National Post (National Edition)
Nothing else opened the door more to the formidably implausible elevation to the Oval Office of Joseph Robinette Biden … in what would otherwise have been the last instalment of his unremarkable career.
Time magazine was wrong. And not just in its lame pick of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as its person(s) of the year. It was wrong in the concept.
2020 was not, by any stretch, a year in which a person or persons could be selected as being most impactful. It was an “event” year; one event visited every corner of the globe, and in one measure or another played out in the lives of almost everyone. The event was, obviously, the coronavirus pandemic, and as that word so clearly marks, it had a greater universal impact than any other event since the end of the Second World War.
Leaving aside its primary, and for many, tragic impact, the medical one, COVID-19 has had such a multitude of effects not medical that a thorough survey of them, at this stage, is simply impossible. They are too many and too deep to count. Some are immediately visible, others will take far more time to work their way through societies and register their effect on the governments of the countries of the world.
China is the villain of this piece, meaning its fully authoritarian, Communist government. Whatever improvement to its “image” it may have achieved in recent years — from the days of the Beijing Olympics to the beginning of the present year — has been blasted and squandered. The origins of COVID-19 were in China; the initial outbreaks were there. But Beijing threw the whole world open to its spread.
It delayed, obstructed or directly repressed early and timely reporting. Surely nothing was more vile in the CCP's response than the arrest and detention of those doctors and medical authorities who gave actual warning and named the outbreak for what it was.
Canada has its own, and specific, motive for a justified enmity with the Chinese government: the detainment and imprisonment, amounting to a government kidnapping, of two of our citizens. Now there is, to borrow the word again, a pandemic enmity against that same government for its recklessness or cold indifference to the welfare of the rest of the world, displayed in its conduct over COVID.
On the major political scale, the pandemic has been a prime agent of so much. The American presidential election was a COVID election. Forget all other factors, however much they played a part. Forget money, campaign strategies, bursts of scandal, media coverage, even the larger-than-life personality of Donald Trump.
Up until this outbreak, on almost every front — the economy, jobs, the return of manufacturing, the collapse of the ridiculous Russian collusion fantasy — Trump was gliding to a win.
COVID, in its sudden outbreak and the consequent shutdown of American industry and business, reframed the entire contest. It broke his streak on the economy. It introduced, beyond the already present fractiousness of the American political scene, fresh anxiety and widespread distress.
Nothing else opened the door more to the formidably implausible elevation to the Oval Office of Joseph Robinette Biden, a 47-year veteran of Washington politics, in what would otherwise have been the last instalment of his unremarkable career.
Where is the soothsayer who could have foreseen that a sickness in Wuhan, China, would exert such a power over the contest for the world's most powerful office?
COVID-19 has blasted the economies of every major government in the world. There are those who wonder, and their wonder has foundation, whether over time the economic fallout from the pandemic will bring with it such a volume of misery, hardship, stress and poverty that its “indirect” effect on general health will be as great, even greater, than its strictly medical one.
Who, during the crisis itself, during its immediate havoc, has had the means or time to keep account of the multitudinous individuals and families who have felt the violence of its economic impact upon their lives?
What wreckage lies in its wake we have yet to see, but that it is vast, and that it is deep, is almost impossible to gainsay.
COVID-19 in its passing — and it is far from done — has left so many wounded in spirit and in fortune.
It is a unique challenge to the equanimity of nations. It has also worked a deep and worrisome extension of government supervision into the everyday lives of people, a new and in many cases deeply invasive oversight on everyday activities.
It may sound like it, but it is not meant to be a flippant observation: who before 2020 thought that governments would be cancelling Christmas? Yet here we are, counting the number of family members who will be “allowed” to gather.
Then there is the matter of government spending, and by that I mean government spending here in Canada. I'll bring that on next time.
BUT BEIJING THREW THE WHOLE WORLD OPEN TO ITS SPREAD.