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      The American Century Ends Early

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      Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7 to discover that we, too, were “a giant insect” with “a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments” and numerous “pitifully thin” legs that “waved helplessly” before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say it: We opened our eyes and found that, somehow, we had become a giant roach of a country.

      Yes, I know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now in charge of the US and waving their own little limbs wildly, trying to do some of what needs to be done for this sad land of the disturbed, over-armed, sick and dying. But anyone who watched the scenes of Floridians celebrating a Super Bowl victory, largely unmasked and cheering, shoulder to shoulder in the streets of Tampa, can’t help but realize that we are now indeed a roach nation, the still-wealthiest, most pandemically unmasked one on planet Earth.

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      But don’t just blame Donald Trump. Admittedly, we’ve just passed through the Senate trial and acquittal of the largest political cockroach around. I’m talking about the president who, upon discovering that his vice president was in danger of being “executed” (“Hang Mike Pence!”) and was being rushed out of the Senate as a mob bore down on him, promptly tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

      Just imagine. The veep who had — if you don’t mind my mixing my creature metaphors here — toadied up to the president for four endless years was then given a functional death sentence by that same man. You can’t fall much deeper into personal roachdom than that. My point here, though, is that our all-American version of roacherie was a long time in coming.

      Or put another way: unimaginable as The Donald might have seemed when he descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to hail his future “great, great wall,” denounce Mexican “rapists” and bid to make a whole country into his apprentices, he didn’t end up in the Oval Office for no reason. He was the symptom, not the disease, though what a symptom he would prove to be — and when it came to diseases, what a nightmare beyond all imagining.

      Let’s face it, whether we fully grasp the fact or not, we now live in a system, as well as a country, that’s visibly in an early stage of disintegration. And there lies a remarkable tale of history happening at warp speed, of how, in not quite three decades, the USS Enterprise of imperial powers was transformed into the USS Roach.

      Once Upon a Time on Earth…

      Return for a moment to 1991, almost two years after the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union finally imploded and the Cold War officially ended. Imagine that you had been able to show Americans then — especially the political class in Washington — that 13-minute video of Trump statements and tweets interlarded with mob actions in the Capitol that the Democratic House impeachment managers used in their opening salvo against the former president. Americans — just about any of us — would have thought we were watching the most absurd science fiction or perhaps the single least reality-based bit of black comedy imaginable.

      In the thoroughly self-satisfied (if somewhat surprised) Washington of 1991, the triumphalist capital of “the last superpower,” that video would have portrayed a president, an insurrectionary mob and an endangered Congress no one could have imagined possible — not in another nearly 30 years, not in a century, not in any American future. Then again, if in 1991 you had tried to convince anyone in this country that a walking Ponzi scheme(r) like Donald Trump could become president, no less be impeached twice, you would have been laughed out of the room.

      Embed from Getty Images

      After all, the US had just become the ultimate superpower in history, the last one ever. Left alone on this planet, it had a military beyond compare and an economy that was the heartland of a globalized system and the envy of the world. The Earth was — or at least to the political class of that moment seemed to be — ours for the taking, but certainly not for the losing, not in any imaginable future. The question then wasn’t keeping them out but keeping us in. No “big, fat, beautiful walls” were needed. After all, Russia was a wreck. China was still emerging economically from the hell of the Maoist years. Europe was dependent on the US and, when it came to the rest of world, what else need be said? This was an American planet, pure and simple.

      In retrospect, consider the irony. There had been talk then about a post-Cold War “peace dividend.” Who would have guessed, though, that dividends of any sort would increasingly go to the top 1% and that almost 30 years later, the US would functionally be a plutocracy overseen until a month ago by a self-professed multibillionaire? Who would have imagined that the American version of a peace dividend would have been siphoned off by more billionaires than anyplace else on Earth and that, in those same years, inequality would reach historic heights, while poverty and hunger only grew? Who woulda guessed that whatever peace dividend didn’t go to the ultra-wealthy would go to an ever-larger national security state and the industrial complex of weapons makers that surrounded it? Who woulda guessed that, in official post-Cold War Washington, peace would turn out to be the last thing on anyone’s mind, even though this country seemed almost disarmingly enemy-less? (Remember when the worst imaginable combination of enemies, a dreaded “axis of evil,” would prove to be Iraq, Iran and North Korea, all embattled, distinctly tertiary powers?)

