Gil Scott-Heron Could Not Have Been More Wrong

Donald Trump outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington DC. Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times.

I recently wrote about how the coronavirus obliterated the memory of the impeachment, which just three months ago seemed so epic and all-consuming. If someone had told you a week ago that something would soon happen that would — at least temporarily — completely knock the coronavirus out of the news, would you have believed them?

We are now in the midst of three historic crises, simultaneously: a once-in-a-century pandemic, an economic catastrophe approaching that of the Great Depression, and now, atop those two, damn near every major American city on fire in a mass uprising spawned by four hundred years of systemic racial oppression.

I know it’s almost too easy a shot, but I must ask:

Is America great again yet?

In fact, things are moving so fast that between the time I wrote my previous blog post last Saturday morning, and when I went to bed that night, the entire national zeitgeist had shifted dramatically. That morning we could still have a calm, if disturbing, conversation about Amy Cooper as she related to George Floyd. Ten hours later, the conversation could only be about what felt like an incipient civil war breaking out in America.

It’s all of a piece of course. The issues the impeachment raised regarding Trump’s lawlessness perfectly predicted his…