The last time I lived a normal life in New York was on March 6. The virus had arrived, but the class I teach psychiatry residents each month at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan had not been canceled. Group meetings of less than 30 people were still allowed in the hospital. This week he read in The New York Times the following sentence: “A doctor at the Weill Cornell Medical Center described the disturbing experience of passing in front of a colleague of just over 30 years, intubated and in critical condition, wondering who will be the next".
An old friend of mine was so ill that he went to the hospital. They sent him home. It got worse. When he returned to the emergency room, he was admitted and spent several days on a respirator. Was lucky. Soon there will be no respirators for everyone who needs them. I have sick friends who languish at home with a high fever. Under normal circumstances, they would have gone to the hospital. Now they weigh the consequences that decision would have. Five days after giving my class, I got sick. My husband succumbed a few days later. Neither of us were serious. We recover. People like us are not tested. We don't know what we had, whether it was the Covid-19 or something else. There are still very few diagnostic tests.
Time has stretched and collapsed due to emotion. My seminar on March 6 belongs to another era, in which the city had traffic, crowded sidewalks and noisy subway cars in which New Yorkers clutched each other's cheek, armpit with nose, elbow to elbow, in which the head Asleep from an exhausted traveler, she could suddenly fall on the shoulder of the stranger sitting next to him, and that fleeting contact meant nothing. These memories now have a hallucinatory nature, both familiar and distant. The city that I remember has disappeared, like countless cities and towns around the world that have become shells, empty of life. Since the beginning of my illness, I have been locked up at home. I write as always, but I live in suspense, with fear. I imagine the future. Will it be a restoration of what there was or a completely different reality?
“It has cast a shadow on the earth, and it has hit so many that it is impossible to take proper care of them, crowding all of our hospitals; and it has proven deadly in so many cases that it has been impossible to dig graves fast enough to bury them all. Our beautiful city has suffered greatly for this, and has made it necessary as a precautionary measure to close schools, theaters, and churches, and to prohibit the entire population from gathering both indoors and outdoors. ” This is how Reverend Francis Grimké spoke to his congregation at the 15th Street Presbyterian Church in Washington DC, in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed about 50 million people worldwide.
"No one had ever seen anything like this," declared the President of the United States on March 19, and on the 26th he said again: "No one would have ever thought that something like this could happen." These statements came after weeks of irrational denial. The virus, he had said, was under control; would disappear. The "nobody has ever seen it" is a recurring verbal tic in the limited trumpiano repertoire; It is part of his hyperbolic, disjointed and self-enlarged prose style, but it is also proof of this man's relationship with the past and the future, which for all practical purposes do not exist.
Otto Kernberg, psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry, was born in Vienna. He fled that country and the Nazis with his family in 1938. He has written extensively about narcissism, which goes through an antisocial personality disorder, also called psychopathy, an extreme form of narcissism. Kernberg points out that people like this, in addition to the usual lies, grandeur, and lack of guilt and empathy, “lack the sense of time, of planning for the future… Their inability to learn from past experience is an expression of the same inability to conceive his life beyond the immediate moment. " For more than three years, the world has seen an American president trapped in his own spontaneous and volatile present, with a pathological narcissism and fed daily by countless media, while millions of followers, both in the United States and elsewhere. of the world, they approve of his viral, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic messages, but emphatic. One of the last: the virus is "Chinese".
The coronavirus, which travels from host to host and infects human cells, moves according to its own acceleration time, regardless of ethnicity, class or sex, propaganda and prejudice. Francis Grimké was the son of a plantation owner, white and widowed, Henry Grimké, and a mestizo slave, Nancy Weston. Her parents lived together as a domestic partner. When the father died during a typhus epidemic, Francis and his two brothers were betrayed by one of Henry's white sons, who violated his father's wishes and enslaved his half-brothers. Francis and his brother Archibald finally managed to escape their fate. Later, their father's feminist and abolitionist sisters welcomed them and helped them pay for their education. In the sermon delivered on November 3, 1918, Grimké asked: “Did the epidemic stop to see if his skin was white or black before infecting him? What value has white skin had during these weeks of suffering and death? Viral ideas have no impact on viral illness. The virus is not intimidated by bluster or racist or macho postures, nor anti-intellectual grandstanding. Francis Grimké hoped that the pandemic would serve as a lesson to the stupidities of racism.
