"We didn't have death"

The American Exception
by Zadie Smith

Death is the great equalizer, "we are all in it together" as Ruse reminds, but

...in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.

Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole.

He speaks truth so rarely that when you hear it from his own mouth—March 29, 2020—it has the force of revelation: “I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death.”

Well, maybe not the whole, unvarnished truth. The first clause was neither true nor false: it described only a desire. A desire which, when I heard it—and found its bleating echo in myself—I’ll admit I weighed in my hand, for a moment, like a shiny apple. It sounded like a decent “wartime” wish, war being the analogy he’s chosen to use. But no one in 1945 wished to return to the “old life,” to return to 1939—except to resurrect the dead. Disaster demanded a new dawn. Only new thinking can lead to a new dawn. We know that. Yet as he said it—“I wish we could have our old life back”—he caught his audience in a moment of weakness: in their dressing gowns, weeping, or on a work call, or with a baby on their hip and a work call, or putting on a homemade hazmat suit to brave the subway, on the way to work that cannot be done at home, while millions of bored children climbed the walls from coast to coast. And, yes, in that brittle context, “the old life” had a comforting sound, if only rhetorically, like “once upon a time” or “but I love him!” The second clause brought me back to my senses. Snake oil, snake oil, snake oil. The devil is consistent, if nothing else. I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms.

Then he spoke the truth: we didn’t have death... (continues)