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Preface

When I tell you I’m Mexican, I’m pointing to the country that wanted me dead first. When I tell you I feel American, I’m telling you I often think about how I’ll die here. Sometimes, when we cite our geographies, we’re telling you what we survived and what is going to kill us.

— MISS JESÚS (2020)

LATE MARCH THIS YEAR, I’m lying on my bed gasping for breath, trying to catch up on the day’s deoxygenation, a plane slowly falling out of the sky. A half hour into the evening’s panting—and nothing so pleasurable as the noise implies—it’s a bit of a wonder that I am now what I study. I’ve got COVID-19 and in my lungs something whose ancestor circulated among bats in greater Yunnan, on the other side of the planet, maybe only the year before. Millions sheltering in place, our worlds are both smaller than at any other time in most of our lives and, with this specter from half a world away haunting infected and well alike, too large from which to hunker down. We’re more online than ever, seeing almost nothing of our neighbors, the busiest streets ghost towns to the end of the empty light rail line. Through May, before the revolt and demonstrations here in the States, our social geometries were folded inside out, with all the trauma of a snake whose live meal ate its way out into the clear.

Where did I pick up my infection?

Earlier in March, I traveled to a premonitory of a conference on racial injustice and health held in Jackson, Mississippi. I flew in to New Orleans a few days earlier—cheaper tickets—taking in a quiet night on the town I hadn’t visited in twenty-seven years. A career along the poverty line, this middle-aged man stayed at a youth hostel before taking a Greyhound north through a part of the country he hadn’t seen before. In the room with two bunk beds lay a European intermittently coughing out his guts. Maybe him? Yeah, a distinct possibility. Or was it in the movie theater a few days earlier in St. Paul when a stye suddenly struck me mid-reel? Or upon my return, at the community event in Minneapolis that a couple soon sick attended, later conscientiously announcing their infections, confirmed by what testing was then—and, ugh, is even now—only kinda available.

COVID-19 in the United States proved canonical. Pandemics slow and fast—HIV and H1N1 (2009)—typically get sucked into New York City early on before being blown back out to the rest of the country by way of the travel network, down a hierarchy of town size, economic power, and travel load.¹ New Orleans was one of the first struck post–New York.² I wonder if I did my part, transporting SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus, to Mississippi, seeding, as documented in other states, what wouldn’t be detected by the public health system there for another six weeks.³

Our airports and the high-end shopping there have been remodeled as cathedrals to the neoliberal sublime. American bus stations are more packing centers for delivering the poor and working class, making their way—I overheard several conversations in Nawlins and Baton Rouge—to sheltering in place with friends and family against bad partners and bad wages long before the outbreak. One man, just released from jail, with all he possessed in a brown paper bag. Another leaving a marriage for a job. At the other end of something of a spectrum, an oil rigger, chatting up a woman of a certain age, with cash enough to invest in house-flipping. People rough in manner but for the most part fine in spirit, however much any of us manifest our circumstances.

The bus drivers and the station clerks were nearly to a one Black. There were no supervisors on-site (and if could be helped, no cops). The Black working class run actually existing Greyhound on its own, getting various and sundry glitches worked out, including botched schedules and a bus that refused to start through the company smart-phone—high-tech supervision—to which it was slaved. The drivers proved both good-natured and broaching no bullshit. They assured their charges and admonished misbehavior. They steered their buses, machine and people both, to their destinations.

Out of New Orleans, I caught the surprises I planned. I saw cranes roosting on rebar in Gulf wetlands suffusing the concrete pylons atop which the interstate ran. A dilapidated bed-and-breakfast along the biomorphic landscape—“La Belle Maison”—swished by. The electrical grid hopped stanchion to stanchion until it disappeared into the fog of the sea. As if our mode of energy production was indeed infinite.

