Lights out again for a U.S. colonial fail | Will Bunch Newsletter

In a wild pre-midterm news cycle, it’s been hard to catch up to big stories like the Martha’s Vineyard migrant shenanigans of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The latest scoop — pamphlets with false info used to lure the 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers onto a plane — raises so many questions. Is there a world where this is not a political kidnapping? Where are the consequences for such an inhumane stunt?

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The whole world wasn’t watching Monday morning when the UK finally laid the late Queen Elizabeth II to rest as the only British monarch most of us have ever known, amid all the predictable pomp and circumstance that apparently serves as an irresistible sauce for American couch potatoes. But among the 3 million or so U.S. citizens living on the island of Puerto Rico, the Nielsen rating for the event was presumably close to 0.0.

Few if any of the TV sets on what’s essentially America’s largest remaining colony were turned on because the island’s fragile electricity grid had yet again suffered a catastrophic failure upon the arrival of Hurricane Fiona, which was a not-major (Category 1) tropical storm of the variety one can expect will strike a Caribbean island every few years. As I write this on Tuesday morning, no one knows how long it will take for power to be restored on Puerto Rico — it took a nearly a year to reconnect its last home after a major hurricane, Maria, hit in 2017 — or the facts on the ground, where floodwaters created by 30 inches of rain in some communities continue to rise.

For those here on the continental United States with loved ones on Puerto Rico, or who simply care about the suffering of fellow Americans, the irony that such a big story was completely ignored for hours by our TV networks for wall-to-wall coverage of a foreign monarch — who’d worked to sustain some remnant of her once-violent colonial empire, mimicked by our century-plus domination of this Spanish-speaking isle — was too much irony to bear.

“Folks, I respect the Queen as much as the next person,” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, the Nicaraguan-American CNN pundit and political strategist tweeted on Monday. “I offer my condolences to the Brits and all who loved her. But can I please get some news and footage of the effects of Fiona in Puerto Rico? For those who need reminding, they are American citizens in distress.” Several other leading Latino journalists weighed in.

On one hand, it’s mildly reassuring that the president this time is Joe Biden and not Donald Trump, who famously dismissed the post-Maria Puerto Rico both with horrific symbolic disdain — tossing rolls of paper towels at a roomful of survivors — but also a substantive response that was less than underwhelming, even as 3,000 American citizens died in a public health emergency that did not have to be as bad as it was. Although attending Elizabeth’s funeral, Biden was quick to phone the Puerto Rican governor and declare a state of emergency — offering hope this crisis will get better attention from Washington.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the wealthiest nation on the planet has had five years under two administrations from both major parties to fix the power-grid problems in Puerto Rico. Ongoing negligence has made this American soil resemble the underprivileged Global South in the inevitable moment when high tropical winds strike.

In the years before Fiona struck, Puerto Rico suffered from a perfect storm of colonial neglect. Some of this was the petty hostility of the Trump administration which restricted spending that Congress allocated. But the usual bureaucratic delays, sourcing problems, and political squabbles mean that less than 20% of the $28 billion earmarked for post-Maria recovery has been spent, and much of that went to debris clean-up or crisis solutions like generators, rather than the modernization of the grid. A decision to privatize electricity in Puerto Rico has so far probably hurt more than helped.

But this failure to fix the power-transmission system before the next storm hit echoes the so many times the American government has let down our largest territory, from its cruelly managed debt crisis to its lingering poverty. When will we acknowledge that these outcomes are inevitable under a system where more than 3 million people fill Washington’s coffers with tax dollars — yet don’t have a vote in Congress or a say in electing the president?

A much-needed conversation about the immoral implications of the British Empire — its economic exploitation, backed up by ruthless violence in colonies such as Kenya — struggled mightily to break through the non-stop praise of Elizabeth’s more laudatory personal qualities. Let’s hope that this new tragedy in Puerto Rico will remind Americans that our own shameful legacy of colonialism still needs to be resolved.

In the short term, Biden — faced with an epic number of front-burner fires to put out — needs to multi-task his overworked administration and speed up immediate relief. It’s also way past time to give our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico their chance to determine their own future as a free people.

Personally, I would love to see Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia become our 51st and 52nd states, but what matters is what the people of the island want to happen. Going into November’s midterm election, Biden and his fellow Democrats should promise to resolve this question for good in 2023-24, which means a majority of its Senate candidates must pledge to end the filibuster that now stands athwart progress. The reality is that our politicians probably won’t turn the lights on for Puerto Rico until we can power up their lamp of democracy.

Question: Where does saying “the pandemic is over” rank among the stupidest things Joe Biden has ever done? — Via Vance Lehmkuhl (@V4Veg) on Twitter)

Answer: Right at the very top, Vance. It reminds of the Frank and Nancy Sinatra classic, that “then I had to spoil it all by saying something stupid...” because in so many ways Biden has been on a roll lately, from canceling student debt to falling gas prices to his leadership in the Ukraine crisis. But his effort to add “ending the pandemic” to his achievement list feels absurd, on a week when a good friend in Delco tested positive for the first time and “long COVID” sufferers staged a protest outside the Biden White House. National case numbers have indeed dropped — finally — but deaths among the elderly and immunocompromised remain stubbornly high. There should only be one message on the issue from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Get the new booster shot — the best protection against hospitalization and death.

Not all trends are cool. Consider the new fad in the Donald-Trump-led extreme right-wing of the GOP — this weekend’s alarming spread of a new fascist style with raised right-arm salutes and the creepy use of quasi-religious theme music borrowed from the wackadoodle QAnon conspiracy theory. When Trump himself employed the music — based on a composition called “Wwg1wga,” an abbreviation of a QAnon mantra — at an angry, grievance-filled rally in Youngstown, Ohio on Saturday night, the world of social media lit up with news of his hard-right turn. But it turns out Pennsylvania, our own extremist GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, and his Christian nationalist allies were one day ahead of Trump.

On Friday night, Mastriano held a rally and fundraiser in Chambersburg — near his south-central Pennsylvania home — with Donald Trump Jr. as featured guest. But the sparks came when Lance Wallnau — a key leader of the New Apostolic Reform movement, the vanguard of the Christian nationalist agenda to smash the walls between church and state — fired up the outdoor crowd. He asked the Mastriano supporters to “put your right hand in the air on the count of three,” as almost all obliged, with many tilting their arms at an angle to create shocking images (shown above) too easily paired with those from Nuremberg in the early 1930s. Wallnau invoked the violent Civil War sacrifices a few miles away in Gettysburg — albeit against the Confederate uniform that Mastriano seems to adore — and concluded with a prayer borrowing from Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 address that “America will have a new birth of liberty.”

That moment made one thing clear: Mastriano — low on money and consistently trailing Democrat Josh Shapiro in the polls — is leaning heavily into Christian nationalism just months after he tried to deny to The Inquirer that the movement even exists. Wallnau — when he’s not making outlandish statements like calling climate activists “controlled by demons” — is the “thought leader” behind its so-called “Seven Mountains” strategy to make Christianity dominate American government and society. The willingness of the Trump and Mastriano campaigns and the religious right to embrace openly fascist symbolism like raised-arm salutes and the weirdness of QAnon is alarming but also more ambiguous in its meaning. It looks like the dominant wing of the Republican Party is morphing from a political party into a cult around personality and dangerous — and potentially violent — delusion. A Pennsylvania that once bragged “America starts here” suddenly feels like the epicenter of its dramatic climax.