Tom Tomorrow's header for today's 'toon dripped with irony at the end of the most disagreeable month, Save November 3-24, 2020 and the 'toonist had no cheerful message at the end of November, either:
I took some time off last week, and had to work through the weekend to get a cartoon written to make up for it, which is not my favorite way to work. Literally just finished this one up a few minutes ago. I hope you all had a good (and appropriately safe) holiday. Thank you to any new subscribers on the list; I usually write more than this, and will likely do so again next week, but right now my brain is fried.
Until then,
Dan/Tom
On that brief note, things were chill and drear for the 'toonist and for this blogger. The COVID-19 Pandemic is taking more lives than ever and today's "This Modern World" unfunny paper has Action McNews' blow-dried co-anchors, Wanda and Biff, delivering a phony message that "everything is fine and normal with no worries." If that is (fair & balanced) lunacy, so be it. And, as long as the post-election nightmare continues...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[xTMW]
Everything Is Fine And Normal!
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]
The 2020 election will be remembered as the sui generis election in US history. If this is a (fair & balanced) description of the damage done to the body politic by the *ILK/WPE (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King/Worst President Ever, so be it. And, as long as the post-election nightmare continues...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Trump’s Farewell Address, In His Own Words
By Dana Milbank
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Two-hundred twenty-four years ago, the first president retired with a passionate warning against political parties becoming “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge … is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington warned. And, “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
President Trump, who has no purpose other than his own elevation, will never pen such a speech. But in the weeks that have passed since the election, he has already given us his farewell address of sorts. Here it is, assembled entirely from his own [italicized] words and tweets:
This election was a fraud. A total fraud. It was a fraudulent election. This was a massive fraud. This fraud has taken place. You have a fraudulent system. Fraudulent voting and fraudulent votes. There’s tremendous fraud here. There’s fraud all over the place. Massive fraud has been found.
We’re like a Third World country. We will find tens of thousands of fraudulent and illegal votes. You’re gonna find fraud of hundreds of thousands of votes per state. They used covid in order to defraud the people of this country. Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can prove that his ridiculous “80,000,000 votes” were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. I just don’t see Americans rolling over for this election fraud. Our big lawsuit, which spells out in great detail all of the ballot fraud and more, will soon be filled (sic).
RIGGED ELECTION! This Election was RIGGED. This, it was a rigged election. Very sad to say it, this election was rigged. This was a 100% RIGGED ELECTION They know it was a rigged election. At the highest level it was a rigged election. This election was a rigged election.
This was an election that we won easily. We won it by a lot. I won Pennsylvania by a lot. In Georgia, I won by a lot. I won that by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way Trump didn’t win Pennsylvania because the energy industry was all for him. No, we won by a lot. We were robbed. We got many votes more than Ronald Reagan.
This election was lost by the Democrats. They cheated. They flooded everybody with ballots. They’re horrible people, and they’re people that don’t love our country.
Horrible things went on. Many other things were happening that were horrible. Just horrible. This is horrible what’s taking place. All of the horrible things that happened to poll watchers. If you were a Republican poll watcher you were treated like a dog.
Dead people were requesting ballots. Not only were they coming in and putting in a ballot, but dead people were requesting ballots, and they were dead for years. Dead people voting all over the place.
It’s a corrupt system. The most corrupt election in American political history. Corrupt election! This is corrupt. We’ll not allow the corruption to steal such an important election. Working hard to clean up the stench of the 2020 Election Hoax! The 2020 Election was a total scam.
We have judges that are afraid to make a decision. Nevada is turning out to be a cesspool. Detroit and Philadelphia — known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere. Why isn’t the @GaSecofState Brad Raffensperger, a so-called Republican, allowing us to look at signatures on envelopes?
Those machines are fixed, they’re rigged. People say the votes are counted in foreign countries and much worse than that. VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN.
I concede NOTHING! It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede because we know there was massive fraud. Should President Trump concede to Biden? Poll Results: No: 190,593 (98.9%). This election has to be turned around. They have to turn over the results.
[And Dana Milbank concluded, in the [unitalicized] tone of the losing candidate:]
Have a great life General [Michael] Flynn! Rudy [Giuliani], you were the greatest mayor. Thanksgiving is a special day for turkeys. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States. I concede NOTHING!!!!! ###
[Dana Milbank is a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist. He also provides political commentary for various TV outlets, and he is the author of three books on politics, including the national bestseller Homo Politicus (2007). Milbank joined The Post in 2000 as a Style political writer, then covered the presidency of George W. Bush as a White House correspondent before starting the column in 2005. Before joining The Post, Milbank spent two years as a senior editor at The New Republic, where he covered the Clinton White House, and eight years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, where he covered Congress and was a London-based correspondent. He received a BA cum laude (political science) from Yale University (CT).]
Jonathan V. Last, a bona-fide NeverTrumper, describes the transformation of the Party of Lincoln into a conglomerate made up of xenophobes, racists, science-deniers, and fascists that calls itself the Party of Lincoln. Their anti-historical attitude is ignorant of the fact that Abraham Lincoln renounced the equivalent of the Party of Haters and Conspiracists in 1856. That political movment called itself the American Party and its political nickname was the Know-Nothings. If this is another (fair & balanced) demonstration that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes, so be it. And, as long as the post-election nightmare continues...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x TNR]
The Republican Party Is Dead — It’s The Trump Cult Now
By Jonathan V. Last
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Donald Trump is the past, present, and future of the Republican Party. And that is because the GOP is no longer a traditional political party designed to win elections so that it can enact a policy agenda. It is a personality cult built around grievance.
