Category: COVID-19

MY LATEST LUNG BATTLE: GASPING FOR BREATH IN A WORLD GONE MAD

For months now, I’ve been ingesting a plethora of antibiotics and sucking relentlessly on a nebulizer tube, all in an effort to slay an intractable lung infection. Instead of the meds, maybe I should have followed the current cultural norm and gone after this bacteria with a brutal and debilitating social media attack. After all, the most popular road to conflict these days seems to be paved with verbal viciousness.  

(Please stay with me on this; a point is about to emerge.)

As Joe Biden would say, here’s the deal: A friend died recently. She was someone I worked closely with decades ago; someone I admired and respected; someone with whom I lost contact, except for occasional Facebook posts.  A text message from a mutual friend said she died of COVID.  Her obituary, however, was silent on the cause of death, noting only that the end came after a “hard-fought battle.” 

The omission struck me as ironic. My friend had been a journalist. She never shied from a clear presentation of the facts. Between a quick perusal of my former colleague’s old Facebook posts, and a story in the current edition of The Atlantic, I figured out what was going on.  

Her FB page captures the woman I remember from 30 years ago.  Retirement clearly did not extinguish her passion; it merely opened up new avenues for it. According to her posts, she was thoroughly disgusted with both political parties, thought Emmanuel Macron should be removed as president of France, and urged friends to “read more books and be nice to each other.”  

But here’s the kicker: There was also a small smattering of messages in support of the anti-vaccine movement. “Imagine,” one of them read, “getting four vaccine shots in one year and calling unvaccinated people crazy.” I hadn’t pegged her as an anti-vaxxer, but it wasn’t a total surprise. Her world view wasn’t designed for pigeonholes.  

Then I read The Atlantic piece titled, “People Are Hiding That Their Unvaccinated Loved Ones Died of COVID.”   It turns out there is a rabid army of anti-anti-vaxxers out there just champing at the bit to publicly curse the corpses of unvaccinated COVID victims.  

These fully vaccinated guardians of morality delight in mocking the deaths of anti-vaxxers. Imagine being consumed with grief while preparing to bury a parent only to be bombarded with messages like this: “Glad your mom died. Too bad she wasn’t vaccinated.” To avoid such abuse, according to The Atlantic, many families of deceased unvaccinated COVID victims are omitting the cause of death in obituaries and other public announcements. 

It gets worse. Hundreds of thousands of supposedly concerned and caring pro-vaxxers have taken to web sites to display screenshots of anti-vaccination posts from mostly ordinary folks who subsequently died of COVID (here, here and here).  Their deaths are mocked, praised and championed. One site posthumously “honors” each death with an award named after Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate who died of COVID shortly after appearing maskless at a Donald Trump campaign rally. 

In less than two years, this pandemic has infected more than 72 million Americans, killed more than 870,000 of us, and shattered the lives of untold millions.  We now add a new category to the box scores of devastation: Deaths Celebrated.  

Call me naïve, but I didn’t see this coming. Sure, our public discourse has degenerated into an ugly verbal food fight. Where we once valued serious debate and dialogue over conflicting issues, we now rush to social media with vile insults and threats for those with whom we disagree. As disheartening as that development has been, however, going from a poisoned thumb tweet about someone whose beliefs you dislike, to dancing on their grave, is one enormous jump.  I so wish we had not made it.

I did not crawl out of my convalescence for the purpose of defending anti-vaxxers. They are completely wrong on the facts. Their actions have hindered efforts to control the virus. That in no way, however, makes it right to mock their deaths and desecrate the grieving process of their bereaved families and friends. Death with dignity is woven deeply into our humanity. It is not contingent upon having the right beliefs.

For centuries, our culture has embraced elaborate norms aimed at respecting the dead and comforting their grieving loved ones. Seventeenth century English poet John Donne, in a far less gender-inclusive era, captured the sentiment well with his famous lines: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

Even in war, there is respect for the dead. The military in most western countries have elaborate rules for the solemn and dignified care and handling of the bodies of enemy soldiers killed in action.  

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church and its picketing of funerals?  Leaders of the small independent congregation believed that the death of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan were God’s punishment for the country’s tolerance of gay people.  As the caskets containing the bodies of dead soldiers were lowered into the ground, the Westboro crew carried signs denigrating the deceased.  There was unanimous – bipartisan and universal – shock and repulsion over this grossly irreverent taboo.  

