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President Donald Trump listens as Mike Pence speaks about the coronavirus. (Alex Brandon / AP Photo)

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This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticismthis time in two countries that think of themselves as polar opposites and enemies: Supreme Leader Ali Khameinis Iran and Donald Trumps America.Ad Policy

On the US side of things, New Orleans pastor Tony Spell, for instance, has twice been arrested for holding church services without a hint of social distancing, despite a ban on such gatherings. His second arrest was for preaching while wearing an ankle monitor and despite the Covid-19 death of at least one of his church members.

The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwins famed Origin of the Species, arguing as it did for natural selection (which many American evangelicals still reject), might be considered the origin point for the modern conflict between religious beliefs and science, a struggle that has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Unexpectedly, given Irans reputation for religious obscurantism, the science-minded in the 19th and 20th centuries often took heart from a collection of Persian poems, the Rubiyt, or quatrains, attributed to the medieval Iranian astronomer Omar Khayyam, who died in 1131.

Edward FitzGeralds loose translation of those poems, also published in 1859, put Khayyam on the map as a medieval Muslim free-thinker and became a century-and-a-half-long sensation in the midst of heated debates about the relationship between science and faith in the West. Avowed atheist Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney at the 1925 monkey trial of a Tennessee educator who broke state law by teaching evolution, was typical in his love of the Rubiyt. He often quoted it in his closing arguments, observing that for Khayyam the mysticisms of philosophy and religion alike were hollow and bare.

To be fair, some religious leaders, including Pope Francis and Iraqs Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, have followed the most up-to-date science, as Covid-19 spread globally, by supporting social-distancing measures to deal with the virus. When he still went by the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and lived in Buenos Aires, the pope earned a high school chemical technicians diploma; he actually knows something about science. Indeed, the Catholic Church in Brazil has impressively upheld the World Health Organizations guidelines for dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, defying the secular government of far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, that countrys Donald Trump. Brazils president has notoriously ignored his nations public health crisis, dismissed the coronavirus as a little flu, and tried to exempt churches from state government mandates that they close. The archbishop of the hard-hit city of Manaus in the Amazon region has, in fact, publicly complained that Brazilians are not taking the virus seriously enough as it runs rampant in the country. Church authorities worry about the strain government inaction is putting on Catholic hospitals and clinics, as well as the devastation the disease is wreaking in the region.

Here, we witness not a dispute between religion and science but between varieties of religion. Pope Franciss Catholicism remains open to science, whereas Bolsonaro, although born a Catholic, became an evangelical and, in 2016, was even baptized as a pastor in the Jordan River. He now plays to the 22percent of Brazilians who have adopted conservative Protestantism, as well as to Catholics who are substantially more conservative than the current pope. While some US evangelicals are open to science, a Pew Charitable Trust poll found that they, too, are far more likely than the nonreligious to reject the very idea of evolution, not to speak of the findings of climate science (action on which Pope Francis has supported in a big way).

In the United States, a variety of evangelical religious leaders have failed the test of reasoned public policy in outrageous ways. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, railing at tyrannical government, refused to close his mega-church in Florida until the local police arrested him in March. He even insisted that church members in those services of 500 or more true believers should continue to shake hands with one another because were raising up revivalists, not pansies.Current Issue

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As he saw it, his River Tampa Bay Church was the safest place around because it was the site of salvation. Only in early April did he finally move his services online, and it probably wasnt to protect the health of his congregation either. His insurance company had cancelled on him after his arrest and his continued defiance of local regulations.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis muddied the waters further in early April by finally issuing a statewide shelter-in-place order that exempted churches as essential services. Then, after only a month, he abruptly reopened the state anyway. DeSantis, who had run a Facebook group dominated by racist comments and had risen on Donald Trumps coattails, has a sizeable evangelical constituency and, in their actions, he and Pastor Howard-Browne have hardly been alone.

It tells you all you need to know that, by early May, more than 30 evangelical pastors had died of Covid-19 across the Bible Belt.

In the Muslim equivalent of the Bible Belt, the clerical leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, stopped shaking hands and limited visits to his office in early February, but he let mass commemorations of the 41st anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Republic go forward unimpeded. Then, on February 24, he also allowed national parliamentary elections to proceed on hopes of entrenching yet more of his hard-line fundamentalist supportersthe equivalent of Americas evangelicalsin Irans legislature. Meanwhile, its other religious leaders continued to resist strong Covid-19 mitigation measures until late March, even as the country was besieged by the virus. Deputy Minister of Health Iraj Harirchi caught the spirit of the moment by rejecting social-distancing measures in February while downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak in his country, only to contract Covid-19 himself and die of it.

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The virus initially exploded in the holy city of Qom, said to have been settled in the eighth century by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Its filled with a myriad of religious seminaries and has a famed shrine to one of those descendants, Fatima Masoumeh. In late February, even after government officials began to urge that the shrine be closed, its clerical custodians continued to call for pilgrims to visit it. Those pilgrims typically touch the brass latticework around Fatima Masoumehs tomb and sometimes kiss it, a classic method for passing on the disease. Its custodians (like those American evangelical pastors) continued to believe that the holiness of the shrine would protect the pilgrims. They may also have been concerned about their loss of income if pilgrims from all over the world stopped showing up.

