I remember when news of the novel coronavirus began popping up, the headlines were like blips on my newsfeed.

The excesses of media saturation make it easy to scroll past even the most dire of predictions. In some ways it has become a survival tactic — a means of preserving one’s mental well-being — to do so. But, as often comes when I do see such headlines, there is a slight knot that forms in my stomach before I banish it into the bottomless void of the newsfeed: “No, no. Things will be fine.”

“Out of sight, out of mind.”

…

I wrote in my first note how the back-and-forth I witnessed between a stranger and their mother over the phone left a mark on me. The moment, in many ways, foreshadowed what was to come: namely, the struggle between alarm and disbelief in the virus.

My own fragile optimism dissipated quickly in the early days of the pandemic as I began following both the spread and the mortalities that occurred across the world. Even so, there were times I fell back on a fleeting sense of hope that things would right themselves quickly. I looked to Time, as I often do, to be the healer that would shuffle these events into the historical record and, for me, into just another notable memory.

But the moment persisted. It’s been rendered stagnant. As it dragged on I came to reflect on the incompetency surrounding the handling of the pandemic at the governmental level, on the politicization of the virus, and on the ideological barriers that stood in the way of a collective will to overcome it.

The U.S. has never been good at reckoning with its own faults and shortcomings. The mythologization of this country, long the bedrock of U.S. patriotism, is the foundation of American Exceptionalism. This mythology has really foregrounded itself in how I approach understanding the issues that define our times — not so much in understanding the causes of particular issues, but more as the reason for the inability to fully reckon with these issues in the popular imagination. In the case of the pandemic, the American Exceptionalism mythology clouds how we might see ourselves in the midst of a major historical event.

Other places face terrible problems, but not the U.S. Other places endure suffering, but not the U.S. And other places are struck by pandemics and face mass death from the uncontrolled spread of preventable diseases — not the U.S.

The denialism surrounding COVID-19 can almost be chalked up largely to a computational error within the American mind. The reality of the horrors of the pandemic does not square with the foundational myths of American exceptionalism, so they do not compute. It’s not real, or it’s overhyped. It can’t happen here.

Perhaps there is also a tie to assumptions in the mind that the chaos of the pandemic should resemble the ravages seen on the Hollywood screen and not the slow march of death hidden largely from the public eye that the pandemic is. Unless it matches the chaos of the fictional portrayal, it is not Real. The simulacra of the screen steals the assumption of truth from The Real.

This notion of “The Real” dominated my mind at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s a reference to the idea posited by Jacques Lacan and further expanded upon by Slavoj Zizek. My understanding remains fairly pedestrian, but the overarching concept (as I understand it) speaks to me — particularly in the notion of the intrusion of The Real into our Reality.

The Real and Reality are two different things. For me, this means very much a constructed Reality that our consciousness passively slides into — one of images of the perceived order influenced by mythologies and tradition. It’s formed within the parameters of culture. The Real is the natural elements that lay outside that constructed reality, but exist — wild and chaotic — hanging over us or nestled in the spaces near us, making its presence felt but one which our social consciousness is not fully tuned to comprehend.

Is that getting into the weeds enough? I only outline this to say that, to me, the pandemic represents that intrusion of the Real and the denialism that has emerged in reaction is our Reality refusing to square with it.

In the U.S., not only is the notion of Exceptionalism an element of our Reality, but so is the business ontology that informs our understanding of liberty. So much of what constitutes freedom to us is entwined with the notion of a freedom to consume.

Our notion of normalcy is tied to consumption. Our notion of freedom is tied to consumption. “Liberty” does not mean freedom from external threats, the things that reveal themselves from the ashes of unregulated consumption. Our freedom is freedom from those realities.

I can’t think of a more apt lens through which one can view some of the tendencies we have seen amid the anti-lockdown protests. Naturally some of the more fervent tendencies include those that have long derided any notion of governmental overstep, but that perspective became even more potent because the lockdown measures fed into the fevered notions of authoritarian overreach they have long claimed to be warring against. What is disregarded is the notion that lockdown measures are meant to stem the spread of the virus and the battlefield is shifted from the crisis to the ideological war surrounding notions of liberty — one in which the prevailing American understanding, where commercialism and consumption equate freedom, dominates.

