In The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford described the satin-lined coffins, beautified corpses and lavish wreaths of the extortionate US funeral industry. What induced the bereaved to pay for such luxuries was not just their emotional frailty in their moment of loss. It was also a national culture that feared and even denied death: that had to literally dress up the cold fact of it.
In a viral pandemic, even one 58 years later, we might expect such a nation to seek to limit deaths at all costs — and those with harsher or more collectivist histories, such as China, to wear greater losses. But then what a bonfire of clichés the past 20 months have been.
The US share of world fatalities from Covid-19 far exceeds its share of the world’s population. It ranks between Mexico and Romania for deaths per 100,000 people. America has also been overtaken by Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil on the take-up of vaccines, despite having invented several of them.