‘So this is COVID’ a not-so-enjoyable earworm
Sometimes the unpleasant stuff goes down better with sugar. There’s the cough medicine made to taste like oranges. The emotional pain rebranded as “personal growth.” The sad song set to an upbeat melody. As an example, three weeks ago I had the jaunty tune to “So This Is Christmas,” playing on repeat in my head, only in place of Christmas, there was the not-so-jaunty word “COVID.”
It’s odd, lying pinned to a sofa for three days and all the while humming (such as you have the energy to hum) a bright tune. Because I couldn’t get any further in the lyrics than that one line — whether due to COVID fog or a lifetime of Jewishness spent not singing Christmas songs, I’m not sure — I decided to Google it. What I discovered was so much more than I bargained for. That “jaunty” little Christmas tune was written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969 and was actually a Vietnam protest song. Am I the last person on Earth to find this out?
The real title of the song is “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” It was written at the height of the counterculture movement, when protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War were rocking the international stage, and was released in 1971. The lyrics include lines like, “War is over (if you want it),” “So this is Christmas and what have you done?” and “Let’s stop all the fight.” According to historian Beth Nevarez, “Happy Xmas” was Lennon and Ono’s appeal to the masses to take personal responsibility for ending war. It began as a multimedia campaign and took its place in history as a reminder that, together, we can change the tide.
What was interesting (besides learning something I should have learned 40-something years ago) was the parallel Nevarez drew between a nation divided on the judiciousness of its involvement in the Vietnam War and a nation divided on the acceptance of COVID vaccinations as part of the personal responsibility required to fight the pandemic.
Who would have thought that throughout history, lessons and parallels pertaining to current events abound? My own father, for one. He tried to point out the interrelationship of the then with the now countless times, but I was too busy doing other things to listen, namely, railing against the tedium of my high school history classes, by asking rhetorical and deeply stupid questions about the pertinence of said classes to life in general.
But back to COVID. It seems that circulating, in person, among millions, possibly trillions of other humans in the teeming megalopolis of London, England, as we did at the beginning of this month, is pretty much a recipe for contracting a highly contagious illness. My husband and I were not surprised to fall ill, even though among our friends and close acquaintances, we were the last to get sick, and he even quipped that, if we returned from London without COVID, we were going to sell our blood. You can get out of line now.
When you have only heard and read about others who have had COVID, actually contracting it is, if you are not too ill for selfreflection, a bit like conducting a science experiment in which you yourself are the subject. It was with an air of respectful (though not exactly objective) detachment that I monitored our flattened bodies, cataloging (in my head, as I was too tired to write) each new finding under the primary heading, “So This Is COVID,” under which came subheadings like, “Fever Variations” (our temps ranged from normal to 101.6 for two days); “Feverish Thoughts” (like, will there be a future in which I leave the sofa to do something other than urinate and feed the dogs)?; and “What We Ate” (anticipating that I too would fall ill once my husband was sick, I made several vats of bean and chicken soup. There were also a number of meals in which cheese featured prominently, because, while anticipating incapacity, I had stocked up on it. It’s also possible that I was already falling ill and stockpiling cheese was the first sign.)
Meanwhile, at regular intervals throughout the study, that well-knownto-the entire-world-but-me Christmas protest song, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” played on loop in my (aching) head. As I sang along unconsciously (“So this is COVID, la la la la la…”), it seemed to me that my husband and I were extremely fortunate to not be sicker than we were, to have access to good medical care and to be getting regular check-ins from thoughtful friends. All things considered, we got COVID fairly late in the war, and I am grateful to those who fought valiantly before us, who pioneered the way to vaccinations, to lifesaving medication and to health.