      Who woulda guessed that a military considered beyond compare (and funded to this day like no other) would proceed to fight war after war, literally decades of conflict, and yet — except for the quasi-triumph of the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — achieve victory in none of them? Staggering trillions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on them, while those billionaires were given untold tax breaks. Honestly, who would have guessed then that, on a planet lacking significant enemies, Washington, even six presidents later, would prove incapable of stopping fighting?

      Who woulda guessed that, in September 2001, not Russia or communist China, but a tiny group of Islamic militants led by a rich Saudi extremist the US had once backed would send 19 (mostly Saudi) hijackers to directly attack the United States? They would, of course, cause death and mayhem, allowing President George W. Bush to launch an almost 20-year “global war on terror,” which still shows no sign of ending. Who woulda guessed that, in the wake of those 9/11 terror attacks, the son of the man who had presided over the first Gulf War (but stopped short of felling Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein) and the top officials of his administration would come to believe that the world was his oyster and that the US should dominate the greater Middle East and possibly the planet in a way previously unimaginable? Who would have imagined that he would invade Iraq (having done the same in Afghanistan a year and a half earlier), effectively helping to spread Islamic extremism far and wide, while creating a never-ending disaster for this country?

      Who woulda guessed that, in 2009, in the wake of a Great Recession at home, the next president, Barack Obama, would order a massive “surge” of forces into Afghanistan, a war already eight years old? Tens of thousands of new troops, not to speak of contractors, CIA operatives and others would be sent there without faintly settling things.

      By November 2016, when an antiquated electoral system gave the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but put Donald Trump, a man who promised to end this country’s “endless wars” (he didn’t) in the Oval Office, it should have been obvious that something was awry on the yellow brick road to imperial glory. By then, in fact, for a surprising number of Americans, this had become a land of grotesque inequality and lack of opportunity. And many of them would prove ready indeed to use their votes to send a message to the country about their desire to Trump that very reality.

      From there, of course, with no Wizard of Oz in sight, it would be anything but a yellow brick road to January 6, 2021, when, the president having rejected the results of the 2020 election, a mob would storm the Capitol. All of it and the impeachment fiasco to follow would reveal the functional definition of a failing democracy, one in which the old rules no longer held.

      Exiting the Superpower Stage of History

      And, of course, I have yet to even mention the obvious — the still-unending nightmare that engulfed the country early in 2020 and that, I suspect, will someday be seen as the true ending point for a strikingly foreshortened American century. I’m thinking, of course, of COVID-19, the pandemic disease that swept the country, infecting tens of millions of Americans and killing hundreds of thousands in a fashion unmatched anywhere else on the planet. It would even for a time fell a president, while creating mayhem and ever more fierce division in unmasked parts of the country filled with civilians armed to the teeth, swept up in conspiracy theories and at the edge of who knew what.

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      Call it a sign from the gods or anything you want, but call it startling. Imagine a disease that the last superpower handled so much more poorly than countries with remarkably fewer resources. Think of it as a kind of judgment, if not epitaph, on that very superpower.

      Or put another way: Not quite 30 years after the Soviet Union exited the stage of history, we’re living in a land that was itself strangely intent on heading for that same exit — a crippled country led by a 78-year-old president, its system under startling pressure and evidently beginning to come apart at the seams. One of its political parties is unrecognizable; its presidency has been stripped of a fully functioning Congress and is increasingly imperial in nature; its economic system plutocratic; its military still struggling across significant parts of the planet, while a possible new cold war with a rising China is evidently on the horizon; and all of this on a planet that itself, even putting aside that global pandemic, is visibly in the deepest of trouble.

