HOLD ON AMERICA AIN'T IT THE TRUTH

If pandemics have theme weeks, this is probably the week where the USA jumped the shark. Okay, "jumped the shark" is definitely the wrong metaphor here and we need to invent a new one, but it'll likely have to include the word "Trump" as a verb and I'm not doing that.

But seriously. In the past week, we've learned that individual American states are buying personal protective equipment and ventilators for themselves, because they can't get them from the federal government. But the federal government is then intercepting and confiscating those shipments, and allowing private distributors to transport those confiscated shipments to recipients determined by federal government in a manner which remains unclear. So the states who had their shipments confiscated then asked the federal government "can we please have some medical supplies since you took the ones we bought," which is entirely reasonable, and this is the point where you probably saw Jared Kushner saying "it's a federal stockpile, it's for us, not the states" because that was ludicrous enough that pretty much everybody saw it. And then states started doing what was basically active smuggling in order to keep the federal government from profiteering off a crisis as their expense.

(DISCLAIMER: we as yet have no confirmation that individuals in the federal government are profiteering off this crisis. But come on, there is no other reason for all of this insanity to happen. We surpassed the horizon of incompetence quite some time ago and now dwell in the realm of malice, which it turns out is much less metal than it sounds.)

Of course, that isn't everything. We haven't even touched on the American federal government actively interfering with or just outright seizing other countries' purchases of ventilators and PPE (including Canada) which managed to alienate everybody (especially Canada). There's also that moment when Donald Trump claimed that the reason New York was short of protective masks was because healthcare workers were stealing them. Let us not forget the fact that today, Trump announced that the government was expending resources to make sure that everybody who was sick would have access to hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug that is completely unproven as a remedy for Covid-19. Literally nothing about the federal response to this crisis makes sense at all. It's kind of amazing, really.

PANDEMIC NEWS FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD (VARYING DEGREES OF SANITY)

Just going to sort of bullet these out:

HUNGARY: Okay, you may be aware that Hungary was already a pretty authoritarian nation, but this week they transformed their country into a dictatorship - with Viktor Orban as the dictator, of course - by passing a bill that gives Orban essentially unlimited power for the duration of a state of emergency that ends when he declares it to be over. No elections, Parliament is suspended, Orban rules by decree. So that's not great!

PORTUGAL: Portugal has, for the duration of the crisis, given all migrants and asylum seekers full citizenship rights (outside of voting) so they can access the country's healthcare and welfare systems, which is A) the humane thing to do and B) also the sensible thing to do, since you don't want the migrants and asylum seekers getting sick and getting other people sick as well.

FRANCE: Really smart domestic violence policy from the French government, who recognized - like a lot of countries have done - that domestic violence is spiking right now with abused partners being stuck in their homes all the time with their abusers. They've set up empty hotels as shelters and created an alert system so women can discreetly explain that they're being abused at their local pharmacies. (In other smart DV-during-a-crisis-policy-news, Spain has exempted women fleeing from abuse from lockdown restrictions.)

INDIA: A Covid-19 death in Dharavi - the most densely populated part of Mumbai, with over 270,000 people living per square kilometer - has the government panicking because, come on, it's a superdense part of an enormous city, it's basically Virus Central if they can't lock it down quickly. So they're working around the clock trying to isolate everybody this person came in contact with over the past two weeks. If they're successful there will be a movie made about this.

DO NOT FEEL OBLIGATED TO OVERPRAISE MEDIOCRE PEOPLE

There's been a lot of talk lately about political leaders people might, under other circumstances, despise and how - and this is coming from them, the person who loathes that political leader - they have to grudgingly admit the leader in question is doing a good job.

Let's be frank about this. Some political leaders have, in fact, done an excellent job. The state of Washington, the province of British Columbia, the countries of South Korea, Japan and Singapore - they've all done a pretty great job. A lot of African countries are also doing a surprisingly great job, if only because they got more advance warning than a lot of other countries did.

Everybody else, though, is doing a job that ranges from average to bad. To be clear, a good, high quality government performance during a pandemic is along the following lines: A) deploying the country's health resources in the most rational and compassionate way possible, B) doing everything practical to halt the spread of the disease, C) implementing a plan to end the pandemic as soon as possible, and D) ensuring that the citizenry is not economically devastated by the pandemic in the interim. Your country might not do all of these well, because pandemic management is hard. But these are the metrics by which you should measure it.

So, because I live in Ontario, let's take three leaders about whom I hear a lot: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Premier Doug Ford and Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. None of these guys is doing an outright bad job during the pandemic. But none of them are doing an especially good job either. With respect to Trudeau: we're a whole month into pandemic lockdown across most of Canada at this point and there's been no real advancement of a testing plan (which you need to eventually end the lockdown), and the economic stimulus for individuals has been means-tested to the point of insensibility because it's designed like most government welfare programs in Canada, with the intent being "encourage people not to use it if possible" and that logic doesn't apply during a pandemic.

Cuomo, for his part, delayed lockdown far too late and just rammed through an austerity budget for the state that will devastate a lot of poor New Yorkers, which is the exact opposite of what he needs to do right now. And the province of Ontario announced this past week that we had a spike in Covid-19 cases as a result of people returning from spring break - the spring break Doug Ford encouraged people to not cancel, despite medical authorities telling him explicitly that this was a terrible idea. Ford's government has also been talking out of its ass far too often on the status of hospital supplies (many hospital workers are reporting on social media that supplies are extremely strained), and is attempting to reintroduce carding across the province, because a policy that has literally never worked and also ends up just being racist in practice is exactly what we need right now.

My point is this: when these guys go on TV and give reassuring speeches about how we're all in this together, that is the bare minimum they should be expected to provide, and praising them for doing the bare minimum is like giving your dog a treat for not shitting on the living room floor. Statesmanship and leadership is more than simply repeating what the experts tell you to say: it's about recognizing crises before they happen, or more importantly before rich upper-class voters start to realize that this particular crisis could happen to them. By that standard many of our leaders failed us before thie ever got started, and worse they continue to fail us on an ongoing basis as they fail to mitigate the pain we're all feeling now as a result.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched in the past week:

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991, Jon Avnet, Netflix) - 3.5/5

Onward (2020, Dan Scanlon, Disney Plus) - 3/5

Spy (2015, Paul Feig, Blu-Ray) - 4/5

The Italian Job (2003, F. Gary Gray, Blu-Ray) - 3/5

I might be starting an online trivia game thing via Zoom, by the way. Will keep people posted here and elsewhere for those interested.

See you in seven.