This Mess

They come out of the shadows to parade across our TV screens every night:  citizens of the United States flaunting stay-at-home orders and instead, packing bars, restaurants, beaches, parks and barbershops.  They march with signs that say “Restore our freedoms,” and “Make America Great Again.”  What they are really doing is courting Death, inviting him in, asking him to make himself at home.  Images across social media—the Grim Reaper at the beach; the virus personified as a human in costume looking for his next victim.

The reality will come soon:  resurgence of the pestilence and therefore, a spike in new cases and deaths.  China and South Korea have raised new alerts and are retesting their populations in response to a renewed outbreak across those countries.  The so-called second wave is coming.  We still do not know enough about this strange entity Covid-19.

 

Yet there they are, mocking those with masks who happen to walk by the bar or restaurant.  Finger-pointing, name-calling, drunk with spirits, arrogance and ignorance.  If only they were threatening only their own lives.  No, someone will have to take care of them when they become ill.  Someone will have to stand by, ready to haul their diseased corpses to the morgue and the crematorium.  Someone will have to clean up the mess.  The front line workers in hospitals and clinics will again be exposed and face their own illness and possible death.

In an issue of The New York Review of Books dated March 9, 2017, an essay by Nathanial Rich discusses Joan Didion’s then latest book, South and West:  From A Notebook.  Three years before the pandemic, and just a few months after Trump’s inauguration, he nails down the divisions we see in our country right now:

“Two decades into the new millennium, however, a plurality of the population has clung defiantly to the old way of life.  They still believe in the viability of armed revolt.  As Didion herself noted nearly fifty years ago, their solidarity is only reinforced by outside disapproval, particularly disapproval by the northern press.  They have resisted with mockery, then rage, the collapse of the old identity categories.  They have resisted the premise that white skin should not be given special consideration.  They have resisted new technology and scientific evidence of global ecological collapse.  The force of this resistance has been strong enough to elect a president.”

 

My fear is that the force of this resistance might be strong enough to reelect a president, one who has demonstrated no competence in the job for which he was elected, and has proven to be destructive to the stability of the country and the world as he has dismantled nearly everything that ever made America great in the first place.

More disturbing is his base’s reliable trope of armed conflict.  They see this as a new civil war, that somehow their rights are being violated because they are asked, for their own protection, to don protective face masks when they walk the dog, or to pick up their take out at the curb rather than dine in the restaurant.

And for their part, the president and his cronies in congress refuse to support small businesses and logical thinking.  The unemployment numbers, although frightening, will not improve if people are too sick to go to work.  One cannot return to gainful employment if she is dead.  Until we have a vaccine or pharmaceuticals proven to mitigate symptoms and get people well, we are only shooting ourselves in the foot.  Maybe that is the danger of showing up heavily armed to the statehouse to protest for alleged freedoms:  we might blow our own foot off while celebrating the Second Amendment and demanding the right to get infected.

 

 

The rage is puzzling as well.  Gavin Newsom in California and Andrew Cuomo in New York, to name two forward thinking governors, gain nothing by keeping people at home and out of work, except to flatten the curve preventing a spike in new cases and deaths.  Facing severe financial implications, governors may even lose their electability as they take these difficult measures.  They risk becoming the flashpoint for public anger when the child-like denizens of their states throw a tantrum because they have to wear a mask.

And then there is the thinly veiled racism that is the cancer of America.  I mean, really?  A black man jogging in his neighborhood is viciously stalked and gunned down by two white men who were not even arrested until word of the crime broke nationally.

Finally, there are the twin enemies of Trump from the moment he took office:  science and facts.  In the case of Covid-19, this takes the form of denunciation of leading experts in epidemiology.  This makes no sense as we continue to see great numbers of new cases and deaths every day in counterpoint to people protesting to reopen the country.  However, when the dead are those protestors’ loved ones and family members, then it is a tragedy; then it is a true injustice.

These issues are not unique to the time of Covid-19.  They have existed in America for a very long time; Trump simply played them up to win election and keep America riddled with cracks and fault lines.  He is the great divider-in-chief, aided and abetted by Mitch McConnell and his ilk in the Senate.  Covid-19 simply exacerbated the situation and brought it to a crisis.  This should be the moment Americans realize the fallacy of Trump intelligence and leadership.  Instead, people are digging in, reaffirming their support for someone clearly in over his head.

America is no longer the land of opportunity, the shining beacon on the hill.  We are running scared and turning on each other.  That is what the virus and the administration have brought us to.  We, like our president, are the victims of our own selfish ineptitude and dangerous narcissism.  That is the American tragedy.