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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #27

Yesterday, March 4, Leslie went to see her hairdresser for the first time in months. She has received her first shot of the Moderna vaccine and is scheduled for the second on March 14. The hairdresser, whom I’ll call Jane, had gotten both. She is fully inoculated, so when she phoned this afternoon with the news that she had tested positive for COVID19, Leslie was unpleasantly surprised. So was I. She will now have to be tested, but because the test isn’t accurate immediately after exposure, she must wait till Tuesday or Wednesday to have it done. Meanwhile, she  has to quarantine herself, wear a mask even inside the house, and keep at least six feet away from me, although I, too, am fully inoculated — for whatever that’s worth. Apparently not as much as we had thought.

I relate this domestic anecdote to underline, italicize, and emphasize that for a long while yet vaccinations are not going to catapult all of us back to normality. This disease is called the Novel Corona Virus not because it’s an extended prose narrative but because it hadn’t  been seen before its appearance in, roughly, January, 2019. Scientists and medical experts have learned a lot about it since then, but by no means everything. It’s full of nasty surprises, mutating into variants that spread more rapidly and severely than the original, infecting people, like Jane, who think that vaccination has made them bullet-proof.

I ponder this as I read and hear about the governors of Texas and Mississippi lifting all restrictions in their states, including mask mandates and requirements to maintain social distancing. The war’s over! These moves, which, count on it, will be copied by other state governments, have been cheered by the nation’s  ignoramus faction — generally the same people who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats — and lauded in the conservative media. The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial and oped pages are to unbridled capitalism as Pravda and Izvestia were to Soviet communism, ran an editorial in this morning’s edition scorning President Biden’s characterization of the above governors as “Neanderthals.” The paper’s argument is that Democrats want the COVID crisis to be perpetual, using it to “expand the welfare state.” Public Health experts have warned that the vaccine rollout ought not to be an excuse to lower our guard until the pandemic is fully contained. But these experts are the despised elite, part of the cabal seeking to cripple the economy so the welfare state can emerge triumphant.

This is nonsense, of course. But in a country where millions believe that liberals drink the blood of children, among other atrocities, it is too much to expect common sense to prevail. Nevertheless, I’ll throw out this idea: mandating that masks be worn in public and that people practice social distancing does not force restaurants, bars, stores, and other businesses to shut their doors. Those sorts of restrictions, as opposed to lockdowns, do not gravely effect economic activity; but if they are not followed, you may be assured that infection rates will surge, ICU’s will become overcrowded, and medical staffs extended to the breaking point, all of which will result in lockdowns. In so many words, the governors of Texas and Mississippi, among other state leaders, aren’t lifting restrictions for economic reasons; their motives are political. As Paul Krugman phrased it in the New York Times, “Refusing to wear a mask has become a badge of political identity, a barefaced declaration that you reject liberal values like civic responsibility and belief in science.”

Are we becoming, if we’re not there already, an ungovernable country?

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 26

A low, lead-colored sky, snow falling (again) as I drive to Norwalk Hospital for my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. It all goes smoothly, in and out in less than half an hour. A security guard checks my temperature, a nurse hands me a form to fill out, attesting that I’ve had no allergic reactions to injected medications and that I understand what the side effects might be; then I’m escorted to a desk near the main entrance, bare my arm, get the shot, am handed a card testifying that I’ve been vaccinated, following which I wait for 15 minutes in a “recovery” room to make sure I don’t go into anaphylactic shock. The nurses and other medical personnel are wearing masks that say, “I’ve been vaccinated.” I ask for one, figuring it will be a badge of honor; but the masks are for staff only.

So now I’m trying to NOT feel (Choose one): overconfident, bullet-proof, invulnerable.

Leslie is due for  her second shot on March 14, after which we will make our long-delayed hegira to Arizona. A few days ago, her friend Karen’s mother phoned, chocked with grief over her daughter’s death from Covid last spring (See the first of these posts). The call caused Leslie’s sorrow to rise up, and she cried in my arms. Meanwhile, I learned that an old friend of mine, Peter Iseman, died recently of virus-related complications. He and Karen are but two of the half-million Americans who have succumbed to this awful plague; they put a face and a personality on the numbers, they give meaning to the numbing statistics.

Some unrelated, random observations: Yesterday, I tuned into NASA TV to watch the Mars rover, Perseverance, land on the red planet. It made a voyage of 290 million miles in seven months, and touched down in a complicated, fully automated series of maneuvers right on time at 3:55pm EST.  A wondrous, astonishing, heartening event in this otherwise disheartening year, an illustration of what we can do in this country when we pull together.

A few hours later, on the nightly news, I watched a Texas family burning their furniture to keep from freezing to death in the winter storm that’s struck more than half the U.S.  A stunning juxtaposition, wouldn’t you say? A spacecraft landing on Mars to search for signs of life, American citizens setting fire to tables and chairs to stay warm. The misinformation and disinformation that’s been spewed for the past four years hasn’t stopped with the retirement of Donald Trump to Mar-A-Lago. The Texas governor and his cronies, voices amplified by right-wing media, blame the state’s plight on the “failure” of renewable energy sources.  Nevermind that only seven percent of Texas’s energy comes from renewables — The windmills froze! Of course, so did the natural gas pipelines. We must, must do all we can to promote burning the fossil fuels that cause climate change that, in turn, causes events like unprecedented winter storms that force families to repurpose their furniture into firewood.

 

 

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #25

I had my inaugural dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Inauguration Day, a week ago today. This came about as a result of a notification from the Centers for Disease Control that I, as a 75+geezer, was eligible for the vaccine; all I had to do was fill out an online form, which I did, and scroll through the calendar for an available date at Norwalk General Hospital, which is just a 20-minute drive from my house. The whole process took less than half an hour; so did the inoculation procedure. The room wasn’t crowded — perhaps a dozen to 20 people, most medical and other “front-line” workers, there for the same reason as I.  A nurse checked my photo ID to make sure I was who I claimed to be, was the correct age, and had never experienced allergic reactions to previous vaccinations or from taking medications. Up went my sleeve, in went the needle.

Apres jab, I was sent to a waiting room to make sure I did not suffer an adverse reaction. I did not, and walked out to my car, having taken one small step toward a normal life, defined these days as a life free of worry that one will end one’s days isolated in an intensive care ward, wheezing through a ventilator. That liberation is, of course, a long way off. I have to get the second dose, scheduled for February 19, and figure it will be at least six months, probably a year, before most everyone else in the country is vaccinated and on their own roads to normality.

Still, I breathed a little easier. I was reminded of a day, a long, long time ago, when my mother took me to the doctor for the polio vaccine . Up until iJonas Salk invented it, every child and every parent lived in dread of that disease. Now we could go to the municipal swimming pool or to school without fear contracting it, and the possibility of a life on crutches or, worse, in an iron lung. 

My experience with the Covid vaccine was a happy one, compared with what other people have to go through. For example, my wife and sister-in-law spent many hours between them seeking an appointment for their 94-year-old mother, Molly Ware. She lives in Westchester County, N.Y., where the vaccine rollout is doing anything but rolling. After two days of searching, Leslie and Jennifer secured a slot for Molly fairly near her home — on April 5th! That was better than the first opening they found — on April 15 at a race track in Queens, many traffic-choked miles from Molly’s home in Rye, N.Y.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #24

I had a long conversation the other day with “G” (the person addressed in #23). The main point of discussion was the possibility of a second American civil war breaking out in the near future, and what could be done to avert it. G., by the way, is a former history teacher and former Wall Street lawyer, a political centrist.

Cautiously optimistic as I am cautiously pessimistic, he thought that the FBI and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security should concentrate on defeating the domestic terrorists in our midst: White Supremacists, Neo Nazis, and right-wing militias, many of whom participated in last week’s insurrection in the nation’s capitol. Infiltrate them, arrest them whenever possible, but by all means necessary prevent them from translating their violent fantasies into action. Under pressure, pushed further and further to the margins, they will eventually disappear, as did the left-wing bomb-throwers in the 60s — the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army.

I said that I hoped that would come about. But I wasn’t entirely convinced, nagged by a suspicion that our capacity for civic and moral virtue has become so degraded that reunifying this fractured nation may no longer be possible. Reading or listening to comments from the insurrectionists has been sobering, depressing, alarming. They believe every lie spewed from the mouths of Trump and his enablers, chiefly the lie that the election was stolen, despite the facts that 50 states ratified the results and that 90 judges dismissed the 60 lWhite House lawsuits alleging fraud  for lack of any credible evidence. They continue to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories — a Satanic ring of pedophiles, led by prominent Democrats, headquartered in a Washington pizza parlor; the Covid pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by liberals to control American citizens. They are beyond the pale. How far beyond? Consider that one of the insurrectionist leaders was recorded urging his (maskless) followers to hug each other and “create a super-spreader event.” Some did. That’s edging toward mass suicide, like the cultists who obeyed Jim Jone’s call to drink poisoned Kool Aid.

