Essays about Joan Didion on California, John Gregory Dunne on Patriotism, China and the WHO, MBS and COVID-19, and Trump's HCQ Guru

They were the most important literary couple of their generation. Joan lives on, an icon. John should be remembered as well.

Joan Didion's California, John Gregory Dunne's 'Spectator Patriotism' Still locked down. Doing a lot of reading from my bookshelves and my computer archives. And it struck me that before reading about Joan Didion in my latest piece for the Beast, maybe one should read something about her husband, John Gregory Dunne, whom she adored, and who inspired some of her greatest work.   Spectator Patriotism (First published October 11, 2005)             On or about Dec. 30, 2002, which was a day after we'd had dinner in New York and a year to the day before he died of a heart attack, John Gregory Dunne put a floppy disk in an envelope and dropped it off at the Manhattan apartment where I was staying. As happens, I misplaced it in my travels after that, and only last weekend did I find it and read the digital newspaper clippings he'd pulled together, which he'd talked about with so much excitement at our dinner.             John was interested in patriotism. He was fascinated by the real substance of it, which he saw as diametrically opposed to what he called "the spectator patriotism" exploited by the Bush administration as it went looking for wars. There was something (it took a while for John to put his finger on it) in the fact that several people he knew had children on active duty: historian Doris Kearns had a son, John himself had a nephew, I had a son. We had people we loved in uniform doing what they saw, and we understood, imperfectly perhaps, as their duty to defend the values and the dreams that are the United States of America. But why were there so few from this circle of acquaintances if the cause was so great?             John would rage. He was articulate and funny then and always, but such was his passion that I remember him as almost inchoate when he talked about the bastards who wouldn't end their Global War on Terror, which was conceived in rhetoric and dedicated to their reelection, yet would send America's sons and daughters on futile errands of suffering and slaughter. John said he was going to write a book about patriotism, but he had a novel to finish first, and then he died.             John's wife of almost 40 years, Joan Didion, has written a breathtaking book about John's death, and the illnesses of their only child, who died in August, and the experience of grief. Joan's book, called "The Year of Magical Thinking,"  has been reviewed widely and well, as it should be. (Robert Pinsky in the New York Times pointed out, rightly, that it is "not a downer" and parts of it are actually quite funny.) Joan sent me the galleys last summer -- Joan and John have been our friends since we met in El Salvador in 1982 -- and I read Joan's book then in a single sitting, lost in a salt sea of emotion and memory. It is a great, great book.             But it was John's 1989 memoir, "Harp," that I picked up to read again yesterday, trying to understand a little better the meaning of the newspaper stories on that long-lost floppy disk, and I wound up searching out on the Web the essays John wrote for The New York Review of Books about wars and soldiers and, yes, patriotism, in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001.... (MORE) This is from today in The Daily Beast:   California Dreaming With Joan Didion ARMCHAIR TRAVELER Trapped in my apartment I pulled Joan's books off the shelf. I wanted to learn again from her meticulous observation of detail, character and setting, and her great sense of irony. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY And these articles are about, well, other topics. Published Apr. 19, 2020  How One Early Tweet From Wuhan May Have Doomed the WHO OPINION TRUMPED UP Bill Gates is right when he says the world needs the organization now more than ever. But its reliance early in the pandemic on China's information—and lies—is shocking. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published Apr. 16, 2020  As Saudi Royals Sicken, MBS Takes on COVID-19—and His Rivals LOCKED DOWN AND LOCKED UP MBS has shown that he can adapt to the changing circumstances imposed by a global pandemic—while exploiting them for his own ends. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published Apr. 12, 2020  Meet the B.S. Artist Behind Trump's Miracle Drug  OPINION FALSE HOPE? Didier Raoult's a climate denier and was a coronavirus truther. That hasn't stopped the White House from embracing his sketchy studies into an anti-malaria drug to treat COVID-19. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY, ADAM RAWNSLEY

