Philip Caputo's Blog, page 5

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #17

Warm, clear, and breezy, Friday was very much like THE September 11 of nineteen years ago, and seemed an appropriate day to commemorate the dead. Leslie and I sailed out to Green’s Ledge lighthouse in her little sloop, Reveille, with her sister, Jennifer, our niece, Lindsay Ellis, and an urn containing the partial ashes of Leslie’s best friend, Karen Wessel Marcus. As visitors to this website will recognize, Karen’s death from the Covid19 virus in April was the subject of the first chapter in this journal.

Green’s Ledge light, now an artifact of a bygone era, stands in Long Island Sound, about a mile offshore from the mouth of the Five-Mile River separating Norwalk from Darien, Connecticut. As we headed toward it, Leslie recalled when she had taken this same boat out to sea on September 11, 2001, and watched smoke billowing, like a volcanic eruption, from the twin towers in lower Manhattan. For reasons I no longer recall, I’d decided to stay home on that day, as significant in our history as December 7, 1941 or April 12, 1861.

Arriving at the light, we allowed the Reveille to drift on the tide. Leslie read from Tennyson’s poem, Crossing of the Bar, the last stanza of which reads: “For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place/The flood may bear me far,/ I hope to see my Pilot face to face/When I have crost the bar.” Karen had been an active Episcopalian, so I read next from the Anglican Communion service for burial at sea: “Unto almighty God we commend the soul of our sister departed, and we commit her body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in Him shall be changed, and made like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.’

Leslie handed each of us tiny slips of paper, about twenty altogether, upon which she’d written the names of places she and Karen had been together, events they’d experienced, things they had done in their sixty-year friendship. These ranged from the dramatic — climbing Mount Kilimanjaro when they were nineteen — to the mundane —  enjoying lunches at the Fountain Diner in Hartsdale, New York.  The slips fluttered from our fingers overboard, like messages from castaways, and drifted away. Then, Leslie opened the urn and sifted the ashes into the water. Lindsay tossed flowers into the whitish stream and the current carried all away — paper memorials, flowers, ashes. As if one cue, a flight of migrating Monarch butterflies winged over at that moment, some hovering over the flowers, and Jennifer called out: “Well, hello, Karen.”

A fitting farewell, I thought.

 

 

 

 

Green’s Ledge Light

Flowers drifting with ashes

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #16

I recently received an email from someone who had read “The Longest Road”, the book I published several years ago describing an overland voyage Leslie and I made from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. The purpose of that 16,000-mile round trip had been to hear from ordinary Americans what they thought held so vast and diverse a nation together. My email correspondent wrote that he and his wife recently traveled 25,000 miles around the country seeking to discover what divides us.

I think his quest may be closer to the right track than mine was. In the past week or so, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot an unarmed black man seven times in the back. Inevitably, protests erupted, and some were marred by spasms of looting and arson. Then, only a few days ago, a 17-year-old self-styled vigilante armed with an assault rifle shot two protestors to death and wounded a third. This past Saturday night, the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, which have gone on for three months and have often turned violent, escalated into a deadly clash between the left and the right. A counter-protestor belonging to a right-wing group called “The Patriot Prayer” was fatally shot, apparently by a leftist gunman.

What unites us? Less and less, it seems. We now hate one another enough to kill one another for…What? I will not be shocked, surprised, or astonished if I, though I’m now 79, live long enough to see the start of a second American civil war. And if that comes to pass (I pray it doesn’t), it won’t be anything like the first one, with armies fighting armies. It will more closely resemble the fational, chaotic bloodshed in Syria.

I invite anyone who reads this post to answer the question posed above: For what? All views will be respected, so long as they are expressed rationally and with civility.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #15

The family vacation and the road trip — two American institutions — are attended by a certain tension during this year of pandemic. Will the people at the next gas station or convenience store, in the next town or state, be wearing masks and practicing social distancing, or will they belong to the cult for whom not taking common sense precautions is a political statement? Did I remember to wash my hands after pumping gas last time? What do the numbers say about our destination? A hot spot or no? Cases up or down or on a plateau? One’s own country takes on an alien aspect; it’s been invaded by an invisible enemy, and by no small degree of idiocy.

