On the Coronavirus (IV)

1.

I didn’t plan to write a fourth chronicle of this virus.  My hope would be that two texts would suffice.  But I have written a third and, now, a fourth essay on this topic.  Today, I see that 33 million people are out of work in the United States due to the virus’ impact on the economy.  Almost 80,000 have died and casualties are not decreasing.  In Massachusetts, if you are older than two years, you will be cited with a $300 ticket for appearing in public without a mask over your nose and mouth.  Protests against mandatory business closings have resulted in demonstrations featuring men armed with machine guns standing in galleries overlooking the Michigan capitol rotunda – this leading to the Michigan legislature passing law precluding people from carrying firearms in the State House.  Meat-packing plants operating under government dispensation insulating management from liability are at 10% of capacity.

On the TV, a Minnesota hog farmer breaks into tears when he describes shooting dead hundreds of his pigs.  There is no capacity in the system for the animals and, so, they have to be euthanized.  A pig is bred to be slaughtered and, so, I suppose, some might question the authenticity of the farmer’s tears.  The journalist notes that, although pig farmers know their animals are going to be slaughtered, it’s their role to raise, and not kill, them – thus, there’s something sinister, uncanny, and disorienting about those who raise pigs having to gun them down.  The farmer’s tears are authentic, I think, with respect to the economic catastrophe that his operation is facing.  

2.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.  Media pundits propose certain optimum measures that will have to be adopted if States are to re-open their economies – something currently underway in some parts of the country this first week of May.  However, optimum responses, although these would be a “perfect” reaction to the plague, aren’t forthcoming – indeed, given human fallibility could never be possible.  Therefore, the logical conclusion to be drawn from many pundits commenting on the TV news shows is that no economy can ever really re-open and that our currrent, chastened and diminished economy is the new normal.

One obstacle to reopening the economy is said to be the lack of testing.  Testing is supposed to determine whether a person has the corona-virus, ostensibly an important fact since many carriers of the virus (possibly most) are asymptomatic.  But I apply the controversy about testing to my present situation with ambiguous results.  If I were to be tested and found positive, I don’t know that my daily routine would be any different.  First, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle and I presume that all of those in my household would also be positive for the virus – therefore, I’m not sure that my habits at home would change.  I go to work each morning, commuting a distance of 5 blocks.  At work, I stay in my office and don’t interact really with anyone.  So, therefore, I guess I don’t see the efficacy of being tested.  I haven’t left Austin for six weeks – my last trip out of town was to Rochester, about forty miles away and this was at the end of March.  My law practice is basically non-existent during this hiatus which threatens to be very much more than a simple pause or intermission in my career.  The chief change in my life is that my Great Books group, a social event that met weekly is now indefinitely paused.  We attempted to meet by email to discuss Gogol’s story “The Overcoat”.  This meeting went badly awry and wasn’t satisfactory to anyone.  Generally, in my law practice, I would see clients two or three times a week, take a deposition every two or three weeks, and each Wednesday have lunch with my colleagues in the firm.  These aspects of my practice are now non-existent.  I feel, sometimes, as if I have lived too long and that it is painful to experience this calamity at the end of my life –although this is a selfish notion:  confinement and lack of activity (as well as economic injury) is far more crippling and painful to young people who have their whole lives ahead of them.

3.

I dreamed that a friend who is a professional writer needed my assistance.  I found that he was threatening to harm himself in the public library in Fillmore County.  It was the coldest day of the year and he was isolated in a room full of books in the library.  I told him the many reasons that he should be proud of his work.  Indeed, my eyes filled with tears as I recounted to him all of his accomplishments. I took him in my arms and carried him tenderly through the world.  He was very light. Somehow, I barked my shin against some obstacle, possibly a low table.  When I awoke, my left shin felt bruised – it had been damaged somehow in the dream.  I have now dreamed several times about carrying people who are important to me in my arms or on my shoulders and how wonderfully light these burdens seems to be.  

4.

The City marked almost all the trees on the boulevard on my street with great red spray-painted “X’s”.  Yesterday, a half-dozen cranes and big earth-movers and yellow front-end loaders appeared in front of my house to murder the trees.  I would guess that the boulevard trees here date to the thirties in the last century – that is, they are ninety years old, big imposing maples and elms with sober, somewhat stern mien, upright, one might say, without being contentious or judgmental in any way.  

Trees are friends to mankind and, therefore, an offense to a tree is a crime against humanity.  The young men employed by the city to overturn these trees and reduce them to sawdust were rambunctious and enthusiastic, but I thought they were disrespectful to their victims, even cruel in the casual indifference with which the trees were knocked over and, then, shredded in the huge wood-chipper.  Hooting and hollering, the young men rode cherry-pickers up over the street, crushing curbs as they chopped down branches, big elaborate scaffolds of leaves and boughs that thudded heavily on the ground.  The trunks of the trees were amputated in sections and set down on the bruised grass of the boulevards and the dismantling of these maples and elms took place with alacrity in a kind of festive atmosphere that seemed incongruous to the event.  Trees should be slaughtered ceremoniously and, only after making offerings to their spirits, and apologizing to the birds and ants and beetles and squirrels and, all the other creatures, that inhabit these leafy strongholds.  The workers cut the trees down enthusiastically and their vast logs encumbered the boulevards, startlingly pale where they had been sliced open, and, here and there, patches of bright yellow-brown sawdust marked where the woodchipper had been operating.  I suppose that if you are young, its fun to vandalize old, helpless trees – but I don’t see much courage involved in the operation: the trees can’t fight back.  

