This week began with the news that the United States had surpassed 500,000 COVID-19 deaths. It seemed surreal, almost uncanny; the figure was just another mundane number in the accounting we have watched ticking off steadily – and then exponentially – over the last year, and yet it was a figure of unimaginable enormity. A half million Americans have died in this pandemic, yet few doubted we would hit that mark.
One year ago, neither “coronavirus” nor “COVID-19” were common features of our lexicon. There was troubling news out of China, about a strange cluster of atypical pneumonia infections in the city of Wuhan. There were news reports that authorities were scrambling to meet a rising threat but it sounded vague and distant. On 11 January 2020, Chinese doctors confirmed that a 61-year-old man with chronic liver disease and abdominal tumors had died of the disease caused by the new virus; one week later, they announced a second fatality, this time of an otherwise-healthy 69-year-old man.
The following day, across the Pacific Ocean, a healthy 35-year-old man presented to an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Washington, with a persistent cough and fever. He had returned to the US days before after traveling to visit his family in China. This was the first confirmed case in the United States. A month later, on 27 February, President Trump held a press conference to report that fifteen people in the US had been infected. “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he reassured Americans. The novel coronavirus was, he insisted, a foreign problem, but a mere trifle at home.
The first American death from the coronavirus came a few days later, on 1 March. Almost 6,500 more Americans would die of the disease within the next month.
Yet, on the cusp of winter and spring last year, the Pandemic still seemed distant, nothing more than a “Red Death” stalking impotently beyond the caste walls. And, like Edgar Allan Poe’s well-heeled revelers and the beautiful young aristocrats of Boccaccio’s Decameron, we laughed. We joked about masks, toilet paper, and zombies; the looming “shelter in place” orders and lockdowns were a kind of apocalyptic cosplay. After all, who didn’t want to work from home in their pajamas for a few weeks until it blew over?
Sigmund Freud believed humor to be the most sophisticated of all the psychological defense mechanisms. We often use it to deflect the horror of reality in to a realm of unreality, especially when that horror is too great to comprehend. There was a dark joke going around the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941: Two Jews meet, and one of them eats a piece of scented soap. The second Jew asks him, “Moishe, how come you’re eating scented soap?” Moishe responds, “If they’re going to turn me into soap, at least I’ll smell good.”*
But that horror can be deflected only so far, and reality soon catches up. Only a handful of people who took comfort in that joke lived to remember it; virtually everyone who told it or heard it in the Warsaw Ghetto died in the killing fields and camps of the Holocaust.
More than 65,000 Americans had died from the coronavirus by the end of April.
It is hard to say when then grinding reality of the Pandemic actually became real. By springtime, shelter-in-place started to feel a lot less like a vacation as schools and businesses locked-down, favorite restaurants shuttered for the duration – and then for good – and the absence of normal social contact began to bite. On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver quipped that he was broadcasting from a featureless void… But it was not really funny at all; we were all suspended in physical nothingness, in a world without place and social space.
Yet, as enervating as our spatial and social anomie seemed, it was a privilege. Vast numbers of Americans – healthcare workers, first responders, industrial workers keeping the wheels of capitalism grinding along, service workers whose occupations demanded physical presence on the job and continuous contact with strangers – did not have the luxury of sitting back and complaining about the artificiality of Zoom meetings.
The disparities of late-stage capitalism and structural racism only intensified the risk. Members of communities already crushed under the weight of our racialized market economy were in the most vulnerable occupations, invariably with inadequate access to healthcare. The Centers for Disease Control dryly observed that these factors “influence a wide range of health and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.”
They died in their thousands – in their hundreds of thousands. The Pandemic had killed more than 130,000 Americans by the end of June.
This fact of the disproportionate risk borne by the poor, by racial and ethnic minorities, by members of vulnerable occupations, like nursing and teaching, conventionally gendered feminine and still dominated by women, helps to explain the eagerness of conservative white Americans and their political leaders to ignore the human cost of the Pandemic. Capitalism, invariably reified as “the economy,” and a perverse notion of “freedom” devoid of a social contract, took precedence over human lives.
Against the advice of public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the President explicitly demanded the “reopening of the economy” in late-March, in time to pack the nation’s churches for Easter. “Our people are full of vim and vigor and energy. They don’t want to be locked into a house or an apartment or some space,” he said. “It’s not for our country, and we are not built that way.”
Dan Patrick, the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas, said the quiet parts out loud on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show when he opined that the elderly – a group most vulnerable to COVID-19 – should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the economy. “Don’t sacrifice the country,” he told Carlson in a twisted logic, sacrifice people instead.
By May, even the president was willing to concede the deadly reality. “There’ll be more death,” he said in an interview with ABC’s David Muir. But his blithe manner, and the unsupported and unsupportable way in which he confidently predicted that the Pandemic “will pass” exposed the truth. The deaths were a simple fact of life that he did not find particularly troubling – an inevitable and necessary sacrifice into Moloch’s flaming maw to ensure prosperity.
And that was why President Trump, his surrogates, and his acolytes promoted wild cures ranging from hydroxychloroquine to injections of household cleaners, why they claimed that simple, if mildly inconvenient public health measures like wearing face coverings in public and maintaining social distancing were ominous evidence of a tyrannical “deep state” conspiracy. In their imaginings, death was not coming to them; it came to the others outside the walls of white male privilege. And those people were expendable, disposable, the inevitable collateral damage of their American Dream.
It was all a myth, of course; white Christian Americans were and are as susceptible to infection by the coronavirus as anyone else. But myths are often more real than reality. In the minds of President Trump and the Magaist masses, the Pandemic was happening to someone else. There is no other way to understand the anti-masker revolts, the enthusiastic, bare-faced crowds packing stadiums at the Maga rallies, and the cavalier superspreader white motorcycle festivals. Whiteness conferred a mythical immunity, so sensible public health measures were an intolerable affront to white privilege.
President Trump tested positive himself for the coronavirus last October but, like many privileged, white Americans, he received immediate and effective medical treatment. The Indigenous people, Black people and people of color who make up a disproportionate part of America’s working poor did not have those advantages, and were not so lucky. White Americans have suffered 150.2 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population; the number is 155.2 deaths per 100,000 for African Americans and, for Indigenous people in the United States, 210.6 deaths per 100,000.
But to the Magaism these people are, as Hannah Arendt would have observed, a “surplus population.” Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, LGBTQ, and non-Christian Americans might be an economically-essential part of the social order, as Black Africans were to Apartheid South Africa, and Indigenous and African slaves were to the plantations of Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Carolinas, but they are not part of the Magaist body politic. They are a resource to be used and expended, not citizens to be protected and defended. If thousands must die to preserve capitalism and political white supremacy, they reason, then so be it.
We know now that, even as he was assuring Americans a year ago that the coronavirus was nothing to worry about, and that it would soon “disappear,” President Trump was well-aware that the Pandemic was an almost-unprecedented public health crisis, a vicious plague that would scythe through humanity. “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down,” he told Bob Woodward in March last year, “because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Panic was bad for “the economy” and the president knew that a healthy economy was good not only for his own bank account and the financial interests of the Republican Party’s biggest donors, but it was the key to his power. He had promised to “make America great again,” and to his angry constituents that meant white prosperity. Even decisive policies to combat the Pandemic would have meant acknowledging the severity of the crisis, and that would have profound economic repercussions. So, in the interests of political expediency, he chose to ignore it. If we didn’t test as much, he explained to Fox News’s Chris Wallace in October, we wouldn’t have so many cases.
By the end of that month, almost 240,000 Americans had died of COVID-19.
A half-million Americans have died since President Trump shrugged off the Pandemic, promised that it would disappear, and did little to stop it. Tens of thousands more will certainly die before it is over. A half-million dead in one year is a measure of something more than incompetence or stupidity; it is a metric of genocide. Our dead are a testimony to a genocide of neglect and political expediency, and we have an obligation to acknowledge that.
At this moment, 514,095 Americans have died in the coronavirus pandemic. We can never allow ourselves to forget.
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* Quoted in Chaya Ostrower, “Humor as a Defense Mechanism during the Holocaust,” Interpretation 69, March 2015, 191-192.