Corona and Karma
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
Covid-19 has not recognized frontiers of race, rank, age, geography, class, or creed. It infected 10 Downing Street in London and the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Washington’s handling has been devoid of depth and class. Corona coincided with Election 2020, making it all the more prone to sending jumbled messages.
Even scientists faltered. Initially, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, said there was no need for widespread usage of masks, on which he later reversed himself. Common sense took an early hit.
A simple “We don’t know” may have worked better. The virus basically is respiratory and it spreads via breathing and affects breathing and lungs and vital organs. Those affected complain of suffocating sensations. It has unsettled mental well-being. No one is safe.
The prolonged pandemic and economic downturn have jeopardized Trump’s reelection prospects. His own contagion brought Corona front and center, enhancing public insecurity and the need for a more reassuring presence at the top.
A top medical publication, the New England Journal of Medicine, in an editorial of October 8, has slammed US leadership response to Covid-19 as “dangerously incompetent.” Noted filmmaker Alex Gibney is about to release his documentary, “Totally Under Control,” about the mismanaged response of US policymakers to contain the pandemic. This is buttressed by an October 9 editorial in The Los Angeles Times, slating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the federal agency responsible for disease control – for taking “months to concede that airborne transmission of the virus is a serious concern.”
For decades, special interest groups from the far right and even liberal circles have found it politically expedient to project the threat to the US homeland as emanating from outside its borders. The thrust was xenophobic, notwithstanding that the biggest terror attack prior to 9/11 was domestic in origin, and happened in the American heartland of Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
11 years ago, in its 2009 report, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a warning that hostility to a black president in the White House was giving rise to white supremacist terrorism. Following an outcry, to cite verbatim a Guardian news story of August 8, 2019: “The head of the DHS publicly apologized. The small team of domestic terrorism analysts who had produced the report was disbanded, and analysts were reassigned to study Muslim extremism.” The Guardian story added that the team leader, Daryl Johnson, was “forced out of the DHS altogether.”
On July 23, 2019, the FBI, led by its director, Christopher Wray, testified that “the majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated … by white supremacist violence.” The Los Angeles Times reported on October 9, 2020 that a new report from the Department of Homeland Security identified white supremacy as the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” In the Los Angeles Times of October 11, white supremacists have been described as the “most significant terror threat in the United States.”
An October 2020 book, “Hate in the Homeland” by Cynthia Miller-Idriss of American University, substantiates the reach of white supremacist extremism embedded in mainstream society, and how its presence happens to be amplified by social media platforms.
This just has been brought home three weeks before the Presidential election, when a terror plot aimed at the kidnapping and killing of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was busted by the FBI. In a TV interview given to George Stephanopoulos of ABC “Good Morning America” on October 9, Governor Whitmer didn’t mince words, blaming the White House for inciting domestic terror, and she compared white supremacist terror with ISIS. Any “decent human being” would have called to personally express concern, continued the governor, which she added the President didn’t do. Governor Whitmer alleged that the problem began when the US President called her “that woman from Michigan” and made a rallying cry to “liberate Michigan.”
It is instructive how thinking shifts when one is personally affected.
The unsavory tamasha of the first Presidential debate presents a pressing need to turn a new leaf. The Corona outbreak in the White House is symbolic of the karma that can befall the over-privileged, who are prone to be dismissive of the plight of the under-privileged.
