The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 22

Last week Maryland Governor Hogan hid a storage pile of Covid resources purchased from S. Korea (through family ties—his wife is South Korean) . He didn’t hide it from a cabal of Maryland criminals, but from the federal government.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has come under scrutiny for her stay at home orders, which, when compared to Maryland and a range of other states appears relatively reasonable. A large group of protestors entered into the state house carrying assault weapons. Because the Republican Party controls both houses of the state legislature (as a result of gerrymandering), they’ve basically forced Whitmer to come out with a staggered end to the stay at home plan. In response to their wishes (and political power) Widmer divided the state into eight regions, with the region hardest hit by the pandemic (Southeastern Michigan, which includes Detroit and its surrounding suburbs) being the last to open.

How to make sense of all of this, without a stiff drink of some sort?

I’m going to go back to the two maps that I created a bit after Trump’s election.

     The archipelago represents the areas that voted for Clinton in the last election, while the contiguous red country represents the areas that voted for Trump. I noted that in many ways we’re in the middle of a cold civil war that might become hot.

So let’s recap.

The Republican leader of the state of Maryland assigns guards to a top-secret stash of Covid resources—a stash that likely only the governor, the lieutenant governor, and perhaps two or three others in his cabinet know the location of. He assigns guards to protect them from the federal government.

The capital of Michigan has witnessed protests over the stay at home order which has now morphed into armed protestors entering the state house, their protests supported by Donald Trump and by people associated directly and indirectly with his cabinet.

(As an aside if you were to go to the Detroit Free Press today, or even the day it happened, you would not see this story on the front page. This may be because you, like me, are not a Michigan resident—perhaps people in Michigan see a different front page than people outside of the state. I understand that the protests are astroturfed and to an extent do not reflect an “organic” grassroots movement—the protests in Michigan and in many other states all have a common infrastructure generated by a two-brother family of 2nd Amendment supporters.)

Combine this with Trump’s statement that suggests strongly that democratic states will get fewer resources than their republican counterparts, and we’re looking at an extension of two-pronged conflict. On the one hand between the federal government and the states (particularly Democratic ones), and then on the other within states between regions likely to vote for Trump and regions likely to vote Democratic. This conflict has already resulted in deaths as the pandemic claims even more lives. It remains to be seen how much more political damage the conflict will cause on our nation’s institutions.

…

Mike Pence visited the Mayo Clinic last week, sans mask. While he said first that he wanted to be able to look the staff in the eye (something obviously impossible to do with a mask on) and then that he didn’t know the rules, it turns out that the Vice President’s press corps (who did wear masks) knew  they had to do so because the Vice-President’s staff told them.

I’m an Americanist and a political scientist at that, which means that outside of a few specific areas I only know enough history to be dangerous.

With that said, it seems to me that Pence’s actions read as very Nazi-like. By not wearing a mask in a facility that required one, he promotes himself as being atypically healthy, and then as he is a representative of the state he then promotes the state as being similarly healthy. The individuals forced to wear masks, by contrast, are weak and in need of control and stewardship.

Now we know that some populations are at more risk than others. The aged and infirm are more at risk than the young. Non-white populations are more at risk than white ones. Spatially speaking the places that are most at risk are spaces that are already depicted as problematic. This disease isn’t deemed to just be separating the weak from the strong but the immoral from the moral. Pence’s actions alongside those of the Republican state legislators in the State of Michigan and elsewhere, can then easily be read as supporting a Nazi-like biopolitics.

There’s at least one issue a state like Michigan has to wrestle with, related to the map I presented above. Not only is Michigan one state of many in the region, the regions themselves are all contiguous. For the plan as the republican legislators articulate to effectively work, the infection rates in those regions have to remain low, or at least only high enough to develop “herd immunity”. If ending the stay at home order means that people will be free to go to the bars, diners, and gun ranges that they used to frequent before the pandemic, how exactly will these people stay free from infection from other sources?

Some believe these people are already immune—one of the reasons that we see protestors  eschew masks is because they, like Pence, believe they are already immune or they are strong enough to only get the mild version if they do get sick.  They don’t need any special protection, they don’t need to be cordoned off from the rest of society. But this is wrong. We now understand that it affects a range of different populations and not just those with pre-existing conditions.

Given the science, we know eventually the people in these communities will be as affected as the people in more dense areas.

What then?

I think what we’re likely to see if the civil war frame is a useful one, is an increased attempt to make sure that populations associated with the disease hot spots are not allowed access into the regions deemed immune.

When I was at Michigan (as an aside if the world were right I wouldn’t be typing this right now, but rather would be in Ann Arbor celebrating my son’s graduation. Life.) as an undergrad, we’d go visit Michigan State for parties. It was about an hour drive. We’d always make sure to have a full tank before we left and a full tank after, because we didn’t want to have to stop off in Howell or anywhere near it.

Why?

Because Howell was a Klan capital.

White residents of Algiers Point weaponized themselves in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shooting several African Americans in an attempt to purportedly protect themselves from looting.

I can see a more robust version of this developing. With the communities associated with the various right wing militias creating their own protection units designed to protect the “safe” spots from those bringing contagion with them.

Parable of the Sower begins in 2024, just thirty years after it was published.

Fellowship stories like the one Butler tells requires movement. Given this, it’d have been hard for Butler to tell the story she wanted to tell if the cities remained mostly intact—it’d end up being a bit closer to Dhalgren. So she had to get the characters out of cities and make cities so dangerous they wouldn’t want to come anywhere near them.

Given what I’m seeing, it isn’t the cities (nor their residents) we need to be wary of.

….

Speaking of wary—Hopkins reneged on a private promise to protect cafeteria workers as part of a broader suite of austerity measures. It’s the second time I’m aware of that they’ve done so. One of the consequences of the slow death of the labor movement is that even as our trust in institutions have waned, our default behavior still implies trust. The politics here are the politics of private negotiation and consensus building. I’m not suggesting that Unite Here was wrong in engaging in private negotiations with Hopkins in the first place, far from it. They were in a weak position in the first place.

But it struck me not only thinking about Hopkins but thinking about the case of former NPR journalist Ray Suarez (who I never thought of as “middle class”), we’re going to need to build a new set of muscles. Or regrow a set of old ones.

….

Marc Steiner ended up doing the piece on the Uprising that I had in mind. Takes a load off of my shoulders. Interesting that the show appeared either the day of or the day before the Blue Angels flew over Baltimore (well, technically speaking, over the White L).

Over the past thirty days, finding yeast here has been like trying to find the proverbial needle. Thankful for one of my Detroit moms, who sent six packets. We are not dependent. We are not independent. We are, at our best, interdependent. That interdependency is our greatest strength. Remember that. Build on that.