In a mood as I close out week three of self-isolation, so here are some observations that violate my usual habit of deleting draft tweets with irritating US-European generalizations.

From a European perspective, US-Americans often seem incredibly myopic and parochial in ways they're completely unaware of. Everything that's true in the US is generalized to the rest of the world, even if there are different centers of gravity in other parts of the planet.

But Europeans generally have no real understanding of what's its like to live in the United States.

Even for me, who has been primarily in the US for a very long time now, it's almost impossible to understand what the absence of a safety net here really means. How do you understand a government that tells everyone "drop dead"?

In Europe, "drop dead" is said first and foremost to those outside the borders; that's the whole point of whiteness/citizenship.

To understand the reaches of precarity here in the United States is very, very hard for most Europeans, because white Europeans (and there are many non-white Europeans) are used to associating precarity with elsewhere.

To understand a government that treats a substantial minority of its citizens as non-people/non-citizens all the time is difficult enough, especially given the rates of imprisonment and police violence here.

But to understand what's actually happening here, and the lack of a meaningful opposition or public debate, and the utter bankruptcy of the 'liberal media' is (outside the UK), so difficult to wrap one's head around.

The difficulty setting of life for most Americans is not something white Europeans get, because it permeates all aspects of life and is combined with that irritating US-centrism.

It's not just that white Europeans don't understand how racialization functions either "at home" or in the United States, though that's obviously true.

The intense disgust the ruling political parties feel for the vast majority of the country (which experiences different degrees of precarity) is inconceivable.

And the breadth of distribution of precarity--that it extends far 'higher' into classed and racially stratified segments of society--is also unseen.

I see headlines in the @nytimes about the "expansion" of the US-American safety net and I want to scream. There *is no safety net* here.

I know 'we' all know that Bernie isn't that far left etc etc, but then I see the *furthest* right-wing (racist, xenophobic, similar to moderate Republicans) party in Norway calling for *full coverage* of the expenses of self-employed workers (like hairdressers, for example).

That's in addition, of course, to the usual: unemployment insurance/universal healthcare/direct financial support for childcare etc etc.

And I am starting to understand what it means to live in a country that has always been a killing machine for black and brown people within its own borders and across the world, and that cannot turn its killing machine off even in a time like this.

That, in fact, decides that this is a time to expand the slaughter to ever-greater segments of the population.

The many ways in which Europe is not the answer have been exhaustively explored. Its own exploitative practices are indefensible. Yet the absence of safety for almost anyone in the US means that the race to the bottom here feels qualitatively different to me.

As I sit listening to siren after siren in the silence of what was New York City, and watch putative leftists in my social media feeds charmed by the repulsive antics of Cuomo and his ilk, and see the people-hating budgets passed by the Democrats in this state...

There is a reason that the Antichrist is traditionally associated with hypocrisy, with making truthful language impossible by using what should be true in the most deceitful of ways.

Hypocrisy takes away our capacity to engage reality. It robs us of descriptive power because we cannot tell the difference between identical-sounding claims.

And description is needed for understanding, and for action. When any description we might offer has been disarmed in advance, as is the case here, in a country that feeds on the dishonest evasion of reality at so deep a level that speech describing it cannot but sound absurd...

What can we say about reality, about people, about our bodily and social needs, about cost and sacrifice and care?

Decades and centuries of dishonesty ("we hold these truths to be self-evident, that *all men* are created equal") have trained a country, an empire, in the finest arts of hypocrisy to a depth that is hard to fathom even for those who theoretically understand.

Does it matter to say that the Antichrist holds sway in the land? Perhaps not. Theological callouts are mere gestures if they are not connected to analysis of how wickedness disguises itself to be indistinguishable from the good, of how lies create their own reality.

There are other factors that have created the situation in the United States today that don't fit into this: cognitive structures that aren't good or bad but have certain effects (the difficulty of generating broad recognition of unlikely but real dangers, for example).

But the absence of governance in this country has vastly multiplied the impact of these ordinary cognitive factors (which were in play across the Global North in the period from initial reports about the virus until mid-March).

And so we see how in themselves relatively neutral human tendencies become sources of suffering and death-dealing directly against the actions and desires of the vast majority of folk impacted by them.