      At the end of Franz Kafka’s classic tale, Gregor Samsa, now a giant insect with a rotting apple embedded in its back, dies in roach hell, even if also in his very own room with his parents and sisters nearby. Is the same fate in store, after a fashion, for the American superpower?

      In some sense, in the Trump and COVID-19 years, the United States has indeed been unmasked as a roach superpower on a planet going to — again, excuse the mixed animal metaphors — the dogs. The expected all-American age of power and glory hasn’t been faintly what was imagined in 1991, not in a country that has shown remarkably few signs of coming to grips with what these years have truly meant.

      Centuries after the modern imperial age began, it’s evidently coming to an end in a hell that Joe Biden and crew won’t be able to stop, even if, unlike the previous president, they’re anything but intent on thoroughly despoiling this land. Still, Trump or Biden, at this point it couldn’t be clearer that we need some new way of thinking about and being on this increasingly roach-infested planet of ours.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      'A breath of fresh air': readers on women who changed the world in 2020

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      Amanda Gorman‘She was a breath of fresh air on inauguration day’She is a young, intelligent and brilliant woman who will accomplish great things for good causes such as feminism, [and fighting] marginalisation, oppression, racism, etc. Our world today needs women and men of this calibre in order to live better together. In this difficult period, with the Covid-19 pandemic, it was so wonderful to get a breath of fresh air on Joe Biden’s inauguration day, and the accompanying enthusiasm to maintain good mental and physical health. Young people, especially, need hope for a future that looks so bleak. Nicole Dorion Poussart, retired historian, Quebec City, CanadaGreta Thunberg‘She dedicated her childhood to defend this planet’She dedicated her childhood to defend this planet. She is still very young but knows how to address the public and express her ideas and ideals. I don’t know how she came to be so dedicated – it’s outstanding! We need people who can persuade politicians to do something and cut emissions, save our flora and fauna and the land.Australia could become a desert if we don’t do something about water and stop the multinational companies from making millions from destroying this environment. We have a beautiful country and lots of people I know want to keep it beautiful, but it is difficult. We need people like Greta – I hope she lives for ever! Nathalie Shepherd, 79, originally from Holland but living in Adelaide, AustraliaAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘She is a political powerhouse’AOC is a Democratic representative from New York’s 14th congressional district. She is a political newcomer and a rising star because of her popular democratic-socialist policies and ideas. It’s ideas like the “green new deal”, tuition-free public college, affordable housing and many more that have gained traction among the working class and future generations.Love her or hate her, you’ve got to admit AOC is a political powerhouse. She works tirelessly to amplify progressive voices that have been neglected by our government for decades. It feels really good having a member of the government actually care about the people rather than the handouts they receive from oil companies and evil corporations. Never has a member of Congress been so transparent and supportive of effective political reform. Abdullah Chaudhry, 19, student, Texas, USZelda Perkins‘She’s been really brave in speaking out against Harvey Weinstein’She has been really brave in speaking out about her regret around the NDA she signed [in 1998] after allegations against Harvey Weinstein, who was convicted of rape and sexual assault in 2020 and sentenced to 23 years in prison. Breaking the NDA, and the debate this sparked about how pernicious they are in enabling abusive behaviour to go unchecked, makes her a really important figure and unsung hero in the post-#MeToo landscape.She’s really committed and brave, and clearly not in it for the fame. She has articulated really well the hold that men like Weinstein have on the women who have come into contact with them, and why this is not just about Weinstein, but addressing a toxic power imbalance. Ruth, 45, LondonStacey Abrams‘She’s been nominated for the Nobel peace prize for her work in the 2020 US election’She is a US democratic politician, lawyer, author and voting-rights activist who played a significant role in getting the state of Georgia to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 US presidential election. She was also largely instrumental in ensuring that the new Democrat government had a working majority in the Senate by getting Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff elected in the runoff election that took place in January 2021. She has recently been nominated for the Nobel peace prize for her work in the 2020 election.In this time of political turmoil, I am inspired by Abrams because she has shown what is lacking in so many of our politicians in the UK and US – intelligence, honesty, bravery, transparency, decency, pragmatism, hard work and a wonderful sense of humour. She has shown that an individual can make a difference, and without cynicism. We should thank her, for we owe her a lot. John Glasser, 74, retired computer consultant, Tring, HertfordshireHannah Gadsby‘She touches on topics such as abuse and autism and puts them in easy words’She’s an Australian standup who has done two Netflix comedy specials. Her second one, which was released in May last year, was on her autism. It’s super-funny, but at the same time touches on so many important topics and subjects that are usually quite hard to explain. I’ve watched both her shows at least 10 times so far and I will probably watch them again at some point, because they don’t get boring.She inspires me by putting subjects such as abuse and autism in easy words and explaining feminist concepts so well. It’s highly educating and encourages me to fight my own feminist battles, to put my own struggles in words and explain them to others. I’m still much less agreeable than she is when I’m talking about feminism, so I hope I will be able to put things into words as lightly and at the same time convincingly as she does. Anna, Berlin, Germany More

