The Monster Enters
"Dizzying... In Mr. Davis's account, the world ends in fire, and the next time is now."
- The New York Times (on Davis Ecology of Fear)"Mike Davis's The Monster at our Door...gives me everything that the news cycle doesn't: a sense of the interconnected forces and the history that set us up for what we're experiencing."
- novelist Molly Dektar in Vogue"[A] tour de force... Read Mike Davis new updated book before the monster rebounds and we spiral down again."
- CounterPunch"Provocative and controversial, as always, and a worthy addition to the literature of plague and pestilence."
- Kirkusabout the book
In this substantially expanded edition of his earlier book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis looks at the COVID-19 pandemic now sweeping the world. He sets the current crisis in the context of previous viral catastrophes, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago that sounded a tocsin, disastrously ignored by those in power, for today's devastating outbreak.
In language both accessible and authoritative, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today's viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.
About The Author / Editor
Read An Excerpt
THE APOCALYPSE IN SIX EASY STEPS
Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.
Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.
-President Donald Trump,
29 March, 2020
Someday - if and when we emerge from our pandemic fallout shelters - diligent journalists will reconstruct in detail Trump's craven abdications, tantrums, lies, and sundry high crimes and misdemeanors during this crisis. For now, it is possible to summarize the major factors responsible for the catastrophic meltdown of the federal response in the first three months of the pandemic.
First, there was no continuity of leadership experience from the Obama era or even from the first two years of Trump's presidency. In the last days of the Obama White House, the President's homeland security advisor, Lisa Monaco, invited her incoming counterpart, Tom Bossert, to co-organize a large-scale test of the country's preparedness to deal with a viral pandemic. She was concerned that all the lessons of the Ebola crisis were passed on to the Trump Cabinet and agency heads. "Crimson Contagion", which took place just a week before the Inauguration, was coordinated by HHS with the participation of a dozen federal agencies and twelve states. Its storyline supposed that an avian flu outbreak in China was brought back to the United States by tourists. The exercise revealed innumerable problems arising from the friction of competing agencies and officials as well as the cacophony of demands from governors and mayors. "But the problems", according to a New York Times investigation, "were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded". Amongst the participants from the new administration, in addition to Bossert, were Rex Tillerson, John F. Kelly and Rick Perry, all of whom reportedly accepted the lessons of the simulation. The White House did not, and by 2019 all of the leaders who took part in Crimson Contagion, as well as the author of the CEA report, had either resigned or been fired. The Trump administration is its own fifth column.
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The Monster Enters
"Dizzying... In Mr. Davis's account, the world ends in fire, and the next time is now."
- The New York Times (on Davis Ecology of Fear)"Mike Davis's The Monster at our Door...gives me everything that the news cycle doesn't: a sense of the interconnected forces and the history that set us up for what we're experiencing."
- novelist Molly Dektar in Vogue"[A] tour de force... Read Mike Davis new updated book before the monster rebounds and we spiral down again."
- CounterPunch"Provocative and controversial, as always, and a worthy addition to the literature of plague and pestilence."
- Kirkusabout the book
In this substantially expanded edition of his earlier book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis looks at the COVID-19 pandemic now sweeping the world. He sets the current crisis in the context of previous viral catastrophes, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago that sounded a tocsin, disastrously ignored by those in power, for today's devastating outbreak.
In language both accessible and authoritative, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today's viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.
About The Author / Editor
Read An Excerpt
THE APOCALYPSE IN SIX EASY STEPS
Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.
Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.
-President Donald Trump,
29 March, 2020
Someday - if and when we emerge from our pandemic fallout shelters - diligent journalists will reconstruct in detail Trump's craven abdications, tantrums, lies, and sundry high crimes and misdemeanors during this crisis. For now, it is possible to summarize the major factors responsible for the catastrophic meltdown of the federal response in the first three months of the pandemic.
First, there was no continuity of leadership experience from the Obama era or even from the first two years of Trump's presidency. In the last days of the Obama White House, the President's homeland security advisor, Lisa Monaco, invited her incoming counterpart, Tom Bossert, to co-organize a large-scale test of the country's preparedness to deal with a viral pandemic. She was concerned that all the lessons of the Ebola crisis were passed on to the Trump Cabinet and agency heads. "Crimson Contagion", which took place just a week before the Inauguration, was coordinated by HHS with the participation of a dozen federal agencies and twelve states. Its storyline supposed that an avian flu outbreak in China was brought back to the United States by tourists. The exercise revealed innumerable problems arising from the friction of competing agencies and officials as well as the cacophony of demands from governors and mayors. "But the problems", according to a New York Times investigation, "were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded". Amongst the participants from the new administration, in addition to Bossert, were Rex Tillerson, John F. Kelly and Rick Perry, all of whom reportedly accepted the lessons of the simulation. The White House did not, and by 2019 all of the leaders who took part in Crimson Contagion, as well as the author of the CEA report, had either resigned or been fired. The Trump administration is its own fifth column.