Day 25 of Nat'l Emergency: Living in Epoch Times

Perhaps your postman, as mine did, brought to your mailbox an unexpected publication—The Epoch Times. From its front page it was obvious the special edition of this 20-year-old newspaper was devoted to China bashing, specifically attacking the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its malevolent actions, particularly as they now relate to the spread of the pandemic COVID-19. 

A quick check of Wikipedia revealed the paper is printed in eight languages. It was founded by John Tang and a group of Chinese Americans “associated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement” that China has attacked. It is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and other far-right politicians. Indeed, Wikipedia says a 2019 report found that only the Trump campaign funded more pro-Trump Facebook advertising. The Epoch Media Group also is big into conspiracy theories, being among the disseminators of stories on QAnon and anti-vaccination propaganda. 

Well, we can’t expect every publication to be The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or The Washington Post. That said, I was intrigued by one particular representation that might be a more accurate count of the dead in China from the coronavirus, or what The Epoch Times calls the “CCP virus” (it prefers to tag the China Communist Party with the identification rather than place any stigma on the innocent people of China or Wuhan where the virus originated). 

Instead of the absurdly hard to believe statistic supplied by the CCP that only a little more than 3,000 deaths occurred in China from the virus, The Epoch Times says many more perished as seven cremation centers in Wuhan were operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, open air pits in some villages burned bodies and 40 mobile furnaces were shipped to Wuhan. Such descriptions are reminiscent of Nazi Holocaust measures. 

The Epoch Times says its sources suggest CCP virus deaths have exceeded one million. But then the paper teases the total could be catastrophically greater. As everyone in China by law must have a cell phone, records released by China’s three cellphone carriers reveal that over the last three months the number of cellphone users dropped by 21 million!

Now that I’ve possibly shocked the bejeezus out of you, some provisos: First, I have no way of validating or corroborating anything in The Epoch Times. Second, even the newspaper hedges its bet by stating that since China allows each person to have up to five cellphone accounts, many of the dropped users could be workers who were laid off and chose to disconnect one or more of their lines to save money. 

There’s a world of difference between 3,000 and 1,000,000 and 21,000,000. Based on our country’s  experience, the actual mortality in China probably is higher than the government figure. But then, even our government cannot supply a true figure as it has been reported that many deaths during the time of the pandemic, at home or in nursing homes, have not been attributed to coronavirus because authorities lacked the manpower or facility to autopsy them all to determine if the deceased were infected (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/coronavirus-deaths-undercount.html?referringSource=articleShare).

One of the more troubling aspects of the national spread of the plague has been some of the comments coming from our elected politicians. I won’t bore you with repeating Trump’s blindness to the pending disaster. He has the excuse, however flimsy it be, that his initial reluctance to believe in the intensity of the danger was because he wanted to give confidence to the public and it was still not clear how bad it would be. What’s more, he hailed his decision to close travel with China. Yet, according to The NY Times, 40,000 entered the U.S. from China in the two months after Trump imposed the ban, including thousands who flew directly from Wuhan (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/coronavirus-china-travel-restrictions.html?referringSource=articleShare). 

More troubling, perhaps, are the comments from governors and mayors late in commanding shelter-in-place directives for their jurisdictions. The mayor of New Orleans said Mardi Gras was allowed to go on unfettered because the city never received any warnings from the federal government. Georgia’s governor claimed he didn’t know until a few days ago the widely distributed news that people without symptoms could spread the pandemic. Florida’s governor waited until pressure from the Trump administration forced him to act. In each of those cases officials put the health of their area’s tourism economy ahead of the public’s health. Ain’t capitalism grand?

The U.S. Surgeon General has compared the pandemic to the attacks on Pearl Harbor and on September 11, but with higher casualties. He’s right, but probably not for the reasons he wants us to acknowledge. Pearl Harbor and September 11 were thought to be surprise attacks. But warnings were known before they occurred. Known and ignored, or at least downplayed. 

The same is true for the new coronavirus invasion. The Trump administration ignored advice on how to deal with a pandemic and how critical supplies needed to be stockpiled. It also at first refused to believe how vulnerable we were. 

Unlike Pearl Harbor and September 11 we do not have a physical enemy on which to launch a counterattack. Our “wartime” president has nobody to blame but himself and his cronies for how unprepared we have been for this deadly assault. 

Don't Let Steve Bannon Hide His Bigotry Behind Freedom of the Press

The mind works in mysterious ways. Or maybe not.

