Death by Dying

Death by Dying

“In cities where the newspaper staffing cuts have been the most severe, we found evidence of lower electoral competition 

for mayoral races in the form of more incumbent-only races, fewer candidates running for office, and larger victory margins. 

We also found suggestive evidence of lower voter turnout in cities with the most drastic newsroom staffing cuts.” 

Newspaper Decline and the Effect on Local Government Coverage. Published by the 

Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, University of Texas (Austin), November 2019

The above quote and chart defined the local newspaper landscape before the pandemic. The Internet, particularly by means of social media and online marketing/search, has long since devastated the business model for local newspapers. Even for those periodicals that have migrated entirely to an online presence, their value proposition to advertisers became diluted by alternative and usually more effective targeted ads. Further, the willingness of consumers to pay subscription rates also seems to have vaporized. Genuine small, focused and honorable (read: journalistic integrity) local newspapers and their online equivalents are simply dying off.

The ability to identify and investigate issues of local importance, which requires staffing, became seriously impaired when the required funding was no longer available. The inability to mount locally relevant, grassroots reportage has contributed materially to the political polarization that defines the United States today. The economic slam from the pandemic, the impact of social distancing and lockdowns on small local advertisers, has only made a bad situation so much worse. Now, prepackaged partisan news is spoon-fed to consumers who have elected to filter their media intake and have outsourced their opinions to “influencers” of like mindset, by forces with severe political agendas that are aimed at nothing more than garnering votes for their cause, regardless of accuracy or veracity.

Writing an OpEd for the December 4th Los Angeles Times, Sarabeth Berman, chief executive of the American Journalism Project (a venture philanthropy for nonprofit local news) reflects, beginning with the cost of COVID-19 on American Journalism: “ [Despite] the surging demand for news, the industry has continued to falter. Since the pandemic hit the United States, 36,000 newspaper employees have been laid off, furloughed or subjected to pay cuts. In many cases, advertising, the foundation of the traditional newspaper model, virtually vanished in the economic downturn…

“In the flood of disinformation filling the internet this election season, it was easy to miss [a] rapidly spreading phenomenon: partisan profit-driven websites putting out propaganda masquerading as local news… Across the country, more than 1,000 websites with the look of local journalism are publishing articles, ordered up by political operatives to cast a favorable or unfavorable light on candidates and issues. These websites, like weeds thriving in vacant lots, have grown to fill the void left by the collapse of local newspapers. Readers, eager for information, often can’t tell the difference because these sites are good at masking their purpose.

“In the last 15 years, according to a report by Penelope Abernathy, a scholar at the University of North Carolina who tracks ‘news deserts,’ more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have closed and 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were left without any at the beginning of 2020. Without local newsrooms, the basic work of reporting — gathering accurate information and demanding transparency and accountability from local governments and powerful business interests — vanishes.

“This loss directly imperils a functioning democracy, which requires an informed citizenry. In communities that have lost a local paper, voters become more polarized, according to a 2018 study by communications scholars. As voters rely more on highly polarized national outlets, they become less likely to cast ballots for candidates beyond any one party.

“The closure of news outlets also makes governments more wasteful; with nobody looking over their shoulder, local officials tend to drive up government wages, taxes and deficits, researchers from Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago have found. Conversely, access to reliable local news is associated with higher political participation. Towns with newspapers have greater voter turnout, according to a study led by Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist.

“The disappearance of local journalism has been particularly damaging this year. In the early weeks of the pandemic, news organizations reported spikes in traffic to their websites as people sought out information about COVID-19 and its effects on hospitals, schools and businesses. When protests against racial injustice erupted in June, Americans looked for detailed reporting on policing and criminal justice policies. This year’s elections, likewise, generated record traffic from voters seeking information.” 

Pandering has replaced neutrality. Making profits has usurped fact-checking and accuracy. And well-heeled political candidates and powerful agenda-driven mega-rich individuals and corporations – often completely unleashed and virtually unregulated by the abominable 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which even enabled “contributors” to hide unnamed behind Super-PACs – now can use massive funding from special interests to distort elections and political priorities. Even as social media giants tackle disinformation and truly toxic fake news, from accelerating take-downs to adding their own advisories, reality tells you that too many Americans no longer get their information from reliable sources, particularly local stories that can materially impact their lives and political choices. Partly because those reliable sources are gone or dying. Democracy cannot survive without transparency and accountability. Local news has always been at the heart of both those values.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the macro-issues are whether democracy can survive without truth and whether we can actually solve serious problems if they are misdescribed and marginalized to satisfy some greedy political or economic agenda that considers truth an inconvenience.