Jackson, named after the slaver and genocidal general, his statue only now to be removed from in front of City Hall, has been for decades running a center of experimentation in Black liberation. The history and the civil rights museums are stunning tributes to fierce resistance. I learned it was at the station our bus rolled into where twenty-seven Freedom Riders were arrested as soon as they arrived. A few years later an albeit titular Black Republic stretched over multiple counties in goddamn Mississippi. Today one can trace the through line not just for legal rights but self-determination and economic democracy to—in no monolith—Mayors Chokwe Lumumba and Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the Jackson-Kush plan, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization, June Hardwick, the People’s Assembly, Rukia Lumumba, solidarity economies, the Amandia Education Project, the Take Back the Land campaign, Operation Black Belt, participatory budgeting, Tougaloo Community Farm, Adofo Minka, and Kali Akuno and the inimitable Cooperation Jackson.⁴

Our climate and health team broke bread with another local group—One Voice. One of its projects pursues energy democracy.⁵ The rural counties of Mississippi are powered by energy cooperatives run by boards of good ol’ boys that pass on energy costs to poor Black majorities for as much as half of family incomes, while, among other egregious examples, wiring private schools for free. The One Voice project works out of a building in Jackson—1072 John R. Lynch Street—that was the heart of the civil rights movement. Everybody passed through: Kwame Ture, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and thousands of others. Fifty years later and the fight continues along these new-century axes. One Voice is supporting efforts to break these boards by getting Black people elected. Out beyond a radical Black-run state capital, where the Confederate flag flew at the governor’s mansion until only this month, secret meetings and shady deals churn apartheid onward, fought against by an organically organized people’s movement. As I offered to a colleague who lives in Jackson on what first appeared an entirely different topic—she was being stymied by a board at a local institution—many white people are terrified of Black excellence.

It isn’t all fried okra and barbecue beans. One night in town, I went to an emergency room to get my stye checked out. The bag beneath my eye was filled with fluid, an ugly red. As if someone had decked me. American health care is Second World for most. A Mississippi hospital, run well enough, felt another half-step down. We had to haggle with the ER computer whether my insurance covered out-of-state visits, as if my health stopped at the Minnesotan border. I played a loving prank I’ve taken up in the past couple years. I prompted the desk nurse, who had an accent that pinged between her Eastern European roots and down-home Mississippi, that this bureaucratic folderol would all go away once we instituted a national health service. Her face brightened at what passes for a paradise of a possibility for American medical staff. Upon filling my prescription, the nurses, kindly to a one, repeatedly warned me to avoid downtown at night.

Days later, back home in St. Paul, I worked hard through my characteristically slow starter of a COVID infection, the first twelve days one long pounding headache and intermittent dizzy spells. I was writing up some of the articles collected in this volume, all finished in the first half of 2020. As my health slowly deteriorated to frightening bouts of shortness of breath and an associated decline in executive function, my kid, at his mother’s, yelled at me through the computer to get my shit together and get some help. With the insidious infection bouncing between scary to whatevs, I needed the prompt. Landing one article on the publication tarmac, I unplugged out of my obligations to get my case checked out.

In a classic Minnesota evasion, the administrative assistant at my primary clinic refused to give me a straight answer over the phone whether my doctor would see me. Upon a decade’s experience in this kind of rope-a-dope, I figured she was refraining from giving me news she thought I didn’t want to hear. And it was certainly that. But the outbreak had broken all my pretense at coddling Jantelagen passiveness. It was my turn to yell. That I needed answers. That not giving them was hurting me more than the disappointment they offered. While I understand why I wouldn’t be seen—to keep the clinic from amplifying the outbreak—my doctor, whom I like very much, still owes me an explanation on the other side of the pandemic. Why would I ever trust their judgment again if they’re to put the system’s needs over mine? A lucrative contradiction beyond us both, tucked into American health care by design.

So I was to be diagnosed online. The first question asked me whether my illness was serious. I clicked “yes” and was bounced to a list of clinics (where I wasn’t allowed). It took me several times to realize I had to choose “no,” my illness wasn’t serious, to reach the COVID landing page. Upon cycling through a series of questions and waiting a day, a nurse practitioner, seeing neither hide nor hair (nor nasal sample), confirmed a diagnosis. No test. No antiviral. No masks and no gloves provided. No community health practitioner stopping by to check on me. Abandoned by modern medicine and the State. Of course, my initial anger was misdirected at the scheduler, born of fear and frustration of a frayed empire that felt beyond intervention. Was it any wonder I was thrilled when the corrupt Third Precinct was burned and looted across the river in Minneapolis two months later? Someone—a multiracial subaltern subjected to the worst of it—had hurt the system back.