Last Thursday night I had an intense dream about the Diary of Anne Frank, the haunting story of a young Jewish girl, her family and friends who hid for years in an attic in Amsterdam from the Nazis who sought their annihilation and ultimately succeeded in the deaths of all but her father.

My dreams often are triggered by something I read or saw during the hours before sleep. I  can’t fall back to sleep until after I’ve written down my thoughts on my iPhone. I remember Thursday evening reading about the suggestion by one of president-elect Donald Trump’s clique that it would be all right to create a registry of Muslims who have entered the country, precedent for that coming from our history of interring Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Trump, himself, had called for a registry of Muslims during the campaign.

And I read how the Israeli ambassador to the United States declared Steve Bannon—a modern day Goebbels spewing racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, xenophobic venom through Breitbart News and just named chief strategist to the next president—kosher and acceptable to the Jewish state.

The moral ground once firmly beneath Israel cries out for solidity. Steve Bannon is no friend of Jews who should beware any person or group that advocates or condones discrimination. He is no friend of any of the ideals upon which Israel, or for that matter the United States, was founded. Sure, he has enjoyed freedom of the press, but he has used that cherished right to issue screeds of hate and division. He is an unworthy counselor for the next president and unworthy of the blessing of Israel.

As Trump’s cabinet and advisors coalesce with loyalists Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general and retired general Mike Flynn as national security advisor the latest to be tapped, it is intriguing to observe candidates who might be welcomed into the Trump orbit. Fascinating not so much because they would offer counterpoint to Trump’s public positions but rather because of what Trump and they said about each other during the primary campaign. 

But let’s be generous and realistic. Trump should not be held to a higher standard than, say, Barack Obama who chose rival Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state after each disparaged the other in 2008. As in love and war, all is fair in politics.

Under the guise of freedom of the press people are excusing Bannon, as well as Facebook and Twitter, for publishing racially offensive, sexist, misogynist, anti-Semitic screeds.

As a journalist all my adult life, from college newspaper through newspaper reporter and bureau chief, through business magazine editor and publisher to now a blogger, I deeply believe in the values of a free and unencumbered press.

But one should not be able to hide behind press freedom when it comes to the dissemination of intolerance and untruths. As an editor and publisher I read everything to be printed in my magazine. If I didn’t agree with the writer it was my job to change the article or kill it. Nothing, nothing would get printed if it didn’t agree with my viewpoint.

Bannon cannot claim articles or headlines in Breitbart News did not reflect his opinions. He was under no obligation to print bigotry or misinformation.

Breitbart News, like Facebook and Twitter, are not public trusts. They are private enterprises and can choose to print or reject any copy that its editor and publisher find objectionable. This is not censorship. It is the proper exercise of an editor or publisher’s red pencil. 

By his acquiescence, and perhaps even encouragement, Bannon has demonstrated he is not qualified to sit in an office two doors down from the Oval Office.

While in Germany last week President Obama called the spread of fake news a threat to democracy. We have elected as our next president a man who boasts he gets much of his news from the Internet, a domain that we somehow have allowed to be poisoned with falsehoods that, sadly, too many of our citizens lack the education and intelligence to know are untruths. 

Like many I am struggling to understand how the electorate chose a candidate who deliberately lied (more often than his foe) and who did not provide details of his plans for America. It was, many pundits now say, a protest vote against Washington.

The “Not My President” crowd, those who argue that Hillary Clinton should be the next commander-in-chief because she won the popular vote, are challenged by Trump’s claim that he would have garnered more votes if the campaigns were run as national popularity contests and not as a race to 270 Electoral College votes. 

Is he right? Impossible to tell, but there is evidence to support his claim. In the 14 battleground states where the candidates vigorously competed, Trump won 10 states; his total count exceeded Clinton’s by more than a million votes.

Brady and Hillary Share Deleted E-Message Legacies

Tom Brady is the Hillary Clinton of the National Football League. Hillary Clinton is the Tom Brady of politics.

Regardless of what you think about them, both have stellar resumes. Millions adore them. Yet both have sizable portions of the population that abhor and despise them. Their detractors won’t believe a word they say. And they now share legacies of deep-sixing sought-after electronic messages that could implicate them, or vindicate them, in scandal. 