To understand its true nature, you must first understand how weak Trump was as an electoral force.
It is devilishly hard to unseat an elected president. Trump is only the third elected president to be defeated since Hoover. His overperformance of polling expectations has obscured how far he ran behind statewide Republican candidates across the map: Trump ran 7 points behind Susan Collins in Maine, 4 points behind Mike Rounds in South Dakota, and 2 points behind Cory Gardner in Colorado.
There are a handful of spots, such as North Carolina, where Trump ran with, or slightly ahead, of the statewide Republican. But those are the exceptions. Trump was—as he has been since 2016—an electoral albatross for the Republican Party.
A rational political party would see the Trump presidency as a mistake and attempt to pivot away from it as quickly as possible. Some people—such as George W. Bush or Mitt Romney—are attempting to move on from the president. But the main body of the GOP is not. They are standing by Trump, either openly and defiantly, or meekly and abstractly, using dog whistles like wanting to count “legal votes,” because as much as party elites might want to jettison Trump, neither Donald Trump nor the base of Republican voters will let them.
Donald Trump will be the first former president not to retire, more or less, from political life since Teddy Roosevelt. He will not repair to Mar-a-Lago, watch Shark Week, and get to work on his memoirs. He has neither the financial nor psychological ability to do so. Instead, Trump will tweet. He will call into the cable shows. He will cultivate an army of followers who can be mobilized and monetized. What he will do with these followers is unclear, but also beside the point. Whether he starts Trump TV, a new vitamin business, or a 2024 campaign, he will want mastery over as large an audience as possible.
And that is why he refused to concede the election. His next move requires exporting tens of millions of followers with him to his new venture, and the way to do that is to keep pushing the notion that he was not defeated, that he has the secret truth, and that he will share it with his chosen elect for $9.95 a month.
You might laugh at the idea that Trump can convince America the election was stolen from him. But consider that while a quarter of a million Americans died from the coronavirus, Trump had the vast majority of Republicans convinced the pandemic was “overblown.” If Trump can pull off such a shameless act of blatant trickery, he can sell the idea that a few hundred thousand ballots were illegitimate; even Eric Trump—even Jared—could do it.
And that’s not close to the craziest things Republican voters believe. Of Republicans who have heard of QAnon, 38 percent say the conspiracy theory is at least “somewhat accurate.” I would not bet the milk money on it, but I suspect that three months from now a greater percentage of Republicans will believe in QAnon than believe that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.
A political party that includes a significant bloc of voters so deeply estranged from reality cannot be anything other than a source of mischief—and worse.
Hope for a different Republican Party invariably rests upon a few fundamental misunderstandings.
The first is that the Republican Party can be “reformed.” During the Obama years, there was a movement inside conservative think tanks to push for a version of conservatism that was more populist, more middle class, and less allied with big business and the Chamber of Commerce. This group, the Reformicons, hoped that the next generation of Republican leadership would be less like Mitt Romney and more like Marco Rubio.
They never imagined that the party and the movement they wanted to reform might turn into something closer to George Wallace and Father Coughlin than Liddle Marco. But that’s exactly what happened. Donald Trump is the reformed version of the GOP. There are still people at Washington think tanks who believe that the party can go back to what it was in 2014, just with a touch more populism around the edges. These people are living in a fantasy.
The second fallacy is that Trump would have been a passable president if not for “the tweets.” But Trump would not have been elected without them. “His people”—the ones at the boat parades and anti-mask rallies, the people shutting down the Garden State Parkway and shooting paintballs at protesters in Portland—voted for him and remain loyal to him even now because of the tweets.
If they cared about populism, or crushing Goldman Sachs, or building The Wall, these people would have been up in arms. But what they really cared about was that Trump was willing to stand up for the Very Fine People who marched in Charlottesville and tell the uppity congresswomen to go back to where they came from.
The final fallacy is that Donald Trump is a Republican. He is not.
He is, in a very powerful way, the owner of the Republican Party. Previous heads of our major political parties have been stewards of the institution. They had beliefs aligned with the ideological composition of the party, and they sought power in order to turn those beliefs into policy. When their time on the stage was done, they exited so that the next leader could shepherd the party. They might exert some lingering influence through donors or alumni, but they saw their work as completed, and they moved on.
Trump, on the other hand, has no ties to the Republican Party. He mounted a hostile takeover of the GOP because he alone understood what Republican voters wanted. They wanted the spirit that had animated his birtherism gambit: a politics devoted not to policies and ideologies, but to grievances and combativeness.
One of Trump’s insights was that these voters had become fully postmodern in that they no longer wanted outcomes. They wanted feelings. And when Trump offered them the pure, uncut catharsis they craved, they offered him their loyalty, and ensured that the party would remain his, no matter what.
The people waiting in the wings to try to take Trump’s place—Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, or even the hapless Ted Cruz—believe that they can succeed by offering populist policies without Trump’s cruelty and contempt for the rest of America. They think that if they can only convince Republican voters that they really will take on Big Tech, then the party faithful will rally to their banner. True Trumpism has never been tried!
Four years from now, these pikers will discover the truth: that the cruelty and contempt are not just the essential ingredients of Trumpism but exactly what Republican voters hunger for. They don’t want deregulation, or a lower marginal tax rate, or even The Wall. What they want is the liberation to talk freely about the people they hate.
