The Isolation Diaries No. 23

“I think of the entire history of human strife and how we navigate the frightening and the unknown.” Anna Badkhen, New York Review of Books

Hot. 90 degrees at 6:00 p.m. in Santa Barbara. Our apartment is stifling, even with the front and back doors open and a ceiling fan and three tower fans running at top speed. The breeze brings warm air. After sundown the wind lashes at the windows, yanks the doors closed with a bang. The wind recedes, then rushes again with renewed ferocity; the wind chimes on the deck dance madly. Another day of self-isolation comes to a close. We survive, none are ill under our roof or the roofs of our immediate family. Our niece, Mia, a nursing student, is hunkered down in NYC. 

I work off and on, read The Plague and The Plot Against America, take a short nap, have a training session in the glaring afternoon sun, sit on my meditation cushion. For my 61st birthday I received a pair of Apple Airpods, an extravagant gift from my wife and mother-in-law. I drink several cups of peppermint tea. 

And then back to the pandemic, the open air asylum that is Trump and McConnell’s America, unmasked now with all its weakness and cruelty on full display. The hypocrisy of the GOP is stunning. Of course the people are subjected to another session of Trump’s verbal diarrhea. Trump seems to have backed off his favorite Covid-19 miracle drug, hydroxycholoquine, now that more evidence against its efficacy is presented. Trump is now on to sunlight and lung-cleansing disinfectants. I wonder if the good folks over at FOX News, like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Dr. Oz, and Brian Kilmeade will echo Trump about the latest nonsense as they did hundreds of times about hydroxychloroquine. Will someone sue these people or FOX News? One can only hope. At a time of great crisis and danger, America is bereft of great men (we have some great women, but none of them are in power). Instead our fate rests in the hands of greedheads, imbeciles, charlatans, jesters, cranks, crackpots, cretins, xenophobes, homophobes, Christian warriors, fools, fakers and misanthropes.

I came across this passage in The Plot Against America: “I went because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country?”

That about sums it up. 

Neoliberalism is on its deathbed, stripped of its gloss and false promises of trickle down prosperity; we should hasten its demise, pull the plug, but the white men in power stay our hand and will, they want to keep the patient alive while they continue, by means fair or foul, to rig the end game so they win and the masses lose. I came across this in the New York Review of Books by Hari Kunzru:

“The rapid disintegration of all social and economic life has exposed the terrible fragility of the American system. How does a society that privatizes risk cope with a public health crisis? How can it ask for social solidarity when it demonizes every expression of it as ‘socialism’? Suddenly we are all socialists, even Mitt Romney, trying to reinvent community as we self-isolate in our apartments.”

I keep fear and despondency at bay by keeping my focus in the moment. It’s a difficult task. Others must feel the same because I see more traffic on the streets, more people outside. My sense is of a boundary being pushed and prodded to see how much it can bend. The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in this county approaches 500.