Politics in the United States has been steeped in conspiracy theories, probably going back at least to Aaron Burr and the unsuccessful attempt to convict the former vice president of the United States of treason in the early 1800s. There indeed was a conspiracy, a partially successful conspiracy, to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln and members of his cabinet. Never proven were innuendos that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew in advance about Japan’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor but let it proceed as a pretext to enter World War II against Japan and Germany. Nor were conspiracy theories proven for the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Richard Nixon’s Watergate conspiracy engendered numerous other “-gate” investigations, two of which involved two more Republican presidents—Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair and George W. Bush’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq hoax. Lots of investigations into Bill Clinton’s presidency produced no tangible conspiracy. Hillary’s actions before, during and after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi remain an open festering wound Republicans continue to investigate as a means to derail her presidential bid.

So what do I think about Hillary and Brady? Nothing so far has swayed my belief she is the best announced Democratic candidate. Yes, she showed hasty judgment in deleting all of her emails. But aside from fostering more conspiracy theories, many of which have been dispelled by Republican-led Congressional inquiries, Hillary’s main challenge is weathering the years-long assault on her character the GOP has waged. Such is the life of a frontrunner.  

With four Super Bowl rings, Brady, as well, is a leader. His image is now tarnished. But I will say that tinkering with equipment, as Brady is alleged to have done in Deflategate, is not unusual in almost all sports. Jerry Rice, considered the best receiver in football history, admitted to putting stickum on his gloves to aid in catching passes. Hockey goalies have been known to dress in leg pads wider than permitted, while their teammates try to bend the rules by curving their stick blades beyond the legal limit. Returning to football, linemen swab their uniforms with Vaseline so their opponents can’t grab them easily. Vaseline also was a favored tool of baseball pitchers hoping to influence the flight of a ball, while batters corked their bats to hit it further. 

Did Brady have his minions on the New England Patriots take the air out of balls used in the team’s 45-7 victory in the AFC Championship game? Who knows? What we do know is that in the second half, in driving rain, after the referees inserted properly inflated balls, Brady scorched the Indianapolis Colts with 28 points compared to scoring 17 points in the first half using under-inflated balls. 

Perhaps a better question to ask is why Brady would think he needed the supposed advantage of under-inflated balls. Probably for the same reason Nixon had the Democratic Party offices bugged in the Watergate Apartments. Because they could and they thought they could get away with it. And no matter how sure you think victory is, they think it’s never wrong to take steps to make sure of that victory. Until, that is, you’re caught. When that happens, it’s wise to remember, it’s not the crime but the coverup that trips you up. 

Remembering Pearl Harbor Day

Most of us can recall September 11, 2001. But where were you December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting U.S. entry into World War II?

Okay. You probably weren’t alive 70 years ago, and those who were likely were too young to remember anything meaningful about the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “will live in infamy.” But as I pondered how to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day yesterday, I realized my regular Wednesday chore of delivering Meals on Wheels in Yonkers would bring me face to face with women who were in the prime of their lives when our nation’s security and relative tranquility ended one Sunday seven decades ago. There wasn’t time for long interviews, just a few questions about how they experienced the war years.

With her marriage scheduled exactly one week later at a synagogue in the Bronx where she lived at the time, Sally picked up her wedding gown December 7. Her marriage to Sol went on without a hitch, but within six months her husband entered the army. She was 20 years old. Like many brides of servicemen of that era, Sally followed her husband around the country as he underwent basic training, first in Hattiesburg, MS, then in Baltimore. After Sol shipped overseas to fight in Italy, Sally moved back in with her parents. She worked as a clerical assistant to an army lieutenant at 55 Beaver Street in Manhattan. Her husband returned safely after the war, as did her two younger brothers who served in the Pacific theater.

Another 20-year-old, Shirley, lived in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, with her widowed mother and 10-year-old brother. Shortly after the war began, her mother developed viral pneumonia. Her doctor recommended an extended stay in Florida, so the family trained down, no small feat in those days when travel was largely restricted to moving military personnel. They stayed in Miami Beach for six months. After returning to Brooklyn, Shirley’s friend got her a job as a clerical assistant in a costume jewelry company. A short while later she was promoted to showroom saleswoman dealing with resident buyers for stores throughout the country.

The youngster of the trio I interviewed, Gertrude was 19 when she listened to the radio reports of the Pearl Harbor bombings. A high school graduate who eventually became a full charge bookkeeper, she hadn’t been able to secure a job before the war, but shortly thereafter obtained one at the Wright Aeronautical plant in Woodridge, NJ. Each morning another worker would pick her up at her home in Inwood in upper Manhattan. They’d drive across the George Washington Bridge to work. Because of her mathematical bent she was chosen to be a precision inspector for assembled impeller shafts, a critical part of the engine of B-29 Superfortress bombers.