Four years from now, another group of eager senators and governors will get crushed while seeking the Republican presidential nomination. Maybe they will lose to Donald Trump himself. Maybe to Don Jr. Perhaps to a glib cable TV host.
Maybe then they’ll understand that there is no going back.
Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But then, they’ve wanted to turn the page on him since he announced his campaign in 2015. They do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want. ###
[Jonathan V. Last is editor of The Bulwark — a news network launched in 2018 dedicated to providing political analysis and reporting free from the constraints of partisan loyalties or tribal prejudices. Previously, he was a senior writer and later digital editor at The Weekly Standard. Last is the author of What to Expect When No One's Expecting (2013). He received a BA (molecular biology) from the Johns Hopkins University (MD).]
In keeping with the football theme in today's essay, the blogger is reminded by an aphorism saying from a former NFL football great, Eugene ("Big Daddy") Lipscomb, who defined personal responsiblity as "If you want to dance, you have to pay the fiddler." And college football players and fans are "paying the fiddler" with their lives. If this is a (fair & balanced) accounting of the price of irresponsible behavior in a plague year, so be it. And, as long as the post-election nightmare continues...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The New Yorker]
Is College Football Making The Pandemic Worse?
By Lousia Thomas
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
For four quarters, at least, Graham Mertz, the quarterback for the University of Wisconsin, lived as if dreaming. A lanky red-shirt freshman, Mertz took the field for his first start as a Badger, in the Big Ten Conference’s season opener, on Friday, October 23rd, against the University of Illinois, and completed his first pass attempt, a gain of three yards. His second attempt gained twelve. His third, a pretty touch pass, went for a touchdown. Mertz completed his fourth attempt, his fifth, his sixth. He followed a conservative strategy, mostly screens and short passes, but grew more daring. He rolled out on a play fake and threw a touchdown off his back foot. He whipped another over the middle, a precise dart into the end zone. With less than a minute to go in the first half, he launched a fifty-three-yard touchdown pass to a streaking wide receiver. By then, he was fourteen for fourteen, with four touchdowns—he threw the ball seventeen times before he missed a target, and only then because the ball was dropped. (Graciously, he blamed himself.) He finished the game twenty for twenty-one, with five touchdowns. Patrick Mahomes, the best quarterback in the world, tweeted his amazement. J. J. Watt, the three-time NFL defensive player of the year, posted a video of a man using a flamethrower, in tribute. Wisconsin won, 45–7.
In a normal season, the freshman quarterback would have looked up to see eighty thousand people cheering for him, chanting and singing and calling his name. But this was not a normal season. The cold metal bleachers were bare, and the cheers that followed each of his touchdowns were fake. When the song “Jump Around” played before the fourth quarter, the small cluster of cardboard cutouts that had been installed in the stands did not jump. When it’s empty, Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium has about as much charm as an old airport concourse. But a touchdown is still a touchdown, even if no crowd makes a sound. “He was smiling cheek to cheek after the first touchdown,” the tight end Jake Ferguson said of Mertz afterward. “He knew, and everyone in that huddle knew, that we were rolling.”
Two days later, Mertz tested positive for the Coronavirus. Then it was reported that Wisconsin’s backup quarterback had tested positive as well. By midweek, the number of positive tests within the football program was up to twelve, and included the head coach—and the team’s next game, against the University of Nebraska, was cancelled. A week later, the number of cases on the team was up to twenty-seven. Two players for Illinois also tested positive, although it was unclear if they were infected during the game or somewhere else entirely. Wisconsin’s next game, against Purdue, was called off.
Purdue vs. Wisconsin was one of ten top-tier college-football games that was postponed or cancelled that weekend. The Badgers returned to the field a week later, on November 14th, routing Michigan, but fifteen other games were not played as originally scheduled that weekend, including four of seven games that were to have featured teams from the powerhouse Southeastern Conference (SEC). So far, more than eighty games have been cancelled, and several conferences are only a few weeks into their schedules. But the season has rolled on, even as Coronavirus cases have skyrocketed across the country. If we could say definitively, in precise and dramatic detail, that the former was connected to the latter, then presumably universities would face public pressure to stop the games. But this is probably the wrong way to think about life during a pandemic. And the approach that we have taken to college football likely reflects our broader failure to grasp what it takes to shut down the virus.
Back in August, the Big Ten announced that it was postponing its football season until the spring. Players had begun returning for workouts in June, and team after team around the country had suffered outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2. There were reports of athletes suffering serious long-term effects—an anguished Facebook post written by the mother of one player, which described her son’s struggle with Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can follow a viral infection, shook many within the sport.
The Big Ten is the oldest conference in the country and includes some of the largest and most respected universities in the world. The decision to call off the season was hugely costly—the conference was in the middle of a multi-billion-dollar television deal—and hugely unpopular. But the concerns prompting it were grave, and many people expected the rest of the so-called Power Five conferences to follow suit, as the Pac-12 (Pacific-12 Conference) did, just hours later. The season appeared to be on the brink of cancellation.
It turned out that there is no more unity in college football than there is in the rest of the country. Not all medical experts agreed about the riskiness of playing. Some parents of players protested the Big Ten’s decision. Players sued. Commentators railed about the decision on sports radio. A player labor movement merged with, and then morphed into, a movement to play the season. The President of the United States mocked the conference on Twitter. The rest of the Power Five—the Big 12, the Atlantic Coast Conference, and the SEC, which, collectively, are home to fourteen of the last fifteen national champions—were not inclined to defer to the Big Ten, and announced that they were going ahead with games. Football brings in more than a hundred million dollars in revenue to top schools, and, although the financial impact for smaller programs is less clear, athletic departments generally depend on money from football. Programs had not stashed away revenue for a rainy day or a pandemic. They had spent it—on other sports, expensive coaches, and lavish facilities.
