Nina Burleigh, The Gilead Playbook

I was born into another world, a year before the end of the Second World War. And in that world, my mother was something of a rarity. I only realized that when, at school, I discovered that most of my classmates’ mothers were, as the term then went, “housewives” (which in many ways was the definition — part of a house — of a middle-class “wife” then). They didn’t work, their husbands did. My father certainly did work, but he was also out of work from time to time in the 1950s, which meant money was short. I can still remember listening to the two of them at night, when I was supposedly asleep, fighting bitterly about how to pay the bills, including “Tommy’s bills.”

That was not, then, the definition of a middle-class lifestyle. My mother worked incessantly. She was a theatrical and political caricaturist, drawing for most of the newspapers and magazines in New York City, including the New York Post when it was a liberal rag, not a Murdoch one, and the New Yorker. And since she spent her days drawing at home, she was, I suppose, not a housewife but a houseworker.

More surprisingly yet, she drew under what was then known as her “maiden name,” Irma Selz, not Mrs. Charles Engelhardt, or even Irma Engelhardt. In her own world of work, my mother was, not surprisingly, also a rarity. Cartoonists and caricaturists were, almost by definition then, men. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that gossip columns of the time (I still have a couple of examples) referred to her as “New York’s girl caricaturist.” There was only one, after all. And if I was then a boy, she was, it seemed, still a “girl.”

All of this came to mind when I read the latest piece by political journalist and TomDispatch regular Nina Burleigh, author most recently of Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s obliteration of Roe v. Wade, the urge in parts of this country to drive us all back to a once-upon-a-time world in which women were eternally “girls” and their fate in hands other than theirs (male, of course, and often all too rough) should chill the rest of us. That, I suspect, represents the very world my mom, in her own fashion, fought against. Think of it as an all-American vision of hell on earth and let Burleigh take you there. Tom

Right-Wing Extremists Are Making Fiction Come True – Can Democrats Craft a Winning Message Off a Smorgasbord of Misogynist Madness?

Ever since the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, standing in a ballroom with red-hatted Trump election celebrants in the New York Hilton, I’ve been waiting for this moment. This eruption of misogyny, unlike any since perhaps the witch trials and the burnings of midwives at the stake, was only a matter of time.

As shocking, as wildly insulting as that pussy-grabber winning the presidency was to American women and girls, it was just the beginning of what appears to be a long season of sadism.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

The election of Donald Trump signaled a cutting of the chain-link fence behind which something drooling and ferocious had been waiting. Unfortunately, what most of us didn’t fully grasp then was just how powerful that force of (male) nature was. Too late we understood that it had been long licking its wounds in a dark corner gathering strength. We sensed it for years, of course, but we didn’t know just how feral and hungry it might prove to be.

Remember the things that once had the power to shock us? They seem so meh now:American voters electing to the highest office in the land someone credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault, on record advising a younger man to “grab ’em by the pussy.” And that was after a presidential campaign in which he and his supporters had showered his female (“rhymes with witch”) opponent with profane misogynistic abuse.

Soon, The Donald and his followers had normalized everyday misogyny, celebrating their leader’s tendency to reduce all women to strip-club sexual attractiveness. Mini-Trumps sprouted in lesser elected positions across the country, publicly calling elected women or those campaigning for office witches and worse. We even got used to the seating of a new rightist Supreme Court with, for added insult, one new justice credibly accused of sexual assault and another a member of a religious cult that called women “handmaidens.”

Meh, meh. That, too, it turns out, was just the beginning.

We’re now living in the after-times of all that the Trump years unleashed.

In 1991, Susan Faludi wrote a book, Backlash:The Undeclared War Against Women, chronicling the ways in which the patriarchy was then fighting to reverse the gains made by our mothers and grandmothers. They were the ones who had braved public scorn in their struggle to pull American women out of their assigned roles as pointy-bra-wearing, breathy vixens consigned to housewifery or professional lives as secretaries, nurses, or at best teachers.

Faludi was spot on, of course. Sadly, though, the backlash of the 1980s she chronicled would prove to be just a prologue. Having had it named for us, you might think we could have checked that backlash and maintained momentum toward gender equality. Who in the 1990s could have imagined a day when elected men in at least 25 states would be legally enabled to force raped women to give birth or prevent doctors from performing procedures to save women likely to die of pregnancy? Who could have predicted the level of hatred toward women embodied in those very statutes and openly spoken of without shame or hesitation by elected leaders?

Obviously, we should have known better.

The change that felt so natural to those of us who came of age between 1970 and the turn of the century was not natural to them. Not even faintly. Never in recorded history had there been such an upending of patriarchal power as in the years when we grew up. We tend to take it all for granted, but the challenge to male power from the successes of second-wave feminism (and access to birth-control options) was indeed unique.

The facts speak for themselves: A majority of women now work outside the home, and we outnumber men in college attendance, too — signaling even greater numbers of women who should be able to rely economically on themselves instead of male partners. American women were enabled to escape lives of utter dependence on men, precisely because we had access to contraceptives and abortion, and for the first time in history were able to control if, when, and with whom we would bear children.

All that represented serious, deeply meaningful change. It altered the way young women and young men interacted, sexually and socially. Admittedly, we are still far from parity. The development of Silicon Valley, another economic revolution like the industrial one, created a new flood of male-only economic dynasties that once again shut out women (who weren’t wives) from the upper reaches of the economy. But the trend lines in general were upending eons of power relations between men and women at the most intimate, domestic level.

It was only a matter of time — and we should have known it — before such advances provoked the beast. The election of Donald Trump provided a green light for the release of sick, dark fantasies of revenge and a resurgence of the apparently ineradicable urge among some men to rule women utterly and completely.

The Predator’s Ball

I’ve always found the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale to be unwatchable, misogynistic torture porn. As a young English major in the 1980s, I read Margaret Atwood’s novel. I understood it then as a dystopic satire on the theocratic woman-controlling impulses already bubbling up around the edges of American society, which that Canadian writer had creatively taken to their logical conclusion.

The streaming series, however, was something else. The graphic and repeated scenes of actress Elisabeth Moss’s subjection as Offred, including the rapes and various bloody mutilations and punishments visited on her and her sister handmaidens, all converged into a category of visual titillation that went straight to the amygdala. I could imagine men who didn’t find such visual crap as impossible to watch as I did.

The fact that the producers were men had, I’m sure, something to do with the tone.

But today, the horror is this: it’s not confined to a Hulu series anymore. The extreme right in American politics is openly working off the playbook of Atwood’s fictional Republic of Gilead. Its urge is to construct an all-American theocracy in which the Old Testament Biblical rights of men to control women as reproductive chattel are restored to them.

There was a time not that long ago when American women could assume our foes were safely isolated in pockets of lunacy like Missouri, where 2012 Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin famously suggested that rape can sometimes prevent pregnancy. Another example: Nevada, where a 2010 anti-abortion Tea Party candidate explained her “no exceptions for incest” position by suggesting that girls impregnated by their own fathers should remember that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

We laughed at them then. But the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has emboldened those freaks to leave their hidey-holes and, as Dr. Phil might put it, open up about their true feelings.

Let’s start with Charlie Kirk, Jr., the co-founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), which exists mainly to bus conservative college students to fill seats at Trump rallies or form media-attracting long lines to shake hands with Marjorie Taylor Greene and harass progressive college professors.

Kirk has a podcast and a massive social media following. On June 24th, in the giddy aftermath of the Roe decision, he gushed about his feelings to his 1.7 million Twitter followers this way (italics mine): “Notice who is marching in the streets: single, unmarried, mostly white, college educated women. Frankly it’s foolish to call conservatives racist — who we actually can’t stand are angry, liberal, white women.”

He was probably disappointed when he only garnered 6,860 likes.

Kirk and his fellow travelers seem to be engaged in a competition to revile women. A few months before Roe was overturned, former NFL football player and Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Minnesota Matt Birk actually got a twofer by slamming working women and supporting rapists simultaneously. Abortion rights, he said, lead to working women who then “go to the rape card” if abortion is restricted. He added: “It’s not over. Our culture loudly but also stealthily promotes abortion. Telling women they should look a certain way, have careers, all these things.”

Have careers, and all these things.

At Charlie Kirk’s recent TPUSA convention in Tampa, Florida, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz brayed to a roomful of young men and women this way: “Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.” (Try to imagine the pasted-on cheerleader smiles of the women in his audience listening to that.)

Who cares about words, though, when sticks and stones — and laws — actually break our bones (or cause us to bleed to death)? Straight from the Gilead playbook, the theocrats are trying to force women who need abortions to stay within the restrictive borders of their states. You don’t even need to imagine how closely this tracks with scenes in Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale. A liberal/left-leaning political advocacy group, Meidas Touch, has created a little video clip to help you see it all too graphically.

In the past few weeks alone:

Texas Attorney General and indicted securities fraudster Ken Paxton sued the federal government to stop the implementation of the Biden administration’s requirement that abortions be performed in case of emergency, when the life of a mother is at stake. Texas is officially on record now, working in the courts to make sure women likely to die of pregnancy actually do so.

Idaho Republicans rejected a measure to allow a life-saving abortion. The man behind the proposal to criminalize all abortions from the moment of conception, Scott Herndon, is running unopposed for a state senate seat. He called it a “declaration of the right to life for reborn children.”

Or look to Texas again for proof that “pro-life” care for the “pre-born” child is a lie and not the real reason for the race to control uteri. A recent Texas Tribune/ProPublicainvestigation revealed that ironclad anti-abortion Texas is one of just a few states that doesn’t allow Medicaid coverage for a full year after a poor woman gives birth. How caring!

Democratic and progressive strategists and speechwriters don’t have to look far to find outrageous anecdotes. When President Biden mentioned a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion, the rightwing info-silo, including the Wall Street Journal, promptly cast doubt on the very existence of the child and the rape. When the alleged rapist was arrested, theocrats continued to offer up treacly, sick excuses, dripping with sanctimony, for why even children should be forced to give birth.

