1.
Snow sifts down from the cold skies. Four inches fall evenly over the landscape. The snow comes from the deep freeze of the January skies and it is very light and full of air. This snow is a pleasure to shovel. It weighs next to nothing and, when you push the snow away, it is like removing an erasure to reveal the color and substance of the world underneath.
2.
The media that I follow praise Joe Biden’s inaugural address to the high heavens. The speech reads okay, but Biden can barely deliver it – he stammers, stutters, and pronounces words wrong.
The central theme of the address is “unity”, surely a subject on which all can agree – there is a unity about unity, one might say. Later, commentators decry the fact that the speech says nothing about “justice.”
Of course, justice is a concept that is notoriously difficult to define and, even more problematic, in its practical application. Does justice mean equality, redistribution of wealth, or, as Thrasymachus maintained in Plato’s Republic, merely the advantage of the stronger? In this context, it’s hard not to hear the word “justice” as meaning “revenge” and this seems to be the connotation of the word as it is used by TV pundits. But those who insist upon “justice” are either unwilling or unable to say exactly what they mean.
3.
Because my daughter, Angelica, works with developmentally delayed pre-schoolers (changing diapers and wiping noses), she’s defined as a front-line worker and so can make a reservation for an injection of the Covid virus. These reservations must be accomplished through a computer system. Making an appointment is a bit like trying to secure tickets to a concert by a popular band.
Angelica’s appointment is 45 miles from home, at the Willow Creek School in Rochester. The injection is scheduled for 7:45 p.m. I drove through the darkness, over the Dexter ridge with its innumerable red blinking wind turbines, and find the school on the windy edge of town. Some barricades block lanes that the motorist is not supposed to access in the parking lot. A couple of police cars are pulled up to the door into the school. About twenty cars occupy the lot – they come and they go. Angelica, who is apprehensive about the injection, walks into the school. She’s back in about twenty minutes. The staff at the school was able to make the injection almost immediately after she entered, but protocol requires that you wait fifteen minutes before being authorized to depart. She says that the injection took just a second and didn’t hurt very much.
We are back home by 8:40 p.m.
4.
A few days earlier I had a hearing at 9:00 a.m. in Jackson, Minnesota, a county seat 102 miles from Austin, due west on I-90. Suspicious of the weather, I began my drive at 6:15 in the morning – this would give me plenty of time to reach my client’s home on the outskirts of the town. I had told my client that I would meet her at 8:30.
About an inch of soft, fluffy snow had fallen and it was quite cold. Snow blew across the freeway but didn’t stick to concrete, at least until I was beyond Fairmont, about 20 miles from Jackson. Visibility was reasonably good and the freeway was most empty. High overhead, the sky seemed to be clearing.
At my client’s farmhouse in Jackson, no one was wearing masks. The acreage was well-kept with a row of grain bins neatly bolted together next to a four-car garage and a large home. The wind was picking up and snow sieved sideways through a shelter-belt beyond a field shaved down to the furrowed earth. On a large TV in the family room, I saw images of pundits frowning and a chiron that read BIDEN WANTS TO MAKE EVERY STATE CALIFORNIA. The TV was tuned to the far right OAN network, that is, the One America Network.
After the hearing, I drove home in a ground blizzard. The one-inch accumulation of snow was picked up by the furious hands of the wind and flung wildly from horizon to horizon. A few miles to the east of Jackson, I saw that semi-trucks had jack-knifed and entirely blocked the west-bound lanes. The freeway is exposed to the rage of the wind all along this route and I drove through an endless, writhing white-out. Most of the way, I navigated by the right-hand fog-line. The freeway was mostly snow-covered, cut into ruts where the traffic was passing and very slippery. The longer I peered into the violence of the storm, the more I began to see phantom lights, weird yellow mirages in the distance, sudden flares against the uniform white curtains flailing against the front of my car. When I stopped for gas at Blue Earth, the wind was hammering against my car so ferociously that I couldn’t get the door open.
The blizzard relented about ten miles east of Blue Earth and I drove the last forty miles in peace. It seems odd for a virus to be raging in this kind of weather. The winter is cold and the snow seems somehow antiseptic and medicinal. I fantasize the virus as a urine-warm pool of slimy liquid. Won’t the cold and the snow freeze this stuff into immobility and cause the virus to subside?
A friend tells me that the family that I represented in Jackson are very much adherents to Qanon conspiracy theories. They grow their own vegetables and grain for home-consumption and eat only animals raised on farms that they have visited and inspected. This is because they believe that genetically modified foodstuffs are a conspiracy to alter the cellular composition of the human body and turn people into strange and obedient mutants.
5.
At the end of the first week of February, the thermometer reads the air under the eaves of my porch as 18 below zero. Dawn is cloudless, although the town froths with exhaled smoke and cold white vapor. In the sunlight, the display on my car shows 11 below. The air is very still and the snow lies white, mostly undisturbed, all about the sidewalks and lawns. In the deep freeze, boots creak underfoot and the trees groan and, as houses shrink in the dry cold air, the floors pop with a sound like shots being fired.
The streets are covered with hard alabaster, an inch or more thick, ice that the sun can’t penetrate, like marble surface at a palace. The intersections are encrusted with sand sprayed onto the ice for traction. There’s no end in sight to this immense cold. Tires have polished the residential streets to a fine white sheen; the roads are a Tsarist ballroom.
When I walk my dog, she’s skittish as if her paws are burning. The shadows where wind has sculpted the drifts show deep, glacial blue to the eye. But this is an optical illusion. The snow is very white and the shadows aren’t colored at all, merely grey upon closer inspection (and walking on ice requires constant close inspection) – if you look carefully, the shadows are just dark within the indentations in the snow and have no hue at all.
6.
I suppose that Jesus was once Q of Qanon. His proclamation to the world was that its sorrow and wickedness would end within a lifetime. Followers of the new God drank his blood and ate his body. If Jesus wasn’t Q, St. Paul surely was.