In the evening, I encountered a neighbor, looking with tears in his eyes at the devastation of the trees.  “Why are they cutting down perfectly good trees?” he asked me.  “I think it has something to do with the emerald ash-borer elm beetle,” I said.  “But that was a maple on the street corner,” he said.  He was wearing a baseball cap that said “Don’t Tread on Me!” and had been tinkering with his Indian model motorcycle.  “I don’t know what they’re doing,” I confessed.  “I just don’t know.”   

5.

On Friday, we order “take-out” food.  The restaurants remain closed, but you can access a menu by internet, place an order, and pick up the food at curbside.

Chinese restaurants and some barbecue joints are experienced managing take-out orders, can construct the food with aplomb, and, more or less, approximate what is ordinarily offered in their dining rooms.  Smaller Mexican restaurants, the kind that operate food trucks, that is, taqueria, are also relatively adroit at providing food on this basis.  By contrast, the more established restaurants don’t manage the trick very well at all and the stuff they sell you curb-side, often, verges on the inedible.  We have had take-out from Perkins (awful), the Oak Grill (passable but not good), El Mariachi (passable but not good), El Padrone (okay), Bella Victoria (disappointing) and the B & J Bar (memorably horrible).  The latter place cooked our hamburgers until they were small, dessicated chunks of charcoal, covered the cinders with a fig-leaf of wilted lettuce, then, embedded these coals in stale bread, and served the mess with either tasteless potato salad or tavern chips that went soggy and wilted before they reached my table.  At the B & J, you have pull up under the watchful, coruscating eye of the old Paramount Theater across the street where the marquee is buzzing with admonitions to stay home, one of them featuring the word SICK in man-high flashing letters.  The back door to the bar is left ajar and you have to dart into the gloomy, empty tavern to pick up the food.  If you’ve ever smelled a restaurant after it’s been mostly shut down for a month, you will have a sense for the aroma in the place, a combination of stale beer, rotting produce, all with deep, booming notes of decomposing kitchen grease.  Atmosphere is important in restaurants and much of the dining experience involves plates coming to the table laden with hot food presented in a relatively elegant manner.  The more elaborate the food preparation, as at Bella Victoria, an Italian restaurant, the more likely the meal will be botched.  My lasagna from Bella Victoria seemed to be lacking noodles.  The dish was layered in its styrofoam container, but the layers seemed to consist of solely of meat sauce, then, white cheese melted into a sort of goo, alternating but without any trace of pasta.  It was fairly good but, also, seemed someone’s idea of a joke.

Notably absent from my account of take-out food available in my town are Asian places – that is, the restaurants that have actually perfected presentation of take-out meals.  But the Asian places operate on such low margins, using what amounts to slave labor to prepare their victuals, that they can’t function at low volume and, so, all of these places are shut-down for the duration – and the duration now seems to be functionally without end.

Some of this take-out food was so terrible, it literally kept me awake at night, attending to the progress of this stuff through my suffering guts.  It’s alarming to wake up after midnight with heartburn and a headache and mouth somehow dry, even seared with a meal eaten six-hours earlier.

6.

A lot of the meat packing plants are locked-down.  You can still get meat but its provenance seems a bit questionable: chicken frozen solid in anonymous wrappers, chubs of hamburger in weird industrial plastic tubes without expiration dates and, also, frozen into icy truncheons.  Most of the meat now doesn’t seem to come from any particular company and the packaging doesn’t bear expiry marks – be happy that you have scored this stuff and eat with your eyes closed and your nose pinched shut.

7.

Cold winds literally howling in the trees so that branch and bough quiver like tuning forks and, across the barren fields, a train wheezes on a siding out in the country and hoots sorrowfully.  The flowers that I have bought for Mother’s Day and Julie’s birthday have to be taken down from the porch where they hang in baskets under the eaves and hidden in the garage.  The temperature is going to dip below zero.  The moon skates by, a yellowish smear on the window of my bedroom – it’s some kind of conflagration in the sky.

In the morning, tree limbs are fallen and sky is too turbulent for birds to be flying.  A hapless little songbird is caught in the gale and blown across the heavens like a leaf caught in a flood.  The clouds scud by, shapes sculpted by the tempest with odd eye-holes and vertebral spines of white that roil and twist overhead.

Before dawn, I dreamt of a tornado. The tornado was a vertical limb to the dark sky, like a chair or a dark table leg and its surface was all decorated with an embroidery of lightning.  It didn’t seem too dangerous to me and I thought I could outrun the cyclone.  I ran for awhile and came to a sunny spot in a meadow.  The tornado was still scrambling over the hills and valleys behind me, whipping debris into the air.  Suddenly, I felt very much afraid.  I flung myself face down in the tall grass and gripped the musty soil as if to claw myself a hole in the sod and the tornado growled at me mercilessly. If only it would pass overhead.

8.

Warm rain turns the spring landscape into a blurred impressionist painting.  The trees droop and sag with their weight of leaves and fresh pink buds and the lilacs are lavender globes, half-melted in the drizzle.  Today, the news reports that the temperature may reach 70 degrees.  The air is very damp and droplets don’t fall but simply materialize on your glasses or shoulders.