John Gregory Dunne, Magical Thinking, and Spectator Patriotism

This piece was published originally as a Shadowland column for Newsweek online, Oct. 11, 2005, but I cannot find a current link for it, so am posting the text from my hard drive:

Spectator Patriotism

            On or about Dec. 30, 2002, which was a day after we’d had dinner in New York and a year to the day before he died of a heart attack, John Gregory Dunne put a floppy disk in an envelope and dropped it off at the Manhattan apartment where I was staying. As happens, I misplaced it in my travels after that, and only last weekend did I find it and read the digital newspaper clippings he’d pulled together, which he’d talked about with so much excitement at our dinner.

            John was interested in patriotism. He was fascinated by the real substance of it, which he saw as diametrically opposed to what he called “the spectator patriotism” exploited by the Bush administration as it went looking for wars. There was something (it took a while for John to put his finger on it) in the fact that several people he knew had children on active duty: historian Doris Kearns had a son, John himself had a nephew, I had a son. We had people we loved in uniform doing what they saw, and we understood, imperfectly perhaps, as their duty to defend the values and the dreams that are the United States of America. But why were there so few from this circle of acquaintances if the cause was so great?

            John would rage. He was articulate and funny then and always, but such was his passion that I remember him as almost inchoate when he talked about the bastards who wouldn’t end their Global War on Terror, which was conceived in rhetoric and dedicated to their reelection, yet would send America’s sons and daughters on futile errands of suffering and slaughter. John said he was going to write a book about patriotism, but he had a novel to finish first, and then he died.

            John’s wife of almost 40 years, Joan Didion, has written a breathtaking book about John’s death, and the illnesses of their only child, who died in August, and the experience of grief. Joan’s book, called “The Year of Magical Thinking,”  has been reviewed widely and well, as it should be. (Robert Pinsky in the New York Times pointed out, rightly, that it is “not a downer” and parts of it are actually quite funny.) Joan sent me the galleys last summer -- Joan and John have been our friends since we met in El Salvador in 1982 -- and I read Joan’s book then in a single sitting, lost in a salt sea of emotion and memory. It is a great, great book.

            But it was John’s 1989 memoir, “Harp,” that I picked up to read again yesterday, trying to understand a little better the meaning of the newspaper stories on that long-lost floppy disk, and I wound up searching out on the Web the essays John wrote for The New York Review of Books about wars and soldiers and, yes, patriotism, in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001.

            John is mordant and funny. He grew up in a wealthy Irish Catholic family in Hartford and went to Princeton with Donald Rumsfeld, among others. When he graduated he wanted, somewhat diffidently, to try his hand at writing. But fresh out of his elite college, John was still uncomfortable with his family’s immigrant background, and very uneasy with the idea of Stanford Business School (which is what his family wanted for him). So he went into the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. As he wrote in “Harp,” “What I wanted most in life was to be an Episcopalian. What I became was a PFC in a gun battery in Germany.”

It was the 1950s. Neither John nor the United States was in a shooting war. He was a clerk, and the only death he saw was from a traffic accident during a drill. But his life changed. “Had I not been drafted, I almost surely would have remained what I had become – the quintessential Princeton prig.” (One does think of Rumsfeld.)

In the enlisted man’s Army, John learned what it was to be an outsider, alien to the world of relative privilege in which he grew up, and he would write about outsiders not quite like himself for the rest of his life. By the late 1980s, when John wrote “Harp,” he would cite the Duke of Wellington’s dictum that the armies that defeated Napoleon were composed of “the mere scum of the earth.” John lauded “the subversive brilliance” of “From Here to Eternity” because James Jones “understood that an army is predicated on class hatred; patriotism is only a convenient piety (‘all stuff, no such thing,’ Wellington said).”

