Taking bids on the Knucklehead Hall of Fame motorcycle festival
Seven full weeks have passed since anyone attempted to break the pandemic record for knuckleheadedness, so I guess we should feel relieved that we made it this far without anyone trying to spread the coronavirus like it has never been spread before.
Seven weeks ago tonight the president of these disunited states attempted to lure more than 19,000 people to an indoor arena in COVID-19 hot spot Tulsa, Okla., a super-spreader event ameliorated somewhat by the fact that most of the 19,000 just didn’t show up.
Not sure they’ll be so lucky this week in Sturgis, S.D., or in its gorgeous surroundings, where they were still expecting 250,000 people for their annual motorcycle rally, a 10-day festival that began Friday, virus be damned.
Mind you, 250,000 is a scaled-back projection now that many of the festival’s signature events — the opening ceremonies, the parades, the contests and the live music at HarleyDavidson Rally Point Plaza — have been canceled in a slight tip of the cap to reality. But those are city-sponsored events, and plenty of other venues were planning to go forward with upholding the event’s raucous traditions.
What is it about even a toned-down version of the Sturgis rally that would have folks bike right into a biosphere ripe with a deadly contagion?
Molly Hatchet, I know, but ...
Quiet Riot, I know, but ... The Lingerie Wrestling Championships, I know, but ...
I hear ya, it’s the championships, but ...
“They’re already here,” one saloon owner told the Miami Herald last week, adding sarcastically that Sturgis residents “have learned to wash their hands,” and that only Democrats
worry about the virus.
Turns out that some 60% of those residents pleaded with the city council to cancel the annual bikerfest, and that would not be unprecedented. When the Sturgis rally was in its infancy, organizers suspended it for three years due to World War II gas rationing. That was different, I guess. After all, in that moment, 419,000 Americans were about to die in four years, where today, we’ve only got about 160,000 dead.
In less than five months. Twenty years ago, the Sturgis rally drew 600,000, and in 2012, it drew motorcycle enthusiasts from all 50 states and five foreign countries. For all the various good ways and bad ways it has been depicted back to the first one in 1938, no one has probably ever called it America’s Worst Contact Tracing Nightmare.
There’s a first time for everything.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who urged pathogen-cautious residents to stay home if they didn’t like her ground rules for the July 4 Trump rally at Mount Rushmore — no masks or social distancing necessary — has long bragged on the state’s minimalist restrictions. So Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend showed up healthy for that rally but went home with a positive test. She was more fortunate than Trump loyalist Herman Cain, who went on a ventilator and died tragically within six weeks of the Tulsa boondoggle.
All that said, it’s probably unfair to posit that Sturgis and South Dakota do super-spreading like nobody else. There are so many outrageously irresponsible spasms flaring nationally, particularly in New York and New Jersey, that New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy invoked an idea whose time has clearly come: The Knucklehead Hall of Fame.
“Yes, it’s hot,” the governor said at a presser this week. “Yes, it’s summer. Yes, we all want — and in many cases, need — to blow off some steam. But this is no time for anyone to be vying for induction into the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.”
Which, obviously, raises all kinds of questions. Where would it be? I think we can agree that currently, there isn’t a building in America big enough to house the Knucklehead Hall of Fame. The space required just to house the video library of the inaugural class — Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp — is measured in acreage.
Washington, D.C., seems like a natural site, and while Sturgis clearly has an argument, the locale could be anywhere in the dozens of states that opened too soon and thus insured that we’d be groundhog-daying this pandemic hard toward 2021.
Super-spreader events are so communally virulent right now that Scientific American posted a story last month explaining that just 10% to 20% of the infected might be responsible for 80% of the cases.
So Sturgis might hold the title of Super-SpreaderPalooza for now and into the fall, but don’t forget what New York City’s got in store for Dec. 31.
One million people in Times Square, and probably not socially distanced at 6 feet. That should set us up nicely for 2021.
If all of that tomfoolery isn’t canceled, you could put a roof over New Year’s Eve at that spot and open the Knucklehead Hall of Fame live at midnight.