Despite having a theocratic government in which clerics wield disproportionate power, Iran also has a significant and powerful scientific and engineering establishment that looks at the world differently, even if some of them are also devout Shiite Muslims. In the end, as the virus gripped the country and deaths spiked, the scientists briefly won and the government of President Hassan Rouhani instituted some social-distancing measures for the public, including canceling Friday prayers and closing shrines in March, thoughas in Floridathose measures did not last long.

In this way, as the United States emerged as the global epicenter of the pandemic, so Iran emerged as its Middle Eastern one. Call it an irony of curious affinity. Superstition was only part of the problem. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif blamed the Trump administrations sanctions and financial blockade of the country for the governments weak response, since the Iranians had difficulty even paying for much-needed imported medical equipment like ventilators. Indeed, the US government has also had Iran kicked off global banking exchanges and threatened third-party sanctions against any companies doing business with it.

President Trump, however, denied that the United States had blockaded medical imports to that country, a statement that was technically true, but false in any other sense. The full range of US sanctions had indeed erected a formidable barrier to Irans importation of medical equipment, despite attempts by the European Union (which opposes Trumps maximum-pressure campaign against Iran) to allow companies to sell medical supplies to Tehran.

Still, as with Trumps policies in the United States (including essentially ignoring the virus for months), Iranian government policy must be held significantly responsible for the failure to stem the coronavirus tide, which by early May had, according to official figures, resulted in more than 100,000 cases and some 7,000 deaths (numbers which will, in the end, undoubtedly prove significant undercounts).

Whether in America or Iran, fundamentalist religion (or, in the US case, a Trumpian and Republican urge to curry favor with it) often made for dismally bad public policy during the first wave of Covid-19. Among other things, it encouraged people, whether in religious institutions in both countries or in American anti-shutdown protests, to engage in reckless behavior that endangered not just themselves but others. Ironically, the conflict in each country between defiant pastors or mullahs and scientists on this issue should bring to mind the culture wars of the early 20th century and the place of the Iranian poetry of the Rubiyt of Omar Khayyam in what was then largely a Western debate.

That makes those poems worthy of reconsideration in this perilous moment of ours. As I wrote in the introduction to my new translation of the Rubiyt:

The message of the poemsis that life has no obvious meaning and is heartbreakingly short. Death is near and we might not live to exhale the breath we just took in. The afterlife is a fairy tale for children. The only way to get past this existential unfairness is to enjoy life, to love someone, and to get intimate with good wine. On the other hand, there is no reason to be mean-spirited to other people.

Some of the appeal of this poetry to past millions came from the dim view it took of then- (as now) robust religious obscurantism. The irreverent Mark Twain once marveled, No poem had given me so much pleasure before. It is the only poem that I have ever carried about with me; it has not been from under my hand for 28 years. Thomas Hardy, the British novelist and champion of Darwin, wove its themes into some of his best-known fiction. Robert Frost wrote his famous (and famously bleak) poem Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Night with Khayyams quatrains in mind. Beat poet Jack Kerouac modeled Sal Paradise, the unconventional protagonist of his novel On the Road, on his idea of what Khayyam might have been like.

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Although compilers have always attributed those poems to that great astronomer and mathematician of the Seljuk era, its clear that they were actually written by later Iranian figures who used Khayyam as a frame author, perhaps for fear of reaction to the religious skepticism deeply embedded in the poetry (in the same way that the Thousand and One Nights tales composed in Cairo, Aleppo, and Baghdad over centuries were all attributed to Scheherazade). The bulk of those verses first appeared at the time of the Mongol invasion of Iran in the 1200s, a bloody moment that threw the region into turmoil and paralysis just as Covid-19 has brought our world to an abrupt and chaotic halt.

As if the wars urban destruction and piles of skulls werent enough, historians have argued that the Mongols, who opened up trade routes from Asia into the Middle East, also inadvertently facilitated the westward spread of the Yersina pestis bacillus that would cause the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, a pandemic that would wipe out nearly half of Chinas population and a third of Europes.

A 15th century scribe in the picturesque Iranian city of Shiraz would, in fact, create the first anthology of quatrains entitled The Rubiyt of Omar Khayyam, many composed during Mongol rule and the subsequent pandemic. The dangers of what we would now call religious fundamentalism, as opposed to an enlightened spirituality, were trumpeted throughout those poems:

In monasteries, temples, and retreatsthey fear hellfire and look for paradise.But those who know the mysteries of Goddont let those seeds be planted in their hearts.

While some turn to theology for comfort during a disaster, those quatrains urged instead that all of us be aggressively here and now, trying to wring every last pleasure out of our worldly life before it abruptly vanishes:

A bottle of Shiraz and the lips of a lover, on the edge of a meadoware like cash in hand for meand for you, credit toward paradise.Theyve wagered that some go to heaven, and some to hell.But whoever went to hell? And whoever came back from paradise?

