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‘The Life That We Have Known, with Modifications’
Some of us, it seems, are positively going to miss the Covid-19 epidemic.
If there is a sense of impending post-pandemic lamentation from some of our progressive friends, it is because they believe that, contrary to the advice of bottom-feeding Chicago demagogue Rahm Emanuel, they have let a good crisis go to waste.
The other Emanuel brother prominent in our public life, former Obama administration adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania, seems ready to let the Covid crisis go. In a conversation hosted by the Journal of the American Medical Association in January, he argued that while there remained work to be done in reducing Covid incidence and transmission, the emergency is coming to a close. “Covid should begin looking like a flu,” he said. “You get it, and you stay home so you don’t infect other people. When you’re feeling better, you can go into work, probably wearing a mask for a few days to reduce the chance of infection. We’re simply going to get back to the life that we’ve known, with some modifications.”
Congressional Republicans have called on the Biden administration to declare an end to the official designation of Covid-19 as a public-health emergency, and, while the Republican argument is not entirely correct in every jot and tittle, the statement spearheaded by Republican Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Brett Guthrie (Ky.), and Morgan Griffith (Va.) is in its general thrust both true and useful: The emergency is over, but the Biden administration is hesitant to give up its emergency powers. Some Democratic governors and mayors also are looking for a return to normalcy (not “normality”) and would like to see an end to crisis measures and crisis rhetoric.
Joe Biden is in a political pickle. As I argued on Sunday, masking and other anti-Covid measures have for a certain kind of American progressive become a matter of culture and identity, with the mask — they prefer them to be mandatory — playing for many Democrats the same role that ritual face coverings and head coverings have played in other religions across millennia. Those of you who are nerdy enough to personalize the emojis on your smartphones may have noticed that you have the option of adding a facemask to your image, e.g.:
Why do you imagine that is? Somebody went to some considerable trouble to make that possible.
We have all seen some way-out-there ridiculousness when it comes to masking: Some people wear masks while walking by themselves on Colorado hiking trails — and grow enraged when they see someone who hikes barefaced — and some people wear them by themselves inside their cars. But surely putting one on a digital image of yourself takes that particular cake. Whatever this is about, it is not about stopping the transmission of a coronavirus.
But even as President Biden has to consider one quasi-religious aspect of Covid culture, if we may call it that, there is another, generally incompatible quasi-religious aspect of Covid culture that torments him. As a candidate, Joe Biden acted in accordance with the superstitious belief, very common among Democrats, that Covid-19 is a matter of corporate sin, that it was a kind of divine judgment on Donald Trump and his administration and would persist as long as that administration remained in place. If you do not believe that our progressive friends believe Covid to be a question of moral failing, consider how gleeful they can be when anti-vaxxers die of Covid, or the fact that Twitter at one point felt obliged to come up with a policy on users sharing their hopes that Trump would die of Covid.
The belief that plagues are a judgment upon impious kings and sinful chieftains is a truly ancient strain of religious thought, stretching all the way back into the darkness of prehistory. It figures very prominently in Judeo-Christian mythology, which made Biden a kind of Moses to Donald Trump’s pharaoh. But Moses never made it to the Promised Land, and neither has Joe Biden. Biden as a candidate promised to “shut down the virus” if elected president, and millions of Americans believed that he would. But Biden did not have very many policy proposals that were both specific and dramatically different from what the Trump administration already was doing, and, indeed, the most important work — developing the vaccines — mostly had been done by the time Biden assumed the office.
The generally (though not always) unspoken proposition was that if the country were freed from the moral burden of having Donald Trump in the White House, then the epidemic would subside. But the viruses that cause respiratory infections are not, as it turns out, morally sensitive. Rather than succeeding in his promise to “shut down the virus,” President Biden had to endure waves of new infections and new variants, and stood by helplessly as the body count ticked upward and upward until the number of deaths on his watch exceeded those on Trump’s. Of course that is a dumb metric from a rationalistic point of view, but what matters in politics is not epidemiology but mythology. We live by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
The most powerful force in American life today is not the Covid-19 epidemic. It is neither populism nor globalization nor white supremacy nor capitalism nor critical race theory nor technology nor any of the other forces we point to as explanations for our unhappiness. The most powerful force in American life today is the ravenous, unsatisfied hunger for community. The frustrated desire for community is what has made social media and other related technologies such a titanic and baleful force in our public life, what drives identity politics and neo-racism, what causes people to seek personal meaning in cults, conspiracy theories, and mobs. Black masks vs. red caps, this chant vs. that chant, this meaningless jargon vs. that meaningless jargon — the fight for community is often vicious.
