“Comparing
the number of deaths from covid-19 to those caused by car crashes never made
any sense. But the gimmick caught on anyway. ‘We
don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the
highways,’ said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). ‘It’s a risk we accept so we can
move about.’ President Trump also took up
the bogus argument while deploying his trademark exaggeration,
insisting that car-related deaths are ‘far greater than any numbers we’re
talking about.’
“In
fact, cars kill about 40,000 people a year. Virus-related deaths hit 70,000 in
only two months and are growing fast — and yet this comparison still doesn’t
even take into account its disproportionate toll on health-care workers, nor
the thousands of survivors who will suffer poor health for years, nor, oh yeah,
the fact that car accidents aren’t contagious.
“These discrepancies were glaringly obvious to
Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, who wrote an entire book, ‘Carjacked,’
about our nation’s fatal romance with automobiles. But more than that, they see
Trump and his allies attempting to foist onto Americans the same kind of stew
of rationalization and magical thinking about the coronavirus that the automobile industry has cultivated around
car-crash deaths for many years.
“In short, they see an attempt to normalize the
hideous toll of the coronavirus — just as we long ago came to accept 40,000
car-crash deaths a year as “normal” — and they are afraid the media is only
going to help Trump’s case.
“‘The problem with normalizing deaths,’ they wrote in a recent
essay for
the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University,
where Lutz is an anthropology professor, is that ‘it allows more deaths. It
makes it easier for the horrors of virus deaths to fall off the broadcast news
chyron, to divert resources away from public health and for future politicians
to treat the next pandemic even more glibly.’
“Consider
the way news outlets and pundits have adopted the language of ‘reopening the
country’ from politicians, making it a constant in headlines, cable panel
discussions and radio reports.
“This
terminology presents a false choice. ‘It’s binary, it’s all-or-nothing, now-or-never, and
it doesn’t allow for rational discussion of how to keep people safe,’ Lutz told
me by phone. ‘It promotes the idea of ‘open is good, closed is bad — so do you
want something bad or good?’
Even
worse, it conflates what’s good for the economy with what’s good for the
citizens of the country.
“Then
there’s Trump’s latest trope: ‘We have to be warriors. We can’t keep our
country closed down for years.” Rather than encouraging Americans to think in a
more nuanced way about how to prevent coronavirus deaths while helping the
millions who are suffering financial disaster, the language implies a brutal
and necessary trade-off.
“Lutz
and Fernandez see an even more insidious (never directly stated) sales pitch
just beneath the surface: That it’s okay for ‘Grandma’ to die, along with the
other members of society, who in former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s crass
terms, ‘were on their last legs anyway.’
“Media critic and New York University professor Jay
Rosen sees a strategy of normalizing the coronavirus as key to Trump’s attempt
to save his political skin before November’s presidential election, as he described in
a widely read essay last week:
“‘The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths
between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create
massive confusion about who is responsible,’ he wrote. The media’s role in Trump’s plan-without-a-plan?
Well, he’s counting on us to regurgitate and magnify his message — and in doing
so, make people begin to shrug off the daily horrors as inevitable. When
journalists repeat the rhetoric about the necessity of widespread ‘reopening’
or when they become inured to the continuing death count, they do his work for
him.
But
there’s another way.
“The media can find ways to point out the loaded
language and its political purpose. (In a smart story,
my colleague David Nakamura explained how Trump’s ‘warrior’ rhetoric is both a
way to suggest that ‘it is no longer just medical workers on the front lines
who must respond’ but all Americans — and a way to cast himself as a wartime
leader.)
“We can report on alternative strategies to the
flailing, premature attempts to return to life as we knew it. We can emphasize
what the scientists and medical professionals are saying.
And, above all, we can keep making the deaths and
suffering personal, more than mere numbers.
“Tell
the stories of those who died. And, as Fernandez put it, ‘keep highlighting the
abnormalities’ — the ways that the virus has so cruelly upended our standards
of what is acceptable. It’s not normal to lose multiple members of one
family, or for family members not to be able to see each other when one of them
is dying. We shouldn’t grow desensitized to it.
“When
Lutz teaches her anthropology classes, she urges students to avoid normalizing
the costs of war, for example, and to challenge presumptions. She calls it ‘questioning
the question.’
In the case of the coronavirus, the flawed question
that demands questioning is the one that asks how many deaths are okay to
restore the economy. Or as Ron Johnson downplayed it, the ‘risk we accept so we
can move around.’
“That
dichotomy closes off a nuanced discussion of other options — such as providing
adequate financial help to unemployed people, rather than forcing them to put
their lives at risk by going back to work too soon.
“Human lives aren’t just numbers. What’s good for
Wall Street isn’t necessarily what’s good for most Americans. Yet
the news media too often absorbs these concepts, and spits them back at the
public as if there were no alternatives. It doesn’t have to be that way” (Washington Post).
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