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      Lindsey Graham: Trump may destroy Republican party but he has a ‘magic’

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      Senator Lindsey Graham has defended his refusal to abandon Donald Trump in the aftermath of the deadly attack on the Capitol, saying that though the former president has “a dark side … what I’m trying to do is just harness the magic”.He also said Trump’s continued grip on the Republican party could make it “bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.”The South Carolina Republican initially said the US could “count [him] out” from backing Trump after the riot but he quickly dropped any show of independence.On Sunday he was speaking to Axios on HBO at the end of a weekend in which Trump was reported to have told the Republican party to stop fundraising off his name and was also reported to be preparing to leave Florida for the first time since leaving office, to visit New York, his home city.Trump retains a firm grip on his party, topping polls of prospective nominees for president in 2024. He is eligible to run for office again because he was acquitted at his second impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the Capitol riot.Five people including a police officer died as a direct result of the storming of Congress by a crowd Trump had told to “fight like hell” in support of his attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden.Graham was one of 43 Republicans who voted to acquit.“Donald Trump was my friend before the riot,” he said, of a man who attacked him viciously in the 2016 Republican primary and who he famously said would destroy the party if he became its nominee. The senator pivoted once Trump took power, to become one of his closest and most eager allies.“I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot,” he said. “I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history. And we’re going to move forward.”Graham said the best way for Republicans to do that was “with Trump, not without Trump”.Jonathan Swan countered that Trump is “still telling everyone he won in a landslide”, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court and which has placed the former president in legal jeopardy.“I tell him every day that he wants to listen,” Graham said, “that I think the main reason he probably lost in Arizona was he was beating on the dead guy called John McCain.”McCain, an Arizona senator, 2008 presidential nominee and close friend and ally to Graham, never accepted Trump as the face of his party. Trump attacked McCain viciously, even over his record in the Vietnam war, in which McCain endured captivity and torture while Trump avoided the draft.Asked if he could afford to abandon Trump because he is not up for re-election until 2026, Graham said: “Yeah, I could throw him over tomorrow … I could say you know that’s it’s over, it’s done. That’s just too easy.“What’s hard is to take a movement that I think is good for the country, trying to get the leader of the movement, who’s got lots of problems facing him and the party and see if we can make a go of it.‘Mitt Romney [the 2012 nominee] didn’t do it, John McCain didn’t do it. There’s something about Trump. There’s a dark side. And there’s some magic there. What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.“To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and PT Barnum. I mean, just bigger than life.”Helms, a North Carolina senator who died in 2008, was a hardline conservative and segregationist, in the words of one columnist when he died, an “unabashed racist”. PT Barnum was a 19th-century businessman, politician, controversialist and circus impresario.Trump, Graham insisted, “could make the Republican party something that nobody else I know could make it. He can make it bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.” More

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      Biden officials visit US-Mexico border to monitor increase in crossings

