Roberto Tallarita

An article by Roberto Tallarita: A popular Internet meme from recent weeks depicts the following scene in the style of an old tarot card. A screaming woman is being sacrificed to a sullen Sun God, her heart ripped out of her chest and offered to the deity. The labels are brutal: the victim is “Grandma,” the Sun-God is the “Economy,” and the figure who kills Grandma to appease the economic deity is “the Economists” (or Trump, or—in a private version shared in one of my WhatsApp groups—a libertarian friend of mine). (Never mind that professional economists are overwhelmingly in favor of strong measures of social distancing.) Crises encourage simplistic contrasts, and the COVID-19 pandemic—the biggest crisis of our generation—has already spurred many of them. One is precisely the contrast presented in this meme: the survival of those infected with coronavirus versus the survival of our economy. Other extreme contrasts are found in countless op-eds, blog posts, tweets, and private conversations: complete social isolation versus health catastrophe; economic paralysis versus economic normality; civil rights versus death. We are fascinated with simple contrasts, it seems, because they pit some obviously sacred value against a deformed caricature of a conflicting interest: the choice between Grandma and a heartless, impersonal “Economy” is much more resolvable than the real dilemma we face.