The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

A24 THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020

N

TO THE EDITOR:

Re “The Best Care May Be No

Care,” by Sandeep Jauhar (Op-Ed,

June 23):

As a physician, I read this Op-Ed

with horror. Dr. Jauhar notes that

many people have been putting off

routine medical care during the

coronavirus pandemic because of

fear of contracting the virus. He

then proclaims that most people

are doing fine despite not having

this routine care, citing a survey

showing that most Americans

think their health has not been

affected. This shortsighted analy-

sis has the potential to do harm if

readers are persuaded to forgo

care that they need.

Much of the routine care people

receive in the outpatient setting is

done beforea disease manifests

symptoms in order to catch it when

it is more easily treatable. Further-

more, ignoring symptoms can have

devastating consequences. Dr.

Jauhar focuses on the cost-saving

implications of skipping “unneces-

sary” care without explaining the

nuanced but very important differ-

ence between inappropriate and

appropriate care.

It is too soon to declare with

confidence the impact of the coro-

navirus pandemic on non-Covid-

related care. The results of these

decisions will play out over many

years and will certainly not be

reflected in a survey being con-

ducted just a few months into the

pandemic.

ERIC SCHWABER, NEW HAVEN, CONN.

TO THE EDITOR:

While it is likely true that a small

percentage of surgeries and visits

are unnecessary, that percentage is

not the main cause of the increase

in health care spending. Instead, it

is administrative costs. Let’s not

blame the doctors.

If you have ever been ill, you

know it is long-established, well-

cultivated medical relationships

that sustain and give comfort and

emotional strength. That relation-

ship needs regular attention and

needs to develop over time. Medi-

cine is not Jiffy Lube. It is about

people and relationships, and both

need careful nurturing.

STEPHANIE TAYLOR, CARMEL, CALIF.

The writer, a doctor, practices holistic

medicine.

TO THE EDITOR:

Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is on to some-

thing. Americans have hugely

“overmedicalized” everyday life

and normal aging. Many of my

contemporaries are desperately

seeking medical help because (in

their seventh decade) they just

don’t have the same “energy” as at

30, or because they have developed

a few little aches and pains. None of

them have any expectation that

their cars, computers or cellphones

will survive in prime pristine condi-

tion until the end. So why should

their shoulders, knees, hearts or

brains?

I would expect to find that many,

or perhaps most, of the millions of

elective treatments postponed

because of Covid-19 were for life-

style rather than health reasons.

Let’s start using our vaunted wis-

dom of age by looking more hon-

estly at our expectations. After

nearly 70 years, I can’t imagine

why anyone would harbor any

expectation of life with no incon-

veniences, difficulties or annoy-

ances. We need to stop trying to

“fix” normalcy.

DAVID VANDERPOOL, CINCINNATI

TO THE EDITOR:

No rushing for the train, bus, air-

plane, no fuming in traffic, no regu-

lating the day by some corporate

idea of work schedules, no packed

elevators. No wonder most people

with nagging health issues and

chronic conditions are doing all

right, as Dr. Sandeep Jauhar says.

Maybe better than they were before

the pandemic struck.

Had the medical profession un-

fairly been profiting from some

unnecessary appointments, pro-

cedures, monitoring? Possibly. But

those people whose work life

stopped or took a homeward turn,

in spite of major inconveniences,

financial woes, and the loneliness

and boredom of staying home

month after month, have in the

main been living a far less stressful

life.

LISA MCCANN

REDDING RIDGE, CONN.

Are We Getting Too Much Health Care?

LETTERS

TO THE EDITOR:

Re “As E.U. Opens, It Aims to Keep

Americans Out” (front page, June

24) and “Trump to Halt Worker

Visas Through 2020” (front page,

June 23):

President Trump has issued an

executive order to deny work visas

to foreigners, and now it seems as

though the E.U. has a message of

its own that counters his. Ameri-

cans may be blocked from entering

E.U. countries because the United

States has failed to keep the

spread of Covid-19 under control.

Imagine, the United States is

lumped with Brazil and Russia as

countries unable to stop the spread

of the virus.

What sweet justice this must be

for all those who have been or will

be denied entry to the United

States.

DORIS FENIG, BOCA RATON, FLA.

E.U. Plan to Bar Americans

TO THE EDITOR:

Re “Microaggressions: Death by a

Thousand Cuts” (Smarter Living,

June 15):

Hahna Yoon provides many

examples of these seemingly small

jabs thrown at us because of un-

derlying assumptions about gen-

der and ethnicity. But left out were

examples of the microaggressions

thrown at older people.

Older Americans are regularly

asked by strangers, “Are you re-

tired?” Organizations dealing with

large populations of older people

often assume that all their clients

have hearing problems, setting the

default volume for automated

phone responses painfully high.

And of course store clerks may use

“diner talk” like “sweetie” when

addressing older people.

Finally, the behavior of older

people is often monitored, espe-

cially in regard to the use of com-

puters, which it is assumed that

they are inept at. The recent

switch to working from home

brought with it seemingly innocent

checks on older workers like: “I

know you don’t like being online.

