Coronavirus: The Nightmare Equalizer?

Norman Mailer, in his book Genius and Lust, about the oeuvre of Henry Miller, referred to New York as “the garbage can of big city bruises.” Earlier Mayor Lindsay had renamed it The Big Apple. Who could’ve conceived of America’s largest city as the epicenter of a horror pandemic without precedent? In recent days U.S. health officials have been recommending self-quarantine for resident New Yorkers as well as others who’ve recently been to the city. 

Meanwhile the president of Gore Vidal’s “United States of Amnesia” is hard-pressed to defend himself against those who would blame the current state of the city that never sleeps on the leader of the world’s most powerful nation—who, typically, had ignored bad-news warnings about the deadly virus as “a hoax.” 

Could the current situation have been averted had Trump taken appropriate action back in December? The answer depends on whom you ask—and where he or she is politically situated. This from the most recent issue of The Atlantic: “Someone with Trump’s makeup, when faced with facts and events that are unpleasant, that he perceives as a threat to his self-image and public standing, simply denies them. We saw that repeatedly during the early part of the pandemic, when the president was giving false reassurance and spreading false information one day after another. After a few days in which he was willing to acknowledge the scope and scale of this crisis—he declared himself a ‘wartime president’—he has now regressed to type, once again becoming a fountain of misinformation.”

Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth comes to mind. At any rate his indisputable declaration that “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” There is good reason why such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama seemed to age before our eyes, never mind the unique perks associated with the office of President. 

Live by the sword, die by the sword, says the proverb, indisputably. Picture yet again the frightened, wet and disheveled Saddam Hussein being hauled like a half drowned rat out of a Tikrit sewer, a long, long way from his regular palatial habitat and his armed bodyguards. Revisit, too, Muammar Gaddafi in similar circumstances, pleading with jeering peasants not to kill him. 

“The bigger they come, the harder they fall,” sang the prophet Jimmy Cliff. They certainly do not come bigger than a combined U.S. of A. and Europe whose leaders, with their much advertised array of WMDs, have been brought in less than three months to their knees. And not by a united China, Russia and Korea north and south. Not even by the retaliations of a too long abused Mother Nature. The leaders of the wealthiest, most powerful countries on the planet are losing their heads, as all around them their worlds daily crumble, their fearsome weapons of little use save to keep their panicking fast diminishing populations under control. 

Meanwhile the microscopic presumed gloating alien enemy hides in plain sight, conceivably chuckling in the masked faces of the world’s brightest lights as they stumble over one another in the darkness of their desperation to create a defense against possible annihilation. In consequence, our most respected health authorities have been turned into inadvertent disseminators of fake news; news that changes on publication.

I return to the earlier cited Atlantic article: “In this instance Trump isn’t facing a political problem he can easily spin his way out of. He’s facing a lethal virus. It doesn’t give a damn what Donald Trump thinks of it or tweets about it. Spin and lies about COVID-19, including that it will soon magically disappear, as Trump claimed it would, don’t work. In fact they have the opposite effect. Misinformation will cause the coronavirus to increase its deadly spread.”

Here at home we continue to turn on one another like rats in a barrel with no way out. We’ve permitted it to become characteristic to pray for smart hurricanes, by which I mean hurricanes programmed to strike only our unsuspecting next-door neighbor and other perceived enemies. We appear less concerned with doing all we can as individuals to protect our shared community. We make demands on an effectively empty national purse that even in the wealthiest countries would be cause for pause. We seek to turn every unconfirmed off-island plus into a new weapon by which to topple the current administration—evidently oblivious to the fact that its removal will not automatically enrich the government treasury, enough to make real the fantasy of free lunches for all. Dominica has this, we say. St Kitts has that. What does Saint Lucia have? Trump has announced stimulus packages for businesses great and small, what is Allen Chastanet doing about de local malaway? 

We flood Facebook with jeers that inevitably amount to spitting in our own faces. We greet with disdain the repeated reminder that our circumstances permit us to do only so much against the seemingly unstoppable pandemic. “Oh, but I thought Chastanet said the economy was doing well,” crowed one Brooklyn-basemented Facebook Greenspan, as if “doing well” meant our country was suddenly debt-free, fully employed, sans crime, with a thriving private sector and lots of what the world needs and cannot buy elsewhere at prices lower than ours—that no longer were we dependent for our survival on the generosity of “foreigners.” 

The coronavirus, rather than forcing us in the name of survival to come together, having set aside our picayune differences— indicative as they are of self-hate—appears daily to be bringing out the worst in our nature. We abuse our constitutional right to freedom of expression, publish satanic verses for the death of our country’s leader after his coronavirus test proved negative. Referencing the disease, we shout out gleefully to the world that our country is the “worst prepared,” as if we were a contestant in a Miss Coronavirus pageant, not the underdog in a mismatched struggle to the death.  

It would serve Allen Chastanet right if he should die from the virus, asserted a Facebook scribbler. Why? The proffered excuse was the government owed him money! News that local health authorities had confirmed only three cases of coronavirus was predictably greeted in certain sections as further proof ours is a lying government, that our CMO and her team lack credibility—as if just one “confirmed” case were not one case too many, regardless of the imagined actual number in the bush! 

The inescapable truth is that the coronavirus has so far proved more than a match even for the most resourceful of nations. It has driven home that in our pecuniary situation there is little more we can do than already we are doing. Testing for the disease costs money. So does maintaining isolation and quarantine units. It costs money, too, when suspect individuals break out and have to be returned to places of confinement for the common good. 

More disconcerting is that the hopefully life-saving actions we are forced to take are potentially deadly. No work, no vacationers from abroad, no taxes to be collected, wall-to-wall shut-downs, all come with a price. Meanwhile the demands on our meager resources increase on the minute. Last evening a friend sent me this note of concern: “Rick, 14 days lockdown? The chicken and bake vendors, who make a $100 a day and must purchase green figs and chicken or balawoo for food daily, cannot wait. They are already suffering . . . and this is only Day 3. I am receiving the calls and I have had to share my own groceries. This is very real. What about the meds? The rent? The cooking gas, the coal.”

I replied: “Sad and real though it is, the condition you described has, regrettably, always been the norm here—however ignored. It’s taken the coronavirus to grab our attention. In my time as a local journalist I have written reams about the poverty in this ever-feting country, and its far-reaching effects. Even the UNDP has complained that there’s little change in the way the majority live even when our economy is actually doing well.” 

I pointed out that ours is a region that’s always been in debt to its eyeballs. “On a more personal note,” I went on, “for how long can you provide for the needy before you cave in?” The question is also applicable to a government that can stay alive only by squeezing blood out of the stone better known as The Taxpayer. That, and outside assistance which can take forever to materialize. 

And speaking of life abroad: Britain, Canada, the U.S., all are on lockdown. All are trying to cope with a multiplicity of shortages, more and more demands, and people dying daily by their hundreds. The “city that never sleeps” has turned abruptly into a ghost town. There’s little difference between pictures taken of Times Square and Jeremie Street at high noon. What sets us apart is that there have been no reported deaths from the coronavirus.

At any rate, not yet!