look square in the eye

A year later, the dictionary of the COVID-19 pandemic has come to include not only scientific terms — asymptomatic, positivity rate, community spread — and neologisms — covidiot, quaranteam, mascne — but a startling number of linguistic feints as well, repurposed for a disaster we in the U.S. proved unwilling, or unable, to look square in the eye.

To Cramer, the bubble and all the trappings that come with it have left Bush an empty shell, a man you could look square in the eye and discover that "there was . . . no one home."