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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Ignoring the President, maintaining your goals, honoring your purpose
By
Published: Mar 24, 2020
Category:
Beyond Classification
March 30. All he had to do is keep his mouth shut and let us masterfully self-isolate for another week and then see how the infection curve looks, and because it’s likely to look just awful, extend the stay home guidelines. He couldn’t do that. So at his press conference last night, we got this:
“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. America will again and soon be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. A lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
Weeks or months?
“I’m not looking at months, I can tell you right now.”
FACT: Trump’s hotel/golf empire is unusually dependent on a handful of properties. Doral alone produces $75 million a year —more than his DC, Chicago, Vancouver, Waikiki, Aberdeen and Vegas hotels combined. The county has now shut Doral down.
“We can’t turn that off and think it’s going to be wonderful. There’ll be tremendous repercussions. There will be tremendous death from that. Death. You’re talking about death. Probably more death from that than anything that we’re talking about with respect to the virus.”
But if we don’t self-isolate, won’t many more people die?
“The whole concept of death is terrible, but there’s a tremendous difference between something under 1% and 4 or 5 or even 3%… we can do two things at one time… We have a very active flu season, more active than most. It’s looking like it’s heading to 50,000 or more deaths – deaths, not cases. 50,000 deaths — which is, that’s a lot. And you look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about. That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody no more driving of cars. So we have to do things to get our country open.”
Why wasn’t Dr. Fauci standing behind him during this press conference? Perhaps because he weighed in on that idea last week: “That’s totally way out. That’s really a false equivalency… I don’t think with any moral conscience you could say, ‘Why don’t we just let it rip and happen, and let X per cent of the people die?’ I don’t understand that reasoning at all.”
Sarah Palin claimed that Obamacare would institute “death panels.” Right prediction, wrong President. Now a monster virus is rolling toward us, its engine pulling an endless procession of death. You and I built a wall around ourselves — a stronger, better wall than that asshole could ever build — and just when we’re getting past the blind fear and are feeling surges of mutual support and making declarations of love, he wants to declare victory. If he’s wrong — and he’s been right about nothing yet… well, listen to a smart person, Marc Lipsitch, epidemiology professor at the Harvard and director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics: “Now is the time to tighten restrictions on contacts that could transmit the virus, not loosen them. If we let up now, we can be virtually certain that health care will be overwhelmed in many if not all parts of the country. This is the view of every well-informed infectious epidemiologist I know of.”
The headlines this morning were all about the stimulus. But this is the real news: In the interest of his suddenly declining fortune, this President will let you die. Call it what it is: capitalist fascism. And the form it takes is genocide.
Suggestion: The networks should position cameras 24/7 outside the emergency entrance of many hospitals and run those scenes in the upper corner of every program.
Before the President spoke, I was planning tentative themes for the Butler week. Today would be love, because I was seeing a lot of it in my mail and my heart. Wednesday: food, because, as Brecht said, “First feed the face, then talk right and wrong.” Thursday… but then I thought about my friends in recovery and their magnificent, hard won steadiness: “One day at a time.” And then I recalled something Gurumayi said: “You are loved more than you can ever know.” Fool that I am, I believed her. Doing this Butler is an exercise in sharing that.
THE REACTION TO TRUMP’S PRESS CONFERENCE
Gabriel Sherman, special correspondent at Vanity Fair magazine: “This is the first time I am genuinely scared. I must have been in denial before. But that presser changed everything.”
Twitter: “If one of my daughters or grandchildren needed my respirator, I’d volunteer in a heartbeat. For the sake of the stock market, NO.”
Jon Lovett: “Trump is a wartime president. And like a great wartime president, first you say there won’t be a war, then you refuse to protect your soldiers, then you lie about losses, then you complain about your press, and then you surrender.”
Twitter: “My 68th birthday is tomorrow. I never thought I’d feel so expendable. I taught school for 36 years. I am a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend. Why do so many Republicans and Trump feel like I’m expendable?”
Twitter: “Because fighting in and surviving horrific wars, The Great Depression, and polio weren’t enough sacrifices for our grandparents.”
Twitter: “Make all seniors take out reverse mortgages and pay for one last carnival cruise into the sunset.”