The season began without the Big Ten. Some players got sick, others tested positive without showing symptoms, and still others were held out while contact tracing was being conducted. Several big games were cancelled, but enough were played to make it appear that something like a full season would eventually be completed. A couple of weeks after the nation’s first game had been played, the commissioner of the Big Ten, Kevin Warren, announced that the conference’s member schools had taken another vote: the Big Ten would resume playing football at the end of October. The Pac-12 soon released a similar statement, as did smaller conferences that had also put off playing. All but a handful of teams across the country would participate in the season.
Big Ten university presidents said that the reversal was prompted by new medical advice. The conference had enlisted a private company to provide daily rapid tests to all teams; experts had provided stringent health and safety guidelines. There was evidence that heart complications might be rarer in athletes than had been feared—and doctors and researchers had developed a screening protocol for detecting Myocarditis.
There was truth to all of this, but it was not the whole story. While some medical experts believed that you could find a safe-enough way to play, most epidemiologists and public-health professors I spoke to were not in favor of it. What had really changed between August and September was that college football had come back without the Big Ten, outbreaks had happened, and there had been little outcry. By the time that the Big Ten resumed play, in late October, Notre Dame, Florida, Cincinnati, and several other ranked teams had all had Coronavirus clusters. The LSU head coach, Ed Orgeron, casually mentioned that “most” of his players had contracted it during the summer. (He seemed to frame this as a plus, because the team presumably wouldn’t need to worry as much about the virus as the season went on; two months later, the team’s game against Alabama was postponed after more members of the program tested positive.) Jamain Stephens, a defensive tackle at a Division II school outside of Pittsburgh, died of complications from COVID-19. But football fans kept tuning in. Teams are not generally forthcoming about infections, both out of concern for the privacy of their players, and, at least according to the University of Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley, because it gives them a competitive advantage. Only rarely did stories of players struggling with the illness, or even being hospitalized, appear in the press. COVID cases and mandatory quarantines were described by coaches and analysts as an annoyance or a misfortune roughly on par with a sprained ankle. Television contracts were being honored. Money flowed to schools and to coaches, if not to players. The playoffs were on the horizon. Fans went to bars. Families and friends gathered for game day. The lower stands of stadiums at many schools were filled with people. You could turn on the television every weekend and see some semblance of normalcy.
The introduction of daily rapid testing had seemed like a real advance—and it was loudly touted by the Big Ten. The argument was that widespread, frequent use of tests with quick turnaround times could allow for a return to more or less normal activity, even if those tests were not as accurate as those that take longer to produce results. The tests wouldn’t stop people from catching the virus, but, theoretically, they could identify infected people before they’d interacted much with others. (The Pac-12 is also using daily rapid testing. Players in other Power Five conferences are tested less often, typically using the more accurate PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests, while teams in less prestigious conferences have differing—and sometimes less stringent—testing regimes.) The results of the approach would potentially have ramifications far beyond football. “This is one of the first really high-quality, real-world tests of that concept,” Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin, told me.
It didn’t quite work. For the first month, testing went smoothly, but Wisconsin’s outbreak occurred anyway—and other programs conducting daily antigen testing had outbreaks, too. At the University of Maryland, twenty-three players tested positive in a two-week span; several Pac-12 teams had to cancel games because they did not have the minimum number of scholarship players available.
When I spoke to O’Connor, in early November, his lab—in collaboration with county and state public-health officials and the CDC—was trying to figure out how the disease had spread within the Badgers football program. The lab was looking for genetic signatures in the team’s positive samples, and was using what O’Connor’s colleague, Thomas Friedrich, called shoe-leather epidemiology to find clues about where the virus had originated. Had there been lapses in social-distancing protocols? Would a more sensitive test have made a difference? Could the outbreak be traced to one source, or was there more than one simultaneous infection? Did the efficacy of daily rapid testing depend on lower rates of community transmission?
O’Connor told me that he’d been partial to the view that, with “really fast turnaround testing, even with lower sensitivity tests, you could enable a safer reopening of schools, a safer reopening of the economy.” And yet, he said, “You can still have an outbreak.” The rash of positive tests on the football team had reminded O’Connor and Friedrich of the need both for data and for humility. When I asked them, over Zoom, if the investigation had changed their views on whether it was advisable to play football this year, Friedrich gave me a wry smile. “My personal view is that it wasn’t advisable in the first place,” he said.
“I started a little more optimistic than Tom on the ability of testing to make it safe,” O’Connor said. “I didn’t think it was advisable, but for another reason. We are in a state where there’s an entire culture around football.” Friedrich chimed in to agree. That culture is intensely social. The bigger problem, as they saw it, wasn’t whether the protocols could protect the players. It was that those protocols wouldn’t protect the rest of us.
This past summer, a group of researchers at Washington State University started thinking about what a football season might mean for the city of Pullman, where the university is based. At that point, Washington State, which plays in the Pac-12, planned to begin its season in September; the question was whether fans would be allowed to attend the games. The perils were obvious: every public-health expert was advising against large gatherings. But what was the precise level of risk? Washington State’s athletic department was running an operating deficit of nearly a hundred million dollars, and around half of its usual revenue came from football, including ticket sales—but the considerations weren’t only financial. Although Washington State has one of the smallest stadiums in big-time college football, its fan base is passionate. Game days are big days in Pullman.
