I went out to grab a copy of the Atlantic and read George Packer’s article, “We Are Living in a Failed State.” Unfortunately a howl of feral dogs sounded through the opening in the post office across the street where the front door used to swing during the Obama Administration. So I took my least-rusty bucket and walked down to the Snoqualmie River, skirting children fighting over a spoiled winter salmon, upstream past the Raging River, now locally known as “Cholera Creek.” “If only Western Washington still had a working sewage system,” I sighed to myself. Having filled the bucket with what passes for clean water these days, I scurried home before street gangs arrived and start shooting the town up with their AK-47s, as they do on Tuesday afternoons.

Such is life in what Packer describes as “decaying communities in revolt against the modern world” in Donald Trump’s America.

America According to Packer

I have to say he understates his case. He says nothing about the “no go” radiation death zones that cover several American states after unregulated nuclear plants melted down. He doesn’t mention mutant cockroaches, or the fiery swamp dragons.

Aside from that serpent Donald Trump, and his scaly son-in-law, Jared Kushner, over whose wrong-doings Packer hoovers like a stalled hurricane for four paragraphs of purple prose. According to Packer, Kushner is not only incompetent, he is the “purest embodiment of political nihilism” in the land.

But Packer also complains about six broader dysfunctions that he thinks bedevil the tortured remains of our nation:

• America’s leaders (at least Republicans) are “too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
• America faced this crisis with “no national plan—no coherent instructions at all,” then not enough equipment when it was needed.
• Our “beggar nation in utter chaos” has thus been reduced to taking charity from Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations.
• The poor, especially “black and brown people,” suffer disproportionately.
• Yet Trump has still not stopped being combatative and rude.
• And to top it all, Packer warns (here I think he makes his case well) our nation is riven by “mutual hatred and endless vituperation.”

Some Things He Missed

Packer failed to mention those other apocalyptic “failed states” which have suffered even more severely than the United States in recent weeks: Belgium, Holland, Sweden, the Brits, the prosperous northern reaches of Italy, the most thriving cities of Spain.

In fact, to go by official figures, it would seem this pandemic has it in less for “poor black and brown” people, than for rich white folk living in the world’s most prosperous urban centers. Personally, I don’t know why we should care how much light a person’s skin reflects when she runs a fever. Most of us have had more important things to think about over the past month than those ridiculous old obsessions. Our souls, for one thing. But look at the pattern of the spread of COVID-19: Northern Italy → Holland → London → New York. Not only are the majority of known victims white, the disease has strangely followed the historical development of capitalism.

One common thread seems to be not the absence of a working state, but bureaucracy that winds, thick as ivy, around the stones of old prosperity.  (I suggest other factors here.)  Why did the CDC insist that everyone use their flawed testing kits?  Hospitals and universities champed at the bit to produce their own.  Why did state and federal officials refuse requests by doctors in Seattle to repurpose flu surveys, to see how far Covid-19 had spread in the early days?

Why did the FDA refuse entry for safety materials approved in other countries?  (An American friend in China finally managed to import 20,000 masks into the US, personally inspecting their manufacture.  He said it was like jumping a “shark-infested volcano” to get desperately-needed safety materials past bureaucrats in both countries).  Did Jared Kushner somehow sabatoge mid-level bureaucrats and retroactively write rules to keep them from acting?   Did President Obama have some fine-tuned medical emergency machine all roaring to go, only for the devil in the shape of the Presidential Son-in-Law to come along and yank its cord?  

We Can Learn From Trump

Donald Trump did not act quickly as he should have, but then neither did hardly anyone. Trump’s Energizer Bunny hyperactivity has now kicked in. And he has gotten three things right which his critics still need to learn:

• America’s relationship with China needs to be based on mutuality. Enough of allowing China to steal our technology. Nor should we outsource our most vital goods. We should seek peace with all nations, but beginning maybe with countries which China tries to bully.
• It is not the failed state but, rather, the state seeking to be omnipotent which messed up testing, prevented the movement of vital medical goods and knowledge, and perhaps also helped create this virus in the first place. The habitual, one is tempted to say sadistic, glacial workings of career bureaucrats at the FDA may explain thousands of American deaths. Trump’s attempts to deregulate seem especially worthwhile in light of such failures. His own biggest failure may be a failure to fire enough heartless paper-pushers.
• Most ordinary Americans are not the fools many in the ruling classes take them for. Most of us can walk in the park and chew virus-free bubblegum. We can go to the beach without giving a star fish a cold. (Indeed, one Chinese study showed that only one of more than three hundred “outbreaks” of COVID-19 occurred out of doors.) We can garden, worship, do home projects, even protest “Big Bro” when he forgets who is boss, while taking care for the health of those around us.

Of Course, We Do Have Our Problems

America may not be the apocalyptic wasteland which some journalists see in their nightmares, but of course we do have our problems. We face a nasty virus. We are now some $26 trillion dollars in debt. Our economy is in shambles. We may also be edging towards a new Cold War with China. (I suspect the Chinese government will find Packer’s editorial much to their liking.) Some in our government are passionately in love with forms, and cannot turn up from them long enough to save the lives of fellow Americans.

My town is not really an apocalyptic wasteland: adults jog, walk dogs, and enjoy this spring’s rich profusion of flowers. Children do chalk art on the road and ride bicycles. It is online that people go Mad Max.

Packer is right that the “hatred and endless vituperation” is growing tiresome. Maybe next time he can help detoxify the rhetorical atmosphere by refusing to demonize his opponents and blame them for everything that has gone wrong in the world.

Dr. David Marshall holds a B.A. in “the Russian and Chinese Languages and Marxism,” an M.A. in Chinese Religions, and a Ph.D. in Christian Thought and Chinese Tradition. His most recent book is Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels.