“America,” writes semi-expat Thomas Chatterton Williams of the pandemic view looking back toward home from France, “is an utter disaster.”
On June 26, a day when the U.S. notched some 45,000 new cases—how’s that for “American carnage”?—the European Union announced that it would loosen some travel restrictions but extend its ban on visitors from the United States and other hot-spot nations. On Tuesday, it confirmed that remarkable and deeply humiliating decision, a clear message that in pandemic management, the EU believes that the United States is no better than Russia and Brazil—autocrat-run public-health disasters—and that American tourists would pose a dire threat to the hard-won stability our lockdown has earned us. So much for the myth that the American political system and way of life are a model for the world.
“We did the right thing,” writes C. M. Condo from here inside America. “And it didn’t matter. Because a few people […] decided that their own pleasure, their own needs, their own discomfort, were more important[.]”