Breathless
“I can’t breathe.” That is the mantra of the moment. George Floyd said those words as Minneapolis police were murdering him. Those words were probably also last on the lips of many of the more than 117,000 Americans who so far have died from the new Coronavirus, gasping for breath, their lungs ravaged by a disease our president once described as a garden variety flu that would quickly disappear.
Rather than going away, COVID-19 is invading new territories by leaps and bounds, aided by the president’s self-interested rush to open the country in the vain hope that by November he can run for reelection on the claim that an economic recovery is already underway. He has been aided in the ignoble endeavor of increasing the risk to the population from this plague by a series of toadies, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading the march of the GOP lemmings toward disaster.
It’s not as if it is a surprise. Epidemiologists warned about this very thing. And, to paraphrase Dylan, you don’t have to be an epidemiologist to know where the virus is going. On June 12, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the highest elected official in Houston said: “I want the reopening to be successful. I want the economy to be resilient. But I’m growing increasingly concerned that we may be reaching the precipice of a disaster.”
Astonishingly, our truculent president has been an enabler of both police brutality and a public health calamity. On police brutality, Trump played a bit role early in his presidency when he advised police officers that they need not bother to be gentle when apprehending citizens and getting them into squad cars. For a president to give permission and encouragement for police to abuse suspects is deplorable. But it was not a one-off.
Now, late in his presidency, he is encouraging repressive violence more than ever, including carrying out displays of force by using the regular military, the National Guard, and the Secret Service against peaceful protesters on the streets of the capital; issuing innumerable threats such as “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and talking about “dominating the street” and “taking back Seattle;” and generally behaving like the autocratic jackass he is.
For a moment there, watching the military personnel carriers rolling down the streets of Washington and the planes flying overhead, I flashed back to old videos of Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the tanks rolling in Santiago, the air force strafing the presidential palace.
Trump’s responsibility for the COVID-19 tragedy is much graver still. The extent of his guilt for the deaths of tens of thousands of people is clear when you compare the death toll here with that in countries with rational leaders. To give an opening to a lethal and highly contagious disease to wreak havoc with the lives of fellow citizens—including, ironically, the 19,000 Trump supporters who are slated to crowd into an indoor hall in Tulsa, Oklahoma—is unconscionable. To risk your life just to listen to the president’s rantings and ravings indicates that in this country it is not just the chief executive who is irrational.
You can’t blame Trump alone for all that is wrong in this country. In the longer view and looking at the big picture, structural and cultural factors such as inequality, systemic racism, American hyper-individualism, and even chance influence history more than the “great leaders” like Churchill and Napoleon we read about in grade school. But leadership counts. Is it a coincidence that the two countries in this hemisphere that are doing the worst in dealing with the Coronavirus—the United States and Brazil—are led by arrogant, authoritarian blowhards?
Ideology counts too. Trump and Bolsonaro are both big proponents and practitioners of what a former Pope called “savage capitalism,” the dog-eat-dog capitalism that prevailed in the nineteenth century during the time of Dickens and Marx and increasingly dominates today. That epoch provides a precedent for the poisonous effect of hyper-capitalism on human survival during a crisis. At the time of the potato famine, the British could have saved millions of the Irish people from mass starvation and a desperate emigration but they rigidly held to the ideology of savage capitalism under which Ireland was obliged to continue to export a huge amount of food to the British market while the Irish starved.
Racism counts too. The mark of racism is clearly stamped on our two current crises, the pattern of police killings and the demography of COVID death. It played a role in the Irish crisis too. The British official charged with dealing with the Irish question during the time of the famine wrote that the potato blight was a divine gift because it would reduce the Irish population.
Countries get the leaders they deserve, goes a saying. Do countries get the tragedies they deserve? How can a country that has produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other elect a man who is so breathtakingly ignorant that he believes there is an AIDS vaccine, that malaria medicine is a good treatment for COVID, that injecting disinfectant could clean up the lungs of Coronavirus patients, and a million other stupidities and absurdities? Most infuriating of all, if you believe him, Trump knows more about infectious disease than Anthony Fauci, more about war than the generals, and he has done more for African Americans than anyone with the possible exception of Lincoln. Delusions this grotesque are the province of psychotics who think they are Julius Caesar.
Last night, watching a report from the BBC, I think I glimpsed an answer. Montana is full of Trump supporters, pathetic patriots who can’t see beyond their lily-white noses. They like Trump because “he cares for us out here in the heartland.” I doubt that is the main reason. The racism that fears that immigration will ruin their monolithically white state has more to do with it. And, anyway, how can anybody believe that a narcissistic billionaire city slicker like Trump would care about Montana ranchers? And can you picture couture conscious Melania in Big Sky country?
I was never sure if I believed Marx’s observation about “the idiocy of rural life.” I do now.
A new poll out of the University of Chicago shows that only 14 percent of Americans are very happy, the lowest percentage in decades. The good news is that at least 86 percent of the people have not completely lost their grip on reality. Because this is a wretched time in America: Trump, COVID, lethal systemic racism, economic depression. What is there to be happy about?
Well, perhaps we will have a passably honest election in November despite the predictable GOP dirty tricks, and all the “inglorious bastards,” (as Quentin Tarantino might say) who rule us now will have a different monopoly than the one of wealth and power and ideology they have today. A monopoly of unhappiness.
On election night 2016, in the wee hours of the morning when I learned Trump would be president, I decided to hold my breath for the next four years. I have not been able to do it. The fetid stench constantly emanating from Trump and his cronies could wake up a three-thousand-year-old mummy. But, come November, I think I will be able to breathe again.
