A deeper sickness, p.1
A Deeper Sickness, page 1
To the essential workers of 2020, in harm’s way to keep the economy running but without adequate protection and paid too little. And to future generations of Americans: learn the right lesson from our mistakes.
A companion archive holding thousands of images, videos, documents, stories, and other bonus content can be found at http://www.deepersickness.com.
In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.
—JAMES BALDWIN, “Down at the Cross” (1963)
INTRODUCTION
This journal recounts in detail the four pandemics—disease, disinformation, poverty, and violence—that charged through the United States like the proverbial horsemen of the apocalypse in the year 2020. During this calendar year, nearly four hundred thousand Americans died of COVID-19, the disease caused by a novel coronavirus. Beginning in April, the country erupted into protest, some opposing public health restrictions, others marching to stop the slaughter of Black men and women by white authorities. The experience changed how we learned, ate, shopped, worked, socialized, practiced medicine, grieved, celebrated, and died. We saw bright spots, moments of great heroism and sacrifice. And yet, in the United States, 2020 will long be known as a time of grief, frustration, confusion, loneliness, and even rage.
Could it have turned out differently?
Journalists and scholars are already uncovering the missteps made by those in power in early 2020 that failed to contain SARS-CoV-2 once it appeared in the US. In this book, in which we follow America as eyewitnesses to the tumult of the entire year, we are after a different question: Is there something in the character of the place, the bones of America, that made the layers of tragedy that unfolded in 2020 practically unavoidable?
As professional historians, we spend our lives trying to make sense of the past, in part so that we can better understand the present. For a full year, we turned our attention to daily events and the historical contexts of this year’s multiple pandemics in the hope of understanding both how we got here and how we might prevent ever returning. In January, Erik L. Peterson, a historian and philosopher of science and medicine, began following the outbreak of this new coronavirus, collecting primary sources for his course on the global history of epidemics at the University of Alabama. Independently, Margaret Peacock, an expert on propaganda, Russia, the Middle East, and the Cold War, decided to do the same for a course on the history of media and propaganda. An incidental conversation in the spring after our university moved courses online inspired us to merge projects.
We constructed this book as a journal, written mostly in real time as the year unspooled. Each day, we tracked hundreds of news stories, reports, tweets, posts, blogs, speeches, and videos from across the political spectrum, intent on capturing how people encountered these moments and what historical factors informed their understandings of the events unfolding around them. Of course, no one could describe a singular “American experience of 2020.” Instead, we set out to provide a wide range of glimpses into individual, subjective encounters with the chaos of this year by recruiting and interviewing a large and diverse group of people from different races, ethnicities, classes, political beliefs, and geographic regions willing to share their expertise and experiences. Dozens of scholars, politicians, activists, physicians, epidemiologists, attorneys, nurses, and public health experts helped us make meaning of the headlines. We also received invaluable insights from “regular folks,” who unpacked their unique perspectives and made this book the expansive, heart-wrenching project that it became.
This canvassing of 2020 required an effort larger than ourselves, and we are forever grateful for the work of so many. We acknowledge the ways this story is deeply subjective, shaped by our own expertise as historians and educators living and working far from the media hubs on both coasts. As such, we wrote this chronicle in the first person. When we need to speak about ourselves, it is with one collective “I,” with each entry reflecting a thorough braiding of each of our experiences and each of our years of training and research leading up to this moment.
One point we want to underscore in this book is how difficult it often was to understand what was happening around us during the pandemic. We want to show how mistaken we were at times, how distorted time felt, how surprisingly powerless and ignorant we all turned out to be, despite our best efforts to stay informed and empowered. We researched and wrote all day, every day, frenetically, yet lived in a state of focused confusion for most of that exhausting year. We had to, of course. Contrary to how most academic histories are composed, including our own work, there could be no “outline,” no “thesis.” We could not know which events would turn out to be mundane, which would become historic—they all felt like both, all the time. So, we took each day as it came, reading and watching and writing, as frantic days rolled one into another, crescendos piling on top of each other. Inevitably, we made mistakes. Rather than fixing them in the editing process, we preserved them here as a testament to the tumult of the year. We see value in them. For, while historians in the next decade or century will no doubt shed more dispassionate clarity on 2020, they will not be able to grasp the messy immediacy of documenting it while living it, that constant sense that the ground under us was quicksand.
