PLAGUE JOURNAL April 2020: Human Sacrifice in Georgia During a Time of Increasing Good News
Markets see through the mayhem. Mulling human sacrifice in the Atlantic.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Re-opening
Markets have a way of looking through bad news to the other side, and they often rally when the news could not get any worse. When the unemployment numbers were skyrocketing in April (2020), the S&P 500 had its best month since 1987. Even though markets are made up of people making individual decisions, and many of the individuals were terrified, the market somehow looked through it.
The trend toward re-opening businesses reflected a similar dual reality. The media amplified the alarm even as the curve flattened, as hospitals were underwhelmed, as health-care workers were surviving in large numbers. Occasionally admitting things were improving, the headlines told us we had to be careful: “health officials” and “experts” advised caution. They warned.
The pessimism and optimism happened at the same time although from different sources. Just when we were told to wear masks in public, and just after the grocery stores added plexiglass barriers, we began to hear about cautious re-opening. The media were convinced that cases and deaths would spike, possibly because they have repeated their own script so many times, but the rest of us have noticed that we didn’t get sick from the pizza box or the jogger or the Uber driver or the mailbox. We noticed that the grocery clerks and brewery staff were healthy, even upbeat, and we noticed, whether we said it out loud or even dared to think it, that warm sunny places were not hit. It seemed clear that Georgia and Texas could relax some constraints and would be fine. The media focused their calumny on Republican governors for their “experiments in human sacrifice” and callous disregard for life, but people who didn’t spend hours with Chris Cuomo or Rachel Maddow or the New York Times sensed that the messages were wrong.
Economic activity = murder
There were plenty of smart and informed people on podcasts, in contrast to the false experts on TV. We lived in dual-reality information systems, and the version from the mainstream had to be wrong because it was so doctrinaire and airtight. Reality could be that unvarying, with such predictable movie-matinee heroes and villains. The people advising us weren’t so much experts as “experts,” “health officials,” and “health experts,” unnamed but invoked to give us the illusion of science and credibility.
If we didn’t stay inside, we would kill minorities and grandparents. Republican states were especially deadly. How many times did we hear about Georgia? The tone was captured perfectly by a certain Amanda Mull in the Atlantic, in an article called “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” with the subtitle, “The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” It was just one of hundreds or thousands of nearly identical stories, which appear in front of us whether we are interested or not. As I type, my Mac pushes emails and news stories into the upper right corner of my screen. I just got “Trump Resurrects His Favorite Diversionary Tactic” from the New Yorker. Is it about the coronavirus? Probably. I don’t know. The stories have no content.
By the time these stories began hitting at the end of April, curves were flattening, cases were declining, grocery stores remained open. The media story was not correct. An ideological commitment to a handful of tenets dominated in the press. There were a lot of hours and a lot of pages to fill. The more they repeated the ideas, the more they needed them to be true. They all compete for the same (like-minded) audience, so any divergence from received wisdom would risk making them targets of angry tweets. In an alternate world, one in which Trump had hyped the threat from the coronavirus, they would have delivered entirely different news, full of stories about ruined businesses and the social cost of isolation. Instead, they wrote about racism, human sacrifice, and extreme danger.
One night a long time ago, I attended a night class on creative writing at a community college, in which a young woman read her story about a Union soldier dying on a battlefield while proclaiming his undying love for his young bride at home (undoubtedly in a Chicago suburb just like the one we were in). The soldier writhed and wailed his love for her, at some length. Then (presumably) he died. Why? Because Ken Burns had made a documentary, recently aired, about the civil war, which featured a dead soldier’s letter read by an actor over “Ashokan Farewell.” (“Sarah, my love for you is deathless.”) I never went back to that class, but I thought of the ardent author when I read Amanda Mull’s Atlantic article.
Mull’s message is full of drama. It seemed that she and the others writing these articles desperately wanted Georgia to be hit with huge new waves of infections and death to prove them right and the Republican governor wrong. She offered news that was neither accurate nor news: “For weeks, Americans have watched the coronavirus sweep from city to city, overwhelming hospitals, traumatizing health-care workers, and leaving tens of thousands of bodies in makeshift morgues.” (She failed to mention that a million health-care workers had recently lost their jobs because business was so slow.)
She continues, “Georgia has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, and the state’s testing efforts have provided an incomplete look at how far the virus continues to spread.” By what metric has Georgia been hit “particularly hard”? At 140 deaths per million (as of May 13th, 2020), Georgia is well below the national number of 247. Its death rate is higher than those of the cold states of the far Northeast and most of the warm states in the South and West but vastly lower than in the damp, cool states of the mid-Atlantic coast. But Atlantic readers probably believe the story. Google and the news-feed algorithms put endless versions of it in front of us.
Mull invokes the ubiquitous unnamed “experts”: “Public-health officials broadly agree that re-opening businesses—especially those that require close physical contact—in places where the virus has already spread will kill people.” Many experts with names do not believe that careful re-opening will kill people, but why would Mull know anything about these experts? Her thesis requires no thought, as her article was written years ago.
Neither Amanda Mull nor her editors are experts. I had never heard of her, although I see she is busy at the Atlantic. Although COVID is her current beat, her last two pre-pandemic articles are titled “Why the Restoration Hardware Catalog Won’t Die” and “How Your Laptop Ruined Your Life.”