On March 13th, we saw a dramatic shift in the United States’ response to the emerging global coronavirus pandemic. After downplaying the severity (“it’s just a flu”), exaggerating our country’s preparedness (“we have it under control”), and even spinning the mounting concern as a misinformation campaign concocted by Democrats and the liberal media (his usual scapegoats, motivated by their desire to undermine his reelection prospects), President Trump suddenly and finally declared a “state of emergency.” The haphazard and reactionary White House communiqués became daily briefings with a semi-consistent cast: President Trump and Vice President Pence joined by Dr. Deborah Birx (head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and United States Global AIDS Coordinator since 2014, as nominated by President Obama) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). The President’s deference to the experts is a welcome centering of people who know what they’re talking about, although the dissonance between Birx and Fauci’s evidence- and experience-based guidance and Trump’s “feelings” serves as quite the opposite of a coherent response (Dr. Fauci’s facepalm expresses how frustrating it must be to damage control diplomatically in real time).
Why the shift in approach? Though Trump’s narcissistic tune has not entirely deviated from the usual (he regularly blames the Obama administration and state governors, berates the media, and congratulates himself for any perceived victory), the undeniable severity of this health crisis has forced him to change his tone. The shocking videos from Italian hospitals circulating on cable news and Facebook serve as a warning of what may be coming in the U.S., where our rates of infection and mortality track with those of Italy just a few weeks prior. Several celebrities have contracted and died from the virus (oh, the sanctity of celebrity!). A critical number of experts have explained in detail the precautions we must take to prevent the spread, and have brought attention to the looming shortages of PPE. Brilliant think-pieces and historical comparisons to the fall of Rome, the French Revolution, and the Spanish Flu have proliferated. Even Trump, who is fundamentally reactionary to the whims of his conservative base, can no longer hold fast to his denial. (As to whether this suggests there is a limit to his rejection of reality, I’m not too optimistic.) What has been most striking in this time of particularly bitter political polarization, which Trump typically fuels to shore up his base, are his occasional, sober attempts to unify the warring parties against a new, common "invisible enemy:" the novel coronavirus.
This virus is awakening an awareness of a fundamental truth that has been long forgotten in public discourse, a truth which threatens Trump: that no matter how drastically our views, our citizenship status, or our socio-economic status may differ, we are all members of the same species, and we are in this together, even if in today’s world it doesn’t seem to be so. As Iran Health Minister Iraj Harirchi stated (only after contracting the virus himself, ironically after denying its severity), “This virus is democratic, and it doesn’t distinguish between poor and rich or between statesman and an ordinary citizen” (1). The calling into question of these false divisions reminds me of the Little Prince’s befuddlement at the whole notion of national borders, these imaginary boundaries that make no logical sense to the outside observer for whom difference along familiar fault lines of race/class/gender/nationality is not too familiar to be questioned.
Unhappily for Trump, this truth renders nonsensical the belief on which his leadership rests: that boundaries are real and based on fundamental difference. Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of political history at Boston College, recently elaborated on the key to Trump’s appeal:
“Key to Trump’s popularity has been a rhetorical strategy identified in 1951 by political philosopher Eric Hoffer in a book called The True Believer. Hoffer noted that demagogues needed a disaffected population whose members felt they had lost the power they previously held, that they had been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people were willing to follow a leader who promised to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader had to give them someone to hate. Who that was didn’t really matter: the group simply had to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters were suffering.”
While the object of Trump’s ire rotates daily, it is always human, some individual or group with nefarious motives. If Trump’s leadership style is to remain intact, he will need to fashion the novel coronavirus into some conceivable enemy of the people. As David Roberts explains in this article for Vox, being without a concrete enemy “leaves the lens through which the authoritarian sees the world (domination and submission) blind, and the tools available to him (scapegoating, exclusion, retribution, violence) impotent. There is no one to punish, no one to make suffer. Without that, the authoritarian is scarcely able to process the threat as a threat at all. A threat without an Other is like a wavelength of light that is invisible to him" (2).
In order to render his invisible-to-the-human-eye “Big Other” concrete, Trump has anthropomorphized it through militant metaphorical rhetoric. We now see this rhetoric everywhere, having been adopted as the predominant mode of conceptualizing this public health crisis: Trump declaring himself a “wartime president” and asserting that “we are dealing with an invisible enemy” but that ultimately “we will win this war;” Biden agreeing that the U.S. is “at war,” but against a common enemy; NPR characterizing coronavirus as an army “marching across the globe;” calling our doctors and nurses “frontline workers,” the “first line of defense,” as if in the trenches; New York Governor Cuomo claiming that Trump’s announcement that he was considering a full shutdown of the tri-state area to be a “federal declaration of war on the states;” even Dave Matthews sang about “winning the war.”