“She would have had the baby and, as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” pro-life lawyer and former Indiana deputy attorney general Jim Bopp typically toldPolitico. He was, of course, speaking of that 10 year old whose medical care he would have wanted to prohibit in his state.

Reports of the post-Roeeffects of care withheld are starting to hit the national news, with bleeding women and those with deadly infections having to wait for legal analyses or travel to distant places to find doctors. As one physician who narrowly saved the life of a miscarrying woman in Texas (having had to wait for the fetal heartbeat to finally stop) put it: “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood, and had to be put on a breathing machine.” Her life was indeed saved, but in our new post-Roe world, barely.

The Disunited States of Pro-Choice

There is no doubt in my mind (nor in Margaret Atwood’s) that we’re now witnessing a real-life attempt to construct her once-fictional Republic of Gilead in our country. It will be complete with forced birth and rape as a means of master-race reproduction — plus lots and lots of female blood.

On the upside, the insane depredations, verbal and legal, being visited on women in these post-Roe months have already handed the Democrats a wealth of material from which to craft effective messages and potentially gain an edge in the coming midterm elections. The question is: Does the party have the will and skill to do it? If past is prologue, we can’t be sure.

For too long, the onus has been on women to figure out how to protect themselves from fanatical political misogyny. For example, when it comes to abortion, feminist activists have long urged women to “tell” their stories. Some are now bemoaning the fact that not enough of us did so before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

The logic here is that if more women talked openly about their experiences, we would “normalize” that procedure. But is that true? Why should women have to “share” personal information in order to sustain our privacy, a right we actually possess, whether secured by law or not?

Our abortion stories couldn’t convert Justice Amy Coney Barrett or deter any other fanatical fetal rights activists from their appointed task before Roe was overturned. And why, in any case, should women ever have to discuss personal reproductive options and decisions outside a doctor’s office?

There is one exception. Survivors of illegal abortions do a service to the cause by sharing these stories. I recommend, for instance, French writer Annie Ernaux’s book The Happening, a short chronicle of her botched back-alley abortion in Paris in 1964. That bloody, terrifying account ranks with the most harrowing war stories ever written.

When abortion is relegated to dirty back rooms, women’s bodies become literal combat zones. The most resonant line among many comes when Ernaux describes the searing pain of a fake doctor inserting a tube into her uterus to start the process. “At that point I killed my mother inside me,” she writes.

A legion of organizations is now coalescing to assist women who will need abortions in the half of America where they’ll be faced with the same horrific choice Ernaux survived. (Some of those efforts are aggregated here and here.)

Doctors, to their credit, seem to be stepping up for women. The American Medical Association (AMA) issued a strong statement opposing the politicization of reproductive medicine. Its president, Jack Resneck, has warned lawmakers of the challenges they’re creating for doctors. The problem is, it might not matter. Like the American Bar Association’s declining influence in the selection of federal judges — unprecedented numbers of Trump’s appointees were deemed unqualified by that group — the AMA has limited influence in a world where significant numbers of the info-silo’ed believe Covid-19 is a hoax and the vaccines for it contain tracking microchips.

Politically, doctors aren’t going to save us anyway. For too long, even at the greatest women’s march of my adult lifetime, the anti-Trump protest in Washington on January 17, 2017, women have presented a disunited front. The history of the fracturing of the women’s movement is long and sad. Discussions of it are fraught territory, mined with political IEDs that I’d rather avoid. I’ll only say this: Why is it that Congress instantly got moving on the gay marriage law after Roe was overturned (and yes, I’m for it!), when it can’t even get the basics for women passed in the federal Women’s Health Protection act. (The Senate has blocked it twice already.)

The answer, at least in part: advocacy solely for women is always easier to defeat than advocacy for issues that also involve men.

Furthermore, we’re weakened from the inside. As Pamela Paul pointed out in a controversial post-Roe New York Timesop-ed on the erasing of women, even Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the ACLU have stopped using the word “women” in discussing abortion in favor of phrases like “pregnant people” or “birthing people.” That the very definition of women is now added to decades of the slicing and dicing of women’s groups into narrower and narrower subdivisions of identity only weakens the movement.

It’s true that heterosexual white women are historically privileged over women of color or of different sexual orientations. But if we can’t even agree that all “women” are ultimately people born with a uterus — a subset of human beings who, whatever our differences in terms of class, race, or ethnicity, share the utterly exceptional, unique challenge of being impregnable — we are going to lose this war.

Nina Burleigh, Living Through the Best and (Especially) Worst of Times

It never seems to end, does it? Three-plus years after it first landed on our shores, Covid-19 is still killing more than 300 Americans daily, while cases are rising again nationally (though sinking in the Northeast and Midwest). And — of course! — two new subvariants were recently detected in South Africa, capable of evading the immunity wall created by vaccines over the past two years (though vaxxing will still make you less susceptible to hospitalization and death).

We’ve all had to live through this in one way or another for what seems like eons now. I’m a careful and carefully masked old man who — despite some members of my family getting Covid — has avoided the disease so far. I was, however, exposed to it relatively recently and had to isolate myself for days. Still, in New York City where I live, I can sense that so many of us have simply thrown up our hands and gone back to something closer to pre-pandemic life. For each of us, at the very least, the Covid-19 experience has been a drama of the first order in which more than a million Americans — the worst record for a rich country — died and so many others, including two aging friends of mine, have ended up with devastating “long Covid.”

Worse yet, Covid has been only one of our pandemics in these years. Can there be any question that this country has an ongoing political fever, too? Call it Long Trump, if you will. And if you doubt it, visit Mar-a-Lago before the next climate-strengthened hurricane hits or have a word with Ron DeSantis, or Dr. Oz, or the Proud Boys recently indicted for “sedition” over their actions connected with the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

With all this in mind, let me offer one person’s account of our never-ending Covid moment, up close and personal. TomDispatch regular Nina Burleigh wrote the superb book Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic. Now, she takes you behind the scenes of her own life to offer one of so many millions of Covid-19 dramas that played out in these years, something that, in one fashion or another, all of us have had no choice but to go through and, of course, it hasn’t ended yet. Tom

My Pandemic in Three Acts: Dealing with the Disease that Never Seems to Leave Town

On New Years’ Eve 2019, Americans celebrated the advent of the roaring ‘20s with fireworks and champagne, amid ominous news alerts from China. Surely that virus would stay on the other side of the planet. I cringe at how entitled we felt then. Covid-19 has now wiped out more than a million of us (by far the worst record on Earth when it comes to wealthy countries). Up to a third of all survivors suffer the sometimes disabling effects of long Covid, with implications for society that will outlast the pandemic — if it ever ends.

I’d like to believe we’ve learned a lesson about our species-wide vulnerability, our planetary connectedness. But in fact, we seem more atomized and arrogant than ever. The pandemic arrived just as technology was driving us collectively mad and pushing us further into our black mirrors.

Researching and writing a book about the science and politics of the pandemic, I lived with it up close and personal. But my book’s last page wasn’t the conclusion for me — or anyone else. Here I offer my personal Covid tale, organized in three acts only because my storyteller instinct demands a beginning, middle, and end… when in truth, there is no end, not yet anyway.

Act 1: The Ides of March

My “last normal thing” (as such activities would come to be called) before the first pandemic lockdown was to attend a birthday party in New York City in March 2020. Covid-19 was already causing moderate to severe panic among our crowd, but no one we knew was dying… yet. We didn’t know enough to wear masks. There were no tests yet. The hostess assured us all that there would be plenty of hand sanitizer around. Some invitees didn’t come, but a surprisingly large number of us showed up. A few already had coughs. Others would end up sick with fevers within weeks — by which time the idea of standing within breathing space of anyone but immediate family members already seemed unthinkable.

A few days after the last normal thing, our kids were sent home from college and high school. Survivalism kicked in hard. My husband, the kids, and I left the city the very next day for upstate New York, holding our breath in the elevator on the trip down to the car. We abandoned a neighborhood that, within weeks, would turn out to be among the most ravaged in the United States.

Up in the country, we dispatched one person to Walmart every few weeks to prepper-shop. We made sure to take off our shoes and strip down from our outerwear at the door because who knew if the virus could come in on your clothes? We washed down everything — cans, cardboard oatmeal cylinders, cereal boxes, packages of beef and chicken — in a kitchen-sink bath of bleach, detergent, and hot water.

Word got around that there was no yeast on the local store shelves. That was alarming even though we’d never bothered to look for it before. So we ordered what seemed to be the last pound of Amazon’s stock, along with a 50-pound bag of flour. Then we had to figure out how to store it. My husband learned to bake bread and proceeded to turn the weekly making of it into the equivalent of a religious ritual, a talisman.

There was panic and death down the mountain, but we lived like gods. We cooked elaborate meals with our stores of food. Every night, candlelight flickered on the groaning board.

We still had some money in the bank. We lost track of the days of the week. While so many were suffering, it was a strangely happy time for our family. We took extravagantly long hikes in the muddy forests. We marveled at the infinite green shades of the spring mosses, freshly revealed by the melting snow. We walked along trickling waters in mist, in birdsong, in a dream.

Then came April, the cruelest month. We viewed videos of forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks in New York City. We made gin and tonics every afternoon and watched the sunset over the golden forsythia, while tracking the rising death-toll graphs on our phones.

Summer swept in and the night sky looked different. Was it our imagination or did the stars even seem brighter? Nature felt stronger with us at rest. I felt stronger, too. As it warmed up, I biked miles and miles and swam daily in the river, ponds, and lakes, or in people’s pools. I rewatched The Swimmer and then reread the John Cheever short story on which that film was based.

For a while I even kept a journal.

