The Year America Melted Down

Watching current events in the United States is a bit like watching the train crash in the movie, The Fugitive. You watch knowing it's going to come off the rails and you just hope the protagonist will survive.

That's something of the feeling I got from reading "The year America melted down" in Saturday's Globe and Mail. It's written by Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian born Canadian journalist, and author of American War, an excellent and very grim novel set in a near-future US that has melted down into a Syrian-style civil war.

In it he looks at the events of the pandemic along with the social and political environment. It's a solid piece of analysis, occasionally almost poetic in it's grimness. It's not easy reading, but still worth the time, although you may want to read it while sipping a stiff drink.

Meanwhile, a host of conspiracy theories and fringe internet blocs start to hijack a growing portion of the national conversation around the pandemic, taking advantage of the lack of clear government messaging and a number of contradictory statements about masks and transmission made by scientists still struggling to fully understand the new disease. Online, I watch myriad videos describing how the coronavirus is a hoax intended to distract from secret pedophile sects and Satan-worshipping “deep state” elites, and it would all be funny if it were only a handful of internet trolls that trafficked in this kind of thing. But it’s not. By the end of the summer, a supporter of QAnon – the amorphous group responsible for many of these conspiracy theories – will become the presumptive House nominee in a heavily Republican district of Georgia, all but certain to head to Congress in November. As with the Tea Party and the Birther movement and Donald Trump’s own political ascendancy, what might have been completely unpalatable to mainstream American conservatism a few years ago has found a way into the tent.

Initially buried amid the many scandals and incremental COVID-19 updates, there comes news of a different kind. Toward the end of the month, police officers in Minneapolis kill a Black man named George Floyd. One kills him slowly, choking the life out of him in broad daylight. And for a while, much of this country does not care. When a major cable news network finally runs a story about the killing, the anchor begins by apologizing for not having covered it sooner.

And then there is a reckoning.

Articles like this are why I subscibe to the Globe and Mail.