A year ago, in what now seems a distant age, Leslie, and I planned to visit Yellowstone National Park with my younger son, Marc, his wife, Erin, and their three daughters, Livia, Anna, and Sofia. It would also be a high-school graduation present for the eldest, Livia. We rented a house on the Yellowstone River, about ten miles from the park’s north entrance. The original plan had been to fly to Bozeman, Montana,Marc and Erin and their daughters from Miami, Leslie and I from New York, and rent cars. The Corona virus monkey-wrenched that; Marc and Erin rented an RV and drove 2,700 miles from Florida — an epicenter of the plague — Leslie and I from Connecticut — 2,220 miles — the second cross-country trip we’d made in two months.

We rendezvoused in Gillette, Wyoming, and pressed on through the part of the Great Plains sometimes called “The Big Empty” to Livingston, Montana, and then south down U.S. 89 to the house. It sat above the river, commanding views of the Absaroka mountains, and felt isolated from the America of disease, riots, unemployment lines, and general civil malaise. It felt that way because it was. I am generally allergic to popular national parks simply because they are popular, but the girls’ excitement, seeing bison, elk, and grizzly bears (viewed from a social distance of a quarter-mile) for the first time made the trip worthwhile. Floridians who had never in their young lives seen any landform much higher than an anthill, they also thrilled to the sight of mountains lofty enough to be snow-capped even in August. We hiked, rode horseback, rafted and fished and did not for one minute of that week read, listen to, or watch the news.

That was a month ago, and it, too, now seems a distant age. The pandemic death toll approaches 200,000 in the U.S., protests over racial injustice convulse our cities and towns, and too many citizens, refusing to wear face masks or practice social distancing, or to do anything to acknowledge that a plague is upon the land, keep proving that while ignorance can be overcome with instruction, stupidity lives forever.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #14

A post office delivery driver rang the doorbell at a little past nine this morning. In her hands was a cardboard box with the return address for the Edwin Bennett Funeral Home in Scarsdale, N.Y. and a sticker that read, in small type, United States Postal Service, and in capitals, CREMATED REMAINS. The package, addressed to Leslie, required her signature, but she was out grocery shopping, so I signed for her. The driver, her voice muffled by a face mask, wished me a nice day, and I wished her one in return, and took the box and set it on a counter. Leslie opened it when she returned from Stop & Shop. A cylinder printed with a pastel rendition of a sunset was inside, and inside the cylinder a portion of the ashes of her best friend, whose death from the Corona virus was the subject of the first post in this blog. Karen Wessel Marcus. It had been sent to Leslie at the request of Karen’s family. Looking at the container, we thought it seemed too small to hold even a part of her mortal remains. Is this all that’s left of a person we had known and loved, with her own  personality, hopes, fears, memories, wishes, in short all that had made Karen who and what she was, a human being unique as her fingerprint?

Today’s events in our lives were re-enacted all over the country, all over the world. Re-enacted thousands and thousands of times. There will be at least as many tomorrow, probably more. Coffins lowered into graves, urns placed on mantlepieces or shelves or wherever you put such things. It’s part of everyday life in the year of the pandemic, when the ashes of your friend are delivered to your door like a Christmas or birthday present.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #13

Mourn on the Fourth of July. Watching President Trump’s Yankee Doodle extravaganza at Mount Rushmore, he and his unmasked audience under the stony gazes of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, I was taken back to two points in the past.

The first was the summer of 2011, when Leslie and I visited the monumental monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We were then about midway through our Florida Keys to Arctic Ocean road trip commemorated in my travel memoir, The Longest Road. After setting up camp near the town of Interior, we had spent some time on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, site of the Wound Knee massacre in 1890, hiked in the Badlands, and later met a remarkable man, Ansel Woodenknife. Ansel bridged white and Native American cultures: a Lakota sun-dancer and shaman, he was also an entrepreneur who had started a chain of restaurants offering fry-bread tacos and who served on the South Dakota tourist board. At one point in our nearly night-long conversation, he said something I’ll always remember: “I’ve never lost the fact that I’m a free person. The government may hate me because I’m an Indian, but my ancestors walked freely, and by God, if it kills me, I’ll walk freely too.”