The poetry ridicules some religious beliefs, using the fantasies of astrology as a proxy target for the fatalism of orthodox religion. The authors may have felt safer attacking horoscopes than directly taking on Irans powerful clergy. Astronomers know that the heavenly bodies, far from dictating the fate of others, revolve in orbits that make their future position easy to predict and so bear little relationship to the lives of complex and unpredictable human beings (just as, for instance, you could never have predicted that American evangelicals would opt to back a profane, womanizing, distinctly of-this-world orange-faced presidential candidate in 2016 and thereafter):

Dont blame the stars for virtues or for faults,or for the joy and grief decreed by fate!For science holds the planets all to beA thousand times more helpless than are we.

Wars and pandemics choose winners and losers andas were learning all too grimly in the world of 2020the wealthy are generally so much better positioned to protect themselves from catastrophe than the poor. To its eternal credit, the Rubiyt (unlike both the Trump administration and the Iranian religious leadership) took the side of the latter, pointing out that religious fatalism and superstitions like astrology are inherently supportive of a rotten status quo in which the poor are the first to be sacrificed, whether to pandemics or anything else:

Signs of the zodiac: You give something to every jackass.You hand them fancy baths, millworks, and canalswhile noble souls must gamble, in hopes of winning their nightly bread.Who would give a fart for such a constellation?

In our own perilous times, right-wing fundamentalist governments like those in Brazil and the United States, as well as religious fundamentalist ones as in Iran, have made the coronavirus outbreak far more virulent and dangerous by encouraging religious gatherings at a time when the pandemics curve could only be flattened by social distancing. Their willingness to blithely set aside reason and science out of a fatalistic and misguided faith in a supernatural providence that overrules natural law (or, in Donald Trumps case, a fatalistic and misguided faith in his own ability to overrule natural laws, not to speak of providence) has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths around the world. Think of it as, in spirit, a fundamentalist version of genocide.

The pecuniary motives of some of this obscurantism are clear, as many churches and mosques depend on contributions from congregants at services for the livelihood of imams and pastors. Their willingness to prey on the gullibility of their followers in a bid to keep up their income stream should be considered the height of hypocrisy and speaks to the importance of people never surrendering their capacity for independent, critical reasoning.

Though you might not have noticed it on Donald Trumps and Ali Khameinis planet, religion seems to be in the process of collapsing, at least in the industrialized world. A third of the French say that they have no religion at all and just 45 percent consider themselves Catholic (with perhaps only half of those being relatively committed to the faith), while only 5percent attend church regularly. A majority of young people in 12 European countries claim that they now have no religion, pointing to a secular future for much of the continent. Even in peculiarly religious America, self-identification as Christian has plunged to 65percent of the population, down 12percent in the past decade, while 26percent of the population now disavows having a religion at all.

In post-pandemic Iran, dont be surprised if similar feelings spread, given how the religious leadership functionally encouraged the devastation of Covid-19. In this way, despite military threats, economic sanctions, and everything else, Donald Trumps America and Ali Khameinis Iran truly have something in common. In the United States, where its easier to measure whats happening, evangelicals, more than a fifth of the population when George W. Bush was first elected president in 2000, are 16percent of it two decades later.

Given the unpredictable nature of our world (as the emergence of Covid-19 has made all too clear), nothing, secularization included, is a one-way street. Religion is perfectly capable of experiencing revivals. Still, there is no surer way to tip the balance toward an Omar Khayyamstyle skepticism than for prominent religious leaders to guide their faithful, and all those in contact with them, into a new wave of the pandemic.

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Religious Fundamentalists Are Making the Pandemic Worse - The Nation

Khaled and Mariam pose during a Jan, 7, 2020, visit to the newly opened Catholic-run clinic in Beirut for a checkup for their two-month-old son, Mohammad. (Photo: Catholic News Service)

By Christopher White, National Correspondent

NEW YORK Marriage and family are primary sites of the field hospital Pope Francis envisions for the Catholic Church, according to theologians Julie Hanlon Rubio and Jason King.

In their new edited volume, Sex, Love, Families: Catholic Perspectives, they compile a range of short essays addressing the complexities of family life today, including migration, racism, consumerism, the hook-up culture, and more all with a perspective toward how this affects the call to holiness.

In an email interview with The Tablet, Hanlon Rubio and King discuss how they believe these challenges can be engaged with compassion and love.

The Tablet: For starters, who is this volume for? Can lay Catholics without theological training make sense of it?

Hanlon Rubio and King: In this volume, we were trying to change the Catholic conversation about sex, love, and families. Too often, discussions of these topics narrowly focus on couples, should couples live together, use contraception, get divorced, and so on. This narrowness has been exacerbated by culture wars that have turned these discussions into battle lines and divided people into camps. What was left out was so much recent scholarship that spoke more to peoples experiences in trying to negotiate sex, love, and families but also the ways in which sex, love, and families can embody the commands to love the neighbor and stranger.

