Urban beat: The Double-Edged City
Cities’ “interaction between people and economies” has always meant greater “exposure to deadly contagions,” Joel Kotkin notes at City Journal. That’s why “European and American cities” first started “building sewers and water systems, carving out space for parks and limiting the most egregious pollution.” Alas, “public hygiene and efficient governance seem less of a concern for today’s ‘woke’ progressives” in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. They’ve “allowed the growth of homeless encampments” that “endanger the public and may lead some to depart for safer climes.” If cities keep promoting policies that exacerbate the spread of COVID-19, they’re doomed.
Foreign desk: Don’t Repeat Obama Diplomacy
Joe Biden wants to “reassure” the Palestinian Authority, which still pays “salaries and pensions to terrorists and their families,” that “help is coming” if he gets elected, Jonathan S. Tobin thunders at National Review. The ex-veep’s policies, including opposing Israel’s annexation of West Bank areas where “hundreds of thousands of its citizens live” and “sending US aid to the Palestinians,” echo those of his former boss President Barack Obama — which didn’t get anyone to “budge an inch toward a peace deal.” While we can’t know if President Trump’s plan will lead to peace, we do know that Biden’s will “bring a rerun” of “past failures.”
Pandemic watch: Don’t Root for Florida’s Failure
All eyes are on Florida as it begins reopening, with everyone “watching to see whether cases and deaths surge there,” observes Bloomberg Opinion’s Joe Nocera. Unfortunately, “the partisans in this polarized country will be hoping to be vindicated by the numbers,” though “the notion that there is a blue-state and a red-state way of attacking the virus is absurd. The point is to beat it back enough so that something resembling normal life can resume.” Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “response to the crisis has been so thoroughly politicized,” but his focus on protecting the elderly has contributed to Florida’s “extraordinary” numbers: “In the nation’s third most populous state, fewer than 1,800 people have died of COVID-19.” “With the state’s economy at stake,” DeSantis “would be foolish not to attempt a reopening with the death toll so low.” Indeed, “Florida’s reopening is worth rooting for.”
Eye on 2020: Joe’s Co-President
“Joe Biden needs a co-president,” Daniel McCarthy declares at The Spectator USA. “Not just a running mate, not just a potential vice president,” but someone who can “be president-in-waiting” behind the 77-year-old — and “represent the future of the Democratic Party.” Biden’s “campaign is staked on the idea that America wants to turn back the clock and return to the pre-Trump idea of normal,” but “that’s hopeless: The 2020s are set to begin with a radically new relationship between the US and China, the world’s strongest military and economic powers, along with what may be the worst domestic economy since the Great Depression.” Instead of excluding “half the population” by promising to pick a woman, Biden should find someone who can “face Republican populism for a long time.” While the “Clinton-Biden, Schumer-Pelosi wing” of the party might win in November, “it’s already losing the future.”
Culture watch: Hold Off on That Pandemic Novel
At Literary Review, D.J. Taylor explains a “lesson of two world wars and the assorted national meltdowns of the past 75 years,” namely, that “fiction is no good in a crisis, resists being written to order, dislikes having to confront world events head-on and prefers operating by stealth.” The “most successful short-term responses to the Second World War,” for instance, “were filed by poets or reporters,” while “the great British ‘war novels’ took years, and sometimes decades, to complete.” It’s the same with politics: “Any fictional judgment” of President Trump or UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson “pronounced at this stage in proceedings is liable to be horribly premature, however satisfying to the wounded sensibilities of the person who writes it.” Such “torrents of unmediated fury” never succeed. “There are novels to be written about coronavirus, but they probably shouldn’t be written yet.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance
