Bob Schwartz

Reviewing previous posts, it is not surprising that many from 2019 on are about the pandemic. It is of little value to repost them, even with contemporary commentary. We lived it, and hoping that we never live it again, a degree of forgetting and self-comforting has set in.

This one from August 2020 did catch my attention. We were in the last months of the first Trump administration, which had been challenging. Not as challenging as the pandemic, but plenty challenging. We were months away from the presidential election and months away from Trump leaving the White House, with January 6 and six years of election denial to come, and more years of Trump back in what remains of the White House.

“Mental-health professionals say that no single event since the second world war has left so many people in so many places traumatised at once.” They were talking about the pandemic. Could they also be talking about ten years (so far) of Trump in and out of the White House, but every day in our lives and our heads?

Stay healthy and sane. And vote.

Mental-health professionals say that no single event since the second world war has left so many people in so many places traumatised at once.
—The Economist, August 29th, 2020 (Worldwide covid-19 is causing a new form of collective trauma)

That one sentence from the current issue of The Economist stunned me. I reread it several times. It is not surprising, given first-hand experience or second-hand reports. That doesn’t make it any less startling.

Just as the diminishing or outright dismissal of the pandemic continues to be dangerous and deadly, so will any similar delusion, as a second “invisible enemy” is following in the steps of the virus.

More from The Economist:

For some, the second half of 2020 will bring much-needed relief. For the time being the number of new recorded global infections has plateaued. In many countries it has dropped dramatically. Yet for those places hit hardest, a full recovery will depend on more than getting the virus under control. In a world paralysed by death, survivors are everywhere: icu patients who faced the horror of covid-19 first-hand, doctors and nurses who cared for them, relatives forced to mourn over WhatsApp and Zoom, families who lost their livelihoods. Mental-health professionals say that no single event since the second world war has left so many people in so many places traumatised at once. How people fare in the months and years ahead will depend partly on how their countries—and, more importantly, their communities—respond….

There were no large-scale psychological studies during the first or the second world wars, though the Holocaust would become the event most deeply associated with mass death and grief. Researchers in the early 2000s found roughly half of Holocaust survivors were still suffering from ptsd. Many had other disorders such as schizophrenia. Even among non-Jewish Europeans who were children during the war, 10-40% still had ptsd symptoms. In communities of survivors, research has shown that “inherited trauma” can be passed to subsequent generations, by growing up flooded with their parents’ memories, and possibly, through genes.

The suffering caused by covid-19 falls far short of the horrors of the Holocaust. Still, Krzysztof Kaniasty, a psychologist and disaster expert, points out that the pandemic presents nearly all the risk factors for ptsd. It has caused sudden death, life-changing events, large-scale social ruptures and chronic stressors like uncertainty and the added hassles of daily life.

The luckiest will suffer mildly from one or two of these effects. Yet more than at any other point in recent history, millions of people have been slammed by all of them….

There is a danger that political divisions, social distancing and economic woes will over time lead to a loss of togetherness in the same way that displacement after the Buffalo Creek flood gave “a degree of permanence to what might otherwise have been a transitional state of shock”, in the words of Mr Erikson. Communities cannot grieve together because the disaster is ongoing and the threat has yet to disappear, says Judith Lewis Herman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. She describes three stages of healing: re-establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnecting with others. Social distancing complicates all of them.

And so like the pandemic itself, the psychological fallout will require assessment and adaptation. Many doctors are still focused on saving lives, but governments and mental-health professionals should start thinking about “psycho-social” interventions.

In case you missed the previous post about the music of Hiroshi Yoshimura, following is another track from another of his albums, Surround (1986). Surround was commissioned by a Japanese company that built prefabricated homes, for playing in their models.

You do not have to have a Japanese home, or a prefabricated home, or live in any particular place, to hear music that will simultaneously transport you and place you joyously right here, right now wherever your ears are. Yoshimura wanted to create music that was as close as possible to air.

America has gone wrong before. Sins of omission and commission. Allowing human slavery for almost a century is one. Waiting years to stop Hitler’s attempt to conquer the world and kill millions of Jews is another. Other official policies and initiatives, some unjust and deadly, against individuals or groups are another. None of this is to deny plenty of good things that America has done and contributed, of course.

The news this morning is that the military, under Pete Hegseth, will be executing a man by firing squad for the first time in sixty years, and will be livestreaming it on December 3.

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed….

Asked whether Hasan had made a final request or reached out to Trump, Hegseth replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”

Is this the worst thing this administration and its perpetrators have done over the past two years? Not even close.

It is tragically just one more indicator of total official inhumanity and degradation, degradation that has proceeded so fast that we have trouble keeping up with it. We may have political and ideological differences, but those with just a modicum of humanity know this is wrong.

What’s worse is the expectation that there is still more of this to come. The chances of slowing or stopping it are questionable, though not impossible. A new and different Congress, that is one with a Republican minority, would be a start.

