Brace for the great American reopening
If you ever wanted proof that everything is relative, consider this moment.
We are in the clutches of a deadly pandemic. Radicalized, armed insurrectionists pose a massive threat. We’re facing another massive drop in employment and the myriad economic problems that go along with it. Russia has made repeated attempts to mess up our elections and recently hit us with the cyber-equivalent of the coronavirus. And how are we feeling? Pretty great. Thanks for asking. Sign up to get Colin’s newsletter delivered to your inbox, for free
It’s like the end of “Lord of the Rings,” when Sauron has moved to Florida, and the hobbits are all really happy and well-fed. Nobody wants to read more than 15 pages of that because it’s boring.
People, we might be about to get boring. Hip-hip-hooray. Speaking of hip, Ned Lamont had one of his replaced. Which means he’s ready to take on new challenges. It also might mean more of that very weird dancing he does from time to time.
Like I say, it’s all relative.
I hesitate to add this because we can’t let down our guard but ... it looks like we’re bending our Connecticut COVID numbers down. This is as it should be.
We’ve kept this disease alive longer than it had any right to be. Americans could not get their minds around its defining trait: the majority of people who get infected have light symptoms or none at all.
A lot of people heard that as a positive. “Hey, most of us can catch it and not get sick!” No. From a transmission standpoint, it’s a problem. Diseases that only infect when a person has symptoms are easier to spot and stop. Diseases that quickly kill most of their hosts often deprive themselves of the chance to spread.
This disease was somewhat controllable if you shut down the roads it likes to travel. Instead, we built a theme park for it, which is why the virus is so happy here. Lots of places with no rules. Lots of people who think rules don’t apply to them. No consistent national policy. It gets to infect 190,000 a day, kill 4,000 of them and keep moving to new bodies.
Suddenly, there’s a guy in the White House who thinks it’s his job to fight the plague. Imagine.
President Joe Biden on Thursday made masks mandatory in airports, on planes, trains and intercity buses. He had already made them mandatory on federal property. He signed 10 executive orders that will ramp up production of protective equipment, tests and vaccine hardware. He’s stepping up data collection and public education.
And oh, he restored our participation in the World Health Organization.
People, this is what it looks like when you have a real president and actual national strategy after a full year of preening and prevaricating.
Biden has made it clear he will acknowledge the existence of Russian aggression and get tough with them about it.
Biden has proposed a $1.9 trillion rescue package to help our economy survive while we get the plague under control. This is winning praise from figures as diverse as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times and former Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett.
As I’m writing this, Biden has been in office for 29.5 hours.
Deep breath. Let it out. Can you feel your blood pressure dropping out of the red zone? “President Biden.” Say it loud and there’s music playing.
Are things going to be perfect? Of course not. Expect some major stumbles on the vaccine front in between now and May. Expect Congress to pick the stimulus package apart. Expect the invisible bugs planted in the massive cyber-hack to wake up and cause havoc. Expect the unexpected, because in the next six months we’ll get hit with one or two things that are nowhere on our radar screen.
Here is the irony. I won’t say “delicious irony” because that would further inflame certain parts of the reading audience.
Common sense says we’re about a year away from a boom. It’s the boom Trump was dreaming he would preside over back when he claimed the virus would vanish of its own accord or go away by April (of 2020) or conveniently act like the flu. People would get back to work. The economy would roar back to life. Cheer would replace fear. And Americans would say, as one, “Thank you, President Trump, for that thing you did that seemed, to the naked eye, like nothing or maybe even worse than nothing but which was actually proof that you are a great wizard.”
That was what he pictured every night while falling asleep in the White House, free to concentrate on the nation’s future because of Melania’s selfless decision to sleep in an entirely different part of the residence.
It was within reach. He would have had to surround himself with people who were not poseurs, quacks, liars, fantasists, sycophants, meat puppets, empty suits, relatives or some combination of those categories.
But he didn’t. So things got worse. And now, the great American reopening seems not only possible but probable. He’ll try to claim authorship, but the only people who will believe him are the people who believe everything he says.
Meanwhile, the worst of times feel suddenly like the best of times. As Howard Jones sang in the 1980s, “Things Can Only Get Better.”
This disease was somewhat controllable if you shut down the roads it likes to travel. Instead, we built a theme park for it.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.