Coronavirus and the Great Disruption
During the 2016 campaign, some deluded souls on the far left promoted the idea that since there were no substantive differences between Democrat Hillary Clinton and evil incarnate Donald Trump, in their minds at least, then it might actually be better for the Celebrity Apprentice host and sham university proprietor to win because his election and presidency would be so disastrous, so cataclysmic, so downright apocalyptic that it would lead to a political revolution.
Where Clinton promised business as usual and slow, incremental change, Trump would be so egregiously awful that his disastrous presidency would expose the innate cruelty and savage iniquities of capitalism and lead people to angrily demand serious, substantive, institutional change.
At least that was the thinking. The reality turned out to be something much different. Trump’s presidency certainly has been disastrous, cataclysmic and borderline apocalyptic. It’s been as bad as we feared, if not much worse. He has been an unmitigated disaster yet before the coronavirus hit there was nevertheless a VERY strong chance he would be re-elected, possibly in a landslide.
It didn’t matter how unconscionably Trump behaved: his base not only stuck with him but elevated him to the level of a golden man-god who could do no wrong even when literally everything he did was not just wrong but sociopathic in its complete disregard for human decency.
Trump’s election did not change everything; it just made what was already awful much worse. The same cannot be said of the coronavirus. Over the course of just a few months or so it has completely changed the way we live our lives and see ourselves and our future.
The coronavirus has proven not just a great disruption but something closer to The Great Disruption. It has the potential to change the way our society is arranged in a profound and lasting fashion, for better or worse.
Only Donald Trump actively hopes that when this all ends we will be the exact same people, with the exact same mercenary values.
It’s incredibly telling to me that Trump recently tweeted, “Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!”
This official message from the president of the United States feels like it was written by someone in a gold elevator snorting bags of Adderall during a month-long manic state.
The kindest interpretation of Trump’s tweet is that the president wants us to not allow our minds to dwell on the sickness and death caused by the coronavirus because it is painful and hard and will take our focus off what’s truly important: MONEY, BABY! MOOLAH, MOOLAH, MOOLAH! WE’RE TALKING ZILLIONS OF DOLLARS! BIGGEST BOOM EVER! YUGE! YUGE! SHOW ME THE MONEY! SHOW ME THE MONEY!
Trump nobly gives people who have lost a child or father or wife or best friend to the coronavirus an exception from this directive to quickly forget the defining tragedy of our lifetime. They presumably still will have to forget the “horror of the Invisible Enemy” but they’ll generously be afforded an extra week or two to remember their dead loved ones before moving onto the all-important task of re-building the economy so that it’s bigger and better than ever.
Trump is famously a realist who would never knowingly give people inaccurate information. So he does not definitively state that after the deaths of potentially millions, runaway unemployment and a tanking stock market, the American economy WILL experience the greatest boom in history. No, he merely asserts that that is PERHAPS a possibility, and one we should all be working aggressively towards rather than being a bunch of babies all sad because grandma died. And grandpa died. And cousin died.
Of COURSE Trump wants us to forget everything that we learned during this terrible crisis. He wants us to forget the way that the coronavirus exposed the cruelty and heartlessness of capitalism. Trump wants us to forget that when things get truly dire, even a grotesque caricature of a capitalist pig like himself is forced to implement Socialist measures like giving money to people in need to help prevent society as a whole from devolving into madness, civil war and anarchy.
He wants us to forget that collective action is the only way to survive this crisis, not rugged self-reliance. He wants us to forget how this tragedy gave us a new perspective on the fragility and delicacy of life, in its fleeting nature and incalculable value. He wants us to forget how we came together as people, how we came to understand that there are things infinitely more important than money and success and winning.
Finally, Trump wants us to forget how terribly he mishandled this crisis, how he downplayed it as a Democratic hoax before its impact became too huge to ignore and then blamed everyone else for his incompetence, most notably Obama.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it and I REALLY don’t want to repeat this nightmare. So let’s aggressively ignore Trump’s typically worthless, self-serving advice, and remember this crisis so that we may learn from it and grow, as people and a nation, and not just an economy.
Will the Coronavirus prove the great disruption Trump’s election most certainly was not? I certainly hope so but history and experience have both taught me the folly of optimism and hope in a world that seems to grow more hopeless by the day.
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