The governor’s order that people must stay at home will expire on Friday and has been replaced by a decree characterized as “safer at home.” Apparently, on Monday May 18, 2020, businesses will re-open although subject to social distancing rules and gatherings consisting of ten people or less will be authorized.  Restaurants can re-open for inside dining, albeit at a lower capacity.  The public is polarized: 24-7 coverage of the pandemic has caused many people, particularly older ones, to feel unsafe anywhere – the disease is lurking, they suppose, in toilets, door-knobs, at the Rest Stops in the country where out-of-state truckers congregate, at check-counters in stores, on gas pump nozzles and other fomites, among the lilac bushes and the roses.  (In the Spring, charities customarily sell tulips.  This year, the so-called tulip drives didn’t take place and so the town is bereft of those flowers.)  People habituated to panic and fear aren’t about to leave their homes.  On the other hand, an equal number of citizens don’t trust the media, feel that the crisis was overblown to begin with, and aren’t about to obey state-wide decrees that they feel are invasive to their Civil Liberties.  Accordingly, the situation is this: the governor’s order doesn’t matter at all – those who have been made fearful by the incessant and, often, hysterical, media coverage aren’t about to emerge from their lairs, while those who disregarded this coverage have, generally, ignored the stay-at-home orders in the first place.

More remarkably, the governor’s order flies in the face of the so-called “science”.  Throughout the crisis, the governor has touted his adherence to the best science and most exact modeling as to the spread of the virus.  But, exactly, as I predicted, everything in the United States, at least from a news coverage standpoint, is indexed to New York City – as the crisis relents in New York City, so, it is supposed that the crisis must also relent everywhere else.  But, of course, this view of things, which is instinctive to the East Coast media, is completely false.  Each State has a different trajectory of infection, depending upon innumerable local factors.  So Governor Walz is relaxing the “Stay at Home” decree exactly as cases in Minnesota continue to spike sharply upward.  Yesterday, for instance, we learned that there were 1200 confirmed cases in Stearns County, a particular hot spot because of poultry processing plant near Cold Spring twelve miles west of St. Cloud.  The general wisdom has been that no State should re-open unless it shows no increase in new cases for fourteen consecutive days.  But Minnesota is now re-opening exactly as cases are growing at an exponential rate.  

These comments shouldn’t be read as criticism of the Governor.  In fact, no one knows how to effectively manage this viral epidemic and, as we have learned, most of the information previously thought to be authoritative has proven to be false.  The simple and brutal fact is that the re-opening is necessary because the economy is poised on the brink of total, and irremediable, collapse and a ruined economy kills people just as efficiently as the virus.  If people don’t go North to their lake cabins and the resorts in the woods in late May and June, whole swaths of the State will be wiped-out, turned into noisome mosquito-infested wildernesses.  Although the governor proposes that no one travel beyond their county of residence for the fishing opener, traditionally the start of the summer resort season, it would be too audacious, and likely too damaging to the State’s economy to declare that fishing licenses are inoperative and that the opener be deferred until –when? – June or July or August?  This latter point is important.  No one knows what the future holds – if you delay the fishing opener until things “settle down”, who knows how long that postponement will last.  

Cultural institutions, which have cravenly and immediately acknowledged that they are “inessential”, have thrown in the towel.  There will be no summer programs at the Guthrie Theater, the premiere cultural destination in Minnesota, and the Fall repertoire season is in doubt.  The Minnesota opera is on hiatus – the summer festival of musicals usually presented at the Ordway Theater in St. Paul seems dead.  These enterprises were already struggling – now, I assume, they will be knocked-out cold by the virus.  What damage is being sustained by the Minnesota Orchestra or the St. Paul Chamber ensemble or the Schubert Club’s program of recitals?  All of these resources are being annihilated as I write.  I called these institutions “craven” – perhaps, they should have claimed that they are as essential as the Big Box stores (the Walmarts and Targets) or the Menard’s and Lowe’s home remodeling retailers.  It would have been irresponsible, but when have we placed a high premium on “responsibility” and good citizenship in the arts?  Guerilla theaters should have been springing up all around the land.  The arts are ecstatic and lawless and, perhaps, when the time of crisis came, they should have behaved as outlaws and not good citizens.  And as I have predicted, when it comes time for professional football to commence its exploits, we will see what society values as essential and what is shut-down as inessential.     

9.

If the country was sharply divided before this pandemic, it will emerge from the crisis as even more grotesquely polarized.  The liberal news media outlets used to feature panel discussions in which four participants were involved – in the interest of fairness, one of the participants would be a supporter of the President.  This accommodation to bipartisan coverage of news events has now completely collapsed.  The panels of talking heads gathered on CNN or MSNBC don’t include a Trump supporter.  Those two networks, at least, have concluded that Trump’s disgraceful and deranged antics during this pandemic are so awful that they simply can’t be defended.

10.

The lesson learned from the shut-downs is that one size doesn’t fit all.  Indeed, issuing economic shut-downs that are state-wide is a burden too broadly imposed on places that don’t require such measures.  Analysis must be granular not general.  We now should have sufficient data to determine risk factors in any specific county that should be assessed to determine whether that place should be shut-down or the degree to which a shut-down is beneficial.  Simply put, it doesn’t make any sense to use the same standard for shut-down for Hennepin County (Minneapolis and suburbs) and Beltrami County (two or three villages, tamarack forests and peat bogs). Presumably, mathematical models based on per capita infection rates could be compared with population demographics, density of settlement, the age of the people living in an area and concentrations of heavy assembly-line style manufacturing or food processing, as well as poverty rates.  Utilizing these factors, it certainly would seem that risk could be calculated and that shut-downs, at least, in the future could be administered on a county-by-county basis.  This proposals has obvious shortcomings – for instance, the migration of workers between counties and the like.  Furthermore, it will be reasonably argued that we don’t have sufficient accurate facts to compile the underlying data on which shut-down decisions should be based.  This is because testing in the United States for the virus hasn’t been prevalent or widely-distributed.  But the perfect is always the enemy of the good and my recommendation, I think, is better than the completely unscientific approach that now seems to prevail.