July 10, 2020: “Keeping the dog exercised is becoming more urgent — as I have less to do anyway. I ought to write a treatment for my book. Time stretches, moments of goal-free existence. So — how things will never go back to ‘normal’ — it will be all new after this and that’s good. Or bad, depending on how it goes.”

August 19, 2020: “Awful lack of work, the sense of being forgotten occasionally surges back… I write this as the sun dapples the wood floors, insects trill, a caterpillar metamorphoses in a cocoon on the counter downstairs… I have drifted…”

Fall came and, as I was seeking nothing, the Buddhist thing happened: within a period of weeks, I was offered three jobs — graduate-school teaching, producing a documentary, and writing a book on the pandemic, which would become my Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic the following year.

Act 2: Hot Vaxxxed Summer

I was blessed. The winter of 2020-21 was glorious. Upstate New York winters are usually a seesaw of ice and mud, but that season powdery deep snow fell and stayed. In the morning, I researched and wrote on the nightmare that seemed to be happening elsewhere. Every afternoon I cross-country skied.

While I was living something like a momentary dream, I was researching a pandemic the likes of which this country hadn’t seen since 1918. And like the death counts and infection rates, I can graph my own pandemic state of mind. It took a 180-degree downturn in mid-summer 2021.

One morning in late spring, I was driving to New York City for some carefully masked business meetings about my book, which was soon to be published, when the phone rang on the car screen. It was my mother’s number in Chicago.

“Hey, Mom!”

“I’m having a stroke,” she mumble-croaked.

From the right lane of the leafy Palisades parkway in New Jersey, Siri called 911, which could do nothing for a woman collapsed on a floor in Chicago. My sister and brother there did, however, reach the local EMTs, while I stayed on the phone, listening as she went silent. Finally, I heard a banging on her door and a man’s voice asking my 92-year-old mom, “How you doing, young lady?”

She had indeed suffered a stroke, the same thing that killed her mother. I flew home the next day, while my brother and sister agreed to let the surgeons operate — against our mother’s express wishes — because they said they could stop the damage.

She woke up intubated on a ventilator — the same machine that had been used, too often to dreadful effect, on tens of thousands of the Covid-afflicted. Her doctors didn’t know if she’d survive the removal of the breathing tubes, but we assured them that would be what she wanted, even if it meant death. They told us to say our goodbyes.

I memorialized that day on the almost-last page of the journal I kept that year:

May 13, 2021: “Bright spangly Lake Mich. Today we go to turn off the machine that maintains our mother. Her eyes already look distant and strange, both seeking and informed, brown. Crabapple trees are blossoming.”

We waited outside the room while they took her off the machine. Instead of dying, she struggled to push herself up from her pillow. That night, in the dark, my mother touched my hair. “Beauty,” she whispered.

“Probably the last time my mom will pat me on the head,” I wrote in my journal, but as it turned out, the surgeons were right. Mom survived and even got most of her language back, though the woman who read us nursery rhymes and always had a book open in her lap can now barely read. Still, she can live on her own, a frail bird in a tiny cage.

That’s how the pandemic passed over mom and me. Friends of mine lost parents to Covid, without even being allowed to say goodbye in person. Mine lived on.

Facing her mortality, and by extension mine, coincided with the end of the first phase of my pandemic experience. The world kicked back in with its speed, competition, and status anxiety, the jostling and elbowing for power. Everything the lockdowns and my own personal lockdown had held in check came roaring back. I was vaxxed and had a book to promote. I needed to make my mark again, but the more I wanted that, the less confident I got. Thwarted ambition, envy, and avarice returned. FOMO pinched again. I blew up a few relationships. Things only seemed to spiral downward.

I don’t personally know anyone who died of Covid. I don’t have anyone to mourn, even if, thanks at least in part to the pandemic, I descended into my own pit of despond. I mostly stopped taking notes on my observations and state of mind last fall. The journal entries faded away soon enough after they became records of rage and resentment. I guess I got tired of recording a view of my inner life stewing in something bitter.

Act 3: Flight

In the last pandemic year, like so many of us, I’ve been in a kind of flight, both literal and figurative. I’ve compulsively boarded at least as many planes and visited at least as many remote destinations as I had in the previous many years combined. It was as if I wanted to challenge the virus in person. I turned down no assignment, no invitation to speak or visit anywhere — as long as it was far from wherever I was.

I flew to Chicago, of course, and was inside hospitals and rehabs with my mother. I flew west to Santa Fe and Taos. East 12 hours to Armenia and back through Paris. East again to Lesbos, Sappho’s island, with its infamous Camp Moria for refugees. Almost every month, there were flights to the Caribbean or Mexico or Florida or Norway or Italy. Miles of walks through airport halls, often thronged with other travelers.

I’ve been a glutton for the new place, for the IRL (in real life) experience, often enough publishing pieces of journalism about them. The question, however, was: How to sit still?

Before I take you, dear reader, farther down this hole, let me just say that I know exactly how privileged I am to be able to run away even as millions of people are disabled from long Covid and tens of millions of Americans struggle to keep up with rising prices and chaotic lives, while trying to hang onto their sanity. And how lucky I’ve been not to get sick at all. (I credit four Moderna jabs. Thank you, science!)

Such frantic movement is undoubtedly my panacea for something. I did note that a popular Instagram therapist’s post suggested that a pandemic seemingly without end challenged the part of the brain that processes anxiety. Depressive people freeze, anxious people act, she explained. Which one are you?

I knew which one I was.

Truth be told, I prefer life as a fugitive now. I don’t even mind the long hours of waiting in airports for delayed flights, the slow trains, the boring highway drives, the hours when I can’t scroll the web. I sometimes prefer the liminal, the in-between place, to the destination.

I’ve been thinking about my journal entry from the first months of the pandemic: “It will be all new after this and that’s good. Or bad, depending on how it goes.”

How is it that I hadn’t anticipated a third option, that nothing would change? That we would learn almost nothing from all this. What if, in the end, the ongoing pandemic leaves us exactly where we were, twitchily scrolling the metaverse? With Donald Trump still lurking?

Remember when we called it “the pause”? I had forgotten about that euphemism until I started writing this. It’s not used anymore. We just look back on a series of lockdowns that, for better or worse, finally unlocked. The machine is churning again, just with more glitches, more broken parts, more sickness and death, all of it moving faster and faster every day.

In May, our spew of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere reached a new record. And I helped. Greta, flight-shame me!

I hold a kernel of memory in my head of empty time and no plans to do anything with it, of being right where I was supposed to be and not going anywhere else. Maybe there’s an imprint somewhere inside all of us of a sky without jets, roads with no cars, and nobody looking for us. That pause showed us something we might never see again: a world where less could be more.

Nina Burleigh, Pandemic Anti-Rights Syndrome

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

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

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

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

America Unmasked – Did the Long Pandemic Spawn a New Kind of Repression?

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

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

Writing a book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic, about the politics and science of our Covid-19 experience, I came to know and trust public-health policy experts and vaccine scientists. I learned enough about the mRNA vaccines so many (but not enough) of us have received that I regard them as a major medical milestone well worth celebrating. I also accept that scientific understanding is based on uncertainty and the advice of our health authorities is only as good as the latest peer-reviewed article.

So I’ve maintained faith in science, even while understanding its limits. And I also understand the frustration of so many Americans. Who among us didn’t chafe at the pandemic restrictions? Who wasn’t going mad trying to work from a home or apartment reverberating with restless children locked out of their schools?

In March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, I thought the crisis might provoke wider support for a more universal health-care system. Nothing of the sort materialized, of course, although the rapid, government-financed development and delivery of free and effective vaccines — to those who wanted them — was indeed a success story.

Now, in the pandemic’s third year, people are ripping off their masks everywhere as Greek-letter Covid mutations continue to waft through the air.

The viral joy of that unmasking, the giving of the proverbial finger to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), begs the question: Did the pandemic make average Americans more anti-government? Did it bring us closer to what decades of rightwing propaganda had not quite succeeded in doing — generating widespread public support for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (a phrase favored by Trump crony Steve Bannon)?

Government activity during the first two pandemic years was certainly intense. Trillions of dollars in business loans and unemployment money washed through the economy. At different points, the government even activated the military and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). States also instituted widespread lockdowns and closed schools. The panic, the isolation, and the quotidian inconveniences made some people barking mad.

Of course, a lot of us listened to Dr. Anthony Fauci. We trusted our public health authorities and their recommendations. To many of us, their intentions seemed good, their asks reasonable.

Federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, however, thought otherwise. Just 35 when Donald Trump appointed her a district judge, she had never actually tried a case. The American Bar Association had rejected her confirmation due to her inexperience, but like many Trump judges, she was a Federalist Society-approved ideologue and the Republican Senate confirmed her anyway to a district that, by design, has become a nest of extreme antigovernment judges.

The anti-maskers could have brought their case in any jurisdiction. Choosing Tampa was a clear case of legal venue shopping. Other judges in the district had consistently ruled against government Covid restrictions on cruise ships and against mandatory vaccinations. The plaintiffs couldn’t actually select Judge Mizelle, but their chances of getting an antigovernment ruling in Tampa were high indeed.

As it happened, the plaintiffs got her and she relied on definitions of “sanitation” in mid-twentieth century English dictionaries to overturn the statute that allowed the mask mandate. None of them explicitly included the word “mask” in their definitions. So, she revoked it.

The ruling horrified public-health policy experts, although the Biden administration — probably with the coming midterm elections and those viral videos of mask-free joy in mind — decided not to challenge the decision directly. “The continuing concern throughout the pandemic has been the politicization of these public-health measures,” Dr. Bruce Lee, a public health policy expert at the City University of New York, told me. “We know that throughout history during public-health crises there has been a need to enact regulations. The big concern with this mask decision is you basically have a scientific or public-health decision made by a single judge.”