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      The new US secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, led a visit by Biden administration officials to the border with Mexico on Saturday, amid a growing number of border crossings and criticism by Republicans that a crisis is brewing.Joe Biden has sought to reverse rigid immigration polices set up by his predecessor as president, Donald Trump, whose presidency was dominated by efforts to build a border wall and reduce the number of legal and illegal migrants.Biden has faced criticism from immigration activists who say unaccompanied children and families are being held too long in detention centers instead of being released while asylum applications are considered.The White House said last week Biden had asked senior members of his staff to travel to the border and report back about the influx of unaccompanied minors. It declined at the time to release details about the trip, citing security and privacy concerns.Mayorkas and officials including domestic policy adviser Susan Rice visited a border patrol facility and a refugee resettlement facility, the White House said on Sunday.“They discussed capacity needs given the number of unaccompanied children and families arriving at our border,” a statement said, “the complex challenges with rebuilding our gutted border infrastructure and immigration system, as well as improvements that must be made in order to restore safe and efficient procedures to process, shelter, and place unaccompanied children with family or sponsors.“Officials also discussed ways to ensure the fair and humane treatment of immigrants, the safety of the workforce, and the wellbeing of communities nearby in the face of a global pandemic.”An influx of people seeking to cross the border is likely to be a big issue in the 2022 midterm elections. Trump may use it to rally his base against Biden and lay the groundwork for a potential return as a presidential candidate in 2024 or as a way to boost a successor.“The border is breaking down as I speak,” Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, told Fox News on Sunday. “Immigration in 2022 will be a bigger issue than it was in 2016.” More

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      Fauci warns against lifting Covid measures but Republican states push on

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      The top infectious disease expert in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, has warned it is too early to end Covid-19 restrictions, despite Texas and Mississippi having lifted mask mandates and business capacity limits this week.States are easing restrictions after a drop in cases, though that decline is starting to plateau at a high rate of 60,000 to 70,000 infections per day.“We’re going in the right direction but we just need to hang on a bit longer,” Fauci said on Sunday, to CBS’s Face the Nation.Public health experts have warned that the US could undermine progress with vaccines and allow for thousands of preventable deaths by lifting restrictions at the first sign of improvements. More than 524,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US and January was its deadliest month of the pandemic so far.Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, said turning restrictions “on and off” risked another surge.“This is not going to be indefinite, we need to gradually pull back as we get people vaccinated,” he said.Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who advised Biden’s transition team, warned the US was still “in the eye of the hurricane”.Osterholm told NBC’s Meet the Press the situation appeared to be improving, but said he was concerned the B117 variant, which is 50% more infectious than other variants in the US, could create a new surge.“We do have to keep America as safe as we can from this virus by not letting up on any of the public health measures we’ve taken and we need to get people vaccinated as quickly as we can,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.On CNN’s State of the Union, the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, said he lifted restrictions in his state because of declining rates of hospitalizations.“Our objective in Mississippi has never been to rid ourselves of the virus … our goal is to make sure we protect the integrity of our healthcare system,” the Republican said.Mississippi has seen an average of 461 cases per day, down 17% from the average two weeks ago, according to the New York Times. There were 1,240 deaths from Covid-19 in the state in January, the highest of any month since the pandemic began. About 16% of residents have received a first vaccine dose.“The numbers in Mississippi don’t justify government intervention,” said Reeves, who encouraged residents to keep wearing masks in crowded settings.Other governors have celebrated their state’s mask mandates and said they will remain in place until there is a substantial improvement in infection rates.Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, told ABC’s This Week his state’s mask order was followed by a “significant drop in cases”.“We’ve seen it throughout this last year, these mask really, really work,” DeWine said.He said his state would drop health orders once it had 50 cases or fewer per 100,000 people for two weeks. Though rates were still high in Ohio, he said, the state’s vaccination distribution was getting better each day.“But as we’re doing that, we can’t give up the defense,” DeWine said.The dean of Brown University’s school of public health, Ashish Jha, said decisions such as those by Reeves and Texas governor Greg Abbott to lift restrictions could slow the process of getting life back to normal and put residents at risk of infection and death.“Given how close we are to the finish line, anybody who gets infected today and dies in three or four weeks is somebody who would have gotten vaccinated a month from now,” Jha told ABC. “This is why it’s urgent to just keep going for a little bit longer.” More