7.
Who knows how to interpret the spectacle of the Super Bowl half-time show? A mountain range of neon signs and skyscrapers appears as a brilliantly lit mirage over the rim of the stadium. Then, a figure descends through the air, dark, with arms outspread as if crucified. Within a subterranean hall of mirrors outlined in red neon, an army of men with their faces swathed in bandages lunge and whirl. Then, they pour out onto the football field and march around in the gloom. Fireworks erupt overhead. Only the wet eyes of the bandaged men are visible on their swaddled white heads. Those eyes flare with incendiary red.
For some, the game is postured as a context of good versus evil. The quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is Tom Brady, a man who has led teams to six earlier Super Bowl championships. He is 42 and one of the former president’s golfing buddies and a MAGA hat has been photographed in his locker. The opposing quarterback has goofy hair and looks disheveled, particularly when compared with the immaculately groomed and uber-Aryan Brady. Brady’s Buccaneers crush the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl game, picturesquely entitled LVI.
The night after the Super Bowl, an African-American commentator appears on TV and says that Brady is a “bad man”, but that the “scoreboard doesn’t lie” – the point being that, unlike his friend in the White House, Brady’s merit as an athlete has been established beyond any reasonable argument.
8.
In January 2021, a variant of the Covid virus arises in South Africa; another variant is identified in England. And, of course, both mutations are immediately observed in the United States. The South African variant is particularly virulent and seems to have defeated vaccinations in that nation – South Africa administers the AstraZeneca brand vaccine to its people. It seems reasonably clear that these new mutations limit the efficacy of some of the vaccines presently distributed.
A client who has suffered through a Covid infection tells me that the vaccines will prove to be useless. The virus is too mutable. The only hope is for “therapeutics” to mitigate the deadliness of the disease. Another friend writes to me and says that the virus is simply killing off those people who haven’t taken care of themselves and, therefore, become physically “unfit”. Thus, the disease is Darwin’s revenge.
9.
On a talk show, two guests (seemingly husband and wife) tell the host that there is no doubt that the Covid virus emerged from a Chinese laboratory. The disease has all of the hallmarks of a cleverly contrived biological weapon. I thought that this theory had been long discredited and so was surprised at the presentation. The guests seemed sober enough and scientifically disciplined in their interview. But who knows about such things? Television is entertainment and it’s foolish, I suppose, to give credence to what you see on a TV show.
This morning (February 9), the World Health Organization announces again that there’s no reason to think that the Covid virus was released into the world by Chinese scientists. At the start of the contagion, people were fearful and rumors spread in all directions. But who believes WHO? That organization has also been discredited. Now, after eleven months of social isolation, 468,000 deaths in the United States, and ghastly new variants of the disease circulating, the atmosphere is febrile again, paranoid, wild with rumor.
10.
Someone says quite reasonably that the media should put a moratorium on the phrase “conspiracy theories.” In fact, most beliefs that are labeled “conspiracy theories” by broadcast pundits are merely false. A “conspiracy” signifies an organized cabal working covertly to achieve some nefarious objective. In the lexicon of the media, any “conspiracy theory” is false and pernicious – the phrase has evolved to mean something like “erroneous ideology.” It would be better, it is suggested, that the phrase “false narratives” be used for most of the notions labeled as “conspiracy theories”.
As Yossarian reminds us in Catch 22 it’s not paranoia if people really are out to get you. And, indeed, there are plenty of conspiracies that actually exist and can be proven. But there are also an enormous number of false narratives or, simply stated, lies circulating that really don’t have anything conspiratorial about them.
11.
Trump’s second Impeachment “trial” begins today. People need villains and heros. Trump is an all-purpose villain and the Democrats can’t hold their coalition together without him. And the media is frantic that Trump’s highly rated “reality TV” presidency continue even after he has been voted out of office. Those who despise Trump the most fiercely, seem, somehow, to be the most dependent upon him. Joe Biden is intrinsically dull – a virtue in politics, but not in the media.
The “trial” is a political spectacle in which no witnesses are called. The House Impeachment managers make assertions and, then, produce documents and video imagery ostensibly to prove them. There seem to be no exclusionary rules of evidence and, so, hearsay as reported by anonymous sources in newspapers (or on TV) is admissible. (Most of the so-called “facts” offered in these proceedings would not be admitted into evidence in an actual trial conducted in a courtroom.) Media pundits opine as to the effectiveness of the presentation – liberal media outlets such as MSNBC and CNN extol the proof presented by the prosecution; conservative media scoffs at the whole enterprise as absurd.
As in all trials, the impeachment is based on hyperbole. Exaggeration is preferable to a sober assessment of the facts. Evidence presented by the Impeachment Managers inflates the level of violence in the affair – the same footage is shown over and over again, cherry-picked for its graphic qualities: we see a battle at a barricade in which rioters attack cops with poles and hockey sticks; there is a police officer jammed in a door by the mob, apparently accidentally, and crushed as he cries out; the crowd lunges at one of the entrances to the Capitol, stabbing at the police with flagpoles from which fluttering banners hang – this is all impressive and shows a scary level of ferocity in the mob, but the footage is, after all, only a few minutes (at most) of what must be hundreds of hours of imagery of men and women idly touring the Capitol building, knocking on doors or gawking at statues and pictures. Immediately, after the Capitol breach, the received wisdom was that the Capitol police were missing in action and withdrew to allow the rioters to enter the building – and, in fact, this is what I saw with my own eyes as I watched the siege in real time. The narrative has now been adjusted to cast the Capitol police as heroic warriors valiantly defending the building against impossible odds – this may be a valid assessment with respect to some aspects of the battle, but battlefields are complex and what occurs in one theater of combat may not bear any resemblance to the action elsewhere. Of course, the House Impeachment Managers must present the police as heroically opposing a violent mob or the narrative will devolve into side issues as to the apparent complicity of much of the police force with the rioters. (The House theory is that Trump controlled every aspect of the mob’s deployment and strategy – something that is manifestly untrue.)