Scientists, they assure us, are searching for a cure.  I think it’s equally important that mathematical modeling on the efficacy of shutdowns versus their economic cost be undertaken.  If you commit suicide because you can’t feed your family and, in fact, don’t see the possibility of feeding your family any time in the future, you are just as dead as an old man killed by the virus in a nursing home.  There should be copious data available at this point based on the so-called laboratory of the states – different places using different ameliorative measures – that rational modeling could be undertaken on a county-by-county basis.  How have things worked out so far?

11.

Mike Osterholm, an expert in infectious disease, appears on MSNBC on May 20, 2020.  (I know Osterholm slightly; when one of my client’s experienced a mysterious and potentially deadly outbreak of infectious disease in an industrial setting, I met with him in his offices at the University of Minnesota.  He kept house in small crowded room in the University Hospitals – the place was stuffed with pictures of Osterholm with politicians and foreign dignitaries.  I recall that he told me that he was a little jet-lagged – he had just returned from a conference in Thailand on infectious disease.  I recall that he was generous with his opinions, liked to talk, and was absolutely cock-sure about everything that he said.)  After a TV segment touting the efficacy of masks, Osterholm appeared for an interview and, casually, debunked everything that the hosts had just said.  Masks don’t do anything; at least there is no scientific proof of any kind that a cloth mask or, even, surgical mask without respirator apparatus is beneficial – you have to breath around the mask, simply creating an aerosol cloud that sprays out over your cheeks and under your ears.  “I’m worried,” Osterholm said, “the masks create a false sense of security.”  Similarly, Osterholm said that there was no evidence that contact tracing could do anything to slow the onslaught of infection.  Testing, he says, doesn’t work either.  “There is too much happy talk,” Osterholm said.  “We need the public to know that there is nothing, short of a vaccine, that will work to slow the spread of the disease.”  He suggests that it will ebb and wane seasonally for 18 months to two years until 70 to 80% of the public is infected.  The cost of governmentally imposed shutdowns is too steep.  A shut-down of 18 months would destroy life as we know it and so these lock-downs (that Osterholm notes that no State has comprehensively enforced) have no real benefit.

In the section before Osterholm’s appearance, Katy Tur and Chuck Todd, the hosts of the show reported on a study involving hamsters and the efficacy of masking.  It would be piquant to imagine hamsters fitted with tiny masks but, of course, that’s not how the test was performed.  Apparently, some sort of cloth barrier was interposed between hamsters with the disease and those without.  But hamsters don’t sing and don’t talk and I’ve never seen one sneeze – so the benefit of a test like this is questionable.  In any event, the findings of the test – that masks might be very efficacious is slowing infection – Osterholm found risible.  

If you believe Osterholm, and I have some confidence in the guy based on my own experience with him, there’s no way out of this except through it.  

12.

I’ve conducted meetings with clients wearing a surgical mask, one that has a wire upper rim that can be molded around your nose.  You can’t breathe effectively through the mask and it’s strangely difficult to speak with fabric brushing up against your lips and cheeks.  The words you speak don’t seem to be assembled properly – they sputter, get entrapped in the cloth, and lose their force and meaning.  Words leak out but they don’t mean what they are supposed to mean and they escape from behind the mask at strange angles.  The mask is hot and, if you puff at it, your warm breath surges upward and fogs your glasses.  Wearing a mask, the world doesn’t feel right – everything is out of focus, a little blurry, and uncertain.

13.

I seem to recall that when I was little, the weather was a constant spectacle of implausible variety: one day it would rain as if the big green clouds had opened all their spigots to inundate the earth and, if the rain fell out of a hot sky, tornados might be abroad.  Another day, it would be fair with sweet-smelling winds and, then, there would be heat, dry sometimes, but mostly humid like a sauna.  But the heat never lasted more than half a week and, then, it would be wet again and cold and the day would feel like the inside of a limestone cavern 200 feet underground.  Winter was the same: sometimes, lethally cold, then, brilliant with a thaw, then, dismal and cloudy with the corridors of the freeways draped in fog, and, at last, the blizzard howling down out of the Northwest.  In St. Paul, one of the fluted art-deco skyscrapers had a weather ball mounted on its crest and there was a little jingle broadcast over WCCO (“the good neighbor to the Northwest”) as to what the colors projected on the gleaming globe meant – the ball was supposed to foretell changes in the weather.  

Now, our weather is stagnant.  This Spring has been grey and cold for the most part.  Every dawn there is a window of blue sky but, then, that is closed and the sky turns grey and there are sinister droplet of cold dew in the air, a flickering drizzle that last most of the day to end in a chilly, lightless dusk.  It’s not unpleasantly cold – the temperature is between 55 and the mid-seventies, but the rain dampening everything makes it seem chilly.  The grass is growing in fierce-looking tufts and the trees, with only a few exceptions, are all dense with leaf and the lilacs in the dooryard are blooming.   

14.

The media is so rabidly dysfunctional and polarized that everyday threatens civil war.  Trump calls an impromptu press conference and declares that Churches are essential and that the governors must open them or – It’s the bully’s standard ploy, leaving the threat unspecified, to the imagination, because it’s not clear what he actually has authority to do.  The mainstream organized religions, of course, know that they aren’t essential, that no one gets to heaven through their intervention – this is, in fact, a central tenet in Lutheranism.  They understand themselves as instruments of social justice, but redundant to other organizations better equipped to deal with questions of legal and political equity and, therefore, weak vessels probably doomed by this pandemic.  They seem poised to just throw in the towel, turn their sanctuaries into day-care centers and food banks and get out of the salvation business.  By contrast, the Catholic bishops, who have declared attendance at Mass mandatory, aren’t about to brook being closed for another six months or a year or whatever is required to “flatten the curve” and keep the level of infections manageable.  And the wild-eyed Fundamentalists and Evangelicals declare themselves ready to die to preserve their creeds – although this is complicated: they are not only ready to die but also ready (and willing) to infect everyone else as well.  Salvation, as they see things, is a kind of contagion anyway, it spreads like a wildfire, Pentecostal flames jumping from brow to brow, and you can’t get to heaven without dying and so, best to throw caution to the winds, trust in the Lord, and open everything up.