Unfortunately, the Herman Cain Awards and their ilk were not met with the same reaction. They should have been. To celebrate anyone’s death, to inflict even more pain upon grieving families, rips at the very fabric of our humanity.  

And that diminishes all of us.

COVID’S LESSON IN UNCERTAINTY IS A HARBINGER FOR FUTURE PLANNING

This pandemic has not only taken close to two-thirds of a million American lives, it has also killed one of our most powerful life forces, the illusion of certainty.  Depending on how we play it, that latter loss could well offer a silver lining.

Think back to very early 2020.  The rhythms of our lives were as measured as the clicks of a metronome. Everyone was up at the sound of an alarm. Kids went to school; parents went to work.  Dinner was at a set time.  So was bedtime. So were the electronic payroll deposits, and the bill payments they covered. Sure, there were little surprises here and there, just to keep things interesting.  But, for the most part, there was a structured certainty to our lives.  Or so we thought. 

Then came COVID-19, updated a year later by the delta variant.  The metronome is silent now, while everyone – from essential workers to bank presidents, from middle schoolers to university professors, from bartenders to Fortune 500 CEOs – mourn the loss of what they believed was certainty. 

Quite clearly, COVID has two lines of attack. One comes through a deadly coronavirus that infects the body’s respiratory system. The other launches a brutal assault on the psyche. It infects the body’s equilibrium, diminishing or eliminating our senses of order, structure and certainty.  

Before you dismiss all that as so much overwritten hyperbole, take a look at a small sampling of news headlines from the past few weeks:

  • America’s Children Head Back to School Amid Growing Uncertainty. (U. S. News)
  • U.S. Mortgage Rates Fall Again as COVID-19 Delivers Yet More Uncertainty. (Yahoo Finance)
  • Uncertainty Is Back on Main Street as Delta Variant Rattles Reopening Plans. (CNBC)

On one end of the spectrum, is an unemployed single mother. She doesn’t know whether to take a new job, fearing that a sudden quarantine might close her 6-year-old daughter’s school without notice.  On the other end, is McKinsey & Company, the Cadillac of management consultants. From its recent client advisory:  “The COVID-19 crisis has undermined most of the assumptions of the traditional planning cycle. Meticulously prepared status reports are now outdated before they reach senior managers.”  

Everyone, it seems, is in their own individual hell of uncertainty.  And it’s about so much more than the efficacy of vaccines, masks, and social distancing.  Most of us thought we had a bead on the trajectory of our lives. It took a deadly pandemic to teach us what survivors of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires already knew: Life does not come with a warranty of certitude.   The axiom holds for people and countries.

In many ways, COVID has already shaken government and business organizations out of their cultural inertia and into meaningful change.  Before the pandemic, a $15-an-hour minimum wage was seen by the business community as a socialist plot. Many entry-level positions at restaurants and other establishments are now paying at least that much. Virtual “telehealth” visits between patients and medical providers exploded during the pandemic, and have become a significant component of our health care system.  There has also been a dramatic transformation of organizational structure built around the concept of remote work, all because COVID forced managers to discover that their employees could perform well from home. 

Comes now the potential silver lining, a long shot to be sure, but a very real opportunity to improve our lives. Ready?  We embrace uncertainty.  Once and for all, we rid ourselves of all spurious notions that it can’t happen here, that for all its foibles, the status quo is pretty darn good, so don’t mess with it. Put another way, we step out of our comfort zone, let go of our inertia, and build better a better life before a another crisis totally engulfs us. 

As the American Medical Association noted, our country was not prepared to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude.  Our illusion of certainty kept it off the priority list because nothing like it had happened in our lifetime, despite the warnings of experts.  

The same is true with climate change. A recent UN report called the devastating impacts of global warming unavoidable, with a small window to stop it from worsening. Scientists have been tracking this existential crisis for decades, with little to nothing in terms of policy changes.  The good news, says environmentalist Paul Gilding, is that things are so bad right now we will be forced to deal with the crisis. “We are slow, Gilding said, “not stupid.” The motto, sadly hopeful and optimistic, needs to be printed on our currency.