The main audience for the book is students of theology and ethics, but the essays are meant to be accessible to lay Catholics. Those who pick it up will find new and expansive approaches to ethical issues that concern them, including fatherhood, immigrations impact on families, and infertility.

This is a volume on sex, love, and families. Given that, how much did Pope Francis 2016 exhortation, Amoris Laetitiachange the conversation on those issues and how is that reflected in this volume?

A volume like this would not have happened without Pope Francis. His emphasis on the Church as field hospital, accompaniment, and welcome opened up new questions and the synods on the family modeled inclusive, frank conversation. Amoris Laetitia brought this new approach to sex, marriage, and family, with a focus on every day married life and parenting and a call to those who minister in parishes to walk with the diversity of families who show up each Sunday.

Our volume builds on this model of accompaniment by including essays on how families encounter structural challenges such as poverty, racism, incarceration, as well as ordinary questions like screen time, privilege, and child care. The authors ask what the Catholic tradition has to offer families but they also show that families have wisdom to offer the Church.

Youre both professors on college campuses so perhaps its somewhat natural you begin with the hook-up culture. What surprised you from some of the contributions on that topic?

Hookup culture communicates a narrative about the meaning of sexual activity pleasure with no commitments. Its dominance in our cultural imagination makes people believe that this is what everyone desires, even though most research indicates most dont. Given this dissonance, it seemed logical to start with it.

What is surprising in the hookup essays is the way they connect love and justice, avoiding simple conservative and liberal perspectives. The contributors draw on peoples experiences and found how unhappy they are with hookup culture and how fraught it is with sexual assault. What is missing is a basic sense of justice. Other essays in the book bring a similar attention to justice to sexual relations in dating, marriage, singleness, and gender, and they do so in hopes of more genuinely loving relationships.

Catholic families look incrediblydifferent today than how they have traditionally looked, been written about, or even portrayed in art from a rise in single families to mixed marriages to LGBT parenting, etc. what are some overall takeaways from this volume that are applicable at the parish level?

We wanted the volume to speak to the questions of the diversity of Catholic families. The issues you mentioned were on our minds, as were nones in Catholic families, working parents, blended families, etc. We wanted as many Catholics as possible to be able to see themselves in this book.

Parish ministers who read the book might notice: (1) We dont avoid controversy. Most of the major sex and gender issues are covered and the tradition is respectfully engaged. (2) We dont get stuck in controversy. We provide essays to help Catholics think through questions about living a good life, from raising ethical kids to paying for domestic care. (3) We dont draw a hard line between family life and social justice. Every major issue treated in Catholic social teaching shapes family life and families are called in CST to contribute to the common good. We imagine that social justice Catholics and family life Catholics could come together to discuss our book.

This obviously isnt covered in the book, but how will the global pandemic shift our thinking on sex, love, and families that scholars several generations from now may be writing on any predictions?

COVID-19 is exposing divisions between families a major theme in our book. Those most affected by the virus and the economic impact of Shelter in Place are disproportionately poor people of color and other vulnerable populations. Were seeing families that already lack privilege struggle with unemployment or risky employment, while those who have the luxury of working from home suffer some discomfort but have much more security.

We think this shift, this necessity of considering social divisions, will keep us from narrowing our focus such that we neglect cultural, economic, and political forces. In Sex, Love, and Families, we brought together thinkers whose approach to sex and love was attentive to these social aspects. Contributors pushed for an expansive understanding of love that could animate people and families, moving us to care for those outside our homes. Hopefully, this perspective will be durable and useful as we try to go forward in this pandemic.

Of course, its hard to know what will emerge on the other side of social distancing. Will we be more afraid of those outside our homes because weve become used to thinking of others as threats to health or will we feel more connected because weve become more conscious of how much we depend on each other? Stories of medical personnel working all day and quarantining away from their children read like Catholic teaching on sacrifice for the common good played out in real time. Walking down the street and seeing sidewalks decorated with beautiful artwork, earnest messages of encouragement, and elaborate hopscotches, we see hope that these strange and destructive times are teaching us the reality of interconnection and the inseparability of justice and the home.

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Family Life Even When Complex Is a Call to Holiness, Authors Argue - The Tablet Catholic Newspaper

Moral hazard. Its an odd-sounding term for a concept well-known to worldly philosophes (a.k.a., economists), but few others. More recently it has become a veritable catchphrase for critics of crony capitalism (a.k.a. corporate capitalism). Chalk it up to the deadliest, most disruptive, pandemic in modern history.

The Covid-19 pandemic has upset the global economic apple cart in ways few could have imagined, ways natural calamities (hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts) and human-induced shocks (terrorist attacks, recessions) in the past, for all the damage, dislocation, and human suffering they occasioned, did not. Lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, school closings, social distancing, people dying in agony surrounded by aliens in full Hazmat gear, and the ubiquitous facemasks that render us all faceless. Such scenes have turned bustling cities into something resembling a sci-fi film depicting life on Planet Earth after the Apocalypse.