By contrast, the cable news media trot out cadres of epidemiologists who declare that science requires everyone to stay at home and die quietly of starvation as the economy collapses.  This pundits are just as irrational as the religious crazies.  They use the word “science” again and again, a dozen times per interview in the sense that “opening the economy” must follow the “science” but they never bother to explain what “science” they are following, who has authoritative evidence-based recommendations and, so, in the end, the word “science” is just a shibboleth because there is nothing objectively scientific about anything that they are arguing – it’s just hunch, guesswork, and panic.  None of these doctors cites any studies because, of course, the studies aren’t univocal, they don’t lead to the conclusions that these physicians are arguing which are fundamentally political – it’s best to keep the economy closed because this will deal a devastating blow to Trump and expose him as vicious, fraudulent, and inept.  But who doesn’t think Trump is vicious, fraudulent, and inept?  Even his supporters draw this conclusion although they admire his paranoid style.  So is it really worth destroying the economy to gain a political advantage.

It’s a classic dialogue between the deaf.  The Left wants to stay closed forever because they imagine that the world can be rationalized, made safe, and that perfection is always just around the bend if only people weren’t so balky, those deplorables “clinging to their guns and religion.”  They purport to proceed in the name of Science – although Science to them is just the name for an ideology aimed at perfecting the world, indemnifying everyone against harm, and rationalizing all institutions.  The Right wants to open immediately because they think that everyone should be working since work is the wages of sin – if you don’t believe it, look in the Book of Genesis, God wrote it out for you in good American prose that’s crystal clear.  Death is inevitable and to be imagined as the portal to eternity and so killing a few hundred-thousand to execute God’s will on Earth – the fatal decree that everyone should work – is an acceptable cost.  Equally irrational, the Left responds that you can’t put a price on human lives.  But this is just rhetorical nonsense – we put a cost on human lives all the time, calculated on a risk-benefit basis down to the penny.  At least, the Mayans and the Aztecs were honest about it: Society is based on human sacrifice.  The religious Right knows this instinctively and their altars have always been smoky with fumes of burning blood and fat.  The Left is “scientific” and, therefore, it’s economists should know this also – after all, big manufacturers routinely calculate the cost of injury and death into their industrial processes and the product liability assessments.  But “science” for the Left doesn’t mean statistics, studies, and evidence – it means a kind of wishful thinking based upon postulates relating to human perfectability that are just as irrational as anything asserted by the Right.

There’s no common language between the factions and this epidemic is merely dramatizing the divide.  And here is the paradox: the people on the Left asserting that Science must guide us are generally irrational and anti-scientific in their rhetoric.  The people on the Right arguing that everyone should get back to work look to me like a bunch of lazy bastards themselves with automatic weapons, the sort of crusaders who are sitting at home on workers comp, sucking down oxycontin, and willing to fight to the last drop of your blood.  

15.

The pandemics’ toll in quality of life will probably never be measured.  For 38 years, I was a participant in a book club.  The members of this reading group have grown old with me.  We can’t meet for fear of inadvertently infecting our more elderly and fragile, members.  It’s not clear to me when, or if, the book group can be reconvened.  Every summer, we watched movies together – usually eight to ten films – and discussed them.  Will we ever do this again? 

What is the cost of losing these kinds of habits and associations?

In my dreams, I’m trying to measure the cost.  Standing near the White House, Michelle Obama commends me for our local book group and asks that I join her task force on this subject.  In fact, she wants me to attend her reading group.  I’m flattered and excited to be of service.  She tells me to follow President Obama – he can lead me to where her book club meets.  Obama walks swiftly with long strides and I have trouble keeping up with him.  We go into the subway tunnels under Boston Commons.  Obama keeps turning corners so that I can’t keep him in view.  At last, he leads me up a flight of dirty steps toward the Boston State House and the great monument to Colonel Shaw and his Negro soldiers.  The steps suddenly become very icy and I have to drop down to all fours to continue the climb, scrambling upward over the dirty ice.  The way out of this subway is now almost completely vertical, frigid handholds that I grip and that lead me to the wan light illumining the monument and the State House.  I am just about to emerge from the precipitously inclined tunnel when I encounter a sort of moat – the steps end with a pit that I have to drop down into so as to reach my destination.  I drop into the pit and discover that it’s a iron-barred cage, twenty by twenty, with a single Black man sitting on a bench in the corner of the cell.  The Black man is reading from a thick book and his lips are moving as he reads but without sound. 

This morning, I’m up around dawn, but there’s no reason to get out of bed and so I fall asleep again.  I’m at a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute.  The performance takes place outdoors and doesn’t involve singing so far as I can tell.  Instead, the performance is constructed from great processions trooping up and down hillsides and stormy hordes of horsemen moving over green, steep meadows on mountain slopes.  Instead of arias, we rest in the green shadow of fragrant ancient trees.  The recitative is masses of men and women, some of them dressed in elegant, colorful costumes – I see them in the distance, storming up green conical peaks and in the valley surging across streams of water, fording creeks on horseback.  I’m sure that every fluxion in the crowds of people hurling themselves across the green and pleasant landscape is correlated to some part of The Magic Flute and I would like to work this out, but, for the time being, the baroque spectacle of parades, attacks and counterattacks, although without casualties, is simply too beautiful and distracting – it is a ballet of elaborate massed movement that is the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen.  (I now know this to be a premonition of demonstrations arising from the death of George Floyd.)