How are you doing? Are you going

to be OK?”

Younger employees probably

don’t receive that.

REBECCA S. FAHRLANDER

BELLEVUE, NEB.

Jabs Against Older People

DONALD TRUMP THINKSwe’re out to get
him.
“You could say 10 speeches. One little
word, they’ll say: ‘He’s lost it,’ ” the presi-
dent complained during a speech in
Phoenix this week.
That would presumably be aninaccu-
ratelittle word. Or something very
weird, like his claim at a famously under-
attended event in Tulsa that he’d ordered
a slowdown in coronavirus testing to
make it seem as if the infection rate was
smaller.
Desperate presidential spinners said
that was just a joke. “I don’t kid,” Trump
retorted.
Tulsa was, according to the president,
the beginning of his re-election cam-
paign. He’s actually shot off the starting
gun several times before. But it does feel
as if we’re in a new phase. Those big ral-
lies are Trump’s very favorite part of be-
ing the leader of the most powerful na-
tion on the globe. He’s been locked down
for months now, confined mainly to gath-
erings in which other people occasion-
ally get to talk.
He needs his screaming fans, even if
this is a terrible idea, healthwise. Six
members of Trump’s advance team got
sick while doing the planning, and now at
least two other staffers tested positive.
You’re not going to get this guy to stay
home. He needs to compliment himself in
front of thousands of people. Lacing into
the Democratic “elite,” Trump assured
his audience that he is more elite than
anybody. “I look better than them. Much
more handsome. Got better hair than
they do. I got nicer properties. I got nicer
houses. I got nicer apartments. I got
nicer everything.”
And, for sure, a bigger ego. After he
finished raging to his staff about the tiers
of empty seats in Tulsa, the president an-
nounced the night had been a historical
smash hit: “No. 1 show in Fox history for
a Saturday night.”

Yeah, Fox News announced “a whop-

ping 7.7 million total viewers” had tuned

in to listen to Trump speak. Pretty im-

pressive, particularly if you ignore the

fact that most of the nation has been

locked up at home in a world without

sports broadcasting, having already re-

watched every episode of “Star Trek”

and “Friends.”

Still, many of us will remember Tulsa

as That Rally Where Two-Thirds Of The

Seats Were Empty. His next appearance,

in Arizona, was much more Trump’s cup

of tea: a megachurch packed with cheer-

ing fans who generally ignored all the of-

ficial pleas for masking.

Most of the audience was young. Hav-

ing lured them into endangering their

health for his ego, Trump entertained

them with tales of his heroic efforts to

drain the political swamp. “I never knew

it was so deep — it’s deep and thick and a

lot of bad characters,” he confided.

Well, there aren’t many swamp crit-

ters more appalling than Roger Stone,

the political fixer who spent part of the

2016 presidential campaign trying to get

information for the Trump forces about

Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Stone was convicted of lying to Con-

gress and attempting to intimidate a wit-

ness — in part by threatening to kidnap

the guy’s therapy dog.

As swamp residents go, Stone would

maybe be the equivalent of a 5-foot-11-

inch mosquito. But on Wednesday a fed-

eral prosecutor told Congress that he

and his associates had been told they

could be fired if they didn’t go easy when

it came to sentencing. On account of how,

you know, Stone was the president’s pal.

Even if they’re a little dodgy on the

facts side, the rallies are at least a good

way to keep Trump distracted. In Tulsa,

he was fretting about the ongoing dem-

onstrations in Seattle. He asked a con-

gressman who was traveling with him on

the plane whether he ought to “just go in”

and do something to stop the protesters.

The reply was: “No, sir, let it simmer

for a little while.” Darned good advice, al-

though if he’d gone the other way, maybe

the congressman could have added,

“And be sure to bring a Bible.”

One other thing about that story — it’s

an example of how Trump likes to lace

his rallies with anecdotes in which peo-

ple call him “sir.” There were 11 “sirs” in

the Tulsa speech alone.

Daniel Dale, a CNN reporter who’s

been following this tic for a long time,

theorized that “sir” was a hint that what-

ever anecdote Trump was telling was ac-

tually fictional. But it’s also pretty clear

that the president just loves stories in

which people are addressing him as if he

were, say, a general.

Trump’s been spending a lot of time

trying to beat down that image of him at

West Point this month, leaving the stage

with an old-guy totter down the ramp.

The fake news, he insisted, cut off all the

film that showed him running — run-

ning! — for the last 10 feet. “I looked very

handsome,” he observed to the crowd.

Later, Trump asked Melania what the

reaction to his West Point speech was.

She assured him that the media wasn’t

saying much about his address but “they

mention the fact that you may have

Parkinson’s disease.”

He referred to Melania as “my wife,”

which is, I guess, nicer than “the old ball

and chain.” Interesting, though, that she

didn’t feel compelled to deliver any good

news. Maybe when you have to live with

an ego that large, you try to chip away

every little chance you get.

And she didn’t call him “sir.” 0

GAIL COLLINS

Trump Speaks! And Speaks. And Speaks...

PETE MAROVICH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

At least those rallies keep

him off the streets.

