Last week I received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine. I woke up the next two days with muscles and joints aching, and a general lack of ambition. Could have been the vaccine. Could have been age. I am recovered—at least from the vaccine—waiting for my second dose on March 25. By that time, we should know if Moderna’s mRNA technology will have mutated my genetic code enough that I’ll have a superpower.
Getting the vaccine while Julie waited in the car was a difficult moment of conscience. It’s hard to think that I’ll be protected when she won’t be. That’s not the way our marriage has worked, for one thing. For another, I would be lost without her, should she catch the virus and die.
Spending a year quarantining together without falling out of love is an accomplishment, I suppose, but it also reveals a terrifying weakness: whichever of us is left living after the other dies will live on in deep, possibly unbearable grief. Speaking only for myself, I don’t think life would be worth living without Julie, or her cooking.
I’m not sure what she would miss most about me. I’m not about to ask.
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Some other events of last week, in the vein of Harper’s Magazine, the dark journal of ironic juxtaposition:
NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed safely on a Martian river delta. Tiger Woods shattered both legs in a car accident. For the first time this year, Julie and I skied the hill a mile downriver—JPP, also known as Julie’s Powder Palace—and it was better skiing than this year’s weird temperature swings and intense winds had led us to expect. Ted Cruz discovered the science of optics and came back to a freakishly cold Texas from a warm Cancun. A Saturday Daily Beast article noted that Cruz’s superpower is that he has no shame. CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory were 416.52 ppm on Valentine’s Day, higher than any time in the last three million Valentine’s Days. Joe Biden launched the first air strikes of his presidency on Iranian-backed militia outposts in Syria, killing 22 or more. A snowmobiler was killed by an avalanche in the Smiley Creek drainage of Sawtooth Valley. Computer simulations have revealed that without humans on the planet, wooly mammoths would have lived another 4,000 years. No word on how long the mastodons would have lasted. We burned the last piece of firewood from the woodpile next to the garage on February 25. It had lasted three weeks longer than last year’s woodpile next to the garage. We are now pulling firewood from the woodpile on the deck, which can be accessed while wearing slippers. In the Disney city of Orlando, Florida, attendees at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference unveiled a golden statue of Donald Trump, apparently unaware that their gesture lay in ironic juxtaposition with the Book of Exodus. Idaho became home to the California and British variants of COVID-19, which are more transmissible and probably more lethal than the Wuhan original. Idaho’s medical community has raised the possibility that second vaccine jabs should be delayed so more people can have their first. Julie and I successfully completed February Fitness Month, during which we abstain from alcohol and exercise every day that lacks blizzards or vaccine side effects. Steak and red wine and postponed Valentine’s hyperbole are on tonight’s dinner menu.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
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Last week also saw pandemic deaths in the U.S. reach half a million. It was a number duly and solemnly noted by President Biden, who emphasized the tragedy the number represented. He urged Americans not to become “numb to sorrow,” which sounds like good therapeutic advice, unless you’re one of the many who grieve. Then you might require a little numbness just to live, because the loss of a parent, spouse, or child can be unbearable.
(Since Biden’s speech, 13,023 more people have died of COVID-19. It’s tempting to think you’re at the shank end of history when the death toll reaches big round numbers, but you’re always in the middle of it.)
We say that time heals all wounds, but we all know people who never got over their grief. They died of it, or they embraced the fog of dementia, or they retreated into denial or paranoia. Families manage to forbid their members to even think about dead children, and grandchildren grow up not knowing about a dead aunt or uncle, or stillbirths or miscarriages. It’s true that grief can act as growth hormone for the soul, but it’s a rare soul that can allow itself the full embrace of sorrow and not come out the other side saying it’s had way more growth than it can stand.
The sheer number of family members, co-workers, friends, lovers, and fans of the dead has turned us into the United States of Grief, a nation of PTSD victims, led by a grieving president, a therapist-in-chief whose life has been filled with irretrievable loss. If, as the Evangelicals assert, God anointed Donald Trump as president for a reason, He has anointed Joe Biden for half a million reasons.
Perhaps the cohort we need to model ourselves upon is the American veterans who returned from the Second World War, who came home having lost friends, innocence, opportunity, youth—everything that made up their lives before the war—and got to work. They dropped their burden of grief and went to school and got jobs and raised families. They didn’t complain, didn’t talk about their war experience, didn’t shirk from hard and lengthy tasks. They became tough in the best sense of the word.
Only toward the ends of their lives did the horror come back to them, in the delirium of hospice drugs or the loneliness of a hospital bed, revealing that you can live a life while being numb to sorrow, but the sorrow is still there when the anesthesia wears off.
