How fear and loathing divided the United States
AS a young art student and later art history lecturer, all things American fascinated me. Even today, those painters, writers and photographers for whom I hold a special interest are those who worked in the United States during the Great Depression years of the 1930s.
From the photography and journalism of Walker Evans, James Agee and Dorothea Lange, to the early careers of painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Ben Shahn, I’ve always thought it ironic how those dark days made for such an enlightened age in American creativity.
This, after all, was a time of immense crisis in the United States when tens of thousands of Americans were losing their jobs and homes.
The very fact that some people – aforementioned artists among them – were able to earn any wage at all was largely down to the remarkable “New Deal” project enacted by then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In fact, it is widely acknowledged that over time and using what was an imaginative programme of public works projects, Roosevelt’s New Deal in great part helped America get back on its feet economically after the ravages of the financial crash.
Now, looking back on that remarkable chapter in US history, many Americans will doubtless find food for thought as today once again their country faces a daunting challenge.
Data released only this month tells an alarming tale. It reveals that the country’s unemployment levels have surged to 14.7% as more than 20 million Americans have lost their jobs, the highest rate since the depression of the 1930s.
On the face of it the coronavirus pandemic would appear clearly to blame, but some see it differently, arguing that rather than the virus “breaking America”, it has only revealed what was already broken.
“When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly,” wrote American journalist George Packer in a searing examination of the country’s crisis in this month’s edition of The Atlantic magazine.
“Chronic ills, a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public, had gone untreated for years,” continued Packer.
“We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity, to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category,” Packer concluded, touching on what for many of his fellow citizens must have been a raw nerve indeed.
Exacerbated by coronavirus, many observers say the sharp realities Americans are now forced to confront are rapidly further dividing an already embittered and angry nation.
They point to the fact that for some time America has been bedevilled by class and religious differences, growing income and racial inequality, a lack of trust in political institutions, an exponential rise in misinformation, a rural-urban divide, and “trash talking politics”.
Commonly depicted as the prevailing traits of American life these days, such polarisation and hyper-partisanship has only accelerated since Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory.
Writing in The Irish Times almost two months ago, the respected columnist Fintan O’Toole pulled no punches in his view that “Trump has destroyed the country he has promised to make great again”.
“It is hard not to feel sorry for Americans