Pandemic’s toll on U.S. is political, too
To appreciate the full mix of weirdness and paranoia of Washington under the current president, hop an imaginary flight ( it won’t be crowded) and make the trip to Guam, a tiny speck in the Pacific, partway between the Philippines and Hawaii.
It was there that the USS Theodore Roosevelt was directed after a historic visit to Vietnam careened into a sea of trouble. The massive aircraft carrier — 20 storeys high with a crew of at least 4,000 — was sent to Da Nang on a mission of epic irony. Its visit, long in preparation, was a show of solidarity between two former enemies who fought a war in which millions died before forcing the U.S. into a humiliating flight.
That conflict was predicated on the belief a communist victory in Vietnam would open Asia to the threat of aggressive Chinese expansionism. Instead, the North won, and now its one-party rulers are keen to join the U. S. in that same effort: blocking Beijing from turning the South China Sea into its own private sphere of influence. Sailing a giant U. S. carrier smack through the middle to Vietnam was just the thing to make the point. The U. S. has 11 aircraft carriers, half the world’s total. China has two.
The visit went ahead despite concerns about COVID-19. It probably shouldn’t have. On departure, dozens of crew members began showing signs of the virus. Soon there were 150 cases, according to U. S. reports. Deeply concerned, Capt. Brett Crozier sent off an email to Navy bosses noting, “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die.” The memo was not limited to people strictly in Crozier’s chain of command and quickly became public. Enraged, acting Navy secretary Thomas Modly relieved Crozier of command, accusing him of “betrayal.” Quite who he betrayed wasn’t evident, given that videos showed hundreds of crew members cheering their support for Crozier as he left the ship.
Still not satisfied, Modly flew to Guam to explain himself in person. It’s a long flight and he had lots of time to reconsider what he planned to say, but let the opportunity pass. Once on board he got on the PA system and proceeded to blast the ousted captain at length in crude and insulting terms. If Crozier didn’t realize his memo would become public, “he was … too naive or too stupid to be the commanding officer of a ship like this.” Just to ramp up the animosity, he added a few words about the dangers of speaking in public. “There is no, no situation where you go to the media. Because the media has an agenda. And the agenda that they have depends on which side of the political aisle they sit. And I’m sorry that’s the way the country is now, but it’s the truth. And so they use it to divide us. They use it to embarrass the Navy. They use it to embarrass you.” While he was talking you could hear people in the background shouting him down.
For a guy offering advice on media relations, Modly evidently failed to appreciate his own words would quickly be shared. Within hours he was apologizing. “I do not think Capt. Brett Crozier is naïve nor stupid,” he said. Instead, “precisely because he is not naive and stupid,” he must have sent the memo on purpose “in an effort to draw public attention to the situation on his ship.”
Why that was such a bad thing he didn’t elucidate, but pretty soon Modly’s own head was on the block. On Tuesday he resigned, “putting the Navy and the sailors above self,” as Defense Secretary Mark Esper put it.
Just to put things in context, Modly had been acting secretary only since December. He was elevated because the previous officeholder, Richard Spencer, was fired in a dispute over Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes for allegedly stabbing to death a prisoner, then holding his head by the hair for photographs. As with Crozier, Esper said Spencer should have stuck to the chain of command rather than taking his complaints to the White House (which ignored him). According to a report in The Washington Post, Modly said he didn’t want to get on the wrong side of President Donald Trump the way Spencer had. In his rant to the Roosevelt crew, he termed Capt. Crozier’s actions a “betrayal,” because “he put it in the public’s forum, and it’s now become a big controversy in Washington, D.C., and across the country.”
In other words, the crime was in risking the displeasure of a president who tolerates no embarrassment, and who demands unquestioning fealty from the flaccid minions with whom he has surrounded himself. On the same day Modly resigned, the latest in a line of White House press secretaries stepped aside after nine months in which she never delivered a press briefing, and the inspector-general tasked with overseeing Washington’s coronavirus response, including US$ 2.3 trillion in economic relief, was removed at the president’s instigation. Just a day earlier Trump ousted a Pentagon official who was supposed to lead a Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, who’d been appointed just days prior. At the same time he launched an attack on the Health and Human Services Inspector General, Christi Grimm, for daring to allow a report that noted testing delays and supply issues at U.S. hospitals.
The body count is rising, and I don’t mean from the pandemic. Trump is now busy energetically promoting an anti- malaria medicine as an antidote to the virus, in spite of numerous warnings from medical experts that it is unproven and may be unsafe.
“What do you have to lose?” he demanded repeatedly in one of his daily appearances.
Just your life. No big deal in today’s Washington.