Strange Days

As the world descends into some sort of death spiral, or at least that's how it appears if you pay any attention to the news these days, I'm happily closing off most access to the outside world and concentrating on the things I enjoy. My reading, for example, has been going well. I've now read seven of Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse mysteries. One, Death Is Now My Neighbor (1996), I read twice, because (on my recommendation) it was the August pick for our Men's Book Club. After reading the first three books, because I already had them on my Kindle, I read three of the later ones leading up to the one we read for the book club. J and I have also been re-watching the PBS series, which I now realize offers slightly altered plots when adapting the novels, making for some interesting comparisons between the books and the TV versions. John Thaw, however, is the embodiment of Morse, especially as the book series progresses and Dexter falls more and more under his spell. And Kevin Whately is, of course, perfect as Lewis. But, as I suggested, the really important thing for me with both the books and the television series is the setting in Oxford. I've even been inspired to revisit our first time in Oxford in one of my little memoir essays on my "Works in Progress" blog.

Our July book club discussion was all about Alexander Hamilton (2004), Ron Chernow's massive biography. I don't think any of us had fully appreciated how significant Hamilton had been to the nation's founding. Even though we knew he'd been a force behind the Federalist Papers and was largely responsible for founding the Treasury Department and the National Bank, it was still a revelation to see his influence on so many other aspects of the birth of the country, including the emergence of political parties. In fact, the toxic partisanship that dogged the early days of the republic, including the many examples of inflammatory journalism, character assassination, and egregious examples of outright lies and fake news made one wonder how the country has held together for so long. But, of course, it nearly fell apart more than once, even before the Civil War, although we tend to gloss over those episodes and treat them as unusual, when in fact the history of the United States has always been about just how fragile that union really is. Now as we seem to be experiencing a low grade civil war, with armed citizens shooting at each other over what each side perceives as life or death issues, it appears we've come full circle. The only thing that strikes me as truly ridiculous, is how incredibly stupid and uninformed some of our latter day patriots appear to be. Or was that always the case, and we've just glossed over that as well?

One thing that will not yield to partisanship or fake news is our little novel coronavirus pandemic. Here we are now more than six months in, more than six million infected, over 180,000 dead just in the US, and you would think, from the sorts of stories that are making the rounds on social media, that it's all about the election or the economy or it's a hoax or just about anything but a new infectious disease that we don't have a cure for. I guess it's not really so surprising that people are making up their own reality, when the government appears to be doing the same thing. My prediction, although I'm notoriously pessimistic about homo sapiens, is that we are experiencing a true inflection point that will alter human society going forward. I don't expect there will be a cure for this (remember the common cold is a corona virus), but we will learn to live with it as an ever present but very unpredictable threat: some will die; some won't even know they've had it; the rest of us will just be very ill for a short or a long time. Meanwhile, we may see the end of the great democratic experiment we've all been so proud of. But part of that may simply be the realization that much of what we "believed" was never true in the first place. Will any of it make any difference going forward? I doubt it. If we didn't have such short memories and brief attention spans we would have realized by now that the more things change, the more they stay the same. All except for the weather. That's going to just keep getting hotter and hotter. But then, I like it warm much better than cold. If we can just not run out of water and air conditioning. I guess I will miss the Post Office. It was always fun getting mail. In fact, I think I'll go see if I got anything today.