We constructed an expansive digital museum as a companion to the book at deepersickness.com. It displays the thousands of sources we curated over the year, the hundreds of pages of additional content we wrote that did not fit into the printed book, a collection of eyewitness narratives from contributors recounting their experiences with this year, and an exhibit space highlighting original research on 2020 from scholars and students around the country. We encourage you to engage with our voluminous research and add your stories to the historical record. We created this digital museum for three reasons. First, we wanted to preserve the anxieties, sorrows, pains, fears, angers, boredom, and even unexpected joys of this experience, including as many voices as we can. We collected many and hope to collect more. These stories take up more space than a printed book allows, but they are invaluable, nonetheless, and worth saving. Second, we built this site to preserve our sources before they disappear. Too many of the internet-based materials we used to construct the project are ephemeral. We like to imagine that our modern data is saved forever somewhere in the “cloud,” but tweets, Facebook/Instagram posts, even news stories, disappear like individual raindrops into a river. On deepersickness.com, we have saved as much as we could. Third, we preserved our sources for readers to view because the recounting of history is a perennial battlefield. How we remember the past shapes everything we do. It defines us in the present and shapes what choices we will make in the future. Inevitably, some readers will disagree with our analyses of these events. In hindsight, we might disagree with ourselves in 2020 as well. Please, readers, examine the sources for yourselves. Preserving sources from 2020 makes it more difficult for people in the future to ignore or gloss over certain realities about this experience. Americans, as we found, too often substitute folklore for history.
As we heard story after story of grief and loss, the question Was the tragedy of 2020 inevitable, and, if so, why? kept reoccurring. Tracing day after day, certain preexisting conditions that shaped this year came into focus—the way a physician armed with a family medical history might see a chronic illness behind a patient’s present symptoms.
Three historical factors, in particular, made America sicker than we should have been in 2020: (a) entrenched racial hierarchies; (b) an economic structure dependent on individual accumulation of wealth and widespread consumption of ephemeral goods and entertainment; (c) distraction, cognitive dissonance, and an intentional historical amnesia that prevented the majority of comfortable, well-intentioned, middle-class, white Americans like ourselves from doing anything about the first two issues.
These factors channeled seventy-four million people—nearly 47 percent of all votes cast—to nearly reelect a narcissistic, predatory charlatan who accumulated immense power by repeating age-old, bigoted, malevolent, and dishonest tropes. Millions more disregarded health and safety guidelines, refusing to wear masks or avoid gatherings in poorly ventilated spaces or with large numbers of people, resulting in higher rates of disease and death in the United States than in most other countries. These factors justified ongoing official and vigilante violence toward Black citizens, whether they were jogging, bird-watching in a park, sitting in their cars, sleeping in their homes, or protesting peacefully in the streets. And in the background, these factors drove many millions of people into increasing states of socioeconomic precarity.
The American 2020 experience was so bad not because coronavirus itself was worse here, but because disease is social and cultural as well as biological. And the causes of that social and cultural disease are historical. In other words, the country’s underlying disorders limited the possible outcomes of the American pandemic year. Despite our prolific technology and our deep-seated belief in progress, we Americans have not broadly diagnosed, let alone treated, the moral failings of our past. Instead, too much of white America remains willfully ignorant, manufacturing and adhering to a false past, preserved in the monuments that adorn our cities and public buildings, constructed in order to distract from the most deeply unequal, unpatriotic, and immoral portions of our present existences. This is amo ng the worst of our preexisting conditions, our deeper sickness.
Through the year, we heard another question echoed time and again: Will 2020 be recognized as a turning point—a 1968, for instance? The answer depends not just on our politicians but on Americans in 2021 and 2031 and 2121. “Apocalypse” is not just another word for cataclysm; it originally meant a revealing of what lies beneath. True to that original meaning, the apocalypse of 2020 revealed the deep, historical deformities in the American body politic. If we allow our amazement that heavily funded biotech corporations were able to create a coronavirus vaccine in record-breaking time to distract us from addressing our deeper sickness, then 2020 will not be a turning point in anything but the most superficial, historically uninteresting way.
A DEEPER SICKNESS
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 2020
Sharon Sanders of Winter Haven, Florida, has been tracking global disease outbreaks on her site, FluTrackers.com, since 2006. It was the first public forum to note the H1N1 influenza (swine flu) pandemic when it appeared in North America. I came across the site in 2013 after it was the first Western media outlet to report on the H7N9 avian influenza (bird flu) outbreak in China. The very next year, they broke the story about eight hemorrhagic fever deaths in Guinea that eventually became the terrifying 2014 Ebola virus outbreak. Sanders has mobilized health experts and volunteers from around the world to translate esoteric news on disease from Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and several other languages.
What Sanders saw last night concerned her. “In the 2013 H7N9 avian flu pandemic,” she tells me, “the earliest reports were that one to four people had the virus.”1 Now, she is seeing two brief media reports out of China identifying twenty-seven people sick with an unknown respiratory infection connected to an open-air market in Wuhan. Twenty-seven—a high number for a first report! She thought about calling Michael Coston, a colleague who runs the Avian Flu Diary blog, but it was the middle of the night. “In fourteen years, I have never called him late at night.” Still, long ago, they had agreed that if it was “very significant,” they would be in touch, no matter the time. So she called him.
