Doppelgänger Dozens

House of Mirrors

This series on psychological profiles of Progressive Believers in Covid-19 dogma, peered inside Naomi Klein’s mindscape through her womanifesto Doppelganger. It’s evolving into a House of Rear View Mirrors, as doppelganger after doppelganger appeared in my headlights, like stunned deer facing the wrong way.

As their House of Covid Cards collapsed, Masks, Social Distancing, Lockdowns, Ventilators, and preventive Vaccines, most discarded soiled outer robes like fast fashion. Yet, all still clutch their New Clothes tightly. What the Pandemic Revealed abut Who America Protects and Who it Leaves Behind by Business Journalists Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean (Portfolio/ Penguin, 2023) flayed all those “public health guidelines”, except for the business miracle of covaxxes.

Corporate cheerleaders dropped the indefensible limited hangouts to guard the crown jewels. Adam Tooe opined in Bidenomics (London Review of Books, 7 November, 2024). “Trump was the least well suited of all recent presidents [to battle] a pandemic with obscure origins in China. He answered with erratic conspiracy theories and failed to counter vaccine skepticism among the Republican faithful, which had the effect of raising America’s death to 1.2 million.”

“To reduce the Trump administration’s response to Covid into a matter of science denial, a theme beloved of American liberals, is to miss the obvious. If the Covid crisis had a viable solution it was not mask wearing or social distancing. The solution was the vaccine. In the American case, and for much of the world’s more fortunate populations, the key vaccines, produced by Moderna and Pfizer came out of Trump’s Warp Speed program. This not only delivered a remarkable medico-industrial breakthrough, it shaped a new economic policy making lot’s of important, high tech stuff fast.”

Break things and apologize later is their motto, with destructive capitalism’s economic imprimatur. Public servants never wavered, even when their own interests were damaged. Rochester, New York’s public school system suffered a 10% drop in enrollment from 2020-2022, as local teacher’s union demands kept its schools closed to in person learning longer than any other district in New York, besides Buffalo. (New York, California, Washington, Michigan and Minnesota school districts were contenders.)

With none returning after resuming IRL classroom schooling - that’s a math problem, became an attendance funded teachers and staff employment disaster. Adam Urbanski, long time president of Rochester Teachers Union, said they “believed schools should not reopen until the district could guarantee high air quality, and it has not been able to. When I reflect back I know this erred on the side of safety, and I do not regret the position we took”, even as 11 district schools were targets for closing in 2024 under his watch and mass layoffs loomed. Not his job, of course.

Alec MacGillis interviewed him for The New Yorker magazine in The Last Day: How Declining Enrollment Threatens Education Nationwide (9/2/2024), and paints a grim picture for future teachers. “Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic public school enrollment has declined by about a million students, [mostly from] switching to private schools, expansion of voucher programs and homeschooling had especially strong growth. Fifty thousands pupils are unaccounted for- simply not in school with unknown outcome.” A quarter million missing kids according to Nocera and McLean, with none on milk cartons.

“Democratic leaning districts that embraced remote learning with the longest closures, had the largest enrollment declines. " Parents pulled their kids out during, “because of inadequacy of virtual learning”, others after “when classroom behavior so deteriorated following the hiatus.” Chronic absenteeism is rampant, dropouts more frequent, poor kids futures anchored to minimum wage and/or crime and punishment.

The federal government gave an extra $190 billion to school districts during the “covid emergency.” That “money is about to run dry.” When MacGillis asked Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, about the looming abyss, she skipped over it. “At the end of the day, kids need to be together in community.” That should have been considered before closing schools, rather than installing air filters.

The only concern about the negative effects of lockdowns proffered by The Progressive magazine (Oct/Nov 2024) was extended to prisoners, where wardens “turned to solitary confinement and lockdowns as their primary means of preventing the spread of COVID-1. Unlike people sheltering at home, those behind bars could not escape human contact or deadly respiratory particles.”

Staff were ordered to report to work if they were exposed or tested positive and were asymptomatic. Inmates and staff made up 13% of national cases that summer, half a million additional covid patients. Jails and Prisons were the second highest superspreader facilities after nursing homes, where sick patients were sent by governors of states with the highest death rates. (The son of a friend imprisoned for a non-violent drug offense, and an older friend in a nursing home died with covid.)

There were 505 deaths in federal prisons that year. Nursing homes passed that in the first months, but not a word about those disastrous policies and practices in The Progressive.

Instead, there’s a hagiography of Tim Walz’s Joyful, Midwestern Populism by Ruth Coniff, a direct doppelganger of Klein. She espouses his “reacquainting the country with the generous, neighborly values of the Midwest- a deep healthy current in American politics.” His “campaign based on joy” stump speech rang hollow. “Even if we would not make the same choices as our neighbors, we respect them because we live by the golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

As governor of Minnesota, where school closures, commercial and church lockdowns, nursing home and prison practices, draconian tactics for enforcing social distancing (riot police paintballing people sitting on their porches), vaccine propaganda and mandates, were as vicious and ineffective as any other Deep Blue State.

No amount of Joy, Joy, Joy, Long Live the Black Queen galas could mask these memories. Voters heeded his projection, “the fascists depend on Fear. But we’re not afraid of Weird People. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”