Even during a pandemic, when, you would hope, people would know better.
They don’t.
On March 29—on CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper”—she ... what’s the proper verb? ... raged? ... vilified? ... Trump, telling Tapper “as the president fiddles, people are dying.”
Trump, a fiddler? Like Nero? Whatever else the man is, he’s a workaholic. Sometimes it seems as if he never sleeps. He may not be doing things Pelosi’s way, but odds are if he were, she’d reverse herself and declare that wrong anyway.
If anyone can be accused of fiddling, it’s Pelosi, who held up the relief package for days making sure that her pet projects (Beltway folks have to have their Beethoven, even if they can’t sit together) were injected into the trillions on offer. She was also the person who urged people to visit San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown for the Lunar New Year, undoubtedly to highlight that Trump had banned travel from China and was, therefore, “racist.”
In our world, political hostility seems to overrule everything, obliterating common sense and collegiality in a crisis. In a sense, we have a “politics pandemic,” as well as a medical one.
The medical one is probably worse, but the political one isn’t terrific and seems to be spreading with the rapidity of the original. Also, they work together, reinforcing each other. The political pandemic helps the medical pandemic spread.
It wasn’t always that way. It wasn’t much more than a week ago that collegiality reined. Govs. Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo were speaking well of Trump, lauding the president for his cooperation in the fight against the virus. Trump was lavish in his praise, demonstrating the feeling was mutual.
Then, the roof fell in, at least on Cuomo’s part. He started by attacking Trump for not delivering enough equipment (hospital beds, ventilators, and so forth) but then let loose on the president as if he were a dictator for suggesting the possibility of quarantining New York and its neighboring states.
Politics again, I submit. Cuomo was getting whispers from his party that he was too close to the president and, more importantly, his name was being bandied about as a possible president himself, now that the Biden campaign was luffing.
A possible president doesn’t consort with the enemy (i.e., the incumbent) in 21st-century politically obsessed America, pandemic or no. He attacks him, no matter what.
As for the media, they are, if anything, worse than the politicians. Forget reporting the news. They see their job as playing “gotcha” on as many levels as possible. On the most primitive, we have seen it writ large with the White House press that take a rote (and virtually brainless) adversarial stance at every presidential press conference.
But even on the supposedly more sophisticated levels (e.g., Tapper, Chris Wallace), it’s about setting subtle traps that ultimately reward the journalist with a scalp. So the media fans the politics pandemic, spreading it further.
As we know, these political hatreds in our society have been with us for some time, rupturing workplaces, friends, and family. It’s a game that we can play or not. Better yet, we can keep it in its proper place and not let it take over every aspect of our lives. That’s something we can learn during the pandemic that will reward us afterward.
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