Healthcare: Redesign Required Hospitals – Phase One?

“A lot of hospitals have what I would call an edifice complex… All they want to do is build buildings.” 

Dr. Bruce Leff, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins for 25 years 

In this time of COVID-19, ask yourself how comfortable you feel, if you require treatment or surgery, with full hospitalization. Feel safe? And if you have ever been hospitalized, even in hospitals affiliated with a religious organization or those nominally defined as “non-profit,” what do you see when you get an itemized printout of services and medications provided? You may not examine the numbers if you are well covered with health insurance, noting that most carriers have seriously reduced pre-negotiated prices that you cannot get if you are an individual payor, but the costs far exceed staying in most five-hotel luxury suites. 

Just walking down the corridors of any major hospital, the cost-causes are obvious and massive – looking at the signs, the large dedicated sections of the building dedicated to incredibly expensive diagnostic and treatment-directed technology, operating theaters with ultraviolet cleaning systems, emergency equipment, monitors, oxygen and anesthetic systems. Computer systems everywhere. Expertise around every corner. Administrative staff and facilities to handle vendors, billings, payroll, etc. Add to that the real estate, from parking lots to the main buildings sporting the names of mega-rich donors insuring that they get extraordinary care if they or their families require hospital care. Multiple buildings. Money talks. Actually, it screams.

As our government chooses to deny ubiquitous access to healthcare, a right in the rest of the developed world (and much of the developing world as well), routine visits for check-ups and minor complaints, the stuff of family physicians, medical issues for those without coverage are automatically shunted to hospital emergency rooms. Profoundly expensive. Profoundly wasteful. But after all, in the United States, healthcare is a privilege until you are qualified for Medicare, which hardly covers what seniors really need across the board. No eyecare, no dental, no vision care, and lots of holes and missing pieces. 

Hospitals are not allowed to deny admission to people in dire need, but absent the applicability of Medicaid (not uniform since many red states refused to expand coverage), payment of the resulting invoice is the obligation of the individual admitted. Lots of medical bankruptcies, which leave hospitals with a need to raise rates for everyone else to cover these losses. We know that the only cure for most of this is full universal healthcare, which is not on any candidate’s agenda. Biden wants to expand Obamacare (the ACA) to cover more people, and, despite a pledge to produce a new healthcare plan that never happens (and has no serious GOP support), Trump is trying to extinguish ACA completely, an issue before the US Supreme Court.

Clearly, we are misusing expensive hospitals. This pushes costs up, up and away, making the average cost of medical care in the United States close to double what it is in Western democracies under their universal care systems. We pay absurd amounts more than those nations for prescription drugs, often multiples of the average costs outside the US. Obviously, there are vastly better ways to do… well… just about everything. For those who tell you that we have the best healthcare system on earth, that is true only for the rich or those with the highest levels of premium health insurance provided by high-end employers or unions with powerful negotiating power. The rest of us face mediocrity or less.

Do we really need to shunt so much healthcare directly into these monolithic mega-structures we call “hospitals”? The answer is a resounding “no!” We still have to get over rules and restrictions aimed at maintaining the status quo, but the time for change is… er… yesterday.  “Doctor Bruce Leff… argues that hospitals don’t have their priorities straight…  ‘A lot of the money that rolls into hospitals goes to cover the fixed costs of maintaining those buildings,’ he says.

“Shifting the finances back toward the patient has been Leff’s goal since the 1990s, when he began pushing for hospitals in the United States to consider a concept known as ‘hospital at home.’ Common in Australia and pretty much what it sounds like, hospital at home enables some healthcare services to be provided to patients directly in their homes, freeing up hospital beds for more serious conditions and bringing down the overall cost of care. ‘You’re not using the dollar to pay rent. You’re not using the dollar to finance the hospital bonds that went into buying the building,’ Leff says. ‘You’re actually using the dollar to provide patient care.’

