Journal Entry from the Plague Year

• Go for jog.  Unusually many pedestrians, many cars, the which is a surprise when the state is officially on lock-down.  Return home, shower, and at table with the other four, conjecture, that Perrysburgers more than Ann Arboreans feel not the urgency of the plague; for, whereas the latter, minded by the return home of thousands of university students and by the now raging epidemic in Detroit, practise caution and keep the streets largely empty of traffic, the former are more insulated and likely feel themselves less vulnerable.  The which sentiment, one notes, prevailed in Defoe’s account of many London parishes which, having initially escaped the plague, blithely congratulated themselves, only to be latterly devastated by its swift and merciless descent upon them.  So might we expect Perrysburgers to be complacent until we begin to hear first of friends and kin, then of neighbors, infected and perished.  To emphasize this point, I told them what I had earlier learned through Facebook, that Adam Nowland, the star speaker of Perrysburg’s first speech and debate team and one of my coaches in Mock Trial, is now quarantined at a Columbus hospital with the Wuhan ’flu.  Even in just the past two months, never mind the last three hundred and fifty years, we have had repeated examples of communities vainly reassuring themselves of their safety from the plague: for at first it was widely assumed that the plague was only Wuhan’s problem, then only China’s, then only the Far East’s, then a problem overseas, before it became Seattle’s problem, then the two coasts’, now all the cities; and yet, judging from the crowded stores to-day and the cars jaunting hither and yon, one would guess, since the weather would hardly elicit joy-riders, that we were approaching an holiday.  To watch, moreover, the vacillations of the market, which surged earlier this week merely on the news that there would be massive stimulus from the Senate, and briefly again to-day when the House ratified the same, one would think that all will end well, despite that perhaps one fifth of the work-force is now disemployed and that international commerce is no less altered than by a world-wide war.  In fact, one suspects that there is an unrecognized trauma in this swift and universal disaster, which has left almost everyone stunned, prompting him either to vociferous denial, as made by the President and his satellites, or to silent and grievous longing for the familiar usages of daily life so abruptly lost, whose vestiges might be as if resurrected by an increase in the stock market or by the frequenting of grocery stores.  These blind stumblings into calamity, I say, were already visible in the Far East, and yet nobody recognizes them: the Chinese government has lied repeatedly, and yet even the New York Times reports the official count of the dead from Wuhan for comparison with those in New York, Milan, and elsewhere as if they were veridical data and not the conjurations of Communist propagandists.  The plague is all but certain to return thither whence it came, and yet journalists write as if it has quit China like an ejected guest.  If China has truly succeeded in eradicated a pernicious and invisible threat that has baffled the better part of the world, it will only be at a calamitous cost to its economy.  Blindness prevails even among those who should know the most.  But let it be recorded her, to remind whoso would remember the first months of the first plague year in over a century, that already, before our lives have become truly difficult, being as yet mere inconvenienced, there are none who have displayed themselves so shallowly and feebly loathsome, so craven and incompetent, as those in the orbit of Donald Trump.  I say not Republicans all, for Ohio’s governor, Michael Dewine, is earnest and true.  But the charlatans of Fox News, who lately enunciate that “The Cure Is As Bad as the Disease” to decry the stay-at-home enactments, insist that the nation’s economy is worth dying for.  By which they mean—Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others—that it were better that other people than themselves die, lest themselves be inconvenienced and their idol dethroned because of the economy that his policies had weakened years before the plague.  Let history remember that these two-bit school-yard bullies, with Trump as their doltish ring-leader, represent an evil not ingenious or conniving, not perversely principled or callously systematic, nay not a respectable and efficient evil, as it were, but rather an evil that is lazy, incompetent, and dazzlingly obvious even to an idiot.  May they everyone of them perish by this plague, and may their fœtid smoke waft over future generations of Americans as a repugnant memorial to the depths of disgust which in their own day they elicited in the fair-minded.