America Uncovered

Author: Anthropologist Wade Davis/Pescanik.net

Never before in our lifetime have we faced a global phenomenon of this kind. For the first time in history, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, is focused together on the same existential threat, awaiting the same, still unfulfilled promises of medical science.

In just over half a year, civilization has been brought to its knees by a microscopic parasite ten thousand times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies but also the cultural foundations of our lives, which are to a community and its interconnectedness what teeth and claws are to a tiger.

What we have undertaken so far has largely been focused on mitigating the speed of infection, "flattening the curve" of morbidity. There is no effective treatment, nor is there a vaccine to rely on on the horizon. The shortest time in which a vaccine has ever been produced was for mumps. It took four years to make. COVID-19 killed a hundred thousand Americans in the first four months. There are indications that those who have recovered from the coronavirus do not develop natural immunity, which raises the question of the effectiveness of a future vaccine, assuming such a vaccine could even be found. Moreover, it must be safe. If the world's population were vaccinated, fatal complications in one in a thousand cases would mean millions dead.

Pandemics and infectious diseases can change the course of history, but not always in ways that are obvious to survivors. In the 14th century, the Black Death killed nearly half of Europe's population. The labor shortage led to an increase in wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, a turning point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated Europe for thousands of years.

The COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a primal event whose significance will only become apparent at the height of the crisis. It will mark this era in the way that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, the stock market crash of 1929, and the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933 became crucial points that marked the last century and presaged outcomes with enormous consequences.

The historical significance of COVID lies not only in how it affects our daily lives. Change, after all, is the only constant when it comes to culture. All peoples, in all places, at all times, are constantly seizing new opportunities that life offers them. And as companies get rid of office space or downsize, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls decline, internet streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into our homes, and air travel becomes increasingly problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as they always have. The fluidity of memory and the ability to forget are perhaps the strangest traits of our species. As history confirms, they allow us to face any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

Financial uncertainties have cast a dark shadow over us. They will loom over the global economy for some time to come, as a sobering realization that all the money of all the peoples on Earth is not enough to compensate for the losses suffered because the entire world has stopped functioning and businesses and workers have faced the dilemma of choosing between economic and biological survival.

Disturbingly, however much such transitions and circumstances may bring us to the brink of complete economic collapse, none of them individually stands out as decisive for a historical turning point. But what we can be sure of is that the pandemic has had a devastating impact on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

For the first time, the international community felt the need to come to Washington's aid due to the ongoing disaster. For more than two centuries, the Irish Times reported, "The United States has evoked a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world, love and hate, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never before been directed towards the United States: pity. As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited air shipments of essential [medical] equipment from China, the doors of history swung wide open, heralding the dawn of the Asian era."

No empire lasts too long, even if few predict its demise. Every kingdom is born to disappear one day. The 15th century belonged to Portugal, the 16th to Spain, the 17th to the Netherlands. France dominated in the 18th, and Great Britain in the 19th. Financially drained, World War I left it bankrupt, Britain feigned dominance until the end of 1935, when the empire reached its largest geographical extent to date. At that moment, of course, the torch had long since passed to America.

In 1940, when Europe was already in flames, the United States had a smaller army than Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men and women would don uniforms, and millions more would work double shifts in mines and factories, thus turning America, as President Roosevelt promised, into the arsenal of democracy.

When the Japanese took control of 90 percent of the world's rubber production within six weeks of Pearl Harbor, the US reduced the speed limit to 55 km/h to protect the tires of its motor vehicles, and then in the next three years invented synthetic rubber that enabled the Allied army to crush the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford's Willow Run plant produced one B-24 Liberator aircraft every two hours. The shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito launched two Liberty ships a day for a period of four years; and one such ship was built in a record four days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes. The American Chrysler Detroit Arsenal built more tanks than the entire Third Reich.

