National character is something conservatives, especially elected Republican officials at all levels of government, say they take very seriously. They tell the story often of the United States being the land of the free and the home of the brave. Americans are a hardy folk, they say, ready to face any hardship, determined to overcome any tyranny despite the odds. No one can defeat an idea, they say. In America, that idea is freedom.
If American behavior during the Memorial Day Weekend is any indication, however, that story is false. If our behavior during a pandemic that has killed more than 99,900 people in two months, the equivalent of thirty-three 9/11s, is any indicator, that story is perverse in its distortion of reality. Sure, we want freedom. We don’t want to work for it, though. We want liberty. We don’t want to sacrifice, though. The US isn’t the land of the free, home of the brave — more like land of the weak, home of the depraved. When the going gets tough, we don’t get going. We say whatevs, and head to the beach.
It’s too easy to blame the president. Donald Trump won’t wear a mask. He mocks “social distancing.” He pushes a revival of an economy in the ditch (even though the economic performance probably won’t have anything to do his eventually victory or defeat). As the death toll surpasses 100,000, he expresses no grief, no sympathy, no hope. Instead of revering Americans who died for our liberty, he goes golfing, and throws punches from the safety of Twitter. He was born on third base, but it’s worse than thinking he hit a triple — the accident of his birth means he won the World Series.
But blaming Trump for ordinary behavior is wrong. We shouldn’t give a pass to grown men and women when they choose not to wear a mask, thinking “Well, that’s what happens when leaders fail.” A leader is not a nation. A nation — a people with its own character and cast of mind, its own values separate from leadership — should not be graded on a curve. Our luck ran out with the election of a world-historical liar, but we rise to the occasion or don’t. We work together in facing calamity or don’t. We are a union — or we’re a mishmash of states that can’t stand each other, and won’t stand.
I’m glad to see the cable news networks heading out to interview beach-goers and start-of-summer revelers who have decided to ignore even modest social-distancing guidelines. I’m glad to see people going on record as being ignorant, lazy or misinformed, and therefore dangerous to public safety and health. I’m glad to see exposure of the lie that wearing a mask is somehow a violation of individual liberty.
But the question I keep wanting to ask, as I watch people rationalize the irrational, is: What would you say to other Americans who lost a husband or mother to Covid-19, but could not touch them — could not be in the same room as they were dying — for fear of being infected? What do you say to people whose loved ones were buried by strangers? A less charitable question but worth asking: Aren’t you pissing on their graves?
It’s not hard to imagine the general contour of the answers to those questions, though, to be sure, the answers themselves would be various and sundry. Basically, it would be: you do you. But in the context of a pandemic, in which your decisions affect me just as my decisions affect you, you do you is as polite as it is dishonest. In reality, we’re all in this together and those who won’t see that are a serious problem. An honest answer, moreover, would be: I don’t care about my fellow Americans, I don’t care about the number of dead, and yes, I am pissing on their graves and I’d be happy to do it again. They’d never say this in front of TV cameras, of course. That would take courage.
Allow me to be clear: I don’t really think America is the land of the weak and the home of the depraved. Polls show a massive and silent majority doing what needs to be done, taking extra care to get on with life without accepting unnecessary risks. Most people in this country are indeed rising to the occasion. They just don’t get play on CNN.
But there are people in this country, there have always been people in this country, who embody a wholly imaged nation within a nation, a confederacy in which “real Americans” are chosen by God to rule in God’s name. “Real Americans” believe in order more than law, control more than freedom, conformity more than individualism. A nation within a nation is built to maintain hierarchies of power. Power corrupts. This “nation” is, therefore, soft and decadent, selfish and disloyal, and willing to wound itself to wound it’s enemies. It’s a perversion, in other words, of the real America.
John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.
Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 26 May 2020
Word Count: 834
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