Page 43 - My FlipBook 1

Joe Biden was as dead as Kelsey’s nuts and huge and as lethal as the 1918 influenza pan- before the pandemic’s arrival threw every-
nobody could deny it. demic that killed more than fifty million peo- thing into palpable unreality.
What I did not know was that, on January ple worldwide. Burr had also recently made Recently, in trying to get a grip on what the
23, 2020, as I listened to the House manag- some stock trades. context of the upcoming national election
ers present the impeachment case in the Joe Biden swept the South Carolina pri- might be, I came upon a psychological phe-
Senate chamber, this country’s very first mary, and that momentum carried him on nomenon called “derealization,” a dissocia-
diagnosis of a new virus had been made in through Super Tuesday and beyond until tive disorder the symptoms of which include:
Washington state. On that same day, the city finally, with the country on lockdown and • Distorted perception of time, space, and
of Wuhan, China, was locked down. The intel- tens of thousands of Americans dead from size of things around you.
ligence community had been warning the the virus, Biden clinched the nomination. By • Feeling of unreality from the world
president about a potential pandemic for then, the campaign was an afterthought, and around you, as if in a dream or trance.
almost a month. On the morning of January the impeachment of Donald Trump might as • Feeling as if everything is foggy,
22, as his trial in the Senate opened, the pres- well have happened on the moon. The Amer- fuzzy, or warped.
ident said, “We have it totally under con- ican people were hunkered down in their • Sense of being disconnected from
trol . . . . It’s going to be just fine.” houses, looking out at their neighborhoods those around you as if you’re trapped
A week later, on January 29, I was in the like fish in an aquarium. It was Zoomworld. in a bubble.
press gallery as senators questioned the man- The body count kept climbing. The president • Thoughts of going crazy or being
agers on both sides. But at the other end of made daily appearances on the television, very ill.
Pennsylvania Avenue, White House trade where he lied, and he whined, and he And it struck me that not only did that
advisor Peter Navarro was informing the pres- deflected all blame and responsibility onto describe my own general feeling during this
ident that this virus had the potential to kill whoever was handy. Joe Biden was largely time of plague and quarantine, but also it
five hundred thousand Americans. The next absent. A shadow-play campaign, evanescent fairly describes the political condition within
day, the Senate was debating whether to sub- figures across an abandoned landscape, which the president has succeeded politi-
poena witnesses. The president was dismiss- faceless and soundless, moved steadily cally, because it also fairly describes the world
ing the warnings of an impending pandemic toward a conclusion like a river that had gone that he has created around himself his entire
from his secretary of health and human ser- underground. No, this wasn’t the 2020 I was life. He creates derealized situations, milks
vices as alarmist. expecting at all. them for every dime, mines them for every
On February 5, the president was acquit- One bit was certain: Joe Biden was as dead as Kelsey’s nuts and nobody could deny it. possible advantage, and then moves along to
ted, one day after he gave the State of the THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY TO DETERMINE his next one, leaving his victims stuck in the
Union address. The mess in Iowa was gradu- how this election will play out. Long before fog of disbelief, both of what they have expe-
ally sorting itself out, and I was headed to the virus came ashore, it was going to be a rienced and of how the president keeps get-
New Hampshire. What I did not know was grimy, grinding campaign, because that’s the ting away with it.
that there had been a briefing with White only kind the incumbent president and his There is no telling what the campaign will
House officials on the coronavirus, and that party know how to wage anymore. There was be like, except that its heart will be dark and
the administration had declined to ask for already disinformation, foreign and domes- ominous. There is even less telling what the
any emergency funding whatsoever. On Feb- tic, and an entire architecture of voter- election itself will be like, except that it will
ruary 11, Bernie Sanders won the New Hamp- suppression tactics, ratfucking under the be foul and furious. The pandemic has
shire primary. Joe Biden finished fifth, with color of law, more widespread than at any sounded El Degüello for all of us. No quarter
a little more than 8 percent of the vote. Mean- time since the height of Jim Crow, thanks to given. Your ballot or your life. We’ve already
while, the National Security Council prepared the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Vot- had a dry run of that in Wisconsin, where the
a memo on February 14 discussing the logis- ing Rights Act. state’s Republicans forced an in-person elec-
tics for a possible program of quarantine and These are the things that were already tion in the teeth of the virus, only to lose it to
isolation measures. The meeting to brief the there, the existing mold and rot in the sys- an enraged Democratic turnout. However,
president was later canceled. tem, before the Republican Party saw fit to about two weeks later, right on schedule,
The last political moment I attended in the nominate Donald Trump, and before enough people in Wisconsin began to get sick.
2020 Democratic primary campaign came Americans saw fit to elevate him to the pres- In this unprecedented time of plague and
on February 27 in South Carolina. Already idency. As a political creature, he exists in fear, we are asked to be separate and together
you could feel the improbable Joe Biden surge that mold and rot, feeds on it, and tells his and choose a president, to be together while
coming. That day, Senator Richard Burr, the voters that it’s all fine dining. It was the case we are separate in order to judge the fitness
Republican chairman of the Senate Intelli- in 2016; it’s still the case in 2020: Forty years of a man whose demonstrable unfitness has
gence Committee, told a gathering of donors of conservative ideology and Republican pol- helped create the derealized country that will
that, according to briefings he’d received, the itics made someone like Donald Trump not somehow hold an election. No, this is not the
coronavirus could produce a pandemic as only possible but inevitable. And that was 2020 I had anticipated. It is not at all that.

NEW The past is prologue in Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy. The Russian-born writer peers through her unique lens on
autocrats to catalog the Trump administration’s assaults on American institutions. But we can’t just blame the Russians.
ELECTION, For decades, as the book chronicles, we’ve fallen away from our identity as a nation of immigrants and invited the wolf
NEW YOU in through xenophobia and an unholy marriage of politics and money. We can never return to who we were, Gessen
argues; rather, we must aspire to a new national identity, centered on “dignity rather than power, equality rather than
wealth, and solidarity rather than competition.” Now go check your voter registration. —Adrienne Westenfeld