When the coronavirus COVID-19 reached the shores of the United States, the President, after downplaying the threat, gagging the experts, and calling it a hoax of the opposition party, appeared to reverse course and called the pandemic “our big war.” However, he did not behave as a man in charge of fighting a war against this devastating pandemic. Was he just saying it because he felt he must say something, throwing out an empty metaphor? As metaphors go, comparing disease to war is an easy one. Whether Camus intended it or not, viewing the disease in his novel The Plague in terms of WWII is a plausible reading. Nixon had his War on Cancer, and UNICEF their slogan War on Disease.
In his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes that “metaphors are not to be trifled with.” The reason: “A single metaphor can give birth to love.” In Unbearable Lightness, Tomas finds Tereza standing at his doorstep with her suitcase and nowhere else to go. Seeing her this way makes him think of the Old Testament story of Moses in the bulrushes. When Pharaoh’s daughter rescues Moses, Tomas muses, she is unknowingly saving the Jews, and with them, “civilization as we know it!” With this comparison, Tomas’s relationship with Tereza changes utterly and forever.
If a metaphor can give birth to love, it can also give birth to hate. The choice of metaphor makes all the difference. What if instead of viewing Tereza in light of baby Moses in the bulrushes, Tomas sees her as a poison mushroom hidden among good ones? What if a sitting President’s son shares a meme depicting refugees fleeing violence as a bowl of Skittles in which only three are poison and asks, “Would you take a handful?” What this reveals is not an objective reality but a perceived similarity, one that views these refugees as worth so little as to be devoured or thrown away with equal disregard.
These perceived similarities become the basis for action and policy. The more the Nazis could get German citizens to view their Jewish population as rats, the easier it was to set about exterminating them. When the President couches talk of brown-skinned immigrants in terms of infestation, refers to them as animals—insects and snakes—the country grows more comfortable with tearing them from their loved ones and packing them into cages. When he calls those seeking refuge at our southern border an invasion, the metaphor becomes one of war, and helpless refugees become dangerous enemies.
The President’s war is not a metaphorical one. He, and his most ardent supporters, have always been at war with people of color in our country and immigrants of color. The onset of the pandemic gave him an excuse to halt immigration at the southern border, something he and Stephen Miller had been trying to do for three years. He told states he would block federal coronavirus aid to them unless they took action against their sanctuary cities. He tweeted support for armed terrorists displaying swastikas, Confederate flags, and nooses when they stormed the statehouse of a governor trying to fight the disease and called the terrorists “very good people.” He then turned around and called people of color protesting the police murder of George Floyd thugs, and used the language of segregationists fighting the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as he threatened to send troops to shoot these protestors. He threatened protestors with “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons,” and told governors that if they would not “dominate the protestors”, he would use federal troops to do it.
He believes he and his family are among the Übermenschen, born into a superior race destined by genetics to win. While touring a Ford manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti, MI, he praised the founder, who was an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator: “Good bloodlines, good bloodlines, if you believe in that stuff, you’ve got good blood.” He has repeatedly stated that he does in fact believe in that stuff. Has said of himself, “You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, no question about it. Great stuff.”
No surprise then that he also believes, as the Nazis did, in eugenics, by virtue of which the fact that COVID-19 is hitting minority communities disproportionately gives him and his supporters cause to sneer at measures designed to protect the vulnerable. As it is, he has mobilized “thousands and thousands” of “heavily armed” military personnel, in order to “quickly solve the problem” of the protesters. Make no mistake: this man is not above committing genocide. It is reasonable to believe that if COVID-19 were not hurting him politically, he would view the disease as helpful, doing for him what the Nazis had to do for themselves.
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