Letter 158: thoughts -- selfish and social -- on the coronavirus contagion

«J’aime Muhamad beaucoup. »

« Moi, aussi. »

« Il est très heureux toujours. »

« Oui, ça c’est vrai. »

« C’est pourquoi je suis très heureux avec sa récupération. »

« Non, pas de tout. Il mourra demain ou le jour suivant. »

« Cela ne puisse pas être possible! Il est plein de l’énergie, de la vie. »

« Ça c’est vrai. J’estime ses qualités tellement élevées. »

« Alors vous êtes d’accord avec moi. » 

« Non, Muhamad sera mort dans deux jours. »

« Shit alors! »

– a conversation between Michel, a French nurse, and me in the Calcutta Subway, 1992.

Introduction: the first two chapters are optional.

After two introductory chapters that one can easily skip, as they are neurotically confessional, this essay will explain my wholly inconsistent “sputterances” with family, friends and Facebook with this pandemic. Like me, the essay will be fragmented.

B.L.U.F. (bottom-line, up-front)
The key take-away remains that values and ideas often clash, leaving a stark choice: ¿does one follow his or her mind in consistency or my heart with integrity? The gulf between the head and heart makes the Gulf of México look like a sidewalk puddle.

CHAPTER-1: The wisdom of death.
B.L.U.F. (bottom-line, up-front): death remains an inscrutable part of life, even when many face the danger of personal extinction as we do with the coronavirus.

In 1992, my withered soul still limped after the death a woman whom I had loved a dozen years earlier. We were not meant for each other, but she was one of singularly magnificent people I have ever known in her mesmerising beauty, her creative intelligence, her machine gun giggle, and her knowledge of the world that still surpasses my own. A dozen years later, I confronted a nagging sensation that my father might not be long for the world.

Dad and I discussed it; he complimented me on my sensitivity and perception. Privately, I cried and cried, but, like it or not, his death would have to be a part of life and I was still off-balance from 1980. The hour had come to confront the shunned but overbearing dimension of the mortality of oneself and his or her loved ones. So, I ventured to a hospital for the dying in Calcutta, booking no hotel reservations, doing no research. Indians kindly helped me out.

When I first arrived at the hospital itself, people tested me out in various tasks. First, I tried my cissy-soft white hands at dish-washing. Soon, however, I had opened up small lesions in my fingers and people were concerned that I would ingest a germ and become very ill. So, the informed and informal foreman – a great guy from California and a hardened veteran of three weeks – took me off that chore.

The next day the formal foreman, a harried Calcuttan with a cool head, assigned me to help a very old, very ill man take his shower, except that he had soiled his cot in a foul-smelling manner. In the shower, I almost dropped him as I came very close to puking with the sight of the smeared excrement and its odour; dropping the poor fellow would likely of have killed him. So, I got fired from that activity as well – gee, sounding like my career-in-brief.

The informal foreman had noticed the way the problematic Yank (i.e., me) had kept patients company during idle minutes. He approached me and asked me how I kept my gaze steady to calm someone complaining in Bengali. Shrugging my shoulders, I answered, “I rub his shoulders and say, ‘l need you because I love you.’” His head knocked back with a seeming ‘aha’ moment. 

Just before lunch, he came to me and again complimented me on a quality he perceived in me. “Well, Edward, you’re pretty good at just sitting there.” 

Smiling, I quipped, “Been great at doing nothing my whole life.”

Still uncertain whether I had just received a compliment or not, he continued, “Here is something you can do. The man in bed number thirty-three – over there by the front doors – won’t eat and he is agitated. Can you sit with him and try and feed him?” That sounded like a purpose and, so, I went for it. The tubercular man shivered and spit out any juice or pulp I would give him, try as I might to trick him or distract his attention to sneak vital nourishment between his clenched jaws and through his puckered lips. 

So, I started feeling defeated again. That self-pity ended with my 'aha' moment: this man was not rejecting me or the food – he just wanted to die; he was ready to depart. 

So, ¿what should I do?

Soothe him, of course, so he could relax and leave his world of struggle in peace and a harsh life with dignity. With the patient asleep at the noon hour, I went to lunch, slipping out one of the two exits flanking either side of his bed, fully expecting to spend more time with him. When I returned an hour later, the bed was empty; the patient had died.