One thing is certain: "This" we have seen before. We have been seeing the ravages of infectious diseases for centuries, and their effects on cities seem curiously the same. "But how few people do I see now," wrote Samuel Pepys about the streets of London during the 1665 pandemic, "and those who are walking as if they had bid farewell to the world." The pandemic has been seen, imagined, and anticipated. The world is smaller now than it was in the 17th century. Long trips last for hours or days, not months or years. But in the last half century we have seen, among other viruses, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, H1N1, MERS and avian influenza, which have killed hundreds, thousands and millions of people. Virologists knew that a new virus could cause a pandemic and knew how it was likely to start. In The Journal of Virology , LW Enquist wrote in 2009, the year of H1N1, a subtype of the flu, about future viruses: “In humans, those infections will likely be zoonotic (ie, transmissions of viruses from wild or domestic animals. humans) ”. Epidemiologists have established trajectory models of possible pandemics and outlined the necessary responses. We continue to ignore many things about the viruses and biological mechanisms involved, but to say that "no one would have ever thought" that such a pandemic lurked on the horizon is ridiculous.
Yesterday, on the BBC radio station, I heard a representative of the Government of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, mimicking Trump: "No country could have imagined this, nor prepared for it." It is a lie or pure and simple ignorance. Or worse, a convenient lie that takes advantage of the ignorance of citizens who harbor a populist disregard for experts and who are looking for a strong man or a charismatic leader who personifies the power they think they have been stripped of, by women or blacks, or immigrants, or Jews, or Muslims or some other threatening group. This contempt is deeply rooted in the history of my country, but it is not limited to the United States, nor can it be separated from the growing authoritarian impetus that is spreading throughout the world, an impetus related to male domination and misogyny.
What did the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, mean when he announced his immunity to the coronavirus because he is “an athlete”, or the President of Mexico, López Obrador, AMLO, when he calmly encouraged the population to go out to eat in restaurants? and kept shaking hands? Before infecting himself with the virus, Boris Johnson recommended "collective immunity" for his country. Let them die. Perhaps Alexandr Lukashenko, President of Belarus, believes that macho arrogance compensates for his country's low position in the world. About the virus, he commented: "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." How should we interpret not just mass tolerance, but even slapstick celebration like this, if not as a form of mass hypnosis, a collective fantasy of narcissistic manhood?
New Yorkers are paying a high price for viral fantasies now mixed with the plague of a real virus that is overtaking professionals in our hospitals. They cannot care for all the sick and they do not have masks, gowns or gloves to protect themselves. To cut costs, the Trump administration in 2018 dissolved the U.S. team tasked with responding to pandemics. He has fired seasoned bureaucrats, scientists and diplomats, and flushed experts one department after another. Trump has filled his government with incompetent and servile adulons. He has repeatedly lied to citizens, promising that the virus would disappear "as if by a miracle." "Anyone who wants to get tested will have it." He has rambled on from one decision to another, denying available respirators under his control to states that needed them. It has even snubbed its own Army, when it offered its help in the crisis. He has shown that he does not have the slightest perception of time, nor memory of the immediate past - what he said yesterday - nor anticipation of the immediate future - what his lies of today will look like tomorrow. His only urgency is to parade for the cameras now.
Slightly to paraphrase Francis Grimké's words, this city has little time left for the disease to be fatal in so many cases that it will be impossible to dig graves fast enough to bury our dead. The heroic efforts of our governor, our mayor, and our sanitarians will not compensate for the incompetence and stupidity at the summit. I do not expect a miracle.
The virus has made our interdependence amazingly evident. We are all natural beings, vulnerable to disease and death. Pests are wonderful equalizers, as long as we listen to them.
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