Hi,
So here are some things I’m thinking about this week.
So it turns out this is no Sputnik moment
This issue is Issue #40, an ironic milestone.
As you may know, the origin of the word “quarantine” comes from the Italian “quaranta,” or 40 days. And unlike lots of other words in English, where we raided the pockets of another language in a dark alley and then redefined them to meet our needs after passing them through like Norman French or something, this is a pretty direct line of derivation. Indeed, the word’s origin is so direct that Jewish rabbis literally dipped into historical records of how Jews serving out the Venetian quaranta prayed in order to advise modern Jewish congregations on how to count a minyan during the earliest COVID lockdowns.
This being issue #40 is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
And now we’re in Omicron.
We’re in Omicron, and the case counts are rising. The hospitalizations aren’t rising as quickly as they would in Delta, or baseline COVID, and it’s been long enough now that enough fog-of-war has lifted, and we’re increasingly confident that it’s meaningfully less deadly, especially if you’re boosted-and-vaxxed. But there’s still tremendous fog-of-war on how transmissible it is — possibly enough that the likely lower deadliness doesn’t matter if cases keep on skyrocketing and cases DDoS our healthcare system — and there’s still tremendous disagreement on how relieved we should be by the seeming decline in case counts in some of the earliest-hit communities with Omicron, like South Africa. Because American case counts are still going up.
But at the same time, Delta facecrushed our hospital systems already in lots of communities this fall, we just had lots of folks come together for the holidays to spend time with family from all over, and, oh yeah, my home of DC might just be the center of the Omicron epidemic right now.
Some have cancelled their holiday plans; others haven’t. Lots of folks can’t find COVID tests (If you can’t find at-home rapid tests and are in DC, I have spares, contact me ASAP), and frankly, lots of folks are still struggling to find booster appointments; neither of these facts seem to be acknowledged by the White House.
We all felt the earthquake, but we don’t know how big the tsunami will be.
So let’s go around the table one last time before the new year.
What Kind Of Day Has It Been?
Just about two years ago, the world learned of COVID. For months, we acted oblivious to the truth that will, in the eyes of historians, be seen as obvious. We still partied, and went to conferences, and made plans for the future (myself included). And though the wicked king’s servants knew the truth early on, they could not make him listen. After all, it was only a few cases, and who understands exponential math anyways?1
So then the truth became undeniable, but the land’s leaders, and doctors, and courtiers were in disarray and chaos. They encouraged people to put themselves at risk, they lied about the usefulness of masks because they thought you’d cut in line and hoard them, they suppressed the development of COVID tests in favor of a flawed test, and then set unattainable standards for the private sector’s at-home tests because people just couldn’t be trusted with the information, and they partied.
And they weren’t just wicked, they were shameful and obsessed with optics and keeping their numbers down: they tried to block testing of people in superspreader cruise ships; they fudged numbers and sent the sick back to nursing homes to infect others; they pretended they weren’t sick to try to show strength and, probably, to try to infect their political opponents at a national debate.
And don’t get me wrong — though the new administration is less actively incompetent, the hits keep on coming. Hell, less than a month ago the Press Secretary mocked the idea of sending people COVID tests for free from the White House podium. Because, I guess, if the government sends lifesaving protective equipment to every American to reduce the taxpayer’s spend on ICU visits, we’re suddenly Stalinist Russia, or some such creepy nonsense.
In short, America did what it all-too-often does in a crisis: fuck around, and find out.
And then we got incredible news, less than one year into the crisis, news that earlier generations would have treated with ticker-tape parades and fireworks and days of national thanksgiving and prayer: the development of vaccine after vaccine that could protect us against the virus. We got so used to it that the approval of several additional vaccines by major foreign regulators this month barely even got noticed.
In other words, America did what it almost always does to get itself out of a crisis: After wasting too much time, it shows up in Act IV with a shit-ton of production and logistics, and steamrollers its enemy. (See, e.g., the Civil War, WWI, WWII and the Manhattan Project, the polio vaccine, the Apollo Program, the Gulf War, hurricane relief efforts, etc., etc., etc.) The people who brought you Moore’s Law show up late, but when we do, we bring an exponential growth curve of our own.
But yet there is not yet joy in Mudville — mighty Columbia seems to have struck out.
I’ve lived in DC most of my adult life. I think it’s one of the best places in America to live. But we are paid by the American taxpayer to do only a few things:
Reflect their preferences through our representative-ish system
Distribute benefits, most of which we hide from people via the tax code, so they can pretend they don’t get benefits
Maintain the state’s monopoly on violence
See around corners, and manage risk
Now, we’re not doing well on any of those. The first is the responsibility of the Congress, where one party openly cheers for the end of democracy to restore the wicked king by any means. The second is creaking as we’ve run out of ways of hiding from the average American voter that, believe it or not, their government does benefit them, which is apparently a scandal because it also benefits some poor people too. The third led to a humiliating, dishonorable, panicking withdrawal from Afghanistan, because apparently our leaders were surprised that unpaid, starving, unsupported Afghan soldiers weren’t willing to spend several months dying to delay a result we told them was inevitable.