The Economist, a paragon of classical liberalism which has been singing the praises of free enterprise since the 1840s, predicts that among the long-term consequences of the coronavirus crisis will be the 90% economy:

In many things 90% is just fine; in an economy it is miserable, and China shows why. The country started to end its lockdown in February. Factories are busy and the streets are no longer empty. The result is the 90% economy. It is better than a severe lockdown, but it is far from normal.

Far from normal means different things to different people, especially in an age of deep class divisions, rising inequality, and culture wars. What it means for frontline workers in medicine and law-enforcement, for example, is farther from normal than for the self-isolating, social-distancing, mask-wearing majority. What it means for furloughed wage-earners and for tens of millions who have filed unemployment claimsis the crushing burden of unpayable bills, families in free fall, and financial ruin.

Will most workers in the private sector still have jobs when local economies reopen? A Goldman Sachs survey found that two-thirds of small-business owners expected to run out of cash in less than three months. In the U.K., the number of commercial tenants in arrears on rent due has risen by nearly a third. Unsurprisingly, the hardest-hit parts of the 90% economy in the U.S. and Europe:

Even now in Europes five largest economies, over 30m workers, a fifth of the labor force, are in special schemes where the state pays their wages. These can be generous, but nobody knows how long they will last.

Meanwhile, far from normal is different altogether if you happen to be Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the worlds richest capitalist, who reportedly raked in $24 billion in profits during the first few months of the pandemic. That is far from normal, too, but it points to a fact of political life under crony capitalism that Republicans in leadership positions never talk aboutnamely that for not a few billionaires with deep pockets who shell out millions in campaign contributions to elect legislative lapdogs, the pandemic has already opened the door to profiteering on an epic scale. And if the past is prologue, we aint seen nothin yet.

Americas billionaires grew their wealth by $282,000,000,000 in just 23 days during the lockdown. Thats $12,300,000,000 a day. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are out of work and struggling to pay the bills. This is a tale of two pandemics.

Robert Reich Tweet, May 2, 2020

In a recent article entitled How to think about moral hazard during a pandemic, The Economist proffered this definition: Moral hazard describes situations in which the costs of risky behavior are not entirely borne by those responsible for that behavior, so encouraging excessive risk-taking in the future.. The moral dimension arises from the fact that moral hazard invariably involves moneymoney managers, money markets, and, above all, moneyed interestsand the greater the amounts the greater the hazard.

If youre thinking something along the lines of No wonder economics is called the dismal science youre not alone. Think of the checks and balances that form the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution. Its an idea that became a lofty principle aimed at safeguarding the separation of powers. Now think about moral hazard. In the absence of checks and balances and a separation of powers, what is to prevent a few uber-rich individuals from buying votes in Congress on everything from taxes, trade, and tariffs to health care and immigration?

Its not rocket science. The answer is obvious: Moral hazard in a capitalist system dominated by a corporate elite arises out of political-economic power relationships that are fundamentally unbalanced and unchecked. Rarely, says The Economist, has the scope for moral hazard seemed as massive as now.

As readers of a recent piece in Forbes magazine learned, the CARES Act provides a glaring example of just how massive the moral hazard is at this time in history.

A $1.7 million stimulus check?

While wealthyAmericans are not eligible for the comparatively measly $1,200 stimulus checks that are now being disbursed to many Americans, they are on pace to do even better.43,000 taxpayers, who earn more than $1 million annually,are each set to receive a $1.7 million windfall, on average,thanks to a provisionburiedin the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

A headline in ProPublica provides another example:

The economy is in free fall but Wall Street is thriving, and stocks of big private equity firms are soaring dramatically higher. That tells you who investors think is the real beneficiary of the federal governments massive rescue efforts.

In this trenchant piece, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jesse Eisinger calls the federal governments attempt to pull the economy back from the brink both a spectacular success and a catastrophic failure. In early May, a time of unfathomable pain across the country not seen since the Great Depression, the stock market was buoyant. Junk bonds, historically dodgy during an economic swoon, have roared back, Eisinger noted.

Shares of major private equity firms like the Apollo Group and Blackstone soared.

The reason: Asset holders like Apollo and Blackstone disproportionately the wealthiest and most influential have been insured by the worlds most powerful central bank. This largess is boundless and without conditions. Even if a second wave of outbreaks were to occur, JPMorgan economists wrote in a celebratory note on Friday, the Fed has explicitly indicated that there is no dollar limit and no danger of running out of ammunition.

Bottom line: Its a bailout of capital.

Capitalism: Cure or Curse?

In politics and the natural order, the key word is balance. Its also true of economics. The Greeks understood the supreme value of balance in all things and gave it a namethe Golden Mean.

There was arguably a time in American economic history when a proper balance was struck between the free market and state intervention. The Great Depression was the occasion and the New Deal was the robust policy response that restarted a badly stalled economy and lifted the hopes of the huddled masses.

