Avoiding America like the plague

DR Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief health correspondent, is a beautiful man. In our house, if we happen to catch him doing one of his reports on the pandemic, we laugh at how absurdly goodlooking he is. And we have noted that when he isn’t doing his journalism, he’s a neurosurgeon.

He also made an appearance in the 2011 movie Contagion “as himself ”, talking about a fictional pandemic in a way that would become awfully real almost a decade later — Hollywood too recognised that in Sanjay Gupta, some kind of human perfection has been realised.

As the name suggests, Gupta’s parents came from India to America, where both of them distinguished themselves as engineers at the Ford Motor Company in Michigan.

And now, most days on CNN, this living monument to the limitless possibilities of the United States, is trying to find the right words to convey the scale of the failure which is killing so many of his fellow Americans.

He’s showing them how to wash their hands. He’s showing them how to make a mask. He’s showing them how to wash a mask.

Calmly, concisely, graciously, he’s trying to explain that it’s not a good idea for the president to be doing things that are likely to spread coronavirus, that it would be better if the president showed good example by doing things that are less likely to worsen the coronavirus crisis.

He probably never imagined that a time would come when he or anyone else would have to go there, and yet there he is, night after night, trying to save Americans from themselves, and from the derangement of their leader.

But last week would have been a particularly poignant one for the good doctor, or anyone else whose people have prospered in the New World, when it emerged that the EU would be lifting travel restrictions on various “third countries”, 15 in all — a list which did not include the United States.

It included Rwanda but not the United States.

That would be Rwanda, where in 1994 there was genocide resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.

Now Rwanda has done a better job at handling the pandemic than the United States.

How can such a thing be happening? How can it be that Dr Sanjay Gupta, this vision of America’s greatness whose parents knew Third World destitution, is not allowed into France or Italy if he’s coming from the

USA? How can America be classified below some other places that Trump himself has called “shithole countries”?

Well, we know the answer, but I still don’t think we have internalised the magnitude of these questions. We are still struggling to accept that the American empire is falling, that all their Sanjay Guptas have been largely helpless against this one character Trump, applying the final deadly twist to decades of “conservative” malevolence.

Ultimately, America is being undone not by an invading army but by someone who embodies at least two of America’s psychotic archetypes, the mobster and the medicine show man.

Yeah, it’s hard to believe it but here are some things we know: at this stage there is virtually no chance of Trump winning a fair election. Having said that, there is virtually no chance of there being a fair election.

The election will be rigged by the forces of Trumpism insofar as it is humanly and mechanically and electronically feasible — yes we “know” these things in some abstract way, as does Dr Sanjay Gupta.

Yet there is still a kind of lingering disbelief at the byzantine badness that it reveals.

The lawyer and novelist Richard North Patterson writes: “This is how completely Trump’s sickness has consumed us — expecting our president to subvert American democracy has become our new normal”.

Indeed whenever they hold any kind of an election in America these days, we see scenes of voter suppression which would draw the disapproval of the “international community” if they were happening in, say, Rwanda. Except Rwanda seems to be sorting itself out these days — it is America which needs the UN election observers now.

But it won’t be getting them, because it is all too far gone — it is now largely agreed by all sides that after this election which we “know” will be corrupted, other fantastically bad things will happen: either Trump will “win”, and the USA will finally be broken — or Trump will lose and the mad lads of the Michigan Militia and their ilk will be breaking it up in their own way.

Certainly the least likely outcome is a peaceful transition to the next administration, and by the way, there’s a plague going on.

I think of Leonard Cohen — not just because he looked a bit like Dr Sanjay Gupta’s older and less handsome brother, but for his line, “Democracy is coming to the USA”.

Cohen died on the day before Trump was elected, and, well... that “democracy” of his never got there.

Now there are reasonable grounds to fear that it never will.

‘It seems even Rwanda has done a better job at handling the pandemic than has the United States’