Then there is the matter of our democratic way of life. We were brought up to believe that our country was the envy of the world.  We wrote the book on democracy. We fought wars over democracy. It’s what American Exceptionalism was all about.  Yet, the majority of one of our major political parties still believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.  Some 147 Republican members of Congress voted against accepting the results of the Electoral College vote. Yes but, comes the certainty argument, Trump’s attempt to override election results was rejected by judges throughout the country.  Meanwhile, many state legislatures have passed, or are considering, bills, that would allow state officials to reverse election results on some of the same grounds those judges rejected last year. They would also make it more difficult for Black people to vote.  Alas, there is nothing certain about the perpetuity of American democracy. 

As a joke, I donned a MAGA hat back in 2015, saying to friends that I totally supported Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, simply because he could never be elected president.  Of that, I was certain. That’s why I am done with the mirage of certainty.  Horrible things we were certain could never happen can, indeed, happen. And have. To avoid, or mitigate against, future catastrophes, we need to be mindful, vigilant and intentional in our actions.  In a perfect world, we would have figured all this out earlier.  But it’s not too late.

After all, we are slow, but not stupid.

GOP QUEST: TO BELIEVE IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

Truth has long been an aspirational jewel in the crown of our democracy. 

Who would have ever thought it would lose its luster? Particularly now, deep into the Information Age. We have the technology to evaluate a gazillion datapoints in a nanosecond, but without fealty to truth those results have limited meaning.  This may be the saddest paradox of our times.

To be sure, truth is often illusive. It evolves with new discoveries and thoughts.  For example, caffeine’s impact on our cardiovascular system constantly vacillates between safe and dangerous, based on the most recent medical study (here and here). Many of us thought George W. Bush was an idiot until Trump came along and made him look like a Rhodes Scholar.  Yet, our one epistemological constant has been the value we attach to truth.  It’s what distinguishes justified belief from a convenient whim.

Unfortunately, we seem to be entering a totally different dimension, a bizarre post-factual space where truth is utterly without value.   

A few signs of life untethered to reality:

  • Rep. Liz Cheney was removed from her House Republican leadership position for saying there was no rampant voter fraud in last year’s election. The facts? At least 86 judges, along with Trump’s own Justice and Homeland Security Departments, completely rejected any notion of a rigged election.
  • Several House Republicans last week described the January 6 Capitol riot as an orderly affair. One said it was a “normal tourist visit.”  The facts?  More than 2,000 criminal charges filed against 411 suspects; some 140 police officers injured, many beaten with flagpoles and baseball bats; five people died.
  • Tucker Carlson told his Fox News audience that the “death toll” from COVID-19 vaccines is “disconcertingly high.” The facts: there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim.

Sure, politicians and political influencers have always lied.  Remember Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman. . .”?  Or Richard Nixon hiding the secret bombing of Cambodia?  Or Ronald Regan denying the Iran-Contra scandal?  The difference is that back then, once the truth was known, there was no sycophantic partisan chorus perpetrating the lie. Congressional Democrats in 1998 did not flood the Sunday morning shows with testimonials about Clinton’s deep and abiding commitment to marital fidelity.   

That’s when truth had value, and untruth was best mitigated by changing the subject and moving on, without relentlessly repeating the lie.  That is decidedly not the case today for many conservatives. This putrid pack of prevaricators seems to have traveled through Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass.  They, like Alice, were mentored by the White Queen on the art of believing “at least six impossible things before breakfast.”

It’s this obsessive drive to believe impossible things – more than the lies themselves – that is gnawing a hole in the fabric of our democracy. Congressional Republicans know full well that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but many of them cling to the public position of voter fraud to stay in Trump’s good graces, and help state legislatures to pass voter suppression laws. According to recent polling, however, a strong majority of Republican voters cling strongly to the belief that Trump actually won the election.  

Just a week ago, QAnon sweetheart and GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene began her speech to a packed Florida ballroom of the party faithful with this question: “Who is your president?”   

“Donald Trump,” they yelled in a thunderous roar, according to NPR. 

This malignant phenomena of believing impossible things has metastasized way beyond political rallies.  Take the pandemic, for example.  Trump knew in February of 2020 that COVID-19 was destined to become the most destructive virus to hit this country in more than 100 years.  But he lied, and said it was no big deal and would soon disappear. 

Months later, as the pandemic death toll climbed into the hundreds of thousands, acolytes of Trump and Fox News continued to view this coronavirus as a hoax.  They partied like it was 2019, disavowing any need for facemasks or social distancing.  Over the past year, news outlets reported countless cases of otherwise intelligent people insisting the virus wasn’t real, even as they or a family member took their final breath in a COVID critical care unit (here, here, here, here, and here ) .

