Thread by @zunguzungu

The insight I associate with @PatBlanchfield is that American gun violence is not shocking or out of control, but that gun deaths are a metabolized constant in American history and culture.

Trump's "we need to live with it" resonates with that: nbcnews.com/politics/polit…

@PatBlanchfield Because American gun violence disproportionately kills *certain* kinds of people--and sustains a *certain* kind of social order--we have learned to "live with it" or have been constructed as a particular kind of "we": the people who shoot guns (not those who are shot by guns)

Something similar is happening with the virus, as the "we" which needs to live with it is the American too free for masks. "Living with it" says: a patriotic American wouldn't catch COVID19; since only unpatriotic Americans catch it, patriotism is the refusal to care about it.

I've been thinking a lot about my mask-skeptical, Trump-supporting cousins, who have had nothing but contempt for any and all concessions made to the pandemic; when a member of their family tested positive, the entire facebook thread was dozens and dozens of "praying for you!"

There's something in that learned, virtuous helplessness, in the anger at imagining that you can and should DO anything to mitigate what is happening neatly flows into an acceptance of God and America's will: good people accept what is given them. We must live with it.

And after all, does not the virus disproportionately kill *certain* kinds of people? (old people, Black and Hispanic people, the working class, New Yorkers, etc) And wouldn't doing something about it--vigorous government interventions--upset the American social order?

So of course we must "live with it." More than that, being *against* masks can give people a kind of meaning, as ludicrous as it sounds. It lets them play out the scripts they love--"I see the truth, everyone else is an idiot sheep"--that they identify themselves through.

This is true, of course, but we miss something crucial if we imagine that "saving lives" is something the American system functions to do. You could even argue that discourse of this kind does less to indict the system than to obscure how it actually "thinks."

Why would we expect (in the sense of "anticipate") our leaders to take dramatic steps to save lives when we know their base does not expect (in the sense of "demand") them to do so?

This is why, I think, this:
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…

has more explanatory power than this:

theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

Fallows describes what could have done if the government were like a pilot who wants to stop a plane crash (for self-interested reasons); Perry observes that both parties in our government have declined to do what is necessary to save lives (because they have parachutes)

Not to the same extent, of course, but if Trump's base lets him off the hook for massively bungling the pandemic, it's worth remembering that a lot of Democrats seem to think Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio did a good job.