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Earlier this week, several members of the Florida Marlins, during a trip to Philadelphia to play the Phillies, contracted Covid-19 because of course they did; what was anyone thinking when they decided to shuttle athletes all over the country during a pandemic to sit in close quarters with one another and open up their immune systems to abuse? The whole matter was a galactic cock-up, which necessarily sent me on a search for information as to how it happened. I eventually alit on this deranged account at The Philadelphia Inquirer:
An apparent coronavirus outbreak was underway in the visitors’ clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park and the Marlins responded by asking their shortstop to determine if the game against the Phillies would be played.
“He’s kind of an unofficial team captain of our club,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said of Miguel Rojas. “He’s always texting the group and getting the feelings of the group. So when we’re dealing with situations or things, that’s usually who we’re working through.”
I read these sentences over and over again because I had to think that, at some point, they might start making sense. It sure looked like what was being suggested was that they outsourced their coronavirus decision-making process to a shortstop by dint of the fact that he was really super active in the group chat. Miguel Rojas: He’s the cutoff man for any epidemiological fly balls that come out of left field! I could not take my eyes off these paragraphs; I couldn’t get over the fact that when Mattingly offered this account to reporters, he expected it to completely make sense. |
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It, of course, doesn’t make sense. But in a way it does. One of the most underappreciated ways that powerful people can exert their power is to not exert it at all but rather create a vacuum into which other people tumble and end up having to take responsibility. We’re learning a lot of hard lessons about this phenomenon during the Trump era. It’s like we went to bed with an infrastructure dedicated to handling pandemics and an in-the-loop Centers For Disease Control and woke up to a woman raving about demon semen. I guess she’s in charge now? I guess someone had to be?
This is how you start the week hoping that lawmakers in Congress will get their act together and keep providing Americans with generous unemployment benefits during the pandemic, and you come to find out that this is how this critical matter is getting discussed:
“IT’S LIKE A GIRAFFE AND A FLAMINGO,” PELOSI said to the room, which included SCHUMER, White House chief of staff MARK MEADOWS and Treasury Secretary STEVEN MNUCHIN. “They’re both at a zoo. A dumb person may think they could mate for offspring. A smart person knows that’s impossible. That’s our bills. They’re unable to mate.”
SCHUMER compared them to dogs -- “a golden retriever can’t mate with a Chihuahua. You have a Chihuahua. We have a beautiful lion,” he said, according to multiple people in the room. PELOSI then helpfully reminded SCHUMER that a lion is a cat, so, no, they could not mate.
What is even happening? Who is in charge around here? These are questions that often have tough answers. A revolving door between Wall Street and our regulatory agencies swept a bunch of foxes into our henhouse. A square mile of lobbying firms stepped in to write bills for Congresscritters, who have to spend five hours a day phone banking for donor ducats. Many of the once smoke-filled rooms in Washington now linger with only the memory of smoke, of who was in charge. |
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| Meanwhile the invisible mechanics that govern our lives spin on, like processes that were set up by long-forgotten engineers to run endlessly in the background as everyone shrugs and says, “That’s how it was always done.”
I’ve been reading, for instance, about a looming eviction crisis, brought on by the widespread inability of renters to pay rent during the coronavirus pandemic. CNBC tweeted a helpful chart that documented “how the eviction crisis will impact each state.” According to their report, “An unprecedented eviction crisis will soon hit the U.S.,” which will “hurt some states more than others” but fall especially heavily on “African-American and Hispanic tenants.” It truly sounds bad! But then you start thinking, “Wait. What if we just ... didn’t evict anyone? What if we just chose to not make a terrifying pandemic worse? We could just ... not make the bad decision?”
And yet the headline says it’s looming; it’s a done deal. The news says it’s definitely going to hurt some states and some people more than others. But who decided this? Who was in charge of this? Are they still in the office? I just have some questions. Can you put me in touch with the person who runs this? I’d like to speak with them for a minute. I just want to clear this up. Please can I just talk to them?
—Jason Linkins, deputy editor |
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| As far as the new baseball season goes, Meredith Shiner covered Opening Day, and Nick Martin wrote about the disaster that followed. Grand opening, grand closing, shut it down. It may be a bad time to be the Miami Marlins shortstop—and a worse time, according to Kevin Mahnken, to be a Republican woman seeking office—but it’s a golden age for white collar criminals, as Ankush Khardori reports. You have a lot of things to worry about right now; why not take Walter Shapiro’s advice and stop fretting over Biden’s vice presidential choice? (It’s going to be Kamala Harris.) If you want to fret about something, fret about Congress’s unwillingness to confront surprise billing or hold Bill Barr accountable or how close they’re getting to pushing you off an economic cliff. Your damp president had another rough week: Matt Ford began the week noting that Trump’s greatest liability was just the bare facts of his own presidency and ended the week attempting to calm everyone down who got to panicking over Trump’s call to “delay” the election. As Osita Nwanevu noted, the fact that there’s an election season doesn’t really impact Republicans from an institutional perspective because they’ve essentially entrenched themselves into power and immunized themselves from electoral consequences. Probably the most shocking news from the Trump White House this week, according to Libby Watson, is that staffers in the administration finally figured out that we’re in the midst of a pandemic. Who knew? |
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