Have you ever read a column or op-ed and found yourself asking, “Why on earth would the author choose that example?”
Over in Politico, Joanna Weiss writes about the HBO show The Last of Us and contends that the show’s popularity partly reflects American fears’ shifting from an all-powerful and draconian government to a government that is hapless and incompetent in the face of a serious crisis.
One might agree with that assessment. I think the fact that — in the show — the U.S. military, from the first night of the crisis, begins executing innocent civilians shows that the biggest problem in the world of The Last of Us is probably not that the government isn’t big or powerful enough.
One detail in Weiss’s essay caught my eye (emphasis mine):
We’re scared of something different now: not evil technocrats and calculating despots, but amorphous problems like climate change and disease. Our sense of government’s competence has shrunk, too, maybe due to real-life examples of government’s failure to protect, in the U.S. and abroad — the grim surprise of 9/11, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and outbreaks of SARS and MERS. For years, polling data has shown a steady decline in faith that government can solve intractable problems. It stands to reason that we’d connect with stories that question the state’s ability to marshal a consolidated plan of action, let alone protect us from the apocalypse.
But SARS and MERS were more or less nonfactors in American life.
For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes that “in the United States, only eight persons were laboratory-confirmed as SARS cases. There were no SARS-related deaths in the United States. All of the eight persons with laboratory-confirmed SARS had traveled to areas where SARS-CoV transmission was occurring.”
Regarding MERS in the United States, the CDC summarized in 2015 that “two patients tested positive for MERS-CoV in May 2014, each of whom had a history of fever and one or more respiratory symptoms after recent travel from Saudi Arabia. No further cases have been reported in the United States despite nationwide surveillance and the testing of 514 patients from 45 states to date.”
Now, if you want real examples of government’s failure to protect citizens, there’s a virtual buffet one can browse. The San Bernardino terrorist attack, the Pulse nightclub terrorist attack, Benghazi, the Boston Marathon bombings, every mass shooter who was on the FBI’s or another law-enforcement agency’s watch list, our insecure borders, the U.S. Capitol Police’s unpreparedness for January 6, the Americans stranded in Afghanistan, the disorganized response to monkeypox from an administration headed by a president who pledged he could shut down the virus, veterans left dying while waiting for care because of a callous, unresponsive bureaucracy at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Office of Personnel Management hack. . . . I’m sure you can think of many more.
The “U.S. government’s failure to protect” has been evident for decades. How on earth could SARS and MERS come to mind first?