Keep The Beaches Open!
Last year the love of my life treated me to an incredible date night. We saw Jaws—one of my favorite films—with the accompanying music performed live by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. John Williams’s amazing score was more effective than ever with the magic and power of live musicians, and the movie holds up 45 years later, fake shark and all. And while I’m not the first to make this observation, about either a foreign leader or my country’s own, I was struck by a thought: The people who want everyone to go back to work during the global Covid-19 pandemic sure do sound like the mayor from Jaws.
For my dear friend who confessed this morning that she’s never seen Jaws, allow me to spoil the basic plot. Amity Island is a New England beach community with an economy entirely dependent on summer tourism. When a shark kills a skinny-dipping woman only a few dozen yards from the soon-to-be-crowded beaches, chief of police Brody uses his authority to close the beaches to the public. Amity’s mayor, under intense pressure from the local business owners, convinces the coroner to revise his findings to declare the young lady was killed in a boating accident instead of a shark.
Another death leads the local government to place a bounty on the shark, even as a shark-expert scientist arrives and confirms that the original woman was most definitely killed by a large and particularly dangerous great white shark. When local fishermen kill a tiger shark victory is declared and the beaches open for business for the Fourth of July weekend, the biggest dollar-earning period for the hotels and restaurants and shops on the island. A simple autopsy on the dead tiger shark confirms no human remains inside, meaning the truly dangerous animal is still engaging in territorial hunting where the tourists will soon be swimming. Predictably, despite all efforts to keep things safe, someone else dies when the shark gets hungry once again. Finally, the shocked mayor is convinced to hire an effective but psychotic fisherman to hunt the shark by boat—taking along the chief of police and a marine biologist. After a struggle that sinks the boat and kills one of the three men (and nearly another), the shark is killed and the beaches are once again made safe.
Right now the world is dealing with a public health crisis the like of which haven’t been seen in generations, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease known as Covid-19. From the first reporting of “mystery pneumonia” in Wuhan, China on January 3rd to the present day, there have been 529,093 confirmed cases worldwide 23,956 deaths as of this writing. Countries all over the world and state and local governments here in the United States have taken various measures to slow the spread of the pandemic, from “shelter in place” orders to full-on lockdown. The global economy has taken a massive hit, the US stock market has tanked, and people everywhere are losing their incomes. While the virus is more lethally dangerous to certain groups (the immunocompromised, the elderly, and people with certain pre-existing health conditions), the virus is coming for us all. As of this writing we’ve had celebrities, senators, writers, and princes confirm as infected, joining the hundreds of thousands of anonymous citizens of the world who have become sick. In most of the world the infection curve is pointed straight up with no signs of slowing down—especially here in the United States, where we now have more confirmed infections than any other nation on Earth. It’s been my assumption that social restrictions will only increase, businesses will be forced to shut down, and the government will need to step in and help everyone last through the crisis until it’s safe to get back to work.
But you know what they say about assumptions. Yesterday I was stunned to hear the Lt. Governor of Texas make an impassioned plea to patriotism, saying that older and vulnerable people like himself are ready to sacrifice their lives for the legacy of the American dream. Then the president of the United States made repeated statements that “our country wasn’t built to be shut down.” The message is unambiguous: Get everyone back to work and the dollars flowing once more. The stimulus package coming from Congress includes one-time payments to Americans, clearly with the assumption that things will be back to normal soon enough since no provisions for repeating the payments were included.
In other words: “Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars!“
Low-Lethality Shark
What the hell was everyone so scared of during the events of Jaws? Yes, the shark can and did eat people but there were hundreds of people on the beaches of Amity island. The odds are really strong that if you were one of the people splashing around in the water you would be fine. Even a big great white shark only has so much room in its stomach, after all. In fact, we see hundreds of people over the course of the movie and only five—plus one poor dog, RIP Pippet—are killed by the shark. Individually, the danger for a single person is low during the course of the movie. We only wish we had those kinds of favorable odds at the blackjack table.
Sound familiar? The nasty pathogen that’s shut down half the world is not nearly as individually lethal as other scares. While it’ll probably be a few years before we have truly accurate numbers on recovery vs. fatality with Covid-19, the media and internet has been awash with people downplaying the danger.
But when things get personal it’s hard for those numbers to be quite so encouraging. The first death of beautiful Chrissie Watkins in the film can only be blamed on the shark. But when a little boy named Alex Kintner is made a meal by the shark, his mother’s grief is tempered by rage when she learns that it was known that a shark had attacked someone only days earlier.
Even after the little boy is chomped in half, the local businesses on the island put extreme pressure on Mayor Vaughn. Everyone knows that there is only one way to stay completely safe from the shark, and that’s for everyone to stay out of the water. But since closed beaches mean no tourism and accompanying dollars, the mayor is determined to try every available tactic except shutting it down. They post a bounty on the shark for local fishermen, they post shark-spotters on the beaches, they have a helicopter doing recon fly-overs. There is a brief moment of hope when a shark is killed, but evidence mounts that is was not in fact the source of the danger. But still, the P.R. spin of one dead shark is enough to keep the beaches open for the financially critical Fourth of July holiday.
Predictably, when served with a buffet, the shark takes another meal in the form of a human life.
Chum in the Water
I mentioned the Lt. Governor of Texas, Mr. Patrick, up top. “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?'” But … “If that is the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said on an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. The full exchange is really worth a listen.
My interpretation? The elderly are willing to be chopped up for use as shark food. To offer themselves up for human sacrifice on the altar of capitalism. Boomers are, according to Patrick, happy to oil the gears of commerce with their own blood.
As this “save the economy by Easter!” message has become the go-to talking-point in conservative media the past few days, there is no evidence that the various measures taken by state and local governments have done much to slow down the spread of infection here in the United States. In fact, simple charts based on confirmed and recent data are both sobering and chilling. Based on my ability to interpret the direction of a line on a graph, the United States will far exceed the number of infected in China—a country whose population outnumbers ours by 1.1 billion (with a B) people.
In my area they are only just now starting to ramp up emergency policies and a Shelter In Place order was put into effect last night as of this writing—really more of a politely-worded request to citizens rather than anything that could or will be enforced. But we live north of a town that has no such restrictions in place, and in my local shopping centers I see half the shops are still open. I openly hear people grumble about how “stupid” and “overblown” this whole situation is. Meanwhile the numbers keep climbing all around us.
Mr. Patrick seems to think we can simply choose who we put at risk and those we protect while most of the country goes back to business-as-usual. That is naive and lazy thinking. The virus is coming for us all, and even though the numbers are scarier for older people and those with pre-existing health conditions, lots of people who were previously young and healthy have died fighting Covid-19. It’s easy to talk of sacrifice and small percentages for the greater good when they are abstract, faceless meeples. But are you willing to offer up your own family, your own loved ones? Even if you don’t care about yourself, few of us can bear the thought of losing those dearest to us—especially if it was a preventable death.
The news of our national and global economy has been very bleak recently. The markets plunged. Jobs are being slashed all over the place. Social distancing orders are forcing businesses to close entirely. In my own industry, comics and games distribution is shutting down for now. There is talk of a recession, or even a true depression. None of us want this. We would all love to be back at work and our normal lives. It would be really great if this shark would just go away.
But the shark isn’t going anywhere until people stop swimming, until we stop feeding it. We need massive, strict social distancing across the board to slow this thing down to the point where the healthcare system can handle the number of critical patients and to give researchers crucial time to develop medications for treatment and a vaccine for prevention. The economy isn’t going to magically bounce back if everyone goes back to work, because there will be fear and illness and death—things that historically are bad for markets and discretionary spending.
If you believe that we need to re-open the beaches for the Fourth of July (i.e. make sure Americans are back to work by Easter) are you ready to send your family into the water when you can see the shark fin from the shore?
Are you willing to be Mrs. Kintner?
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