16.

I was sent over to Albert Lea to adjust the clocks.  Most of the clocks in that town have a feature that shows the day and the month.  But these features had not been re-set for many years.  Accordingly, the clocks were displaying the proper time but not showing the day and month.  

Most of the clocks on which I worked were readily re-set.  But there were a group of clocks of the kind known as “Wuppertal” time pieces.  These kinds of clocks are made for mantles and they are wooden with the clock face set within a semi-circle of wood that is flanked on both sides by wings that support the clock.  These clocks rely upon a mechanism that has to be set by hand.  This mechanism is a cardboard wheel that can be rotated to display different numbers in flag-shaped window above the clock face. Accompanying the day wheel, there is another cardboard inset, also round, that is printed with the twelve months and, also, must be rotated within the clock body to show the proper month.  These are manual adjustments and have to be made daily and, if neglected, the clock will not display the proper day or month.  When I worked on the mantle-style clocks, I found that the Wuppertal mechanisms were so old and dried-out that the cardboard wheels disintegrated when I touched them.  And, so, I had to locate a source for Wuppertal wheels.  I expected this to be difficult but it turned out to be much easier than I expected and, in short order, I had the clocks once again equipped with a manual mechanism to display month and date.

Driving back from Albert Lea, I reflected on the notion that there are an infinite number of universes arrayed in dimensions inaccessible to us.  If an universe is identical to ours in all respects except that a single subatomic particle is missing or not where it should be as predicted by quantum mechanics, than this universe, occupying an unknown dimension, will be an alternate to our own.  Since the number of particles in the universe is enormous (although not perhaps infinite), there may be billions of universes that look exactly like ours but that are different by merely one electron or that are identical to ours except that one or two electrons were displaced from where they should have been at some point hundreds of millions years ago – the fact of this displacement, thus, also, rising to the definition of an alternative universe.  Similarly, there may be someone exactly like me, another self, in these universes but if a single fleeting thought that I had twenty years ago is not accurate to what I actually thought at that time in this present space and time, than, this person who is like me in all other respects occupies an alternative universe.  The range of alternative universes is immense with an almost infinite number of possible iterations and, furthermore, all of these universes are interpolated into dimensions that surround me, but that I can’t sense or access in any way other than through the gloomy deserts of mathematics.  

These thoughts inspired a kind of vertiginous dread in me. 

Why Wuppertal?  Pina Bausch’s dance company hailed from Wuppertal, although why this would suggest dream imagery of this kind is unclear to me and I’m not even sure that I was aware of this fact until I looked up the city on Wikipedia.  The city is also known for the inverted monorail that runs elevated above the urban streets.  The monorail glides suavely over the Wupper River, the cars hanging down from the rail above them.  This conveyance called the Schwebebahn (“hover-track”) is prominently shown in Wim Wenders’ movie Alice in the Cities, although I’m not sure that I recalled this fact, at least consciously, at any time during the last decade.  

When the Wuppertal monorail was first opened, the City Fathers wished to demonstrate it’s safety and sound mechanical engineering by transporting a young elephant in one of the cars.  The stunt was conceived by a circus impresario named Franz Althoff.  On July 21, 1950, the elephant was loaded into a Schwebebahn car and set off for her ride, accompanied by a number of passengers.  The elephant, a female named Tuffi, panicked, began to trumpet wildly, and charged the side of the monorail, smashing through the window and plunging 39 feet down into the Wupper River.  The river was only 50 centimeters deep where the elephant landed, but it was muddy and the animal was not seriously harmed.  Several humans were pretty badly battered in the accident and everyone involved in the stunt was fined. Tuffi, the fliegender Elefant von Wuppertal became very famous – there is a mural showing her in Wuppertal today located on a building adjacent where she took her celebrated fall.  The Tuffi brand of dairy goods is sold in Wuppertal to this day.

Tuffi outlived Franz Althoff and died of old age in 1989.  At that time, she was performing in a circus in Paris.  

16.

We’re living in the mouth of the corona virus.  Everyday is the same: dawn comes without sun; the humid sky brightens a little and, when I step outside with my dog, I can feel dank, clammy droplets in the air.  The grass is soaking wet and the streets are dark with puddles.  My mid-morning, the clouds break up a little.  The sky remains turbulent with Mammatus clouds, greenish bulging tumor-like forms dangling from wind-curled scrolls of white cloud ripped open to reveal blue and, then, more thunderheads rearing upward in the distance.  By noon, it’s hot enough to be unpleasant outside, although there’s rarely and direct sunlight, just cloud cover that’s brighter in some places than others.  By mid-afternoon, the patches of blue sky are larger and radiate damp heat.  After supper, the clouds start rumbling with thunder and suturing themselves together along seams of black falling rain.  There’s dabs of lightning in sky far away and a sound like a distant cannonade.  Then, it begins to rain in a desultory fashion and darkness falls and, for most of the night, I can hear water trickling through drain pipes. Then, it’s dawn and the cycle repeats.

17.

My daughter, Theresa, has her baby.  The child inhales meconium and ends up in the neo-natal ICU for the long Memorial Day weekend.  Theresa, then, takes a ride to the Hospital with a colleague.  The colleague’s daughter tests positive for covid-19 supposedly.  All of this happens in Fargo and the truth of the matter, the actual facts about the child’s birth and subsequent misadventures is very hard to understand.