Another exaggeration ceaselessly stated is that the Capitol attack cost five lives – a number sometimes increased to seven if one takes into account two Capitol cops who committed suicide. In fact, this casualty count could never be sustained in a court of law. Two people actually died in the fighting – a woman named Babbit was shot by a cop as she tried to leap through a broken window and a policeman named Sicknick was supposedly bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher. This latter claim is suspect. Apparently, an autopsy conducted on Sicknick failed to demonstrate any blunt force trauma. Therefore, it’s unclear as to exactly how he died. The other three cases in the canonical five are instances of people suffering heart attacks or other medical emergencies at or near the Capitol. These cases are obscure: we don’t know where the people died – that is, how close they were to the Capitol – nor do we know what they were doing when stricken. My expectation is that no one would be able to prove a causal link between these casualties and the Capitol riot. Then, there are two cops who supposedly killed themselves after the event – there is no reliable reporting as to these suicides at all. So, in reality, the Capitol riot resulted in two deaths (although the exact circumstances of Sicknick’s demise remains unclear.) There were undoubtedly many injuries almost all of them minor – the sort of bruises or sprains that would result from a robust game of tackle football or a rugby match. The attack on the Capitol was undoubtedly violent in some places, but the level of violence is grossly exaggerated in House presentation.
The most pernicious aspect of the Impeachment Manager’s case is the sudden elevation of Donald Trump to the status of the greatest leader of all time (GLOAT). The mythology is that the GLOAT rallied men to decisive action with mere words, that he summoned armies to attack the Capitol, and that, in fact, could have halted the mayhem with a single tweet. This is patently absurd and offensive: Trump is not the greatest leader of all time. He isn’t even a competent public speaker. The House Managers seem to have accepted Trump’s own self-aggrandizing rhetoric and, now, cast this dimwitted fool as a powerful leader of men – this isn’t even remotely plausible. Trump, as has been often noted, is no Hitler when it comes to charisma and public oration. The man is a reality TV star with a funny clown-orange hairdo and an inarticulate way of speaking that was readily, and openly, mocked when he was in power. But, for the purposes of this Impeachment, Trump is GLOAT, a titanic figure capable of directing armies with a single tweet.
Trump certainly richly deserves impeachment and his Republican supporters are a group of craven cowards, a gang of lickspittles unparalleled in American history, but I think it’s offensive to assert that Trump somehow on January 6 rose to the occasion of serving as an effective Field Marshal for his impromptu army. And the word “army” is a misnomer as well. The rioters that surrounded the Capitol building were a mob and the salient feature of a mob is that it can’t be controlled. Once the riot began, there was nothing Trump could have done to halt the mayhem. In fact, if Trump had gone to the Capitol building and announced that Joe Biden had won the election, the rioters would have torn him limb from limb for betraying his own cause. If Trump had, in fact, disavowed the rioters, they would have come for him and burned down the White House.
Clearly, the House’s best argument is that Trump’s unprecedented attack on the integrity of the election laid the groundwork for the riot. In this country, Presidents concede to their adversaries once the election results are known, certified, and legally accepted as valid. Trump is known for violating norms and his gravest offense was his refusal to concede the validity of the election. This is not a crime but it is an exceptional and destructive transgression against political norms. Impeachment is a farce as a “trial”. It is, as conceded generally, a “political” process. Trump’s crimes were political, not criminal, and the political process of impeachment is a valid instrument for holding him accountable. But by treating Trump’s rather vapid speech as the direct incitement to riot and, then, accusing the former President of not shutting down the violent festivities with a single propitious tweet is, indeed, absurd and will give cover to the President’s pusillanimous allies when they vote to acquit.
The nonsense quotient in media coverage of the impeachment proceedings is high. A Senator from Maine appears on TV to defend the proposition that Trump’s so-called “incendiary” rhetoric on the morning of the riot triggered the attack on the Capitol. The Senator observes that one of the President’s Republican supporters has erred in arguing against Trump’s role in causing the riot. The Maine Senator says: “I know that my friend (referring to the Trump supporter) went to law school as I did. So we learned the same thing. There’s no question that ‘but for’ Trump calling his supporters to Washington on January 6th, this riot would never have occurred. ‘But for’ Trump’s incitement, there is no attack on the Capitol.” The Senator has apparently misremembered his law school education. There is no jurisdiction in the United States that regards ‘but for’ causation as the proper legal test for establishing the relationship between and act and its consequences. To the contrary, tort law insists that the idea of ‘but for’ causation not be the measure for determining legal responsibility for the consequences of a bad act. In most jurisdictions, causation is determined by the formula that an act must play a “substantial role” that “foreseeably” results in the adverse outcome. In Minnesota, at least, it is an error to instruct jurors that causation is established if an outcome would not have occurred “but for” some certain event. So the Senator on TV is asserting an entirely improper and legally inapposite standard for establishing a causal relationship between events and their outcomes.
Why is this so? A truck is hurtling toward a collision with another vehicle. The truckdriver stops at a roadside café for a cup of coffee. The waitress has just learned that her husband is having an affair with another woman. A text message to that effect has appeared on her cell-phone. She goes into the rest room to cry for a few minutes locked in a toilet stall. As a result, the truckdriver’s order for coffee is delayed by 120 seconds. The woman emerges from the rest room with her make-up a little smeared and her eyes red. She serves the coffee to the truckdriver and, after he consumes it, he departs. Five minutes later the head-on collision occurs. Of course, if the truck driver had received his coffee 120 seconds earlier, the two vehicles would not have collided at the time and place on the highway where the accident occurred – indeed, the accident would have been wholly avoided. But for the roadside café, the accident would not have happened. But for the delay in serving the coffee, the accident would not have happened. But for the text message, the accident would not have happened. But for the adulterous love affair, the accident would not have happened. But for the invention of the text-messaging feature on cell phones, the accident would not have happened. But for the invention of cell phones in general, the accident would not have happened. But for scientific developments leading to the invention of the cell phone (that is the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum), the accident would not have happened. And so it goes. The scope of “but for” causation is infinite. But for God’s creation of humanity (and, in particular, his fashioning of Eve from Adam’s rib), the accident would not have happened. And God is not liable for the torts of his creatures.
12.
The vaccination process, now apparently stalled, has proceeded in exactly the wrong sequence. Of course, we can all agree that the physicians and nurses combating the illness should be the first to receive protection. But it seems highly questionable that the next priority should be elderly people confined in nursing homes or living in group settings. (I have just heard on the news a cheerful and optimistic account of the vaccine being administered to a number of elderly nuns cloistered in a convent in northern Minnesota.) Obviously, the vaccine should be administered to those who are the most likely to spread the illness. A group of nuns, all of them older than 80 years of age, isolated in a convent in northern Minnesota in the Winter is not likely to be a vector for the transmission of disease. It would be best to corral those people frequenting taverns during the Super Bowl game, for instance, and vaccinate them. In fact, the folks who are most adamant about their alleged right to go into public places without wearing masks are those who should be targeted for early vaccination. If vaccinations were conducted in pubs and singles’ bars that group of people most likely to spread the virus would be neutralized as vectors for infection. But, of course, this would affront most people’s notions of equity – why should we vaccinate a group of Scofflaws who refuse to acknowledge that a virus even exists? Of course, it’s because those people are most likely to spread the disease.
13.
The vaccine is now available at pharmacies. My wife stays up past midnight to get me an appointment for an injection at Walmart in Albert Lea. She is remarkably devoted. I wouldn’t be able to put up with the delays and indignities of the process necessary to secure the vaccination.
14.
The defense of Donald Trump’s impeachment had slid into total craziness. Trump’s lawyer, Bruce Cox, speaks vehemently about the President being persecuted by such people as Ben Roethlisberger. This man is the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Evidently, Cox means Ben Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, a Republican official bullied by Trump about election results in that State. Even more bizarrely, David Schoen, another of Trump’s attorneys, asserts that a tweet by one of the President’s loyal fans saying that she was “bringing the calvary to DC” was a reference to the passion and crucifixion of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Schoen accused the prosecution counsel of falsifying the tweet by (apparently) covertly correcting the embarrassing misspelling – that is, “Calvary”, Mount Golgotha where Jesus was crucified for “cavalry”, a group of mounted horseman frequently seen in Westerns rescuing embattled pioneers under Indian attack. Everyone has heard of the phrase “bringing the cavalry” or the “cavalry to the rescue”. No one has ever intentionally used the locution of “bringing the calvary” although plenty have inadvertently substituted the high place near Jerusalem for the armed horsemen (“cavaliers”). Schoen’s allies contacted the hapless fool who had made this mistake in her tweet and got her to say, disingenuously, that she had, indeed, meant “bringing the calvary” to Trump’s rally, although, of course, no one has any idea what this might mean. In light of the bellicose nature of the mob, perhaps, they were planning to crucify Mike Pence – they built a gallows on the Capitol lawn and, I suppose, could have erected a cross as well. The argument is not a good look for Schoen, who is Jewish and has demanded that the defense pause for his Shabbat observances.
15.
Trump is acquitted by the Senate although a majority votes for his conviction: 57 aye and 43 nay. After the proceeding, Majority Leader, Schumer, a Democrat, gives an impassioned speech, arguing that all Republicans who voted for acquittal will be stained with infamy. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, gives a more temperate speech, excoriating Donald Trump and, in fact, encouraging his criminal conviction, but arguing, with reason I think, that it is unconstitutional to try to an officer who is no longer incumbent to his position. (This question is close. When I read arguments opposing what McConnell’s position I find them equally, if not even more, compelling.)
In any event, Trump announces that he is “back”, a godsend to the media both liberal and conservative because he is their meal-ticket. The former president’s role is that of necessary villain, the buffoonish if deadly Joker from Gotham City.
16.
The skies are bright and it is 18 below zero an hour after dawn. This kind of cold can have serious consequences. Whilst walking my dog, I stooped to pick up some steaming feces and found my plastic sack from Walmart all shredded. But I made this discovery only after picking up the stuff with my numb fingers. My hand was soiled and so I couldn’t put back on my mitten. I was only three blocks from my house, but by the time I reached the door, my fingers felt seared, as if burnt, and I had no feeling in my knuckles and the edges of my hand on which there were bright brown scales of frozen dog shit. It would be embarrassing to go into an Emergency Room with a hand ruined by this sort of mishap. However, at home, the throbbing pain in my fingers increased for a few minutes, then, gradually subsided.
17.
In the morning, I creep down to my shower-stall in the cold basement. Above the concrete block enclosure, a dark opening at the top of the cellar wall extends out into the crawlspace under my back porch. This area is unheated and, during winter, can be terribly cold, exhaling a faint breath of dust and dirt and ice into the area above the shower. I’ve taken to showering in my socks and sweat shirt and pants – this means that I don’t have to expose my skin to the raw chill in the basement but, also, complicates my dressing and short drive to work. Generally, my drenched underwear and stocking cap (which I also wear in the shower) are frozen solid by the time I reach my office. The heap of sweats in the basement dries quickly – this kind of cold desiccates; it makes a mummy of the world.
18.
I suppose it’s a benefit that the water that comes from my taps at home is glacial, so cold and bright to the palate that it induces headaches. This brilliant ray of water reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s water in “North and South” that would “surely burn you tongue/...drawn from the cold hard mouth/ Of the world, derived from the rocky breasts/...knowledge, forever, flowing...”
19.
