President’s lies now threaten the health of every American
Confined to her house in Galway, Kathryn Kozarits finds that her anxiety is down to what’s going on back home in Chicago
SOME time, as Seamus Heaney once suggested, we must make the time to drive out west. But not now.
For now, and for some unknown time to come, the four of us — my husband, our two girls, aged 8 and 11, and I — are confined to the house in Knocknacarra, just beyond Salthill, Galway and the 2km radius allowed for brief exercise. Within that radius are two grocery shops, the shore of Galway Bay and Barna Woods. So, it’s not too bad for us. And anyway, there is nowhere else to go.
My husband and I can work from home and our children are of an age when they need family more than friends; we can cope.
For sure, I worry about friends and family elsewhere in Ireland, most especially my mother-in-law and other elderly relatives and people working in the health sector.
But with due care, by doing what we have been asked to do, we can come through this crisis.
The Government in Dublin followed sound medical advice and kept the public informed. It has done well. Certainly, the State response is not perfect — testing and tracking have not progressed as quickly as they might, but State agencies have risen to this great challenge.
No, the focus of my anxiety is not here — it is my home town, Chicago. Confirmed cases in the state of Illinois are growing exponentially, most acutely in Chicago and its outer suburbs, where my vulnerable parents now shelter. And the surge is to come.
My father was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer in August 2018, a terminal prognosis that he continues to fight. A born boss, a rugged individualist, I never thought he’d dutifully fall into the role of patient, but he has surprised us all, trading his steak and red wine for granola and almond milk. Every three weeks, he drives to the purpose-built cancer care centre and he takes the cocktail of chemicals that destroys his immune system but keeps him alive.
Then Covid-19 entered the equation. Taking a page out of the playbook of Donald Trump, whom they support, my parents downplayed the threat. Life continued as normal, they kept going to the grocery store.
Shocked, I turned to the family WhatsApp group and pleaded with my siblings to take it seriously, and alert my parents to the tsunami of infection that was about to break on America.
They’re now staying put. My brother defies the lockdown and occasionally drives to his non-essential workplace, maybe just to keep the fantasy of normality. My eldest sister feels for her daughter, who goes to the postbox every morning in hope she’ ll receive word that she’s been accepted into the University of Notre Dame, class of 2025 — and I wonder if there’ ll be classes to attend in September. My other sister struggles to homeschool four children in a neighbourhood where, conned by the president about the gravity of the situation, their peers get out to wander around.
In the last three decades, the American public sphere has slowly disintegrated. Once, not so long ago, there was a general — not universal, but general — acceptance that the major news networks strove to be impartial, to seek the truth and to hold power accountable. Now, the US is a house divided against itself. People exist in either a CNN or Fox News bubble, and the inhabitants of one bubble deride those in the other. And then there are the echo chambers of social media: people listen to what they want to hear, read only what they want to read. We all do it, here and there — but, I think, most especially there. Here, there remains some faith in “the mainstream media”.
Truth and science mean little in the age of Trump. Back in November 2016, I woke, terrified, to the reality of President-elect Trump. My Irish husband assured me we’d be “grand”. Trump was a blue state Democrat at heart, he said; he’d initiate major capital projects, build roads and bridges, surround himself with advisors embracing a liberal agenda and govern as a Democrat. He was wrong, and he admits it — which is just as well. But even I didn’t envisage it would get so bad.
Somebody observed recently that, in Covid-19, Trump found an opponent he could not bully or belittle. But he has tried.
Where is the leadership? Where is my country? When you have the captain of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt relieved of command for appealing for aid for his virus-ravaged crew and Putin sending medical equipment to the US, the short answer is ‘I don’t know’. And yet as the death count rises Trump’s approval ratings are at an all-time high.
I tune into the nightly press briefings from the White House and hear Trump boast about his ratings whilst berating journalists for trying to hold power to account. His lies and narcissism no longer just threaten the political health of the US, they endanger the lives of its citizens, not least his base. Where is the outrage?
A small state on the edge of Europe is responding in a more strategic manner to this vicious virus than the biggest player on the world stage. And that gives me comfort. I know that someday I will drive out west.
But in the meantime, I watch the news.