Like a tsunami slowly approaching the shore
Like a tsunami slowly approaching the shore
If I can't write about coronavirus then why do the twist at all?
Well gee whiz. When I started this newsletter 4 months ago, even I didn’t predict that the sheer amount of apocalypse-related events in 2020 would overwhelm my capacity to make sense of it. Someone tell God I’m not *that* interested in this topic.
By now you’ve seen the news. Maybe you know the stats: 56 countries, 2% mortality rate, 4.4% stock market dive, 15 confirmed cases in the US, approximately 34 billion indications that our Narcissist-In-Chief has no idea what he’s doing. On that last point, you may also be aware that HHS staff milled around 2 quarantined military bases with no training or protection, and after a whistleblower spoke up, he was threatened with the boot.
Encouraging signs all around!
“It’s like a tsunami slowly approaching the shore,” my wife said yesterday at dinner. What’s frightening is the extent to which actors behind the scenes are assiduously working to make sure the tsunami causes as much damage as possible, through a magical combination of incompetence and power worship.
The incompetence can be seen every time Trump slurs some combination of words into being on a hot mic, whilst his AIDS-enabling second-in-command reacquaints himself with how to use his facial muscles in public. For the power worship, look no further than the possibility of an unamended renewal of the Patriot Act, even over the (typically incoherent) objections of Trump himself. Everyone used to shaking their heads at China’s public shaming of jaywalkers should think about what a militarized police force, in tandem with a surveillance state 20 years in the making, could do with an accelerated outbreak in the US. If nothing else, coronavirus casts into relief the myopia of decrying Trump as an aberration whose defeat will return Republicans to normal. If America’s dedication to civil liberties is the proverbial frog in a pot, the water hasn’t been boiling since November 9, 2016; it’s been boiling since September 12, 2001. We are collectively inured to the security state precisely insofar as it has become, over the course of the early 21st century, practically invisible.
At the same time, of course, Trump-era politics has inflected the GOP panopticon with its own brand of audacious stupidity. Never missing the opportunity to project onto Democrats his own worst impulses, Trump Jr. said on Fox News that the Democrats just want millions of people to die to increase their electability chances. Yes, because a pandemic will work in favor of the party that’s working, somewhat half-heartedly, against authoritarianism and the expansion of the surveillance state. I’d say that this is the dumbest thing our wannabe King Richard the Lionheart princeling has ever uttered, except that he recently tweeted that Pelosi’s prayers for Trump are as ridiculous as the thought of Satan quoting Scripture.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Junior’s expert commentary does raise a legitimate question, in miraculous spite of itself. Democrats may not want millions to die, but to what extent do otherwise progressive-minded citizens underrate the severity of the virus, just because it will “only” affect the sick and elderly?
Engel’s A-plus tweet, which tells you a lot about the bedside manner of the doctors in his circle, forgot to include the danger to “people who can’t afford to take time off work” and “people who have existing respiratory issues thanks to the sociopaths who designed their health insurance.”
There’s obviously some garden variety ageist and classist obliviousness here, but I genuinely think there are only so many signs of civilizational breakdown that the human brain can process. I mean, after we’ve accepted that “only” a few million people are going to be displaced or extinguished thanks to a cocktail of climate crisis and resource wars, everything starts to look like a preview of a trailer of a reboot of a comic book adaptation. By which I mean, our era has exposed our need to downplay, and distance ourselves from, the severity of how fucked the human experiment is.
From a November email exchange with a friend and constant reader: “I’m sure you’ll be hitting this, but I think the proliferation of apocalyptic / dystopian TV shows, films, and literature demonstrates that people are indeed thinking about the possibility of massive, global destruction. In fact you could say mass culture is kind of obsessed with that very notion. But the problem is that the whole thing has been Hollywood-ized.
Yes people will die, Hollywood acknowledges. Yes many will suffer. Yes everything we have will be lost. But it’s sort of an abstract suffering, essentially serving as a very dramatic backdrop against which we will see a human story of resilience and redemption play out, centered on a lone figure or a band of survivors.”
Do the movies inculcate an indifference to the broader collective, or does indifference to the broader collective produce the movies we watch? My friend emphasized the latter; I think there’s a feedback loop here. The gospel of individualism tells us to stick to our own band of survivors and not think too hard about the sick, the aging, service industry workers, people with pre-existing conditions, Uighurs in detention camps. So we (and by we, I mean privileged citizens with disposable income to spend on Netflix subscriptions) watch movies molded by that philosophy; the movies, in turn, reinforce our biases. No wonder a ton of people reacted to coronavirus by watching the 2011 film Contagion. Hell, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve watched my share of world-ending flicks. What else are these films for if not to ultimately reassure us that we, the viewers identified with Matt Damon, will still be standing when the credits roll?
And isn’t that reassurance the basis for the escapist theology that defines so much of the Evangelical church, the need for a God who will scoop up his elect and leave the rest to burn? It’s easy to scorn Rapture-ready culture from the outside, but having the completed works of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins isn’t the only way to cultivate a mystical belief that one will be spared from the coming fire. Rapture theology is America’s theology now.
It makes a perverse kind of sense, then, that savviness-addicted journalists assure their Twitter followers that the coronavirus will “only” affect the vulnerable; or that responsible adult Democrats, who have never had their houses of worship spied on, might ultimately conclude that a clean renewal of the Patriot Act is the grownup thing to do; or that, over the past week, news outlets collectively shrugged as the spread of coronavirus was mirrored by the contagion of anti-Muslim pogroms in India, sweeping the nation at the same time that Trump gently caressed his fellow strongman Modi; or that, as we scroll through each horrible new update, some part of our brains insists that the virus will pass over us and those we love. We’re trained to think of ourselves as Matt Damon, not Random Extra Dying On A Gurney. So unless we emphatically reject our impulse to half-ass the apocalypse, unless we throw out half-measures, unless we embrace something approaching real solidarity with all the broken and breaking bodies we’ve quietly hoisted on crosses of our own making, the tsunami will roll ever onward.