In the long run, we’re going to make it through this
Thursday’s announcement that the Bank of America ChicagoMarathon is now officially set to step off next Oct. 10 felt like the sight of green shoot poking through the frosty earth.
The certainty of the date is firmly, if not defiantly, optimistic in light of the current rampant spread of the novel coronavirus. The announcement plants a flag on the calendar and says, “There! Then! On that day, we will be able to safely hold an event that, if held now, would be the mother of all superspreaders.”
Marathons are petri dishes of snot and droplets. In Chicago, some 45,000 runners clump shoulder to shoulder in the starting corral in Grant Park and then lumber past a nearly equal number of shouting spectators along the 26.2-mile route. The declaration that it will happen on our streets less than 11 months fromnowisn’t a sign thatwe’re “rounding the corner” on the pandemic, as soon-to-be-former President Donald Trump said on the campaign trail, but an assertion that metaphorical spring will eventually arrive following what President-elect Joe Biden haswarned will be “a very dark winter” of isolation, disease and death.
The race date on the applications now available is not a guarantee, of course. Even though recent news about vaccines has been promising and testing techniques and therapeutics for COVID-19 are improving all the time, viruses are tough to predict.
Recovery and the return to normal will be gradual, we knowthat. Therewon’t be a triumphant moment whenwe rush into the streets and begin kissing strangers on the lips like celebrants did on V-JDay in 1945, but insteadwe’ll experience a series of moments in whichwe cautiously take down the barriers that have been confining and separating us.
I’m looking forward to having indoor guests, making music with friends, returning to the office, going to restaurants, shows and sporting events. My eye has been on late July for a significant expansion ofmy comfort level around friends and strangers, but Oct. 10 seems like a reasonable approximation for when it will feel festive and not fatal for people fromall over theworld to crowd together and breath on one another.
Even if not, the announcement itself reminds us that the date is coming, that the green shoot will blossom. And thatwe need to do our best to protect ourselves and others in the meantime so that more can enjoy its arrival.
Requiem for ‘Hillbilly’
The release earlier this month of “Hillbilly Elegy,” director RonHoward’smovie forNetflix based on author J.D. Vance’s bestselling autobiography of the same name, prompts this friendly reminder that “hillbilly” is a slur and it pays to be careful howyou toss theword around.
It “was originally a derogatory term,” said a Roanoke (Virginia) Times editorial in 2018. “The first printed references to the word appeared in the 1890s. In 1900, the NewYork Journal described the term this way: ‘A Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Tennessee, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.’ None of thatwasmeant as a compliment.”
For many, theword is shorthand for an ignorant, backward and unrefined rural person but, as the same editorial noted, “hillbilly” doesn’t pack the same punch as the more toxic racial and ethnic slurs that we need notmention. In Appalachia and among Appalachians, it’s sometimes used “in a neutral or even positiveway. In the early days, country musicwas promoted as
‘hillbilly’ music and, when it ran up against rock ’n’ roll, the last part of theword became part of a new genre called ‘rockabilly.’ Elvis Presleywas called for a time ‘the Hillbilly Cat,’” said the editorial. “Just over the state line, Pikeville, Kentucky, hosts an annual festival called ‘HillbillyDays.’”
What about “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the TV sitcom that ran from1962 to 1971 and made loving sport of the nouveau riche hill folk transplanted into awealthy California enclave? Well, thosewere less enlightened times. When CBS announced a reality-based reboot titled “The Real Beverly Hillbillies” in 2002, the networkwas shamed out of it by an anti-defamation campaign led by The Center for Rural Strategies, an advocacy group in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
“The brass at CBS clearly think it’s safe to make fun of and commercialize lowincome rural folks,” said the center in a news release at the time. Author Vance, who grewup poor in a fractured, troubled family in southwestern Ohio, is entitled to use “hillbilly” affectionately, descriptively or however he sees fit in accordance with the unwritten rules of in-group slang.
But the Roanoke Timeswas unequivocal: “Someone who is not froma rural background should abstain fromusing the H-word to describe people who are.”
Re: Tweets
So much wit has been flying around Twitter that I broke the Tweet of theWeek reader poll into two divisions. Winner of the political divisionwas “Joe Biden has a coronavirus team; Trump’s team has coronavirus,” a quip repeated (stolen) so often that Iwas unable to trace it back to a single source (various). The winner of the apolitical division also strikes a controversial tone in its admonition to those who plan to ignore the guidance of health experts and attend large holiday gatherings in the coming days: “Bringing a deadly disease to people with little to no immunity is a very authentic Thanksgiving re-enactment,” by @bazecraze.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/ zorn where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/ newsletters.