But 15 years later, I think John’s sense of patriotism was more complex. He was looking for something “without tricks or hurrah,” as he described a U.S. Marine’s memoir of World War II in the Pacific. That campaign -- so long, so bloody, so deeply rooted in race-hate, fanaticism and atrocity  -- commands so little of our attention when compared with the relatively more civilized war in Europe. But the Pacific offers so many more lessons for the present and the future.

“When the country is once again unexpectedly at war,” John wrote for The New York Review of Books about four months after 9/11,  “the campaign in the Pacific is the model to keep in mind. It was a war of hate as this will be. The kamikazes were primitive precursors of those more technically sophisticated suicide pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more people in half an hour than the Divine Wind did when it sank and damaged over four hundred ships off Okinawa. 

 Patriotism is abroad in the land; in print and on the airwaves, men who were not inclined to serve as PFCs or platoon leaders in Vietnam talk about ‘taking out’ not only Osama bin Laden but any number of foreign leaders. Those who preen about ‘taking out’ have all the bravado of [an Ivy League lieutenant in a Marine mortar unit on Okinawa during the last days of WWII] who peed in the mouths of Japanese corpses.

“At a memorial service ten days after the WTC tragedy, I ran into a friend, another old Marine who had enlisted after Pearl Harbor and served in the Pacific,” John wrote. “Many of the mourners were wearing lapel flags or red, white and blue ribbons. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘patriotism is easy. It’s the war that’s hard.’”

A year later, as the invasion of Iraq approached, John was focusing his rage like sun through a magnifying glass. His targets were the armchair war-lovers in and around the Bush administration who seemed somehow unsatisfied with the Afghan victories and already wanted more war to satisfy whatever it was they thought America should be. By the time John reviewed “Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles,” the page was starting to burn.

“The volunteer military has always been most enthusiastically, even devoutly, embraced by those who would not themselves dream of volunteering – or of encouraging their children to do so,” John wrote, noting that only one of the 535 members of Congress had “an enlisted son in the Iraqi combat zone.”

“For interns at the The Weekly Standard or National Review, where the martial instinct finds its most insistent voice … the military ‘career path’ is not widely seen as a plausible future,” John railed. These “people with a fondness for the military search their memories and Rolodexes for someone wearing the colors other than the maid’s son or a limo driver’s daughter.” To defend their notion of a national cause they might cite “the historian’s son, the novelist’s nephew, the sons of both a retired columnist in San Francisco and a newsmagazine correspondent in the Middle East, the top aide to a senior Democrat, the conservative pundit’s boy,”

As John made sense of this small constellation of families in his circle who had children in harm’s way, including mine and his, he realized they could not and should not obscure the fact that these new wars were going to be waged, as the old ones were, mostly by people who had come from the powerless classes. Writing about football-star-turned-Army-Ranger Pat Tillman, whose example was used by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan as proof that “in this war, not only the sons of the poor are enlisting,” John asked “Who was the second NFL player to enlist?” (Tillman served in Iraq, then Afghanistan, where he was killed by friendly fire in April 2004.) 

            Those digital newspaper clippings that John dropped off at my apartment a few days after Christmas 2002 were all about the American military as it had become: a force of volunteer professionals and reservists who were trying to make sense of their lives now that the peace dividends of the 1990s were supplanted by the open-ended wars of the new millennium. “In many cases, the reserves and the [National] Guard offer a kind of military welfare, a second job with medical benefits and PX privileges for people unable to support themselves and their families with only one paycheck,” John wrote in May 2003. “The gamble is that any call to active service will be brief, and that their home-front jobs will be waiting for them when they return.” After the gamble in Iraq, of course, all bets were off.

