James Morrow: America not cracking up under weight of COVID
The left’s comic book view of America as a nation torn apart by Trump and crushed by COVID doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
To say that the left-leaning media has a love-hate relationship with America is like saying a toddler has a love-hate relationship with food.
One minute they can’t get enough of it, the next they’re screaming and chucking it on the floor.
And never has this been more the case than during this strange interregnum between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The still-president’s options to remain in power are diminishing, even as Biden broadcasts from the entirely fictional and made-up “Office of the President Elect”.
Mirroring this contradiction, the Australian left can’t quite figure out what to make of it all: Is the US the heroic nation that rejected Trump, or is it falling apart under the weight of a second wave of coronavirus?
Take the ABC, whose news division last week promoted a report by the recently-returned correspondent Michael Rowland with a tweet reading, “I just flew back from the US – and what I saw helps explain the COVID surge”.
Rowland wrote that he loves America but that “in my nearly three weeks on the ground in the US covering the election, I got the impression way too many Americans were far too relaxed about COVID-19 and the massive public health tsunami about to wash across the country”.
It’s a pretty typical viewpoint, though one which ignores rising coronavirus case numbers around the world — and the fact that pretty much everywhere, the second wave appears to be far less deadly than the first.
Funnily enough, I also had the chance to spend a few weeks in the US — my home country — around the time of the election, and what I saw was just the opposite.
What I saw was not so much an America that didn’t take coronavirus seriously as one which would rather be left alone to take its own precautions rather than have lives and livelihoods smashed up by heavy-handed lockdowns.
In the heart of Trump country in central Pennsylvania, where everyone was (and presumably remains) terrified that Biden will bring in a Green New Deal that will destroy the local fracking economy, everyone I interviewed wore a mask.
Yes, mask wearing was sparse at an open-air Trump rally I attended in Scranton, but then again, in all the civil disorder, chaos, riots, lootings, and eventual open-air street parties celebrating Biden’s win, there wasn’t much in the way of social distancing either.
Which cuts to the heart of claims that it is only right-leaning Americans who are doing the wrong thing, or playing politics with the virus.
If anyone has politicised COVID restrictions, it has been America’s Democrats — and their pals in the media — who’ve gleefully cheered every infected Trump contact while whistling and looking the other way at the double standards enjoyed by their own side.
After all, how were conservative Americans supposed to react when Democrats cheered on a “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally in Brooklyn, New York, in June, which attracted as many as 10,000 people — even as they were told that they weren’t allowed to go to church on Sunday?
And while every death is a tragedy, the fact remains that the US has still performed better in terms of mortality than nations like Spain, the UK, Italy, and Belgium.
That’s even after losing thousands early on not to Trump, but to edicts by Democrat governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo who stacked nursing homes full of positive cases.
Nor was there much in the way of evidence of a country torn apart by politics. The debate was robust, but no one was going at it hammer and tongs.
In a suburb of Pittsburgh, the owner of one diner said that she had imposed a “no politics” rule, and everyone loved it.
The one place where I saw politics acted out on the street was in New York City.
Upon pulling into town a few days before the election, I saw stores along Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue in mid-town and trendy boutiques in Soho boarding up their windows before Election Day, as if a hurricane or tornado was predicted to whip through the canyons of Manhattan in case of election-related violence.
Which brings us to another bit of lazy narrative — that the Trump administration had brought the US to the edge of breaking up with itself, violently.
Of course, after months of riots and looting by Black Lives Matter and Antifa-connected leftists, no one really believes that those stores were locked down in preparation for angry Republicans, to come smashing things up in protest of a Biden win.
Just the opposite: As one store manager told me, “If Trump wins again there’s gonna be trouble.”
While most on the left like to stick to the narrative that this year’s protests were, as one CNN graphic put it as a correspondent stood in front of a burning suburb, “mostly peaceful”, occasionally the mask slips.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald that Joe Biden’s election had brought her to tears, columnist Amelia Lester added this past weekend, “this was a nation that felt on the brink of a civil war a few weeks ago, and now … it’s not.”
The implication, of course, being that had things gone the other way, all bets would be off — and all those shopkeepers wouldn’t have wasted their money boarding up.
The fact is, America is a large and complex country made up of 50 states that fiercely guard their independence and whose governors need to give permission to bring in the National Guard in case of disasters.
Its President may be using every challenge he can think of to stay in power, but it’s not much different to Al Gore challenging the 2000 election results. It’s certainly less severe than Congressional Democrats using debunked evidence (the infamous Steele Dossier) to attempt to unseat Trump through impeachment.
And it cannot hermetically seal itself off from the world like Australia, nor can it afford to shut down its economy for months on end to wait for a vaccine (indeed, neither can we).
The fact is Americans want to do and think for themselves, and are quick to call out an expert class whose heavy-handed and often contradictory restrictions prevent them from earning a living.
There are, it must be said, worse things that you can say about a people.
More Coverage
Join the conversation
Runaway train: Who’s in control of this strike action?
ANALYSIS: The strike action crippling Sydney’s rail network has become a runaway freight train that rail union boss Toby Warnes is unwilling, or unable, to stop, writes James O’Doherty.
Read more
Anti-Semitic nurses are victims of hateful ideology
The Bankstown nurses, victims of a culture fuelled by extremist propaganda that dehumanises all Jews, are not the originators of this disease – merely the symptom, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Read more