It took that judge just 18 days after arguments — a nanosecond in judicial time — to side with two women who said airplane masks gave them panic attacks and anxiety and so unlawfully prevented them from traveling. They were joined by an organization called the Health Freedom Defense Fund.

Using the Virus to Seed Fresh Political Astroturf

The Fund, based in Sandpoint, Idaho, is run by Leslie Manookian, a wellness blogger and antivaccine activist who, after having a child in 2003, left a career in international finance with Goldman Sachs to become, as she describes herself, “a qualified homeopath, nutrition and wellbeing junky” and “a health freedom advocate.”

Manookian has declined to provide information about the sources of funding for her organization, to which the Internal Revenue Service granted nonprofit status in 2021. It’s likely, however, to be just another green swath on the great field of rightwing Astroturf. While social democrats like me imagined that the pandemic might provoke a more equitable healthcare system, the crew on the right had other plans for how to manipulate the crisis.

Politicians, strategists, and chaos agents ranging from Donald Trump to Sean Hannity and Alex Jones, sometimes backed by dark money, have used the public-health restrictions to fuel their demands for more “freedom” from government. The definition of freedom among this crowd is primarily understood to be low or no taxes, with access to guns thrown in for good measure. In the spring of 2020, for instance, the billionaire Koch Brothers, who once funded the Tea Party largely to crush Obamacare, were among the conservative megadonors who helped activate the network behind the lockdown “drive-bys” of state capitols. Those initial lockdown protests would later devolve into Y’all-Qaeda-style pro-Trump pickup convoys. In Lansing, Michigan, a protest even ended with armed men entering the State Capitol. Among the intruders were members of a clan of gun-loving militiamen who would eventually plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan for restricting their freedom.

The pandemic seeded new Astroturf for the right. America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), for example, was formed during the early months of the pandemic to challenge public health policy in favor of keeping the economy rolling. Besides promoting antivaccine misinformation, AFLDS referred more than 255,000 people to a website created by Jerome Corsi, an author and longtime political agitator, called SpeakwithanMD.com. The site charged for consultations with “AFLDS-approved physicians” about the Covid “cures” ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that President Trump and his fans so loved.

The messages of such groups (eventually including just about the whole Republican Party) were, of course, amplified by the usual rightwing media outlets — One America News Network, Newsmax, and above all Fox News — that started out by calling the pandemic virus a hoax. When Covid-19 was undeniably killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the messaging shifted to equating lockdowns, vaccines, and mask mandates with totalitarianism.

Globally, there’s no doubt that the pandemic did indeed release the worst instincts of authoritarian governments. Real autocracies unleashed real abuses of power on vulnerable people in the name of Covid-19. Some of these were cataloged early in the pandemic by the democracy and human-rights organization Freedom House. In October 2020, it found that, in 59 of 192 countries, violence or abuses of power took place in the name of pandemic safety. It reported, for example, that the government of Zimbabwe was using “Covid-19 restrictions as an excuse for a widespread campaign of threats, harassment, and physical assault” on the political opposition there.

In terms of hubris and scale, though, the totalitarian dystopia to beat has been China. Exiled Chinese writer Liao Wiyu published a vivid book earlier this year describing how the authorities there disappeared doctors, silenced the citizenry; and in a harrowing fashion nailed the doors of homes and apartment buildings shut, marking them with red banners to identify contagious inhabitants. The images were straight out of Daniel Defoe’s novel about the bubonic plague in seventeenth-century London, A Journal of the Plague Year, updated with modern gadgetry like biosurveillance.

China’s “zero Covid” response has included epic crackdowns on freedom of movement. Forty-six cities and 343 million residents have recently been under strict lockdown. Some residents of Shanghai, forbidden to leave their apartments, have been running short of food and medicine. Videos of dogs being lowered by ropes and pulleys from apartment windows for daily walks only added an element of macabre hilarity to the scene.

In the U.S., rather than increasing trust in government, the relatively mild pandemic public-health measures instituted by the CDC and state governments only inflamed America’s “freedom” fetish. Claiming that mask and vaccine mandates were the slippery slope to Chinese totalitarianism was certainly a stretch, but one that many on the right have been all too eager to promote. For years, the right-wing echo chamber has been priming the info-siloed and mentally vulnerable with warnings about “FEMA camps” for Christians and conservatives (and, of course, while they were at it, the feds were always coming to get your guns, too).

As it happened, though, the pandemic also triggered anti-government sentiment outside the usual quarters. Take Jennifer Sey, a self-described Elizabeth Warren Democrat and San Francisco liberal, who was forced out of her job at Levi Strauss & Co., when she started advocating against restrictive school closings. The mother of four and the company’s chief marketing officer, she found it increasingly hard to understand why her children couldn’t go back to school after the first Covid surge in 2020. Irritation and frustration led to public outrage, which led (of course!) to a social media following. She became an online leader of parents for reopening schools. Her employer didn’t like it and soon banished her.

The Anti-Government Infection as a Symptom of “Long Covid”

Public-health policy expert Dr. Lee finds it less than surprising that even Americans like Sey rebelled. He mostly blames the way science was miscommunicated and politicized in public debate in this increasingly Trumpified country. “There needed to be consistency. Once you start straying from science and becoming inconsistent, people get confused. We saw people talking about school closures, and many of them were off in different directions. School closings were not a long-term solution. The increased politicization of science and public health policy is largely a result of certain political leaders and certain TV personalities and anonymous social media accounts. What it does is, it damages — it causes chaos. You hear people saying, oh, they don’t know what to believe anymore.”

The question is: Where are we now? Along with the ongoing pandemic, are we experiencing a full-blown anti-government infection and is that, too, a symptom of “long Covid”? Or is the resistance to government mandates and vaccines simply a response to the Astroturfing of the rightwing echo chamber?

Or, in fact, both?

Conservatives have been smacking their lips over what they regard as signs of a resurgence of the flinty libertarian. “A funny thing happened on our way to democratic socialism: America pushed back,” a Cato Institute commentary proclaimed earlier this year. “Across the country, in all sorts of ways, Americans reacted to the state’s activism, overreach, incoherence, and incompetence and… kinda, sorta, embraced libertarianism.” (Of course, that’s putting it in an all too kindly fashion. Substitute, say, fascism, and that statement feels quite different.)

Conservative commentator Sam Goldman, writing in the Week, hit the same note:

As the pandemic has continued, opposition to restrictions on personal conduct, suspicion of expert authority, and free speech for controversial opinions have become dominant themes in center-right argument and activism. The symbolic villain of the new libertarian moment is Anthony Fauci.

It’s not clear that this represents a lasting trend. An October 2021 Gallup poll found that Americans’ attitudes reverted from a desire for more government intervention at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 to essentially where they had been when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Since the 1990s, Gallup has been polling American preferences when it comes to the role of government in our lives. The long-term graph shows regular mood swings, although those between 2020 and 2021 were unusually steep.

Note as well that the American response to pandemic regulations differed strikingly from the European one. A study published earlier this year in the European Journal of Political Research explored attitudes in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, specifically the role of emotions in the way people responded to restricted civil liberties during the pandemic years (including restricted movement through Covid phone apps and army-patrolled curfews). Fear of contagion, not surprisingly, was the chief emotion and that fear led to a striking willingness to accept more government restrictions on civil liberties.

In Europe, safety won. In this country, it seems not. I haven’t seen similar research here (though there has been some suggestion that, in the Trump era, fear has been the driving emotion in individuals who lean right). It certainly seems as if the American response to the pandemic wasn’t to accept more restrictions on civil liberties, not at least when it came to masks and vaccine mandates.

But look more closely and you’ll see something else, something far more deeply unnerving. In these last months, even as masks have come off and booster shots have gone in all too few arms, there has been an unprecedented assault on other civil liberties. Red-state lawmakers are attacking the civil rights of women, gays, and minorities with unprecedented ferocity. In its landmark upcoming ruling that will, it seems, overturn Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court driven rightward by three Trump appointees has now apparently agreed that there is no right to privacy either.

As political journalist Ron Brownstein pointed out recently, conservative statehouses in red states “are remaking the American civil liberties landscape at breathtaking speed — and with little national attention to their cumulative effect.” In the process, they are setting back the civil-liberties clock in America to the years before what legal scholars called the “rights revolution” of the 1960s.

The speed and urgency with which right-wing judges and legislators are embracing a historic anti-liberty enterprise suggest panic and fear. This anti-freedom movement, ultimately, is not a response to the actions of the federal government or the CDC. It emanates from the frightened souls of the very people who have been shrieking about totalitarianism whenever they see a mask.

Now, excuse me for a moment, while I put my mask on and face an American world in which the dangers, both pandemic and political, are rising once again.

Now that we're all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it?

The instinct to forget pandemics, as I've pointed out when it came to the 1918 "Spanish flu," has historically been strong indeed. In these years, the urge to forget official malfeasance and move on has, it turns out, been at least as strong. Washington's failure to investigate and bring to account those who led the nation and ultimately the world into the folly of the Iraq War may be the most egregious recent example of this.

In the end, that's why I wrote my new book Virus — to memorialize a clear and accessible historical record of the deliberate and deadly decision-making that swept us all into a kind of hell. I had the urge to try to stop what happened to us from being instantly buried in the next round of daily reporting or, as appears likely now, relegated to the occasional voluminous government or foundation report on how to do things better.

In the early months of 2020, as rumors of distant death morphed into announcements of an imminent pandemic, followed by a patchwork of state and local lockdowns, most Americans were too stunned by daily events to absorb the bigger picture. Memories of those days still click by like surreal snapshots: prepper shopping, toilet-paper hoarders, forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks, and a capricious leader on TV night after endless night talking about quack cures, his own ratings, and how he "liked the numbers low." Meanwhile, he left desperate states to compete with each other for badly needed protective gear.

