CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Sometime in 2021, we will be able to walk inside a restaurant, sit down at a table, and order a glass of wine and dinner.
It's been a long time coming, but when we get to 300 million vaccine injections, this country is suddenly going to be a lot freer. Figure that around August or September, we will be able to travel and function (mostly) in normal fashion. The libertarians aren't going to like it, but there will be some sort of vaccination ID card. Maybe we can turn this into the national ID card for voting, and solve the problem of voter suppression at the same time.
And there's more.
There will be a full stadium for the first pitch of the World Series. Once again we will be elbow to elbow in stores and in concert halls. I've got an envelope full of tickets to the LA Opera that were never used because the performances were cancelled, but one of these days there will be two thousand people in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
But with the good stuff, there will also be some bad stuff. This country has managed to work itself into a frenzy of paranoid craziness. Forget the Area 51 obsession -- we have a substantial fraction of our people who at least claim to believe that the national election was stolen. They've managed to get to that point without confronting all the evidence to the contrary, but in the universe of the authoritarian personality, one man's word is all that is required. Still, there may be ways of living alongside each other, in the same way that competing crowds have faced off in Huntington Beach only to head back to their homes peacefully.
Here's what I don't think will happen: The United States is not going to break out into open civil war just because Trump lost and a lot of people don't like that fact. We should expect a few outbreaks by the nasties, but they won't be able to get themselves organized into armies. It will be like the old story about the American versions of the communist party and the Ku Klux Klan. They were so flooded with FBI agents that they could only function at a low level.
At the international level, we have been arguing with the wrong adversaries (Germany and the rest of Europe) and playing footsie with North Korea and Russia. These errors not only will come back to bite us, they already have. The Russian cyber-attack on our government and industrial centers is already an act of war, or close to it. Joe Biden is stuck making clear that this is not acceptable. He will start by appointing competent professionals to the security agencies rather than slavish toadies.
Biden is also going to be stuck with reasserting American dominance over a world which is becoming ever more splintered. The way to do so is of course to rebuild our NATO and other alliances. Other than Trump, postwar presidents knew this lesson right down in their bones, and made sure that there were plenty of allies looking towards the east from their European homes.
Donald Trump got away with a passive foreign policy because people give him credit for being ignorant and not just a little bit stupid. Joe Biden won't enjoy the same advantage.
The Curiously most important event of 2020 as it affects the next decades
In looking forward into 2021, it is necessary to look at a major change that happened in 2020. The genesis will be argued by the historians, but the effect was hugely dramatic and, we can hope, will be permanent.
May 25, 2020 was the day that George Floyd died at the hands of a police officer. It would be more correct, if brutal, to say that Floyd died from the officer's knee to his throat, a literal description of a long history of racial abuse of blacks by whites. Within days, a national (and even international) movement had sprung up. Our streets were filled with people who protested under the Black Lives Matter banner.
And what was particularly important -- and emotionally moving -- was that the protesters were of all races. There were those of both sexes, White, Black, Asian, and Middle Eastern. And a lot of them were quite young. Why this particular movement took root so quickly and so strongly is perhaps an unimportant question. I sometimes think that a lot of people were just tired of being confined due to the pandemic, and took advantage of the moment to express a thought that many of us have been holding for years. What is important is that the movement did take hold.
The year 2021 will be the first full year in which Black Lives Matter is not the radical slogan of a minority, but an accepted principle of the American nation.
Yes, some of the above remarks are admittedly incomplete. There will still be some Americans who reject the emotional and physical equality that the new system represents. But now, suddenly, they are in the same position that segregationists found themselves in after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. We are entering into an era in which we can look at each other just as other people, and not have to think so much about how racial and cultural differences translate to cultural rankings. And when I listen to the so-called conservatives on talk radio, the ones I hear are not defending racism, as previous generations of reactionaries would have done. They just deny that conservatism is racist which acknowledges, however warily, that lack of racism is the currently acceptable norm. Even the president found it politically expedient to claim a lack of racial prejudice, in spite of his personal history on the subject.
One more thing, which I hope to see continuing to develop in 2021: Not only are we sick of racism, we can be sick of those who tolerate it. And now we will be saying so out loud.
One explanation: This discussion is not intended to represent a "political correctness" that elevates hypersensitivity to an artform. It is not to argue that Norwegians don't get to tell Swedish jokes. Rather, it is the necessary rejection of a murderous hatred and insensitivity that led to actual murders. And this is why George Floyd will go down in history for having saved some of the American soul through his death.
A Political era ends
The new year will have its surprises, they'll just be a different kind. We've gotten used to watching crooks and thieves and those who would give the world away to our worst antagonists. Some of that is going to stop, at least as of noon on January 20, 2021. We will have a president whose word we can trust. He may even make a joke about the size of his inaugural crowd.
