COVID in the American Imagination

It is our fate, as humans, to experience things we have no way of knowing in any tangible way, but which nonetheless demand an opinion of us.

Case in point: our friendly neighborhood pandemic.

COVID, of course, cannot be tasted, palpated, watched, or heard. We know it by its signs and its symptoms, and even these are abstract. We read that people in a place we may never have heard of are sick in novel ways (worldly as I am, a city of eleven million people had previously escaped my attention). We are presented with conclusions drawn by experts we’ve never met. We may be able, if we seek it out, to find data that allow us to draw our own conclusions, but that requires that we trust a collection of numbers and labels beamed to us from somewhere. If we are unlucky, we become sick with something a test tells us is COVID-19; or if it is a loved one who becomes sick, a doctor might tell us we cannot visit them due to the risk of infection and spread of, you know, that disease.

From these pieces, we answer a basic question: is it real? It requires an exercise in imagination to piece together a picture of pandemic, and many of us decided we weren’t interested in completing that flight of fancy. Those of us who did complete it came away with a belief in a microscopic sphere of proteins, a tiny ball that attaches itself to particles inside our lungs and sickens us.

The people who fall into that camp earned themselves a second question: how important is it? Okay, some people are getting sick and some people are dying, but how many really? Is the glass .6% full or 99.4% empty? Can we not explain away the only slightly hastened death of the old and infirm?

Between these twin points, we constructed a bigger story:

• It is a hoax.
• It is a bad flu.
• It is a more dangerous disease, but not that dangerous.
• It is dangerous, but I can be responsible and still do what I want.
• It is a true emergency that requires collective effort to mitigate pain and suffering.

The question of which of these points of view is more valid than the next is not the subject of this essay. I have a certain meta-sympathy for all of us stupid apes trying to use our tools. You certainly could, if you so choose, decide that science is fiction and/or not care about a few spare hundreds of thousands of deaths in your own country. It is true that we look past all kinds of deaths all the time. Should we? Is it a problem that we would accept the demise of 3,000 people each year just so we can go 70 miles per hour on the interstates instead of 60?

That’s a worthwhile debate, but I’m more interested in the question of which of the above opinions carried the day and why.

When you look at the numbers here in the good ol’ U. S. of A., it’s glaringly obvious that the last version of events — that of a true emergency that we could manage together — was decidedly unpopular. Even when we were supposedly in a nationwide lockdown, the virus kept spreading and spreading at high numbers. We simply never cared all that much. From the public discourse, it’s easy to understand why. A very small minority of people who imagined a society fighting together against a true emergency were shouted down by two other groups: those who didn’t think it was real and those who thought it was, but didn’t require anything of them. Not wearing a mask. Not staying home. Not even getting a vaccine.

You could break those folks down into three groups: the deniers, the mean-spirited, and the conscientious objectors.

The deniers aren’t particularly interesting, except inasmuch as it was willful ignorance. I am sure…scratch that, I hope that there were some people of sincere religious conviction who eschew electricity and other modern conveniences and therefore knew that COVID was simply another plague their god would defend them from. The much more vocal group worshipped a very earthly god of spite. “I don’t like the people who are telling me this, so I will simply refuse to listen. It means more to me to pwn the libs than it does to avoid contagion. No mask or social distancing for me — I will lay down my life to show allegiance, if that’s what it takes.”

Godspeed, Herman Cain. I hope it was worth it.

The mean-spirited make a more interesting study. “I know COVID is real, but FREEDOM!” Studies have since emerged showing that vaccine hesitancy correlates with an attachment to the concept of liberty. This is the “every man is an island” school of thought. “I am a rugged individualist, the descendant of the pioneers. Self-reliant.” [Please no one point out that this modern-day cowboy has a pickup truck that he most decidedly did not whittle from pine.] His point is: I have stuff to do, and the tree of happiness needs to be watered from the time to time with the blood of losers who can’t stay healthy. Let me go back to work, visit the bar, and don’t ask me to look like a wuss while I do it. Such hostility masking as something more edifying.

*sigh*

[It’s not his fault, entirely. Part of his identity rests on the unfortunate contention that he is indestructible. The durability of the ego, once it meets with chauvinistic superiority, must deny his vulnerability to infinitesimal threats. How could a man who sinks fence posts in thunderstorms and wrangles cattle in hip-deep snow (while fighting a cougar, natch) be susceptible to a little sniffle? He can’t allow it, much to his own detriment. I know Rush Limbaugh used to warn us men about being feminized, but personally, I’m okay with that, if it means not having to act tough while I’m being intubated. If being a priss means avoiding illness, sign me up. Heck, if it just lets me avoid appearing as if I like COVID when I refuse to wear mask and then refuse a vaccine, that’s all the convincing I need to lose a few man points.]