Two Winter storms in swift succession pummel Texas and much of the southern Midwest. Vaccine is shipped from Memphis, Tennessee and Kalamazoo, Michigan. Both supply sources are compromised and the vaccine serum can’t be shipped. In Texas, for instance, where millions have lost electrical power, there is no way to safely store vaccine and the Press is replete with stories of hospitals and pharmacies setting up ad hoc operations to inject anyone in the neighborhood to avoid wasting the precious stuff. Minnesota has run out of the vaccine by the beginning of the week on which I am scheduled to be injected and, so, the injection is now indefinitely deferred. I was planning on wearing a jaunty Caribbean-patterned short-sleeves shirt for the vaccination. But, now, this will have to wait.
20.
Because new Covid cases are plummeting in Minnesota (and, I suppose, because I expected to be vaccinated on the morrow), I drove to Minneapolis to deliver Christmas gifts to my mother and attend an exhibition at the Walker Art Center. Since there was no gathering for Christmas, we have been storing my mother’s gifts – they are bulky, fragile, and not readily shipped. I haven’t been to an art museum for a year and, intrigued by paintings by the German artist, Michaela Eichwald, I spent some time on-line securing a ticket – museum admission is limited so that social distancing can be implemented.
Cold weather continues, although it is not as bitterly frigid as last week. At dawn, the temperature is about two degrees below zero with a light dusting of snow. The new-fallen snow, not measurable as precipitation, coats the highways and, ground into the concrete by tires, becomes deadly, invisible ice. On the freeway to Minneapolis, I pass a number of wrecks, generally downstream from access ramps where cars have tracked ice onto the road. Cars and trucks caught on the black ice are catapulted far off the road and, some of them, are upside down in the ditch. A little bit south of Northfield, a road advisory sign warns that there is a crash ahead and the left lane is blocked in ten miles. About six miles later, on a grim curving upgrade where the highway climbs out of a slough, everything stops dead. I can see the cars and pickups tapping their brakes ahead, a Morse-code of flashing that signifies that the hill is so icy that hard braking would cause a crash. On a knoll, there’s an old Catholic church, a gloomy castle with high bell-tower rising above some stark retaining walls. The blank faces of the retaining walls along the lane twisting up to the church look like the sort of place where captured soldiers or hostages would be executed by firing squad. For many years, the bell-tower of the Church was illumined by a bright, yellow flashing light – a strange display that didn’t seem to signal hospitality so much as a warning: the hill and its freight of heavy, brown brick Church was a reef on which night-going vessels might be wrecked. The traffic on the adjacent freeway stops completely on the highway and for twenty minutes the double column of cars lurch forward only at irregular intervals. At last, I pass the crash scene, not in the left lane any longer, but rather a debris field strewn along the right where there are some cop cars and a flatbed trailer to haul out the vehicular casualties. A small car is crushed beyond recognition. The semi-truck that did the damage sits placidly on the roadside without any marks of damage that I can see.
Fortunately, the highways in the Cities are dry, although visibility is impaired by crusts of grime that accumulate on the windshields and windows. I’ve been to the Metro Area on only one other occasion in the last year – that was for the hearing at the Court of Appeals when my neighbor Gabriel Ramirez-Hernandez was admitted to the Bar. Some of the roads have changed and traffic patterns seem more complex and unpredictable.
I reach the Walker Art Center twenty minutes before my timed admission and so I sit in the frigid garage under the museum on the hill and read a magazine. It’s an odd experience to walk the galleries wearing a surgical mask. There are a few other visitors, not significantly less than would be touring the place mid-week during the day. The galleries are fully staffed with security guards who seem to be have been trained to unobtrusively drift away from visitors so as to maintain reasonable distance. The middle urinal in the toilet is marked as “out-of-service” to keep people from standing side-by-side. The mask over my nose and mouth fogs my glasses and I see the art through a blurry fog. Everything is very silent. It’s as if some kind of interfering lens has been set between my eyes and the art works. The steps are stumble-hazards.
21.
The calamity in Texas, persisting snow and ice that has flattened the house of cards that is the State’s power grid, has ramifying consequences. Ice locks up the heaps of lignite used for fuel for thermal production of electrical power. Other gas-fired plants can’t get fuel because the oil fields and refineries are snow-bound and LP pipelines freeze. The wind turbines in west Texas are similarly paralyzed in armatures of ice. The electrical power fails or has to be rationed by rolling black-outs. This, in turn, cause water pumping plants to cease activity. And, when they are no longer driving currents of water through their pipes, the system freezes. So millions find themselves without water. Roads are snow-covered and Texas lacks the resources necessary to plow its highways or salt them for ice. This means that food deliveries to grocery stores can’t be made. As a result, the food supply chain collapse and stores have to close or severely limit admission – there are said to be people waiting in lines for two or three hours in the bitter cold only to find that the grocery shelves are mostly bare. When power is restored, burst pipe-lines flood houses and ceilings and floors collapse. The houses themselves are built on concrete pads over windy crawlspaces and poorly insulated. Cold invades houses and kills people. Unfamiliar with ice, hundreds of people venture out poorly prepared and fall (breaking arms and legs and skulls) or crash on the highways. Hospitals, already over-burdened with Covid victims, are now even more crowded. Some people set up braziers in their homes and burn charcoal with the result that they are killed by carbon monoxide. And so it goes.
If you are on the Right wing of the political perspective, you will blame reliance on renewable energy sources – those damned, unsightly wind turbines. This is a false narrative. If you are to the Left, you will blame rampant climate change. This is also false. Wind turbines comprise less than 13% of Texas repertoire of power sources. Therefore, energy reduction due to those turbines freezing doesn’t account for the failure. Similarly, weather in Texas is always extreme – blazing heat or deadly cold. In fact, by definition, weather is always extreme – what we recall about weather are its memorable events: catastrophic wind storms, floods, tornados, and blizzards. There are historical precedents for the recent cold weather in Texas.
A rarely acknowledged reason for deadly weather calamities is population increase. An infra-structure designed to accommodate ten million will not survive stress when strained to provide power and services to a hundred million. It’s one thing for a utility to correct damage that has resulted in power loss to 50,000 people; it’s another thing entirely to scramble to repair weather damage affecting several millions. The true cause for the catastrophe in Texas is that there are too many people competing for resources that are too scarce.
The only way climate change will be controlled is if human populations that produce this change are reduced. But no one is talking about this aspect of the problem. This same analysis applies to wild fires and flooding – people are living in places where the terrain and meteorological conditions don’t support large populations. The Covid virus itself is a symptom of overpopulation. First, urban development over-runs wild enclaves and creates a permeable interface between human beings and viral agents in creatures like bats and mosquitos and rodents. Second, density of human populations accelerates community-spread of contagion and health care infrastructure, already marginal in many places, can’t keep pace with the disease. I have a suspicion that the Covid virus is a symptom that global carrying capacity for human populations is reaching its practical limits.
22.
On the long road to Minneapolis, I have the radio tuned to MPR (Minnesota Public Radio). Michael Osterholm is answering listener questions. The program is unsettling. Osterholm likens the situation to people on a beach in the tropics enjoying a warm, clear day with gentle surf washing over the sand. Four-hundred miles away a hurricane is surging across the sea toward the resort. No one heeds calls to evacuate – it seems implausible that this fine, mild weather could change into something hostile and deadly. But the hurricane’s approach is inexorable and, when it arrives, it will seem equally implausible that this holocaust of wind and flooding could possibly have been ignored. The point of Osterholm’s extended metaphor is that variants of the Covid virus are approaching the United States. Most particularly, there is an United Kingdom mutation called B.1.1.7. that is said to be 70% more infectious – that is 70% more efficient in attaching itself to human cells and destroying them. This variant is more lethal. At this time, vaccination create antibodies to the U.K. variant and remain efficacious, but there are said to be viral mutations from South Africa and the Amazon at Manaus that have developed vaccine resistence. Osterholm cautions that there will be a massive and deadly spike in infections in mid-March and April that will dwarf previous surges. Unfortunately, Osterholm’s past record with respect to predictions as to the course of this disease has been uncannily accurate and so there’s no reason not to credit this prognostication. It seems clear that the disease and its depredations will be very much with us through some time in 2022.
23.
On a grey, wet day with the temperature about 35 degrees, I drove to Hy-Vee for my Covid vaccination. Hy-Vee operates a pharmacy within its grocery store on the outskirts of our town. My appointment was for an injection at 10:00 am. I arrived ten minutes earlier and received the vaccination very soon after I went to the counter and identified myself. Before being vaccinated I had to confirm my birthday and address, something that I did verbally. (The appointment was made by my wife who has been very diligent and patient in working through obstacles to my access to this procedure.)
The vaccine was administered in a nondescript office. There was some confusion as to where I would sit. Initially, I sat in the metal chair from which the provider made the injection. But this wasn’t right and so I moved to a bench along the wall of the little, cluttered room. The woman who vaccinated me had a small tray made from grey plastic containing a needle in a plastic package. She swabbed some alcohol on my arm and, after telling me that the vaccine was made by Pfizer, injected my left arm near the bicep. The injection was essentially painless – a tiny nip and, then, nothing, no other sensation. The woman handed me a card advising that I should sit outside the office for 15 minutes to ascertain if there were any side-effects. I had seen an acquaintance earlier waiting against the wall facing into the grocery store and so I talked with him for a few minutes. He said that he felt all right. I went a few seats away to an empty chair and sat, facing an aisle in the pharmacy where adult diapers and other items for urinary incontinence were on display. About four or five people were waiting for the time to lapse so that the could leave the store. I read an article on my cell-phone about a trove of colored photographs taken sixty years ago at a remote Yu’pik village in Alaska. No one knows for sure who took the pictures but there is a woman in several of them carrying a KLM bag, probably someone employed in the early sixties as a stewardess on a Royal Dutch Airlines plane. (In those days, airplanes flying over the top of the world had range limited by fuel and had to gas up in Alaska before completing their trip from Indonesia or Australia to Europe.) The identity of the person who took the pictures remains unknown but many people in the small community were able to recognize themselves or their kin in the pictures. About half of the people shown in the photographs are now dead. The children shown against the bare icy mountains have grown to be old themselves. One little boy shown carrying a bucket full of snow with a dog trotting happily at his side was identified as someone who died in 1973. The snow was melted for bathing water. Of course, the little dog is long gone as well and, probably, wholly forgotten, but people in the village still remembered the boy’s name and some of them cried to see him resurrected in the old photographs.
At 10:07, I was free to leave. I brought the card with the time written on it to the pharmacy counter and was given a package of papers providing information as to the vaccine that had just been administered to me. In the package was another card, the size of a carte d’ visite – I am supposed to bring this card when I come for my second vaccine injection in mid-March.
There is wet ice everywhere. The snowstorm on the weekend covered the ground with four or five inches of snow polished into ice by the tires of cars. It would be ironic to slip on the ice and crack my skull while crossing the street and parking lot after my vaccination against the Covid.
24.
Rarely have two predictions been so starkly opposed. Michael Osterholm, the chairman of the Department of Infectious Disease at the University of Minnesota, declares that there will be a terrifying spike in the disease in the middle of March. A doctor named Marty Makary argues that “the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection” and says that “Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
Dr. Makary’s prognostication appears in the Wall Street Journal on February 19, 2021. The doctor observes that the probable “capture rate” by testing is 1 positive to 6.5 actual cases.. If this is correct, the 28 million positive covid tests creates an inference that 55% of the American public has already been infected, mostly without any symptoms. If this is true, herd immunity, arising from a combination of vaccinations added to the majority, albeit slim, of people who already have natural antibodies to the disease, requires the conclusion that the virus will have no place to go by the middle of April. Markary mentions the new strains of covid circulating in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and South Africa but only to remark that these mutations occur against a backdrop of new infection numbers that are steadily, and dramatically, decreasing.