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      Donald Trump set to visit New York for first time since leaving White House

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      Donald Trump could arrive in New York City for his first visit since leaving the White House as soon as Sunday night, according to multiple reports.
      The former president was born in Queens and rose to fame in Manhattan but changed his primary residence to Florida in 2019 and has been at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach since leaving Washington on 20 January.
      After reports of a New York visit proliferated on Saturday, local station WABC-TV reported that police were preparing to increase security around Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The New York police department did not comment.
      Trump’s New York home was the subject of protests and a heavy police presence from the start of his run for the White House in summer 2015 through to the end of his term in office in the acrid aftermath of the 6 January Capitol attack.
      In July 2020, amid national protests for racial justice and policing reform, city authorities painted the words “Black Lives Matter” on the street outside Trump Tower. Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed to have “liberated” that stretch of Fifth Avenue. The mural was repeatedly vandalised.
      Trump was impeached for a second time for inciting the Capitol insurrection, in which five people died, as part of his claim that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court. He was acquitted, when only seven Republican senators voted to convict.
      He retains a grip on Republican politics, regularly topping polls of potential presidential nominees for 2024 but this week reportedly demanding the party stop fundraising using his name.
      On Saturday the New York Daily News quoted former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen referring to a gold statue which made a splash at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida last week, when he said: “The human Donald must … be put on display for the multitude of NYC followers.”
      In truth Trump remains a divisive figure in New York, a Democratic city, amid two investigations which have added to his considerable legal jeopardy since losing the protections of office. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr and state attorney general Letitia James are both looking into Trump’s financial affairs.

      Cohen is under house arrest in the city, completing a sentence for offences including paying hush money to two women who claimed affairs with Trump, claims Trump denied though he admitted knowing of the payments.
      Cohen has spoken to Vance. The Daily News said Trump’s visit would not be in connection with that investigation, which received a huge boost last month when the supreme court declined to block access to Trump’s tax returns and financial records.
      Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have also relocated to Florida since the end of their time in power, with Ivanka thought likely to mount a run for US Senate in the southern state.
      Trump’s own future in Florida has been called into question. Though he owns the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, a 1993 agreement says he cannot live there permanently. Last month the former president won favourable comments from the town attorney, in a hearing involving residents who want to hold Trump to that deal. A decision is due in April. More

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      Afghans dread the ‘danger hours’ as fragile gains of 20 years slip away

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      Ghazaal Habibyar’s trembling hand hovered over her mobile phone, unable to type the numbers. “I was afraid to hear bad news,” she recalls of that morning in Kabul when she heard there’d been an explosion close to her young son’s school.
      “Why should we have to choose between educating or protecting our children?” asks the 38-year-old mother of two – a former Afghan deputy minister of mines and petroleum. That day, her six-year-old son was sitting safely in class.
      This is how the day begins now in Kabul – the time of day in a time of war that is most worrying of all. Afghans call them “the danger hours”.
      “There’ve been blasts before me, and blasts behind me,” says 22-year-olduniversity student Sadeq Alakozai. “Every day we wonder whose turn it will be.”
      One morning, a magnetic “sticky” bomb slapped on a minibus took the life of a popular TV presenter at the same time Alakozai and his friends were driving to work on the same street. Another morning, a district security chief was assassinated in a blast so strong it flipped the police car upside down at a busy roundabout just before they reached the same corner.
      Afghanistan – map
      From 7.30am to 9.30am, when the diesel fume-soaked streets of the capital are choked with traffic as government employees go to work, is the time to avoid, if you can. Every day someone somewhere in Afghanistan is picked off: journalists and judges; civil servants and scholars; activists and academics.
      Many of the victims came of age in the two decades since the Taliban were toppled from power in the US-led invasion after the 9/11 attacks; their lives are being cut short as the last of the US-led Nato forces deliberate over a departure date and the Taliban boast of victory.
      The Taliban’s path back to power could either run through accelerating moves by President Joe Biden’s team to negotiate a political way out of war, or what many fear could be the most blistering of battles this summer in a country which has already lived through more than 40 years of pain.
      No one takes responsibility for this wave of assassinations. The Afghan government blames the Taliban. The Taliban accuse the Afghan government, which is also under fire for not being able to protect its people. And, in a time of rising insecurity and impunity, anyone with a gun and a grudge can exploit the moment.
      Many see a concerted campaign by Taliban supporters to kill off or frighten away what is described, in shorthand, as the “gains of the last 20 years”: educated, ambitious women; a vibrant media; an active civil society.
      “They claim these realities were created under the US military occupation and are like foam on top of water, which goes away as soon as you touch the waters underneath,” says Tamim Asey, a former deputy defence minister who now chairs the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul. More

