America Inured
Have we as a nation become inured to mass death? Also, Sen. Chris Murphy makes the case for decreasing the US footprint in the Persian Gulf and your semi-regular reminder to never tweet.
Before I get into the news this week, a personal note. As I’ve alluded to before - and some of you may know - I am a single father. I share joint custody of my two daughters, who are seven and nine. After weekends when they are with me, I usually don’t write on Monday. It’s a day that I use to recharge, catch up on my reading, and talk to sources. So to make a long story short: I will generally not be sending posts on Monday!
Also, there’s no better way to start the week than by upgrading to a paid subscription! As I’ve mentioned here before, Truth and Consequences relies on your contributions, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, please give it some consideration.
Now on to the news.
Half A Million
On Monday, the United States hit a grim milestone: more than 500,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. That is more than all the US deaths in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. It is one out of every 670 Americans.
Half a million is a staggering number and one that a year ago would have been unimaginable. It is, however, symbolic of what I see as a larger phenomenon in American life: we are become disturbingly inured to mass death.
Take, for example, the opioid epidemic. In 2019, more than 70,000 Americans died from a drug overdose - an amount nearly double that of a decade before. Last year, during the pandemic, overdose deaths increased by 29 percent.
Gun deaths peaked in 2017, at more than 39,000. Since then, the numbers have dipped slightly but are still, by far, the highest in the world.
These tragedies go on year after year, and yet little is done to address them. On the federal level, there’s been no recent legislation enacted to tackle the scourge of gun violence. There’s been a more significant effort to get a handle on the opioid epidemic, but nothing commensurate with the number of lives lost per year. Hundreds of thousands of Americans die sooner than they would because they lack access to health care. Medical errors, which include misdiagnosis or acquired infections in hospitals, take the lives of an estimated 250,000 Americans every year. Yet, Washington is still arguing over Obamacare, which has increased health care access to tens of millions of Americans.
That brings us to the recent cold snap that devastated the Midwest and Texas. According to a report last week in the New York Times, at least 58 deaths have been tied to the winter storms. (The final number is likely to be higher). This includes fatalities from carbon monoxide poisoning, car crashes, drownings, house fires, and hypothermia. The deaths included a mother and her 7-year-old daughter, who both died of carbon monoxide poisoning after charging her phone in an idling car in her garage because she had no power. In Conroe, Texas, an 11-year-old boy died in his bed because his parents had no electricity in their home.
Many of these deaths were preventable. Had the Texas power grid been winterized to prepare for a deep freeze, there would have been fewer blackouts, fewer homes without electricity, and fewer Texans dying because of extreme cold. But even after a devastating winter storm in 2011, Texas officials didn’t want to put onerous regulations on electric companies, even if doing so put state residents at lower risk of losing power. It’s not that terribly different than refusing to put tougher regulations on firearms because gun owners prize unfettered access to guns over saving lives.
Texas officials are now calling for mandatory regulations on electric companies to winterize their infrastructure, which is a bit like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. As far as I’m aware, none of these same officials have indicated they now take the threat of climate change seriously and recognize the need to prepare their state or the country for a future of more and more extreme weather events. In fact, state GOP officials continue to falsely blame a failure of wind turbines for the power outages across the state.
I can’t help but see this as all part of a larger trend in American life. We simply take for granted that our fellow citizens will die from gun violence, opioid overdoses, extreme weather, even a pandemic that almost every other country in the world sought to tackle head-on. As a nation, we don’t demand that our public officials - at either the state or federal level - do more to prioritize saving lives from preventable deaths. It’s no surprise that life expectancy in the United States has been trending downward for years - a statistic that stands in sharp contrast with nearly every other country on earth. I don’t know if we are simply inured to this or feel powerless to change it. Whatever the answer, it represents a frightening shift in our national ethos.
I still often think of the little old lady I spoke to in Allentown, PA, at a Trump campaign event in late October last year who told me that 99 percent of people who get COVID don’t die. It was a refrain I heard from many Trump supporters.
When I asked her about the 1 percent that has or will die (and the fatality rate is actually higher than 1 percent), she said to me, “we’re all going to die.”
I fear that her nihilistic attitude is one far too widely accepted by our fellow citizens. As tragic as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, I wonder if we will learn the lesson from this awful tragedy and increase our effort to protect those in our society who are most vulnerable. Or will we simply compartmentalize this unimaginable loss, as we do so many other aspects of life and death in America? I fervently hope for the former but fear it will be the latter.
America’s Policy Toward the Middle East Needs To Change
Last week, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote a smart piece for “Foreign Affairs,” arguing that America’s policy toward the Middle East, particularly the Persian Gulf, is dangerous, outdated, and needs to change. Murphy makes an important and often overlooked point: that the national security interests of the Persian Gulf states that the US counts as allies are frequently in conflict with America’s own national security goals.