            I do not know what John would have said in his book about patriotism. He did not know himself. “There are those of us for whom words have no meaning until they are down on paper,” he wrote on the first page of “Harp.” But I can guess from what he did put in print that he believed we, the people of the United States, should be entirely committed to a war or we should not engage in it at all. Yes, sacrifices should be shared. Yes, the sons and daughters of the rich as well as the poor should be put in harm’s way. Yes, taxes should be raised; gasoline should be rationed. Yes, we should fight to win, and as quickly as possible. And, no, Americans should not be called on by coddled elites to fight gruesome wars spawned by grandiose academic theories, then exploited by political cynics for electoral convenience. John might not have said it this way, but as I write the words on paper myself, it strikes me that true patriotism is about one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Endit

I've mostly been editing  stories by our great world news team. (If you're not a Daily Beast member, sign up!) But I did write one pretty good essay.

From BC (Before COVID-19) to the Roaring 2020s I particularly enjoyed writing this essay.  Travel Like a Snob with 'Brave New World' Author ARMCHAIR TRAVELER Many of us worldwide are stuck at home, which means it's the perfect opportunity to escape with a great travel book. Our first selection? Aldous Huxley's "Along the Road." CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published Mar. 23, 2020  The Coronavirus Crisis Tears Europe Apart at the Seams DIVIDED WE FALL As Germany imposes border controls, the gravity of the situation and the threat it poses to the EU are clear. The consequences on this crowded little continent could be fatal. FLORIAN ELABDI, ITXU DÍAZ, CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published Mar. 15, 2020  Europe Shocked by Trump Travel Ban: 'He Needed a Scapegoat' DESPERATE ACT The two highest-ranking officials in the European Union said Trump's decision was made "unilaterally and without consultation." CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published March 12, 2020 ******************************************************************* But mainly I have been editing stories focused on the spread of the plague. I would encourage you to follow developments large and small and sometimes even darkly amusing under the Coronavirus heading at The Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/keyword/coronavirus You can also follow my desultory Paris Lockdown Diary on Facebook and Instagram.   Copyright © 2020 Christopher Dickey, All rights reserved. You are receiving this because you were on my personal mailing list, and this is in fact a personal account. But please do feel free to "unsubscribe." Our mailing address is: Christopher Dickey 555 W 18 Street The Daily Beast New York, New York 10011 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Some useful coronavirus / #COVID2019 insights from The Atlantic and Bloomberg.Com

From The Atlantic - 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

COVID-19 is already reported to have killed more than twice that number [1,000 killed by SARS and MERS respectively]. With its potent mix of characteristics, this virus is unlike most that capture popular attention: It is deadly, but not too deadly. It makes people sick, but not in predictable, uniquely identifiable ways…the new virus may be most dangerous because, it seems, it may sometimes cause no symptoms at all….

The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, “Actually, let me start again.” So it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.” … Even with the ideal containment, the virus’s spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work.

Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”

From Bloomberg.com 

Coronavirus Mismanagement

One nasty coronavirus side effect seems to be that it makes government officials forget how to act. Like the bug itself, this epidemic of shaky leadership is spreading quickly around the world.

As with Covid-19, the clumsiness began in China, where authorities spent the contagion’s early days denying anything was wrong. They got their act together soon enough, enacting drastic quarantine measures, but too late to stop the disease. By then, the World Health Organization had caught China’s overly optimistic attitude. It still won’t call the virus a pandemic, though it increasingly walks and quacks like one. The WHO’s desire to mollify China, a major donor, and avoid a panic have outweighed its need to protect public health, writes Therese Raphael. It’s got to get its priorities straight.

President Donald Trump too has overindulged in coronavirus denialism, with optimistic promises his health agencies, and events, almost immediately contradict. He had a chance to get everybody singing from the same hymnal last night in a news conference, in which he could have reiterated that the disease isn’t the end of the world, while also urging Americans to prepare. Instead, he rambled and ranted at his enemies and gave Vice President Mike Pence the keys to Virus Busters HQ while immediately undercutting his authority, writes Jonathan Bernstein. It was not reassuring.

The administration does seem closer to embracing reality, at least, Max Nisen writes. But its messages remain too mixed, and there’s still not enough action being taken. The disease will quickly test Trump’s claims it’s all under control.

