Packaging Death For Political Gain
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me.” Emily Dickinson.
The New York Times chose the American Memorial Day weekend to mount a macabre front page listing the names of the Covid-19 deaths in America. For good measure it memorialized the deaths of these people with the tag, “Incalculable loss”. (Even as it toted up said loss.)
Readers observing the Memorial Day weekend were meant to see a connection between these fallen soldiers in the war against the pandemic with the soldiers who died in military service for America. Even though the real soldiers enlisted and the dead patients were anything but willing participants in their demise.
(One person the Times noted sixth in its list apparently died of a Covid-related gunshot wound. But hey, mistakes happen.)
This being the Gray Lady putting on its journalistic weeds there was a lot of solemnity and gravitas as the paper celebrated itself. Or as former Times writer Alex Berenson noted, “Your Dept. Of Pandemia issues a Special Journalism Prize (redeemable for six Pulitzers) to @nytimes for this stark yet beautiful reminder No One Ever Died Before.”
Berenson had the temerity to suggest that, despite its funereal invocation of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters etc. the Times employment of the regrettable victims had more to do with its political jeremiad against the current president, whom the paper is now trying to blame for the deaths. The families are their human shields.
Forget that New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent infected seniors back into retirement homes where over five thousand have died, now admits that everyone was wrong about Covid-19, from experts to social-media wags. There’s to be a hangin’ at noon and no one is going to deprive the Times of a little string music in Times Square for former NYC citizen Donald J. Trump.
The Times’ unhinged behaviour is partially forgivable; its home state and neighbouring New Jersey have been more hurt by Covid-19 than any other states in America. As of this writing 23,564 people have died in New York State, 11,340 in NJ— about a third of the national total. Death has, regrettably, been all around them.
But as Berenson noted, people die every day of terrible things in America. Daily, about 7,250 die across the country in all manner of awful ways. Will there be a NYT front page for the estimated 599,108 cancer victims each year in America (many dying at home this year while hospitals beds sit empty waiting for non-existent Covid victims)?
The Center for Disease control reported 647,500 died of heart disease. Do they get a page? How about the almost 40,000 who die in car crashes, the leading cause of death for individuals 2 to 34 years old? Are these, too, not incalculable losses?
Perhaps, but it’s tougher to blame Trump for them. So Covid it is on Page 1.
Surely this insidious pandemic must have produced a surge in the national death rate, no? According to CDC, through five months there have been 933,260 deaths nationally in 2020. On a pro-rated basis that projects to 2.239 million for 2020. In 2017, when the last flu epidemic started, there were 2.65 million deaths in U.S. Much can happen before year’s end, but it’s hard to identify a dramatic surge in overall deaths from the pandemic, particularly going into the summer where numbers drop.
(Almost as hard as remembering how the world shut down in 2017-18 for an epidemic that cost over 60,000 lives.)
No, the Covid-19 toll is, so far, within the statistical norms. But when you’re a Pulitzer hammer everything looks like a Prize nail. To the Times that’s excuse enough to rattle the chain of a population that considers itself largely insulated from death these days. With so many octogenarians and nonagenarians still alive, there has been a feeling of invulnerability in the middle and upper classes in America, Canada and Europe.
That’s why celebrity death has so often become a spectator sport in contemporary society. Princess Di’s death and elaborate mourning was a classic sample of many people who’ve known little grief safely wallowing in someone else’s. The Kobe Bryant death was a more recent example of public death as performance theatre. Grieving is now a reality show.
So the Covid culling of moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas has petrified many in the cozy suburbs and desirable neighbourhoods who thought themselves safe. The urban elites have been confronted with their mortality, and have fully embraced the lunatic extremes of isolation as barter against death. Furthermore, they scream from behind closed doors at those who defy death, stigmatizing these renegades walking free as heartless killers determined to reap a harvest of old folks.
Death can do that. These curious bouts of morbidity seen in quarantine have precedence in those wishing to defy death. People in Victorian England equipped their coffins with bells lest they be buried unconscious and wish to say “I’m not dead yet”. The great Americans poet Emily Dickinson was obsessed with death in her work in the late 1800s.
To those on Memorial Day weekend who remember the real harvest of death that was brought on by World Wars I & II (including the Spanish flu) plus Korea and Viet Nam, Covid is something to be borne stoically. Duty and sacrifice have defined grief for these people.
But in this emotive age silent suffering is passé. Death, the natural end of us all, is suddenly La Boheme, an opera of grief and tragedy to play out in the front pages of a paper that once knew better. And now urges its readers to cower in fear.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.