What looked like chaos or ad hoc decision-making by an improbably elected fraudster president was, in fact, deeply rooted in ideology; specifically, in the belief that the job of the government was neither to exercise leadership, nor activate government agencies to assist the American people. It was to promote private industry and its profits as the solution to anything and everything pandemic.

That ideology led to profiteering, politicized science, and mass death. Now, as the pandemic wanes (at least for the time being, though not necessarily for the unvaccinated) in this country, it deserves an investigation. Somewhere between almost 600,000 and more than 900,000 Americans have died so far from Covid-19, a significant number of those deaths unnecessary, as even the former administration's medical expert, Dr Deborah Birx, has said.

The virus arrived in America after the Trump administration — steered by right-wing Heritage Foundation policy wonks and their donor-class comrades — had already laid waste to key agencies like Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control. Their instant response to the pandemic was to similarly sideline government emergency-management experts, put inexperienced 20-something volunteers in charge of finding and distributing protective gear, and circulate lists of possible suppliers — one of whom, typically enough, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no medical contracting experience, snagged a cool $86-million contract from the state of New York for ventilators he would never deliver.

While most of the country hunkered down in a state of stunned paralysis, a faction of Trumpworld recognized the pandemic not for what it took away — human lives and livelihoods — but for what it offered. The chaos of the moment allowed them to road-test their dream system, to prove once and for all that the forces of supply and demand, the instinct to make a buck, could do a better job managing a natural disaster than the government of the United States and its bureaucrats.

Is any of this likely to be investigated? Will anyone be held accountable for what appears to have been a response deliberately mismanaged by religious zealots and crony capitalists, crews equally cynical about expertise, science, and the government's ability to prevent or ameliorate disaster?

What We Don't Know About the Trump Pandemic Disaster

Here, as a start, is a rundown of where inquiries into that disaster now stand.

Buried in the alphabet soup of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act is the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), established in March 2020 to keep track of the federal money (by now $5.5 trillion) that was to be spent on the pandemic. It's a consortium of agency inspector generals, headed by Michael Horowitz, a career Department of Justice lawyer. His name will be familiar to anyone who followed the Trump-Russia investigations. He produced a report in 2019 that — to the dismay of Trump's supporters — failed to conclude that the FBI had begun investigating connections between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Trump campaign without legal cause and as a political dirty trick.

PRAC is authorized to conduct oversight of pandemic-related emergency spending of any sort. Its inspector generals have already issued nearly 200 pandemic-related oversight reports and charged 474 people with trying to steal more than $569 million. (Details in its quarterly reports are available online.)

While PRAC has been genuinely nonpartisan in its acts, its focus so far has been on the small fry of the pandemic era, not the truly big fish. In its most recent semi-annual report, for example, it makes clear that 55% of its charges had to do with fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program and 40% were related to fraudulent unemployment assistance claims. Among the bigger PRAC successes: charging a Texas man in a $24-million Covid-relief fraudulent loan scheme last October and seven men in another fraud scheme in which they used their ill-gotten pandemic gains to buy, among other things, a Porsche and a Lamborghini.

The CARES Act also authorized the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to monitor the federal response to the pandemic. Its most recent semi-annual report included 16 recommendations in selected public-health areas like testing, vaccines, and therapeutics, only one of which has so far been implemented. A source at the GAO told me that a report on some contracting irregularities can be expected this summer.

So far, such government self-assessments have shown little appetite for dealing with the true cronyism, profiteering, and disastrous politicization of the federal pandemic response by Trump's minions. Among the schemes begging for a deeper look is Operation Airbridge. Led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it was an attempt to use federal funds to underwrite the air-shipping costs of private companies in an effort to speed the delivery of the kinds of personal protective equipment that were in such short supply last spring. That unorthodox effort included large no-bid contracts granted to a small group of private health-care companies without restrictions on pricing or even on where the desperately needed products were to be delivered.

In the spring of 2020, as hospital workers began popping up on social media and network news programs clad only in garbage bags and makeshift or reused face masks, sometimes in tears and pleading for help, the White House maintained its focus on private enterprise as the way out of the disaster. The administration called for volunteers to staff what would become another public/private bonanza, the White House Covid-19 Supply Chain Task Force, also helmed by Trump family fixer, Jared Kushner.

We don't know what, if anything, Kushner's group actually accomplished. The audacity of the former administration's disregard for federal rules and regulations coupled with the scale of the no-bid contracts they issued certainly attracted political pushback at the time. Democrats and civil-society groups in Washington filed requests for more information about how such contracts had eluded federal guidelines, and where the supplies actually went.

It's possible, however, that we may never know.

Ventilating Money

In April 2020, a group of Democratic senators led by Elizabeth Warren, citing the administration's secrecy, opened an investigation into the operation. They sent a letter to the six Operation Airbridge beneficiary health-care giants — Cardinal Health, Concordance, Henry Schein, McKesson, Medline, and Owens & Minor — requesting explanations for reports of "political favoritism, cronyism, and price-gouging" in the ongoing supply effort. "Taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars on this secretive project and they deserve to know whether it actually helped get critical supplies to the areas most in need," Warren said that June.

Three of the six suppliers did, in the end, give the senators copies of memorandums of agreement (MOAs) indicating that they "had complete discretion about how to distribute supplies across hotspot counties" and that "nothing in the MOAs appears to prevent a supplier from sending all of its supplies designated for hotspots to just a single customer in one of the hotspots." The government hadn't, in fact, put any kind of conditions on the cost for that protective equipment and the Trump Justice Department would insist that it was none of its business how suppliers arrived at the prices they charged for it.

Using taxpayer funds to grease private enrichment was, of course, a Trump family tradition, going back to the Eisenhower years when Donald's father, Fred, fleeced the government of millions of dollars in loans aimed at housing World War II veterans. Hauled down to Capitol Hill to explain himself, the New York builder was unrepentant, arguing that a loophole in the law allowed for his private gain and, under such circumstances, only a fool would have left all that money on the table.

What, from the outside, came to look like White House-inspired chaos — of which Operation Airbridge was just one example — should, in fact, be seen as a deliberate effort to disengage the federal government and leave the blame and the logistics problems to Covid-afflicted states, at the time mostly run by Democrats.

On March 24, 2020, for instance, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo begged the federal government to help get more ventilators for what was clearly going to be a surge of coronavirus patients. (New York City's health-care system was already overwhelmed by then.) At the time, hooking patients up to ventilators seemed like the best way to go, though doctors later realized that, for many patients, the tricky disease could be foiled earlier with anticlotting and steroid medication.

"How can you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can't get a ventilator?" asked Cuomo. Three days later, Trump tweeted, "General Motors must… start making ventilators, now! Ford, get going on ventilators, fast!"

Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer for tech firms like Google, tweeted back at the president, "We can supply ICU ventilators, invasive and non-invasive." Within days, he turned up on a list vetted by Kushner's team of volunteers and, at their recommendation, officials in New York closed a deal with him.

The only problem: Oren-Pines had no ventilators and had never been in the medical supply business. When he failed to deliver on the $86 million deal, Wells Fargo froze his account and New York canceled the order, demanding the money back, though by summer 2020, it had yet to collect a final $10 million.

The Great Forgetting?

In addition to making various large or politically well-connected health-care companies far wealthier, the administration also lavished staggering billions on a small group of Big Pharma firms for Operation Warp Speed, the project it backed to develop vaccines and medicines to treat Covid-19. Those contracts, too, were written outside normal government channels and the companies themselves were chosen by a panel of industry insiders without any oversight. Many of them stood to (and did) profit from the soaring stock prices of those firms when the news about clinical trial successes was released.

In November 2020, to launch an investigation into that situation, Senator Warren teamed up with Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) to request copies of all federal contracts for Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines. "The American people," they stated, "deserve to know that the federal government is using their tax dollars to develop Covid-19 medical products at the best possible price for the public — not to line the pockets of wealthy companies by cutting corners in consumer protection, pricing, and quality."

Warren raised questions about a Department of Health and Human Services deal with Gilead Sciences for the pandemic therapeutic remdesivir (part of the "cocktail" of drugs administered to Donald Trump and other Republican insiders like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani when they got Covid). HHS had indeed acquired a large supply of remdesivir at an exorbitant cost to American taxpayers and Gilead itself would charge American hospitals $3,200 per treatment for it, $860 more than its price in other developed countries.

In addition to Warren, who sent a letter to the administration requesting information on HHS's pricing negotiations with Gilead for the drug, other people also stood up. Whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), for instance, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Dr. Robert Kadlec, a Trump HHS political appointee, had engaged in multiple schemes to funnel contracts to politically connected companies — and that this had begun even before the pandemic was even a reality. According to Bright, Kadlec then pushed him out of the government, despite the fact that federal law officially protects whistleblowers.

In his complaint, among other things, Bright alleged that in 2017, a Kadlec friend and Big Pharma consultant pressured the agency to maintain a contract with a company owned by a friend of Jared Kushner's, even after an independent review determined it should be cancelled. Bright testified before Congress, and the fate of his whistleblower suit remains to be litigated.

As for the rest of the inquiries, so far, money and power appear to have eluded the investigators. It's unclear whether Senator Warren's and Representative Porter's requests met with any response from the former administration, or even whether they've continued their inquiry into Big Pharma and no-bid contracting. They have made no further announcements and neither office replied to requests for updates.

You won't be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that the name "Jared Kushner" is so far not to be found in GAO or PRAC reports.

The best chance for public accountability — if not legal liability — might be the House of Representatives, especially its Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, launched in April 2020. The Trump administration blew off its subpoenas for former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield to testify in December 2020, and blocked documents and witnesses related to politicized data, testing, and supply shortages, among other areas of inquiry. But the subcommittee did manage to expose emails from Trump political appointees, revealing efforts to skew CDC data. It is also investigating some whopping no-bid or sole-contractor deals that the former administration cut with preferred businesses. One was a $354-million four-year contract awarded on a non-competitive basis to PHLOW, which was incorporated in January 2020 to manufacture generic medicines to fight Covid. It's the largest contract ever awarded by BARDA and includes a 10-year option worth $812 million.

