Dick Brass: How Americans Have Already Failed the Greatest Stress Test of Our Lives

OPINION

I was supposed to be with you, safe in Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand and well away from Donald Trump’s America. But I screwed up the plan.

Let me introduce myself. My name is
Dick Brass. And while I’m best known as a former Microsoft executive and one of the inventors of the spell checker, I used to be a journalist in New York City and editor of America’s largest newspaper at the time, The Daily News.

As a result, like most Manhattanites, my wife Regina and I were familiar with Trump’s stunts. We knew that his presidency would be a colossal train wreck. True fact: Trump got just 10 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton in Manhattan, where he lived the longest and was best known. Ten! If a candidate named Ebola Mussolini were on the ballot, he would get more votes than 10 percent.

So when Trump was elected, we quickly applied and were granted permanent residence in his wonderful country. But it took a while to get there and finish the process. We knew that all of our friends and family would come visit us … once. And then we would never see them again. When we were finally ready, the pandemic struck. The borders were quickly closed.

I imagined that in New Zealand, my new neighbors and friends would ask me to explain what the hell happened to America.

They would say: Why do 40 percent of you passionately support Trump? What about the armed anti-mask dudes plotting to kidnap a state governor? Why is the preeminent medical science nation doing so badly against Covid? Are you going to become a fake democracy, like Russia and Turkey? Will Trump lose, win or steal the election?
And she would please him the best she could. But since I’m here, thanks to my kind Herald editors, I’ll try to do the same from North Seattle.

These next few weeks will probably be a great journey. There is still a good chance that an explosive tsunami for Biden will force Trump to leave office peacefully. But Trump has consistently refused to say he would abide by the election results. He has worked hard to cast doubt on the almost non-existent voter fraud. It has deliberately spoiled the ability of the US Post Office to deliver our tens of millions of ballots by mail. He has told the armed militias to “stand back and stand by.” So if the elections are close, no one should be surprised if there is confusion, chaos and more than a little violence.

This would just be our local circus, if America’s footprint in the world were a little smaller. But if Trump remains president and the United States descends into full-blown “populism”, and a truly unpredictable or unsavory foreign policy emerges here, New Zealand and all our traditional friends will have to rethink their dealings with us. The truth is that they already are and have been for four years.

I am hopeful that we will come through, optimistic but not entirely sure. It is difficult to ask for re-election when some 225,000 Americans have been allowed to die from Covid, compared to fewer than 460 in South Korea and just 25 in New Zealand. The polls clearly favor Biden. But, on the other hand, America has already failed the biggest stress test of our lives this year.

Think of the virus as a stress test for the nations of the world, as 2008 was a stress test for the economy and banks.

People argue all the time about which nation is better. What has happier people or richer people? Which is more or less repressive? Which one is more or less honest and more or less democratic? The lists are compiled regularly and are read with enthusiasm by aspiring expats like us.

But it is usually a difficult judgment because all countries have good and bad episodes. Good and bad leaders. Good and bad aspects. But now, every country in the world is under roughly the same stress and challenge. And we can see which countries care more about money than people, which lie, which are cruel or crazy … and which ones act rationally, effectively, decently and compassionately.

And thanks to computers and digital statistics, the results can be seen not only qualitatively in the decisions made but also quantitatively in the number of cases, the number of deaths and the economic numbers.

So far, Taiwan, South Korea and New Zealand look bright. Singapore, Vietnam, Australia, Japan, Norway and Senegal look great. Germany, Israel and Canada look good. China looks much better than expected. Ireland looks better than England. England looks bad. And America looks like the ridiculous giant banana republic we have become.

Do we stay like this? To get better? Worsen? The next few months will tell the story.

Dick Brass was vice president of Microsoft and Oracle for nearly two decades. Before that, his firm Dictronics developed the first modern dictionary-based spell checker. He was also an editor at The Daily News in New York, where his frequent and terrible spelling mistakes led him to help create spell-checking software.