That was then and this is now. Then America had Franklyn Delano Roosevelt in the White House; now we have Donald Trump. Then the Republican Party nominated the moderate and decent Alf Landon as its presidential candidate. Now Mitch McConnell is the grim face of Republicans in the Senate who only represents the corporate interests of an elite class of capitalist extremists and libertarian lunatics who conflate any state intervention aimed at protecting competition, consumers, and a balanced economy with socialism. Here, for example, is Leora Levy, a wealthy onetime commodity trader and Trumps pick to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Chile, on Twitter: AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A SOCIALIST COUNTRY!!! she posted. WE ARE BORN FREE AND WILL STAY FREE!!! (@labbielady 2/5/19)

Todays extreme capitalists (a.k.a. far-right conservatives) extol the virtues of deregulation and stigmatize any public-spending designed to help people who need help as socialism and a giveaway while insisting that billion-dollar bailouts for banks, massive tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for agro-industry, coal mining, and big oil are necessary for economic expansion and job creation.

The Founders buying into the idea of a commercial republic is a mirror image of Adam in the book of Genesis taking a bite of the apple. The original sin that gave rise to the unbalanced, oligopolistic capitalism so evident in America today can be traced to the late 17th Century when John Locke (the Father of Classical Liberalism) set forth his seminal ideas on social contract theory, natural rights, and private property.

A century later, Adam Smith rhapsodized about the invisible hand of the marketplace in The Wealth of Nations, a work destined to become the holy gospel for the apostles of modern market economyand for its apologists. What began as an economic theory has been perverted and turned into a secular religionan extreme version of capitalism neither Locke nor Smith envisioned but Karl Marx predicted in his three-volume work, Das Kapital.

Jump ahead to 1945, the end of a cataclysmic era bracketed by two world wars, the stock market crash, depression, and the Holocaust. The turbulent interwar years produced two major totalitarian threats, one on the left and one on the right. They also produced original thinkers like Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation.

Polanyi lived in social-democratic Red Vienna during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s. Nikil Saval writing in The Nationexplains how Polyani at first embraced Marxism as a hopeful counterpoint to the Dickensian poorhouse on one extreme and fascism on the other and later not only broke with Marxists but also broke new ground as an economic historian. Polyani showed how the gold standard rendered the efficient and humane management of a market economy impossible and, at the same time. Under the gold standard, he wrote, . . . the leaders of the financial market [are] in the position to obstruct any domestic move in the economic sphere which [they happen] to dislike. As Saval notes,

For Polanyi, the problem with this social arrangement was not only that it impeded the democratic process but that is also allowed the interests of the market to assert their primacy over those of society.

The aforementioned article first appeared in December 2016. Thats significant because the author did not have the kind of window on the cruel and corrupting side of capitalism the Covid-19 pandemic has given the world.

Clearly Wall Street traders, bankers, and hedge-fund managers have no answers to the medical challenges this pandemic poses. What is equally clear that the elite business class is not to be trusted with answers to the economic challenges we face.

Indeed, many highly influential business and banking elites back the deceitful, hate-mongering, name-calling narcissist in the White House. Skeptics are urged to read Evan Osnoss trenchant How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump (The New Yorker, May 3, 2020):

The story of Trumps rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of Americas lite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.

Osnos, who grew up in Greenwich, notes that the latest Forbes ranking of the worlds billionaires lists fifteen of them in the Greater Greenwich Area, led by Ray Dalio, the founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater, who is worth an estimated eighteen billion dollars.

Nor did the rise of a politically engaged, jet-setting billionaire class happen overnight, Osnos argues. In fact, a generation of unwitting patrons paved the way long before Trump stepped onto the political stage.

From Greenwich and places like it, they launched a set of financial, philanthropic, and political projects that have changed American ideas about government, taxes, and the legitimacy of the liberal state.

No wonder the government of the richest nation in the world was among the least well-prepared or equipped to deal with a pandemic! Its not because market economies are inherently corrupt and chaotic or because free-enterprise is a bad idea in theory. What Churchill said about democracythats its the worst form of government, except for all the otherscan also be said of capitalism. Its the worst way to operate an economy, except for all the others.

Capitalism is inherently neither cure nor curse. The problem is a state-sponsored, pseudo-capitalist ideology that bestows massive bailouts and tax benefits for the superrich. A system that rewards greed and manic wealth accumulation at the expense of everything worth protecting and preserving in an otherwise decent societyeven to the point of denying people a living wage or coronavirus victims access to affordable health care.

The problem is not capitalism with a small c but Capitalism capitalized, the kind of extreme capitalism that seeks to kill competition rather than protect it, that rewards the use of junk bonds to finance hostile takeovers, and that turns the myth of the free market into a commodity to be sold to a public conditioned to believe that state regulation and intervention are thinly veiled socialism.