And the House has continued to seek transparency. According to a Brookings House Oversight Tracker, as of March 2021, 30% of congressional oversight letters and 40% of its hearings were related to the federal government's pandemic response. But there are signs that the Biden administration, while more cooperative, is not eager to force agencies to comply with requests the previous administration ignored.

My sense is that the emergency created by the insurrection at the Capitol last January and the desperate need of the new Biden administration to have palpable policy achievements in order to do well in election 2022 has taken the steam out of any inclination to dig deeper into the profiteering, cronyism, political scheming, and chaos with which the Trump administration met the Covid-19 virus. It went far deeper than an article like this can possibly indicate, leaving so many hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths in its wake.

Think of it as a memory hole, still brimming with schemes and money.

Copyright 2021 Nina Burleigh

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Nina Burleigh, a TomDispatch regular, is a journalist of American politics and the author of six previous books. Her seventh, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic (just published by Seven Stories Press) is a real-life thriller that delves into the official malfeasance behind America's pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.

When people give driving directions to the upstate New York hamlet of Narrowsburg, they always refer to the big red brick schoolhouse at the stoplight. Narrowsburg Central Rural School has been on the hill on School Street since 1929, educating four generations of local children.

Nobody alive in town remembers a time when the campus -- with its white doors, sloping green lawn, and Stars and Stripes snapping in the breeze -- was not there. But last year, bankrupted by local fiscal mismanagement and the woes of the post 9/11 New York state economy, the little school was shuttered. When the last student skipped out of its double doors in the summer of 2005, janitors moved in with packing tape and boxes from a nearby egg farm to empty the classrooms. Among the pupils left behind was my son, a member of the last kindergarten class.

Our family first arrived in Narrowsburg in 2000 as city people hunting for a cheap house. For barely $50,000 we were able to buy the "weekend house" we thought would complete our metropolitan existence. But soon after we closed on the home, we moved to Paris, spurred by the serendipitous arrival of a book contract. When our European idyll ended after two years, and with tenants still subletting our city apartment, we moved into the Narrowsburg house. After growing accustomed to the French social system -- with its cheap medicine, generous welfare, short work week and plentiful child care -- life back in depressed upstate New York felt especially harsh. We'd never planned to get involved in the life of the town, nor had it ever occurred to us that we might send our son to the Narrowsburg School. Suddenly we were upstate locals, with a real stake in the community.

In the fall of 2004, we enrolled our son in kindergarten at the Narrowsburg School. The school's reputation among our friends, other "second-home-owners," was not good. "Do they even have a curriculum?" sniffed one New York City professor who kept a weekend home nearby. Clearly, Narrowsburg School was not a traditional first step on the path to Harvard. As far as I could tell, though, no one besides us had ever set foot inside the building. When my husband and I investigated, we were pleasantly surprised. The school had just been renovated; it was clean, airy, cheerful. The nurse and the principal knew every one of the 121 children by name. Our son would be one of just twelve little white children in a sunny kindergarten class taught by an enthusiastic woman with 18 years' experience teaching five-year-olds.

Still, for the first few months, we felt uneasy. Eighty of Narrowsburg's 319 adults are military veterans and at least ten recent school graduates are serving in Iraq or on other bases overseas right now. The school's defining philosophy was traditional and conservative, starting with a sit-down-in-your-seat brand of discipline, leavened with a rafter-shaking reverence for country and flag. Every morning the students gathered in the gym for a "Morning Program," open to parents, which began with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a patriotic song, and then discussion of a "Word of the Week." During the first few weeks, the words of the week seemed suspiciously tied to a certain political persuasion: "Military," "tour," "nation" and "alliance," were among them.

But it wasn't until our boy came home with an invitation in his backpack to attend a "released-time" Bible class that my husband and I really panicked. We called the ACLU and learned this is an entirely legal way for evangelicals to proselytize to children during school hours. What is against the law is sending the flyer home in a kid's backpack, implying school support. After we called to inquire about the legality, the ACLU formally called the principal to complain. She apologized and promised never to allow it again. While we were never identified as the people who dropped the dime to the ACLU, there was clearly no one else in the school community who would have done so -- and the principal never looked at us quite as warmly again.

Shortly afterward, another parent casually told me that she wanted to bring her daughter's religious cartoon videos in to share with the class but couldn't because "some people" might object. When we later learned that the cheery kindergarten teacher belonged to one of the most conservative evangelical churches in the community, we were careful not to challenge anyone or to express any opinion about politics or religion, out of fear our son would be singled out. Instead, to counteract any God-and-country indoctrination he received in school, we began our own informal in-home instruction about Bush, Iraq and Washington over the evening news.

Learning to love America

Politically, Narrowsburg is red dot in a blue state. It is not named for any small-town frame of mind, but for the way the Delaware River narrows at the edge of town, then widens into a serene, lakelike eddy that at twilight mirrors the lights of town and the ranch-style houses on the flats. The towering pines along the river are nesting spots for bald eagles that soar year-round in pairs above Main Street and swoop down into the river to sink their talons into trout sighted from a hundred feet up. That year, driving to school every morning along the water, my son and I witnessed the wind gradually scrape away the bright foliage, the snow fall and the ground freeze. In the white, leafless months, we could see the entire span of the Delaware River valley from the car, a long arc of pastoral perfection.

If you knew nothing else of the world, if you were just five or six or ten years old, and this place was your only America, you wouldn't have any reason at all to question the Narrowsburg School's Morning Program routine. Hand over heart, my son belted out the Pledge with gusto every morning, and memorized and sang the Star Spangled Banner. I never stopped resisting the urge to sit down in silent protest during the Pledge. But I also never failed to get choked up when they sang "America the Beautiful."

Listening to their little voices, I felt guilty for being a nonbeliever. When I was five years old, in 1965, did I understand what my lefty parents were saying about the Kennedy assassination, Watts and dead soldier counts? Who was I to deprive my son, or his 11 kindergarten chums, of their faith in a nation capable of combining "good with brotherhood?" In a five-year-old's perfect world, perhaps such places should exist.

That November, at the school's annual Veterans' Day program, the children performed the trucker anthem God Bless the USA (one of the memorable lines is "Ain't no doubt I love this la-aand, God Bless the USA-ay!"), as their parents sang along. About a dozen local veterans -- ancient men who served in World War II, and men on the cusp of old age who served in Korea and Vietnam -- settled into folding chairs that had been arranged beneath the flag. When the students were finished singing, the principal asked the veterans to stand and identify themselves. Watching from the audience, I wondered if anyone would speak of the disaster unfolding in Iraq (it was never a Word of the Week).

No one did. The men rose and stated their names, ranks and theaters. Finally, a burly, gray-bearded Vietnam veteran rose and said what no one else dared. After identifying himself, he choked out, "Kids, I just hope to God none of you ever have to experience what we went through." Then he sat down, leaving a small pocket of shocked silence. No one applauded his effort at honesty. On the contrary, the hot gym air thickened with a tension that implicitly ostracized the man, and by extension -- because we agreed with him -- me and my husband.

A month later, just before Christmas, my son and I drove together into New York City with bags of children's clothes and shoes he and his sister had outgrown. The Harlem unit of the National Guard was putting on a Christmas clothing drive for Iraqi children. On the way into the city, I tried to explain to my son what we were doing, and -- as best I could -- why. As we crossed the George Washington Bridge and the Manhattan skyline spread out below us, I began to give him a variation on the "Africans don't have any food, finish your dinner" talk. I wanted him to understand how privileged he was to live in a place where bombs don't rain from the sky. It was a talk I'd tried to have before, but not one he'd ever paid much attention to until that day, trapped in the backseat of our car.

In simple language, I told my son that our president had started a war with a country called Iraq. I said that we were bombing cities and destroying buildings. And I explained that families just like ours now had no money or food because their parents didn't have offices to go to anymore or bosses to pay them. "America did this?" my son asked incredulously. "Yes, America," I answered. He paused, a long silent pause, then burst out: "But mommy, I love America! I want to hug America!"


Shedding patriotism

A month after the Christmas outburst, the first rumors that all was not well with the school began circulating. Fiscal mismanagement, high fuel and retirement costs and the depleted state economy had created a huge and unexpected cash shortfall for the tiny district. The parents of Narrowsburg School soon had a figure: It was going to cost just over $600,000 to keep their school open for another year. Chump change in Washington and New York City, but impossible to collect in a town where the median family income is barely $45,000. By late June 2005, the little school's fate was sealed. To my surprise I found I was deeply sorry about it.

The patriotization of our son was thorough enough to survive the summer. He decorated his birthday cookies with red, white and blue sugar, and in his summer camp program, when doing arts and crafts, those were the colors of paint he favored. "I made the stars red, white and blue -- like the flag!" he exclaimed, holding a paper mobile he'd strung together.

Now it has been almost a year since my son scampered down the steps of Narrowsburg Central Rural School for the last time. We've since returned to the city, driven back to urban life more by adult boredom and the need to earn a living than our children's relative educational opportunities. Our son is now enrolled in a well-rated K-5 public school on Manhattan's Upper West Side; he's one of two white kids in his class. Not surprisingly, the Pledge of Allegiance is no longer part of his morning routine. Come to think of it, and I could be wrong, I've never seen a flag on the premises.

My husband and I realized, though, that Narrowsburg did more than mold our boy into a patriot. He can, it turns out -- despite the warnings of other city parents -- read at a level twice that of his new peers. Since we returned to the city, he has learned how to ride a bike, long for an X-Box, practiced a few new swear words, and, somehow, learned the meaning of "sexy." He has pretty much stopped favoring red, white and blue.