In many ways, this situation does reflect wartime: a sudden instance of mortality due to a specific event (in this case, the virus), with the White House predicting as many as 240,000 deaths, far surpassing casualties of WWI; the Navy hospital USHS Comfort, which usually responds to war-torn areas, being deployed to New York City to relieve pressure on hospitals overrun by the unprecedented influx of ill; grocery store rationing; coordinated efforts (at least locally) of mutual aid and solidarity with essential workers.
Declaring a “state of emergency” is absolutely necessary at this time, as it frees up funds set aside for just such scenarios (later I’ll get to the misuse of those freed federal funds). However, the White House’s rhetorical jump from under-control public health concern to all-out war raises red flags. My aim here is to draw attention to the potential perils of this militant rhetoric, which bears the risk of harnessing the radical potential in our collective efforts and coalescing it into an ideological unification resting on a foundation fraught with dangerous violent and nationalist underpinnings.
Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor”
Trump is hardly the first to lean heavily on metaphoric rhetoric to control the general perception of a crisis in the popular discourse; indeed, the precedent is so deeply embedded that the adoption of coronavirus-as-invisible-enemy as the predominant frame for this pandemic across the ideological board feels neutral and natural.
In her 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag outlines just this historical precedent in a cultural history of the discourses on tuberculosis and cancer. The military metaphor became widely used in medicine in the 1880s with the discovery of disease-causing bacteria (Sontag 715). This rhetoric was then adopted into the discourse of cancer, both on the personal level (the body being “invaded” and “colonized” by the cancer cells) and the medical level (finding a cure to end “the war on cancer”).
Sontag elucidates how ideas surrounding tuberculosis and cancer coalesced into myths that figured prominently in their successive modern eras of art and though. For each, it was widely believed that the character of the individual caused, and was ultimately expressed by, the illness—a certain Romantic sensitivity and melancholy for tuberculosis in the 1800s, and a stoic repression of true passions for cancer around the turn of the 20th century. Once mythologized, the diseases could then be utilized as metaphors to criticize society and attack opponents—to the detriment of the people who suffered in a very non-metaphorical way from these ailments, who had to carry their metaphorical weight and stigma as well. In light of this, she establishes at the outset that her “point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness… is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (Sontag 677).
She spoke partly from experience, writing the essay in the midst of her own “battle” with breast cancer (to use the common metaphorical lingo), at a time when cancer was still quite taboo and often kept a secret, often even from the patients themselves by their doctors.
Illnesses have proven useful tools throughout history “to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust” (Sontag 719). In pre-modern times, a plague could be viewed as divine retribution against an entire group or society; in the Romantic era, tuberculosis was thought to be contracted due to the melancholy and sensitive nature of the individual, and was even valorized as a mark of the true artist; AIDS, because it was sexually transmitted and specifically affected an identity group defined by its stigmatized sexual orientation, initially was thought to affect only those dirty gays and needle users who “had it coming.” Today, devout Christians “covered in the blood of God” believe that their faith will protect them from contracting COVID-19, and that anyone who does is a sinner who deserves it. Thankfully, this is generally viewed with skepticism and fear at the real threat this stance poses to public health.
Often, with the cure of the disease—the resolution of the mystery of causality and treatment—the unfounded metaphoric thinking is also cured. Rereading Sontag’s essay only 40 years after publication as a member of my family is being treated for cancer, the stigma seems bizarre to me—how could an ailment that anyone could get through no fault of their own be taboo? While we have far from ended the “war on cancer” (sorry, Nixon), and while cancer is still used metaphorically, at least we understand it better, treatments have improved, and the disease itself has been largely de-mythologized.
A viral discourse
Like cancer, it seems as though the understanding of who catches COVID-19 has by now been mostly relieved of any false notions (yes, even young people are susceptible), which is likely due to our solid understanding of how the virus is transmitted. We can even find clear images of the enemy virion on the internet, which helps us visual creatures who rely on experiential evidence to make sense of the abstract.
(the coronavirus “enemy,” pic from Wikipedia)
At first non-expert glance, this could be a work of modern art, early photography, or even some distant phenomenon in space captured with a telescope. Presumably taken with a super high-powered microscope, we are looking at something magnitudes smaller than anything the average person encounters in day-to-day life. In the scheme of human history, this capacity to image and imagine invisible threats is momentous, and fundamentally changes the way we relate to the coronavirus.
I used another world-changing technology—Wikipedia—to learn more about how viruses operate. My understanding is that: the virus, which is a bundle of DNA in the gray area between living and non-living thing, attaches to and penetrates/fuses with a cell, wherein it hijacks “organs” of the host cell to perform genetic reproduction and eventually release its copies, which will then disperse to find new host cells and continue the parasitic reproductive process.