I did remember I had an N95 mask somewhere in the back of the utility closet. I’ve been studying infectious diseases since my early days in graduate school. I’d been working on the new generation of threats since 2005, starting on bird flu H5N1. Over this expanse, I’ve had to learn to compartmentalize myself from the dark logic that pulses at the heart of capitalist land use and agricultural development, selecting, along its aggressively expanding gyre, for the most dangerous pathogens possible. Every once in a while, however, I’m shook by the reality behind the numbers and narratives dancing across my screen. The emergence of avian influenza H7N9 disturbed me enough to purchase the mask. So out-of-step Rob circa 2013 helped sourly vindicated Rob 2020. Just the kind of precaution the world governments, servicing first and foremost the very industries driving the emergence of these pathogens, offered only a desultory hand signal. Did it mean “a-okay” or “white power” or both? Dead epidemiologists played doctor the past decade, jet-setting about in that gesture’s negative space, rewarded for administering what, in actuality, was a grand fiasco. Not a-okay.

The collection here addresses the resulting COVID-19 outbreak in near-real time. Keep track of the dates of publication across a dilated duration, within which each week still seems a month, with new revelations about COVID-19 emerging on the daily. It’s surprising what twenty-five years of study can do to help prep one for such an outbreak. I had wired most of what was going on by mid-January. The first essay here reads as a veritable projection of what would indeed accrue the world over in the months to follow. At the same time, we can detect a shift in understanding across the pieces beyond assimilating new data. A broader conceptual framework now fits the strange menagerie of pathogens that have emerged this century, one after another.

The origins of the COVID outbreak are tracked over and again to their multiple moments of inception, starting in December 2019, yes, but also in and out of multiple biocultural domains, to capitalism and science more broadly and, without a whit of prepper snark, to the very beginnings of civilization. We end the collection in the bat caves of COVID’s proximate start, where many might think we’d begin instead. But there is much ground to cover first to get to the point of understanding on what the epidemiologists paid handsomely to investigate coronaviruses for the decade never bothered to check.

No one gets to walk through this in the clear, however, no one. We are all bonded to epochal failures in leadership and institutional cognition. What, for instance, was someone who had worked through COVID’s imaginarium early on doing flying a week into March? I too had been infused with a peculiarly American moment, wherein financial desperation meets imperial exceptionalism. I too had to travel for work and nothing was going to happen to me. It’s a fetish that working man George Floyd, who two months later died by a cop’s knee on a street corner in South Minneapolis I regularly travel, never believed for a moment that he livestreamed himself talking of the daily dangers of being Black. Nor did the series of “mouthy” Black detainees into whom Minneapolis police had paramedics inject ketamine, risking respiratory arrest under the cover of a Hennepin Hospital study. The greatest sources of U.S. wealth are the daily reenactments of the slavery and genocide and environmental decimation on which it was built. From the ritual murders of arrestees to forcing meatpackers back to work during a deadly outbreak, to risk, with COVID attacking our vasculature, blood chokes of their own. As if the country couldn’t recognize itself otherwise.

MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE to my co-authors, in alphabetical order: Alex Liebman, David Weisberger, Deborah Wallace, Luca de Crescenzo, Luis Fernando Chaves, Luke Bergmann, Max Ajl, Richard Kock, Rodrick Wallace, Tammi Jonas, and Yaak Pabst. To my colleagues at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps, Pandemic Research for the People, and Regeneration Midwest—Ann Wolf, Brian Rumsey, Carolyn Betz, Cora Roelofs, Etant Dupain, Graham Christensen, Jasmine Araujo, Jessica Gnad, John Choe, Graham Christensen, John Gulick, Kaare Melby, Kenichi Okamoto, Kim Williams-Guillen, Laura Paine, Laura Thomas, Meleiza Figueroa, Patrick Kerrigan, Ryan Petteway, Serena Stein, and Tanya Kerssen—thank you for the delightful collaboration.

To my Monthly Review Press compatriots Camila Valle, Erin Clermont, Fred Magdoff, Jamil Jonna, John Bellamy Foster, Martin Paddio, Michael Yates, and Susie Day, thank you for the thousand save-the-days so professionally delivered. To Ben Ehrenreich, Edgar Rivera Colón, Firoze Manji, and Mindy Fullilove, I am humbled by your reports back upon a first reading. The greatest of appreciation to Peter Cury for another excellent cover. And to all my friends online and off, my sincere gratefulness, with grandiose hat tips to Jonathan Latham for our discussions about COVID’s origins, Kezia Barker for early editing on the origins of ag disease piece, the Spirit of 1848 listserv for a first-cut critique of our bat cave ideas, and to Anthony Galluzzo and Green Boots for leads to exactly the story hooks I needed.

— JULY 2020