Psychologists have long noted the tendency of some folks to deny the seriousness of a pending disaster as a mechanism for reducing anxiety.  Studies on the deadly 1918 flu, for example, cite instances of people referring to it as a hoax or treating it as no big deal.  However, the research shows far fewer instances of such denial, compared to our most recent experience.  

In 1918, of course, the country was deep into a world war. The only news organizations were newspapers, and they went along with the government’s request to play down the reporting on the virus in order to protect the country’s war efforts. John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the 1918 flu, The Great Influenza, noted in a recent interview with The New Republic that President Woodrow Wilson and other political figures remained virtually silent on the pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans.  

Now, take the prompt-free coping mechanism of denial, and mix in Trump’s goofy affirmations of the same. Then add a constant bombardment of hoax advocacy by Fox News and miscellaneous trolls. Stir well, and you have the official lethal stew of our current pandemic. 

This is what happens when millions of Americans insist on believing impossible things.  They snickered about the myth of COVID a year ago. Now, they heed the warnings of know-nothings like Tucker Carlson and popular podcaster Joe Rogan, and refuse to be vaccinated.  As a result, according to the New York Times, most infectious disease experts say we may never hit the level of herd immunity needed to eradicate the virus. 

Sadly, it will take substantially more than a shot in the arm to restore truth as the loadstar in our quest for knowledge. For that to happen, facts need to matter again. Fiction can be a wonderful escape while sitting on a couch on a rainy afternoon. 

As a governing principle, it’s a total disaster.

FREEDOM FROM MASKS: THE RIGHT TO INFECT YOUR NEIGHBOR

In the name of liberty, unmasked MAGA heads are freely emitting oral and nasal droplets of God-knows-what. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America. In this bizarre upside-down moment, a former germaphobe has used his presidential power to turn unprotected coughs and sneezes into acts of patriotism.  Mandatory masking, Trump argues, is an attack on liberty.

Speaking of liberty, do you think Patrick Henry would have worn a face mask?  He’s the guy who, in 1775 created the rhetorical predicate for the Revolutionary War with his “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech. It’s hard to imagine those infamous words being uttered behind an N-95 facial covering. So weak and low energy, as our Twitterer-in-Chief would say.

But little did Henry know that, 245 years later, his precious aspiration for liberty would be used in another lethal battle, this time to preserve the Republican right to forgo wearing face masks during the most deadly pandemic in a century. 

In a year overflowing with specious and spurious arguments, comes this granddaddy of insipidness:  In the interest of personal liberty, nobody should be required to wear a face mask in mitigation of a virus that has infected more than 8.6 million Americans and left more than 224,000 of them dead. 

Reasonable people can differ over the closing of schools and businesses.  But to the medical professionals and other scientists tracking this epidemic, there is no dispute over the efficacy of masks. They work. And they are becoming more essential every day. 

Despite Trump’s claim that we have “turned the corner” on this virus, we are actually moving into another crisis stage. There were 82,600 new cases on Friday, the highest since the pandemic began. More than 1,000 Americans die from this disease every day. Hospitals in 38 states are at capacity or near-capacity levels. Yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the virus could be brought under control in two months if everyone wore a mask. Between now and February, universal masking, according to another expert, could save at least 100,000 lives.

But there’s this liberty thing.  A quick sampling of GOP governors:  

Greg Abbott of Texas: “Requiring everyone to wear masks is an infringement on liberty.”  (Texas liberty fun fact: You can be fined for selling Limburger cheese on Sunday.)

Ron DeSantis of Florida: “(Masks are) a matter of personal liberty.” (Florida liberty fun fact: Women who fall asleep under a beauty salon hairdryer are subject to fines.)

Brian Kemp of Georgia, “(Masks) must be a personal choice, not a requirement that infringes on people’s liberty.” (Georgia liberty fun fact: It’s a crime to give away goldfish as a prize in BINGO games.)

Doug Burgam of North Dakota: “(Mandatory masks) are not a job for government because people have liberty.”  (North Dakota liberty fun fact: In Fargo, you can be arrested for wearing a hat while dancing.)

