One murder made a Villain,
Millions a Hero. — Princes were privileg'd
To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime.
— Beilby Porteus (“Death, A Poetical Essay,” 1759)
Covid-19 reaches the West Wing. The president’s valet, the vice-president’s press secretary (Katie Miller, wife of top presidential advisor Stephen Miller): both test positive. Folks in the West Wing are nervous; they work in close quarters. The germaphobic president is reportedly furious.
The hypocrisy might be amusing if the threat weren’t fatal. White House staff have temperatures taken daily, are tested routinely. The millions being urged to return to work (and save states money by getting off the unemployment rolls) have no such assurances; the “track and trace” model — the best way to open the economy while keeping people from dying — works around the president but not the rest of the country.
One Washington observer opines that the virus circulating within the sanctum sanctorum will crush the illusion that Trump has tamed the virus, made it safe to reopen the country. But this requires us to accept the notion of the president as a magician wishing to create such an illusion.
At which a diplomat from French Ministry of Foreign Affairs replies: “The war? I can’t find it too terrible! The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!”
— German satirist Kurt Tucholsky, published in Vossische Zeitung, 1925
From farther away, the pattern looks more obvious. Attorney and author Teri Kanefield uses sociologist Max Weber’s definitions to describe Trump as a “charismatic leader” rather than a “rule of law leader.” He cares not about truth, justice, governance, but about the myth of his own power. His only strategy: excite the base by taunting enemies; make himself and the nation a victim; blame China, Democrats, the press. (He spent Sunday tweeting or retweeting almost 200 times.)
Kanefield cautions us to reject the mythos of Trump as a political savant, not to buy into his “fake invincibility.” His tactics worked against an unpopular Democratic nominee in 2016, during a time of relative (if ill-distributed) prosperity. The GOP has been mostly losing races ever since: the 2018 midterms, Alabama’s senatorial election, recently in Wisconsin.
“It's dangerous to underestimate Trump by assuming that he's just stupid and crazy,” Kanefield writes. “It’s equally dangerous to overestimate him.”
Joe Biden is not a gifted politician, but he’s not widely disliked. Part of our dotard’s recent foul temper stems from his own internal polling, which shows him getting thumped (including among elderly voters who handed him his victory). Also, election season will see the nation’s economy struggling at Depression-era levels, plus tens of thousands of more dead people. How to recast that story?
NYU’s Jay Rosen writes succinctly, “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.”
There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China. … It is merely that the mind is unable to grasp a suffering in the gross. Suffering is so intimately personal a thing that it must be explained through the personal equation, if at all.
— article in anarchist newspaper The Blast, Alexander Berkman, ed., 1916
On our Sunday family call, my siblings and mother ponder why so many Americans remain unmoved by deaths among their compatriots in New York City, Detroit, New Orleans.
Much of it doubtless stems, as Adam Serwer writes in a devastating essay in The Atlantic, from the nation’s “racial contract” — the unspoken notion that rules don’t apply to non-whites in the same way. (“Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.”)
Beyond that, my brother notes, many of his California business’s customers know no one who’s sick. The 30-year-old right-wing war on verifiable information has created inherent rejection among millions in anything reported by mainstream media.
“I live in California in a county that had only one case of the virus — so far,” a high school classmate wrote after I cautioned her for forwarding bogus social media stories. “I simply reposted someone else's post. I by no means believe that this virus isn't serious and deadly. I only see what many see in the media.”
The numbers mount; the numbers numb. The New York Times has a special section for the dead; I can only read one or two at a time before I put down the paper, close the laptop. To date they’ve recorded 138 people as worthy of obituaries. That’s 0.0048 percent of 286,226 human beings across the globe whose deaths have been attributed to Covid-19. So far.
But you can reach the top of your profession
If you become the leader of the land.
For murder is the sport of the elected,
And you don't need to lift a finger of your hand.
(New York state numbers on Sunday: 335,395 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.7 percent; 207 dead, to a total of 21,478, up 1 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 941, to a total of 73,891, up 1.3 percent.)
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