Sculptor Amanda Matthews arrived on the Kentucky COVID Memorial earlier this month ready, able to restore her work. Positioned on the grounds of the state capitol in Frankfort, the sculpture options a number of figures positioned round an enormous silver sphere emblazoned with the state seal and motto: “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” It’s the primary official state COVID memorial within the nation, and, as soon as once more, it had been vandalized.
However to Matthews’ shock, somebody had already repaired the sculpture, changing one of many bells that chimes within the wind. With its bells and figures, inexperienced lights and reflective surfaces, the memorial was meant to echo the ritual-filled daily pressers held by Gov. Andy Beshear through the early days of the pandemic.
For somebody, the vandalism of the COVID memorial was an act of contempt they couldn’t abide. And they also mounted it.
Per week later, a distinct story of contempt was unfolding within the nation’s capital. Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared earlier than the Republican-led Senate Homeland Safety and Governmental Affairs Committee to face a barrage of accusations and animosity relating to his dealing with of the pandemic. On Thursday, the committee voted alongside occasion traces to carry him in contempt. The previous head of the Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Ailments, a person whose life’s work has saved tens of millions upon tens of millions of lives, earlier than and through the COVID pandemic, is now dealing with the specter of jail time.
Why now? Fauci has appeared earlier than Congress 20 times to testify about the pandemic. He has additionally been retired for 2 years. Why not Alex Azar, the Well being and Human Providers secretary below President Trump in 2020? Or why not the present secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., below whose watch the U.S. has hit a 35-year high in measles cases?
Or we may ask, to what finish? With the unchecked warfare in Iran, allegations of rampant corruption, unaccounted shootings of Americans by immigration brokers and the skyrocketing price of residing for American households, doesn’t Congress have extra urgent points to research?
Good-faith investigation wasn’t the driving force final week. As Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) remarked after the committee listening to on July 29: “For the previous 18 months, the Trump administration has been engaged in a marketing campaign to rewrite this historical past. Right now’s continuing, I worry, is a part of that effort.”
Pandemic revisionism is a well-liked card to play lately. Take, for instance, Kennedy’s latest “falsehood-filled” interview with Dana Bash on CNN. Our analysis workforce, Rituals in the Making, an ongoing anthropological examine of COVID loss of life, mourning, reminiscence and misinformation based mostly at George Washington College, has been monitoring revisionism and its results for years. However as we’ve come to grasp, revisionism is about greater than anyone virus and even the 1.2 million deaths that COVID triggered: Makes an attempt to efface, rewrite, or deny elementary experiences of loss and struggling expose a deeper rot. A extra insidious type of contempt.
We’re additionally clear in our understanding that the individuals who skilled that loss — healthcare professionals, funeral house workers, clergy, hospice staff and, above all, the bereaved — aren’t fooled, not for a minute, regardless of congressional hearings and spin doctoring.
The social media responses we’ve been following within the final a number of days seek advice from most of the similar traumatic photographs and motifs: refrigerated vehicles parked exterior hospitals as morgues, farewells through iPad to family members dying in hospitals, ventilator shortages, lack of protecting tools for important staff, countless shifts, worry of infecting one’s circle of relatives. As our analysis attests, these are photographs seared into People’ reminiscences. Responding to the Kennedy interview, a former ICU nurse posted on Instagram: “How dare they assume we don’t keep in mind? It’s solely been a minute.” Or one other describing his unhappiness and now anger: “We noticed so many individuals die … it completely altered my mind chemistry. We have been terrified.”
The Fauci listening to and the vote to carry him in contempt present simply how asynchronous and unanswered this nation’s pandemic grief stays. The spectacle of Fauci’s public pillorying is greater than a nationwide shame. It’s a window into the machinations of revisionism and our present political local weather of deflection and distraction.
However those that misplaced know higher. When blatant and contemptuous revisionism emerges, the outrage that lives quietly beneath the floor turns into too robust to suppress. “How dare they assume we don’t keep in mind?”
Sarah E. Wagner is a professor of anthropology at George Washington College. Martha Greenwald is the editor of “Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial” and teaches writing at Bellarmine College.
