“When the virus came
here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited
them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic
bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone
untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms.
It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock
Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
“The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
“The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
“The administration
squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful
blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy
theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted
quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a
government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took
the mic and politicized the message.
“Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver.
“Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver.
“States and cities
were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and
corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep
ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan,
and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a
beggar nation in utter chaos.
“Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.
“Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.
“Like Pétain, Trump
collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged
disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a
collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future
autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and
Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France.
“Despite countless
examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is
national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to
ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective
response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government? [...]”
(We Are Living in a Failed State, The Atlantic).
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