All of these red states have a plethora of laws regulating human behavior in order to protect the health and safety of its citizens.  Drivers there stop at red lights and obey speed limits, not out of personal responsibility, but because they don’t want to be fined. Stroll through their liberty-loving parks and you will see signs mandating “No Bicycling; No Rollerblading, No Skateboarding; No Loitering.” 

Yet, in the name of liberty, they will not post a mandatory mask sign that says “No Public Release of Potentially Infected Spittle.”  Encouraging the spread of a deadly virus for reasons of political expediency is bad enough. But falsely and shamelessly cloaking it in the garb of a noble-sounding political philosophy is about as low as you can get.  

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece this week under the heading of “How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?”  With tongue planted at least partially in cheek, Krugman suggested that this anti-mask liberty nonsense was derivative of the late conservative philosopher who advocated that selfishness was a virtue.  

There has been speculation that Trump is an Ayn Rand fan.  After all, she did create this sentence:  “Man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others.” It is hard to imagine The Donald as a Randian scholar – or any type of scholar, for that matter.  My guess is that someone might have highlighted that sentence and read it to him. Probably during a Fox News commercial. 

As we have learned these past five years, nothing with Trump is ever remotely profound, deep or even thought-out. This, I believe, was the impetus for mask liberty:  He needed optics to match his lie about the pandemic petering out. He got the word out to those GOP governors who think they need his blessing.  And they used the liberty gambit because . . .well, because they didn’t have anything else to justify their position in the middle of a punishing pandemic. 

Sadly, this approach has falsely and dangerously ignited a violent righteousness in whacked out and frequently armed ruffians who delight in defying mandatory mask rules at grocery stores, restaurants and other public places. There have been countless examples of low-wage workers shot or otherwise assaulted by these thugs asserting their Trumpian-blessed liberty (here, here and here).

The fact of the matter is that the concept of government imposing restrictions on citizens for the public good has been a pillar of democratic governance for more than 200 years.  Nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, an advocate of individual freedom, once wrote, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”  The U.S. Supreme Court, in a long line of mandatory vaccine cases, has upheld the same principle. 

Patrick Henry would have shuddered at the notion that liberty means allowing people to freely disperse their droplets during a deadly pandemic.  Yet, for those unmasked Trumpian warriors who insist on baring their full faces in every crowd, a simple conjunctive change in Henry’s memorable line would cover them.  It is this:

Give me liberty, or and give me death.  

KING DONALD AND COVID: WHERE IS SHAKESPEARE WHEN WE NEED HIM?

Out there in some afterlife, is a very frustrated William Shakespeare begging for a chance to write and produce a play based on America’s 2020 presidential election. Think of it: King Donald The Maskless, shaping an entire campaign around the denial of a plague, and then being stricken by it just as voting begins. 

Americans aren’t used to presidential elections with this kind of high drama and daring plot twists.  We’re much more accustomed to Al Gore and his demand to put “Social Security in a lock box,” or George H.W. Bush’s cry of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” or, Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in.”  

It’s hard for us to wrap our weary heads around such a diabolical storyline: An accidental and bombastic king is so taken with himself that he repeatedly tells the citizenry to ignore talk of a disease infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. He says it will all go away soon.  And then the virus suddenly swoops in and attaches itself to him, capturing not only his body but also his fate. 

Oh, what the Bard could have done with this material!  He was the master of plot twists and iconic irony.  In Henry V, for example, Shakespeare had the King of France send a crate of tennis balls to the young Henry as he assumed England’s throne. The gift was intended to mock him for his carefree, pleasure-seeking ways. Unamused, Henry upped his game from tennis balls to cannonballs, with which the military used to invade France in an epic battle. To top it off, Henry married the French princess, his adversary’s daughter.  

In The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus, a Macedonian king, was traveling with his infant daughter. He tells the audience that a vision appeared to him in a dream and warned him that he would never see his home or his wife again. Antigonus laid his daughter down in the woods.  As he walked away, a bear attacked and killed him. Soon a shepherd and his son, a clown, found the abandoned baby. They vowed to raise the child themselves.  Really.

In Shakespeare’s storytelling, events follow a karmic pattern of actions begetting reactions, of causes and effects colliding on a sometimes slippery slope.  The playwright would have been fascinated with the Donald Trump character, a rude, profane elite wannabe, born to aristocratic, emotionally sterile parents. 