Both experts can’t be right. So we’ll have to hold our breath and wait to see how this works out.
25.
Winter’s last blizzard buried the town in snow the day before my second corona-virus vaccine shot. Late-season blizzards spin up in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico and, then, sail northeast picking up vast amounts of water from snow-melt in the Rocky Mountains. These storms are warm, piling up big accumulations of luke-warm, cardiac-arrest-producing slush – two feet fell in Denver and, when the slow-moving behemoth of a blizzard reached Austin, eight inches fell here.
Around mid-morning on a Monday, the snow fall in town commenced and the storm continued until dusk – times were hard to ascertain, confused: day-light saving time had begun overnight on the preceding weekend and car clocks and other time-pieces disagreed among themselves, and, even, worse disagreed with the quality and timbre of the light sifting through the leafless trees. It seemed either earlier than it was by the dial on the clock (or its digital display) or later, depending upon your mood.
Where cars and people had gone, the snow was compacted to ice and hardened overnight into scabrous patches, radiant with water running over their surfaces and, accordingly, very slippery. On Tuesday morning, when I parked my car outside the Hy-Vee pharmacy, the way into the store for my injection was perilous. I thought it would be ironic if I fell on the way to my second vaccine injection, smashed apart a bone or fractured my skull. (I observe that I expressed the same concern before my first injection.) Everywhere the thaw was pervasive – Winter’s last siege was already withdrawing its pale forces into the vaporous and tepid skies.
26.
In the grocery store, I sat on a chair facing display racks of sanitary napkins. The technician called me into the nondescript office where I sat on a Naugahyde-upholstered bench while the woman verified my age and name. The second injection was considerably more painful from the first – perhaps, the angle of the needle was oblique. I felt the prick and, then, sensed the fluid pumping into my arm – on the first injection, I had felt little or nothing. But these sensations were brief and I went outside to continue my vigil among the tampons and feminine hygiene products. I read liner notes to an old album by Astor Piazzola that seemed written in some sort of half-illegible foreign language. I also read a DVD pamphlet extracted from the Criterion edition of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.
This time the injection site was painful, burning a little and, even, throbbing. Of course, the recipients of vaccine are to regard these symptoms as salutary – they show that the medication is working. After returning my card showing that I had waited the requisite 15 minute interval, I walked through the store and bought a few items for lunch.
Later, I discovered that the injection site was bloody. The nurse had pressed a little decal onto my arm, a round strip of adhesive equipped with a porthole through which the location of the injection on my upper bicep could be observed. The porthole was occluded with blackish blood.
It was about 10:15 in the morning when I picked my way across the icy parking lot, returning to my car.
27.
My blood is black. But what color is the virus? The media shows the virus as reddish-yellow, glowing a little like a dark sun.
What color is the vaccine? White, I suppose, filaments of lacy white like jet condensation trails dissolving in the firmament.
28.
During the day of the injection, I felt a little sluggish but, otherwise, well. However, around one a.m., I woke with a sense of ominous dread. I was shivering and couldn’t get warm. I got up and went to the toilet and, while standing there to urinate, the cold disoriented me and I was a little dizzy. Back in bed, I shivered and was unable to sleep.
Someone told me that the vaccine induced vivid, lucid dreams. This wasn’t my experience. But, somewhere between sleep and waking, I found myself hovering in the air with a sickle-moon under my bare toes, floating on the little sharp rung of moon as if I were the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin perches like a parrot on her own roost of sickle moon, sharp as a razor, and held under her feet by a little subaltern angel in a red tunic. The points of that crescent moon are upturned and look like the blades of box-cutters.
You are standing on “sables”, I thought. But I knew that the word was really Saebels – that is, German for “sabres.” Why are the “sables” sabres? During the day, I had spent a few minutes translating a story by Hebel (rhymes with Saebel) in which a Jew hides in a sack that is beaten by a hussar with the flat of his sabre. The hussar asks a bystander: “What is in the bag?” “Glass,” the bystander lies. Whereupon the Jew in the bag pretends to be glass, crying out in a high-pitched voiced “kling, kling, kling” – simulating, that is, the tinkle of glass breaking.
I suppose I am a Jew in a bag, broken like glass, and my feet are black with coagulated covid-virus, although the co-vid is, as I have imagined, reddish-yellow and the vaccine is white as the new-fallen snow.
There is pain at the heel of my foot. The Heavenly Woman will be enemy to the serpent and she shall crush its head with the heel of her foot.
29.
By mid-afternoon on the day after my vaccine injection, I felt a little wobbly. Later, in the evening, fever made me very cold, shuddering, and slightly nauseated. I took three ibuprofen and went to bed sick.
I dreamed that I was in North Dakota – in fact, in Grand Forks. I found myself searching for something in a sleek modern shopping mall, an atrium elevated above parking lots below at the center of a glass skyscraper. I was waiting for someone and, so, went into a confectionary named Hygge. The place featured Danish candies and pastries. I sat against the wall, alone in the restaurant. A waitress brought me pictures of various kinds of pastries printed on color cards. But the text was in Danish or some other Scandinavian language that I couldn’t decipher. I ordered by handing the waitress one of the cards. Some Goths entered the confectionary and sat next to me. They were involved in aggressive role-playing, cos-play of a kind that was strange to me, and I was very afraid that they would force me to join in the skit that they were acting out. The goths were vampire-pale and dressed in mourning, sable it seemed. I drew a pall over my face, a black veil, and didn’t move, hoping they would not allude to me in any way.
The waitress came with a pale, torpedo-shaped pastry with cream filling protruding at both tips. The pastry was on a yellow plate. A gutter running the length of the stainless steel table where I was seated next to the Goths was now full of round black candies like malted milk balls.
It makes me hungry even now, thinking about the pastry and candy. I was about to eat the pastry and lifted the confection to my mouth, but, then, I woke up.
30.