“That approach is becoming increasingly appealing to healthcare systems. An estimated $3.6 trillion is spent annually on healthcare in the U.S., and more than $1 trillion of that goes to cover hospital care. Seeing room to bring that cost down and reap the profits, several hospital-at-home startups are now bringing this model to markets and patients across the country. They could revolutionize how hospitals provide care, and where.

“Twelve years ago, Raphael Rakowski was preparing to take a seat on the board of an academic medical center when his elderly father became ill and needed to be hospitalized. He ended up at the very medical center Rakowski was about to join. Sitting in his father’s hospital room, Rakowski, an entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience in healthcare, began a diary tracking the medical care being provided and the hospital’s workings—a kind of user’s perspective of the hospital he was going to help advise.

“Then something happened. A mistake was made—a medical error—and Rakowski’s father died. The sudden shock led Rakowski to look more deeply at the hospital and how it worked. One of his discoveries was that 68% of the cost of delivering care there went to brick-and-mortar overhead. ‘That led me immediately to the conclusion that 32% of the cost of care is inadequate to care for someone in an acute episode,’ he says. ‘I became obsessed with this idea of a bricks-and-mortar tax on services.’ He set out to get rid of that tax and learned about emerging hospital-at-home efforts being attempted by people such as Bruce Leff. Rakowski says he and a business partner, Rami Karjian, stayed up for two days drinking Diet Coke and making a list of all the problems they’d have to solve for hospital-at-home to work. They came up with 188. ‘Regulatory, structural, operational, clinical, legal, financial. There was no shortage of things that got in the way,’ he says. Gradually, though, he says they figured out how to address many of these barriers and launched a company now known as Medically Home, based in Boston, which uses technology to bring doctors, nurses, and medical equipment to patients’ homes, both physically and virtually.

“All he had to do was get hospitals on board. ‘I started going on a marched mission to convince hospitals to take patients out of their own hospitals, to care for them at home,’ he says. ‘And of course they’re in the business of putting heads on beds and not in the business of discharging patients, so it was a very, very lonely, expensive, and time-consuming effort to get thrown out of some very famous health systems.’

“But as technology improved, two-way video calls, remote monitoring of patient vital signs, and easily portable medical equipment such as electrocardiogram machines made it possible to provide more care more reliably in peoples’ homes. Patients who’d otherwise be admitted to the hospital for pneumonia or low blood flow related to congestive heart conditions or an infected wound can now be treated directly in their homes.

“Medically Home is working with healthcare systems in five states and will soon be expanding into two more. It’s recently partnered with the Mayo Clinic and is now operating in two of its markets, in Florida and Northwest Wisconsin. Using Medically Home’s technology, the Mayo Clinic can have its doctors make scheduled virtual rounds via video connections in patient homes, where a nurse or contracted paramedic is standing by to administer intravenous fluids or otherwise be the doctor’s hands. Vital signs are streamed directly to the doctor’s control center, and Medically Home’s software coordinates the delivery of medication or the scheduling of visits by specialists such as physical therapists. Unless the patient’s condition worsens to the point of needing to go to an ICU, nurses and other practitioners administer care based on the orders of the doctor. In the majority of cases, the doctor can guide treatment without leaving their office…

“A key piece of Medically Home’s model—and the model of other companies providing hospital-at-home services—is getting personnel, services, and equipment to patients as efficiently as if they were inside the walls of a hospital. Paramedic services are one solution. ‘We have paramedics everywhere in the country, and they’re dispatchable rapidly,’ says Rakowski.

“That’s the basis of another hospital-at-home startup, DispatchHealth. Based in Denver, the company operates hundreds of paramedic-style vehicles with on-call remote medical professionals ready to provide both emergency and ongoing care to patients in cities such as Seattle, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and smaller markets like Springfield, Massachusetts, and Spokane, Washington. In partnership with local hospitals and health systems, the vehicles can arrive at a patient’s home within an hour, carrying a suitcase-sized ‘moderate complexity lab’ capable of running blood tests, administering fluids or medication through an IV, treating shortness of breath, arranging for x-rays, ultrasounds, and EKGs— ‘basically everything in the ER, short of a CAT scanner, an MRI, and certain higher-level procedures,’ says Dr. Mark Prather, the company’s founder and CEO.