Think about it.  Here’s this 74-year-old orange-tinted man-child, the most unpresidential of presidents, the product of an election he was not supposed to win.  All he really wanted was to pump up his brand a bit so he could sell more condos, steaks, bottled water and neckties. He billed himself as a business genius who, alone, would solve all of our problems.  In truth, he was deep in debt and badly needed to hawk more stuff.  He saw a presidential campaign as a road to two riches that had always eluded him: financial stability and an adoring fan base. 

As we work our way through the final act of this tragedy, King Donald’s election opponent is technically Joe Biden.  But the King’s real foe is COVID-19.  Right now, the battle between the two of them is both actual and metaphorical.  

Although Trump knew since February how lethal this virus is, he kept telling his kingdom that it was nothing to worry about. Even as the pandemic shook every corner and cranny of this country, leaving behind a terrorized trail of loss and raw fear, the president, rather than managing the disaster, continually minimized the virus. Just a week ago, with 7 million Americans infected and more than 200,000 dead,  King Donald insisted that this disease “affects virtually nobody.”

And then, just a few days later, he got it.  The “harmless” virus invaded Trump’s body.  It also infected a growing list of GOP office holders and staff who had earlier gathered – maskless  – in a Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.  Right now, there is nothing in this world that affects Donald Trump’s future more than this novel coronavirus.

Shakespeare’s fascination with this development would hold regardless of the outcome of Trump’s disease. The conflict is not one of life and death. Instead, it’s about a powerful ruler’s battle between truth and deceit, between science and the will of a fool. 

This president constructs his own reality to please himself and his loyal fans.  He insisted Hilary Clinton was a crook, and his fans chanted “lock her up.”  He claimed caravans of violent migrants were invading our border, and his fans grabbed their guns and headed south. He says the Democrats have rigged the election against him, and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist, white supremacist group, is “standing by.”

That Donald Trump has desecrated all notions of truth is no longer in dispute.  According to the Washington Post, his current average is 23 falsehoods a day.  The culture of deceit in this White House is so deep that the first 48 hours after Trump was hospitalized were dominated by false and conflicting reports on his condition. Not only that, but there has been widespread speculation on the left that Trump is lying about having COVID in an attempt to move his poll numbers.  What else could we expect from a fact-free administration?

Science, however, does not lie.  For all of the 7.6 million Americans infected with this virus, including the 210,000 who died, there are tens of millions more – family members, friends and neighbors – who know first-hand how real and how devastating this disease in.  They also know how wrong Trump was when he tweeted from his hospital bed: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”  In this bizarre election drama, those are merely sad, close-to-final lines of a sick man and a failing candidate.

What would Shakespeare think of it all?  Well, he gave us a hint in the second act of Measure For Measure:

“. . . proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”

AMERICA THE UNEXCEPTIONAL

As we bury our COVID-19 dead, let us dig the deepest grave of all for the only victim that deserved to die:  American exceptionalism.  

For more than 200 years, we have clung to the dangerously delusional notion that our country is vastly superior to all other nations. The myth of American exceptionalism has found its way into every Fourth of July parade, every Veterans Day memorial, every politician’s rhetorical flourish.

Ronald Reagan called America a “shining city on a hill.”  Thomas Jefferson referred to it as the world’s “empire of liberty.”  Abraham Lincoln said it was the “last best hope of earth.” 

And then came the Great Trump Pandemic of 2020.  The president spent months dismissing the approaching plague as a “Chinese virus” that would pose no problem for Americans.  Despite his rosy, it’s-nothing-to-worry-about prognosis, the White House, according to the New York Times, knew in January that the coronavirus would strike us so hard that the death toll could hit 500,000.  

Trump’s administration was also aware that the country seriously lacked sufficient medical equipment and gear to deal with the pandemic’s magnitude.  Yet, it did nothing in January or February to prepare for the coming avalanche.  By late March, the only sign of American exceptionalism was that the United States had more cases of the deadly virus than any other country in the world. On Saturday, it also claimed the trophy for the most COVID-19 deaths. 

The concept of America as innately superior and exceptional has long been a deeply embedded national illusion. The dynamic is reminiscent of George and Martha’s imaginary child in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. On some level we knew it wasn’t true, but like Albee’s quarreling protagonists, the more we pretended that it was, the better we felt, and the more real it seemed.  

In a deliciously ironic twist, the term American exceptionalism was coined quite sardonically in 1929 by Joseph Stalin. American communist leaders had argued that the country’s unique brand of capitalism was an exception to universal Marxist laws.  Stalin’s response was to condemn the “heresy of American exceptionalism” and expel the U.S. delegation from the Communist International.  