(HIV reproduction in a cell, colgateimmunology.blogspot.com)
Although we mostly understand how the virus moves and reproduces itself, there remains the present mystery of whether or not I have the virus right now, which worries many due to the unpredictability of symptoms and the lack of testing. Given recent experiences with SARS and Ebola, we can have faith that with time, immunologists will be able to develop an effective vaccine.
However, there are other mysteries characteristic of any virus to varying degrees, those of where it will go and who will get it. Being susceptible to this virus, us humans have had a natural anxiety-response to a threat to our health, and the possibility of death. While these mysteries will only be resolved in hindsight, we do know that social distancing and rigorous personal hygiene are the best defenses available to us at the time to limit the spread.
Our understanding of how a virus propagates and its inherent mysteries does not exempt the disease from being freighted with metaphoric meaning; in fact, the opposite is true, as our understanding of virology has provided us a new model for describing our world. The first half of the 20th century saw a complete revolution in the understanding of viral infections due to numerous research studies on the devastating Spanish flu and scarlet fever outbreaks, and the development of successful vaccinations for yellow fever and polio. Inspired by the recent knowledge, Albert Camus’ novel La Peste (The Plague), published in 1947, which has recently gained renewed readership, used the Biblical and 17th-century phenomenon as a metaphor to examine human nature. The word “viral” entered the lexicon to describe infectious diseases in the late 1930s, but it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that “viral” became the most apt term to describe how information “circulates widely and rapidly” on the internet. Now, “viral” has a primarily digital connotation: your computer can get a “virus” of malware through a spam email, an illegal download, or a visit to a risqué/risky website; a video, meme, or advertisement “goes viral” once it is rapidly shared by millions of internet users. The adjective does not carry exclusively negative connotation: going viral can be a person’s ticket to stardom—usually short-lived but sometimes sustained, as in the case of Chance the Rapper—or a brand’s success or failure (never forget the 2017 Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner).
The motives and outcomes of militant rhetoric
Behind the unknowable scope of the damage this pandemic will cause is the greatest mystery we face: how effectively will we respond to this global pandemic, and how might our associations with the word “viral” affect our approach? The metaphoric drive is in how those in power characterize the viral pandemic and control humanity’s relationship to the disease itself.
The ultimate danger of this wartime rhetoric is the propagation of dangerous ideologies. The metaphoric potential of a virus operates on two levels: microscopically the virion “penetrates” and “hijacks” the host cell to reproduce itself; macroscopically, the human, like the host cell, becomes infected by the virus, and has the capacity to spread the virus, often unwittingly, to other people. It is not a far leap to recognize that the scientific language of virology lends itself to visions of an invading terrorist force, something certain interests in our country would exploit. Trump has insisted on calling this the “Chinese virus,” which has spurred an uptick in racist harassment of and violence against Asian people in the United States. This joke tweet reflects the farcical reality that there are people who would believe something as indiscriminate as a virus could be a bio-attack on the United States coordinated by China or even jihadists. While this is nothing more than thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia, the U.S.’s present predicament is not completely divested from our entanglements in the Middle East. Murtaza Hussain highlights in this article for The Intercept the irony that “a country that has spent trillions on foreign wars… is unable to defend its citizens from basic threats like disease and economic collapse” (3). Twenty years of intervention in the Middle East and the squandering of a massive defense budget has only further destabilized the region and earned the U.S. more enemies. We could view the fight against radicalization as a failed “vaccination” of sorts: the controlled exposure to the harmful disease (education about the dangers of radical Islam, verging on propaganda and fearmongering) with the intent of building a collective resistance to it, and ultimately a herd immunity.
Giorgio Agamben and Naomi Klein have written about how crises are generally good for leaders, allowing them to consolidate power due to a “state of exception.” It seems as though Trump is attempting to narrativize this pandemic as his “war,” which would make it the most popular in recent history. While public opinion overwhelmingly favored both World Wars, and the public’s turn against the Vietnam War was gradual, the wars in the Middle East have been contentious from the start, and public opinion has generally favored pulling troops out. Rhetorically, militarizing the pandemic affords Trump an “enemy” to “defeat” so that he may someday in the future claim “victory.” In reality, a more accurate way to describe this pandemic would be a collective effort of hygiene and personal responsibility, and ultimately healing. Of course, in Trump’s patriarchal authoritarian approach, the “masculine” triumphing over our evil enemies will carry much more political currency than the more “feminine” solidarity, tending, and healing.
Declaring not only a state of emergency but of war also serves to justify executive power grabs that are questionably related to dealing with the pandemic, which we are seeing around the world as well as in the United States. Senate Republicans attempted to pass a bill that would give $500 billion with no strings attached to industry executives (we saw how finance CEOs kept their massive bonuses in the bank bailout of 2008). Texas and Florida have qualified abortions as “nonessential” medical procedures. Trans rights are at risk of being rolled back even further. Trump fired the intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson when Congress was not in session to challenge him. Republicans in Wisconsin battled the governor’s attempts to postpone the state supreme court elections, brazenly suppressing the ability to vote in progressive strongholds to ensure a conservative appointee. Many countries have implemented shockingly invasive technologies of data tracking, that I fear may not be rescinded in the future. States of exception should ideally come to an end, but will authorities relinquish these powers, and how many of their actions are irreversible?
