Do
Americans Understand How Badly They’re Doing?
In France, where I live, the virus is under control. I can
hardly believe the news coming out of the United States.
JULY 2, 2020
Author of Self-Portrait
in Black and White
THE
ATLANTIC
I returned to Paris with my family three months after
President Emmanuel Macron had ordered one of the world’s most aggressive
national quarantines, and one month after France had begun to ease itself out
of it. When we exited the Gare Montparnasse into the late-spring glare, after a
season tucked away in a rural village with more cows than people as neighbors,
it was jarring to be thrust back into the world as we’d previously known it, to
see those café terraces overflowing again with smiling faces.
My first reaction was
one of confused frustration as we drove north across the river to our
apartment. The city had been culled of its tourists, though it was bustling
with inhabitants basking in their reclaimed freedom. Half at most wore masks;
the other half evinced indifference. We were in the midst of a crisis, I
complained to my wife. Why were so many people unable to maintain even minimal
discipline?
Glued as I am to the
news from the U.S.—where I was born and grew up and travel frequently— I
couldn’t shake the feeling that France was also opening up recklessly early.
But I was wrong to worry. As Donald Trump’s America continues to shatter
records for daily infections, France, like most other developed nations and
even some undeveloped ones, seems to have beat back the virus.
The numbers are not
ambiguous. From a peak of 7,581 new cases across the country on March 31, and
with a death toll now just below 30,000—at one point the world’s fourth
highest—there were just 526 new cases on June 13, the day we masked ourselves
and took the train back to Paris. The caseload continues to be small and
manageable.
America, however, is
an utter disaster. Texas, Florida, and Arizona are the newest hubs of
contagion, having apparently learned nothing from the other countries and
states that previously experienced surges in cases. I stared at my phone in
disbelief when the musician Rosanne Cash wrote on Twitter that her daughter had
been called a “liberal pussy!” in Nashville for wearing a mask to buy
groceries.
That insult succinctly conveys the crux of the problem. American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound.
On June 26, a day when the U.S. notched some 45,000 new
cases—how’s that for “American carnage”?—the
European Union announced that it would loosen some travel restrictions but
extend its ban on visitors from the United States and other hot-spot nations.
On Tuesday, it confirmed that
remarkable and deeply humiliating decision, a clear message that in pandemic
management, the EU believes that the United States is no better than Russia and
Brazil—autocrat-run public-health disasters—and that American tourists would
pose a dire threat to the hard-won stability our lockdown has earned us. So
much for the myth that the American political system and way of life are a
model for the world.
We didn’t stay long in the city. Although the chance of
contagion in Paris is minimal, the thought of unnecessary risk unnerved me, and
so we left again for another round of self-imposed confinement. But this was a
choice. I think of my mother and father trapped in New Jersey, in their 70s and
80s, respectively, and at the mercy of a society that is failing extravagantly
to protect them. And it is failing to protect them not from some omnipotent
enemy—as we believed in March and perhaps even as late as April—but from a
tough and dangerous foe that many other societies have
wrestled into submission.
I think of my father, whom I realize I may not see this calendar
year or possibly even the next, and I picture him housebound indefinitely,
unable to experience a pleasure so anodyne as bookstore browsing. I think of my
mother, who is missing her grandchildren’s birthdays and watching them grow
tall through FaceTime, and I imagine her leaving the house at dawn to arrive at
the grocery store during its early hours for seniors. I am infuriated. I am
also reminded once again of the degree to which so many other countries deliver
what is, in real terms, a palpably higher quality of life by any number of
self-evident measures.
America is my home,
and I have not emigrated. I have always found the truest expression of my
situation in James Baldwin’s label of “transatlantic commuter.” I have lived in
France off and on since the early 2000s, and it has been instructive over the
decades to glimpse America’s stature reflected back to me through the eyes of a
quasi-foreigner. If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under
George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack
Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and
indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?
