[ Discussion article - Never in our lives have we experienced such
a global phenomenon. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also
the cultural foundations of our lives. COVID didn’t lay America low;
it simply revealed what had long been forsaken.]
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THE UNRAVELING OF AMERICA   [[link removed]]

 

Wade Davis
August 6, 2020
RollingStone
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_ Discussion article - Never in our lives have we experienced such a
global phenomenon. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the
cultural foundations of our lives. COVID didn’t lay America low; it
simply revealed what had long been forsaken. _

The COVID crisis has reduced to tatters the idea of American
exceptionalism., Gary Hershorn/Getty Images // RollingStone

 

For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity,
informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come
together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same
fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet
unrealized, promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic
parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19
[[link removed]] attacks our physical
bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of
community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth
represent to the tiger.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate
of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at
hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest
vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19
killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that
natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how
effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it
must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal
complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death
of millions.

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history,
and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In
the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s
population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising
expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection
point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that
had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a
seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the
crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of
Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933
ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last
century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our
daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to
culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing
with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize
central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping
malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into
the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and
miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of
memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of
our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with
any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering
over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization
that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never
be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases
to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice
between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a
complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in
history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact
that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing
of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the
illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with
more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of
a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government
largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to
America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send
disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported
the _Irish Times_, “the United States has stirred a very wide range
of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope,
envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has
never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American
doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic
supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every
kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese,
the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and
Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the
British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the
empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course,
the torch had long passed into the hands of America.

In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller
army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million
men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working
double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President
Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.

When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90
percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed
limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented
from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to
roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant
produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards
in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a
day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours
and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit
Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.

In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United
States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for
half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of
all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle
class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with
limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send
his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but
affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity
of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income
inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no
means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.

But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States,
virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War,
never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops
are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once
gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy
Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has
enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most
warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S.
has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that
might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China,
meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years
than America did in the entire 20th century.

As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June
6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun
violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of
April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans
had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the
first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five
nations.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era
lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was
the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in
terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common
purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost
its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in
divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living
beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to
retirement homes.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the
workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only
reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American
father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with
his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent
fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen,
contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called
a national security crisis.

 

Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio on April 3rd, 1944. When
the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90
percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed
limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented
from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry.
AP photo  //  Rollingstone
Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social
interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the
world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the
working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis
that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for
Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening
chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing.
Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can
be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of
settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are
mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce
social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of
family, the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of
place.

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the
promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories
close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs
abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two
generations, America has celebrated globalization with iconic
intensity, when, as any working man or woman can see, it’s nothing
more than capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of
labor.

For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States
have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was,
but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of
loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments
and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time
of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at
least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as
much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were
90 percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that
of their mid-management employees.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of
their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in
stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control
$30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than
assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest
160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households
have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for
black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that
of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown
— are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a
nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most
Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3
million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned
enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in
federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are
suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at
nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of
American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the
blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even
in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American
history.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long
been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying
every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter
planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or
cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that
defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in
medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a
buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as
a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to
understand.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the
United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With
less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon
accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of
American victims of the disease who died was six times the global
average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and
mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and
boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker,
a grifter on the make.

As the United States responded to the crisis like a corrupt tin pot
dictatorship, the actual tin pot dictators of the world took the
opportunity to seize the high ground, relishing a rare sense of moral
superiority, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in
Minneapolis. The autocratic leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov,
chastised America for “maliciously violating ordinary citizens’
rights.” North Korean newspapers objected to “police brutality”
in America. Quoted in the Iranian press, Ayatollah Khamenei gloated,
“America has begun the process of its own destruction.”

Trump’s performance and America’s crisis deflected attention from
China’s own mishandling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, not to
mention its move to crush democracy in Hong Kong. When an American
official raised the issue of human rights on Twitter, China’s
Foreign Ministry spokesperson, invoking the killing of George Floyd,
responded with one short phrase, “I can’t breathe.”

These politically motivated remarks may be easy to dismiss. But
Americans have not done themselves any favors. Their political process
made possible the ascendancy to the highest office in the land a
national disgrace, a demagogue as morally and ethically compromised as
a person can be. As a British writer quipped, “there have always
been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But
rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid”.

The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his
opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as
of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false
statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George
Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t
recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham
Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and
charity for none.

Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline
than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and
perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain
almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their
country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the
life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes
to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of
the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern
border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented
mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a
complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom
as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of
weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of
children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers
have been shot on school grounds.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the
very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be
prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical
care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be
fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality
public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and
infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many
signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats
— climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the
country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective
well-being, even within its own national community? Flag-wrapped
patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no
match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political
rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising
freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the
weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic
and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump
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liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the
backbone of a bully.

Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting
that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth
lab. Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis
well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just
three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began.
Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of
flights arrive each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should
have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed
exceedingly well. Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada
have been consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita
basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every
person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in
Massachusetts, a state with a comparable population that has reported
more COVID cases than all of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates
of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States,
with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British
Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients.

When American friends ask for an explanation, I encourage them to
reflect on the last time they bought groceries at their neighborhood
Safeway. In the U.S. there is almost always a racial, economic,
cultural, and educational chasm between the consumer and the check-out
staff that is difficult if not impossible to bridge. In Canada, the
experience is quite different. One interacts if not as peers,
certainly as members of a wider community. The reason for this is very
simple. The checkout person may not share your level of affluence, but
they know that you know that they are getting a living wage because of
the unions. And they know that you know that their kids and yours most
probably go to the same neighborhood public school. Third, and most
essential, they know that you know that if their children get sick,
they will get exactly the same level of medical care not only of your
children but of those of the prime minister. These three strands woven
together become the fabric of Canadian social democracy.

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously
replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may
seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as
seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy. Canada
performed well during the COVID crisis because of our social contract,
the bonds of community, the trust for each other and our institutions,
our health care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the
medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not
the private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental
property. The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the
currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and
resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that
connect all people in common purpose.

This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do
with the quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die
in childhood or in giving birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the
same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less.
They pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in
return they get free health care, free education from pre-school
through university, and the opportunity to prosper in a thriving
free-market economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty,
homelessness, crime, and inequality. The average worker is paid
better, treated more respectfully, and rewarded with life insurance,
pension plans, maternity leave, and six weeks of paid vacation a year.
All of these benefits only inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80
percent of men and women aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a
figure far higher than that of the United States.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping
socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the
United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely
because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to
benefit every tier of society. That social democracy will never take
hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a
stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he
quipped that the United States was the only country to go from
barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many
Americans made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations,
placing their own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the
country and the world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only
credential for the job was his willingness to give voice to their
hatreds, validate their anger, and target their enemies, real or
imagined. One shudders to think of what it will mean to the world if
Americans in November, knowing all that they do, elect to keep such a
man in political power. But even should Trump be resoundingly
defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized
nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse,
America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is
no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. In a moment of
international peril, when humanity might well have entered a dark age
beyond all conceivable horrors, the industrial might of the United
States, together with the blood of ordinary Russian soldiers,
literally saved the world. American ideals, as celebrated by Madison
and Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, at one time inspired and
gave hope to millions.

If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps
for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200
million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their
people, we will surely long for the best years of the American
century. For the moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump.
Between praising the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs,
describing their internment and torture as “exactly the right thing
to do,” and his dispensing of medical advice concerning the
therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked,
“One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He had in
mind, of course, the coronavirus
[[link removed]], but, as others have
said, he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.

_[Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at
Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books
include “Into the Silence” and “The Wayfinders.” His new book,
“Magdalena: River of Dreams, [[link removed]]” is
published by Knopf.]_

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