We've been lucky to have avoided a major crisis for the last three years, but our luck has now run out. sullydish writes
“How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views.” Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images Plagues routinely start with denial. In his great novel, The Plague, Albert Camus describes a scene at the very beginning, after several rats in a town started dying identical deaths:
Those of us who have already been through a plague experience in our lives know this all too well. As the clear signs of a new and deadly epidemic began to emerge among gay men in the early 1980s, most people ignored or downplayed or even joked about it, and many of those most at risk shut their eyes.
Which is the case with ICU beds right now in the U.S. Even when the deaths mounted in The Plague, the public resisted facing the reality: It is rare that the authorities act swiftly enough and drastically enough to stop a plague from growing. Even with the difficult-to-catch HIV retrovirus, by the time it was very clear that the best course of action was no sex or very safe sex, the die was cast. Plagues are dynamic things and are fueled by complacency. With this coronavirus, which is far, far easier to catch, we had obvious warning signs from China, but assumed a travel ban would keep the U.S. safe.
With Trump, we have a deeper crisis, of course. Trump is incapable of admitting error, numb to any form of empathy, narcissistic even in a communal crisis, and immune to any kind of realism. He simply cannot tell anyone bad news. And he cannot keep a story straight, which is essential for public health. His only means of communication is deceptive salesmanship. He defunded the federal body designed to tackle such emergencies, and his Cabinet is packed with incompetence, corruption, and fealty.
The only thing we now know for certain is that a description of this era as surreal is now out of date. At some point, reality was bound to step in, of course, and it’s been quite amazing how long we have been able to postpone it. But this is now as real as it gets. And it is just the beginning. Yes, the future fiscal outlook is grim — Sunak spent the first third of his budget speech on measures to contain the coronavirus — and disentangling from the E.U. is bound to be economically hazardous. But as a package for a contemporary conservatism, he’s hard to beat.
“We disagree with [the historians’] claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding.
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