There's a Light at the End of the Tunnel
On the year anniversary of the day COVID-19 arrived with full force in America, there is reason for hope.
Just a quick reminder that March is $50 for 50 month at Truth and Consequences - with 10 percent of the proceeds going to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please consider clicking the link below. And thanks to all those who wished my mother a happy birthday! She really appreciated it.
One year ago today, I wrote this tweet:
I vividly remember what I was doing when I tweeted this. I was a few blocks from my apartment, walking my dog not long after the NBA had announced that it was shutting down. Around this time, the cable networks broke in with the news that actor Tom Hanks had tested positive - and the WHO had declared COVID-19 a full-fledged pandemic. For me, that evening was the moment I realized that everything was soon going to be different.
Before March 11, it was clear that something was happening. Still, none of us were wearing masks, schools had not closed, restaurants and bars were still open, and I was still making dumb jokes on Twitter about how difficult it was not to touch my face (one of the early health guidances was to avoid this activity). The weekend before, I had taken my kids to an NBA game, gone to an indoor rock-climbing gym, and took them out to dinner (indoors, of course).
But the night of March 11 was when it suddenly dawned on me that COVID-19 was not just one of those news stories that I would write about, but it would also reshape my life. The next day, Broadway theaters shut down - a clear indication that life in New York was about to change dramatically. Within a few days, the city finally shut down schools. That weekend I went food shopping so I could stock up on supplies. I assumed we’d all have to hunker down for a few weeks.
I met a friend for drinks on the evening of the 12th. We shook hands with our elbows, sat outside, and I covered myself in hand sanitizer. I remember walking around afterward and seeing people in bars and restaurants and wondering if at some point we wouldn’t be allowed to do this anymore. Never in my wildest imagination did I think that a year later, we’d still be living this nightmare. Certainly, I had no idea that I had contracted the coronavirus. I just figured my runny nose and sore throat were allergies acting up. It would be months later that I took an antibodies test and discovered I had COVID-19. I was one of the lucky ones - asymptomatic. To this day, I try not to think too much about who I might have exposed to the coronavirus and the ultimate consequences if I did.
However, if March 11, 2020, was the first day of impending doom, March 11, 2021, has a very different feel. Last week, my mother got vaccinated. States are preparing for a flood of new vaccinations in the coming weeks. Tomorrow, a president not named Trump will sign legislation pumping trillions of dollars into the economy. Here in New York, it’s 65 degrees and sunny, and I’m preparing to take my dog on a very different walk than a year ago. Indeed, I am dealing with an emotion that has been in short supply over the past 365 days - hope. It’s no longer a question of if things will return to normal, but rather when.
I know that COVID-19 is not over. Many people are still going to die from this awful virus. Today, there is optimism for the future that most of us have gone without for the last year. March 11, 2020, was the day that shit got real. Maybe we’ll remember March 11, 2021, as the day when hope made a comeback.
The Complicated Politics of COVID Vaccinations
In his latest column for Truth and Consequences, Tom Schaller hails the good news on COVID vaccines but worries that the continued reluctance of Trump’s supporters to get vaccinated could blunt the progress being made.
Over the past several weeks, four COVID-19 vaccination developments have offered Americans both hope for the future and continued exasperation about our current plight.
First, the FDA fast-tracked approval for Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine that, along with Moderna and Pfizer, now offers Americans three vaccination options. Working with traditional competitor Merck, J&J will immediately ramp up production.
According to the Center for Disease Control’s tracking website, as of today, 18.8 percent of all Americans have received one vaccine shot (Moderna and Pfizer require two). Among those 65 or older, the number is even higher - 61 percent. With vaccinations steadily topping more than two million per day, President Joe Biden provided the second bit of good news three days after the J&J vaccine approval: By the end of May, vaccine production should be high enough to cover every adult American.
Unfortunately, those two hopeful signs were offset by two disconcerting developments.
