The Last COVID Article
So is this it? The last COVID column? Remember COVID? It used to be a big thing. Thing faded faster than a Justin Amash presidential bid and was just as politically impactful. It feels like some old memory from high school — did it really happen? Did we really do that stuff? Did I really have a mustache back then?
Sorry Dems, we didn’t all die fighting over the last ventilator. Human colonies still exist in Georgia. Joe Biden re-appeared in public (masked so he couldn’t hack up a new “gaffe,”) Trump is still president, the stores are full again with iJunk from China, and with summer here and any second wave months away, it looks like most Americans are kind of done with this. We tend to binge watch selectively now anyway, and the good part is over.
I found a unique way to reflect on what passed for the last few months. To pass the lockdown time, I bought a Chinese-made streaming device of ambiguous intellectual property rights morality that delivers over 700 free TV stations from around the globe. I built up a little obsession watching COVID news from dozens of countries in English where I could find it, some in languages I knew a little of, some in languages I couldn’t even identify. Grossly unscientific as well as probably a little illegal, but if you watch enough of it the patterns become very, very clear.
No nation on earth tore itself apart over a virus response like the U.S. There was plenty of debate globally over the right thing is to do, but it all appeared intended to be productive and not politically-motivated destructive in nature. Not to say the U.S. media didn’t try to show the leadership they claim the world wants from us; while the BBC headlined new vaccine trials, on behalf of the Indispensable Nation CNN ran a report based on “sources” claiming the four countries which make up Great Britain are at odds with each other over how to respond. CNN then helpfully reminded Americans “Wales and Northern Ireland too often feel like an afterthought.”
In Italy, the news simply reported the Prime Minister announcing “a calculated risk opening in the knowledge that the contagion curve may rise. We have to accept it otherwise we will never be able to start up again. Italy would end up with a strongly damaged economic and social structure if it waited to relax distancing measures until a vaccine becomes available.” Saying the real part out loud like that would have triggered calls for impeachment if not giant cracks in the earth itself in the U.S.
Perhaps most importantly of all, I found no other nation where a large number of people were convinced their leader was literally trying to kill them, to the point news in America is still weeks later falsely reporting Trump wanted people to drink bleach. This is more than just one item on this list. It is the core of America’s failure, the willingness to believe their government is not simply men who make mistakes, but men out to kill them.
No other media did what the NYT did on May 24, just ahead of Memorial Day, devote its front page to the names of COVID-dead Americans, the first front page in four decades to be just words, no photos or graphics. One has to go back to LBJ and the Vietnam War to find something similar — hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today? people chanted — holding the president himself directly responsible for the deaths of individual Americans. LIFE magazine later devoted most of an issue to the photos of the men who died in Vietnam one week (which included Memorial Day 1969), a shocking sum of a failed policy. For readers who know history, the NYT stunt’s connection to Vietnam was undeniable. The direct responsibility link seems however more a creation of 2020 than the realization it was in 1969. The media’s intent, however, was unambiguous: he killed them, vote elsewhere.
I also found no other nation where a large number of people were convinced their neighbors were also literally trying to kill them by not wearing masks. In Taiwan the government said people should wear masks, and then distributed them. In other places cops handed masks, not summonses, to people who weren’t wearing one. No one shouted “Burn the witch!”
Americans had to create their own masks via little handicraft projects, and then make heart-felt decisions multiple times a day under the judgment of strangers. Outside the U.S. a mask seemed to just be a mask, whether you were wearing one or not. When I heard the next story was to be about unmasking, the graphic was likely Michael Flynn’s face, not a social media mob with pitchforks out to destroy someone.
No where else did armed protesters challenge their government (American media is however in the global lead on obsession with Hong Kong protesters.)
America is the only place using the virus to justify less public transportation.
With the possible exception of China responding to U.S. criticism (their TV people do not seem happy about this), I could not find any place that made the virus into a signature foreign policy issue. Borders got shut, then opened, as expedients, not as sneaky answers to unresolved immigration policy. Much the same for free college, public housing, social programs, guaranteed income, economic inequality, national service, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, abortion rights, the post office and voting by mail.
No place else seemed so determined to find new crises within the crisis. In America we had a sub-crisis-of-the-week. Not enough tests, not enough doctors, not enough PPE, not enough ventilators, not enough lockdown. And of course each sub-crises came with its own sub-blame game. Nowhere except the U.S. was everything so centered on blame, looking backward.
Swedes had dry daily news conferences that paced like farm price reports. Of course the U.S. press have always been aggressive questioners, but I cannot find anywhere where open mockery and passive-aggressive questions so dominated. This follows through to the “news” itself, so much of which is simply name calling, saying people are bonkers, stupid, mentally ill, incompetent, and lying sacks of crap.
This in turn uniquely spilled over into entertainment. It is very difficult to find anything produced in the last few years in America as “comedy” that is not just name calling and mockery aimed at one side of the political spectrum. I cannot find anywhere outside the U.S. where media stars attack each other, and claim each other distorts the facts to the point they are producing foreign propaganda. You get a little of that during Prime Minister’s question time on the BBC, but they are much more clever. Otherwise, you have to read the lowest of the tabloids for it.
No other nation has a cheerleading squad embedded in its media happy when a possible cure fails. Except when talking about America’s reaction, everywhere else hydroxychloroquine is just another medicine to be evaluated. Hope is rationed in America because it is a political weapon.
I see nowhere else people wish fellow citizens get sick and die to prove a political point — You reopened too soon! You didn’t wear a mask! Your third-party vote killed grandma! I didn’t see elsewhere the U.S.-standard told-you-so story, something with the headline like “Barber Who Defied Lockdown to Cut Hair Tests Positive.” Serves him right, yes?
Racism is not unique to the United States but I cannot locate anywhere else where it is so embedded in the way the nation talked about or dealt with the virus. Same for a search for “communities” hurt more than you in the virus’ Oppression Olympics: LGBT people, immigrants, Asians in general when just Chinese are not enough, special needs kids, a lip-reader who can’t understand masked people, prisoners, various “survivors” of bad things, an endless search for more victimized victims.
At the same time, no one else seems driven to fetishize “heroes,” from cashiers to trash collectors. Same for countries with woman leaders; they don’t make a big deal of it in Germany or New Zealand but the American media sure does. The press in those women-led countries talk about competence in government not gender.
No one else seemed so anxious to both undercount and overcount the virus deaths. A fair number of nations seemed to underplay their death tolls, but nowhere was it both under and over at the same time for such different reasons.
So that’s it for COVID, a good couple of seasons’ worth. Jeez, I gotta get out more.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.