A few politicians and pundits have said that these people are, in effect, victims of propaganda broadcast by social media and right-wing websites. Really? No one forced them to turn to those sources of disinformation, no one forced them to believe the falsehoods and hysterical conspiracy theories. They believe that crap because they want to, perhaps need to, as they need to stoke the inchoate rage simmering in their hearts (for reasons I can’t even guess at). It’s as if they delight in abandoning their reason and judgment. Think of it. They are so discontent, so white-hot furious that they came very close to seizing the Senate and the House of Representatives in the name of overthrowing the results of a free and fair election. A coup! It beats me why they feel as they do. They aren’t the starving masses, they had the means to travel long distances to Washington, to buy meals and rent motel rooms for days. They could afford all those flags and banners and tactical gear.

Just to be clear, I am not speaking about all Trump supporters, but of his most devoted disciples. Five of my friends voted for Trump in 2016, because they agreed with his policies on lower taxes and deregulation, or on securing the border, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, appointing conservative judges etc. They weren’t caught in the magnetic field of his negative energy. As far as I know, none think that the election was stolen, nor that Biden will be an illegitimate president. But they could be a minority.  Polls show that Trump’s fabrications are accepted as truth by 70 percent of the 74 million Americans who cast ballots for him.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that 70 percent of those 50 million will never in a thousand years believe that Biden’s victory was anything but a colossal fraud perpetrated by radical lefties seeking to take over America.That gives us 35 million people for whom violence is justified to “save” the country. I don’t see any way their minds can be changed. They live in an alternate universe, liberated from facts; they don’t speak the same language as the rest of us, they don’t think the same way as we do. Unifying a country with such a huge number of disaffected, alienated, grievance-filled citizens is itself a fantasy.

Which brings me to a proposal I made to G.. It was semi tongue-in-cheek, that is, it was semi-serious: Let’s make the Disunited States a political and geographic reality, and avoid armed civil conflict,  by means  of a peaceable secession. I submit Texas as a feasible candidate. Talk of secession has been buzzing in the Lone Star state for a decade or more; a petition to leave the union gathered 125,000 signatures several years ago. Texas has a lot going for it as a separate country: 1. History — it was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845. Geography — its 268,600 square miles make it larger than France (248,580 sq.mi.). 3. Economics — Texas has a diverse, vibrant economy, bustling urban centers, and access to world trade through its Gulf coast and the port of Houston. Population — With 29M citizens, its population is less than half of France’s (67M). Suppose, then, that a referendum calling for secession succeeds in Texas, and the U.S. government bids it farewell and God speed; suppose further that the 35M hard core Trumpanistas are persuaded or induced to move there and establish a nation of their own, perhaps with Trump as its President for Life. The sovereign Republic of Texas would then have a population approximating that of France, in a land area 20,000 square miles bigger. Room enough for all!

G. dismissed this idea with a brusque wave of his hand. Impracticable, if not impossible. I could not disagree, What would happen to liberal Austin and San Antonio? But I was — I am — teased by the image of a state where right-wing populists might be able to live happily, giving the rest of us a chance to live happily without them.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 23

Text of an email i sent to a friend. His name has been deleted.

G: I would describe myself as “cautiously pessimistic” about the country’s future, short-term and long-term. Pessimism comes almost naturally to me, mostly because I’ve seen too many wars and revolts and riots and acts of terrorism. In other words, I’ve been witness to a lot of history, defined by Gibbon as largely the “record of the crimes and follies of mankind.” My experiences have made me skeptical about humanity’s capacity for moral virtue. People tend to do the right thing only when the wrong thing fails to present itself. What makes me cautious is that I could be mistaken in predicting that the sack of the citadel of democracy by a mob was not the end of something but the beginning, and that that something will make yesterday’s events look decorous by comparison. Weather forecasts are the only prophecies we can rely on, and even they are often off the mark.