His words came back to me as CNN showed Sheriff’s deputies clearing the road into Mount Rushmore of Lakota activists protesting Trump’s campaign rally. To their and Ansel’s forebears, the Black Hills were as sacred as the Vatican is to Roman Catholics. The tall poles used in the Lakota Sun Dance were harvested from its forests. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 promised the Black Hills to the Lakota for as long as the grass grew and the rivers flowed. The grass did grow and the rivers flowed, but when gold was discovered in the mountains in the 1870s, the Lakota were pushed out and their land seized. More than a century later, in a 1980 Supreme Court decision, the taking of the Black Hills was ruled illegal and the Lakota were offered$106 million in compensation. The tribe refused the settlement. Although the fund, invested in an interest-bearing account, is now worth nearly one billion, they still refuse. They want the black Hills returned to them. So it was, as the  protestors were led away in handcuffs, a Trump supporter yelled, “Go home!” and a Lakota turned to him and said, “This is  home.”

The second point in time was in 1978, when the cult leader, Jim Jones, ordered the mass suicide of 918 of his followers in the infamous Jonestown Massacre in the South American nation of Guyana. The members of Jones’s People’s Temple, mesmerized by their charismatic self-styled Reverend, obediently gulped grape Kool Aid laced with cyanide. Three hundred and four of them were children.

Fast forward to July 3, 2020. The 7,500 people attending Trump’s festival were told that face masks were optional and that social distancing was not be practiced, despite the upsurge of Corona virus in 36 states. With but a handful of exceptions, they obeyed these summons from their cult leader and sycophantic disciples like South Dakota governor  Kristi Noem, who had declared on Fox News that they were being asked to  “to come, to be ready to celebrate, to enjoy the freedoms and liberties we have in this country. We won’t be social distancing.”

Apparently, those freedoms and liberties include the freedom to behave recklessly, endangering other people, as well as the liberty to get sick and possibly die themselves. Not wearing masks and crowding together were the Kool Aid and cyanide in the Trump temple.

Meanwhile, back here in Connecticut, the state’s oppressive government has mandated social distancing and masks in public places, and started a robust campaign of testing and contact tracing. We are all of us here groaning under these tyrannical measures, yearning for the freedoms folks in South Dakota are enjoying. It’s true that Connecticut’s hospitalizations for the virus have dropped to a four-month low, and positive new cases are now below one percent. But what is that compared to our lost liberties? I’m going to protest these onerous restrictions and exercise my Constitutional rights when I go to my brother and sister-in-law’s place for a holiday cookout tonight. I am going to drive the wrong way down a one-way street at sixty miles an hour. Live Free or Die! No, make that, Live Free and Die!

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #12

Today is Sunday, June 28, and we have been back In Connecticut a little over a week. Three days ago, we learned that the state has ordered everyone coming in from states experiencing significant increases in the Covid19 virus to self-quarantine for 14 days. We’re not sure if it applies to us, as we left Arizona nine days before cases began to rise there. Anyway, as a writer, i’m accustomed to self-quarantine. We have been careful, going out only on essential errands, keeping our distance from other people, wearing our masks.

But today’s was an exquisite, early-summer morning, so we took Luna, our English Setter, for a run in the Wilton Town Forest, a preserve about half an hour’s drive from our place in Norwalk. It was a good way to start the day.

Tramping along in the cool, shady woods, I realized that I miss the wide, symphonic landscapes of Arizona, the deep silences of the high desert grasslands and the mountain ranges that command them. Riding horseback or hiking with Luna, we could see thirty or forty miles in any direction. Looking southward from the San Rafael valley presented views of Mexico and the Sierra Madre, blued by distance. A wet winter brought bursts of color from the desert flowers — golden poppies and Mariposa lilies, red pentstemon, and tall prickle poppies, their blossoms white as an egret’s feathers. The cactus were blooming as well in brilliant reds, bright yellows, a welcome sight after winter’s browns and tans. What a grand feeling to top out on a ridge and watch hawks soaring on the thermals and to hear no sound but the wind in the trees. And the night skies, so clear that you could see stars and galaxies invisible in the light-polluted heavens of the crowded east, helped keep things in perspective. Plagues and wars and famines have ravaged civilization ever since it began; yet the constellations have, through all those troubled millennia, journeyed down the ecliptic, indifferent to what happens on this planet.

