Calling Healthcare Workers War “Heroes” Sets Them Up to Be Sacrificed
This week, a flight of eight military jets—handsome and sleek, with bright-red tails—flew over the shuttered Las Vegas strip, so close to the city the roar could be heard from the ground, their dark bellies close to the glassy spires of empty hotels. Flying in tight formation from Nellis Air Force Base, they issued plumes of cloud into the desert air, uniform trails that dissipated into the big, bright, cumulus-dappled sky over the empty streets. It was a thank you from the United States military, said the U.S. Air Force Demonstration Squadron, “to show appreciation and support for the healthcare workers, first responders and other essential personnel in Las Vegas and around the nation who are working on the front lines to combat the coronavirus." Each Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon plane costs $18 million; it costs roughly $8,000 to fly a single one for an hour. There they were, the shiny hardware of the United States’ endless wars, soaring cleanly over a newer and bitterer struggle, and away.
It was a military salute—flush with all the cash the Department of Defense has lavished on its deadly, elaborate toys—to those conscripted against their wills into peril. “Doctors and nurses are at the front lines of this war and are true American HEROES!” wrote the president on March 18, echoing the martial metaphor. The danger is real, the pressures to work are as inevitable as the harshest draft. In America’s military conflicts around the world, beneath the pomp of heavy-duty equipment, the ordinary soldiers fighting America’s wars have faced similar privation: they have entered conflict zones without proper body armor or bulletproof vests, returned traumatized from deployments to find inadequate care and scant employment prospects. The same government that disgorges endless elaborate fighter planes, scattering billions to defense contractors without a thought, leaves the working stiffs at its front lines undefended. The rhetoric of heroism—with its encouragement of sacrifice for the fatherland—obscures the fact that so much of this suffering is unnecessary. And the same is true of those battling the plague at home, the new “war on the Invisible Enemy,” as Donald Trump puts it.
Far below the F-16 airspace, on the streets of American cities and towns, millions have lost their jobs with no hope of recompense or any reliable transfer from governmental coffers to alleviate their hunger. Those of us who can are doing our best to stay indoors to counteract the rise of a virus whose viability on surfaces and in the air remains contested. The possibility of air poisoned with unknown disease hearkens back to older eras of plague. During the Black Death of the Middle Ages, Medieval medical science, such as it was, rested in large part on theories of the air. The very name for malaria, an ancient and still deadly disease, evinces the long and influential life of miasma theory; the name is a contraction of the Italian words mala aria—“bad air.” For premodern scholars and doctors, the emissions from marshes and rotting organic matter—miasmata—putrefied the air, mingled with the breath and gave rise to epidemics: cholera, influenza, plague. Today, there are innumerable unanswered questions, as the deliberate pace of science is overrun by piling bodies tumbling into mass graves. We know enough to know that the danger comes from other people: from breath, from cough. For those lucky enough to be able to sequester ourselves, the very air itself feels like a threat, a miasma bearing plague into our lungs.
But millions more are venturing out daily into this miasma. There are those working to keep the floods of patients alive: doctors, nurses, hospital aides, respiratory therapists, physician assistants, hospital sanitation workers, and administrative workers. There are those who work to get us fed and medicated: grocery workers, farm laborers, pharmacists, restaurant workers, warehouse packers, delivery workers. There are countless more, on dairy farms and chicken plants; there are prisoners sewing face masks for their own guards. Each thin polyester gown and polypropylene mask is a few dollars, a miniscule fraction of the cost of a warplane flown in honor of a doctor or a grocery worker. Yet none of them are sufficiently protected. It is not even close.
The evidence of the paucity in protection, and by extension the disposability of the lives we have failed to protect, is everywhere. The president preens, pouts, and explodes in fits of rage against his critics while lying about necessary supplies; New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, draws praise from the credulous while cutting billions of dollars in federal Medicaid funding from the state budget and comprehensively refusing to employ his broad powers of clemency over rapidly dying prisoners. Last week, my own mother, an obstetrician-gynecologist in New York City, found her usual vendors unable to supply personal protective equipment in a marketplace hijacked by profiteers, and asked me if I could help source her some masks through Twitter. In New York, the city is seeking to acquire rain ponchos, medical gowns having grown so scarce that there is little hope of maintaining sufficient supplies. Grocery workers are dying, and are forced to acquire hand sanitizer and masks at their own expense. One worker at Food Giant, a 27-year-old woman named Leilani Jordan, died without ever being provided with a mask or gloves by her employer. Her final paycheck, her mother noted, was $20.64.
In exchange, there are demonstrations of public support: nightly applause at 7 p.m. for “health care heroes.” The flyover; the slapdash adulatory tweets from a negligent president. They deserve better than empty cheers, than words of war unmatched by bloated defense budgets. The rhetoric of heroism implies that those forced needlessly to labor unprotected amidst threat to their lives must be grateful for a chance at martyrdom. In response to workers striking for greater protections at its warehouses, Amazon, a company whose share price rose to a record high this week, fired Staten Island strike organizer Chris Smalls, and smeared his name in the process. Traders Joe’s and Walmart workers have revealed to reporters that they are not allowed to wear protective gear from home, nor have they received sufficient cleaning products from the company to maintain anything close to safety. Those who fall under the mandate of “essential workers”—those who the militant rhetoric of the “war on coronavirus” would describe as “troops”—are being forced to confront a reality in which the work they perform is essential, but their lives are not. In order to be fed, we are asking men and women across the country to feed themselves to the maw of death; in order to be nursed and doctored back to life, we are asking nurses and doctors to die. But it doesn't have to be so.
“We’re not essential. We’re sacrificial,” Walmart cashier Jennifer Suggs told New Orleans public radio WWNO. “I will be replaced if I die from this. I don’t have a mask or gloves. The only thing I have is a stupid blue vest.”
The truth is that pandemic and war are not the same, though in our militant society, conditioned to adulate a violent state above everything, the rhetoric of warfare is the only metaphor we know. The plain failure of the national government to enact anything close to a war effort—its fitful or outright damaging policies, its confiscation of equipment bound to hospitals—render this ragged metaphor even more of a mockery. If this is war, it is not waged by the tech-savvy and cash-rich defense contractors and generals of the contemporary Pentagon. It bears most resemblance to the trench warfare of World War I, which raged alongside another pandemic one hundred years ago: a surge of bodies, fed in wave after wave to oncoming bullets, falling across the bloody fields of a national Verdun.
“The fear of contagion makes the plague different from the psychology of war,” writes the historian John Kelly in The Great Mortality, his magisterial survey of the Black Death. “In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear and despair.” Those who are not permitted or not able to evade contagion still suffer from the fear of it; they know they are not protected. The Greek root of the word “hero” means “protector”; what we ask for from legions of workers is protection, is sustenance, is healing, with nothing given in return. They deserve every bit of adulation. But by cheering martial metaphor without providing protection and payment, we are asking for martyrdom, not heroism—insensible, unnecessary martyrdom, a death caused by the miserliness of capital, the dysfunction of government, the failure of a state so comprehensive it staggers the mind.
Talia Lavin is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her first book, Culture Warlords, is forthcoming in 2020 from Hachette Books.
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Originally Appeared on GQ