Murphy argues that the United States needs to disengage from the Gulf states’ “proxy wars with Iran,” which feeds instability and anti-American attitudes in the region. He writes:
“Although the United States should retain its security partnerships with Gulf nations, the US footprint should be smaller. Before the Gulf War, the United States was able to protect its interests in the region without massive military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia and without billions in annual arms sales to these same nations. The foreign policy community in Washington acts as if this massive military presence is now mandatory to protect US interests, even though it wasn’t prior to the creation of the post-9/11 security state. US bases are costly, drawing focus away from increasingly important theaters such as Africa and Asia; they create pressure on the United States to ignore serious human rights abuses lest criticism puts the troop presence at risk; and they stand out as military targets and propaganda fodder for Iran, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State (or ISIS). As US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin undertakes a global review of the United States’ military posture, the Biden administration should seriously consider reducing its military basing in the region. Reconsidering the costs and benefits of basing the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain would be a good start, as the United States’ massive footprint is becoming more trouble than it is worth.”
This is an old bugaboo of mine, which I wrote about with my friend Micah Zenko a few years ago. Over the past four decades, the US has spent billions of dollars and lost more than 7,500 troops fighting wars, enforcing no-fly zones, and bolstering Middle East allies with lousy human rights records and interests far different than our own. This is happening even though the nominal reason for US involvement in the region was to protect US access to Middle Eastern oil. As Murphy points out, “the United States produces as much oil as it gets from abroad, and only 13 percent comes from Gulf countries. The United States now imports more oil from Mexico than it does from Saudi Arabia.” As for terrorism, another stated rationale for the large US military presence in the region, Americans are as likely to be killed by falling televisions or lightning strikes as they are jihadist terrorists.
I would approach the issue more broadly than Murphy. The Middle East is no longer a region that is vital to US national security interests. It’s the least democratic, poorest, and most violent of any region in the world. It’s almost certainly the area where US trade is the smallest, and aside from concerns over terrorism, which are dramatically overstated, it holds little strategic importance to America. As Micah and I argued in our book, “though the Middle East/North Africa (MENA0 region gets over-sized media attention, it constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s population and is not representative of the overwhelming majority of the planet’s seven and a half billion residents.”
This is not to suggest that the United States should walk away from the region. We have historical ties to Israel, for example, and long-standing treaty relations with Egypt and Turkey. For better or for worse, we are the only country in the world able to assemble a military coalition to beat back the Islamic State. In addition, as we did with the Iran nuclear agreement, preventing nuclear proliferation will almost certainly remain a long-standing principle of US foreign policy. But as Murphy points out, there are costs for the relationships we have maintained. Our alliance with Saudi Arabia, which dates back to the 1940s, led to our involvement in that country’s horrific war with Yemen. By doing so, we enabled a humanitarian disaster. It’s good to see the Biden administration begin to back away from the conflict. Our close ties to Israel have led us to look the other way at the Netanyahu government’s increasingly anti-democratic bent and settlement policies in the occupied territories, which run counter to US interests. Our support for the Sisi regime in Egypt has led us to back of one of the worst human rights oppressors in the region. In short, while we are the great power, we’ve been allowing our allies to dictate our policies in the region, with disastrous consequences.
It’s long overdue that we reverse that strategy, and it’s good to see a prominent Democratic senator like Murphy making a case for it.
Never Tweet
On Monday, it became increasingly clear that Neera Tanden’s nomination to be head of the Office of Management and Budget is not going to happen. Last week, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin said that he would vote “no” on Tanden, and this week, three Republican senators who were seen as possible “yes” votes (Romney, Collins, and Toomey) announced they would do the same. The reason for Tanden’s demise is her tweets. Among other things, she called Collins “the worst,” referred to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas as a “fraud,” said “vampires have more heart” than Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “Moscow Mitch” and “Voldemort.” She also attacked the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, endorsed some of the more outlandish theories around Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and spent way too much time on the social media site getting in fights.
On the one hand, Republican senators are engaging in rank hypocrisy. For them to complain about infelicitous tweets after four years of pretending that they never saw so many of Donald Trump’s abusive, obnoxious, and hate-filled tweets is just too much. For Manchin to make it a rationale for voting against Tanden when he supported Richard Grenell, when he was nominated to be ambassador to Germany and had previously been a full-time Twitter troll, it is stunningly inconsistent.
On the other hand, Tanden kind of brought this on herself. Tanden’s lack of self-control on Twitter - and her hyper-partisanship - was evident for years. She had been repeatedly warned that it could be a problem if she ever hoped to get a Senate-confirmed Cabinet position. As for Manchin, yes, he’s a hypocrite, but a Democratic senator from an overwhelmingly red state is always going to look for ways to show off their centrist bonafide, and shivving Tanden was an easy way to do it. The policy impact will be minimal, and this allows Manchin to engage in some performative centrism. Don’t get me wrong, what’s happening to Tanden is not right, and her opponents are hypocritical, but if we’re honest about it, she handed her opponents the knife.
While Texas is, indeed, closing the barn door after the cold has gotten in, this weather situation is likely to happen again - and sooner than the ten year gap that just passed between the last two. So if Texas will 1) properly insulate their power structure; 2) connect to the two national grids so help can be provided; and 3) revamp their fees structure so nobody gets any of the ridiculous bills that we've seen, this "left-wing radical" will approve.
This just goes to prove Stalin's adage that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic": Americans, especially right-wing ones, seem to be unable to process large numbers of illnesses or deaths ... statistics sound "elitist" and therefore are ignored or dismissed as "hoaxes". And, as to the lady who thought a 1% death rate was ok, I recommend the article in the current New Republic on after-effects of Covid suffered by "long haulers" who survive, but sometimes wish they had not done so.