Triumph of the whim: the Debacle of the Pandemic

 
Emergency morgue trucks - NYC 2020

To read The Path Beneath the Seas is not only to turn back to an age of imperialism, but also to return to  an era of optimistic faith in progress, which celebrated the triumph of man over nature and American ingenuity and heroism over every obstacle, in the pursuit of a destiny that still seemed manifest.  Today we live in a postmodern age, in which an enterprise like the building of the Panama Canal seems an impossible dream.

Peter Winn

New York City

January 2002

Foreword to the Francis Parkman Prize Edition

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal: 1870 -1914

By David McCullough

David McCullough’s masterful The Path Between the Seas was published in 1977.  The product of years it happened to appear as Jimmy Carter, perhaps our best ex-President, struggled and succeeded in his greatest accomplishment: to peacefully relinquish a triumph of the colonial and industrial era.  The Panama Canal made possible what Columbus, Hudson, Vespucci, Magellan, and many others had dreamed of: sea passage to the Orient without the rigours of Cape Horn or the impossible ice of the Arctic Ocean.

Today projects of such scope can be undertaken only with acute awareness of the global climate crisis and the fragility of our environment.  But a century and a half ago the environment was seen as an obstacle to overcome, to be mastered, not protected.  The Panama Canal, like the Suez, transformed the world.  What had been a voyage of the few – around Cape Horn, the stuff of epic like Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast – became a maritime superhighway, transforming world trade.

We may lament the imperialism, the suffering of the laborers, the heedlessness of environmental consequences, but we recognize that the Canal was a world transformative labor.  It has correctly been understood as a heroic accomplishment, a point of American pride.  But today we suffer under a President who promised, without the capacity or vision to Make America Great Again.  His incompetence and egotism, aided by his deplorable allies and protectors, have led us into the greatest debacle of our history:  the bungled response to a plague of historic proportions.  Today, six months after the virus’s DNA was mapped it rages out of control.  Today new cases in Florida set a new single day record – over 15,000.  Today we live not in an “era of optimistic faith in progress, which celebrated the triumph of man over nature and American ingenuity and heroism over every obstacle”.  Rather we suffer, huddled at home, in the triumph of the will of a fool and his many acolytes. - GWC