Joy to the Vaccination Centers!
Joy to the Vaccination Centers!
Change the narrative: It's time to convert private relief into a public affirmation that government is capable of doing something Big and Right.
Remember this video from mid-December of health workers at the Boston Medical Center dancing to celebrate the arrival of the first COVID-19 vaccines? Hold it in your mind as you read today’s newsletter.
A few days ago, my friend L.A. Kauffman got her first COVID-19 vaccine. On her Facebook page, she wrote, “The atmosphere inside the huge vaccination tent this morning was unlike anything I or probably you have experienced in more than a year: fizzy, ebullient, filled with joy. I can't wait for the rollout to reach everyone and for this feeling of relief and possibility to wash over all of you, too.”
Her comment was on my mind as I read yesterday in The Washington Post how “The happiest place in medicine is anywhere there is vaccine, and the happiest people in medicine are the ones plunging it into the arms of strangers.” Reporter Maura Judkis writes in a beautiful feature that, “For health-care workers, the opportunity to administer the vaccine has become its own reward: Giving hope to others has given them hope, too. In some clinics, so many nurses have volunteered for vaccine duty that they can’t accommodate them all.”
She adds, “The arrival of The Shot has transformed the grim pop-up clinics of the pandemic into gratitude factories — reassembly lines where Americans could begin to put back together their busted psyches.”
But here’s the thing about the vaccine rollout, now that it’s finally beginning to rev up and local authorities are addressing the gross inequities of its early days--where far more affluent suburban whites got shots than their share of the population—by siting more distribution centers in communities of color and restricting access to local zip codes. For some reason, government policy makers have decided that getting vaccinated should be a private moment of joy, even though it is also actually a singular public achievement.
Think about it. Tens of millions of Americans are getting life-saving vaccines that were developed with public dollars at record-breaking speed, and which are now being given to everyone who wants them for free. This could only have been done by government. It is a success story for government as an institution that can improve people’s lives.
Ten years ago, Cornell University political scientist Suzanne Mettler wrote a book called The Submerged State, where she explored the disconnect between American attitudes toward government and their actual lived experience benefiting from government programs. Polls often show that majorities want smaller government, and believe that they’ve never used a government program, even as nearly everyone has benefited from Social Security, unemployment insurance, mortgage interest deductions, student loans, along with basic government-funded infrastructure like public roads, parks, water and sewage systems. She wrote, “Americans often fail to recognize government’s role in society, even if they have experienced it in their own lives. That is because so much of what government does today is largely invisible.”
This isn’t only true for big, ongoing government programs. As Mark Schmitt noted in his review of Mettler’s book in The New Republic, taxpayers had no idea that President Obama had steered a tax cut their way in 2009. That’s because his economic advisers convinced him the best way to use that money to stimulate the economy was through reduced payroll tax withholding. Contrast that to all the people who got a $1200 COVID relief check last year with “President Donald J. Trump” printed on the check next to the words “Economic Impact Payment.”
Mettler’s point, which is still valid, is that we can’t have a real debate about the role of government when so much of what it actually does is hidden from public awareness. “The greater the number of visible policies an individual had used, the more likely he or she was to agree that ‘government programs have helped me in times of need,’ but greater use of policies of the submerged state had no comparable impact,” she writes. And without that, people are left with an exaggerated belief in their own efforts and the role of the market.
So, here’s a crazy idea. We need to convert private relief into public joy. Like #JoyToThePolls, which was a deliberate, organized effort to make waiting on voting lines into a celebration of civic power, we need #JoyToTheVaccinations. And there are a lot of out-of-work musicians who I’m sure would gladly step up to pitch in—how about a relief program for them that doubles as a celebration of when government changes people’s lives at scale? Since Ronald Reagan’s bold claim that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help,” we’ve been living under a destructive narrative that has tilted our politics dangerously and stupidly to the right. The vaccination rollout, as imperfect as it is and as it finally gets its footing, is a chance to change that narrative.
Bonus link 1: Here’s Jon Batiste performing at the Javits Center a few days ago for some of the health workers vaccinating people there. It’s part of a pop-up program being promoted by New York state as a baby step toward the revival of the entertainment industry, but with a little imagination it could be much more.
Bonus link 2: Here’s a new video from Hip Hop Public Health, a community outreach organization founded by Columbia Univerisity neurologist Olajide Williams, promoting vaccinations.
Odds and Ends
-Say hello to the Project for Good Information, a putative $65 million effort to pump money into local nonprofit media and also support for-profit media companies, all aimed at combating the flourishing ecosystem of rightwing misinformation. Teddy Schleifer reports for Recode that the new effort is helmed by Tara McGowan, the Democratic powerhouse behind ACRONYM, and that she is “attempting to strip away the partisan ties that have dogged her previous journalism plays.”
-“What do you call it when ordinary citizens are enlisted in installing digital spy devices, for use by the state, with data also flowing back to a megacorporation for opaque analysis? We might call it the ‘surveillance state,’ though that doesn't quite grasp the scope. The Stasi in East Germany, for example, ran a particularly cruel and effective system of spying and repression, practically the definition of a surveillance state. But that was just the state. Amazon, with its Ring doorbells, is creating something new.” That’s Mark Hurst in his Creative Good newsletter, connecting the dots being laid down by Amazon.
“If the goal is to undermine a violent ideology like white supremacy…you don’t do that by only talking about white supremacists. Someone should probably mention this to national outlets who consistently frame stories around interviews with white supremacists.” That’s Chris Jones of 100 Days in Appalachia explaining, from the perspective of a deeply embedded local reporter, how elite media and local media alike can do a better job covering extremism.
-If you’re on Clubhouse, or thinking about trying it out, make sure to read this helpful guide from Consumer Reports’ Yael Grauer on what that means for your privacy and security. Among the issues: audio chats are inherently nonprivate, and in order to invite other people to the app you have to give Clubhouse your contact list. And that means the company now has the phone numbers of lots of non-users. (Full disclosure: I’m on Consumer Reports’ board. And I have some Clubhouse invites to give away, if you’re on an iPhone.)
-Nearly 100 economists recorded hundreds of economics presentations and then coded how gender affected presentations. They found that women presenters received 12% more questions than men, and they were more likely to get questions that were patronizing or hostile. As Ben Casselman reports for The New York Times, “The paper is the latest addition to a mounting body of evidence of gender discrimination in economics. Other researchers in recent years have found that women are less likely than men to be hired and promoted, and face greater barriers to getting their work published in economic journals.”
-Facebookization, continued: The company is planning to include facial recognition in its soon-to-be-released smart glasses product but is assessing whether it has the legal capacity to do so, Ryan Mac reports for BuzzFeed News. If you haven’t yet read Mark Pesce’s excellent book Augmented Reality about the aims of the Big Tech to dominate AR, now would be a good time. Here’s my review, to start.
-Is the Knight Foundation undermining its own stated goal of advancing trustworthy journalism through its investments in hedge funds like Alden Global Capital (which has made a reputation strip-mining newspapers), its decision to give its platform to people like Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, and grants it has made to the American Enterprise Institute, the American Council on Education, and the Heritage Foundation? That’s the case made by Simon Galperin of The Objective. I’m not sure I agree with all of Galperin’s arguments, but there’s never been any question that Knight’s board has a conservative tilt, as exemplified by the long presence of several Knight family scions on it. And since the departure of Chris Hughes from the Knight board, there’s no one on it with a progressive profile. (h/t Eric Alterman)
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