Nightly news coverage of the Vietnam War taught military and political leaders never again to show the American public war that up-close. Bodies and blood don’t sell geopolitical abstractions very well. Nor does a parade of coffins — flag-draped or otherwise — bolster support for endless military adventurism and war profiteering. So the George W. Bush administration turned the Iraq invasion into a video game. The supposed war on COVID-19 is similarly sanitized.
In reading Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps) accounts of life during the Great Plague of London (1665), Andrew Sullivan noticed how very in-your-face death was to this member of Parliament and of the Royal Society. It was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England. Within seven months one-fifth or more of Londoners were dead. Many deaths went unrecorded. The Great Fire of London destroyed many records the next year. No one knows for sure how many actually died.
Somehow, Pepys survived. He carried on as normally as he might as people around him perished. The bartender at his local pub lost “his wife and three children … all, I think, in a day.”
Sullivan continues:
And then just a little moment that gives us a sense of how lucky, in comparison, we are: “It was dark before I could get home, and so land at church-yard stairs, where, to my great trouble, I met a dead corpse of the plague, in the narrow ally … But I thank God I was not much disturbed by it. However, I shall beware of being late abroad again.” Maybe it’s just the English stiff upper lip as far back as 1665, but the tenacity and composure of the man are impressive, even as he passes by mounds of corpses lying out in the open, piled up against the walls of houses in the streets, dumped into mass graves, and all the doctors dead in Westminster, leaving the dying to fend for themselves.
We are spared all that. “Everything we hear about the impact of this virus is technical,” Sullivan explains. “All the dead are abstractions. We chart graphs. We predict curves.”
Broadcasting etiquette, medical privacy laws, and refrigerated trailers keep stacked bodies from public view. Only drone footage of mass burials on Hart Island give a hint of the scale of death in New York City. Over 27,000 have died statewide at this writing and over 88,000 nationally. Many victims never make it to the hospital. Few but family and FDNY crews see them.
Sujatha Gidla is a conductor for New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and author of “Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India.” She survived COVID-19, noting there has been minimal or inadequate PPE for MTA workers. (Mustn’t panic the riders.) Gidla’s experience of her city under a pandemic is closer to that of Pepys than many. By May 5, she had already lost dozens of colleagues:
We are stumbling upon dead bodies. I know of two cases. A train operator nearly tripped over one while walking between cars. The other person was sitting upright on a bench right outside the conductor’s window and discovered to be dead only at the end of an eight-hour shift after my co-workers kept noticing the person on each trip.
The conditions created by the pandemic drive home the fact that we essential workers — workers in general — are the ones who keep the social order from sinking into chaos. Yet we are treated with the utmost disrespect, as though we’re expendable. Since March 27, at least 98 New York transit workers have died of Covid-19. My co-workers say bitterly: “We are not essential. We are sacrificial.”
Sujatha Gidla is still recovering.
The rest of us are not encountering bodies in subway cars or in the streets. Nor are we seeing images of what COVID-19 can do to healthy people lucky enough to survive.
“I have yet to see a Covid19 patient in the terminal phase of the illness; I’ve never seen one being forcibly intubated; I haven’t seen video of the coughing fits of the victims,” Sullivan observes. “There are no photos of the dying; and very few that even show the toll of survival.”
Photos a friend texted him of a gay coronavirus patient in his 30s recalled patients Sullivan saw during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Skeletal, shrunken. At least families then (if not their partners or husbands) could visit them in the hospital. Not now.
Now the pandemic is moving out into Trump counties in swing states where the dead will be even less visible, “sacrificial” meat packers among them. And black and brown laborers largely invisible in normal times. Perhaps those insisting on risking themselves and neighbors by refusing to observe social distancing or to wear masks could stand to see more images and hear more stories of what could await them. I quit counting dead pastors after 50.
“The most incredible pain that I’ve ever experienced,” David Anzarouth, 25, of Toronto told the CBC after contracting COVID-19 during a Miami, Florida vacation in early March.
“Models show that if 80 percent of people wear masks that are 60 percent effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R0 of less than one. That’s enough to halt the spread of the disease,” The Atlantic reported. Reopening for business without masks and distancing could land us right back in shutdown and do more lasting economic damage.
Wearing masks for MAGA red hats is a public admission of Dear Leader’s failure. For Donald Trump and his cult, aversion to masks is also “like a gay man in the late 1980s loathing condoms,” Sullivan writes:
Is mask-wearing some kind of signal of effeminacy? That appears to be Trump’s moronic assumption, which is why his vanity prevents him from wearing one. But taking advice on manliness from an obese president who cannot directly confront someone, lobs insults from a distance, shrinks from any criticism, dodged the draft, cheats at golf, and walks around with a ridiculous bouffant hair-do and an absurd orange fake-tan, is not something a real man would ever do.
[…]
We need a model for men that prizes restraint and courage, prudence and pragmatism, and enfolds this in a model of maleness that is rooted in the defense of our societies from carnage. Looking around, I see plenty of this at work: men with calm and dignity and common sense protecting their families, friends and country. The only place where it obviously isn’t happening is in the White House.
Well, not the only place, as the tweets above demonstrate. They will feel awfully manly tied into hospital beds and sedated with breathing tubes down their throats.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.