After several B-29s crashed, the cause was determined to be faulty impeller shafts. Assembly of the plane engines halted until re-inspection of all impeller shafts could be conducted. As each impeller shaft bore the mark of the inspector who processed it, it was not difficult to pinpoint who had approved faulty production. Over the loudspeaker of the plant, Gertrude was summoned to the manager’s office high above the assembly plant. While she climbed the steps to his office, co-workers whispered she was the guilty inspector. Not a comfortable moment for a young woman not yet 20. Gertrude was told that of all the impeller shafts re-inspected, hers alone were perfect. Henceforth, only she would inspect impeller shafts. The other precision inspectors would be reassigned. She would work six days a week. When she wasn’t there, production would stop.

It was that way for about 18 months, until the Japanese surrendered. That day, Gertrude recalled, Wright Aeronautical announced that the 17,000 employees who had worked three shifts at the Woodridge plant need not come back anymore. Their jobs, the nation’s job of defeating Japan, and before that Germany and Italy, had ended.

Reflections on September 11

Inside my cranium all sorts of thoughts, emotions and memories swirl about, battling for supremacy.

I get it. I understand media fixation on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. But I’m struggling with my own acceptance of the commemoration, as if paying respect to the dead in some way can assuage the tragedy that has befallen our nation by the subsequent acts of our elected leaders who chose to plunge us into two intractable, interminable wars and into a political no-fly zone where government by negotiation and compromise is as foreign as an al-Qaeda peace offering.

I can’t bring myself to read but a handful of the articles spewed out by the omnipresent media. I can’t bring myself to watch special after special depicting the loss of our seeming innocence 10 years ago. September 11 without a doubt was a national catastrophe, but it was not the first time our country suffered physical and emotional scars, some deeper and more conflicted than the sudden though perhaps expected assault by an enemy committed to our destruction as a beacon of civilization.

We lost 2,983 mostly civilian souls 10 years ago. An almost incomprehensible tally. But not unprecedented, not in sheer numbers the largest of any one day toll, nor the biggest in percentage to total population. On the killing fields of Antietam, near Sharpsburg, MD, on September 17, 1862, the armies of the North and South inflicted the highest single day carnage in our nation’s history: 3,654 died, almost 20,000 more were injured. The dead represented .00011% of the U.S. population of 31,443,000. Put into perspective, the equivalent loss of life against 2001 census figures would have been 31,361. Antietam. Aside from Civil War buffs, hardly anyone takes note of September 17, I’d venture to say.

We do remember and commemorate Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941, when 2,459 perished, .000018% of our then population. Film of the sneak attack was as visible in its day as the tumbling of the Twin Towers.

Other seminal moments have been seared into our national conscience: 274 sailors killed in the the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor February 15, 1898, that precipitated the Spanish-American War; the sinking of the Lusitania May 7, 1915, with the loss of 1,198 passengers and crew, including 128 Americans. Though a British ship, the torpedoing of the Lusitania fueled U.S. entry into World War I two years later after Germany began a new campaign of indiscriminate U-boat attacks on Atlantic shipping; the now refuted attacks by North Vietnamese gunboats on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin August 2-4, 1964. No one died in that incident; from 1965 until U.S. involvement in Vietnam ended in 1975, nearly 58,000 Americans perished.

Perhaps part of my antipathy to September 11 is I knew no one who died that day, though one of our friends surely escaped death by having the good fortune to reschedule a morning meeting to his midtown office rather than in the headquarters of AON in 2 World Trade Center.

Perhaps another part of me is disturbed by the failure of our government to seek shared sacrifice in the war on terror. I’m not an advocate of a draft, but paying for the wars with a more equitable tax schedule, especially for the wealthy, would have been appropriate. Moreover, equipping our troops with the right materiel should have been a no-brainer, along with providing top notch veterans medical care and employment help once their tours of duty ended. Of course, launching an undermanned, trumped up war in Iraq instead of pursuing al-Qaeda in Afghanistan cannot be ignored, either.