Next morning, the informed informal foreman approached me and dispatched me once again to cot number thirty-three, with another stubborn non-eater. Only a couple of minutes had passed for me to understand the situation was the same as the previous day: this man was ready to depart. He had fought hard for long enough. Obviously, I repeated the approach of the previous day, though it took two hours for the patient to attain the tell-tale calm of readiness.

Upon returning from lunch, I learned that this gentleman, too, had departed during the hour of absence. As I would learn later, with my father’s death, most people prefer to die alone.

The next morning, the Californian – a good, if temporary, friend – asked me how I had felt about the previous two days. Shrugging my shoulders thoughtlessly, I answered spontaneously, “All’s cool of the Western Front. But, if you want me to go back to bed number thirty-three, perhaps you ought to get the express consent of the patient, first.”

Little did I understand that my flippancy proved that I had accomplished my mission: death, finally, really became – and remains – part of life.

CHAPTER-2: The burden of integrity in character.
B.L.U.F. (bottom-line, up-front): integrity implies resolving, on a transitory basis, the constant, daily clash of preferred ideas against embedded values.

Death is a part of life. Fighting it does little. Fearing it does less. Fleeing it does nothing. The tragedy of a young woman’s death in 1980 plus the suicide of two close friends in the following two years made for a stinking, ultimately maturing, teen-age trauma. (In my mid-twenties, mine was a particularly late puberty.) At the core of the universe lurks an element of the casually chaotic, inexplicable to limited human intellection, occasionally crushing in its arbitrary timing and circumstance.

Rationally, that should make me an atheist; yet I value religion and need it to be a part of my life. Conservative by nature, I lean on tradition. The only one of the older faiths that makes sense, at least to me, is Judaism. The stories of the Hebrew Bible tell me that there is an uneasy monism – riddled with good and evil, primarily indifference – that makes one’s mission that of walking in the way of the Lord with virtue being its own reward.

The bottom-line? 

Do the best I can today and only today. 

Additionally, values run deeper than ideology.

When ideas and values conflict, turmoil ensues forcing an irrevocable choice between one or the other. No learning curve makes these choices easier over time. One finds no relief from the back-breaking burden of an elusive integrity on the deepest level. Repeatedly, one stumbles anew into that core void at the centre of the universe, of life, that I first perceived forty years ago. No markers. No guidance. No ideology. No road-map.

All badges and polysyllabic words are stripped away: one must use what lies at his or her innermost core. Another diversion may elucidate why this ‘G-d trap’ leads to occasionally spectacular, usually evident, inconsistency or bare-faced flip-flopping in my “sputterances” on Facebook and in life.

In 1982, I was in a career ‘feed-in’ internship in the U.S. Senate with the non-standing Republican Policy Committee. Though I had voted for President Carter twice, and would never reconsider either vote (though President Ford has emerged as the best President of my life-time), I was a middler and peddled my more conservative views to get by.

One day, I interviewed, for the third time, some ‘insider’ in the rising right-wing of the Republican Party to be his gofer, deputy, etc. (i.e., ‘general factotum’) in his super-P.A.C. fund-raising and lobbying. He and I would be calling on people like the Koch brothers, the Hunt brothers, Adolf Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, etc. 

My prospective manager, in making the job offer, made it quite clear that these men had daughters or grand-daughters and would find me an ideal addition to the family. In short, I was set. That offer came on a Friday. No wild guess that I entered the week-end elated. 

(To be clear: it may all have been one big snow-job; if not, I likely would have gotten stubborn, then principled, then fired.)

Yet, something did not feel quite right. First, I recalled the widespread scorn heaped the preceding week on Senator Weicker, a Republican hero of Watergate, as he defended bussing. The élite in which I would (supposedly) enter, to be sure, would not brook such government intrusions as bussing or, perhaps, de-segregation.

Then, as the week-end wore on, I could not suppress thinking of President Johnson’s Great Society, President Kennedy’s Peace Corps, Senator Robert Kennedy’s ‘new’ America, Vice President Humphrey’s exhortation to vote for hope, not fear; and, of course, President Jimmy Carter's resolve in bringing home over fifty of his fellows alive from Teheran, despite suffering humiliation, perhaps foregoing re-election (sic).

Rationally, I should take the job. The politics involved corresponded more closely to my own than any of the Democratic titans previously mentioned. The trade-off was not so much to ask, really; we all make adjustments in life, ¿right? Even in the worst case of the ‘insider’ being a B.S.er, I would still learn and travel a lot. All good for my career ambitions. The values were important but I could make them ‘personal’ by forgetting them and getting on with life.