“Prather would know. As an emergency room doctor with more than 25 years of experience, he’s seen the gamut of what comes into a hospital’s emergency department…. “For 60% of what walks into an emergency room, this is actually perfectly appropriate,” he says… There are significant potential savings in treating patients at home. Prather says the average ER visit costs between $1,000 and $2,000. A little bit of that is the physician’s fee, and a lot of it is what we call the facility fee, or what the hospital charges. So if we could do this care for a couple hundred dollars, which is essentially what we charge, we could save five to six times on every single case,’ he says…

“But the hospital at home model still has one main hurdle: reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid. As of 2017, 58 million people in the U.S. are enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid, but those systems don’t currently have any way to fully reimburse healthcare systems for services provided in patient homes. Patients in the Medicare Advantage program and those covered by private insurance can often qualify for their hospital at home care to be reimbursed, but that still leaves a large chunk of the market—older Americans—out of luck.

“‘You have 65% to 70% of Medicare-eligible patients not able to access the hospital at home program, and those are typically the ones that could benefit most from this model,’ says Travis Messina, cofounder and CEO of Contessa Health.” Nate Berg writing for the September 8th FastCompany.com. And yes, there is a new generation of very portable x-ray equipment rising fast.

This tumultuous reality is the product of a healthcare system that just evolved, seldom with any central plan. Our starting point on costs, compared with the rest of the developed world, emanated from post-WWII realities. Our cities and infrastructure were hardly touched by the war, as so many other nations had to deploy money toward rebuilding. We built a consumer economy instead, with high growth industries and powerful unions pushing prices and salaries far above the rest of the world. And the cost of medical care. 

Well, we are all in the same economic boat these days, and we have to undo the bad habits of the past to evolve a medical system that actually works for most of us. Just think how much less COVID would have spread if groups of underpaid workers had had doctors to go to in the beginning. As late October showed the pandemic enter its second wave, with new US cases accelerating to the highest levels seen to date, the very future of generally available care is at stake.

I’m Peter Dekom, and myopic desires to “save taxpayer money” often result in vastly higher costs that far exceed that attempt to cut taxes… and are still carried by “everybody” anyway.

Toxic Individualism

We clearly don’t need courts to interpret statutes, regulations or the Constitution. We can cut way back on having police officers protect or control crowds. And doctors, university research facilities, government agencies aimed at protecting health, safety, and consumer rights are a total waste of money.  US intelligence agencies, federal policing authorities (ATF, FBI, etc.) are wasting taxpayer money every day investigating foreign interference in our elections or the non-existent threat of “domestic terrorism.” They know the immigrants of color are mostly criminals and deadbeats, so best to close our borders completely.

There are so many individuals, without any real authority, training or medical knowledge and experience out there who are somehow able to tell you without hesitation that they absolutely know that a government mandate to wear masks or close down a business during a pandemic violates the US Constitution. Their 2nd Amendment rights will allow them to control crowds. That the novel coronavirus is not much more than a bad flu, that we are almost over it and that China intentionally exported that virus to the rest of the world. They know that Russia did not mount a major campaign to spread disinformation during our election cycles. 

Each one of those positions is wrong, but a huge part of this nation continues under the belief that they are right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. Civilians with no legal education telling judges and specialized lawyers, people without a scintilla of medical qualifications, individuals with no access to the relevant underlying research contradicting experts based only on what they think should be. What’s worse, they act as they have the legal power to overrule the experts and act without any regard for the lives of others. Unilateral, private and unsubstantiated actions. Some have guns if you want to confront their ignorance. 

If you ask, they will tell you that they have an exceptionally reliable set of sources – from tabloid newspapers to so many stories online to information given to them by friends or generated by “opinion” television. To maintain the purity of their vision, they also filter out any nasty contradictory information as unreliable or biased beyond the pale of their credibility. These sources let them make life altering medical diagnoses on their own and issue and act on their own legal opinions without asking a court. And should you challenge their “opinions masquerading as facts,” they simply laugh at your idiocy and cite the greatest affirmation of their position possible: the President of the United States of America. QED.

Carolina Miranda, writing for the November 1st Los Angeles Times, addresses this seemingly uniquely American vision of Me, My Rights and My Individual Power that allows individuals to make major life and death decisions on behalf of others based solely on their unsupportable opinions, which she calls the “American myth” resulting in “toxic individualism.” Or what she describes as “The focus on individual rights over the greater good is one for which we are paying with our health and our lives.” The American collective, the notion of that United States where we are all in this together, appears to be unraveling.