The first and least surprising was confirmation that Donald Trump quietly got vaccinated in January, just before his term ended. Despite all his tough talk, the former president—who frightfully asked doctors last fall after he contracted coronavirus if he was going to be “one of the diers”—took care of himself but kept silent about it.
Nobody spots a sucker’s payout quicker than Trump, of course: He risked forfeiting donations from supportive anti-vaxxers if he made a public show of getting vaccinated live on television. For him, the smart play was to follow the science when it comes to his personal health but pander to conspiracy theorists whose blind devotion pads his personal wealth.
The second bit of bad news is the disturbingly high share of Americans who continue to say they will refuse to take the vaccine.
Only some of the blame for this ongoing aversion falls at Trump’s feet. Most notably, an unusually high percentage of Black Americans are wary about taking the vaccine. Understandably, the ugly history of inhumane medical experiments performed on Black Americans gives many pause.
Considering that Blacks are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die from COVID than white Americans, it’s sad that racism’s reach is so great it can span from the failed Tuskegee experiments conducted almost a century ago to today’s pandemic politics. However, there is some hopeful progress to report on this front: A new Pew poll shows a recent uptick in the share of African Americans who intend to get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, many Republicans—overwhelmingly white, of course—are also refusing to get vaccinated, proving that politics does sometimes make very strange bedfellows. In a pre-Trump era, I would have been shocked to see large swaths of the public resistant to protecting themselves and their families from taking a simple, free shot to avoid contracting a potentially lethal disease. But in our post-truth America, where a resounding majority of Republicans blame the January 6 terrorist attacks on Joe Biden, Antifa, George Soros, or whoever the demon-of-the-moment is, nothing is truly surprising anymore.
This brings us to the fourth recent development: the dispiriting partisan results of the COVID attitudes poll conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation in mid-February. The survey shows that only 41 percent of Republicans say they either have been vaccinated or intend to get a vaccine once it is available to them. Almost the same share of Republicans told pollsters they either would refuse to take the vaccine (28 percent) or would get vaccination only if by mandate (10 percent).
By comparison, 51 percent of independents and 73 percent of Democrats plan to get vaccinated if they haven’t already. Clearly, the one virus against which America has zero immunity is partisanship. If NASA announced that the only way for people to protect themselves from contracting fatal skin cancer caused by a giant, impending solar flare was to cover their bodies from head to toe in blue cloth, one can’t help but wonder if half of Republicans would stand nude on their lawns rather than wear Democratic colors.
To his credit, Trump finally encouraged his followers to get vaccinated. But given how many conservatives anti-vaxxers there were before Trump declared for president in 2015 or the coronavirus emerged in 2019, Trump’s entreaty may not convince conspiracy mongers to do the smart thing for themselves and the nation.
Achieving herd immunity requires any nation to act like its citizens share a national identity and common set of interests. The sad fact is that these days nothing seems to unify Americans, not even the specter of death, nor the hope of eluding it. The costs, in lives and livelihoods, of the anti-masker resistance are clear: With just four percent of the world’s population, America accounts for 20 percent of global COVID fatalities.
When Biden announced his end-of-May goal deadline for every American to have access to the vaccine, I couldn’t help but wince. Like the start of March Madness or the presidential debate season, is it not better to set expectations low and beat them, than the reverse?
Now, I’m more worried about what happens on June 1, when the next-stage problem arrives: how to persuade vaccine resistors to get their shots. For the Biden Administration and state governors, that battle promises to be a cultural war fought along American’s next dividing line, between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated. The ugly political fights over mask-wearing may seem quaint by comparison.
What I’m Writing, Reading, Watching, and Listening To
Writing
This week I tried to find a silver lining to polarization - it has helped progressives realize their policy agenda. I wondered if Joe Manchin is, in fact, something of a political genius. I wrote about why the COVID relief bill is a "big f***ing deal" (for subscribers only). For this week's podcast, I spoke to Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin about the upcoming parliamentary elections in Israel.