Anyone who has followed closely the fraying of our social and political fabric in recent years would not have been surprised by what happened yesterday. Shocked, disgusted, appalled, angered, yes, but not surprised. The storming of the Capitol building was the expression of what Philip Roth termed “the American Id,” and the armed thugs were its embodiment, as is the man who incited them. Donald Trump is, moreover, both a product of the darker impulses in our national character, as well as their accelerant.

A headline in today’s Times read: “Americans at the Gates: The Trump Era’s Inevitable Denouement.” The last word implies a climax, an ending. It suggests a hope that once Trump is out of office, a semblance of normality will be restored and his legion of followers fade into the shadowy margins inhabited by cranks. Trumpism, the thinking goes, is not an ideology but a cult; with its leader off the stage, it will eventually disappear. Well, maybe. I don’t doubt that the incoming Biden administration will considerably improve things, but I find it difficult to believe that Wednesday’s insurrection was, as it were, the breaking of a national fever. Even if Trump winds up where he belongs — in prison — and never utters another public word, never sends one more hysterical tweet, that we’ve heard the last from the people who worship and idolize him: white supremacists and right-wing militias, the whole huge mass of QAnon lunatics, conspiracy theorists, anti-immigrant fanatics.

I read somewhere that 70 percent of the 70+million who voted for Trump are convinced that the election was stolen from him, despite the total absence of evidence. Millions of our fellow citizens live in an alternate reality, embracing every lie he’s told,  absorbing all the outrageous propaganda injected into their brains by the house organs of the extreme right. It’s not that they’re innocent dupes of a huge disinformation campaign — they seek disinformation, they want their views and biases confirmed, they want easy, off-the-rack explanations for the social and cultural changes the U.S. is undergoing, because they’re too lazy to examine the issues themselves and draw reasonable conclusions. They can’t drink enough from the fountains of conspiracy theories, no matter how outlandish, because they need to think of themselves as recipients of special knowledge not possessed by the elites they despise. They likewise need to stoke their rage.

If those millions represent the shaft of the spear, the thirty-thousand who took part in Wednesday’s festival of vandalism are the blade, and the armed militias are the point. Those are the ones we should look out for — the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Precenters, or the lesser-known, localized bands like the one that planned to kidnap Michigan’s governor, or who, armed to the teeth, broke into the state capitol (rehearsing for the one in D.C.?) to protest pandemic restrictions. I have studied these groups, read their manifestos. What they want is civil war; they fantasize about it, imagining themselves marching under their Gadsden flags to battle socialists, lefties of all stripes, blacks, hispanics. Most of them, if not all, have never seen or fought in a war; if they had, they wouldn’t find it so attractive.

They are going to go ground for a while, but I think they will improve their organization, acquire explosives, train more, and then strike.

It could come in a week, it could be in a month or two or six, but we have not heard the last primeval howl from the Great American Id. Once again, I might be wrong, I certainly hope so. In fact, I would like you to persuade me that I am.

Regards, PJC.



























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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 22

About 25 years ago, I started to study Stoicism, the philosophy founded in Athens  in the 3d century B.C. by the Greek thinker, Zeno of Citium, developed by his pupils, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and carried on during the first and second centuries A.D. by Romans like Seneca, Epictetus, and most notably, the emperor Marcus Aurelius. My introduction to Stoicism came through reading Aurelius’s Meditations, and an essay by Seneca titled De Ira — On Anger.  (I had anger-management issues at the time, which may have been a lingering after-effect from service in the Vietnam War). Since then, I have begun almost every morning by reading ancient Stoic texts as well as essays by modern Stoics such as Ryan Halliday and Donald Robertson. Beyond studying the philosophy, I try to practice it. I say “try” because I often fail. Stoicism is difficult to put into practice, especially in a consumer-capitalist culture, with its emphasis on self-indulgence as opposed to self-discipline, its pressures to acquire money and stuff, the (false) idea being that the more you have the happier you’ll be,.

Stoicism teaches that money and possessions and power are not necessarily goods: Virtue is. It is not just the highest good; it’s the only true good. The Stoic virtues are: wisdom — the ability to distinguish what is in our control from what is not — self-mastery,  fortitude in the face of adversity, and justice toward one’s fellow man. These characteristics are gained through a will in agreement with our essential nature as rational animals. Humans, the Stoics teach, are in harmony with themselves when they are in harmony with their reason, which is our share of the logos, the universal reason — the mind of God, if you will. The purpose is to achieve what the ancients termed eudaimonia, which roughly translates into “serenity.” And you achieve this state of mind by improving, through reason, your ethical and moral well-being.

That goal is encapsulated in the famed “Serenity Prayer,” written by the 20th-century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and recited countless times in 12-step recovery programs: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

If you’ve stuck with me so far, you can guess where I’m going with this.The pandemic is the adversity we are all facing to one degree or another. Stoicism enables a person to endure its emotional, psychological, and financial costs: the loss of a friend, a loved one, or a job, the joyless monotony of quarantine and lockdown.

Stoicism empowers me to overcome fear. I focus on what is in my control — wear a mask, practice social distancing, wash my hands frequently — and leave what is not in my control to fate. Obviously, I have no influence over the virus, nor over the millions of Americans too lazy or careless to do what they can to avoid spreading it, nor over government leaders more concerned with their own political fortunes than with the welfare of their citizens. If, despite my best efforts, I should become infected, then so be it. I won’t be happy about that, but I’ll at least know I did my best to protect myself as well as others. I will have the courage to face the worst, even my own death.

The country could use a strong dose of  Stoicism — call it a spiritual vaccination. Instead of ignoring the advice of medical experts, wise Americans would heed them. The Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Fauci, and others pleaded for people to avoid travel and shelter in place during the holiday season, warning that failure to do so would result in a huge spike in cases. Millions responded by crowding airports and train stations and highways between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and sure enough, infections and deaths have now reached catastrophic proportions. Why? Over the past few decades, much of our society has forsaken self-restraint for self-indulgence, self-reliance for the selfishness of extreme individualism. I want what I want and I want it now! Or, I don’t want to do something, like wear a mask in public, because it infringes on my personal liberties; therefore, I won’t do it! But wearing a mask helps contain the spread to other people. I don’t care, that’s their problem, my freedom to do whatever the hell I feel like takes precedence.

Among the many things my wife and I wanted to do this past year was to make our annual trip to Arizona after the holidays. We have put it off because our doctor out there advised against it. A new, more transmissible variant of the virus was spreading, Arizona’s infection rate was among the three or four worst in the country, mostly because far too many Arizonans were flouting what few restrictions the governor had imposed. We trusted the doctor’s expertise, we didn’t delude ourselves into thinking we knew more than he; we listened to him, and I’m glad we did. This morning, we learned that the state now has the highest rate of cases per capita in the U.S., higher even than California’s.

One Stoic beneficial practice is called praemeditatio malorum — the anticipation of adversity. Its a way of steeling yourself against unexpected disasters — the Stoic wise man or woman expects them. I’ll confess that I never anticipated a global plague, but by training myself to expect other bad things that might happen, I’ve been better able to weather this particular bad thing. I think back to my combat service in Vietnam: before going out on a long-range patrol, we preplanned artillery concentrations in case we ran into a superior enemy force, we performed counter-ambush drills because we knew that we could be ambushed. To do otherwise, to think otherwise, would have been criminally foolish. Praemeditatio malorum would be a fine antidote to denial. Millions of Americans, fed by propaganda from right-wing websites and social media, as well as from our Denier in Chief, continue to embrace the notion that the pandemic is a hoax, or that its severity is exaggerated. Like spoiled children, they can’t believe that this virus has struck, so they’ve convinced themselves that it hasn’t.

As an old friend of mine once observed, Ignorance can be overcome with instruction, stupidity lives forever.

 

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #21

We celebrated the welcome demise of 2020 in a manner befitting a plague year — all dressed up with nowhere to go. But we had a good time all by ourselves: martinis before dinner, a fine old vine Zin with filet mignon and roast potatoes, followed by dancing to Ella Fitzgerald,   then watching the ball drop in Times Square on TV. My  hope  is  that  the  new  year  will  at  least  be  no  worse  than  the  old  one,  while  holding  to  the  possibility  that  it  will  be  better.  Perhaps  to  save  me  from  even  that  modest,  very  cautious  optimism,  my  younger  son,  Marc,  texted  me  this  quote  from  King  Lear:  “And  the  worst  I may  be  yet.  The  worst  is  not  so  long  as  we  can  say,  ‘This  is  the  worst.'” Applied to the current situation, the mere turning of a calendar page changes nothing. That said, I am extremely grateful that things are well with us, though we have lost three friends in the past nine months — two from Covid. My wish is that the country’s fortunes improve, that citizens suffering from lost jobs, lost friends and relatives, see their own fortunes and happiness restored, and that this awful pandemic becomes history,