“The summer has seen a cinematic array of meltdowns in supermarkets and restaurants across the country, all inspired by the simple request to wear a mask. A customer inside a North Hollywood Trader Joe’s threw down her basket and blasted frontline staff with obscenities. A woman at a New York City bagel shop stalked up on another customer and deliberately coughed in her face.

“And it has only escalated from there. In May, a guard at a Family Dollar in Flint, Mich., was shot and killed after telling a customer that her child needed to wear a mask in the store. During that same period, gangs of armed paramilitaries (calling them “militias” is too romantic) showed up at the Michigan State Capitol to protest stay-at-home orders and mask mandates — at one point, brandishing semiautomatic weapons inside government chambers.

“Much of it is fueled by the belief that these measures represent an undue restriction on individual freedom. Former San Francisco Giants slugger Aubrey Huff, responding to ‘soy-boy professors and the blue check mark crazy cat ladies’ ‘guilt shaming’ him for declaring mask enforcement ‘unconstitutional,’ said in a Twitter video: Just because others may be susceptible to the disease ‘doesn’t mean the whole world has to shut down.’ He added that he would ‘rather die from coronavirus’ than wear ‘a damn mask.’

“Never mind that if he does die, he’ll likely take others with him, since communicable diseases don’t just strike individuals. ‘The point is that masks do not just protect the wearer, they protect others,’ stated a Scientific American dispatch from May… We live in a culture of rugged individualism run amok. Call it toxic individualism. Because in the case of this pandemic, it is literally toxic.

“Example-in-chief: the Trump White House, where masks for long stretches of the pandemic have been a rarity and which may have been the source of at least one super spreader event in October (Rose Garden virus-gate), after which the president himself was hospitalized with COVID-19. When he returned to the White House, he proceeded to rip off his mask, action-movie style.

“Less than a week before the election, Vice President Mike Pence’s team is taking its turn at the virus wheel as the infection blooms among his staff… According to the continuously updated figures published by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, as of Wednesday, the United States is among the top 14 countries in the world when it comes to case fatalities from the novel coronavirus, and we are among the top five nations in the world when it comes to per capita deaths…

“[Where does this self-importance come from?] A good piece of it is tied to the cultural legacy of manifest destiny and the settlement of the West: the myth of the up-by-the-bootstraps pioneer who helped tame the uninhabited West in the name of the United States.

“Never mind that the land was already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. And never mind, as historian Greg Grandin points out in his book ‘The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,’ that the nation building was not the work of rugged individuals working alone but a lot of people working in tandem, with the regular support of the U.S. military and the U.S. Treasury — for what was, to put it mildly, a government handout on an epic scale. (‘What we think of as the West, since its inception, has been the domain of large-scale power, of highly capitalized speculators, businesses, railroads, agricultural, and mining,’ he writes.)

Even so, the mythos of individualism has infused both our culture and our politics… Herbert Hoover hammered the idea into the popular consciousness by popularizing (possibly coining) the phrase ‘rugged individualism’ in a 1928 campaign speech — in which he described a choice between ‘rugged individualism and a European philosophy of ... paternalism and state socialism.’ It was an idea that continued to be echoed decades later by presidents such as Ronald Reagan, who once quipped at a 1986 news conference that ‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ’

In culture, rugged individualism frequently materializes in the form of the solo cowboy: ‘The Lone Ranger’ popularized by ’30s-era radio, the westerns of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and the strapping Marlboro Man of cigarette advertising campaigns — a figure that the Economist once described as epitomizing ‘resilience, self-sufficiency, independence and free enterprise.’

Rugged individualism manifests as the solitary, sharp-tongued justice seekers of the 20th century — the early noir detectives, such as Carroll John Daly’s tough guy, Race Williams, and the self-absorbed Batman of comics and film. They are archetypes that, as literary scholar Susanna Lee, author of ‘Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History,’ noted in a recent essay, may make for great entertainment, but don’t offer great role models in a pandemic, when ‘a fully rounded human and worker among workers — able to tolerate discomfort and put others first’ is what we need… Instead, we have the opposite. Trump has shown zero empathy for the more than 226,000 Americans who have succumbed to the disease. At his rallies recently, he complains that all CNN does is talk about ‘COVID, COVID, COVID.’” Miranda.

