Don’t compare COVID-19 to 9/11

Human communication is fraught with metaphor and simile; these are basic tools which help not only establish a shared frame of reference but allow us to view events from a more detached perspective (seeing the forest, if you will). As such they are crucial in language development.

However, their use is not always helpful to providing a foundation from which we can approach or respond to the event(s) we’re analyzing. I don’t mean the notion of “mixed metaphors”, tho that is of course a thing; what I mean here is that too often inapt comparisons are made which detract from our ability to understand that with which are attempting to deal, which seems frequent in propaganda.

Recently I have been hearing media, especially left-leaning media, making comparisons between COVID-19 and 9/11, particularly as relates to the death toll. I’ve also been seeing this happening more frequently in social media from friends and acquaintances who are also left-leaning. Ultimately it seems the point they’re attempting to make is that the US have spent and continue to spend many trillions of dollars fighting wars that are encroaching on 20 years in length now, originally as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attack; therefore, why is the US government not taking COVID-19, which at this point has killed about 25 times as many people, as seriously or more serious than 9/11?

I’m not about to offer an answer to that question; that isn’t my reason for writing this.

I’m writing this because the comparisons of COVID-19 to 9/11 need to stop. At an academic level I don’t disagree with the point that I think is being made by those comparisons, but their use as a method of creating a shared frame of reference is terribly flawed.

From the early days of this pandemic, the President has made and continues to make frequent reference to COVID-19 as an “unseen enemy” and has within the last couple days compared US citizens to soldiers on the front lines of a battle. Essentially, the President is framing this pandemic as a war that we can actually fight with an enemy that, while unseen, we can define and compartmentalize.

Using 9/11 as a frame of reference plays right into that narrative. Perhaps most dangerously, the immediate rhetoric that was widely and repeatedly spread after the 9/11 attacks was that if we didn’t continue on with the “American way of life”, the terrorists would win. This is exactly how many people are treating the quarantine/stay-at-home orders coming from their state governments: a disruption of the American way of life which, if we allow, means the terrorists win.

Is COVID-19 a terrorist? No. It is a virus; it does not have an ideology. “Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, but at least it’s an ethos.” Even if we were to further the 9/11 metaphor and suggest that it’s an enemy we can fight (which the President is doing), remember that even treating 9/11 that way has caused, again, nearly 20 years of arguably unnecessary war costing many trillions of dollars, let alone far, far more deaths than 9/11 itself. We’ve presumably been fighting those wars to preserve the American way of life. How do you think this plays out if we treat a virus the same exact way?

Even at an academic level, the comparison is just sloppy. There are more apt comparisons to make; e.g., the Titanic is plenty simple, plenty straight-forward, and more effectively mirrors the response the US government has been pursuing.

Added to which, COVID-19 and 9/11, for the US anyway, are two parts of a broader narrative which few people truly deign to consider: the end of empire.