THREE MONTHS AGO, Bernie Sanders
lost his chance at the Democratic nomi-
nation. But the developments of the last
month, the George Floyd protests and
their cultural repercussions, may prove
his more significant defeat. In the winter
he merely lost a nomination; in the sum-
mer he may be losing the battle for the
future of the left.
Throughout his career, Sanders has
stood for the proposition that left-wing
politics after the 1970s allowed its central
purpose — the class struggle, the war
against the “millionaires and billion-
aires” — to be obscured by cultural bat-
tles and displaced by a pro-Wall Street
economic program. This shift has made
left-of-center parties in the West more
upper class and conservatism more blue
collar, but Sanders argued that the trans-
formation need not be permanent: A left
that recovered the language of class con-
flict could rally a majority against plutoc-
racy and win.
The 2016 Sanders primary campaign,
which won white, working-class voters
who had been drifting from the Demo-
crats, seemed to vindicate this argu-
ment. The 2020 version, however, made
it look more dubious: His most passion-
ate supporters — highly educated, eco-
nomically disappointed urbanites —

tugged Sanders toward the cultural left,

dooming his quest for a broader work-

ing-class insurgency.

Now we’re watching a different sort of

insurgency, one founded on an intersec-

tional and racial vision that never came

naturally to Sanders. Rather than Medi-

care for All and taxing plutocrats, the ral-

lying cry is racial justice and defunding

the police. Instead of finding nemeses in

corporate suites, the intersectional revo-

lution finds them on antique pedestals

and atop the cultural establishment.

So far, this revolution has been more

unifying than Sanders’s version — unit-

ing the Democratic establishment that

once closed ranks against him, earning

support from just about every major cor-

porate and cultural institution, sending

anti-racism titles rocketing up the best-

seller list.

All this, from one perspective, vindi-

cates critics who said Sanders’s revolu-

tion was too class-bound and race-blind

all along.

But the longer arc of this insurgency

may still end up vindicating the socialist

critique of post-1970s liberalism — that

it’s obsessed with cultural power at the

expense of economic transformation.

The demand for police reform at the

heart of the current protests doesn’t fit

this caricature. But the action around it,

the anti-racist reckoning unfolding in

colleges, media organizations, corpora-

tions and public parks, may seem more

unifying than the Sanders revolution

precisely because it isn’t as threatening

to power.

The fact that corporations seem par-

ticularly enthusiastic is perhaps the tell.

It’s not that corporate America is deeply

committed to racial equality; even for

woke capital, the capitalism comes first.

Rather, anti-racism as a cultural curricu-

lum is relatively easy to fold into the

mechanisms of managerialism. The idea

of retraining your employees so they can

work together without microaggressing

isn’t Marxism; it’s just a form of

Fordism, with white-fragility gurus in

place of efficiency experts.

In our cultural institutions, too, the of-

ficial enthusiasm for the new radicalism

is suggestive of its limits. The tumult is

obviously a threat to certain people’s

jobs: The revolutionaries need scape-

goats, wrongthinkers to cast down, su-

perannuated figures to retire with preju-

dice. But they aren’t out to dissolve Har-

vard or break up Google or close The

New York Times; they’re out to rule

these institutions, with more enlighten-

ment but the same fundamental powers.

And many changes the protesters seek,

the establishment can happily accom-

modate: Few influential people will feel

particularly threatened if statues of pre-

World War II presidents and Franciscan

missionaries come crashing down.

So the likely endgame of all this turbu-

lence is some redistribution of high-pro-

file jobs to a more racially diverse young-

er generation, the abolition of perceived

impediments to the management of elite

diversity (adieu, SAT) and the inculca-

tion of a new elite language that will de-

lineate the professional class more deci-

sively from the unenlightened proles be-

low.

Yes, critics of structural racism have

an agenda for economic reform as well.

But that agenda isn’t what’s being ad-

vanced: Chuck Schumer will take a knee

in kente cloth, but he isn’t likely to pass a

reparations bill, and the white liberals

buying up the works of Ibram X. Kendi

aren’t going to bus their kids to minority

neighborhoods. In five years, 2020’s leg-

acy will probably be a cadre of commis-

sars getting people fired for unwise Twit-

ter likes, not any dramatic interracial

wealth redistribution.

You can dismiss this critique as the

usual conservative allergy to the fresh

air of revolution. But it’s also what old-

guard leftism would predict of a revolu-

tionary movement that has the estab-

lishment on board.

The destiny of liberalism, for some

time now, has looked like handshake

agreements among corporate, academic

and media power centers, with progres-

sive rhetoric deployed either reassur-

ingly or threateningly to keep discon-

tented factions within the elite in line.

The promise of the Sanders campaign

was that the insights of the older left, on

class solidarity above all, could alter this

depressing future and make the newer

left more than just a diversifier of capi-

talism’s corporate boards.

The current wave of protests will have

unpredictable consequences. But right

now, their revolution’s conspicuous elite

support seems like strong evidence that

Bernie Sanders failed. 0

ROSS DOUTHAT

The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders

He may be losing

the battle for the

future of the left.