One of the perils faced by Odysseus (I always prefer the Greek name to Ulysses) trying to get home from the Trojan War (Homer’s Odyssey) was a narrow sea passage between lethal threats. Odysseus must choose between the monster who will eat several of his crew and the whirlpool which will swallow his ship whole. He makes a rational choice which costs the life of six comrades.
It seems to me that we face a similar dilemma today in the intersection between COVID 19 and politics. Of course, people with a conscience don’t want to politicize the imminent deaths of many thousands of people. However, the political dimension of our current situation is, quite simply, reality. There is no escape from it, and it will constrain the future of our democracy and of the world’s environment. I see it like this.
The foul GOP has drawn on decades of anti-scientific animus to deny the seriousness of the virus. Doing so, it has established a clear metric. “It’s just a flu. Do you know how many people die each year of the flu?”
For the Kool Aid drinkers and, crucially, for low information voters, this metric defines a threshold. If deaths remain low enough to support a comparison with typical flus, then GOP propaganda memes will soar. The besotted will feel confirmed in their refusal to listen to experts (well, they will anyway) and the inattentive will bridle at the cost and inconvenience of what will seem to have been a liberal over exaggeration. That dynamic would really hurt us in November.
And of course that is Charybdis, the whirlpool. Another 4 years of the current GOP and honestly the survival of democracy and of the world will be in serious doubt.
But of course the Thugs are taking a huge chance on this. If COVID19 soars past that metric then it is difficult to see how the GOP can survive. At least for now, the ship is likely to sail on safely. The cost, however, will be horrific. Thousands of lives and many more thousands of sufferers enduring health systems failure. Those members of Odysseus’s crew paid with their lives for the ship’s safety. (Actually, every single member of Odysseus’s command dies except for the lone survivor who returns to Ithaca after 10 years.)
Obviously, the difference here is that no one can directly choose between these options. And I know that everyone around here chooses life insofar as we can. I am sure we are all choosing to cooperate in order to save as many lives as possible. We will all rejoice whenever the health care folks get things under control and stop the deaths. WHENEVER that happens.
But I feel so much ambivalence. These idiots are so stupidly venal and corrupt. They are so WRONG about it all, but in our political climate, they can’t be properly condemned until their idiotic metric is left in the dust, at the cost of thousands of lives.
And there is a built-in and infuriating irony in the situation. Many Democratic governors (including Gov. Walz of my home, MN) are doing a fine job of leading an attempt to flatten the curve. But there is a danger that their very success will become a weapon against them. Keep the incidents and deaths down through competence and leadership and the jackasses will use those results to bleat on about how it was just a flu. Maddening, but typical of today’s staggeringly unreal politics.
Well, I suppose that there is nothing to do but to function as responsibly and wisely as possible. Honestly, the epidemiological reality doesn’t seem to hold much promise for the “just a flu” meme. Tragically and at the cost of many lives and our economy.
And in the end, we come back to what was always there waiting for us: November. By then, we will have lost many to Scylla. We better work damn hard to ensure that the whole ship doesn’t go down into the vortex of Charybdis as well.