How soon childish national pride is shed, I sometimes think now, and not a little wistfully. Only once it was gone did I realize that, after our initial discomfort, my husband and I had begun to see our son's patriotism as a badge of innocence. His faith was a reminder to us that the reason we are devastated by the war in Iraq and the Bush presidency is that we too love America. We too want to believe in its potential for good and brotherhood.

Our family now visits the Narrowsburg house only on weekends and holidays. Sometimes we pass the stately red brick school building, so recently renovated with thermal windows and elevators for the disabled, a town landmark for 75 years. The flag still flies there, but the doors are padlocked and the windows are black.

A different version of this article first appeared on Salon.com

It isn't the 1950s, but you wouldn't know it from the baby gold rush in Manhattan these days. Everyone I know is either pregnant or has just given birth, is fighting for a place in preschool, or cashing in their IRAs for multiple rounds of IVF. Oh, and adopting.

When I walk the streets of the East Village, my old haunts before I reproduced myself out of the city, I see young men hunched over tables in the café windows and for a moment, I think I know them. Then I remember, the guys they look like are all daddies now. They have jobs, and no longer linger over espresso, looking like they're reading Dostoevsky or dreaming of the day when their screenplays might sell.

Their girlfriends, those lissome working babes who thought nothing in the 1980s of having abortions and smoking cigarettes, consider themselves lucky jackpot winners because their ovaries functioned. Some of these gals still have jobs, and even care deeply about their jobs. Others are drifting, drifting away from the office, ceding that realm to men, while they learn the best way to remove stains from Onesies and transition from bottle to sippy cup.

We don't live here anymore.

We have all been vaporized from the vibrant streets of Manhattan, teleported into the domestic realm, for better or worse, and with varying degrees of shock, joy, misery.

That's why I like the new ABC hit "Desperate Housewives." As a mother of two dabbling in stay-at-home housewifery only at peril of my mental health, I couldn't agree more with the premise that women who stay home all day go utterly mad.

I'm a working mother who would rather fight than quit my job, and I'm sick of hearing about the "complexities" of modern women's lives. I'm tired of the very sound of the words, the earnest lexicon, the endless lather over how we can "manage" to "juggle" our "choices."

As Mary Cheney would probably say, in another context, it's not a choice.

"I admire the way you're keeping so many balls in the air," some well-meaning person (female) said recently. Fuck you, I thought, smiling. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I have heard women say they actually prefer to stay home with their children. I don't personally know anyone who can say that believably. In fact, I've always detected a whiff of scary depression inside the minivans and cozy homes of stay-at-home mommies, starting with my own mother's house in the 1960s. I think I suffer from vicarious post-traumatic stress disorder – the lasting psychological consequence of watching my mother trapped alone in the 1960s with three children, including me.

So "Desperate Housewives" rings true on a fundamental level, even if it's a little fake. Wisteria Lane is a mythic place, where the wives are admirably taut, and don't have to work. Financially set, thin mothers (most of them), they are living out the final stage of the fantasy that hip baby-dreamers in Manhattan are chasing. They have found the golden key, turned it in the lock and entered:

Hell.

"Desperate Housewives" puts the lie to all the post-mod happy homemaker myths, rehabilitated and updated for this decade's baby boom. The collective memory has erased Betty Friedan, and we're all back to believing that real fulfillment starts at the business end of a baby.

I suspect that even the healthy, seemingly happy women who stay home with their children all day for years at a time are secretly on Prozac. The only women I know who could do it had to be medicated. It's a simple fact that the adult attention span is longer than the infant and toddler attention span. The worst thing about spending vast amounts of time with baby is losing access to that part of yourself that can focus. Some women seem to give it up with ease, others need to be medicated to turn it off.

A part of me relates to all of the characters. One critic's cliché is another's archetype.

My favorite character, Bree, is Martha Stewart on crystal meth. I too get that mad urge to put things right in the midst of family chaos at least five times a day. I recognize exactly how insane it is when I'm reaching down to wipe up a smear of spilled dinner on the floor, while at table level baby is reaching for a knife and five-year-old is knocking over his milk. But I still can't stop myself.

I've screamed for order at dinnertime, if only in my head. I know the sound of the other screams too. I've not tried it yet myself, but I recognize the motivations of the sexy woman who seduces the high school kid to get revenge on her self-absorbed husband, and of the divorcee who can only get over her husband's infidelity by catching the eye of the plumber. Last but not least, I know well the career woman pretending to like staying home with four brats, haunted by the ghost of her former life.

There are bits of each of the Housewives in me, whenever I'm pottering around the house on a weekday, picking up toys, dressing for nobody.

I've actually experienced a version of the scene with Lynette being pulled over by a cop because her unbuckled, rowdy brats in the back seat attracted his attention. The cop backed down, but my son has never forgotten that mommy can be sent to jail for a long time – maybe forever – if he unbuckles again.

Like Lynette, I also know that hell is other parents (the fat woman ready to call a social worker after she left her kids on the side of the road as a buckle-up lesson). I could even donate a colorful scene from my real life to the writers: being screamed at by a pack of toothless female rednecks in a diner and having the short order cook emerge from the back and threaten to call the state police on me for leaving my sleeping infant in the car seat outside while I ordered something to go for my five-year-old, who then disappeared off into the video rental section of the fine establishment.

The show was created by a man and six of the ten writers are men, but the sex – so far anyway – isn't the gay male fantasy Sex and the City variety, where poor Sarah Jessica Parker and three other perfectly fine actresses spent years channeling the queen-y, voracious desires of Michael Patrick King. The Housewives treat sex the way real married women do – as another necessary bodily function, if not a household chore.

ABC, the critics and its advertisers, are surprised at the show's popularity. It attracted 20 million viewers an episode, the majority, 63%, of them adult and female, in the first two weeks. Not surprisingly, the critics rate it below the high-end cable shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, to which, in tone at least, it owes some debt. This is the female version of those satires, and the fact that it showed up on network television in the age of reality-based swill is a welcome sign.

One female critic complained that "Desperate Housewives" is just another show about women written by a man. It is that, but I don't agree it's a problem.

Men know what housewifery does to women. That's why they're still avoiding it.

On a recent trip through South Carolina, I visited the Museum of the Daughters of the Confederacy in Charleston. The charming curator there, June Murray Wells, is a trim 70-something raconteur who remembers being asked to pull tight the corset stays for bird-like nonagenarians in the 1940s whose daddies really had worn the grey in the Civil War.

With Hurricane Charley bearing down on us, Mrs. Wells reminisced about the last big hurricane to slam Charleston � Hugo in 1989 � and walked me over to a display case which, she said, held the single most precious object in the Museum�s entire collection, one that provoked thousands of concerned letters from across the South after the big storm, inquiring about its safety.

On a bed of red velvet, I saw what pearl of great price had survived. A single coiled yellow-gray strand of Robert E. Lee�s hair, purportedly trimmed from the actual corpse�s head.

Medieval relic worship cannot surprise anyone who has spent any time at all in the Palmetto State, where state legislators famously refused to take the Confederate flag down from the Statehouse dome in this new millennium. Charleston is, after all, home to the Citadel, whose towering pink faux-feudal crenellated walls still cloister fresh generations of Southern men who sport spit-shined swords and memorize the fine and not so fine arts of war.

That Old South, though, is crumbling away, notwithstanding the integrity of those walls. The change has not been sudden, but more of an erosion. Slowly, slowly – as slowly as the hundred long years of Strom Thurmond�s life – the reign of white and black men who came of age in an era of separate drinking fountains and burning crosses is ending.

Republicans – as they are wont to remind black voters – freed the slaves under Abraham Lincoln. The South was dominated, though, by white male Democrats throughout the first half of the twentieth century, until LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Southern majority turned to the Republican Party, which has been quadrennially tossing racist red meat to poor whites ever since. LBJ predicted that was ahead, remarking, when he signed the law, �I have signed away the South for a generation.� It turned out to be two.

But forty years later, with Thurmond�s death, the retirements of North Carolina�s Jesse Helms and now, Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, and Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia in 2004, the old conservative bulls in the Senate who have retarded the South�s social progress for decades are finally letting go.

There are to be sure, relics still in power. But with each passing year, their luster dims, their strength wanes. There�s the oleaginous disgraced former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. As slick in person as a shiny patch on the Missisippi Delta – and nearly as toxic – he�s still befuddled over being betrayed by his fellow Republicans after publicly pining for the good old days of separate but equal, a sentiment with which, he surely thought, any Southern man would concur.

Turncoat Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia put in a career-zapping performance that marked the end of his political life when spoke before Dick Cheney on the convention podium on Wednesday. The Democrat running for his Senate seat is an African-American woman, United States Rep. Denise Majette.

The departure of the old white boys isn�t the only needed change. It�s possible that the black civil rights leaders themselves, men like John Lewis, must move on too before the Old South can finally rest in peace. The rhetoric and imagery of black men who cut their political teeth marching in the 1960s, while genuinely heroic, will have to give way to make room for younger black men and women speaking for a generation of Southern blacks whose problems are more complicated than separate drinking fountains.

The change-over couldn't come soon enough. In spite of conventional thinking that says the Voting Rights Act changed the South, poor Southern whites and blacks are still paying the ultimate price for the continuing lock-hold of Old South values on the region�s – and the nation�s � politics. Those quaint-sounding values – chivalry and honor through military heroism – have justified centuries of anti-feminism and countless unnecessary young dead men.

An analysis by The State, a South Carolina newspaper, on Iraq casualties shows the war's death rate for South Carolina – the 26th-largest state – is eighth in the United States, with almost one death per 200,000 residents. That's 50 percent above the national average.