The real poster child for irresponsible coronavirus leadership must be Iran, though, writes Bobby Ghosh. Its deputy health minister, who was caught feverishly sweating on camera even as he tried to downplay the disease, infected who knows how many people all by himself. The regime has been too blithe about the illness; and given how widely Iranians travel throughout the region and the world, this carelessness is a global health problem. It probably won’t be the last.

Further Dubious Virus Response Reading: Hong Kong’s stimulus seems designed more to boost already overinflated property values than to fight virus effects. — Andy Mukherjee

Markets in Coronavirus

Stocks spent another day being slapped around by coronavirus headlines. All told in this sell-off, the major indexes have lost more than 10%, the technical definition of a “correction,” with the pain intensifying after news California is monitoring 8,400 people for the disease. This volatility is just going to be the norm for a while, writes John Authers.

John says these market declines are still orderly, but you can bet a certain president of the United States doesn’t feel that way. He probably agrees with Narayana Kocherlakota’s call for the Federal Reserve to cut rates immediately to fight the virus’s effects on sentiment and economic activity. It risks losing credibility otherwise, Narayana writes.

Ordinarily a rate cut, or simply the promise of one, would be enough to turn markets around. But in this case it would provide only temporary support, warns Jim Bianco. The market won’t truly bottom until it finally stops responding to negative news quite so negatively. And it won’t do that until we have a better handle on the scope of the crisis. And that could take a while.

Further Virus-Market Nexus Reading:

• Pandemic anxiety has turned safe-haven utilities stocks as expensive as tech stocks. — Liam Denning
• European companies were on shaky ground even before the virus, setting the stage for a market rout. — Chris Hughes

Affairs of State

Recent articles, from the assassination of Soleimani to the mysterious murder of JFK's mistress.

Affairs of State: From the Murder of JFK's Mistress to the Assassination of Soleimani The JFK Mistress Gunned Down in Cold Blood TIME OF ASSASSINS Among those haunted by the memory of President Kennedy's murdered lover, Mary Meyer, were the most powerful reporters—and spies—in America. What secrets were in her lost diary? CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published Jan. 21, 2020  This Is Trump's Benghazi Moment: 'It Doesn't Really Matter' OPINION NO JUSTIFICATION He railed at Hillary over her "What difference does it make?" snap. But the president's impatience on Iran and Soleimani led to his own insouciance about some serious matters. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published Jan. 15, 2020  Nuclear Threats From Iran and North Korea Grow by the Day DOUBLE TROUBLE By blowing away Soleimani, Trump wanted to show he is not a paper tiger. But his "disproportionate" actions may push North Korea and Iran to step up nuclear cooperation. DONALD KIRK, CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Published Jan. 06, 2020  Iraq Tells Trump GTFO After Soleimani Strike WAKEUP CALL Iran says it is done with the nuclear deal, Iraq's parliament voted to kick U.S. troops out of the country—and Trump is threatening a "disproportionate" response. ERIN BANCO, CHRISTOPHER DICKEY, ASAWIN SUEBSAENG Published Jan. 05, 2020  Why Obama, Bush, and Bibi All Passed on Killing Soleimani HELL NO The Iranian general was in American crosshairs before. But nobody could begin to be sure what would come next if Soleimani were killed, and no scenario looked good. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY, NOGA TARNOPOLSKY, ERIN BANCO, BETSY SWAN Published Jan. 03, 2020  U.S. Braces for Iran 'Counterpunch' After Soleimani Is Slain 'REAL JEOPARDY' The consequences may not come quickly or directly. But they could be enormous. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY, ADAM RAWNSLEY, ERIN BANCO Published Jan. 03, 2020  Saudis Put Khashoggi Murder Behind Them With a 3-Day Rave OPINION BEHEADINGS AND CIRCUSES Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman knows how to keep his people happy by eliminating—and sometimes terminating—opposition. Trump must be envious. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY