In addition to being one of history’s foremost authors, Mark Twain is renowned as a satirist, and he did not spare even fellow authors. Probably the most famous example of this is found in an essay he penned entitled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” By Twain’s time, James Fenimore Cooper had become an iconic figure in American literature, famous for his series “The Leatherstocking Tales.” Yet Twain skewered this work, charging Cooper with violating scores of literary “rules” (of Twain’s own choosing, of course). Perhaps the best-known “violation” was a passage in which Cooper described a particular spot on a river as 50 feet in width, which a few pages later he shrinks to 20 feet to set the stage for a new event in the story. In effect, Twain charges Cooper with getting so enthralled in his initial description that he fails to anticipate how the site needs to fit into the overall narrative. In sum, Cooper got carried away in the moment, and ends up with an incoherent story.

You might be wondering what this has to do with Emergency Management/Crisis Response. After all, a literary degree is not a common requirement in the field. Moreover, unlike fiction writers, who get to make up their story (and can catch any discrepancies in an editing process, as Cooper might have), those in the field are dealing with developments in real life and real time that they neither edit nor control. Yet as I’ve noted in my previous two posts, narrative is in fact playing a powerful role in Emergency Management/Crisis Response, and thus there are lessons to be learned. Twain’s criticism of Cooper for getting caught up in the moment and failing to anticipate the needs of his larger narrative is certainly applicable to present responses to a number of emergencies/crises.

For example, in late July, the Washington Post published a report of an internal assessment conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concerning the CDC’s public response to developments with the COVID virus. The findings were troubling. The CDC had long stood by a number of assertions about the efficacy of vaccines that emerging data and studies were clearly contravening. The CDC now found itself having to “walk back” a public narrative in full public view, a fact that would call the agency’s credibility into question at a pivotal moment. A mid-August report by the Post expanded on this, noting that the CDC’s approaches in handling and reporting data had allowed for “overly rosy assessments” of vaccine effectiveness, leading to public complacency even as a new variant of the virus loomed. The sudden shift in narrative had left many, even “friends” of the CDC, deeply uncertain, if not suspicious, of its public guidelines, indeed the agency itself.

Suggestions of how the CDC should respond to this problem are numerous, yet have some definitive focal points. Notably, there is an emphasis on the need for transparency with regard to its methods and findings. As both supporters and critics note, the agency has tended to hold on to information and tell the public to “trust us.” That approach obviously will no longer suffice. Transparency will enhance credibility, as it will not only allow the public to see how the CDC functions and develops its guidelines, but also ensure that the agency is actually doing a good job. Put another way, if the agency knows its work is closely scrutinized, there will be an added incentive to ensure that this work is good.

Yet the overarching consideration here ought to be that the agency needs to work on having a coherent narrative. After all, public doubt is not generally the result of specific CDC data sets, but the story has helped the author. Think of it this way: much like Cooper’s river went from 50 feet in width to 20 feet, vaccine effectiveness has likewise diminished in the CDC’s account. Of course, unlike Cooper, the CDC is not authoring the chain of events and thus does not have the same degree of control over its story. Yet it certainly could have better anticipated how events might develop, and adapt its narrative accordingly. Put another way, it could have “hedged its bets.” Herein lies a caution, one missed in the Post articles. Underlying the calls for transparency is a sense of immediacy, that there is a need for up-to-the-minute numbers on which policymakers can premise decisions. Yet over the last year and a half, there already has been a tendency toward this, with policies being made on the basis of other readily available sources. This has resulted in hasty decisions about courses of action and hasty appraisals of their effectiveness, both of which have proven flawed over the long run, with serious, even deadly consequences. Here one can appreciate Twain’s point that the future long-term narrative needs to be kept in mind, otherwise, the story (to use current parlance) might not “age well.” This is not to argue against transparency, but to point to the need for a larger narrative into which the immediate information can be situated, which makes for not only a coherent story but a coherent response.

This is true not only of COVID but other emergencies and crises. One can see this in the recent events in Afghanistan, as the lack of a coherent narrative and response has been on display for all to see. The crisis there is hardly peripheral to our field; as a colleague of mine at CBI has noted, NATO members (amongst others) will now have a new crisis to manage in the form of a vast number of displaced Afghans who will flee the country. This too will require a coherent narrative to ensure that any response is credible and sustainable over the long term. This will not require that those responding to it be literary experts, but they certainly should be aware of the need for a coherent narrative about the work they are doing.

Yasmeen Abutaleb and Lena H. Sun, “How CDC Data Problems Put the U.S. Behind on the Delta Variant,” Washington Post (19 August 2021).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/18/cdc-data-delay-delta-variant/

Yasmeen Abutaleb, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Joel Achenbach, “‘The War Has Changed’: Internal CDC Document Urges New Messaging, Warns Delta infections Likely More Severe,” Washington Post (29 July 2021).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/29/cdc-mask-guidance/  

Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” (1895).