The researchers used mathematical modelling to simulate how visitors coming to a campus community very much like Washington State’s to attend a football game would affect the levels of the virus in the community. The scope of their inquiry was relatively narrow: they did not have anything to say, for instance, about whether a visitor might become infected and bring the virus back to her own community—a risk that “could lead to multiple outbreaks around the country,” as Jill Weatherhead, a professor of infectious diseases at the Baylor College of Medicine, told me. The Washington State paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but what the researchers found was sobering. In simulations in which a small number of visitors with COVID-19 mixed lightly with a campus community experiencing an uncontrolled outbreak, cases rose in the community by twenty-five per cent. When visitors with a high prevalence of the Coronavirus mixed heavily with a campus community where the virus was previously under control, the local increase was more than eight hundred per cent.
The Pac-12 and the Big Ten ultimately decided not to let fans—with the exception of players’ families—into stadiums at all. But the rest of the Power Five, along with several smaller conferences, did. On those campuses, and in those college towns, we don’t yet know whether things played out the way the researchers’ model projected—for one thing, most of the schools are admitting fewer fans than the model estimated. And we may never precisely learn the results of these gambles. Two weeks before the SEC football season began, Oxford, Mississippi, where Ole Miss is situated, had the highest daily infection rate—eighty-five per one hundred thousand people—of any college town whose school was playing football. (Health officials generally recommend the suspension of nonessential activities at anything above twenty-five.) When the team kicked off the season, nearly fifteen thousand fans were in the stands; more than two and a half million people watched on television, many of them doubtless gathering to watch at bars or inside homes. Katie Taylor, an epidemiologist with Mississippi’s department of health, told me, in an e-mail, that the department had not “at this time directly tied cases to outbreaks or clusters associated with football-related activities.” She added, “However, we know that many of these settings, especially gatherings for football watching, can lead to transmission.” The University of Alabama saw a massive surge in cases when students returned to campus. The number of cases had dropped by the time the football season began, and it has not risen precipitously since. But cases in Alabama as a whole have been rising steadily all fall. Karen Landers, an officer in Alabama’s public-health department, told me, “Attendance at sporting events and also attendance at parties relating to sporting events has contributed to outbreaks.” Department policy prevented her from providing specifics, she said.
The Texas Department of State Health Services maintains a database of investigations conducted by local health departments. The database is not comprehensive, but, for what it’s worth, earlier this month, it included only eighteen cases indicating in-person college-football attendance. Eric Lofgren, one of the Washington State researchers, told me that, as far as predicting outbreaks goes, “I would really like to be wrong.” It’s possible that students and visitors don’t mix in the way the researchers’ model assumes. It’s also possible, Lofgren noted, that people going to games are taking the virus more seriously than they sometimes get credit for. It may help that people at football games are captive audiences for public-health messages about mask-wearing and other precautions. The games are played in large, outdoor stadiums where fans have been required to wear masks: these factors, too, may have reduced the risk of widespread transmission. And with such uncontrolled community transmission across the country, it’s hard to say where infections are occuring.
Some football programs are using in-person attendance as an opportunity to identify positive cases. The University of Texas at Austin requires proof of a negative test in order for students to pick up their tickets; of the twelve hundred students tested before the first game of the season, ninety-six tested positive, and the seventy-five who had not previously had the virus were then isolated. “It was an incentive for folks to come and get tested, which is great,” Amy Young, the vice-dean of professional practice at the university’s medical school and the chief clinical officer for UT Health Austin, said.
And yet, viewed another way, that data simply illustrates what a risky experiment schools are undertaking. At most of these schools, no test is required before a fan may enter the stadium—and even at the University of Texas, only twelve hundred out of the fifteen thousand people who attended were tested. That nearly a hundred people tested positive out of this small sample suggests that, across the state, thousands of people infected with the Coronavirus are going to games, where they shout, use bathrooms, and grab beers from concession stands. The city of Lubbock, where Texas Tech is situated, has permitted some tailgating. A month into the season, Lubbock had one of the highest Coronavirus-infection rates in the country.
Darlene Bhavnani, the head of the University of Texas’s contact-tracing program, told me, “Looking at the data we’ve collected, there doesn’t seem to be transmission at the game, at the stadium.” But contact tracing is an imperfect art, and, as a general rule, it is more focussed on preventing further spread than on determining the specific activity that led to an infection. The point is “primarily to establish an infectious period and then to identify contacts,” Sam Jarvis, a Community Health Manager at Johnson County Public Health, in Iowa, wrote in an e-mail.
What’s more, as Lofgren pointed out to me, “The majority of people’s engagement with sports is not actually in the stands.” The Washington State study includes transmission from any event surrounding a game, such as an out-of-town visitor catching the virus while going out to dinner near campus the night before. “Does the contact tracer identify that as because of football?” Lofgren asked. “I don’t know. I think there’s ambiguity.” In places like Iowa City, where the University of Iowa is situated, they probably wouldn’t, Jarvis told me. “We don’t have the capacity to pinpoint single events like that,” he said. “It’s frustrating, for sure, because we know it’s happening, but it’s difficult to pinpoint like that with all the noise.” Tracing has only become harder as the pandemic has entered its third wave. “With overwhelming spread, public-health resources are going to have a much harder time tracing back where infection happened,” Jill Weatherhead told me.
