When people are faced with external threats, they need to pull together. A Canadian anthropologist named Wade Davis pointed out that this once was true of the United States.
In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria.
Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.
When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis.
At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock.
Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes.
A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.
That was then. This is now.
COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken.
As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease.
The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.
As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind.
With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths.
The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.
Some of these statements need asterisks. Latin America has overtaken North America as the center of the coronavirus infection, and several advanced countries have higher coronavirus-related deaths per million people than the USA does, at least so far.
Davis, like many Canadian critics of the USA, is somewhat blind to the problems of his own country. An American who has lived in Davis’s Vancouver pointed out that it is far from being the semi-utopia he claims it is.
But none of this disproves Davis’s general point. U.S. industrial and governmental capacity has been unraveling for a long time. This process won’t reverse by itself. The first steps in change are for us Americans to understand our situation, pull together and stop accepting excuses for failure from our supposed leaders.
LINKS
How Covid-19 Signals the End of the American Era by Wade Davis for Rolling Stone.
The Unraveling of “The Unraveling of America” by Deanna Kreisel for Medium.