"Lebanon knew of danger for years. It didn’t act."

That’s the front-page headline in today’s New York Times, atop a story detailing how 2,750 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate, which the Lebanese government had known about, blew up in Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least 135 people, injuring at least 5,000, and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Press accounts of the disaster detail the emerging consensus of the Lebanese people that their governing elites have long neglected the public good, and make clear that the nation’s economy is structurally too weak to fix the damage the explosion wrought.

Dysfunctional government neglecting public safety? Dysfunctional economy leaving a large share of the nation behind? Sound familiar?

Instead of one mighty blow, our nation has been singularly incapable of stopping or even limiting the spread of COVID-19. We may be the wealthiest nation on earth, but fully one-quarter of the people the pandemic has killed are Americans, even though Americans constitute just 4 percent of the world’s population. The number of Americans who’ve tested positive for the disease is more than five times the combined total of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Australia.

And just as in Lebanon, this deadly fish stinks from the head. It takes a government of stunning ineptitude and indifference to transform our nation into the world’s most vulnerable; it takes a president focused only on himself and dismissive of science—and an administration he’s created in his own image—to produce such mournful numbers. And it has taken a Republican Party (with the help of some Democrats) dead-set against rights the rest of the world takes for granted to withhold paid sick leave and universal medical care from its people, to fight to withhold adequate unemployment insurance and public employment, to make the prospect of economic recovery far slimmer than it needs be.

All failed states have their own story, but we’re up there with Lebanon, grieving, gasping, and hemorrhaging needlessly.