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If Americans could become a tough (if numb) people, and, post-pandemic, build a nation the way we did from 1946 to 1963, I would have more hope for this country and this world. But this country and the world have, in the most literal sense, fallen apart since that time. The pandemic has exposed widening divisions between rich and poor, between people who read science and people who don’t, between conservative and liberal, creditors and debtors, white and Indian, white and Black, white and Asian, white and Hispanic. We are divided into employed and not, religious and not, well-nourished and not. We are QAnon or not, addicted or not, armed or not, psychopathic or not.
The term American used to hold us all together. It doesn’t anymore. There is no sense that we might be stronger as a nation if we had the stamina and intelligence to partner up with the fellow Americans we see as enemies.
I’m a person who has written an end of the world book, so it will come as no surprise when I say that America is over, more or less. I’ve written that the year 2030 will see us destroyed as a nation, with our formerly United States “a moonscaped radioactive desert where the survivors are confined to caves and ruins and drink ash-fouled water and don’t look too closely at the meat they’re eating, and knowledge and technology diminish with each burned book and broken machine and dead battery.”
It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. All it would require is courage and superhuman effort and constant brutally honest self-assessments as to whether or not we’re contributing to the whole. Also, generosity. Also, temperance. Also, justice. Also, kindness. Also, sacrifice. Basically, we all have to put ourselves in the position of an ICU nurse during a pandemic.
Probably not going to happen.
2030 it is. Plan on having to get tough, and not in the best sense of the word. Bring the hot sauce. Don’t expect that if there’s a virus going ’round, you’ll get vaccinated against it.
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Rosa Luxemburg, the early 20th century economic theorist, is credited with inventing the slogan “Socialism or Barbarism,” which has been stuck in my head lately.
I’m not advocating one or the other, because I can’t. In fact, my reaction to the slogan is, “Like we have a choice.”
I do know that capitalism is a temporary phenomenon, one dependent on free resources and the ability to pollute without cost. That’s why energy companies—the prime example of contemporary capitalism in crisis—resist clean-air laws and restrictions on extracting oil and gas from public lands. If these companies aren’t subsidized with public resources, they can’t produce a product at a price their customers can afford.
It’s worse than that. Capitalism has to expand and keep on expanding, because it depends on debt. Interest rates generally reflect how much an economy is growing, plus whatever the financial class takes for its own sustenance and amusement. That’s why super-low interest rates indicate a non-producing, non-expanding economy, one headed for a crash once its debts come due. At that point, capitalism becomes barbarism, if barbarism means starvation in the midst of luxury, Orwell’s “boot stomping on a human face—forever,” or simple old Might Makes Right.
Socialism holds out the promise that a country or a culture can last a little longer than it would if it stuck with pure capitalism. You can argue that this country still exists because of the socialistic reforms that tamed the trusts or brought Social Security to a generation of starving grandparents. Great Britain would be lacking its gentry if its returning soldiers hadn’t chosen the ballot over the gun in 1946.
Julie and I are too old and too averse to violence to do well under barbarism. That’s not necessarily true of the neighbors. Even now, absent the rule of law, there are people in Sawtooth Valley who would supply the boot if we would supply the face. That sounds paranoid, but it’s more like the watchful waiting of a cautious oncologist.
Anyway, it’s in our interest to return to as much of the world of 2019 or earlier—1955, say—as we can. But I’m old enough to have witnessed what millions of Americans call free will morph into a lemming migration, one heading in a rush toward the cliffs, and below them, the sea. 1955 isn’t going to come again, and neither is 2019.
The pandemic has delivered a body-blow to the American economy. In effect, it’s sped up the process of economic decay, and increased the unavoidable costs of energy, health, food, and shelter at a time of extreme unemployment. 2030 doesn’t look as far away as it used to. I think Joe Biden’s got his heart in the right place, and he’ll try to keep the suffering to a minimum, even if it means raising taxes on the rich. Because of that, this country will last longer under him than it would have under Donald Trump. But Biden’s an old man, and the barbarians are at the gate.
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Now that we’re in a month when we’re free to drink alcohol again, Julie and I will return to a sunset ritual that has us sitting on the couch with glasses of wine, eating hummus and crackers and kalamata olives, and conducting ongoing conversations about the many ironic juxtapositions that mark our lives. One of those juxtapositions stems from the fact that Sawtooth Valley, especially during tourist season, resembles a carefully constructed diorama, and we locals have a tendency to become part of the exhibit.
We note that we have done what we were supposed to do with our lives, mostly. We went to college, got jobs, bought a house in a rising market, saved our money, kept learning new skills, refused to buy snowmobiles or Sprinter Vans, and lived as frugally as we could in the world of fragile privilege our parents’ hard work had given us. As a result, we have had a good life, but it may have come at the cost of being the last middle-class couple in America, soon to be extinct. At least that’s what it says on the plaque on the other side of the glass.