Instead, the President appears rather nonchalantly to embrace obvious mythology and effectively infect and even kill his most ardent supporters. “A rigorous attempt to gauge the after-effects of 18 of the president’s reelection rallies, all held in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggests they have led to more than 30,000 additional cases and at least 700 additional deaths.

“Those casualties would not have occurred if the campaign events had not taken place, according to a team of Stanford researchers. Media coverage of the rallies made clear there was little effort to follow guidelines about social distancing, and mask use was optional for attendees, who typically numbered in the thousands. (Indeed, face coverings were disparaged by the president on several occasions.)” LA Times, October 31st.

While the 20th century Marlboro man pictured above was mostly killing himself, the 21st century mask-fighting equivalent isn’t content to die without taking a few others with him. The former notion of a selfless and bold rugged individual has collapsed into a widespread pile of unrepentant Trump-inspired narcissism. PS The COVID-19 virus thanks them all for the best feeding imaginable.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I continue to seek a good example where unbridled hubris has ever served any individual or nation well.

Religious Fever vs Free Speech

Mess with someone’s religion, decry their most fundamental beliefs, make fun of their vision of their God, and standby for rage, loud voices screaming and perhaps even ultra-violence and war. And so it was with France’s over-the-top, built-to-offend and self-described “irresponsible” humor magazine, Charlie Hebdo.  The magazine cover reproduced above is among the least offensive of their anti-Muslim jeering covers. Here’s how the Encyclopedia Britannica characterizes the magazine and its proclivity to insult and offend, one not well-received by the Islamic world:

“Charlie Hebdo had earned a reputation for satirizing everyone, and a statistical analysis conducted by the newspaper Le Monde showed that the magazine was far more concerned with French politics than with religion; it had devoted a mere 1.3 percent of its covers to the topic of Islam in the decade prior to the attack [see below]. Nevertheless, problems had arisen earlier. In February 2006 Charlie Hebdo reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had originally appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten. Such visual depictions of the Prophet were prohibited by Islam, which adheres to the principle of aniconism, the opposition to the use of icons or images to portray living creatures. The Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organizations sued under anti-racism laws, accusing the magazine of inciting hatred against Muslims. A French court ruled in favour of Charlie Hebdo’s executive editor, Philippe Val, stating that it was only fundamentalists, not Muslims in general, who were being ridiculed in the cartoons. On November 2, 2011, the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo were destroyed in a firebomb attack after the magazine announced a special edition under the name of ‘Charia Hebdo’ and named the Prophet Muhammad as editor in chief. Following the attack Charbonnier, who had taken over as editor of Charlie Hebdo in 2009, was placed under police protection.”

Fatwahs flew. “True believers” were called into action, even martyrdom. Britannica: “On January 7[, 2015] the offices of Charlie Hebdo were the target of a terrorist attack. At 11:30 AM Algerian French brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, armed with assault rifles, entered the magazine’s offices and killed caretaker Frédéric Boisseau. They then forced cartoonist Corinne (“Coco”) Rey to enter the security code that granted access to the second floor, where an editorial meeting was being held. The attackers stormed into the newsroom, and police officer Franck Brinsolaro, who had been detailed to protect Charlie Hebdo editor Stéphane (‘Charb’) Charbonnier, was shot before he had the chance to draw his weapon. The attackers then asked for Charbonnier and four other cartoonists—Jean (‘Cabu’) Cabut, Georges (‘Wolin’) Wolinski, Bernard (‘Tignous’) Verlhac, and Philippe (‘Honoré’) Honoré—by name before killing them as well. Their other victims were economist Bernard Maris and psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, both columnists for Charlie Hebdo, copy editor Mustapha Ourrad, and journalist Michel Renaud, a guest at the meeting.

“A police car arrived at the scene as the attackers were leaving the building, but they opened fire on the officers and were able to drive away in their own vehicle. While fleeing from the scene, the Kouachis stopped to kill their 12th and final victim, police officer Ahmed Merabet, who was on patrol in the area. After the terrorists abandoned their getaway car and hijacked another one, the police were thrown off their track, but an identity card left behind in the abandoned vehicle allowed authorities to identify the attackers. Molotov cocktails and two jihadist flags were also found.” France was outraged, and the French public rallied to support the magazine. Pledging not to be intimidated, a new editorial staff vowed to continue.