 

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HUNTER’S MOON LISTED IN NYT NEW IN PAPERBACK FEATURE

Click on this link or copy and paste it in your browser to see the New York Times’s mention of the paperback edition of HUNTER’S MOON.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 20

I haven’t posted for several weeks for a couple of reasons: one, until two weeks ago, I was busy finishing the first draft of a new novel, an effort that left me too mentally depleted to write so much as a shopping list; two, I was recovering from a concussion caused by a late-night fall down a darkened staircase. The novel, titled Memory and Desire, is now being looked at by an editor, who will soon make her recommendations for revisions. As for the concussion, it’s healed — no skull fracture, no bleeding in the brain.

Harry Rilling, mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut, sent out a blast message to his constituents the other day warning that Covid19 is on the rise in our city (as it is almost everywhere in the U.S. of A.) and that the National Guard is being activated to assist in testing for the virus. Right now, people who want to be tested have to stand in line for hours, as I did recently, and then wait three to five days to learn the results. I tested negative, by the way, which doesn’t mean a whole lot — you can walk out of a testing center and be infected five minutes later.

A friend of mine who lives on a Long Island mentioned to me during a lengthy phone conversation that he finds the pandemic “strangely euphoric.” Yeah, I said, that sure if strange, and he replied that perhaps euphoria wasn’t quite the word he was looking for to describe the feeling produced by knowledge that one is living through an extraordinary time. I agreed that this is an extraordinary era, what with plague, racial tensions, and economic pain everywhere, not to mention a president who seems determined to become an American Caligula. But I don’t find it euphoric, exhilerating, or exciting; dreary, rather, as if every day is a blue Monday. Human beings are social creatures by nature; it’s unnatural to stand or sit six feet way from someone you’re speaking to; to walk into a store or supermarket masked, as if you’re going to rob the place; unnatural to keep distant from your own family, as Leslie and I will be doing this Thanksgiving — for the first time in more than 10 years, we will not be spending the holiday with children and grandchildren in Florida. Nor are we sure if we’re going to make our annual drive to Arizona. Four days on the road, through some of the hottest virus hotspots, might not be wise. As I said, dreary. The country ought to declare the day when the much-touted vaccines become available to be  “VV Day,” and maybe pose a sailor kissing a girl in Time Square to mark the event with an iconic photograph.All that said, we’re grateful to have what we have, and to have escaped the evil little germ so far. Two of our friends have died of it, another survived but is suffering its effects six months after her recovery.

 

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 19

We here in Connecticut are learning to live with Covid19. While the virus is not our friend, we seem to have reached some sort of rapprochement with it. Most the state’s citizens wear masks in public places and observe social distancing mandates, without feeling that their constitutional liberties have been infringed upon. There have been localized spikes in four towns, New London, Norwich, Preston, and Windham, and the governor and public health department are considering ordering those places to remain at Phase 2 of reopening. But most of the state appears to have the virus under control, at least for now, with less than 5 new cases per 100,000 population being reported.

In my own little life, I recently cancelled my annual grouse hunting trip to Wisconsin and Michigan because Wisconsin has become a virus petri dish, with Michigan catching up, thanks to the Republican legislature and the state supreme court preventing Gov.Gretchen Whitmer from imposing new restrictions. Also, as you must have heard, members of  a Michigan militia have been arrested by the FBI for a plot to kidnap Whitmer and try her for treason at some hidden location in neighboring Wisconsin, with the hope of somehow sparking a civil war. The militia, known as the Wolverine Watchmen, accused the governor of being a “bitch tyrant,” which suggests that these boys may be misogynists pissed off not because their governor is a tyrant but because she’s a she. Anyhow, I had a picture of myself tramping through the northern woodlands with my dog, shooting at a grouse, and drawing fire from militiamen in training for some other violent stunt.

Meanwhile, Leslie is watching the British Baking Show, which she does every afternoon. She finds the civility of its contestants soothing while the president of our country rages around the White House, madder than mad King George at his craziest.

That’s the news from Lake Wobegon.

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