Most of the people I know fall into the conscientious objector category, which was the reluctant spiritual cousin of the mean-spirited. They acknowledge the seriousness of the virus. They never denied it was happening. They took obvious precautions. And yet…the commitment was incomplete. They moved around. They boarded planes. They gathered with friends. They held themselves to a standard I have described elsewhere as “the maximum that wasn’t harmful” rather than “the maximum that was helpful.”

Even though I held myself to the latter (very high) standard, I have a certain sympathy. If I’m being honest, I was restless, in that peculiarly American way. The regular cyclical pattern of life holds no joy for people like us. Time has heft in proportion to the extent of novel experience. I achieve something better than I did before. I see something remarkable (and prove it by sharing pictures with the world). I eat something new and amazing.

In the absence of these things, we exhibit dissatisfaction. Yes, I have a nice home and many creature comforts, but these are already factored into the baseline. They have ceased to be meaningful. I need to get out and do something. Although I may not embrace the need to make something of myself as an ideal in the same way the mean-spirited might, I am not immune to its effects. The FOMO is real.

The other underlying psychology that enabled the conscientious objectors to opt out of some or all of the guidelines for combatting a global pandemic was the noble belief in one’s own goodness. “I am good. I am the hero of the story. By definition, what I do cannot be bad.” This would come across in attestations of caution, mated to facts that immediately undermined that narrative: “I have been soooooooooo careful” was closely followed by tales of unmasked car rides with people outside their household or indoor gatherings with individuals whose risk factors they couldn’t possibly know or trips back home to see family for the holidays.

Humans are wired to see safety in the familiar. It’s a useful impulse that saved countless medieval serfs from violent death. Inside the walls was salvation; outside was dissolution. It might seem inconsistent with one’s best interests to treat family and friends as vectors of disease, but I submit: if one believed in COVID, your care and concern for others necessitated staying away. And if they truly cared back, they would agree, instead of guilting you into a cross-country flight to eat turkey and celebrate one of the signature moments of continental conquest.

It was just one of many conflations of personal, egocentric considerations with the epidemiological lessons that even laypeople had absorbed. “I want to eat dinner out so bad. I want to see my family. I don’t want to seem impolite. I’m following all the guidelines, so I can go to my gym.” Even people who believed they knew better said and did these things.

For people like that, the pandemic forced a pitched battle between a vision of the worst health crisis in 100 years and their own inflated importance (or anxiety of their own unimportance, which is the heads of that particular coin). In this, they are not so different from the rugged liberty types. Both are self-obsessed; while the conscientious objectors can also imagine something other than themselves, they cannot imagine something greater than themselves.

This is the stunted American imagination. Humanity has always been self-obsessed. Even the first caveperson artist couldn’t just draw a gazzelle. He (I’m guessing it was a he) just had to add himself, holding the spear that killed the poor beast. For good measure, he placed his left hand on the cave wall and sprayed his red ochre around it in a prehistoric “I was here.” Ancient humans, when they imagined the gods, just happened to divine them to be humanoid. Hmmm. But at least some peoples had richer inner worlds that had something to say about the world around them. The Hindis let the elephants play a part in their pantheon. The Incans had the puma and the condor. The Salish peoples had the fox and the raven.

Now what do we have? Having done away with the anthropomorophic god of Christianity, we Americans have: the self. We enshrine it in all our photos. We invest our energy in shaping its physical form (check out my abs, follow me to see how I shape my glutes). Even when we join collective causes, it is a reflexive, defensive cry: I don’t need to apologize for who I am, and anything less than full-throated support is an attack. That American twist on the redress of legitimate historical grievances is betrayed by its origins: the same definition of liberty that animates the vaccine-hesitant.

This is why the best we could do in response to our tiny little space invader was a vaccine. We don’t do sacrifice. We have no patience for abnegation. But shopping for Pfizer or Moderna? Now you’re talking our language. I’ll protect myself. I might even jump the line (lots of people I know did — on all kinds of flimsy pretenses). An orderly distribution of life vests? Not on this Titanic. We are all Billy Zane.

I get how we got here. All these impulses were useful at one time. They’re useless now, and this daisy chain leads here: millions of people dead now, instead of next year or the year after that or — in the case of the infrequent, unfortunate 40-year old who succumbed to a cruelly capricious coronavirus — decades from now.

We’ve lost the ability to imagine anything that isn’t pleasing to me, me, me. It is why we didn’t deal with this problem. We left the baby to stew in his own excrement, and now his ass is chapped with the worst diaper rash you have ever seen. His skin doesn’t care that we had other things to do, and neither does COVID.

The human imagination is a powerful thing. It has helped keep this soft, slow species alive for hundreds of thousands of years by making sense of a hostile, chaotic world. It may even allow the upper classes of our kind to sail through this crisis more or less intact; but as we confront more and more problems that are of our own making, we may eventually meet our match.