In the midst of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States, with only 6 percent of the world's population, accounted for half of the world's economy, including 93% of total automobile production. Such economic dominance gave rise to a resilient middle class, labor movements that ensured that a single breadwinner with limited education could own a home and a car, support a family, and educate their children in good schools. It was by no means a perfect world, but abundance allowed for a truce between labor and capital, mutual opportunities in a time of rapid growth and reduced income inequality, which were marked by high tax rates for the wealthy who were by no means the only ones to profit in this golden age of American capitalism.

But freedom and abundance came at a high price. The United States, a practically demilitarized nation on the eve of World War II, never stopped after the victory. Today, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not gone to war once; America has not spent a single day in peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making it, as he wrote, "the most warlike nation in world history." Since 2001, the US has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and wars, money that could have been invested in domestic infrastructure projects. China, meanwhile, has been building, spending more cement in three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

As America took on the role of world policeman, violence came home. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Allied casualties were 4,414; in 2019, domestic violence involving firearms claimed that many lives by the end of April. In June of the same year, guns in the hands of Americans caused more casualties than the Allies lost in the entire month from the beginning of the Normandy landings, an operation involving the military forces of five countries.

More than any other country, the United States has celebrated the individual at the expense of the family and community. Sociologically, it was the equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of the common good. Across America, the family as an institution has been eroded. By the 1960s, 40% of marriages ended in divorce. Only 6% of American households had grandparents living under the same roof as their grandchildren; the elderly were left to nursing homes.

With slogans of "24/7" celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves working jobs that only increased their isolation from their families. The average American spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with their child. By the time they turn 18, children spend a full two years watching television or sitting in front of a computer screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that members of the national military leadership call a national security crisis.

Only half of Americans claim to have meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. They consume two-thirds of the world's antidepressant production. The decline of the working family is partly responsible for the opioid crisis, which has replaced traffic accidents as the leading cause of death among those under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies the growing gap between Americans who have a lot and Americans who have little, or nothing. Economic disparities exist in all nations and create tensions that can be destructive, as inequality is unjustified. In most cases, however, the negative forces that tear society apart are mitigated or even suppressed if there are other elements that strengthen social solidarity – religion, the strength and comfort of family, tradition, attachment to land and homeland.

But when all these things we can rely on prove to be false, when the promise of a good life for the working family disappears at the moment factories close and corporate leaders, becoming richer day by day, open new jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has wholeheartedly celebrated globalization, while every man and woman could see that there was nothing in it but capital in search of ever cheaper sources of labor.

For many years, the conservative right in the United States has been nostalgic for the 1950s, for an America that never existed, but had to assume it did to rationalize its sense of loss and abandonment, its fear of change, its bitter disappointment, and its long-standing contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, times of new aspirations for women, gay people, and people of color. To be sure, if nothing else in economic terms, that country of the 1950s was as much like Denmark as today's America. Tax rates for the wealthy went up to 90%. Corporate executive salaries were only 20 times higher than average employee salaries.

Today, it is not uncommon for those at the top to have earnings 400 times higher than regular employees, with various ways of accumulating money through stock options and bonuses. The top one percent of Americans control assets worth $30 trillion, while the bottom half has more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the 160 million poorest of their compatriots. One-fifth of American households have a total net worth of zero or negative, a number that rises to 37 percent for African American families. The median asset value of black households is one-tenth of that of white households. The vast majority of Americans – whether white, black, or brown – are just two bi-weekly paychecks away from bankruptcy. Although, as a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live beyond their means, without a safety net to cushion their fall.

With the arrival of the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses closed, including 41 percent of black-owned businesses. Black people, who significantly outnumber white people in federal prisons, although they make up only 13 percent of the population, suffer shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying almost three times more than white Americans. The basic rule of American social policy – not to let any ethnic group fall below the bottom, not to let anyone suffer more humiliation than them – is present even in the pandemic, as if the virus were copying the pattern of American history.

COVID-19 did not bring America to such a low point; it simply rediscovered what had been forgotten for some time. As the crisis, in which one American died every minute of every day, unfolded, the country that once produced a new fighter jet every hour failed to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs needed to track the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery has been reduced to a laughingstock, with a clownish president advocating the use of disinfectants as a cure for a disease he intellectually knew nothing about.