As both history and the current Covid-19 pandemic amply demonstrate, an active state is both an economic and social necessity. Competition, not deregulation, is the key to a market economy that works for the many rather than the few. Experience in this unprecedented health crisis is conclusive: Absent an impartial referee there is nothing to prevent a mythical free market from decaying into crony capitalism and causing irreparable damage to society, economy, and a badly battered political system. The role of the state in normal times is to keep markets functional and fair; in a crisis, this economic principle becomes a moral imperative.

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Capitalism, contagion, and moral hazard: A cure worse than the disease? - NationofChange

Graham Williamson reports on how the COVID-19 phase of the culture wars in Middlesborough are an endless re-run of the 1940s.

We are, it is said, at war. The full commemorative tea set of metaphors has been brought out to persuade us that the fight against COVID-19 is this eras Blitz. The anxiety, though, comes not just from the crisis but its potential aftermath. Boris Johnson now coyly refers to austerity as the A word, but that unspeakable road ahead is still one his party finds ideologically acceptable.

Here in Middlesbrough, we havent recovered from the last dose of austerity. Nobody here looks forward to seeing their town mentioned in the national press, unless they get a perverse kick out of cataloguing things were worst in the country for.

Heres one. On 1 March, Professor Sir Michael Marmot released his Health Equity in England report, which revealed that, for the first time in a century, Middlesbroughs life expectancy was moving backwards and quickly. From 2011 to 2016, the average Middlesbrough man saw 1.3 years shaved off how long he could expect to stay alive.

This was partly ascribed to deaths from substance abuse and suicide among forty-somethings. But, poverty has slower methods of killing, ones which are particularly lethal coupled with the Coronavirus.

Insecure work never knowing if next month will bring you enough money to live on saps the heart and immune system, as well as the spirit. Poverty makes newborn babies underweight and adults fed on cheap, low-quality food overweight. It forces families into overcrowded houses with damp walls and insufficient heating. These are all time-bombs that go off during a public health crisis. It is why the Centre for Progressive Policy put the area as number one on its list of at-risk areas.

If this is a war, a noticeable minority act like it is a phony one. Cleveland Police have been called out to 20-person barbecues and mass VE day parties. Our independent mayor Andy Preston blamed the BBC for giving the impression that lockdown would be relaxed on VE day an impression not dispelled by Prestons decision to re-open parks that very same day.

The rest of us know whos really to blame: the Idiots. They are not a unified group and share few interests other than idiocy and ruining it for the rest of us. Idiocy is so vague, it can provide a shared enemy even in times as divided as these.

Britains current culture wars are essentially a duel between competing visions of the 1940s: military glory versus the welfare state, an endless re-run of Churchill versus Attlee.

The comments sections of local news sites have been full of condemnation for them, which is fair. But something about the insatiability of the idiot discourse disturbs me. Even the most catastrophic failure of Government now causes little more than a sigh, but the Idiots never fail to provoke fury. Somehow, weve come to expect more from ordinary people than elected officials.

The idiots apparent nihilism, refusing to protect even their own lives, is another symptom of the same underlying condition behind our mortality rates. If you live in a place where the economy basically functions, the world now looks frightening and strange busy streets deserted, shop fronts now impassive metal masks. If you live in a poor area, this is what things look like all the time.

So our new normal is basically the old normal, which can breed a dangerous complacency. A VE Day party was held on the Grove Hill near my house, an estate traduced as the Beirut of Britain in the early 1990s and slowly demolished over the following decades. The people living there have seen nothing improve under John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May or Boris Johnson. Why should they listen to the Government now?

But it also expresses of a longing for community, the same need which drives the Clap for Carers ritual. In Middlesbrough, it verges on folk art, with NHS murals on garden walls and home-made banners being driven past the hospital.

Theres a particular breed of columnist who interprets everything that happens outside Wapping as moral panic or virtue signalling. Clap for Carers lends itself well to that boilerplate. The left resent the perceived insincerity of Conservative voters applauding nurses, the right tried and failed to hijack it with Clap for Boris.

I love it. Its the first time Ive seen my street, the residents of which can be transient, insular, isolated by age or illness, all outside doing the same thing. There are some parts of this country where the streets do not hold tea parties for the latest royal baby; Clap for Carers is our social bonding.

But it doesnt allay my fears about what comes next. In the race to deal with the pandemics economic fall-out, the Netherlands are using Kate Raworths doughnut model. Britain merely has a hole, specifically in our understanding of recent history.

Even The Guardian keeps discussing deficit spending by mentioning Gordon Brown, then Rishi Sunak and, in between, nothing. It is as if the facts of the last decade brutal spending restrictions that failed so badly that they massively increased borrowing, produced feeble growth and failed every other test Cameron and George Osborne set themselves is so incomprehensible to the commentariat, that their memories rejected it.

Yes, austerity is unpopular, but unpopularity is too generous a fate. Its actually pseudo-science. In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a paper claiming that economic growth collapses once debt exceeds 90% of GDP. It came at exactly the right time to justify austerity measures across the Eurozone, but no one could reproduce its findings.