Hard to believe, but Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick suggests that senior citizens would be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to save the U.S. economy for their kids and grandchildren
JOAN BUCK’S THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Focus on what you can do indoors. Stay kind, listen. Notice how much better the air is. Don’t think about the macro. Don’t speculate. Don’t try to fix anything but that mess in the sink. Fold the laundry.
A MESSAGE FROM DAVID HOCKNEY
A watercolor: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring”
ITALIAN MAYORS
“Those hairdressers coming to your home… Who is going to see you? Don’t you know your coffin will be closed?”
GOOD NEWS (ABOUT ASTEROIDS)
Three asteroids with Earth-crossing orbits missed the Earth. None of them was large enough to destroy civilization but two were large enough to do serious local damage.
TODAY’S SONG
Josh Ritter. “Lights.” From The Beast in Its Tracks.
I cannot recall when I’ve felt like this
It’s been a long, old time if I ever did.
So if I act strange, I’m hoping you’ll forgive
I’ve got your light
I’ve got your light in my eyes.
On some distant moon I lie on my back
For a glimpse of blue ‘fore it’s gone to black
It used to be like this, now it’s not like that
I’ve got your light
I’ve got your light in my eyes.
Every heart on earth is dark half the time
Oh I try and try but I can’t read your mind.
Sometimes I can’t see, that don’t mean I’m blind
It’s just your light
It’s just your light in my eyes, in my eyes, in my eyes…
TODAY’S POEM
“Problema 3,” by Greg Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry,
The Fulton St. Foodtown is playing Motown and I’m surprised
at how quickly my daughter picks up the tune. And soon
the two of us, plowing rows of goods steeped in fructose
under light thick as corn oil, are singing Baby,
I need your lovin, unconscious of the lyrics’ foreboding.
My happy child riding high in the shopping cart as if she’s
cruising the polished aisles on a tractor laden with imperishable
foodstuffs. Her cornball father enthusiastically prompting
with spins and flourishes and the double-barrel fingers
of the gunslinger’s pose. But we hear it as we round the rice
and Goya aisle, that other music, the familiar exchange of anger,
the war drums of parent and child. The boy wants, what, to be
carried? to eat the snacks right from his mother’s basket?
What does it matter, he is making a scene. With no self-interest
beyond the pleasure of replacing wonder with wonder, my daughter
asks me to name the boy’s offense. I offer to buy her ice cream.
How can I admit recognizing the portrait of fear the mother’s face
performs, the inherited terror of non-conformity frosted with the fear
of being thought disrespected by, or lacking the will to discipline
one’s child? How can I account for both the cultural and the inter-
cultural? The boy’s cries rising like hosannas as the mother’s purse
falls from her shoulder. Her missed step from the ledge
of one of her stilted heels, passion loosed with each displaced
hairpin. His little jacket bunched at the collar where she has worked
the marionette. Later, when I’m placing groceries on the conveyor
belt and it is clear I’ve forgotten the ice cream, my daughter
tries her hand at this new algorithm of love, each word
punctuated by her little fist: boy, she commands, didn’t I tell you?
TODAY’S MOVIE: “SHOPLIFTERS”
Nothing seemed to be happening, just daily life. But I couldn’t see 5 seconds ahead. And there were big surprises, sometimes happy. I saw it in a theater with a 99% Japanese audience. Rapt silence throughout. At the end, applause. I’m with them: one of the best films I’ve seen in a decade. From the Times review: “His way of discreetly unwrapping stories and people is pleasurable; you never feel as if he’s gaming you. But it’s also a shrewd way to build suspense. Even when something out of the ordinary happens — as when this family kidnaps a child — — the movie’s pulse remains fairly steady even as yours begins racing.” [To stream it from Amazon, click here.]
BLACK HUMOR: MATH PROBLEM
Question: If a golf cart can move $1 million in cash, and America needs to move $500 billion from DC to Mar-a-Lago, how long will we have to delay making ventilators because all our factories are building golf carts?
Best answer: If you put $2 million in each cart: 250,000 carts will stretch bumper to bumper between DC and Mar-a-Lago, and back!
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LATE NIGHT
It starts Eastern, becomes “I Want to Know What Love Is.” With lights out, on intoxicants or not, this sends me into dreamland in a state something like peace. Krishna Das, from Kirtan Wallah.