Nature in this part of New England is confined and tame — the forest mentioned above is hardly a forest, covering only 200 acres. Nevertheless, I’ll take what’s offered. Daily contact with the natural world, even when it is circumscribed, is a tonic for the uncertainties and anxieties wrought by the pandemic.

There is another medicine I take every day, sort of a vitamin for the soul: Stoicism. I mean the philosophical system as opposed to stoicism, the attitude of indifference to pain or pleasure. I have studied it and practiced it (often failing) for twenty-five years. Every morning, after I’ve made coffee, let the dog out and fed her, I spend about half an hour reading from the three great Roman Stoic philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. Sometimes, through an online group I belong to, ‘Modern Stoicism,” I dip into other thinkers like Cicero or  Musonius Rufus (Epictetus’s teacher). I came to this philosophical system more or less by accident in the mid-90’s, when someone (I can’t for the life of me recall who) sent me Seneca’s lengthy essay, De Ira — On Anger. At the time, I suffered from bouts of rage, which I attributed to the after-effects of my experiences as a combat marine in the Vietnam War. I’d always been somewhat hot-headed, but those episodes were more than fits of temper; rather, they were prolonged spells that alternated with periods of depression (which has been aptly described as “frozen rage”). It was as if the war had taken an inherited trait and magnified it into a major character flaw. Seneca’s essay left me breathless for its clarity, its insights, and its contemporary tone. This man who had died almost 2,000 years ago seemed to be in the room with me, speaking into my ear. His definition of anger resonated — it was, he wrote, a temporary insanity. His prescriptions for mastering it (far too long  for this blog) constitute the best anger-management course anyone could ask for.

Stoicism is essentially a moral philosophy that doesn’t concern itself overmuch with abstract concepts. Its sphere is ethical behavior and the art of navigating a steady course through life’s defeats as as well as its triumphs, its disasters and upsets as well as its glorious moments. Its principal precept is that we human beings are distinguished from animals by virtue of our rationality, our capacity to reason. To abandon reason is to become, in effect, less than human. It stresses differentiating between what is in our control and what is not, what we can influence and what we cannot. This idea was summarized by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in his Serenity Prayer: “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.” As you can see, Stoicism is a fairly simple philosophy; it’s also one that is very difficult to practice.

Applying it to our current predicament, I know that the virus is far beyond my control. I’m not going to discover a treatment or vaccine for it. What is in my control is taking actions that diminish my risk of infection and also the risk of infecting others by wearing a protective mask in public places, observing social distancing, washing my hands frequently. These are reasonable things to do, and the people who refuse to do them are betraying their powers of rational behavior. They do so out of ignorance. Now, the ignorant can be enlightened, but when they turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to instruction, there is nothing that I can do to change them (In Catholic moral theology, this is known as “vincible ignorance,” that is, willful ignorance of matters one is obligated to know). But one other thing is in my control when dealing with such people. Marcus Aurelius advises: “All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill… I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.” Easier said than done, right? As I said, Stoicism can be very difficult in practice.

Reading about the huge spikes in Covid19 cases in states like the one we recently left, I’ve tried to fathom why so many Americans refuse to take common-sense precautions for their own good as well for the good of their fellow citizens. Why they rebel against the mandates of their local and state governments, or won’t listen to the recommendations of medical experts. Why, in the extreme, they believe that those mandates and recommendations are sinister attempts to rob them of their liberties. There has always been an anti-rational streak in the American national character. It has been empowered by the Trump administration, and heightened by social media, both of which confer legitimacy on ideas and actions that are just plain crazy. Forty years of being told that government is your enemy, that science, including medical science, is not to be trusted have produced a nation within a nation of the willfully ignorant. Evolution? A lie.Climate change? A hoax. A pandemic? Ditto.