It emerged that the 90% figure was the result of a spreadsheet error. To their credit, Reinhart and Rogoff withdrew their conclusion. The politicians who used their work did not. An Excel typo robbed my townspeople of more than a year of life. But that wasnt widely enough reported, so austerity is still seen as merely a harsh medicine unpleasant, but still effective.

It could, then, be re-sold to the public. The idiots are unpopular enough to be pressed into rhetorical service, just as the last age of austerity was blamed on their ancestors, the Scroungers. Or they could be reclaimed, like the DeVos-funded anti-lockdown protests in America, as the real patriots.

Local newspaper comments about VE day parties werent all condemnatory. One man said he was proud to join in, that the parties were about freedom and patriotism. All you lot, he said, go to the hospital to applaud every Thursday. Why couldnt the estates have their celebration?

Britains current culture wars are essentially a duel between competing visions of the 1940s: military glory versus the welfare state, an endless re-run of Winston Churchill versus Clement Attlee. Should the need arrive, this will be the populist rights gloss on our current moment: council-estate patriots being scorned for celebrating VE Day, while the middle-classes meekly applaud their socialist healthcare.

It is divisive, mean-spirited and above all untrue. But theres a war on, and we all know what the first casualty of those is.

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Postcards from the Red Wall: Victory Celebrations for a Nation at War with Itself - Byline Times

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Patton Oswalt looks happy. Traversing the stage at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, for his latest Netflix special, I Love Everything, the comedian cant help but burst into a giant grin repeatedly over the course of his set. Even during his complaints about the horrific nature of the healthy breakfast cereals he now makes himself consume in his 50s (Im eating cereal that tastes like an unpopular teenagers poetry), Oswalt is all smiles. It may seem surprising to longtime fans who still recall the royally pissed-off nerd who launched salvo after whip-smart salvo in the culture wars during his early comedy albums like Feelin Kinda Patton or Werewolves And Lollipops. But the man who once raged against the appalling nature of 80s hair metal seems to have made peace with thingswell, except maybe Dennys.

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Patton Oswalt

May 19 on Netflix

Actually, this newfound joy might sound even stranger to those who remember Oswalts fiercely cathartic set addressing the 2016 death of his wife, writer and journalist Michelle McNamara, as detailed in his most recent stand-up special, 2017s Annihilation. Since then, he has remarried, and rediscovered the joy of everyday living. After acknowledging that he had initially assumed he would just exist after McNamaras death, he urges the audiencein the most earnest and emotional moment of I Love Everythingto seek out the best reason for living: If you find love, run toward it. And all of the jokes that surround that exhortation are suffused with that sense of uplift. Does it sap some of the vicious bite from his wit? Undeniably so. But it also makes it awfully hard not to like spending an hour with the comic; hes gone from being the antisocial malcontent holding hilarious court at the end of the bar to the funny friend who makes you feel better just by being around. Its a fair trade.

I Love Everything, for all its easygoing charm, is still instantly recognizable as the work of Oswalts free-associative comedic persona. Whether riffing on how the blandly organic makers of his aforementioned breakfast must have begun (Sorghum Farms was born outside a Phish concert in 1990) or inventing lengthy backstories for the tragic-looking characters on the kids menu at Dennys, his penchant for following narrative curlicues down absurdist rabbit holes remains undimmed. But where the punchlines used to live in the outrage that seemed to continually simmer below the surface of every acid observation he made, now Oswalts humor is laced with a relatable world-weariness that comes from having been through the wringer, coming out the other side, and being confronted the fact that maybe its not worth getting so pissed off about the little things, no matter how irritating. This is comedy borne of fascination, not rage.

Thats not to say some things dont still make him mad. But Oswalt largely passes by the Trump-shaped elephant in every room, pointing out the nigh-futility of joking about this administration by comparing it to an eighteen-wheeler full of monkeys and PCP that crashed into a train full of diarrhea. And everybodys watching it, like, Holy shit, look at this! And then you as a comedian walk up and say, Hey, wanna hear a joke I wrote about this? Instead, he saves his ire for things like having to miss the Hollywood premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story, complete with a life-size recreation of the Millennium Falcon you could wander around in, because he had to attend his daughters second grade art show. Though even this gets shrugged off with the subsequent realization that his younger self would be fine with this trade-off, given it means he will have sex at some point in the future.

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Oswalt ends it all with an epic thought experiment about the time he took his daughter to Dennys as part of a Daddy-Daughter Day, a closing bit that demonstrates the comedian fusing together all the things he does bestunexpected wordplay, imaginative flights of referential fancy, and cutting assessments of humdrum corporate actions that might just be far more sinister than they appear. Its funny, smart, and imaginative in all the right ways, with a generosity of spirit underlying the cutting nature of the humor. (That generosity extends to his fellow comedian Bob Rubin: Oswalt has attached the stand-ups set to play right after his.) Patton Oswalt is changing into a different, more empathetic type of comedian, but for those willing to follow along on his new path, there are ample rewards.

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Happiness looks good on Patton Oswalt in the charming and wry I Love Everything - The A.V. Club