And there may be another reason that no college football game has been confirmed as a superspreader event: luck. The Washington State model is stochastic—it involves randomness. “There are many examples in the data where you don’t have anything bad happen,” Lofgren explained. That doesn’t mean that holding mass gatherings is a good idea, just that it’s possible schools have taken chances but have not been burned—yet. In that case, the more transmission there is within communities, and the more games that are played, the more likely our luck, such as it may be, will end.
During a normal year, in the lead-up to a Michigan State home game, Aaron Stephens, the mayor of East Lansing, would be worrying about traffic. This year, he was focussed on a public-messaging blitz: don’t go to the stadium; don’t tailgate in the parking lot; do wear a mask. Indoor gatherings in East Lansing were capped at ten people, and outdoor gatherings were limited to twenty-five. Violators could face fines of up to five hundred dollars, but Stephens tried to emphasize the carrot rather than the stick: “If we want to have football, we have to adhere to these rules.”
Stephens, who became the mayor this summer, is twenty-four years old, and a recent graduate of Michigan State. “I understand the reality of being in college,” he said. He was at game-day parties himself not so long ago. This year, during the season-opener, people crammed inside apartments off campus, with the game on television in the background and the kegs tapped. “I saw a couple of parties that were probably above a hundred people,” Stephens told me later that week. There was only so much the city could do. “By the time we get there and break up the event, the spread has already happened,” he noted. We spoke the day before Halloween, when Michigan State was set to play its rival, the University of Michigan. Stephens was dreading it, expecting mayhem if the Spartans won. “In a weird way, it got me rooting against my own team,” he said. Michigan State beat Michigan, 27–24, and fans flooded the streets. Some wore masks. Many did not. They headed toward the apartment complexes in Cedar Village, where they partook in a time-honored tradition of setting couches on fire.
I asked Linda Vail, the head of the health department for Ingham County, which includes East Lansing, if there was evidence that the game had contributed to the spread of the virus in the area. She told me that, in the two weeks after the game, there was a significant increase in cases. “That said, we’re seeing a significant increase across our community, too,” she said. “So, yes. But who knows.”
The cities where Big Ten universities are situated form a kind of consortium. In early October, Stephens’s office started contacting the other mayors, and a Zoom call was arranged. Stephens proposed writing a letter to the Big Ten executives, requesting that, when they decided whether or not to hold games, they take into account the prevalence of the virus not only among players and coaches but within the local community. The mayors had other suggestions, too, such as scheduling games earlier in the day—night games are often preceded by hours of drinking, which can lead to more reckless behavior. The final version of the letter was signed by eleven of the fourteen Big Ten mayors. It was carefully worded—almost painfully so. The mayors “humbly” requested that the Big Ten determine “defined metrics for overall community population positivity rates and test positivity” when deciding whether to play. Every mayor I spoke to emphasized the strong relationship that he or she had with the local university. Some said that they were glad to have football back. All of them were in an impossible position.
Football helped put East Lansing, a city with a population under fifty thousand, on the map. Ohio State has a phenomenal veterinary program, but that is not what brings most visitors to Columbus. The economic impact that football has on these local economies is tremendous, and so is its effect on the morale of many people who live there. The mayors understand this. Still, they had watched the virus spread on campuses, and they knew that the social buffer between students and locals, which had helped contain the virus during earlier outbreaks, was likely to break down when football arrived. Several of them described what took place after games like scenes out of a covid-19 nightmare: students pouring into downtown, spewing the virus with drunken screams.
Such behavior isn’t wise, but it is predictable. Fans, especially young fans, play their roles as well as any defensive line. It is possible that the enduring image of the 2020 season will be the strange and stupid sight of hundreds of Notre Dame students flooding the field after their team upset No. 1 Clemson. (It was a somewhat fluky result: Clemson’s star quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, missed the game because he had contracted the Cronavirus.) Afterward, the university’s president, who had contracted the virus after attending a gathering at the White House for Justice Amy Coney Barrett without wearing a mask, admonished the students, in a letter, for their poor decision-making. The letter did not offer any reflection on the institutional decisions that had led to the students being in the stadium in the first place.
After the mayors sent their letter, Jim Borchers, Ohio State’s team physician and the chair of the Big Ten’s return-to-play medical subcommittee, told the Wall Street Journal that the university did monitor “other metrics from the university, local communities and states where the teams are participating.” He added, “I don’t know that the student athletes should be punished for the inability of the general public to get their minds around how to prevent this.” Many of the arguments in favor of having college-football games come down to the idea that players deserve to chase their dreams. Football always involves some risk, and every decision we make during a pandemic involves trade-offs and risk assessments. But those who criticize the schools can make a similar argument. College athletes are not more deserving of their dreams than those who have postponed weddings, or attempted remote learning for their kids, or held virtual funerals rather than gathering in person.
“Every step we take back toward normality has a risk and a benefit associated with it,” Zach Binney, a professor at Emory with a degree in epidemiology, told me. “Establish the level of risk that you’re OK with. And that’s going to vary based on the benefits. This is not some crazy theory. We never closed grocery stores. Why not? Because the benefit of having them open was too high.” Other activities, though, lead inevitably to arguments. How much risk is acceptable when marching for social justice? Or celebrating a political victory? With college football, the calculation is even more complicated, because much of the risk is connected with associated behaviors—those watch parties, for instance—that don’t have to happen but should probably be expected. The sport provides a welcome, and some would even say necessary, distraction, at a moment social ties are under strain. But at what cost? “If you have to ask the question, should people be able to party during Badgers games or have first graders in school, you should choose first graders in school,” O’Connor, the University of Wisconsin epidemiologist, said.