We have created a new political category: a Stupidocracy.

 

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 11

The headline in a June 22 Politico dispatch read as follows: ‘THE U.S. HAS HAMSTRUNG ITSELF’: HOW AMERICA BECAME THE NEW ITALY ON CORONA VIRUS. And the subhead: “While Trump touted America’s reopening and watched infections climb, European leaders maintained struct rules and drove cases down.”

Another Politico article on the same date stated: ‘GOVERNMENT ITSELF CAN’T SOLVE THIS PROBLEM’: FLORIDA OFFICIALS ALARMED AS VIRUS RAGES.

And in the June 22 editions of the Wall Street Journal: AS CORONAVIRUS CASES RISE IN ARIZONA, NEW MASK RULES SPARK A FIGHT: ‘Under pressure from health experts, governor allows local authorities to mandate the use of masks, sparking relief from some and rage in others.”

In the WSJ story, the enraged “others” were patrons of the Buffalo Chip Saloon and Steakhouse in Cave Creek, Arizona, a bar I have been in. It features Friday night bull riding on a mechanical bull, a big attraction for wanna-be cowboys, most of whom are Phoenix suburbanites.

From The Hill: At his disappointing campaign rally in Tulsa, President Trump said that he’d asked his  advisors to slack off on testing because that only increased the number of confirmed cases. His press secretary later walked that back, stating that he’d made the remark in jest. But then Trump partially walked back the walk back, telling The Hill ‘I don’t kid” (a good thing — if that directing his staff to slow down testing was his idea of a joke, he will have no chance of a post-election career as a standup comic. Should he lose, that is).

All of this had inspired your correspondent to draft…

A MODEST PROPOSAL

To state it succinctly, considerable advantages will accrue to American society by abandoning all attempts to mitigate or suppress the Corona Virus, aka COVID19 and allow the disease to sweep the nation unchecked. Face masks, surgical gloves, social distancing, testing and contact tracing will be prohibited; all shops, stores, stadiums, gyms, churches, synagogues, mosques, movie theaters, bars and restaurants, etc., etc. will be permitted to reopen at full capacity. This will inevitably lead to a rise in infections and deaths to make the current upticks look minor by comparison. About 600 Americans are dying a day under present conditions (some estimates go as high as 800). The let-her-rip policy I’m recommending could conceivably double those numbers, resulting in anywhere between 216,000 and 288,000 additional deaths by year’s end. That would bring the total, factoring in the 120,000+ who have already died, to a low of 336,000 and a high of 408,000. Assuming no vaccine is developed, the corpses will accumulate well into, and possibly beyond, January 1st, 2021. A grim prospect, yes, but we Americans are optimists, and I’m here to present the silver lining in the cloud.

1. As you have probably read, people in my age group are the most susceptible. Somewhere around forty percent of the deaths recorded so far have occurred in nursing homes. Allowing the virus to spread unrestricted would accelerate the reduction of the country’s aged population, in or out of extended care facilities. Under ideal circumstances, it would wipe them out entirely. But we must deal with reality, not the ideal. Consider the savings that would result — the Social Security system would be returned to solvency, ditto for Medicare and Medicaid. I know I am willing to die to relieve taxpayers. Aren’t you? In a similar vein, a great many deaths, regardless of the person’s age, are suffered by people with pre-existing health problems such as diabetes, obesity, respiratory and heart ailments. Culling these individuals will also realize considerable savings in health care costs. All others, the survivors, will have developed herd immunity, giving the U.S. a younger, healthier, and more vigorous population.

2. People of color in general, African Americans in particular, are dying at far higher rates than whites. Giving Covid19 free rein should eliminate many POCs, which would go a long way toward toward relaxing today’s racial tensions. With significantly fewer black and brown people in the country, Caucasians will have less cause to worry about becoming a minority by mid-century. Their confidence restored, they will be that much more unlikely to be attracted to white supremacist movements. And there will be a reduction in police shootings of African Americans; with an invisible virus felling blacks by the score, the cops will no longer have a reason to kill them. Finally, consider that almost all employees of meat-packing houses, vegetable growers, and chicken-processing plants are immigrants, the majority illegal. Shrinking their numbers would boost job openings for American citizens (provided they’re willing to work for low wages with few benefits), and help solve the immigration crisis.