You are entitled to believe that renewing the military firing squad after six decades and livestreaming it for you to view is a good thing and a part of making America great again. You might want to talk to your religious leaders about that. If you believe this is the wrong direction, and want to slow and stop this and hundreds of other inhumanities: Vote.

The world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man may both be crazy.

I asked Claude (possibly the world’s smartest AI) what could happen if they were both crazy.

It’s a good question to think through structurally, partly because history has real examples of unstable or erratic people holding enormous power. I’ll treat it as a hypothetical rather than a judgment about any particular person, since “crazy” covers a lot of ground and I wouldn’t diagnose real individuals from a distance.

What the most powerful person could do. The danger scales with how much they can act alone. A head of state with nuclear launch authority, command of the military, emergency powers, and control of foreign policy can do damage fast, and some of it can’t be undone. Erratic decisions about war, trade, alliances, or domestic crackdowns move quickly through a government. The worst historical cases, like late-reign Caligula, the “Mad King” George III during his illness, or leaders with untreated paranoia such as Stalin in his final years, show the range. It runs from paralysis and chaos to purges and mass death.

What the richest person could do. Wealth is slower and less direct, but it reaches many places. A very rich person can fund campaigns and movements, buy or shape media and communication platforms, control critical infrastructure (satellites, energy, AI, payments), and move markets with a single statement. An unstable billionaire could distort public information, destabilize companies that thousands of people depend on, or use their money to punish critics.

The combination is where it gets worse. If the two allied, money and state power could reinforce each other. Wealth could buy political protection and propaganda reach, and state power could hand out contracts, deregulation, and immunity. That loop can wear down the institutions that normally act as brakes. If they fell out, you could get a volatile feud with public infrastructure, markets, or government agencies caught in the middle.

What usually limits the damage. In most systems, neither person actually acts alone, so a lot depends on what surrounds them:

• Institutions. Courts, legislatures, a professional civil service, and military officers who refuse illegal orders all matter. The 25th Amendment in the US exists for an incapacitated president.
• Advisors and staff. They can slow-walk, push back, or resign publicly.
• Corporate governance. Boards, shareholders, and regulators can constrain a CEO, though founder control weakens this.
• Markets and public opinion. Capital flight, falling share prices, elections, and protest create pressure.
• Federalism and a free press. Power spread across states and independent reporting make it harder to dominate everything.

The honest answer is that the outcome depends less on the two individuals than on how strong those guardrails are. Strong institutions can absorb a lot of erratic behavior at the top. Weak or captured ones turn one or two unstable people into a systemic crisis.

If you’re thinking about specific people or events, I’m happy to look at the actual checks and balances involved in that situation.

–Claude Opus 5.5

Dad: BRAINS alone won’t preserve freedom, Billy! You can’t reason with a TYRANT!

Billy: Then I guess it’s up to us to HELP!

Historical context: This comic is dated December 1941. It was published right before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II. Americans were well aware of tyrants ruling in Germany, Italy and Japan, but many Americans were still reluctant to get involved.

Dad was right. Billy was right. Though could they imagine that tyrant at home?

The story of prisoner Crista Pike in Tennessee, left in a coma by a failed lethal injection, has raised the issue of capital punishment, again. The issue rises and falls, depending on high-profile events, such as reinstating firing squads in some states and in the military, and now Christa Pike.

About half of Americans support the death penalty, half oppose it. About 145 nations have abolished the death penalty. America has not.

Some religious people turn to the Bible for guidance: “The punishment must match the injury: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise. (Exodus 21: 23-25). (Some interpreters find this a limit on punishment, so that it does not exceed the wrongdoing.) On the other hand, the Catholic Church declares the death penalty “inadmissible in all cases.”

Whenever I hear that issues with a moral component are “more complicated” than a simply drawn line (tell that to the Catholic Church and 145 nations), I suspect that people, not surprisingly, are challenged by working through difficult philosophical questions.

Here is the bright line. The death penalty is about mercy. In our lived lives we consider mercy to be conditional, situational and subject to degrees. But the wisest and most enlightened view, promoted by the religious traditions so many of us claim to follow, is that we are at our best, or on our way to being our best, when we put no conditions on mercy. Otherwise, what is our mercy at all?

As I look back at previous posts, I’m not sure how to describe my reaction to seeing how relevant some of them remain. Astonished? Surprised?

Seven years later, is the White House still a car crash we can’t take our eyes off of? What do you think?

There are many who say the occupant of the White House is incompetent, ignorant, corrupt and crazy, at the least. Yet when we try to stop thinking and talking about him, many of us utterly fail.

It is a cliché to say that people often can’t take their eyes off a car crash, particularly a gruesome one. Clichéd and true.

For better or worse, American civic life is centered on the White House. The situation there can be described as a horrible and chronic car crash. The fire department never arrives to put the fire out. The tow truck never arrives to haul the wreck. The ambulance never arrives to carry the sick and injured away.

We keep calling 911, but no one answers. So we just keep gawking.