventilators in a couple of weeks. We need leaders who can organize their massive manufacture and distribution without excess or hoarding. We need doctors and biotech researchers who can find and validate quicker and cheaper tests for infection incipient and infection overcome—and eventually vaccines and cures. We need industrialists who can organize and quickly ramp up massive production and distribution of all of these things. (For an example of a modern medical industrialist whose new ideas might help fight the pandemic, click here.)

We need construction czars who can make whole new hospitals rise from the ground in ten days, as in China. And when the whirlwind pandemic finally has passed, we will need industrialists and planners who can put our shattered economy back together, perhaps nearer to the heart’s desire. Presumably what rises from the ashes will be not only more equitable, fair and just to workers and families, but also less reliant on profligate use of planet-killing fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, many of our people who could help us do all this are no longer working here at home. They’re in China, Mexico, Vietnam and Bangladesh, where leaders of our three “professions” sent them to make piles of money and send it home.

And that’s precisely the problem. Since Athens fought Sparta, our species has understood a painful truth. Live the Good Life, too far prolonged, and you become weak, lazy, selfish and stupid. After 75 years of the Good Life—nearly four continuous generations!—we have to get strong, diligent, selfless and smart overnight.

We have to find, promote and follow people who actually know that they are doing, not spreadsheets or some simplistic ideological mantra. Of course we have to dump our Buffoon-in-Chief. But if we wait until November, we are toast. Right now, we must kick him upstairs, letting him Tweet and grab credit at will, while finding and putting experienced, competent people in charge of our society, or at least our response to the pandemic. We have to listen to them and turn on a dime, just as we did when we realized, too late, that we don’t have nearly enough tests.

We also have to stop beating our flabby breasts, crowing about past glory, and bashing other societies, like China, for not being like us. Yes, China got off to a slow start, but so did we. If we can face this virus as well as China is doing now, let alone South Korea, we might have something to crow about, maybe a year down the road.

If not, then once the dust all settles, China’s ascendance and the acceleration of our decline will be virtually assured. No society can count on dominance, let alone transcendance, for any particular length of time. If we don’t find and heed good leadership in response to this first big challenge in 75 years, our global dominance will become history shortly after the crisis ends, and our nation will be immeasurably weaker.

What kind of foreign leader will pay any attention to a man who disbanded our government’s principal pandemic leadership team, and then, once the pandemic hit our shores, belittled it, failed to work hard to insure adequate testing, made four basic errors of fact in his first address on the subject, praised himself repeatedly, and gave himself a “10” for performance? Mitigating the most obvious aspects of economic devastation is not hard. All it requires is violating Republican orthodoxy and handing out money to people who are not oligarchs. Stopping the pandemic, making sure that it’s stopped, preparing for the next one, and restructuring our economy in the wake of its devastation to be more just, fairer and more resilient to both medical and climate shocks will require much, much more.

Try to imagine what this nation will be like after four more years of this raucous parade of self-congratulating incompetents. Then act, work and vote accordingly. Please.

Thought for the Day. Except for Mitt Romney, every single Republican senator voted to keep our Incompetent-in-Chief in office. As you watch your loved ones suffer and/or die for lack of tests, ventilators, hospital beds, ICU beds, healthy care providers and/or effective mobilization, please remember them.

Endnote: China’s push to assure its ascendance in mobilizing globally against Covid-19 is already happening. Having apparently contained its own part of the pandemic, and having expanded its production of masks twelve fold since the outbreak began (from half of the whole world’s supply at the outset!) China has begun exporting masks, ventilators and expertise to hard-stricken foreign countries like Italy and Iraq. If you want a premonition of the future, just watch China run.

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