The above is just a broad outline for dealing with the pandemic in the near future. I will humbly leave working out the details and implementation to the White House and its allies in the House and Senate, and in state governments.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #10

We arrived in Connecticut yesterday evening at six, after driving 10 hours a day for four days. We covered 2,459 miles through 12 states and over nine major rivers: the Rio Grande, Pecos, Canadian, Cimarron, Mississippi, Ohio, Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson. I cited those mileage statistics and riverine names to give the journey the quality an epic adventure. Besides, I’m fond of euphonious words like Susquehanna and Cimarron. In actual fact, the trip was fairly tedious, mostly because its object wasn’t to see the country but to get across it as quickly as possible without contracting Covid19. We’ll have to wait about two weeks to find out if we were successful.

It was interesting to observe the difference in attitudes toward the virus west and east of the Mississippi. In the west, as noted in previous posts, most people were cavalier about it, almost displaying their unmasked faces and ungloved hands as badges of honor. I half-expected someone to cough in my (masked) face to show his disdain for my and Leslie’s cautiousness. From Illinois all the way through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, folks appeared to take the pandemic more seriously. A sign pasted prominently on the door of a service plaza in Pennsylvania warned customers that wearing masks and standing six feet apart were mandatory. That was remarkable for a state aptly described by James Carville as “Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in between.” Similar mandates apply here in Connecticut. When Leslie went to our local supermarket, Stop&Shop, virtually every customer had his or her nose and mouth covered and obeyed the one-way signs posted on the aisles (to avoid crowding). She compared the Stop&Shop to the markets in Arizona, where taking sensible precautions was optional. Oh, and I don’t want to forget that when we passed through Tulsa on Wednesday, Trump cultists were already lining up for tickets to the rally the President is holding tonight. They stood cheek by jowl and had pitched tents to await the great event.

I wonder, why this contrast? Is it that westerners see easterners as docile sheep who do as they’re told and themselves as open-range cowboys who’ll be damned before they’re corralled by government restrictions and cowed by a bug so small it’s invisible?  Nope. If the interviews I saw on the evening news were accurate, not all those people waiting in Tulsa called the west home; they came from all over the country. To put it in other terms, you don’t have to be a cowboy to be a cowboy. It’s a state of mind. Geography, however, plays a role. The virus struck hardest in populous eastern states. People in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, etc., had to take the pandemic seriously because other people were being hospitalized and dying all around them. Western states were spared the worst until recently. Arizona governor Doug Ducey, for example, prohibited municipalities from imposing restrictions or mandates stronger than he had — and his weren’t all that strong. To state things charitably, the idea was that some lives had to be risked for the economic well-being of most. Even so, some Arizona officials chafed at his orders. Mark Lamb, Sheriff of Pinal County (which borders the state capitol’s county, Mariposa), refused to enforce them, claiming they were unconstitutional (Lamb wears a cowboy hat, by the way). Well, there’s nothing like a hard right cross from reality to make a believer out of an infidel. Arizona is now a Covid19 hot spot, with hospitals reporting more than 2,000 new cases a day. One thousand medical professionals begged Ducey for a statewide mask mandate. The governor’s response has been an almost-er. He relented on his previous order, announcing on Wednesday that local governments could impose mask and other requirements to mitigate the virus’s spread. And Sheriff Lamb? He tested positive, and now says he would have done things differently had he only known…Which, of course, he should have.

To a degree, then, the prediction that New York governor Andrew Cuomo made weeks ago, during the height of the crisis in his state, has come to pass: “Our reality today will be your reality tomorrow.”

Yet, huge numbers of Americans are unable, no, unwilling, to confront that reality. They have cultivated a contempt for expert opinion, including the opinions of medical professionals; they are willfully ignorant; they believe, despite evidence to contrary, that the pandemic is left-wing hoax designed to cripple the economy and thus undermine the President’s chances for re-election. They lined up in advance to get into Tulsa’s Bok Center arena to cheer on their cult leader, nearly 20,000 of them. He’s rambling along right now, as I type these words. He’s not wearing any sissy mask, and neither are his followers. You’ve probably read that six of Trump’s campaign staff tested positive for Covid19. No doubt, as those despised medical experts have forecast, many in the crowd will also be infected. I hope none of them die, but if any do, I would like to submit their names for the 2020 Darwin award.

