Amusements Rick McGinnis
It has been more than eight weeks now since we were told not to leave the house. At this point I’m not sure if I’m more dumbfounded that this even happened, or that the majority of the world, at least for the sake of appearances, agreed so placidly (at first) to put their lives on hold. If we didn’t understand it two months ago – it seems like so much longer now – we certainly now know that the delicate balance between suppressing a lethal outbreak and devastating the global economy was probably never possible in the first place.
Personally, I’m not complaining, but that’s because I’ve always been uniquely well-suited to a shut-in’s life. Admittedly my profession – journalism and some esoteric subset of professional photography – has been in such a steep decline for the last decade or so that the nearly total lack of work just feels like the usual winter freelance doldrums extended for a few more months. In any case, knowing that the rest of my peers are similarly underemployed has provided a camaraderie that’s absent, by and large, in a business that’s by design competitive and a zero-sum game for gigs.
But I can understand why not everyone might be so blasé about what is, by any yardstick except that of total war, a global catastrophe. Around six weeks into the North American lockdown, writer Andrew Sullivan published a post on New Yorkmagazine’s website that began with “I began to lose it this week.”
“My sleep patterns are totally screwed up,” he wrote, “and I find myself waking up tense several times a night, crashing out for 10 or 12 hours at a time. I wake up and want to go back to sleep. My appetite is waning, and my body longs for some weights to push and pull. My teeth grind all night long and my jaw is tense. I have all the time in the world to read and write, and yet I find myself anesthetized with ennui, procrastinating and distracting myself. Yes, I scan the news every day, often hourly, to discern any seeds of progress.”
I’m certain Sullivan’s dismal self-portrait applied to no small part of the locked down population, desperate for relief. And it was probably during the second month that the most obvious signs of rebellion against lockdown restrictions began to happen. It was around then that the libertarian magazine Reasonpublished a look back at the Cholera Riots that broke out in Europe during a pandemic nearly two hundred years ago. In the Prussian city of Konigsberg, a funeral for a carpenter turned into an attack on police headquarters, during which eight people were shot by military troops.
“The rioters believed that the carpenter had died not from cholera but from a medication prescribed to treat him,” author Jesse Walker writes, drawing on historian Richard S. Ross’ 2015 book Cholera in Prussia, 1831. “They also chafed at the quarantines and other cholera rules that interfered with their ability to go about their lives. Many of them believed a conspiracy theory that the disease itself was a government plot to cull the lower classes. By the chief of police’s account, the rioters shouted that ‘the doctors are poisoning the poor, the police drag them to the lazaret (hospital) and close up their houses, saying they have to go because they are poor.’”
There would, of course, be conspiracy theories abounding about the coronavirus – why should it be different than anything else? – and in early May the “Plandemic” video went viral, detailing a sinister plan by vaccine manufacturers to increase demand by government enforcement of social distancing to curtail herd immunity. Paranoia was bound to blossom in a world where billions of people were locked down with nothing but the internet to amuse or inform them, and even before that speculations about Bill Gates’ apparent advocacy of forced immunization and government plans for stepped-up microchipping and surveillance were ricocheting through Facebook feeds.
If there was any kind of dividing line emerging – or rather, thrusting itself into starker relief – it was whether you thought the experts were right, that the government was handling the crisis well, what it knew beforehand, and if you trusted it having any kind of workable plans going forward. The Reasonarticle went straight for the new government subsidies to blunt the hammer blows to the economy that no one imagined happening back when Australian bushfires were the trending bad news.
“The government may be bad at many things, but no one doubts its ability to pay people not to work. Whether it will direct those payments appropriately is a different question. To judge from the contents of the CARES Act(Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security), and from the virtually unaccountable way the feds have been distributing that money, most of the relief funds will end up in the hands of whoever has the best lobbyists, not whoever has the greatest needs.”
In truth, no virus or lockdown could stop political polarization from continuing to metastasize. In an Unherd article titled “Who are the corona tribes?” Ed West explores the conventional political wisdom from a British perspective, opining that “lockdown skeptics tend to come from the Right, and to be pro-Brexit; lockdown pessimists are from the left and the more vociferous are very Remainy.”