There was a sense among some Americans that the Covid-19 epidemic would be this generation’s Great Depression and its World War II — trauma transfigured by triumph. Communities founded in shared trauma are some of the most intimate and most enduring ones, which is one reason that Americans living in this age of peace and plenty expend so much effort inventing fanciful new traumas for themselves. Masks are for some Americans a sign of community, an exterior marker of shared values. And they will hold on to those — at the grocery store, in their emojis, in their hearts — because they do not have anything else to hold on to. For President Biden, the political dilemma is the choice between satisfying the relatively apathetic majority that is ready to move on from the emergency mentality and responding to the highly motivated minority that wishes to cling to this moment in the belief that it still has some mojo, that there remains alive some hope, however faint, for transfiguration.
But the kind of wounds we have as Americans are not the kind that can be healed by shared trauma or shared grief, or by political factionalism based on these. Covid-19 did not make us one and whole any more than 9/11 did 20 years before. War with the Russians or the Chinese is not going to do it, either. Our Republican–Democrat split is no more about political policies than Northern Ireland’s Catholic–Protestant troubles were about theology, and, as such, there is no political solution possible. Partisan rage gushing through digital channels creates a momentary feeling of community, but not the real thing. Shared hatred is not enough.
When faced with a national emergency, Americans often speak in hopeful terms about the possibility of achieving “unity.” We believe that we will find contentedness in unity, that if there is unity of national purpose then our many disagreements and divisions will be able to be set aside, along with any unpleasant or inconvenient necessity for compromise or reconciliation. But it is not unity we are after — it is domination, the “unity” that comes after our enemies and rivals have submitted to us. Politicians from Franklin Roosevelt to Indira Gandhi have invoked the rhetoric of unity while relying on emergency powers to crush their opponents and attempt to impose their will on the whole of society. That is what is meant by, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
And that is why it is always so difficult to get a politician to relinquish emergency powers, and so necessary that we force the issue.
Words About Words
A reader flags Michael Brendan Dougherty’s use of the phrase “return to normality”: Isn’t it normalcy?
This is a golden oldie.
When he was running for president in 1920, Republican Warren G. Harding promised a “return to normalcy.” He had good reason to offer such a promise: Between the autocratic innovations of Woodrow Wilson, the world war, and the Spanish flu epidemic, life had been turned upside-down for many in these United States, and Americans were not altogether happy about it. A little over 100 years later, and we are in a very similar situation.
Harding’s use of the word normalcy was derided as illiterate by many journalists and public intellectuals, but Harding had the standard references on his side: “I have looked for ‘normality’ in my dictionary, and I did not find it there,” he said. “‘Normalcy,’ however, I did find, and it is a good word.” One columnist described Harding’s usage as jackasstical, which I quite like.
As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, there is a persistent unfounded belief that Harding coined the word normalcy. He did not. The word was commonly used in mathematics, where it had a particular technical meaning, but was also used popularly in the sense Harding used it, i.e., denotating the normal state of affairs. As Merriam-Webster points out, the folk belief that Harding made up the word has appeared in formal published literature as recently as 2016, when Joshua Kastenberg and Eric Merriam repeated the claim in their In a Time of Total War.
I myself prefer a return to normalcy — both the word and the state of affairs.
Rampant Prescriptivism
In the Sunday column referenced above, I wrote: “From thence, the theory goes, the covered head came to be a sign of physical cleanliness, and, by extension, moral purity.” A reader asks whether the from is redundant there — doesn’t thence mean “from there”?
Yes, it does.
In fact, thence is used in place of a few similar words that have gone out of fashion, including therefrom and thenceforth. Thence means “from that place” or “from that condition,” the latter having been once denoted with therefrom.
From thence is, strictly speaking, redundant, but pretty common. Our old friend Hannibal Lecter throws in the extraneous from: “The significance of the moth is change: caterpillar into chrysalis or pupa, and from thence into beauty.”
Thenceforth, meaning “from that time,” also has been supplanted by thence, commonly in the phrase “thence afterward,” which I suppose is redundant, too.
So, thence, not from thence.
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Home and Away
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In Other News . . .
Is it me, or did YouTube for some reason just get like 500 times dumber than it was? (No mean feat.) The landing page and suggestions I get seem to have become radically stupid over a very short period of time. I know this is driven by user behavior — maybe I Googled something weird? Anybody else ever experience anything like this?
In Closing
I think what C. S. Lewis wrote about individual men is also true of nations: “When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.”
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