Perhaps I’m distant from the commemorations because on September 11, 2001, I was in Phoenix, attending a technology conference. I turned over in bed at 6 am and decided to alter my usual business travel routine. Instead of turning on the TV to watch the news, I picked up the USA Today at my front door and returned to bed to read. A half hour later, 9:30 in New York, I called my office to listen to voice mail. My brother Bernie in Maryland had left a cryptic message asking if I was all right. I transferred to Mary Beth, our managing editor. Perhaps she could explain why he might have asked a question so strange 10 years ago, so commonplace today. She stunned me saying two planes had flown into the Twin Towers, one of which had already imploded. For the next several hours I lay transfixed in bed watching hell transform lower Manhattan.

I called Gilda. Along with the rest of the Beth Israel Medical Center staff, she was assigned to prepare and wait for survivors who never materialized. At 8 pm, she was sent home.

I was marooned in Phoenix until Saturday. Sunday morning, after an overnight stop over in Chicago, I flew back to LaGuardia Airport, a trip I had made some 25 times a year for the prior 25 years. More than 500 approaches to the city, in daytime and evening, never tiring of the spectacle under wing. At first, if not at a window seat, I would crane my neck to snag a view of the stalagmites of steel and glass rising from the bedrock of Manhattan.

Now, on September 17, 2001, as the flight from Chicago descended in the sky above New Jersey, from 50 miles out plumes of smoke could be seen still rising from the spot where the World Trade Center stood less than a week earlier. As the plane glided up the East River, even without the Twin Towers the Manhattan skyline was still spectacular, as majestic as the Rockies or the Grand Canyon.

I had visited the World Trade Center many times for business meetings. I had eaten in Windows on the World, taking in the food and the view. I was a dazzled tourist on the observation floor, sitting in the scooped out seats flush against windows that let you peer almost straight down from more than 1,000 feet in the air. I miss the towers.

But perhaps because I’m from an ethnic culture that has known more than its fair share of trauma, unspeakable, often unimaginable, offenses, and yet extraordinary resilience and rebirth, I can’t stop for a day dedicated to one event. I can pause and hope we will be vigilant enough to prevent a similarly invasive assault on our way of life. I hope those who lost loved ones always remember them. I hope their fellow countrymen never forget them. But I also hope we keep our collective grief in context while rededicating our nation to values that made America the most remarkable and envied in the world.

WikiLeaks, Fire and a Motto

How delicious an irony is it that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested today, December 7, the 69th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day?

Though arrested in London on suspected sex offenses in Sweden, Assange is reviled, or revered, for his public spillage of secret files that have undermined U.S. diplomacy around the world and war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Imagine, if you will, how history might have changed had Assange and WikiLeaks been active in 1941 and the years leading up to the Japanese sneak attack on our Pacific naval base. FDR’s secret efforts to maneuver the U.S. into the fight against Hitler might have strengthened the hands of the isolationists. The “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor might not have been so surprising.

But why stop at WWII? WikiLeaks would have been revelatory in the 1960s and the buildup of the Vietnam War. We would have found out what McNamara & Co. really thought without having to wait 40 years until The Fog of War. Or maybe we would have discovered that Nixon had no secret plan to end the war, just a secret plan to snooker the public to get elected.

Too bad WikiLeaks wasn’t around to warn us about the election of 2000, or the road to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don’t condone the wholesale release of secret documents, but it’s hard to condemn an action that has revealed the true nature of the diplomacy around us, domestically and internationally.


Fire: Am I being too sensitive, or did the major TV and radio news media mostly ignore the fire that killed 42 Israelis over the last week? When the fire broke out near Haifa there were radio reports in the morning, but as the day grew longer, those reports mostly vanished from the air waves.

Had 42 people died from a terrorist bombing, or from a military response to a demonstration, there surely would have been coverage. Put into greater perspective, the 42 Israelis who perished would be the equivalent of more than 1,000 Americans dying from a fire. It was a devastating blow to a small country.

One of the towns mostly destroyed was the artistic village of Ein Hod in the mountains above Haifa. Gilda and I visited Ein Hod in 2003. In one of the ceramic galleries we bought a flowered bowl we display in our dining room.


No Argument Here: I’m a pretty argumentative person. Gilda can attest to that. So can my kids. I enjoy a reasoned and respectful disagreement. But what’s going on in politics these days is anything but reasoned and respectful.

The latest absurdity is the back and forth over the country’s official motto. Is it “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one), or “In God we trust”? Both apparently are correct, except that people like Glenn Beck and his acolytes believe it is the latter and are attacking President Obama for saying in Indonesia that it is the former (http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012070024).

This type of silliness, linked as it is to the belief that Obama is trying to stifle religion, at least Christian religion, is prima facie evidence that there is waaaaay too much air time extended to agitators like Beck.