Coston confirmed her concerns. It fit the profile of a viral outbreak. Sanders posted the stories to FluTrackers.com and slept for a few hours. Part of her worry came from knowing that news of this sort normally doesn’t pass through the Chinese government internet firewall. “A single outbreak of any disease involving twenty-seven humans that was being widely broadcast means something serious is going on,” she says. Overnight, others posted additional info out of China.2 The Wuhan city government claims there has been no human-to-human transmission of this new virus.
This morning, Sanders checked again. Nothing on the American news sites. Nothing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2020
Anthony Fauci, an American immunologist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), reports that the United States has reached peak levels of influenza a month early.3 There have been four hundred confirmed flu deaths, with larger-than-usual numbers of children being hospitalized.4 It could be a bad year.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) announces a disease cluster with an unspecified illness in Hubei Province, exactly as Sanders and others at FluTrackers.com are reporting. The CDC issues a Level 1 advisory, meaning Americans should avoid live animal markets overseas and stay home if they feel sick.5 Cases in China have grown to fifty-nine, including some in Hong Kong, which is worrying because Hong Kong is a good distance from Hubei Province.6 China’s medical and scientific community now suggest there could be human-to-human transmission.
Posts to FluTrackers.com show a run on face masks in China. Ever since the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak two decades ago, it has become customary in China to wear face masks during disease outbreaks. In 2002, SARS started as a mystery pneumonia from the interior of China. By the spring of 2003, SARS was on every front page in the world—the next calamity after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks and the anthrax scare that followed.7 At the time, the Chinese government clamped down on news about the outbreak, jeopardizing lives. The virus killed fewer than one thousand people globally, and fear of SARS faded.8 When MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) appeared ten years later, there was even less concern in Western countries, though it was a deadlier coronavirus.
It might feel like a SARS moment for disease trackers like Sanders, but WHO takes a “wait and see” approach. We in the United States, at least, are in no danger.9
The real worry is that we are on the brink of war with Iran. Last week, the US government killed Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, which infuriated the Iranians. People are protesting in the streets both here and in Iran. Just two days ago, Iranian ballistic missiles hit the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq, possibly injuring American soldiers. Now we hold our breath to see if tensions will escalate.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2020
WHO reports the sickness in China is a new kind of coronavirus, much like SARS or MERS. Disease trackers around the world might be unnerved by this. I’ve seen the American media report on it, yet the rest of the American public isn’t giving it much attention.
That’s no surprise. Adam Smith, the economist and moral philosopher, wrote long ago about how easy it is to detach ourselves from disasters in faraway places that are beyond many Westerners’ imaginations.10 Even in the Information Age when you can communicate with someone in China in seconds, the actual people there are abstract, too far away, and far too easy to stereotype. The reports say that this new coronavirus came from a “wet market.” It is a strange term, but it just means a place where animals are often butchered and sold. Many Americans have never heard of a wet market and have no idea how it could help spread a virus. It is too remote to matter.
I have resolved to document this pandemic if it comes to the United States. As historians have long noted, disease outbreaks reveal the fault lines and weaknesses of a society. We are living on the eve of a polarizing presidential election, amidst rising income inequality, housing insecurity, underfunded education systems, continued race violence, and brutal school shootings. We inhabit a world where one’s media popularity often matters more than one’s commitment to speak the truth. How would we handle such a crisis if it came to our shores? Would the constant movement of populations around the globe enable a disease that started in China to spread to my front door? Could the American healthcare system, which is based on a structure of profit-driven, acute care, respond adequately to keep me safe? Given our nation’s long history of violence, nativism, and racism, and given how divided we are on matters ranging from environmental protection to immigration to notions of freedom and liberty, would we be able to put aside our political differences and join forces in the face of a national crisis to protect ourselves and one another? What are the odds that our acrimonious, outrage-driven, twenty-four-hour media landscape would politicize a pandemic and prevent collective mobilization? Hopefully, we can avoid these questions. Hopefully, the virus stays in China.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2020
The CDC reports the new coronavirus is already in the United States. Two days ago, a man in his thirties checked himself into a clinic in Snohomish County, Washington, with body aches and labored breathing. The office staff gave him a mask to wear and left him waiting for twenty minutes in the front room—standard procedure. Four days earlier, on January 16, he had flown home from visiting his family in Wuhan. He had not been to the Huanan Seafood Market, where Chinese authorities suspect the new coronavirus originated, nor had he spoken to anyone who was sick during his travels. He hadn’t felt ill until the day before going to the clinic. Healthcare workers in Snohomish County sent him home to quarantine while awaiting the test results. Later, officials in hazmat suits showed up at his house and whisked him off to an airborne-isolation unit at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington.