.

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR

We arrived in Connecticut yesterday evening at six, after driving 10 hours a day for four days. We covered 2,459 miles through 12 states and over nine major rivers: the Rio Grande, Pecos, Canadian, Cimarron, Mississippi, Ohio, Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson. I cited those mileage statistics and riverine names to give the journey the quality an epic adventure. Besides, I’m fond of euphonious words like Susquehanna and Cimarron. In actual fact, the trip was fairly tedious, mostly because its object wasn’t to see the country but to get across it as quickly as possible without contracting Covid19. We’ll have to wait about two weeks to find out if we were successful.

It was interesting to observe the difference in attitudes toward the virus west and east of the Mississippi. In the west, as noted in previous posts, most people were cavalier about it, almost displaying their unmasked faces and ungloved hands as badges of honor. I half-expected someone to cough in my (masked) face to show his disdain for my and Leslie’s cautiousness. From Illinois all the way through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, folks appeared to take the pandemic more seriously. A sign pasted prominently on the door of a service plaza in Pennsylvania warned customers that wearing masks and standing six feet apart were mandatory. That was remarkable for a state aptly described by James Carville as “Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in between.” Similar mandates apply here in Connecticut. When Leslie went to our local supermarket, Stop&Shop, virtually every customer had his or her nose and mouth covered and obeyed the one-way signs posted on the aisles (to avoid crowding). She compared the Stop&Shop to the markets in Arizona, where taking sensible precautions was optional. Oh, and I don’t want to forget that when we passed through Tulsa on Wednesday, Trump cultists were already lining up for tickets to the rally the President is holding tonight. They stood cheek by jowl and had pitched tents to await the great event.

I wonder, why this contrast? Is it that westerners see easterners as docile sheep who do as they’re told and themselves as open-range cowboys who’ll be damned before they’re corralled by government restrictions and cowed by a bug so small it’s invisible?  Nope. If the interviews I saw on the evening news were accurate, not all those people waiting in Tulsa called the west home; they came from all over the country. To put it in other terms, you don’t have to be a cowboy to be a cowboy. It’s a state of mind. Geography, however, plays a role. The virus struck hardest in populous eastern states. People in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, etc., had to take the pandemic seriously because other people were being hospitalized and dying all around them. Western states were spared the worst until recently. Arizona governor Doug Ducey, for example, prohibited municipalities from imposing restrictions or mandates stronger than he had — and his weren’t all that strong. To state things charitably, the idea was that some lives had to be risked for the economic well-being of most. Even so, some Arizona officials chafed at his orders. Mark Lamb, Sheriff of Pinal County (which borders the state capitol’s county, Mariposa), refused to enforce them, claiming they were unconstitutional (Lamb wears a cowboy hat, by the way). Well, there’s nothing like a hard right cross from reality to make a believer out of an infidel. Arizona is now a Covid19 hot spot, with hospitals reporting more than 2,000 new cases a day. One thousand medical professionals begged Ducey for a statewide mask mandate. The governor’s response has been an almost-er. He relented on his previous order, announcing on Wednesday that local governments could impose mask and other requirements to mitigate the virus’s spread. And Sheriff Lamb? He tested positive, and now says he would have done things differently had he only known…Which, of course, he should have.

To a degree, then, the prediction that New York governor Andrew Cuomo made weeks ago, during the height of the crisis in his state, has come to pass: “Our reality today will be your reality tomorrow.”