Part of the issue, perhaps, is that the focus on the safety of players and on fans in stadiums has obscured the risks of game-day rituals and the ripple effects whenever infections spread. “All those other activities,” O’Connor said, “conspire to make it more difficult to bring the virus under control.”
If there is a single underlying fallacy that has led to the persistence of college football during the worst pandemic the country has seen in a century, it is the idea that football is a discrete activity that can be considered separately from all the other things that we do. College athletes are young and generally healthy; even if they contract the Coronavirus, they are unlikely to face its severest consequences. When the Wisconsin Badgers resumed the season after a few weeks of cancellations, Graham Mertz was back on the field and threw two touchdowns. (He threw three interceptions in a loss a week later.) For the most part, the students who were cheering him on at home or at watch parties probably do not belong to the most vulnerable population when it comes to the virus, either. But many other college football fans are older. Some have underlying health conditions. And those with asymptomatic cases can and do spread the virus to others. The people they spread it to can then spread it further.
The real danger that college football poses during the pandemic may not be in the mass gatherings and dramatic outpourings of enthusiasm but in the ordinary and suddenly unsafe behaviors of small groups of people trying to find, in football, the refuge of their remembered lives. Millions watch the games every weekend, and many are watching in groups that include people from outside their household. Public-health officials have made numerous statements warning of the dangers of viral spread when people gather to watch football, but it’s hard to get such messages across when events are being held as if little has changed. Kathleen Bachynski, a professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, asked me, rhetorically, “If football is proceeding, what does that signal to people about where we’re at with our pandemic response?”
Football, particularly college football, is an occasion, a communal event. The ecosystem around the sport is vast. It starts with the players, but it extends to their classmates and to their coaches. It branches out to athletic trainers and their partners and kids. It extends to journalists, and camera operators, and photographers, and stadium workers, and bus drivers, and their families. It includes alumni scattered all over the world, and their children, and other children in other places who root for the teams with the uniforms they like. It brings together grandfathers and granddaughters, and aunts and cousins, and their spouses, and their friends. This is the majesty of college football: it connects people in a great web of affection. These are the filaments along which the virus can spread. ###
[Louisa Thomas is a contributor to The New Yorker and a former editor and writer at Grantland. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and The Paris Review. Thomas has written two books: Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams (2016) and Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—a Test of Will and Faith in World War I (2011), She is a former fellow at New America. Though much of Thomas's writing is on the subject of sports, it is influenced by her studies of poetry; she cites Wallace Stevens as a major influence. Thomas received a BA (English) from Harvard University (MA).]
The New Yorker's Andrew (Andy) Borowitz rings in Thanksgiving 2020 with a fresh perspective on what this blog describes as the "Worst President Ever." If this is (fair & balanced) political assessment, so be it. And, as long as the post-election nightmare continues...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The New Yorker]
Trump Blasts Biden Cabinet’s Lack Of Reality-Show Experience
By Andrew (Andy) Borowitz
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
In a series of blistering tweets, Donald J. Trump ripped President-elect Joe Biden for choosing Cabinet members woefully lacking in reality-show experience.
Calling the Cabinet picks a “bunch of losers who have spent their lives working at desks,” Trump questioned the team’s preparedness to take on the challenges presented by today’s complex reality-show landscape.
“These people have never earned an immunity idol, presided over a rose ceremony, or danced with a star,” Trump said. “This is the best Sleepy Joe could do?”
He saved his most withering criticism for Janet Yellen, Biden’s pick for Treasury Secretary. “If Joe really wanted a woman for this position, why didn’t he choose one of the "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills?” Trump asked. “They know a lot more about money than this clown.”
Leaving aside Biden’s failure to pack his Cabinet with experienced reality-show participants, Trump was baffled by his successor’s decision to bypass other highly talented candidates. “Ivanka, Jared, Eric, and Don Jr., are all looking for jobs,” he said. ###
[Andrew (Andy) Borowitz is the creator the Borowitz Report, a Web site that is a lot funnier than the stuff posted by Matt Drudge and his ilk. Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker. He is the first winner of the National Press Club's humor award and has won seven Dot-Comedy Awards for his web site. His most recent book (and Amazon's Best Kindle Single of the Year) is An Unexpected Twist (2012). See his other books here. Borowitz received a BA, magna cum laude (English) from Harvard University (MA).]
There is a singular talent that The *ILK/WPE has brought to the Oval Office. In the days before the 2016 election, The *ILK/WPE was light-years ahead of his political rivals in the mastery (with typos that morphed into malapropisms) of Twitter with its Tweets. There are more that 80 million people who "follow" (subscribe to @realDonaldTrump) to receive his questionable Tweets daily on their smartphones. Recently, the @realDonaldTrump account has been suspended until tweets that are outright lies are removed by the "Tweeter." Today, the NY Fishwrap's Internet-savvy Kara Swisher predicts that the Tweeter in the Oval Office will disappear from the daily news feed of Mainstream Media after 1/20/2021. The Iron Law of Twitter is that irrelevant tweets are routinely ignored as followers will unsubscribe from @realDonaldTrump once he is out of the White House. If this is a (fair & balanced) illustration that "yesterday's news" is no longer "news," so be it.