Here is the context:
Jury selection has begun in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis policeman, who killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. The lawyers are seeking 12 people (and two alternates) so benighted and ignorant (or so dishonest) to say that they have no opinions on the most widely publicized criminal indictment of the 21st century. At stake are parts of the City of Minneapolis that will undoubtedly be put to the torch – indeed, probably regardless of the outcome. After nine jurors have been selected in the trial, the City has a press conference to advise that it has paid 27 million dollars to the family of George Floyd, a settlement that can’t be justified on any rational terms. Of course, the jurors already impaneled learn of the settlement, a payment that seems to acknowledge that the City is not merely at fault, but terribly, terribly culpable. Two of the jurors, quite reasonably, regard the settlement as an admission of fault by the City and, therefore, Derek Chauvin, and have to be dismissed from the panel. (They are promptly replaced.) The exorbitant and lawless settlement is a transparent attempt to buy peace – that is, appeasement of the Floyd family. But appeasement never works. It is like apologizing. Political enemies demand an apology – the first response is denial. Then, political enemies and the media and the public, in general, demand an apology. And, so, a lame non-apology is issued, something to the effect that “I’m sorry you felt aggrieved.” Political enemies, the media, the public, and fellow officials decry the insincerity of the apology. And, so, an authentic apology is issued, this time involving much groveling. Tears are shed. Political enemies, then, declare the apology as an admission of guilt and insincere in any event. No one is satisfied with the apology because there have been, as it is said, “no consequences.” No further apologies are likely to be forthcoming but the damage has been done. (One of President Trump’s shrewd strategies was to never apologize for anything ever; he understood that apologies are never accepted no matter how humiliating and authentic.) The same is true with respect to paying money to appease activists who have opportunistically latched onto some spectacular miscarriage of racial justice. No amount of money can be paid in recompense for the offense. And, so, it is pointless to pay extravagant and unfounded damages with respect to these types of cases – payment of “blood money” never appeases anyone.
Meanwhile, some poor ignorant kid goes to a massage parlor in a suburb of Atlanta and guns down four people, three of them apparently Asian sex-workers. Not satisfied with this massacre, the kid goes into Atlanta itself and shoots four more people to death, again some of them Asian masseuses. He hops into his car and heads for Florida planning to murder some more people there. Fortunately, the boy is captured. He denies any racial animus. Instead, he says that he is a “sex addict” and that his plan was to eliminate sources of temptation. Photographs show a callow, freckle-faced kid with reddish hair and a scraggly neck-beard – he’s obviously someone who can’t get laid without paying for service, pathetic, except for the fact, that he’s also a mass-murderer.
These killings occur in a fraught environment in which Asians have been targeted for abuse due to their alleged complicity in importing the Covid virus into the United States – an obviously nonsensical claim. But activists and their lackeys in the media, immediately, seize upon the killings as evidence of systemic racism against Asians. This leads to utterly bizarre news coverage. First, officials investigating the murder of eight people are put in the position of publicly stating that they aren’t sure that the killing constitute a “hate crime.” Obviously, hatred in a virulent form is necessary to induce mass homicide, but the word “hate” in this context means a crime that is racially motivated – and a racial motivation is exactly what the feckless suspect denies. So we have the peculiar spectacle of the media speculating as to whether the mass murderer, who shot eight people to death, committed a “hate crime.” Some Asian activists take the stage to say that their people have always been accused of being “the ideal minority.” By this, I assume, that Asians (or, at least, some of them) would like to considered as a “non-ideal minority” – that is, perhaps, they would enjoy the specious and utterly destructive glamor of being regarded as intrinsically murderous, stylishly lazy, and sexually aggressive. Exactly why Asians denounce White people for regarding them as an “ideal minority” is a little vague. There follows analysis that Donald Trump vilified Asians as carriers of the disease, an ailment that he dubbed “the Chinese virus” or the “Kung Flu” – thus, by sleight of hand, the former President can be denounced as the cause of the Atlanta Asian masseuse massacre. This is consistent with a liberal media culture that regards Donald Trump as the fons et origo of everything evil in American society.
On the morning news, an angry woman is denouncing White privilege. She makes her points in media-friendly manner – that is, she is succinct, hard-hitting, articulate, and outraged. When she has concluded her diatribe, her tone of voice changes completely – it is now soft, husky, post-coital. “Thank you having me,” she breathes to the interviewer. She doesn’t like White people in general, but has no problem with White members of the media willing to “have her.”
31.
So it is mid-March. What about predictions made a month ago?
It seems a mixed bag. The virus hasn’t vanished. On the other hand, it hasn’t exactly surged either. (Of course, we will have to wait to see what occurs after Spring Break when, once again, thousands of young people have converged on beaches and, more dangerously, bars in Florida.) In Minnesota, positivity rates as to infections detected on testing is at 4.1% on March 18, 2021. (This is down from a high of almost 16% in late December and above the lowest recorded rate of 3.3% in late February.) State-wide hospitalizations have doubled from about 39 to 74 – not a good indicator but not alarming either; the high for hospitalizations was something like 340 in late December. 77% of the population older than 65 has been vaccinated and 23% of the State at large has received shots. It’s estimated that undetected cases of Covid-19 amount for about 1.5 million infections that have not yet been discovered. Presumably, the State may reach herd immunity levels of resistance to the virus by the first of May.
In my office, three of the five lawyers became ill with Covid. I have been spared and one other partner. A secretary and receptionist have also had the sickness. Our office is comprised of nine employees – five of us have had Covid.
32.
I have an early phone conference on Thursday, now two days after my second vaccine injection. When I arise before dawn, I feel bright, young, invigorated. Perhaps, the vaccine has this effect. My mood is good and I feel strong and capable.
For some reason, I feel like I could sing a round or canon with myself. One voice would be low and guttural like a Tuvan throat-singer. The other voice would be a high, crystalline tenor. The vaccine fills my veins with fat, yellow sunshine.
March 18, 2019
