gracchusdixit

As his poll numbers bob up and down like a yo-yo and his reelection prospects grow more rickety by the day, Donald Trump is rolling the dice, wagering not only his own political fortunes but the lives of thousands of Americans on the off chance that, by reopening the country, the economy can somehow “get back to normal”.  This, all the while COVID-19 infections and deaths continue to mount, particularly in the states and rural communities that constitute “Trump country”.  

Putting aside the corrupt self-interest of both Trump himself and his Republican enablers, the yearning to return to some approximation of “normality” is widely felt and entirely understandable.  But it is also a delusion.  Whatever “normal” was before the global pandemic swept us up in its lethal embrace, the “normal” we are returning to is going to be something altogether different.

The philosopher George Santayana famously observed:  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  That mordant comment is more relevant today than ever, and it applies to Americans, in particular.  Our country’s failure to prepare for this pandemic, as well as the reality that lies ahead, is a specifically American failure of imagination and humility in the face of history’s complete disregard for the self-congratulatory conceits of countries and civilizations.  For more than 200 years, we have flattered ourselves for being an “exceptional nation,” as if the United States were somehow capable of avoiding the iron grip of history.  Thanks to COVID-19, we are exceptional no longer.  History has caught up with us, and it is confounding our conceit.

We are not the first to confront the disorienting reality that a way of life once assumed to be enduring can evaporate in an instant.  Consider the thousand-year-long period we call the Middle Ages.  That remarkable epoch reached its glorious apogee in the 13th century, when hundreds of magnificent cathedrals thrust their vaulted naves and lofty spires heavenward; when knowledge and learning were reborn, as renowned universities were founded in Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Padua; when philosophical and theological thought reached a pinnacle in the works of William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas; when Giotto began to paint, and Dante began began to write.  And yet, a mere 10 years after Giotto laid down his brush, the medieval world was suddenly torn loose from its moorings.  

On an early October day in 1347, a small flotilla of Genoese merchant ships drifted into the harbor of Messina in Sicily, carrying the riches of the east in their cargo holds.  They were also carrying rats, and those rats were infested with fleas carrying bubonic plague.  By the time the ships tied up at the docks, most of their sailors had already suffered a horrible death.  All that was left were putrescent corpses oozing puss.  

Within months, the Black Death, as it came to be called, spread throughout Europe, and by the time its first wave subsided, at least a third of the population had been wiped out.  For the next 300 years, other waves spread over the continent, drowning Europe in a roiling rip tide of disease and death.

This unprecedented catastrophe not only cost millions of lives, it utterly transformed what remained of economic, social, and political life.  Institutions and norms, supposedly ordained by god and once accepted without question, were cast aside.

So few peasants were left to work the fields that serfdom collapsed, and the poorest of the poor were able, for the first time in centuries, to challenge their betters.  Massive peasant revolts broke out.  Most were eventually suppressed, but the ruling classes, who once imagined themselves to be untouchable, had been taught the lesson that their grip on power would never again be absolute or secure.

Vast swaths of property were abandoned, as owners and occupants succumbed to the scourge.  The laws governing property rights and inheritance, carefully codified and ruthlessly enforced, simply collapsed.  The result was one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history and the upending of the medieval social order.  It wasn’t long before the sharp-eyed, deep-pocketed merchants of the bourgeoisie refused any longer to bend their knees to kings and aristocrats.

Belief in the eternal verities of the Catholic religion began to crumble, as no amount of ritual and prayer proved capable of fending off the plague bacillus.  When it became painfully obvious that the faithful died no less often than the faithless, men turned away from the authority of the Church and looked to themselves, hoping to make sense of a world that no longer operated by the rules they had been taught.  Such “heretical” thinking spawned the Protestant Reformation.

COVID-19 is not the Black Death (at least not yet), nor is it likely to completely upend the global order.  Its transformative power is nonetheless far from negligible and is already making itself felt.  

During the Democratic presidential primaries, “mainstream” candidates like Joe Biden lambasted progressives for daring to suggest that private, for-profit health insurance should be replaced by a single-payer system.  Why, they asked, should Americans be deprived of the employer-provided health insurance they supposedly “loved”?  Now, we know the answer.   Millions of those people are suddenly out of work and have no health insurance at all.  Who is going to pay their medical bills?  Our private, for-profit health care system has been exposed for the sham, and scam, that it is—a system that is utterly incapable of caring for the nation in crisis without massive government intervention.

Before the pandemic struck, Donald Trump blustered endlessly about creating “the greatest economy in history”.   That claim was always a con, and thanks to COVID-19, the con has become painfully obvious.  Even as the Trump’s financial finagling pumped up the stock market, the real economy was gasping for breath.  Credit card and student loan debt reached new highs; real wages, adjusted for inflation, were little changed from what they had been a generation earlier; the average household didn’t have enough cash to pay for a $400 emergency.  The wealthy few were indeed wealthier than ever, but the rest were living on the edge.  

The pandemic has pushed millions of Americans over that edge.  Nearly 40 million have lost their jobs.  Many can’t pay their rent or utility bills.   In the months ahead, hundreds of thousand will be forced to declare bankruptcy.  In their desperation, thousands more are already queuing up to get food handed out by charities.  Hand-outs may tide people over, but their desperation and dependence will breed nothing but humiliation, leaving wounds that never heal and scars that can never be erased.

Worse than any of that, COVID-19 has revealed, once and for all, the callous cruelty of American capitalism.  The disgraced but unrepentant former Fox News host, Bill O’Reilly,  dismissed the cost of reopening the economy as trivial, because the victims of the pandemic “are on their last legs anyway”.  The Republican chief justice of Wisconsin’s supreme court belittled a major outbreak in a local meat packing plant, because it didn’t affect “regular folks”.  The governors of Iowa and South Dakota, Republicans both, warned workers that, if they refuse to return to their jobs because they are afraid of becoming infected, they will be denied unemployment insurance.  The Republican governor of Nebraska, a multi-millionaire and major Trump donor, defended meat processing companies in his state that refused to disclose the infections in their plants, because “that’s a business decision”.   The message is clear.  Profit matters more than people.  The Dow matters more than the death toll. 

As I write, the number of American lives claimed by the pandemic is approaching 100,000.  By the time you read this, the toll will almost certainly have passed that grim milestone.  It may be that many Americans will respond to this calamity by embracing the false promises of the pathological liar who occupies the White House.  Or, it may be that, after decades of false promises, they will turn in a different, more hopeful direction.  

I have no idea which choice my fellow citizens will make or what the future holds.  But I do know this.  The new normal won’t be the normal we left behind.  This pandemic has exposed the fundamental failings of our society.  We can confront those failings and try to change them, or we can try to excuse them away.  But we can no longer pretend that they do not exist.  There is no going back.