The fourth, however…the fourth is our common responsibility. Almost everyone who works in the first three in DC also does the fourth, and lots of people besides work only on the fourth.
And these past two weeks, DC got its teeth kicked in on the most predictable, obvious thing.
About two weeks ago, DC residents suddenly woke up and realized that they were going home for the holidays, because apparently, Christmas vacation is an unpredictable phenomenon, like an earthquake:
District residents were queueing for tests like people in the Soviet Union lining up for bread:
The people who allegedly call themselves reporters were somehow unable to read their own news outlets’ reporting about the rise of Delta and Omicron, or act on it ahead of time by clicking buttons on Walmart dot fucking com:
DC Councilmembers claimed that there was no way to fund distributions of N95 masks to the population, because they required the Mayor’s assent for emergency legislation — telling on themselves that they had literally never realized, across two years of a pandemic, that N95 masks were necessary, and now were panicking.
And, oh by the way, all of this is still better than the DC suburbs are doing.
And, we now know, the Biden administration itself rejected a plan to distribute free at-home tests. But no worries; they’re going to, by sometime in January after this doesn’t matter any longer, launch a website to allow people to order deliveries of at-home tests. Good thing we have a perfect track record in launching government websites for health-critical needs, huh?
All of this should be a Sputnik moment. It’s not just that we can’t do our damn jobs for you, dear reader; we can’t even do it for our own self-interest.
Now, we eventually have managed to get some tests distributed and the lines moving faster in DC. But we sure aren’t doing it for the rest of the country.
It’s not as if we don’t know that there are problems already in how we work as a nation. I think it’s fair to say that, given that I have spent much of my career earning my wages working as a contractor or consultant for the public sector or its adjacent entities, in a town of many such folks — we know it’s already too broken, or works only because of the ceaseless efforts of some overworked, underpaid civil servant that has been promising their husband or wife for a decade that they’ll retire. After all, we eventually got folks to speed up the COVID test distribution lines; it was a bunch of DC residents of all backgrounds volunteering unpaid on their vacations to back up our overstressed librarians and firefighters. But robbing Peter to pay Paul does not a system make.
To steal a phrase from someone very important to me: we’ve broken the entire system to temporarily work around each urgent thing that’s broken, and now we don’t know our way back.
And that, too, is a vein of rich discussion in the public policy press and Twittersphere: Alex Stamos would argue it’s (in part) about a lack of cross-training between law/journalism/policy and other communities they need to work with (like tech) that renders good policymaking impossible, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen would argue that it’s about (partially) a loss of a mindset that prioritized speed, Philip Zelikow would argue it’s (at least somewhat) about a rise of legalism and academism over a pragmatic and engineering-driven problem-solving background, plenty of other folks in the vein of Jim Scott (e.g., Dave Guarino, Scott Alexander) would argue that it’s about (in some ways) a loss of focus on real people and their real experiences and needs. Probably all of that’s true.
Let’s put it another way: we’ve lost the ability to reason at the object level about the problems we face and organize to do something about them, even when they’re life-or-death. We, demonstrably, can’t react to information, or plan about it, or take the most simple choices.
This isn’t a condemnation of you, dear reader. I know some of you, because of new infants, or intense times at work trying to teach kids or save lives or livelihoods or our country, or family obligations, or grad school, or just being sick and tired, didn’t have time to plan ahead. That’s not your individual fault.
The system — the one you pay your tax dollars to, the one you give your consent to, the one that feeds the news, the one I blame institutionally — failed you. This Town, as a symbol for that system, failed itself.
And, I suspect, we won’t learn anything from it, or learn how to tackle the problems it exposed, unless we try.
So, let’s try!
In 2022, this newsletter will still be what it is: an unrehearsed, hastily-assembled reaction to the issues of the day; my way of trying to stay in touch with you, and occasionally share some animal GIFs to cut the doom and gloom.
But there’s one thing I’m going to try to get back to, something that I put more attention on two years ago, when I started this thing, before COVID: looking more at what happens when you peel back the layers on top of the world, and seeing how things really work, and what we can do about them. Maybe it’s foolish, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe I’ll forget it in a few weeks, like most New Years’ Resolutions. But maybe, just maybe, it turns out that trying to understand the world, and actually change it, is actually something we can still do. And maybe an Apollo moment can follow a Sputnik one.
Happy New Year.
"You need to learn WHY things work on a starship."-Admiral James T. Kirk, USS Enterprise, Battle of Regula I, Stardate 8130.3 (March, 2285)
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
Though one should treat anything said by Dominic Cummings of the UK with intense skepticism, the “and then I had to hit x2 over and over again on my iPhone calculator to convince the UK cabinet this was going to be a problem soon” anecdote he tells seems very believable…