I’m a complete sap. Name the maudlin, tear-jerking film, song, book or even TV commercial, and you’ll find me weeping.
Maybe this should be embarrassing, but I also fall completely for whatever idealistic or perhaps even naïve plotline unfolds. I’m thrilled when Harry finally gets together with Sally. I cry every time Clarence gets his wings.
It’s why I’m still moved to tears when just hearing the opening bars of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” because I truly can “imagine all the people sharing all the world.”
So when all the world was infected with an insidious virus, I expected a “Happy Feet” response. In that animated film, when the dancing penguin tells humans they are overfishing and killing all the animals in his homeland (spoiler alert!), all the world joins together to put an end to the problem.
It didn’t happen that way with the coronavirus.
While hundreds of thousands died and countless more suffered and will continue to suffer unknown long-term problems from contracting COVID-19, leaders around the world failed. Including the leader of the United States. Bigly.
Superman did not reverse the planet’s rotation. Wonder Woman did not defeat Ares the God of War. There is no yellow brick road leading us safely home.
But in 2018, our commander in chief disbanded the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, charged specifically with preparing for another pandemic. He pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization.
Last May, Germany, France, England, Japan and Israel held a virtual vaccine summit, pledging to raise funds and develop vaccines and drugs to combat the coronavirus. The U.S. was conspicuously absent.
It’s especially perplexing to me that the POTUS not only failed to confront the coronavirus, he actively downplayed the seriousness of the virus. More than 200,000 Americans have died so far.
Our president is a man who desperately covets attention and recognition, to the point of inventing stories about distinctions he’s won. Recently, he rejiggered a 2016 endorsement by a small group of veterans into the “highly honored Bay of Pigs Award.” He also claimed to have refused the last Time magazine “Person of the Year,” a claim flatly refuted by the editors who actually choose that cover.
COVID-19 was the president’s opportunity. He could’ve finally stepped into the role of “leader of the free world.” He could’ve shown he has the tiniest fraction of concern for the people he was (sort of) elected to serve. The POTUS could’ve legitimately acted in a way that put him in line for a Nobel Peace Prize (or “Noble Prize,” in his words).
He didn’t do those things.
Every U.S. president falls short. But never before have we lived under a president who blatantly governs solely to his own self-interests. Never before have we been led by a man whose contempt for the law of the land, its civil liberties, its scientists and its people has directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
As the character Sydney Ellen Wade said in the film “The American President,” “How do you have patience for people who claim they love America but clearly can’t stand Americans?”
A president should be, at the very least, inspirational, hopefully even aspirational. If the current president’s term were a film, I would demand my money back.
Here’s how my movie fantasy would play out: Justin Trudeau calls the POTUS, the POTUS calls Russia (because I understand there’s currently a direct, private line), Russia calls Japan and so on and so forth, right down to Monaco, Liechtenstein Lichtenstein — the little ones. All the world agrees to share their very best virologists, epidemiologists, pharmacologists, facilities and all of their findings, focusing to find a viable vaccine.
Together, all the world figures out how to produce and distribute this vaccine everywhere. Together, all the world agrees to maintain this scientific body for the next plague, because there will be a next one.
And when this project is finished, all the world agrees that working together would ultimately be ridiculous if the next day countries return to their weapons, hatred and distrust, and resume trying to kill one another. The film ends with a rolling shot of a giant Zoom meeting screen full of world leaders, smiling as the music plays.
My yet-unmade film is a documentary. Imagine.
A former Baltimore resident, Deborah Walike is a self-described lapsed journalist living in upstate New York.
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