And, as long as the post-election nightmare continues...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
The End Of Trump’s Reign of Tweet Terror Is Near
By Kara Swisher
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
It’s going to disappear. One day, like a miracle, it will disappear.
Not COVID-19, despite some promising news of late on vaccine development. I am talking about Donald Trump on Twitter.
It was President Trump, of course, who made that specious claim in February about the Pandemic, declaring it will go away — just like that. It was one of so many lies he has told, culminating this week in a flurry of ALL-CAPS tweet lunacy about the election results.
In a late-night frenzy on Sunday, he typed, along with other lies, “I WON THE ELECTION.” It was quickly labeled by Twitter — as have many of Mr. Trump’s digital expressions of late — as inaccurate.
Watching Mr. Trump’s Twitter odyssey has been disturbing and unsettling. But I am here to tell you that the president’s tenure as troll in chief is at an ignominious end. Mr. Trump’s magic social media wand will soon be powerless.
However loathsome it has been to some, the president once had a genuine digital narrative. But he is badly misreading the room by lapsing into indignant rage.
There are many people who would say I’m wrong. They think that Mr. Trump’s reign of tweet terror will go on indefinitely, assuming that he will be able to rouse his base with a tap of his thumb for years to come.
It’s true that Mr. Trump has been perhaps Twitter’s most adept user ever. He has a preternatural ability to convey what he thinks without saying it directly through retweets of toxic memes, cruel nicknames and big-mouthed compliments of himself and his accomplishments.
For example, a classic Trump dog-whistle tweet from September: “Biden REFUSED to use the term, LAW & ORDER! There go the Suburbs.”
Most of his tweeting has been horrid, some of it funny, and it was always, in its own malevolent way, riveting.
But the mistake that Mr. Trump has stumbled into lately — in full force this week — has been to be direct. Instead of the obnoxious feints and ugly insinuations that have worked so well for him on Twitter, driving his detractors nuts, he has been abandoning the implicit for the explicit, thus making statements that are demonstrably untrue.
In the past, he could slip out of some of his tweets by pretending he was joking. Less so, now. When he tweets lies like “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN!”, as he did on Sunday, they are verifiably false.
He’s showing not only that the emperor has no clothes, but that he looks pretty bad naked.
The added problem for him is that many Twitter users, even some honest ones, are also labeled by Twitter with warning lines like “This claim about election fraud is disputed” and “Official sources called this election differently.”
For years, Mr. Trump has gotten a pass on his skein of lies and petty aggressions — but now his tweets are labeled over and over. Some consider the labels ineffectual, yet they are having a cumulative effect, revealing that his spewing has been a big bunch of nonsense.
The question remains whether the effect of labeling Mr. Trump’s tweets will filter down to his most vehement followers, who lap up whatever he is peddling with gusto.
One clue to what is coming for Mr. Trump is the sudden silence of QAnon. The landslide victory Mr. Trump had promised did not materialize, and QAnon’s vaunted claim that the Deep State was on the ropes now seems shaky.
“Q’s sudden disappearance has been jarring for QAnon believers, who have come to depend on the account’s posts, or ‘drops,’ for updates and reassurance,” wrote my Times colleague Kevin Roose. And what’s worse for the Trump believers, all things QAnon have been banned from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Which is why it is not a stretch to imagine Trump acolytes will get weary of the president’s antics when they are no longer as much fun. And they will tire of them, too, because everyone eventually tires of online acts. Mr. Trump resembles a hot app or viral video or popular video game or cool start-up that can suddenly go ice-cold.
So, too, will Mr. Trump disappear. Like those once-hot, then-not phenoms, he will continue to rage to an ever emptier room until his rants meld into the louder noise. And then, a beastly new rough voice, its hour come round at last, will slouch toward Washington to be born.
This is our new political reality. And it is scary that Mr. Trump has been trying to take democracy down with him as he attempts to sell his latest scheme. But it is also clear that he is much less able to weave a digital fantasy to ensnare his audience when the factual world is intruding more strongly.
Put more simply, for Mr. Trump, reality eventually bites and it bites hard. ###
[Kara Swisher is the host of “Sway,” the new twice-weekly interview podcast about power by New York Times Opinion. She has been a contributing Opinion writer since 2018. Over her career, Ms. Swisher has hosted hundreds of newsmaking interviews, going head-to-head with prominent figures including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, Stacey Abrams, Kim Kardashian and President Barack Obama. Her early and no-holds-barred coverage of the technology industry earned her a reputation as “Silicon Valley’s most feared and well-liked journalist.” Swisher began her career at the City Paper in Washington, DC and interned at The Washington Post, where she worked her way up to reporter and covered nascent digital companies like America Online (AOL). She moved to the San Francisco bureau of The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s as one of the first reporters on the internet beat and eventually began her popular “Boom Town” column. With her longtime collaborator Walt Mossberg, she was a co-producer of the technology conference “D: All Things Digital,” where they interviewed major tech figures including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The duo later founded Recode, which was sold to Vox in 2015. In addition to her contributions to The Times, Swisher is an editor-at-large at New York Media, host of the “Pivot” podcast and executive producer of the Code Conference. She is also the author of aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web (1998) and co-author (with Lisa Dickey) of the sequel, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere (2003). Swisher received a BS (culture and politics) from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (DC) and an MA (journalism) from Columbia University (NYC).]