As the years passed, however, American exceptionalism was thoroughly drained of any trace of Stalin’s sarcasm.  Instead, it reflected a deeply held – if misguided – belief that our country was somehow divinely inspired to be the very best the world has to offer. A 2017 Pew Research poll showed that only 14 percent of Americans believe there are countries better than ours. Obviously, this view that America is and always has been superbly exceptional, ignores a number of ignoble chapters in America’s story. To name just a few: massacres of native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow Laws and rampant, ongoing discrimination on the basis of race, sex and national origin. 

Even before the Trump pandemic, the data consistently refuted the claim of American exceptionalism. According to a variety of studies, America ranks 33rd for political freedom, 19th for happiness, 13th in quality of life, 45th in infant mortality, 46th in maternal mortality, 36th in life expectancy, 27th in healthcare and education and 48th for protecting press freedom. Of the G7 nations (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK), America’s income inequality is the highest. 

Whatever lingering doubt there may have been about America’s status as the world’s shining city on a hill was decisively resolved by our country’s despicable bungling of the biggest crisis in our lifetime.  Many other nations, with far fewer resources, have totally out-shown the United States in marshalling a response to the pandemic.  For example, to name just a few, the governments of South Korea, Germany, Finland, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada and Denmark have far and away surpassed the U.S. in battling this virus (here and here).

Amazingly, the United States had as much if not more information about the Coronavirus as those other countries.  They succeeded because they acted quickly and decisively based only on the scientific data, not on the political optics of a leader’s reelection campaign. Donald Trump, on the other hand, spent more than two months ignoring that data and rejecting repeated warnings to prepare for what would be the plague of the century.

As a result, one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, is still scrounging around for ventilators, personal protective equipment, hospital beds and body bags.  The president performs on his daily reality television show, spewing forth false information, mixed messages, and nauseating self-promotion. Anxiety-stricken Americans tune into this spectacle looking for guidance on this terror that has gripped our lives. Instead, they see a president insulting his political opponents, accusing hospital employees of stealing protective equipment, and boasting about his television ratings. 

Hardly American exceptionalism.  Yet, America used to do some exceptional things.  At the very start of the Ebola crisis in 2014, the Obama administration sent thousands of medical workers to fight the disease at its epicenter in West Africa, an effort that not only slowed the disease in that country, but blocked its spread to the U.S.  

Not surprisingly, Trump has done just the opposite.  Not only has he failed to establish a cohesive national plan to combat the virus, the president has avoided any effort to coordinate with other countries, preferring instead to slam doors in their faces.  He tried – unsuccessfully – to buy a German company working on a Coronavirus vaccine so that the U.S. could horde the medication.  He ordered companies making masks and ventilators not to comply with contracts to deliver some equipment to other countries.  One of those countries was Canada, which has been sending medical personnel from Windsor, Ontario into Detroit to help care for COVID patients.

No country is inherently and permanently bad or good.  Like people, nations are mixed bags, package deals, the contents of which depend on all sorts of variables, like polices, resources and leadership.  The notion that we as a nation are exceptional, that we are the best, blocks our ability to grow, to become better, to learn from other countries. 

As our 45th president has so ably demonstrated, the narcissistic illusion of perfection is a virus of the soul that disposes of the need to change.  Until we come up with a vaccine, let’s keep our social distance from American exceptionalism. 

OUR COMPOUNDED VIRAL CRISIS: COVID-19 & TRUMP

And on the 56th day of the pandemic, Donald Trump crawled out from under his rock of make-believe and denial, to declare: “This is a bad one. This is a very bad one.”  Gone was talk of the coronavirus being a “Democratic hoax.” Gone were assurances that “it will work out well,” and will soon “just go away.” Could it be that The Donald has finally seen the light? Either that or, as the New York Times reported, he saw a new scientific warning that, without drastic actions, 2.2 million Americans could die. Worse yet (for him), he could lose the election.

Many of us thought Trump hit rock bottom when he had children snatched from their parents’ arms and tossed into cages. Wrong. For this volatile and mercurial president, there is no bottom in sight. All we have, as the past few weeks have shown, is a metastasizing obliteration of everything we value in a leader. Like decency, humanity, empathy, humility, insight and competence.