No brainer. Except . . . .

. . . . the values emerged triumphant and I turned down the position on the following Monday, to the shock of my proposed manager, not to mention many other of the emerging kulturkampfers around me. Thus ended my good standing and my internship. The professional field that I had figured I was born into was long gone, now.

Okay, that happens. Except . . .

. . . . almost everybody privy to the situation correctly viewed me as inconsistent. A majority reasonably dismissed me as a fool. Many validly wrote me off as a hypocrite. A few understandably disliked me as a liar.

The decision was not an act of courage, but neither was it easy. From the dollar and cents realities of a world measured by outward appearances and managed through impressions, I had earned those censures. Looking back almost four decades later, being honest with myself did not cost me all that much, but it proved to be a burden almost beyond forbearance at the time.

CHAPTER-3: this pandemic as a case study in explaining ideas, values, and flip-flops.
B.L.U.F. (bottom-line, up-front): the anxieties, existential and intellectual, surfacing these days reflect a state of “not-knowingness”; thus people cling to ideology as a life preserver in the stormy salt-waters of ambiguity. Ideas change; values endure. The latter steer one through.

The basic problem we are seeing here is that even the best-informed people really have no idea just how bad this pandemic will prove to be. As a hopeless Pisces and middler, I seek out persuasively argued theses, meticulous in their research and evidenced adduced, from both liberal and conservative thinkers alike so I can decided for myself, however tentatively, what the Hell is going on.

The rub is that, while professional experts may be better informed in their details, outcomes and consequences remain a mystery to be resolved by the grinding tyranny of time and whip-sawed by arbitrary surprises, over the next year or two. Thus, I find me at that core void of chaos at the centre of life once again. This time, however, the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible – G-d’s rod and staff – comforts me.

After all, this pandemic is not about me and no one, most especially me, ultimately knows what (s)he is talking about in well thought out assertions like 40-70% global infection rates. That does not mean that Dr Lipsitch and I are intellectual equals ¡No way! My final recourse lies less in time-conditioned knowledge; I must rely upon my deepest pre-natal values, the breath of G-d that gave me life at birth.

So, for better, worse or, most likely, presumptuous, that sixty-three-year-old breath echoes even today: the essence of inconsistency of thought and perseverance of conscience.

So, I join three hundred million of my closest friends in confronting the daily barrage of emotionally charged social media and verbal expressions, all understandable since the stakes for each of us are quickly becoming existential. For oneself, not really a big deal. For his or her loved ones, the very big deal of that core, non-negotiable, and arbitrary chaos at the centre of the universe invading the web of life. Those statements include:

• President Trump’s destroying the pandemic prevention infrastructure;
• President Trump’s placing medical first responders at risk;
• President Trump’s deeper concern for the economy rather than people; as well as,
• President Trump’s indecision costing two hundred to three hundred thousand lives.

There are, of course, countering points to each assertion as well as other, derivative talking points on both sides. Anyone following this situation more than casually stipulates to the basic veracity of most, or all, of these statements. For me, at least, these statements appear to have factual validity. Values clash with ideas, charged with the emotions of ideology, when people impugn motives to the President.

Now as I look at these sobering statements, my values are tapping me on the shoulder big-time. And what are those values, politically and otherwise? They primarily include, as far as I can identify them:

• fairness in seeing both sides of an argument;
• forbearance of human faults and mis-cues;
• humility in judging the actions of others;
• seeking to place myself in the other man’s shoes; as well as,
• courage to state transparently and paying the price of criticism.

Quickly and superficially (to avoid 'tome-aine' poisoning), I will address the idea-values clash of each of the accusation levelled at President Trump.

First, the elimination of the pandemic prevention infrastructure. The evidence remains irrefutable. No one likes it, including me; now to the test of ideas against values.

1. Fairness: we do not know the decision-making here and President may not have known about the dissolution of one particular team in one of hundreds executive agencies.
2. Stoicism: one must remember that the President had to cut the budget somewhere.
3. Humility: admit alternative possibilities; e.g., a reduced level of remote C.D.C. stations reflecting a post-peak level of need.
4. Empathy: I can see myself making the same hard choice in the face of incomplete information.
5. Transparency: stating, inconsistently, that the fact is irrefutable but acknowledging that the President was not necessarily stupid or indifferent.