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      'Talk to me': Molly Jong-Fast on podcasting in the new abnormal

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      Molly Jong-Fast has known great success as a writer but over the last year on The New Abnormal, her podcast on politics in the time of Covid, she has become both half of a crackling double act and an interviewer with a habit of making news.The double act formed with Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and the co-founder of the Lincoln Project who is now taking a spell off-air. The producer Jesse Cannon has stepped in but the interviews remain largely the realm of Jong-Fast.Years ago, Molly and her mother, the author Erica Jong, gave a joint interview of their own. Molly, the Guardian wrote, was “loud, arch and snappishly funny [with] the mien of a runaway train, words hurtling forth, helter-skelter.”It remains the case. Before the pandemic, she threw famous dinner parties which brought unlikely people together. Now a contributing editor for the Daily Beast, she throws politicians, scientists, policy wonks and comedians together on a podcast, a form of broadcasting well suited to pandemic life. Down the phone – or up it – from Wall Street to the Upper East Side, appropriately socially distanced, I appropriate one of her own ways to start any interview. A few introductory remarks, then …“Talk to me about that.”And she does.I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing“As you know, as someone who lives in New York, our lockdown came fast, and it came very profoundly, and we were locked down. Actually, it was this time last year. I had just come back from [the Conservative Political Action Conference] in Washington DC. As I was coming home, I got an email that said, ‘If you were at CPAC, you may have been exposed to a super-spreader, and you need to quarantine.’ So I actually called the school nurses at all my kids’ schools and I said, ‘You guys, what I do?’“Since nobody really knew anything about the virus, they said, ‘Look, you can do whatever you want, but we would really appreciate if you would just keep your kids home for two weeks.’ I was like, ‘Absolutely. We don’t know anything.’ As someone who is not a doctor but who is completely obsessed with my own physical health in a totally deranged and neurotic way, I’m proud to say I’ve worried about every pandemic that comes. I was worried about H1N1 before.“And you could see this coming. I have friends in Milan … You saw these stories about Milan, and you knew we were a week behind or we were two weeks behind. I had a friend in London … her mother had a fancy private doctor and the fancy private doctor would send her these letters about who was going to get treatment in the hospital and who was going to be left at home to die.“So I had a sense that that stuff was coming, so I really made sure that everybody locked down way early in my house. Then I had nothing to do.“So I said, ‘Let’s start a podcast.’ I had sort of been the driver behind it because I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing. But I’m always interested in what other people have to tell me. So … I get a lot from it.“Another thing about me is, besides being dyslexic and a horrible student, I have terrible, terrible ADHD, which has never been medicated. I don’t take medicine for it because I’m 23 years sober, so it just would be too complicated for me. And I’m a person who was, in my heyday, a terrible cocaine addict, so I would not trust myself for a minute with ADHD drugs.”I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we ge people and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh’Jong-Fast chronicled those wild years in two novels and a memoir about being the daughter of a writer who wrote a lot about sex. In the 1970s, her mum invented “the zipless fuck”. But I digress. As Jong-Fast likes to say to interviewees: “Continue.”“But I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we get these people, and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh.’ I’m like, ‘This is very boring.’ So I think that has made the pod good, because I do these interviews and I get very bored. Then I’m like, ‘Come on. Get going here, people.’”New Abnormal interviews are fascinating and often hilarious. That’s down to a mix of the ethics of podcasting, looser than for talk radio – as Cannon says, “FCC guidelines would never be able to handle what we do” – and the ethics of the Daily Beast, a New York tabloid in website form, pugilistic and intelligent, taking the fight to the man.Another Jong-Fast interview technique, very much in the vein of the podcast’s one beloved regular segment, Fuck That Guy, is to ask key questions in the bluntest way possible. Take two recent examples. To the White House Covid adviser Andy Slavitt: “Can you explain to me what’s happening with AstraZeneca, because that seems to me very much a clusterfuck.” To Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk, there to discuss Brexit: “What the fuck is wrong with your country?”What the fuck is that all about?“Well, as someone who was interviewed a lot when I was young and would sit through endless mother being interviewed, grandfather [the novelist Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus] being interviewed, always watching, I always think that the worst questions are the questions where you tell the person what you want them to say.“Look, I get it. I write things all the time where I want people to say stuff, but you can’t really get them to say it anyway … Part of it is I always think you should make it so they’re comfortable enough to really tell you what’s going on and to let you in. Also, I think they know that I don’t have a malicious intent. I just want people to see who they are.”What they are, in many cases after a year of lockdown, is suffering.“I had Mary Trump on the pod again today,” Jong-Fast says, of the former president’s niece. “She’s a psychiatrist, so she and I always talk about mental health because I’m just a sober person, and when you’re sober you’re always in your head thinking about mental health. We were talking about how we really are in the middle of this terrible mental health crisis, and everyone is just in denial about it.”Donald Trump has left the White House. The Biden administration is flooding the zone with vaccines. But we are still in the new abnormal.“I’m always surprised no one sees that. So it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t understand why I have a terrible headache. It can’t be because hundreds of thousands of Americans have died.’ So it is weird.”‘I wish we could get more Republicans’The New Abnormal has featured Democrats – senators, representatives, candidates – and bureaucrats and technocrats too. But in both the very strange election year in which the pod was born and in the brave new world of Biden, few Republicans have followed.“I wish we could get more,” Jong-Fast says. “I think I got one Republican guy who was running for Congress, but it’s not so easy.”That was John Cowan, from Georgia, who ran against Marjorie Taylor Greene and her racially charged conspiracy theories – and lost.“Yes, and he’s going to run again. He’s a neurosurgeon. I was thrilled to get him. But they’re not so interested in coming on, even the sort of moderates.”She does the booking herself, so perhaps Congressman Adam Kinzinger or Senator Mitt Romney might one day pick up the phone to find Jong-Fast full blast.“‘You are a fucking genius. Why are you so brilliant?’ I’m very good at schnorring people into doing things for me. I’m very able to just endlessly schnorr people. I think that’s key to getting the guests.”I don’t know what schnorr means.“It means you sort of just put the arm on people to get them to come on the pod. The guests are the big thing because the people who want to come on are often not people you really want.”A lot of listeners want Wilson to return. Jong-Fast, formerly an unpaid adviser to the Lincoln Project, calls him “a very good friend” but is uncomfortable talking about his absence from the podcast – which was prompted by allegations of sexual harassment against another Lincoln Project co-founder and reporting on fundraising and internal politics.Cannon calls Wilson “one of the most politically astute people in America” and “a genius”. And he may well be back, one day, to reconstitute the double act, the Florida Republican and the Upper East Side liberal lobbing spiralling profanity at the extremity, inanity and insanity of Trumpism and life under Covid-19.But it’s not all about fighting back.“I wish there were a little bit more good-faith want for people to interact with the other side,” Jong-Fast says. “Look, there are people on the other side, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are not good-faith actors, and you can’t even try. But there are people like Mitt Romney who, while I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, he’s a very good-faith actor. So I think there’s a real chance.”If you’re reading, Mitt, if Molly calls … pick up the phone. More