Historians will one day divide the Trump administration into two chronological periods: before and after the plague of COVID-19. Americans rarely experience the fear and pain of a crisis at the same time. Hurricanes, fires, tornadoes and the like devastate regionally, leaving the rest of us to breathe an empathetic sigh of relief as we send thoughts and prayers to the victims.  Not since the 2001 terrorist attacks, have we suffered together as a nation, experiencing the same foreboding – over both the present and the future. There is now, as there was then, a dramatic loss of social equilibrium.

Our world, as we know it, is shutting down.  Churches, schools, restaurants and workplaces have been shuttered. Flights, sporting events, Broadway plays and community festivals have been canceled. From the dark depths of our existential isolation, we ponder the unknowable and unthinkable: How long will this last? Will I lose my job? Will my 401(k) come back? Will I, or people I love, get this virus and die?

This national angst and anxiety cried out for leadership, someone to soothe our souls, acknowledge our pain and provide us with credible information and constructive steps to deal with the crisis.  Bill Clinton did that after the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed. George W. Bush did that after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Barak Obama did that after the Charleston church shooting.

Donald Trump, however, will go down in history as the only president who grabbed hold of a national crisis and made it worse.  Rather than trying to unite the country by appealing to “the better angels of our nature”, as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, Trump turned a deadly virus into a bitterly partisan litmus test. He insisted that talk of an epidemic was designed to hurt him politically.   Until just recently, when U.S. cases of the virus began to grow exponentially, national polling confirmed the absurd and unprecedented results of this politicization of a disease.  Democrats were seriously concerned about the coronavirus. Republicans were not (here, here and here).  

To be sure, Trump did not cause this virus. What he did, however, was inexplicable, inexcusable and downright dumb. This president totally shut down the very essence of who he is. Gone was the bombastic, I-alone-can-fix-it authoritarian, a guy who routinely abandons the rule of law in order to have his way with the world. 

This is the same president who told border patrol agents to break the law in order to keep immigrants from entering the country, promising to pardon them if they were arrested.  He started his presidency by slapping a constitutionally dubious Muslim travel ban together, letting the courts sort it out later. He did the same with cutting off funds for sanctuary cities, placing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, funding his Mexican wall, among many other issues. He moved quickly, unilaterally and often illegally, but won more than he lost in subsequent litigation.

Here’s a thought experiment: Turn back the clock to January 21, when the first U.S. coronavirus case surfaced. Imagine Trump, in his finest bellicose and authoritarian persona, doing what he did Monday with his “bad one” rhetoric, and ordering, in an abundance of caution, a ban on groups of 10 or more gathering together.

Imagine further that he declared a national emergency back then, instead of waiting two months, and issued an executive order closing all schools, non-essential businesses and public transportation, all to protect Americans from the tragic experiences of other countries.   Sure, some of us liberals would have yelled about his authoritarian overreactions. The ACLU might have gone to court.  But, if come May or June there was a substantially smaller spread of the virus here than in other countries, Trump would claim hero status. And for the first time in his life, such self-adulation would have credibility. With mere months to go before the election.

Of course, that would have involved concepts foreign in Trump’s orbit, like strategic thinking, science and planning ahead.  This is a president who lives only in the moment. All that matters to him is how he looks in that moment. He didn’t want the stock market to tank and make him look bad.  So when the Dow took a big dip, he insisted the Democrats created the virus as a hoax to torpedo the economy and hurt his reelection chances.  He insisted there was nothing to worry about and encouraged people to take no precautions.  As the number of infected Americans began to rise, he told one lie after another. When there were 14 cases, he claimed the number would soon drop to zero. The number is now more than 5,000.  He insisted millions of people would be tested. The United States, to this day, remains the least tested among industrialized countries.  He said a vaccine was at hand. It is not.  

As a result, our country is engulfed in two crises of astronomical proportion.  One is COVID-19, a disease caused by a fast-spreading virus that will, according to medical experts, infect at least a third of the country, potentially killing millions of us. The other crisis is one of deplorable and morally bankrupt leadership, a president who can’t see beyond his own ego needs, one who – slogans notwithstanding – has never put the American people first. 

Scientists are confident that the virus will eventually be controlled.  As for our other crisis, the only shot we have at eradicating the poison from our democracy is the ballot box.  May November 3 bring us the vaccine we need to restore dignity and decency to the American presidency.