The Apocalypse Will Be Broadcast In Slow Motion

It seems everywhere you look these days, you’re seeing death. I’m not just talking about people dying of the 2020 plague, though they’re the most obvious victims, but also of the millions who are dying and will die because of the economic fallout, which as we all know is affecting disadvantaged communities far more than affluent ones.

Politico reports that President Trump rejected plans this week to reopen the federal health care exchange for a special enrollment period in response to the coronavirus, despite the idea being previously under consideration, prompting Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson to remark, “The only thing worse than a public health pandemic is a public health pandemic without health care. It's like watching the Chernobyl disaster and deciding to bulldoze the fallout shelters.”

Ah, Chernobyl. Look at images of it today. Watch the excellent HBO series. The United States’ response to the coronavirus is clearly taken from the Soviet playbook. Congratulations, tovarish

So we’re seeing an apocalypse, but one without the expected appearance of the mushroom cloud or even Mel Gibson. All the post-apocalyptic movies make everything seem so clear-cut, don’t they? The beleaguered resistance is battling it out in burned-out landscapes hunted by creepy predators. Everyone watching the movie or reading the book knows precisely who has the moral high ground, who needs to win.

In truth, the apocalypse is moving more slowly, more gradually, like one of the glaciers we’re destroying, and it’s not so clear-cut. People doing us harm still look vaguely human.

I wonder if that will change.

Our government has decided it’s acceptable for people to die, for a lot of people to die, because they’re not People Who Matter. They’re from across the tracks, across the great privilege divide, in many cases across the racial divide. It’s Them, not Us, who will die; and so it’s all right.

Ignoring the fact that it’s by mere chance that some of us were born privileged. An accident of birth. And instead of feeling grateful, the great white one percent feels smug and superior.

Maybe it started there. I don’t know. I don’t know where it started. Do you? 

In any case, a lot of us are left echoing David Bowie’s This is Not America. And yet it is—it’s what America has become. And a lot of people are angry, upset, because it isn’t fair.

Fairness was one of the first things to go, if indeed it was ever part of who we are. I’ve come to doubt that, along with much of the tenets of American exceptionalism; let’s not forget the founding fathers themselves believed other people could be owned. You think lynching was fair? You think poverty is fair? You think synagogues and mosques and churches burning are fair?

We have to give up “that can’t happen here.” It can. It is. We have to give up assuming we’re the good guys. We’re not, even if in the past there was some glimmer that we might be, some whisper of hope we could learn to be. We are a nation governed in large part by people who are racist, homophobic, misogynist, and really in their heart of hearts would love to go back to the good old days when you could look out over your fields and see the broken bodies of slaves toiling to keep you in cheroots and bourbon. Those were the days, my friend.

I could have written this essay at any time over the past three years. I could have written it when right after right was stripped from people and handed to corporations. I could have written it when a senate theoretically elected to protect those rights, of those people, refused to call out the president for the criminal he is. My greatest fear is that I’ll be able to write it again next year when he has been re-elected because he’s good for the Good Old Boys.

And I’ll be honest with you: I don’t even know why I’m writing it now. I don’t believe that something gracious and beautiful will rise from the ashes of the coronavirus crisis. I don’t believe this has changed anybody’s mind. I think it is another example of the kind of wanton cruelty that is the natural offspring of capitalism.

Until we change that, nothing else will change. Just a lot more people dying.