But there is a fork coming up in the political highway -- which political party will win the senate seats in Georgia? If I were a betting man, I would expect the Republicans to take both seats because we're looking at a very conservative state. But who knows right now?
If the Democrats were to win both senate seats in Georgia, all bets are off. The Democrats could (theoretically) abolish the filibuster and carry out reforms that are long overdue, ranging from the composition of the Supreme Court to some kind of Medicare for anybody who wants it. We could also get Joe Biden's two trillion-dollar climate bill.
But if we want to follow the smart money, we are going to expect a divided government, with a slight majority of Republicans in the senate, and the Democrats holding the House and the presidency. This is where I think the nation will see some surprises. I don't see Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrats putting up with Mitch McConnell's abuse the way they did in the past. There are ways to even things up a bit. Mississippi can have funding for ship building, but it can't strangle Obamacare. Fair is fair.
Times Change
A colleague mentioned that we used to read the newspaper over breakfast. Some people still do, but overall circulation has been falling, with the loss of small-town papers being particularly acute. At the same time, the serious reporting is still done by the print media including big city newspapers and magazines such as the Atlantic and Mother Jones. Where the world of news media is heading is still in question. And it is an important question -- we need an alternative to the brainwashing that is being carried out by the more partisan elements in the broadcast media.
But more and more, we are seeing local news and editorial writing coming through in sites like City Watch LA. Those of you who have been interested in city government get the stories here. It is predictable that online, local sites will -- more and more -- dominate ultra-local coverage.
This ultra-local news system developed online in the Minneapolis - St Paul area back in the mid-90s. The continuation in commercial form can be found right here in the form of Next Door, which tells me if somebody lost a dog, found a cat, or sighted a coyote. In a way, we've gone back to the telephone party-line that people used to enjoy, except that this one lets you insert pictures.
Here's another big question. What will the experience of a year-long global pandemic do to the movie industry? Here is one out-of-the-blue prediction that comes from the land of wishful thinking but is also based on the recent experience of platforms like TikTok. I think that the cost of doing videos will continue to come down. The continuing question is whether all those kids making all those videos and movies will find some place to show them for a modest profit. Wouldn't it be fun to reinvent a modern day version of the nickelodeon theater where you could watch indi films and videos all day for a buck?.
Beyond our own borders
It's a shock the first time you watch the weather report on the BBC in Europe. I can remember seeing a weather map where all those European countries -- from Britain down to Spain, and over to Russia in the east -- were not shown by mapped borders, but just as locations over which storm systems passed, the same way we look at a low pressure area heading from the west coast over the Rockies and thence to the Midwest.
The point here is that we as a nation are parochial in our own way, missing out on how people in other countries see things. Think about Brexit lately? It may sort of work out.
Europe has experienced a true second wave in the pandemic, unlike the United States, which has experienced a nonstop epidemic which got briefly better and is now much worse. Unlike the Europeans, our own current wave is at a higher level than it was back in the spring.
In contrast, the European second wave more or less mimicked the first wave in terms of the death rates suffered in different areas. And as they did previously, the Europeans have managed to put the clamps on the current wave, at least so far. We have a lot to learn from the European experience, even if we don't want to.
Looking ahead to the next four years
A minor point to many of you, but this is an ax I will continue to grind. I'll start with the good news. We finally will have a president who owes Nothing to Iowa or New Hampshire. So there could be a chance that we can change the primary system, at least to the extent of removing these two self-appointed king-makers from their current preeminent position. It's worth a try.
The big story of course will be the lack of continuing chronic corruption at the presidential level. As Donald Trump demonstrated with his latest pardons, it's been acceptable to be a crook, a liar, or a traitor in this administration. Trump waited nearly as long as he could, but he pardoned Stone and Manafort. Bill Clinton made one pardon at the end of his second term that was equally disgraceful, so the Republicans can have that to hold onto.
I'll mention in closing that Trump's pardoning of his buddies in crime signals more clearly than anything else that he understands that he is on the way out. He didn't concede when he should have, probably due to underlying emotional difficulties, but even Trump would understand that you don't go into a second term acting like you've got nothing to lose.
The one last thing we can predict for 2021 is that some big thing will happen that nobody predicted. My wish list includes a breakthrough in energy storage (maybe one of those liquid metal ion batteries) and two or three iterative advances in disease therapy and prevention. We're getting close to being able to sequence everyone's entire genome for a few dollars, and out of this will come truly personalized medicine.
And how about this for wishful thinking? The Medicare system will be allowed to negotiate drug prices, and this will establish a national price for each currently expensive drug. Or how about this: Medical bills for the uninsured will be limited to what insurance companies currently pay.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