Julie delivers flowers to her father’s grave in the country at the Red Oak Lutheran Church.  The graves are huddled around the little white church as if seeking shelter in its shadow, or, at least, the rotating penumbra of the steeple, counting the hours like a sun dial’s penumbra.  Some of the country roads are closed due to mud and flooding.  Julie has to access the church by zigzagging back roads.  The skies threaten rain and the graves are covered in moss and mold.  As she sets the flowers next to the grave, the sky opens above her and there is a broad, gold halo of light, something like the ring of illumination that jets from a bright flashlight.  The halo tilts upward and angles into the storm clouds overhead.  Then, Julie feels jumpy – a black fly seems to be squatting on her nose.  When she shakes her head, the fly-shape wobbles unsteadily in the center of her field of vision.  She drives a mile on the muddy gravel road and, then, pulls over to the side of the lane to call me.  “I’ve got a huge floater in the middle of my eye’s field of vision,” she says.  A little constellation of gnats, also moving shadows, whirls like a satellite around the dark spot.  This is concerning and, the next day, Julie goes to see an eye-doctor (I defy you to spell “ophthalmologist”).  He says that she has a detached retina and that immediate surgery is necessary to reattach the tissue and eliminate the defects in her vision.  This is done with a laser focused through a lens put over Julie’s eye.  The problem is that this procedure is performed while both Julie and the doctor are wearing surgical masks and, so, the lens on her eye keeps fogging over.  Apparently,the eye-doctor’s face-mask is also clouded.  The process is protracted but, apparently, successful.  The doctor makes no recommendations as to pain or convalescence – he seems fine with Julie returning to work.  But by mid-afternoon, she’s experiencing horrible pain.

Several days of misery pass.  Julie sees the doctor again and the physician reluctantly admits that her cornea has been lacerated.  “But you’re healing well,” he tells her.  No Mayo Clinic doctor has ever accepted responsibility for an adverse outcome.  So the physician immediately blames her for the mishap – “you must have rubbed your eyes when they were numb,” he speculates.  Then, he proceeds to tell her that her eye may be glazed with virus, thus explaining the pain.  The man’s defensiveness implies culpability but, of course, there is nothing to do but pay the ransom and get away from the quack.  

18.

The baby goes home from NICU.

19.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, the police murder a black man.  A cocky White cop kneels on the Black man’s neck, taunting the man to “get up, bro, and get in the squad car.”  To demonstrate his complete indifference to the Black man’s suffering, the White cop thrusts his hand in his pants pocket, possibly to jiggle his enormous testicles.  The point of this gesture is to show that he is in such utter command of the animal pinned under his knee that he can afford to masturbate for the camera.  A squat ugly Hmong cop runs interference, bickering in a high-pitched voice with the crowd of onlookers.  The rubber-neckers are surprisingly restrained – they keep pleading with the cop to take his neck off the Black man’s cervical spine.  The suspect, if that’s what he can be called – “victim” is more the more apposite word – cries out several times for his “mama”, says three times that he can’t breathe, moans and writhes a little and, then, passes out.  Although the man is unconscious, the cop keeps bearing down on the back of his neck for another four minutes; two other police-men are out-of-sight, but a reverse angle shows them kneeling on the Black man’s legs and buttocks.  The little Hmong thug keeps bickering with the public who become more and more irate.  Blood is coming from the Black victim’s nose.  An ambulance arrives and the cops yank the limp figure up onto a gurney.  The man is pronounced dead a few blocks away at the Medical Center.  Most videos showing police brutality are ambiguous – it’s not certain what you are seeing.  In this video, shot by a bystander on a cell-phone and posted to You-Tube, there’s little doubt as to what has been recorded.  The victim of the police assault doesn’t move for seven minutes except to beg that the cop remove his knee from the back of his neck.  The man is unresponsive, seemingly comatose for four minutes.  The most violent imprecation cast in the direction of the murderous police officer is “you’re a bum, a fuckin’ bum”, phrases that seem oddly disproportionate the the protracted homicide shown on the video.

Protest on the night of the killing is mild.  A cop car is burned and some Molotov cocktails are thrown.  It rains and peaceful protesters stand soaked and silent outside the Third precinct police station.  The humidity breaks apart in a gush of cool wind the next day.  It’s dry but with dramatic storm clouds.  The protesters rage all day, but the demonstration is peaceful.  By nightfall, however, several city blocks are set on fire.  The cops fire rubber bullets and blast away with tear gas.  A Target store is looted and there are images of mobs of Black people dragging out booty.  More storefronts are burned down.

It emerges that the victim, George Floyd, was trying to pass a counterfeit twenty dollar bill at a local Somali-owned grocery.  Floyd wanted to buy cigarettes.  More surveillance footage is released showing that contrary to police reports, Floyd wasn’t resisting arrest in the several minutes preceding his murder.  Floyd seems wild-eyed and intoxicated, but he’s also docile and doesn’t seem sufficiently sober to be much of a risk to anyone.  The Hennepin County Attorney, Doug Freeman, refuses to charge the four cops involved in the arrest, although on the demand of the Mayor, they are all fired.  The police chief, who is Black himself, seems pushed to margins and stays out of sight.  A FBI lawyer says that investigation is ongoing but that “more information” is required before anyone can be arrested.  The escalation in demands from the African-American community proceeds apace with the stonewalling by the police and prosecutorial authorities.  The community wants all four cops charged with something: manslaughter or 2nd degree murder.  The community wants a trial.  The community will want four convictions.  It would seem that four convictions will be impossible to achieve – for instance, the Hmong cop seems to be nothing more than a “good Nazi”; that is, he is “just following orders” and those complicit in that way are rarely successfully prosecuted.  After all, we are all complicit to that extent, the conspiracy of those who look on and do nothing.