He glibly calls them “Exiteers” and “Remain Insiders,” and goes on to muse that “these divisions must to some extent be less about personality traits being associated with political beliefs, and more down to (Nixon political strategist) Kevin Phillips’ explanation that ‘understanding politics is all about understanding who hates whom’.”
I don’t know if you find it hopeful or not that, having deferred or sacrificed our lifestyles, pastimes, careers, incomes or worse, we’re still finding the energy to identify our enemy from across a crowded internet and shriek at them like the alien vegetable changelings in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Quite against my instincts I’ve been looking for things to be hopeful about, and I’m not finding many. Most of the articles speculating about the post-lockdown world accept the premise of Yuval Noah Harari, published in the Financial Timesearly in the lockdown. “Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life,” he writes. “That is the nature of emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger.”
“Entire countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments. What happens when everybody works from home and communicates only at a distance? What happens when entire schools and universities go online? In normal times, governments, businesses and educational boards would never agree to conduct such experiments. But these aren’t normal times.”
Nearly two months later we’re at least resigned to distance learning and working from home and perhaps enjoying getting almost everything delivered by businesses that had no delivery model for their goods and services at the beginning of March. We celebrate their pivots and enjoy the convenience of the world becoming more like Amazon Prime, but there’s still no guarantee that their agility will save them. Every day brings the news of another local fixture or struggling chain calling it quits, and that cascade effect hasn’t really started yet.
In an Atlantic article with the ominous title “I Have Seen the Future – And It’s Not the Life We Knew,” Uri Friedman does a bit of time traveling by describing the lives of people living on the other side of the first wave of Covid-19 pandemic. An American living in Wuhan, ground zero for the outbreak, took Friedman on a video tour of the city. Darkened storefronts are already a familiar sight here, as are restaurants with tables blocking their doors, set up for pick-up and delivery orders.
Stranger, though, is the cab driver who asks him for “documents detailing his health status, which were checked and photographed. When he arrived at the gated community where he lives, a masked police officer wearing gloves scanned his wrist to check his temperature each time he left the compound.”
In Denmark, schools are back in class but it’s “an alien, atomized environment of outdoor classes, hourly hand-washing, and fewer teachers. ‘The kids are not allowed to touch each other, to play together, to embrace each other, to do high fives, things like that,” said Merlin Schaeffer, a professor at the University of Denmark. ‘There’s only one child per table, because normally you have two kids sitting (at) one, two-person table.’”
This, at least for the moment, is the worst thing about the “new normal” we’re being sold. A month into the lockdown, I watched a nearly empty streetcar pass by the foot of my street, and thought for a moment that the people on there were pretty brave before I realized that this was a basically absurd idea. There are reasonable precautions to be taken, but going forward presuming that every encounter with someone outside your household is potentially fatal will tear at whatever bonds hold society together.
I wouldn’t want to live through these two months again, even though my experience in lockdown has been the most anodyne imaginable. Lent was strange; celebrating Mass in front of the television is less than ideal, and resembles the Eucharist much as food eaten while standing only notionally resembles a meal. I miss the fellowship of other parishioners – probably one of the few times in a week when I’m actually grateful for society.
The worst victims of the virus by number have been the elderly, many of whom have died neglected and alone; I doubt if there will ever be a reckoning for their vulnerability. The most disheartening thing I’ve seen, though, is the grim fear expressed by many of my friends and acquaintances, some of whom are actually begging for the government to regulate a mass quarantine at nearly any cost. The virus might be largely invisible to many of us sheltering in place, but for them its threat has been embodied in any other citizen who expresses a desire to be allowed to work and move freely again. This is neither reasonable nor rational.
At the beginning of the lockdown, there were a lot of published articles hoping that, in spite of the worst that could happen, culture, society, economy and government might be somehow reset. Depending on your ideals, people longed for the end of consumer culture, the jettisoning of the cheap and disposable, a new focus on family and community, or a spiritual reawakening.
But on the far side of the first wave this is apparently asking too much. “It’s full sunshine, some people have shorts,” says professor Merlin Shaeffer of the University of Copenhagen in the Atlantic article. “The parks are blooming…Everything feels like a new beginning. It’s not. We all know it’s not.”
