The experts and first responders are worthy of our admiration; our "leaders," not so much

Only the heroes have any kind of worthwhile information - and it's not enough

Not all of history’s inflection points have been devoid of figures of heroic stature at the top. The triumvirate of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II stared down the Soviet empire. Obviously, Churchill and Eisenhower in the first half of the 1940s bear out the truism that times of crisis generally produce true heroes on the leadership level. Their vision, courage, and ability to rally an entire civilization prevented a disaster too grim to contemplate. (Okay, Roosevelt qualifies, too, but only for his leadership in World War II; the measures he and his team of administrative pointy-heads - Frances Perkins, Rexford Tugwell et al - took a decade earlier did not heal America’s ravaging from the Great Depression.) The Founders of the American experiment rank in this pantheon. Pericles not only ensured that Athens prevailed militarily over its enemies, but established it as the model for representative democracy and flourishing of arts and learning, providing an alternative to the harsh empire model which everyone in that time and place assumed was ubiquitous.

There are no such figures at the top in the coronavirus pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party’s contribution has been outright mendacity, depriving the world of data in the crucial early days of the microbe’s menace, when the spread might have been resolutely arrested. Boris Johnson not only kept Britain completely open for business as a matter of deliberate policy after the virus’s spread there was acknowledged to be rampant, but shook hands everywhere he went, and is himself now in quarantine, having tested positive.

Here in the US, the commander in chief has demonstrated that he is completely irrelevant to the proceedings. From his early pronouncements about how the virus just might miraculously disappear, to proclaiming on February 26 that the number of US cases was “going substantially down,” suggesting that it had peaked at 15, to saying in early March that a vaccine was “coming soon,” to his ridiculous suggestion, after states and municipalities had gone into indefinite lockdown, that Easter morning (April 12) could see packed churches across the nation, to his bizarre assertion yesterday that “you can call it a germ. You can call it a flu. You can call it a virus. You can call it many different names. I’m not sure anyone even knows what it is,” he has made his own case that he should be nowhere near his task force’s daily briefings.

Capitol Hill Democrats likewise have offered nothing serious or responsible to the effort to address this crisis. We are now saddled with a gargantuan relief bill, bearing a price tag the likes of which the world has never seen, and still laden with funding for completely unrelated progressive-wish-list items, because they held the nation hostage as the hours ticked away and deprived individuals and businesses of a simple, clean bill that would send out cash money.

The only players in the entire situation that merit veneration are first responders, the sleep-deprived nurses, physicians and therapists in the nation’s increasingly strained hospitals, and the experts on the task force, who unflinchingly give the public the straight, bracing truth every evening.

Even these people lack adequate data to provide a comprehensive picture. They are beginning to drill down into what is happening on a county-by-county basis, but no one still has any idea how many asymptomatic carriers are among those we’re keeping a six-foot distance from when we go to the supermarket, or how many people become infected the day after being tested.

The record book will not be able to note a figure bringing the requisite leadership at the overarching level in this catastrophe. History will merely say that our civilization - indeed, our word - muddled along in states of panic, despair and intermittent, fleeting hope, with bedraggled care-givers and researchers on the ground doing what they could, armed with what knowledge was available.

God help us.