While numerous countries acted swiftly to stop the virus, the United States stumbled along, denying the danger, as if deliberately closing its eyes to it. With less than four percent of the global population, the US accounts for more than a fifth of all COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease was 6 times higher than the global average. The world's highest morbidity and mortality rates did not inspire shame, but only further spread of lies, shifting blame to others, and boasting of miracle cures as dubious as any other claims of a carnival charlatan from the White House.

While the United States reacted to the crisis like corrupt dictatorships, actual world dictators seized the opportunity to position themselves better, enjoying a rare sense of moral superiority, especially after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Chechen autocrat Ramzan Kadyrov rebuked America for "malicious violation of the rights of ordinary citizens." North Korean newspapers protested "police brutality" in America. Ayatollah Khamenei, quoted in the Iranian press, stated: "America has begun the process of its own destruction."

Trump's performance and the American crisis distracted from China's mistakes in handling the initial outbreak in Wuhan, not to mention its attempt to undermine democracy in Hong Kong. When one of the US officials raised the issue of human rights violations on Twitter, the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded with George Floyd's short sentence: "I can't breathe / Ne mogu da dišem."

Perhaps such politically motivated remarks can be dismissed. But Americans themselves have done nothing for their own benefit. Their political procedures have allowed the rise to the highest position in the country of a national disgrace, a demagogue morally and ethically compromised to the extreme. As one British writer jokingly said: "there have always been stupid people in the world, and there have been plenty of nasty ones too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, and nastiness so stupid as now."

The American president lives to cultivate resentment, demonize opponents, valorize hatred. His main tool of governance is lies; by July 9, 2020, the number of his distorted and false statements had risen to 20,055. If the glorious trait of the first American president, George Washington, was that he could not tell a lie, the current one is incapable of recognizing what is true. Twisting the words and feelings of Abraham Lincoln, this dark puppet of a man has malice for all, mercy for none.

Disgusting as he is, Trump is less a cause and more an incidental phenomenon of American decline. And while Americans stare into the mirror, perceiving the myth of their exceptionalism, it is almost bizarre how incapable they are of seeing what has actually happened to their country. A republic that defined the free flow of information as the lifeblood of democracy is now ranked 45th in the world in terms of media freedom. In a country that welcomed masses of immigrants from all over the world, more people are in favor of building a wall on the southern border than support healthcare and protection for mothers and children who, without any documents, knock on their doors in despair. Completely abandoning the idea of the collective good, the laws of the United States define freedom as the inalienable right of the individual to possess a personal arsenal of firearms, a natural right that threatens even the safety of children; in the last decade, 346 American students and teachers have been killed in schools and schoolyards.

The American cult of the individual negates not only the community but also the broader idea of society. No one owes anyone anything. Everyone must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy considers basic rights – universal healthcare, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the old, weak, and infirm – America rejects as socialist indulgence, as signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead them in the fight against global threats – climate change, species extinction, pandemics – when this country has lost its sense of common purpose or collective well-being even within its own community? Patriotism wrapped in flags is no substitute for compassion, nor is anger and resentment for love. Those who gather on beaches, in bars, or at political rallies, thus endangering their fellow citizens, are not exercising their freedom; they are demonstrating, as one commentator noted, the weakness of people who lack the stoicism to persevere despite the pandemic and the courage to overcome it. Their leader is Donald Trump, a foot soldier of the status quo, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong personality behind which stands a common thug.

In recent months, a joke has circulated on the internet that living in Canada today is like having an apartment above a crystal meth lab. Canada is not perfect, but it is coping well with the COVID crisis, especially in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is only a three-hour drive from Seattle, where the infection started in America. Half of Vancouver's population is of Asian descent, and dozens of planes from China and East Asia usually arrive here every day. Logically, the city should have been severely affected by the infection, but the health system has responded to the crisis exceptionally well. Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have consistently been five times higher than in the US. Canada has suffered half the rate of morbidity and mortality per capita. For every person who died in British Columbia, 44 died in Massachusetts, a state with a similar population to British Columbia and which had more COVID infections than all of Canada. While as of July 30, the number of infected people was rapidly increasing across the United States, with as many as 59,639 new cases on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of 5 COVID patients.