This is not to disregard the very real concerns in the economic crises that have emerged from the lockdowns, and the difficulties faced by those unable to work. But this does speak to why the U.S. approach has never been uniform and skirts around ever embracing a strategy that has worked, or at least proven more effective, in other countries (i.e. widened social welfare measures to ensure livelihoods aren’t lost during lockdowns). It’s a half-approach, one that seeks to preserve our notion of normal, i.e. a consumer society, while attempting to control the spread of the virus.

The thing is, this is an attempt at compromise with an entity in which compromise is not possible. Our political leadership hedged their actions on the ability to tie our yearning for normalcy with risk — they bet on us taking risks for a semblance of normalcy, and we obliged. The result of this approach is the situation we now find ourselves — most COVID-19 cases, most deaths, and a spread that seemingly will never be put in check.

This is not to say that the U.S. is the only country struggling to implement concrete measures against the virus while running against consumerist desires, as that ideological torch has been taken up particularly by right wing elements in places like Brazil, the UK, and elsewhere. But I always find it important to focus on the U.S., if not simply for our overarching historical influence on the development of consumerism as we know it now.

I also don’t wish to come off as laying blame on the common individual as a source for why things have gotten as bad as they have. It is, after all, very easy to be frustrated with those who have flouted basic safety precautions and I’m sure I’m not alone in having moments where I shake my head when I see such behavior. But, as with anything, I find it most important to first understand the underlying causes that lead to such behaviors — behaviors couched in ideologies upheld and transmitted from the top-down through systems of power.

This reflex of the state reminds me of another Lacanian/Zizekian concept — the big Other. There’s a relation to the notion of Reality I had outlined earlier. I like to think of the big Other as the arsenal of assumptions about the functions of reality that guides policy. The big Other is the idea of the public that abides by these assumptions and to whom politicians appeal to when making decisions. As Mark Fisher explains in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, the Big Other is a “collective fiction”:

“One important dimension of the big Other is that it does not know everything. It is this constitutive ignorance of the big Other that allows public relations to function. Indeed, the big Other could be defined as the consumer of PR and propaganda, the virtual figure which is required to believe even when no individual can. …

Yet the distinction between what the big Other knows, i.e. what is officially accepted, and what is widely known and experienced by actual individuals, is very far from being ‘merely’ emptily formal; it is this discrepancy between the two that allows ‘ordinary’ social reality to function. When the illusion that the big Other did not know can no longer be maintained, the incorporeal fabric holding the system together disintegrates.”

It’s not as if those in power don’t know what it will take to overcome the pandemic — it’s that to do so will be a much deeper admittance that the current social structure is incapable of rapidly overcoming it.

I will stress this rapidly aspect. I am not so cynical to think we will never see an end to this current pandemic — even with the alarmingly erratic vaccine rollout we’ve seen thus far. But this will be an end following a trajectory of hesitance, slow reaction, and the expenditure of lives (and it should be stressed, lives that largely fall along racial/class lines) for the sake of normalcy. That requires more of a moral compromise embedded within a system, one which points to an inhumanity that ought to be rejected if we’re to weather the next pandemic any better.

…

As the pandemic dragged on and the thoughts I’ve outlined here formed in my mind, I couldn’t shake the notion that the U.S. was in many ways the perfect host for this pandemic. Here was a virus that demanded a collective will to overcome, that dared a population to temper its desires, and that tested the ability of political leadership to respond. It encountered a society in which individualism is stressed, where freedom is entwined with the desires to consume, and with a stripped-down state that wavered at the demand of any centralized response.

It encountered a system that was prepared to simply accept and live with the virus rather than break with the ideological fetters that would upend the notion of normalcy.

Out of sight, out of mind.