Despite his insistence that this is war, Trump has been reluctant to utilize the Defense Production Act to require factories to produce essential PPE. Instead, he has put Jared Kushner in charge of overseeing the outsourcing of aid to the private sector, relying on Walmart, CVS, and Target to provide the services that the federal government is unequipped to provide. (This has undeniably been a shitshow, with states in open bidding wars over face masks.) While fifty years of neoliberal policy and Trump’s firing of the pandemic response team in 2018 have weakened federal institutions to the point where the private sector is the only place with the capacity to handle this crisis, public-private partnership is not the only or best way forward. We could consider temporarily nationalizing at-risk essential services, as Spain is doing with all private hospitals, and as France is considering for some major corporations. Meanwhile, as my friend Jay Sharma reports in this article for Liberation, the owner of an empty hospital in Philadelphia demanded nearly a million dollars in rent to the city, which it couldn’t afford, so the hospital will remain unused. Nationalizing would secure public funding for these major institutions and corporations, which employ and serve thousands and prop up the economy, with sustained oversight to ensure the money is used responsibly, like continuing to pay workers their wages during the quarantine. I fear that another corporate bailout will bring the same results as 2008, where the money certainly did not trickle down.
Trump’s comments about the risk to the economy reveal his priority of profits over people. In a White House press conference, he stated that we “can’t keep [the market] closed for years, we are gonna win the battle… People get tremendous anxiety and depression, you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies… Our country wasn’t built to be shut down.” This scare tactic identifies the true enemy to public health as anything that would threaten our economy, which he locates as the beating heart of our nation. The novel coronavirus happens to be the threat this time, but it could be socialists attempting to regulate big business, or immigrants “stealing our jobs.” Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick expressed this most astonishingly in his suggestion that old people sacrifice themselves instead of sacrificing our economy.
Amid all of this nefarious activity, one positive outcome is broader public awareness of social issues to which the marginalized and disenfranchised have been trying to attract attention for years. Interestingly, the operation of metaphor in this process has been inverted compared to previous crises: instead of an illness-metaphor being used to condemn society, the invisible-illness-as-real has rendered visible and visceral the ways in which the systemic corruption and injustice of U.S. society has become naturalized by the myths of social Darwinism and rugged individualist “bootstraps.” Income inequality and lack of access to health care have too long been assumed to be norms (Black people are dying of COVID-19 at disproportionate rates), to the point where our cutthroat capitalist society became calcified in its class structure, believed to be the way things have always been and always will be. People are waking up to the fact that the unequal distribution of access to necessities and prosperity is the result of political choices and systemically-entrenched prejudice—and that these problems are fixable.
We must be careful not to be swept by the metaphorical undertow from the shore of factual basis into the roiling sea of ideological ulterior motives. We must remember what this virus is not: some evil force with malicious intent bent on the destruction of the human race. While it is only natural to attempt to make sense of this seemingly meaningless human suffering, we must be careful to make space for positive meaning in the lessons we learn and what “new normal” we want to establish. I hope that we emerge from this crisis with a sense of global solidarity rather than divisiveness, and with an understanding of the difference between a virus and human society. At our worst, we could be characterized as a virus, a scourge on the earth (though this verges on eco-fascism); but we can live, and have lived, harmoniously, in balance with all life on the planet. Perhaps our enemies are the forces undermining that reality, namely resurgent nationalism, colonialism, and extraction for profit.
Sources & further reading:
1) Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism — RT.com, 2/27/20
2) David Roberts: "The moral logic of coronavirus: Why helping people victimized by forces outside their control is a good idea." — Vox, 3/17/20
3) Murtaza Hussain, Coronavirus is Exposing How Foreign Crusades Bled America’s Domestic Resources Dry” — The Intercept, 3/6/20
– Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American”
– Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor” (page numbers from Library of America’s edition of Sontag’s essays from the 1960s & 70s)
– Roland Barthes, "Mythologies" (not cited, but indispensable overview of the process of mytholgizing)
– BYang, “COVID-19 basics for the H2 Biology student”
– Selam Gebrekidan, “For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power” — NY Times, 3/30/20
– **Ian Millhiser, “The Supreme Court’s disturbing order to effectively disenfranchise thousands of Wisconsin voters” — Vox, 4/6/20
– Jay Sharma, “Philadelphia’s COVID-19 response sabotaged by capitalist greed” — Liberation 3/26/20
– Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, "Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders" — NYer, 3/30/20