When my American friends ask me to explain why this is the case, I encourage them to recall their last grocery shopping trip at their local Safeway supermarket. In the US, there is almost always a racial, economic, cultural, and educational gap between consumers and supermarket employees that is difficult, if not impossible, to bridge. In Canada, the experience is quite different. Staff interact with customers, if not on equal footing, then certainly as members of the same wider community. The reason for this is very simple. The person charging for the goods may not share your standard of living, but they know that their union provides them with a living wage. They know that you know that your children and their children most likely attend the same public school in the neighborhood. Third, and most importantly, they know that you know that their children, if they get sick, will receive exactly the same medical care not only as your children but also as the children of the Prime Minister of Canada. These three threads are woven into the fabric of Canadian social democracy.

When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi gave the famous answer: "I think it would be a good idea." Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects how America is viewed today from the perspective of any modern social democracy. Canada has been successful during the COVID crisis because of its social contract, because of the connection of the community, trust in each other and in its institutions, especially in its health system, with hospitals meeting the health needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the needs of private investors who see every hospital bed as a rental property. The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the money accumulated by the fortunate, but the strength and resonance of social relationships and interconnectedness with a common purpose.

This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die in childhood or at birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the same after taxes as Americans, working 20 percent less. They pay an additional 19 cents in taxes for every dollar earned. But in return, they receive free healthcare, free education from preschool to university, and the opportunity to advance in a developed free-market economy with a dramatically lower level of poverty, homelessness, crime, and inequality. The average worker is paid better, treated with respect, and provided with life insurance, a pension fund, parental leave, and 6 weeks of paid vacation annually. All these benefits only inspire Danes to work more, 80% of men and women aged 16 to 64 are employed, a number far higher than in the United States.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism "lite," something that would never work in the United States. And in fact, social democracies are successful precisely because they foster dynamic capitalist economies that then serve the well-being of all strata of society. It may be that social democracy will never take root in the United States, but if so, it is a shocking verdict and says exactly what Oscar Wilde meant when he said that the US is the only country that has gone from barbarism to decadence without passing through a period of civilization.

Evidence of such deadly decadence is the choice made by a huge number of Americans in 2016, prioritizing their personal indignation, placing their resentment above any concern for the fate of the country and the world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only qualification for the job was his willingness to give voice to their hatred, to valorize their anger, and to put a target on the heads of their enemies, real and imagined. One cannot help but shudder at the thought of what it will mean for the world if Americans in November, knowing what they know today, choose to keep such a man in power. And even if Trump is decisively defeated, it is not at all certain that such a deeply polarized nation will manage to find a way forward. In any case, America has run out of time.

The end of the American era and the handing over of the torch to Asia is not an occasion for celebration nor a time for gloating. At the moment of the world threat of World War II, when humanity entered a dark age beyond all imaginable horrors, the industrial power of the United States, along with the blood of Russian soldiers, literally saved the world. American ideals, as celebrated by Madison and Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, once inspired and gave hope to millions.

If and when China rises to the top, with its concentration camps for Uyghurs, its ruthless military power, its 200 million surveillance cameras monitoring every movement and gesture of its population, we will surely regret the best years of the American era. At this moment, all we are left with is Trump's kleptocracy. In addition to his praise of China for its treatment of Uyghurs, describing their internet control and torture as "exactly what should be done," and his sharing of medical advice regarding the therapeutic use of disinfectants, Trump cheerfully added: "One day it will miraculously disappear."

He meant, of course, the coronavirus, but as some have said, perhaps he actually meant the American dream.

Wade Davis holds the Chair in Culture and Endangered Ecosystems at the University of British Columbia.