Member-only story
Politics Aside, How Well Are We Managing the Pandemic?
We are a nation at war … or, to be honest, a nation fighting two wars simultaneously. The first war is with a swarm of invisible soldiers that, in less than five months, has swept across the nation and killed more than 127,000 Americans. Incidentally, this is more than we lost in the First World War. And while we have slowed their advance in some areas, we are not even close to defeating them.
The second war is with ourselves.
America has been sliding into partisan rancor for the past forty years, with an ever-widening gulf developing between the right and left fed by cable news channels and talking heads on the radio who call themselves “advocacy journalists,” offering news with a “point of view.” When I was a Vietnamese linguist with the Air Force, and read newspapers printed in Hanoi, we had a different word for advocacy journalism — we called it propaganda.
In a democracy, it is natural and healthy for the citizens to question how well those who govern them are doing, and in a time of crisis that becomes even more important. Theoretically, having a vigorous debate over how well we have managed a crisis should generate some insights and show us how we might cope better next time. I stress the word theoretically because that rarely happens. We have short memories and often fail to apply the lessons…