Second, I next address the assertion that the President placed medical first responders at risk heedlessly and needlessly. This statement surfaces both anxiety and recrimination for obvious reasons. Yes, our doctors and nurses are at risk. Many people have friends and family in those higher callings; one can only hope – ¡what a whimpy feeling, thoughts and prayers! – that these people survive. Many will not. Factually, I can agree easily with the ideas underlying this assertion; now to the test of ideas against values.

1. Fairness: any president, even President Obama, would be facing this dilemma imposed by realising efficiencies in hospital care at the expense of the redundancy usually maintained by public non-profit utilities.
2. Stoicism: one must accept that the nation lacks the resources to stock every national stock-pile (e.g., the strategic petroleum reserve) per a worst-case scenario.
3. Humility: it is impossible to know how one will decide in these situations until (s)he is there..
4. Empathy: yes, I would regret the lack of resources; what counts now are the decisions taken going-forward.
5. Transparency: stating, inconsistently, that the fact is irrefutable but praising the President for a concerted public-private response despite its tardiness.

Third, I next address the assertion that the President deems the economy more important than people; a loaded proposition from which many aspersions arise. The President downplayed the pandemic without question. He stymied the delivery of tests by the World Health Organisation. President Trump has mentioned the importance of the economy. There is increasing evidence of, at least attempted, self-dealing from this contagion, within the Admin. All of these statements are true and I share the same out-rage as many others; now to the test of ideas against values.

1. Fairness: any president, even President Obama, would be worrying about the economy, too, whether up for re-election or not.
2. Stoicism: one must realise that most people hope that unexpected things will go away.
3. Humility: I have no idea what I would be thinking and I am not convinced that l would necessarily be up to a decision where any choice means somebody loses.
4. Empathy: the same people gnashing their teeth at the President now would be doing the same if he locked down the country and cratered the economy; the argument would run that the President really sought to crush the middle class so the 1% could gobble up more assets (i.e., foreclosed homes) on the cheap by willfully shutting down the economy.
5. Transparency: praising, inconsistently, the rapidity (i.e., five-to-six weeks) of the President in building a sweeping private-public-N.G.O. coalition for a concerted and communal response after ‘dithering’ for at most two weeks when he faced the climax of a partisan impeachment and Senate trial.

Fourth, I wind up by addressing the final assertion of the President’s delay causing two to three hundred thousand deaths. This assertion also whips up many emotional derivative claims, mainly that the President has proven his malevolence and indifference to suffering by spinning his upcoming, almost certain, failure as an achievement to win re-election. There may be some of that, as most actions and decisions involve more than one motive, savoury and otherwise. Nevertheless, I thoroughly and heatedly disagree; now to the test of ideas against values.

1. Fairness: if current penetration rates prove to be correct, three hundred thousand deaths will calculate out to a mortality rate of less than 1%, and more like 0.1%; truly an accomplishment vis à vis the Spanish Flu of a century ago.
2. Stoicism: in looking at the totality of response, the President’s response, if delayed and imperfect, one must concede that it is comprehensive.
3. Humility: available resources are limited and the decision-taking here remains sobering no matter how good or bad the decision-taker.
4. Empathy: it is obvious to me, at least, that I would have focussed exclusively on the impeachment and Senate trial, even if it had been deserved though partisan, and would have waited to see if the suspension of air-service would be enough.
5. Transparency: praying, inconsistently, that the President will succeed at limiting the death toll to 300,000 of my fellow Americans.

Conclusion: detaching with compassion.
As I did in 2015, do I still believe that President Trump is dangerously authoritarian? Yes.

As I refused to do in 2016, will I vote for President Trump in 2020? No way. 

As I did in 2017, do I still hate this President? No, but I will always dislike him. 

As I rejoiced in 2018 with the mid-term elections for the House of Representatives, do I wish for a repeat toward a liberal ascendancy in 2020. Absolutely. 

As I argued angrily in 2019, do I detest many of this Administration's policies? Without hesitation.

In 2020, can I understand the President’s hurt over his justified, if partisan, impeachment and his subsequent Senate trial? Yes.

In 2020, can I sympathise with the human pain the President faces with the dilemmas, many of his own making, imposed by this COVID-19 killing spree? Of course.

In 2021, will I believe that President Trump's response will prove to be more concerted than would that of any other President of my life-time? Probably, with the likely exceptions of Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson. 

This flip-flopping maps out the course ahead, for me at least: support the President’s effort; match his perceptible mistakes with solutions; and, appreciate what he does right.