The governor calls out the National Guard because there is “flash rioting”.  This means a mob will suddenly appear, sometimes miles from the area near Lake and Minnehaha where Floyd was killed, loot and burn a store, and, then, melt away.  The police are stretched too thin.  State Troopers are called off the highways to patrol the street.  Before this is over, Minneapolis will be an occupied city, filled with tanks and armored personnel carriers.  On the third night of rioting, many more buildings are destroyed, fires rage unattended, and the 3rd Precinct police station is burned to the ground. Around dawn, the State Patrol officers arrest a CNN news crew, presumably because the reporter is Black. The head of CNN calls the Governor – this shows us where the real power resides.  The governor orders the release of the jailed news crew within the hour.  Trump helpfully tweets: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”  Twitter flags the tweet as “glorifying violence.”  Trump says that he will “take over Minneapolis.”  I don’t know what that means.  But he won’t – there’s no political advantage.  

The rioters are wearing face masks.  This is convenient.  But they aren’t social distancing.  There’s a crush of people removing things from the wrecked Target store.  It’s hard to social distance when you’re doing some hard-core looting.  

The death toll from Corona Virus now exceeds 100,000 with no end in sight.  The world is coming apart at the seams.

20.

The skies darken again for more rain.  Perhaps, I’m not seeing things clearly.  The lenses of my eyes are smeared with virus.

Before the humidity dissolved, the air was heavy with the scent of lilacs.  The lilac flowers were like fruit, heavy and decaying on the round bushes.  There’s covid at the slaughter-house and so production there is diminishing.  Eighty cases now.  The air smells clean – no pork fat is being rendered and the odor of death that hangs over the town, particularly when its humid and warm, has lifted.  Even the pleasant scent of bacon being spiced has vanished.  The sidewalks smell of lilacs.

21.

Events achieve a kind of confluence.  An autopsy conducted on George Floyd shows that he was infected with the Covid virus.  The virus is said to disproportionately affect African-Americans.  For a week, the cable news networks broadcast nothing but havoc on the streets – large day-time protests that turn into violent looting after dark.  Buildings are burning and smoke fills the canyons between skyscrapers.  A fire is set so close to the White House that the President and his wife and child are hustled down into the bunker below the building. Of course, these vast marches snaking across cities, occupying bridges over rivers and harbors, endless numbers of people trudging through the humidity and haze of heat are the vectors for further infection.  Perhaps, Floyd was symptomatic when he was arrested.  Maybe, some aspects of his desperation and panic were related to the virus.  But who knows – it’s imponderable.  The only thing that is clear is that the two dimensions of calamity afflicting the nation have now converged.

22. 

My dog suspects that something about me has changed.  She will no longer go for her walk with me.  Although she approaches wags her tail and huffs in an excited way when I call her for her walk, outside, she balks.  I get a couple of blocks and, then, the dog simply sits down on the sidewalk and refuses to go any further.  It may be the heat and humidity, or, perhaps, her age (she’s an old dog) or her fear of encountering other dogs.  Perhaps, she wishes to practice social distancing and thinks it irresponsible that I am urging herto enter the world where there is always the risk of interacting with others.  A few weeks ago, Senor Gomez (as I call him), an arrogant Chihuahua pestered her mercilessly as he strolled along the sidewalk.  Later, Senor Gomez came to our house and sat at the front door, stalking my dog, Frieda, and terrorizing her.  (I have no idea why Frieda is frightened of Senor Gomez – when he sniffs at her rear end, his nose comes to about the level of the crook of her hind quarters, but she is very skittish about the dog and, indeed, he is shifty, quick to dart from underfoot, with a red nose and bulging eyes. Frieda has many phobias – just yesterday, when we went in the backyard in the morning, the dog began barking frantically and skipping about, doing a little dance of fear around something frightening on the paving stones.  I wondered if Frieda wasn’t alarmed by a large beetle or a centipede, but, in fact, the cause for her consternation was a single feather dropped from bird roosting somewhere overhead.  When Frieda breathed on the feather, it trembled, even wafting up toward her nose for a moment and it seemed to me that a combination of characteristics dismayed the dog:  the thing smelled like a living being, but it was shaped like a twig and seemed to move of its own accord, rising and falling as the dog sniffed it.)

Perhaps, the dog senses something deviant about me, something sneaky, a trace of White privilege and incipient racism perhaps.

23.

A house-cat the color of caramel sits on a window sill in a house that looks all closed-up, lonely and desolate.  The cat is close to the picture window and glows in the morning sunlight like a burnished ceramic sculpture.  A grey void surrounds the cat – I can’t see into the gloomy brick-walled house and, so, the outline of the animal seems posed against a strange dark cavity.  The cat is practicing social distancing while all the time dreaming of the mice and the baby birds that it will torture to death.

24.

Nature uses everything. I suppose even the Covid virus has some purpose in the ecology of the world, although it’s unclear what that purpose might be.  In an effort to encourage the dog to go on her nightly walk, my wife brushes Frieda with a tool intended to cull the fur that she is shedding.  The result is a second dog, a phantom dog, consisting of tufts of fur scattered across the back steps.  In the morning, I see tiny birds, sparrows I think, foraging in the dog fur on the back steps.  The little creatures flutter up into the green trees with beaks wreathed in the pale yellow fur.  They are using it to make nests.

June 5, 2020