Yet, huge numbers of Americans are unable, no, unwilling, to confront that reality. They have cultivated a contempt for expert opinion, including the opinions of medical professionals; they are willfully ignorant; they believe, despite evidence to contrary, that the pandemic is left-wing hoax designed to cripple the economy and thus undermine the President’s chances for re-election. They lined up in advance to get into Tulsa’s Bok Center arena to cheer on their cult leader, nearly 20,000 of them. He’s rambling along right now, as I type these words. He’s not wearing any sissy mask, and neither are his followers. You’ve probably read that six of Trump’s campaign staff tested positive for Covid19. No doubt, as those despised medical experts have forecast, many in the crowd will also be infected. I hope none of them die, but if any do, I would like to submit their names for the 2020 Darwin award.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #9

We left Patagonia at 8:30 a.m.yesterday, on a four-to-five day drive back to Connecticut. By the time we arrived at our first night’s destination, Tucumcari, New Mexico, we learned that Arizona had set a record for new cases of the Covid19 virus. Texas and Florida also had that distinction, while 15 other states reported an upward trend in positive cases. But not to worry! Vice President Mike Pence painted a rosy picture, in an oped in the Wall Street Journal, stating that the increases were largely due to increased testing — a misstatement, according to public health officials. Apparently, this declaration of victory was in preparation for the President’s forthcoming rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nineteen-thousand people will be crammed shoulder to shoulder in an indoor stadium. Masks will be available for those who want them, but I’ll bet few will. Their cult leader won’t be wearing one.

I guess that the public, in general, is taking Pence at his word. On yesterday’s’ 590-mile journey, we saw far more people not wearing masks or practicing social distancing than those who were. Today, pushing on from Tucumcari to Springfield, Missouri (650 mi), the thin herd of masked social distancers grew even thinner as we proceeded through the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma — the heart of MAGA country — until we reached Springfield. Our motel here had posted signs and floor stickers requesting guests to maintain a six-foot span between them and others; the desk clerks and staff courteously wore masks, but most guests had naked faces. 

My conclusion: Many Americans, possibly most, have become childish, self-indulgent, undisciplined, and unwilling to face reality even when it’s killing tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. 

Leslie and I took precautions, donning masks when we stopped at gas stations and at our lodging places. We sanitized surfaces in our rooms, avoided crowding into elevators, and ordered no-contact or pickup dinners. I’m not touting our virtue , merely pointing out that some fundamental precautions are all that’s necessary to mitigate the deadly effects of this plague.

It was a wonderful drive, across the vast spaces of the southwest, from the Whetstone Mountains in Arizona, to the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, and from there northward on U.S. 54 through basin and range landscapes as inspirational as you’ll find anywhere in the country. That highway brought us to I-40, which led to I-44. Together, those two interstates follow the route of the fabled Route 66 —the “Mother Road” in John Steinbeck’s memorable phrase. There are a couple of Route 66 museums along the way, with photographs of dispossessed Okies heading for California in Model T’s, or mid-century travelers at the wheels of Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets sporting tailfins and chrome bumpers. I recalled driving 66 from its start in Chicago to its end in Santa Monica in late 1964, a recollection that made me feel like a historical figure who has outlived his time.

Speeding along on Interstates mile after mile, random thoughts pop into the mind. I ran one past Leslie, apropos of today’s social and racial turmoil. Why not revive the draft, but without confining it to the military? Call it Compulsory National Service for every American ages 18 to 26. No exceptions, no deferments allowed, and both sexes would be required to register. A draftee would be allowed to choose the military if he or she chose, but other options would be available: Americorps, the Peace Corps, or a 21st-century version of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, serving in National Parks, on public lands, or on infrastructure improvement projects. Americans of all races and classes would work side by side, and, one hopes, learn to respect each other as human beings. I’m thinking of my own time in the Marine Corps, when a Harvard grad might find himself in the same barracks as a kid who never finished high school; they would have to cooperate to accomplish a task. Or when a white kid from the suburbs (as I was then) would march and sweat alongside a black kid from the inner city. The draft was a great engine of social equality, and taught that you owed something to your country.

Leslie began to point out some difficulties — what about the man or woman who wants to go to medical school, for example — but she generally thought it a good idea.

Tomorrow, we’ll set off again on I-44, pick up I-70 in St. Louis, and proceed another 600+ miles to Columbus, Ohio. Our English Setter, Luna, appears to be enjoying the trip, but I can’t be sure: she spends most of it dozing in her kennel in the back of our overloaded 4Runner. 

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