Reading
Perry Cammack has some smart thoughts on what it will take to get Iran and the United States back to the negotiating table. A fascinating profile of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley - the kicker, is perfect. Ben Jacobs sees a return of the politics of derp. A great package of stories on COVID one year later. Republicans rely on the support of blue-collar voters, but they are doing nothing to help them economically. Say goodbye to deficit politics. David Baddiel's new book "Jews Don't Count" is a fantastic look at modern anti-Semitism and the limits of intersectional politics.
Watching/Listening
Over the past week, I watched Showtime's "Good Lord Bird," and it is arguably one of the best miniseries I've seen in years. The show is an irreverent look at the exploits of abolitionist John Brown, as told through the eyes of a fictional character named Henry, a young boy who Brown believes is a girl and who, like so many Black characters in the show, plays the role that White people have cast him in. What makes "Good Lord Bird" so compelling, beyond the extraordinary performances by Ethan Hawke as the main character and Joshua Caleb Johnson as Henry, is that it flips the oft-told tale of the white savior on its head. Brown's commitment to the abolitionist cause is unquestionable, but like so many of the White characters in this show, he sees Black people as caricatures, not complicated people. Indeed, it is not coincidental that he, along with all the other Whites, views Henry as a girl, while every Black person correctly understands that he is a boy. Even those who seek to liberate Blacks from slavery don't truly acknowledge their essential humanity. In the show’s most memorable line of dialogue, a Black character tells his white master, “He ain’t gonna save us. He’s trying to save you.”
Perhaps the most inspired element of the story is Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass's portrayal as something of an elite dandy who lives in his Rochester home with his Black wife and White mistress. Douglass was a great man, but like all men and women, he is not without his imperfections. The show does not shy away from presenting its Black characters as flawed and even conniving, even if it's well understood that it's a by-product of a slavery system that treats them as less than human. Indeed, in "Good Lord Bird," the Black characters are portrayed as refreshingly human. So too is Brown, whose portrayal veers between that of a heroic figure and a religious fanatic. Brown is a complicated figure - a man of great faith who intoned against the evils of slavery while celebrating violence and bloodshed as the only means for abolishing it. "Good Lord Bird's" portrayal of him does not offer easy answers as to how history should perceive him today or even if his infamous raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry was the right thing to do.
"Good Lord Bird" is also an irreverent comedy, and there are moments of true hilarity, particularly from Brown, who when he is not killing slave owners and preaching against the "peculiar institution" is something of an absent-minded activist. But it is interactions between white and blacks in the show that stuck with me the most. One is, of course, aware of the inhumanity of slavery, but to see it presented in such daily and frequently off-hand fashion - humiliation piled upon humiliation - is to understand it in a much more visceral way. It's not often that a show can navigate the lanes of history, comedy, emotion, and the evil of slavery, but "Good Lord Bird" does it beautifully and leaves the viewer both sated but conflicted.
Musical Interlude
As I mentioned recently, I purchased tickets last week to see Wilco in concert next August in New York - my first live concerts since February 2020. So with that in mind, here are a few live clips from the band that I would argue is one of the best America has ever produced.
My favorite Wilco song - "I'm Trying To Break Your Heart."
Probably my second favorite Wilco song - “One Sunday Morning.”
From their second album, “Being There” - “Monday.”
Not live (and not all that well-known), but this is a beautiful tune - “When The Roses Bloom Again.”
One of my favorite Tiny Desk concerts.
I’m rather partial to this show since I was in attendance - October 13, 2019, in Brooklyn.
Ah, Wilco. Song that hooked me: "War on War." Best song to dance with your daughter at her wedding: "My Darling." Mid-life crisis anthem: "We're Just Friends." Funniest pop reference: "30 Rock," when Congresswoman Regina Bookman (Queen Latifah) asks Jack Donaghy, “Why is it that NBC looks about as diverse as a Wilco concert?” Best George Harrison guitar solo: "I'm the Man Who Loves You." Royalties to Neil Young guitar solo: "At Least That's What You Said." Best noise ending: "Handshake Drugs" from "Kicking Television." Best Nils guitar break: "You Are My Face." Best album: "Blue Sky Blue."