France has been at the forefront of banning trappings of religion in governmental buildings – like the traditional hijab worn by local French Muslim women. French President Emmanuel Macron has been viewed as the protector of the French secular value of free expression. Committed to revenge against the unwillingness of the French government to contain such “blasphemous” journalism aimed at the Prophet Muhammad, terrorist revenge has continued into the present. On October 29th, three more fatal stabbing reprisals occurred in a church in the French Mediterranean city of Nice.

“President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday's [10/29] stabbings were an ‘Islamist terrorist attack.’ Security is being stepped up throughout France… The 21-year-old Tunisian suspect arrived in the city the night before the attack, his brother told the BBC.

“Meanwhile, France's interior minister said more militant attacks were likely…  ‘We need to understand that there have been and there will be other events such as these terrible attacks,’ said Gerald Darmanin. ‘We're at war against an ideology, Islamist ideology.’.. Security has been increased at places of worship and schools across France following two similar attacks within two weeks. Earlier this month a teacher was beheaded in a Paris suburb after showing controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to some of his pupils… Mr Macron's subsequent defence of the right to publish the cartoons has stoked anger in several Muslim-majority countries.” BBC.com, October 30th.

Muslim demonstrators the world over, from Berlin to Dubai, rose in protest to Macron’s support of Charlie Ebdo. The October31st Associated Press reported: “Thousands of Muslims, from Pakistan to Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, poured out of prayer services to join protests Friday [10/30] against French President Emmanuel Macron and his vow to protect the right to caricature the prophet Muhammad.

“Demonstrations in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, turned violent as about 2,000 people who tried to march toward the French Embassy were pushed back by police firing tear gas and beating protesters with batons… Crowds of Islamist activists hanged an effigy of Macron from a highway overpass after pounding it furiously with their shoes. Several demonstrators were wounded in clashes with police, and authorities deployed more security forces to protect the embassy.

“In the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, thousands of worshipers celebrating Mawlid, the birthday of Muhammad, took to the streets chanting anti-France slogans, raising banners and clogging major roads en route to a Sufi shrine… In Multan, a city in eastern Punjab province, thousands more burned an effigy of Macron and demanded that Pakistan sever ties with France and boycott French goods.

“In Jerusalem, hundreds of Palestinians protested against Macron outside the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, chanting: ‘With our souls and with our blood we sacrifice for our prophet, Muhammad.’… Some youths scuffled with Israeli police as they exited the esplanade into the Old City. Israeli police said they successfully dispersed the gathering and detained three people.

“A few hundred demonstrators in Beirut flocked toward the Palais des Pins, the official residence of the French ambassador to Lebanon, but found their way blocked by lines of police officers in riot gear. Carrying black-and-white flags with Islamist insignia, the Sunni Islamist activists cried: ‘At your service, O prophet of God.’ Some slung stones at police, who responded with tear gas.

“Anti-France protests in Lebanon are an embarrassment for Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri, who is trying to form a new government that would implement a French plan for reform in Lebanon [as the Hariri begged the French for massive financial aid]. France, Lebanon’s former colonial ruler, has been helping chart a course for the country out of its severe economic crisis.

“A huge crowd of about 50,000 demonstrators also rallied in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, burning effigies of Macron and holding signs that read, ‘Say no to Islamophobia,’ ‘Stop racism’ and ‘Boycott French products.’ Authorities deployed hundreds of riot police and used barbed wire to cordon off the country’s main mosque.

“And in Afghanistan, members of the Islamist party Hezb-i-Islami set the French flag ablaze. The party’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, warned Macron that if he doesn’t ‘control the situation, we are going to a third world war, and Europe will be responsible.’” Perhaps the watchword for the beginning of the 21st century has to be “polarization,” so much of that rising level of angry schisms generated by religious fever. The rage between red and blue factions even in the United States is as much a battle between Democratic secular individual rights against a red wave of ultra-conservative evangelicals hell-bent on imposing their interpretation of the Bible on everyone under the mantle of statutory power. Finding middle ground seems to have become the impossible dream.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as if the fault line that streaks across attempts to contain the pandemic were not enough, the eleventh and a half hour confirmation of a religious fundamentalist to stack the US Supreme Court has become yet another blue vs red battle cry.