I wish the discourse on why America got steamrolled by this virus was a little less "people going out and having fun" and a little more "this country has no paid sick leave, our health care is a disaster, and the GOP isn't the only party prioritizing the economy"
Obviously this country has way too many politically-motivated vigilantes and folks who are just lazy, uniformed, or confused, but, like, super-spreading events at jails, workplaces, and nursing homes aren't about people's refusal to defer pleasure
It's worth framing this as the lure of the Jeremiad: instead of describing the structural arrangement which effectively pre-determined how things would play out, the jeremiad form frames the problem as a matter of *choice.* (You COULD have, but you denied God, etc)
Jeremiads can take an event with truly wicked, complicated, and structural causes--which could therefore have gone otherwise than it did only by imagining thorough and structural changes--and propose, instead, that people should have JUST BEEN BETTER.
Issuing Jeremiads allows you to reframe the problem, say, of an utterly immoral and deadly healthcare, labor, and economic system--which lets people die in every disaster, not just this one--into a problem of INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE MAKING WRONG INDIVIDUAL CHOICES
Individual people making individual choices can't explain, for example, why "More Than 40% of U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Linked to Nursing Homes." nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Sacvan Bercovitch's "The American Jeremiad" suffers from the malady of a lot of that era's best American studies (perceptively describing a feature of US culture but then explaining its cause as "well, the puritans!") but is nevertheless very good
books.google.com/books?id=YLwZR…
books.google.com/books?id=YLwZR…
Those who are invested in the status quo--which is an economic system predicated on exploiting many and leaving many to die--would naturally rather imagine that the problem isn't that system, but rather "stupid bad people making bad choices"
