COVID For Historians

I have COVID, as do my wife and eight-year-old son. We're all fine; they seem mostly over it and in vaxxed and double boosted and fully planning on spending the next few days taking it incredibly easy.

It's interesting that back in 2017-2018 we all thought there would be no way to write the history of the Trump era.  I remember tweeting about it sardonically, as did so many other much finer historians: there would be no way to capture a presidency, I thought, where every week brought a new scandal.

But now, only two years after Trump's first presidency (I know, I know, he has no chance, except he had no chance in 2016 either, so I'm counting on nothing in this regard), I think it will be all too easy.  Everything about Trump's presidency, in the history textbook, will be discussed in light of what followed: That pandemic that hit us in 2020 was the defining moment of a generation, much like 9/11 was a decade before.

People sometimes foolishly claim that 9/11 brought us together as a nation.  I dislike that claim.  Just like World War II (shout out here to the person who encouraged us Twitter types to try our hands at blogging, Melissa Amateis, an excellent WWII homefront historian, whose blog is here), it brought some of us together in a firm consensus.  New York was great, not all Muslims (always said in that self-righteous self-satisfied way) were responsible, had to rally around the flag.  But as it did so, it raised big divisions and placed Muslims under tremendous suspicion in this country.  Brown folk weren't in the consensus.

If 9/11 divided us into "us" and "them," the "them" were defined as foreign.  COVID, however, has divided us into clearer "us" and "them" categories.  But now it's hard to argue that anyone is foreign, though some right wing nut jobs try to argue that anyone who believes in masking/vaccines/sanity is somehow anti-American; and some have tried to argue that the right wing is not truly American today.  For me, I couldn't care less who claims the mantle of being more American.  I'd rather be humane than American.  (One of my favorite lines from The Paper: "I don't fucking live in the fucking world! I live in fucking New York City!")

Divisions between us and them are an old and important part of American history, of course; I don't find all cultural history all that valuable, but the study of how communities form and dissolve over time, how different ways of imagining us and them have come together and come apart--that seems to me important if we are to understand the past at all, let alone if we are to understand something so complex as how people in the past imagined their world.

Ive wandered off topic. But it is fascinating what COVID has done for historians. And I look forward to seeing how historians, a generation down the line, try to tell the story of COVID.