Pandemic’s least mourned losses
Wednesday’s anniversary of the national lockdown led by the Bay Area marks a year of lives, livelihoods and living lost to a mismanaged pandemic. In the spirit of acknowledging that these losses can hardly be described, much less redeemed, let’s take note of a few casualties of the contagion that need not be mourned and might yet be celebrated. Governors: For the most part, they’re barely qualified to run a DMV, let alone a country. So when our former president effectively forced them to do his job, the luckiest ones muddled through satisfactorily enough not to be noticed beyond their borders. Others, however, appear to have accepted their newfound prominence with all the equanimity of King Lear.
Take Gov. Kristi Noem, whose laissezfaire approach to the pandemic ensured that the virus killed more people in South Dakota than it did in South Korea. The governor’s performance embodied the drug awareness slogan her administration was best known for before she botched this crisis: “Meth: We’re on it.”
But the least fortunate governors were briefly elevated by the pandemic, the power vacuum and perpetual press briefings to quasipresidential status only to come crashing earthward under the weight of the task and their own hubris. Gavin Newsom went from logorrheic liberal darling to the brink of being only the fourth governor in history forced to beg the voters not to fire him midterm. Andrew Cuomo’s antigravitational moment was even less explicable given the pandemic’s disastrous course through New York, and his implosion is proceeding even faster than Newsom’s. Influenza: Last winter, the flu killed some 22,000 Americans; this season, it hasn’t killed 500. That is a pale silver lining given half a million coronavirus deaths, but it demonstrates that simple precautions such as wearing a mask and staying home when we might be sick can save lives not just from a novel virus but also from our alltoofamiliar microbial scourges.
One of the most persistent and perverse arguments against pandemic precautions was that because the flu kills tens of thousands every year, we should be fine with another virus costing as many lives or more. That is to take precisely the wrong lesson from this disaster. The right one is that we should not shrug at any preventable illness that kills thousands of vulnerable people a year just because it would be inconvenient for everyone else to assume some small responsibility for not getting sick and breathing on them.
Cubicles: If you’ve ever wished you could have your own office without such inconveniences as a door, then you might understand the appeal of the cubicle. But the rest of the legions suddenly freed from these postindustrial holding cells, along with the hours of commuting often necessary to reach them, are probably wondering whether their living room couches aren’t preferable.
Good luck to all the middle managers who, out of whatever misguided attachment to 20th century nostalgia or casual corporate surveillance, are forced to corral us back into these carpeted closets.
Prohibition: Many residents of our marijuanascented, magicmushroomdecriminalizing state assume we’re nearly a century beyond the legacy of Prohibition and on to legalizing all sorts of drugs that are more fun and less dangerous than alcohol. But the pandemic reminded us that like the rest of the country, California is still wrestling with the repercussions of the least likable movement in preQAnon America, the Drys.
As if it weren’t enough that bars and their employees had to fend for themselves amid justified pandemic precautions and unjustified lapses in federal relief, they had to do so under the additional burden of the byzantine regulations governing them. This required a dizzying series of revisions of the already confusing rules that govern the industry to enable bars and breweries to get by with outdoor and takeout service. It wasn’t until last week that the state began to ease restrictions that prevented breweries but not wineries from serving drinks without food outdoors — as if an order of chicken wings or a glass with a stem makes any difference to public health.
If customers are safely distanced outside or taking their orders home, it shouldn’t be this difficult to let them support their favorite bars and bartenders by getting a drink. After this year, we could use one.