To his credit, Sen. Fritz Hollings has proposed reinstating the draft "because of the inequality for those who have to serve.� Fighting to replace Hollings are Democrat Inez Tenenbaum, state superintendent of schools and Republican Rep. Jim DeMint. Both of them were too young to have voted before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In North Carolina, Sen. John Edwards, Sen. John Kerry's running mate, won his seat from the outrageously Old South pig-farming millionaire Lauch Faircloth, who made his fame by handing over his Senate offices for the use of anti-Clinton hate groups in the 1990s. Edwards served just one term, then opted out of the Senate, leaving former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles as the Democratic candidate this year, who lost to Elizabeth Dole in his first try for a North Carolina seat in 2002. Bowles is widely expected to win against his opponent, Republican Richard Burr, a five-term U.S. House member. Edwards and Bowles, and some of their Republican counterparts represent the new South in their focus on economics � not race – to win over the potential swing vote comprised of Nascar Dads.

It might take a while for the political transition in the New South to emerge and triumph, but signs of its arrival are evident everywhere in South Carolina. Governor Mark Sanford, for example, is a young and relatively moderate Republican who cut his teeth in Congress as part of Newt Gingrich�s wild-eyed Contract-with-America freshman class of 1995. He had the cunning, however, to cut and run back to the executive post in his home state rather than continue associating himself with the extremist wing in Washington. Famous for his ascetic style (he slept in his Congressional office rather than spend taxpayer money on an apartment) he has promoted and signed into law various reforms aimed at opening the South Carolina political process.

So political change is afoot in the South, and the people and landscape are changing as well. After leaving the charming Mrs. Wells in protective charge of Robert E. Lee�s hair at the museum, I moseyed into the countryside beyond Charleston and into the live oak swamps on the Magnolia Plantation, a 600-acre former rice farm turned wildlife refuge.

After bicycling around the old gardens, planted by a member of the Civil War generation who lost his house to Sherman, but who managed to hang onto the property, I met the current owner of the plantation. Taylor Nelson, 27, wears his long hair in a pony-tail and sleeps in a small cabin on the grounds. Committed to conservation, he worries about the effects of the proliferation of nearby housing subdivisions on the region�s fragile wetlands. This 12th generation descendant of slave-owners lives with the Old South ghosts in his own blood, perhaps that's why he wears a red Kaballah string on his wrist.

As I write these words, Peter Arnett is presumably packing his bags and hailing a taxi to drive him over the Jordanian border and his future life on a pension.

As in Gulf War One, Arnett was the last American TV journalist broadcasting out of Baghdad. In 1991, he was denounced as a traitor for showing civilian life and death under American bombing, but CNN kept him on the air. Now, after just 11 days of wartime footage on the ground for NBC, not only is his loyalty suspect, he's out of a job too.

In these days of lies and propaganda swallowed whole and dissenters chewed up and spit out similarly, what's amazing is that the old war dog lasted through almost one whole spin cycle before getting the boot. But then, his traitorous crime was committed on a weekend, when only the right-wing watchdogs who never sleep were holding the perimeter.

A brief review of the chain of events before this episode gets flushed away by the next media industry profile in courage is in order.

Arnett gave an interview to Iraqi television in which he said what reporters have been reporting in the U.S. and all over the world for days: "The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan."

This was not news to the Iraqis. It's also not an opinion, having been reported worldwide for days.

To take one example, Newsweek quoted Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the Army's ground commander in Iraq that, "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we war-gamed against." Newsweek added that, "Because of the fierceness of the resistance and overextended supply lines, the war is going to take longer than predicted, Wallace told reporters." Arnett went on to state that footage of civilian casualties in Baghdad possibly gave ammunition to American war protesters. Not news either.

He then apparently tacitly praised or thanked the Iraqi information ministry for letting him and other reporters continue to cover Baghdad during the 12 years since the Gulf War. That's certainly a notion many would dispute, given that journalists are disappearing from the streets of Baghdad, but not terribly atypical journalistic pandering either.

Arnett's Interview with the Enemy gave the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz an easy Monday morning story with which to scandalize the capital.

Kurtz, ever fair-minded and eager to get "both sides" for his stories, solicited an opinion from National Review editor Rich Lowry who called Arnett an "agenda-driven reporter." Howie also downloaded some quotes from the ravers on Fox to complete his balanced roundup of reax. The White House weighed in that Arnett was "ignorant" of war plans. Howie printed that assertion without noting that no one in the White House has spent a fraction of the time in that war Arnett, the veteran war correspondent, has.

The Wall Street Journal's reporter -- probably also scanning Fox -- picked up the story too, focusing almost exclusively on Arnett's seeming praise of the Iraqi info ministry. Sunday night, while Kurtz and the Journal reporter were typing away, Arnett still had a job -- a nasty one certainly, under nightly bombing, but someone ought to do it.

When he went to sleep, NBC was still behind him all the way, pointing out that he and his crew "have risked their lives to bring the American people up-to-date, straightforward information on what is happening in and around Baghdad" and calling his remarks "analytical."

Oh, how efficiently does a single spin cycle wash away the stain of a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent during this wartime! By Monday morning, in the wake of the two stories in key establishment newspapers -- and the right-wing howl always inching toward "booooycooottt!" -- NBC and National Geographic had ditched their courageous reporter faster than you can say Tokyo Rose.

"It was wrong for him to discuss his personal opinions" on Iraqi state TV, said NBC President Neil Shapiro. National Geo simply said the Society had not been consulted and had it been, Arnett would have been told not to talk to the Iraqis.

Arnett's mistake -- a big and foolish one -- was to behave like a reporter first, and a Pentagon spokesman second. Having been called a traitor on the floor of Congress 12 years ago, he ought to have learned by now.

The irony of all this is that if we really want to "liberate" Iraq, giving them a taste of the First Amendment in action, with an American reporter free to speak his mind anywhere and anytime, might have brought us a step closer to that stated goal of "winning hearts and minds."

But then, as everybody in the world knows -- and the Iraqis are the last people to need Arnett to tell them -- that Big Ole' Compassionate war plan has been sacked, just like Pete.

Nina Burleigh is researching a book on the scientists who accompanied Napoleon into Egypt. Her book about James Smithson will be published in September by William Morrow.

Recently I attended one of those legendary Washington dinner parties, attended by British cosmopolites and Americans in the know. A few courses in, people were gossiping about the Bush family's close and enduring friendship with the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, dean of the diplomatic corps in Washington. By the end of the evening, everyone was talking about how the unfolding events were going to affect the flow of oil out of Central Asia.

I left wondering whether 6,000 Americans might prove to have died in New York for the royal family of Saud, or oil, or both. But I didn't have much more than insider dinner gossip to go on. I get my analysis from the standard all-American news outlets. And they've been too focused on a) anthrax and smallpox, or b) the intricacies of Muslim fanaticism, to throw any reporters at the murky ways in which international oil politics and its big players have a stake in what's unfolding.

A quick Nexis search brought up a raft of interesting leads that would keep me busy for 10 years if the economics of this war was my beat. But only two articles in the American media since September 11 have tried to describe how Big Oil might benefit from a cleanup of terrorists and other anti-American elements in the Central Asia region. One was by James Ridgeway of the Village Voice. The other was by a Hearst writer based in Paris and it was picked up only in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In other words, only the Left is connecting the dots of what the Russians have called "The Great Game" -- how oil underneath the 'stans' fits into the new world order. Here's just a small slice of what ought to provoke deeper research by American reporters with resources and talent.

Start with father Bush. The former president and ex-CIA director is not unemployed these days. He's been globetrotting as a member of Washington's Carlyle Group, a $12 billion private equity firm which employs a motorcade of former ranking Republicans, including Frank Carlucci, Jim Baker and Richard Darman. George Bush senior and colleagues open doors overseas for The Carlyle Group's "access capitalists."

Bush specializes in Asia and has been in and out of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (countries that revere him thanks to the Gulf War) often on business since his presidency. Baker, the pin-striped midwife of 'Election 2000' was working his network in the 'stans' before the ink was dry on Clinton's first inaugural address. The Bin Laden family (presumably the friendly wing) is also invested in Carlyle. Carlyle's portfolio is heavy in defense and telecommunications firms, although it has other holdings including food and bottling companies.

The Carlyle connection means that George Bush Senior is on the payroll from private interests that have defense business before the government, while his son is president. Hmmm. As Charles Lewis of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity has put it, "in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. And that to me is a jaw-dropper."

Why can we assume that global businessmen like Bush Senior and Jim Baker care about who runs Afghanistan and NOT just because it's home base for lethal anti-Americans? Because it also happens to be situated in the middle of that perennial vital national interest -- a region with abundant oil. By 2050, Central Asia will account for more than 80 percent of our oil. On September 10, an industry publication, Oil and Gas Journal, reported that Central Asia represents one of the world's last great frontiers for geological survey and analysis, "offering opportunities for investment in the discovery, production, transportation, and refining of enormous quantities of oil and gas resources."

It's assumed we need unimpeded access in the 'stans' for our geologists, construction workers and pipelines if we are going to realize the conservation-free, fossil-fueled future outlined recently by Vice President Cheney. A number of pipeline projects to carry Central Asia's resources west are already under way or have been proposed. They would go through Russia, through the Caucasus or via Turkey and Iran. Each route will be within easy reach of the Taliban's thugs and could be made much safer by an American vanquishment of Muslim terrorism.

There's also lots of oil beneath the turf of our politically precarious newest best friend, Pakistan. "Massive untapped gas reserves are believed to be lying beneath Pakistan's remotest deserts, but they are being held hostage by armed tribal groups demanding a better deal from the central government," reported Agence France Presse just days before September 11.

So many business deals, so much oil, all those big players with powerful connections to the Bush administration. It doesn't add up to a conspiracy theory. But it does mean there is a significant MONEY subtext that the American public ought to know about as "Operation Enduring Freedom" blasts new holes where pipelines might someday be buried.

This is Nina Burleigh for TomPaine.com.

Nina Burleigh has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and New York magazine. As a reporter for TIME, she was among the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War.