Paul Hudon Diary in the Time of Coronavirus

Diary in the Time of Coronavirus

paul hudon

March 23, 2020

This Monday, the 23rd, marks the 23rd anniversary of Midsomer Murders. It is tailor-made for binge-watching in the time of coronavirus. In terms of scripts, it’s nothing so good as Inspector Morse, but several cuts above Rosemary & Thyme. Middlebrow, then, far as Brit mystery productions go. Characters tend to be of the cut-out type, but the stories do keep moving, with a turn of events nicely paced like a fresh start. You get a re-think just when your attention starts to wander. Best part: The scenery. Midsomer is a fictional county in England where the villages have florid names. My favorite is Badgers Drift. The people live in fabulous houses: vine-covered, mullion windows, thatched roofs, exposed oak beams. Houses that would cost you four or five million (pounds or dollars). And a lot of the furniture is at least two generations old. We’re talking families, lineage. There are exceptions to this. Once or twice, I’ve watched an episode where a band of roma or some such is camped outside the village. Friction results. Worst part: The g.d music. Somebody on that production staff has a serious jones for brass. It’s loud, incessant, irritating. The opening theme is played by a theremin. Enough said.

Twenty-three years is not quite a record in the UK. That belongs to Doctor Who, which ran from 1963 to 1989, three years longer than MM. Here in the States, Gunsmoke ran from 1955 to 1975, three years fewer. You get bored, you could take up the mysteries of numerology, conjure with that for all of ten minutes.

A toast to Midsomer Murders, episode 126.

March 24

“I’m going home and sit in a corner where I know everybody.”—Ida Morgenstern, Rhoda’s mother

March 25

Here’s irony for you, on an epic scale: The experience of social distancing will remind us that

bonding is fundamental to being human. Experience is the operative word: embodied learning. Downright somatic training. And the scale is epic because our coronavirus experience is sure to divide time, BC from AC. Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again, again.

For thousands of years homo sapiens has experienced pandemics such as the one visited on us now. But over the last century or two we’ve progressively clarified our knowledge of how this happens. As our grip on how has improved, the why of events has been restructured. Divine agency has been crowded out. The off-planet Minder has been left behind.

Why and how have become interchangeable, though Why is still preferred in our common speech when it’s How that really captions what we know—‘‘Why are there so many traffic accidents at this intersection?’’ ‘‘Why do giraffes have such long necks?’ We use Why as the equivalent of How does it happen that. This habit of mind throws us off the scent.

This pandemic is an opportunity for us to shift our sense of location, to rejoin the original world wide web. To survive we’ll need to get real. We need to assume a radically biological predicate. Which is how it happens that le trompeur is in the way. Le trompeur is all about self, exactly what we need to leave behind.

March 26

Well, it’s a done thing. Grocery shopping has been accomplished. Haven’t been out of the bldg. since Thursday the 12th. Two weeks exactly. First stop, Speedway, corner of Wilder and Pawtucket, taking the detour. Left onto School etc. The bridge over the Pawtucket Canal won’t be finished for another year, into 2021. Don’t expect to get there.

I do get to Speedway, five a.m. Down Wilder, to Pawtucket. Looks like Hopper was here before me. Artificial light draws the scene out of nowhere, the river just barely there. A surface, at the top. Valéry’s toit tranquille.

Half ’n hour later, 5:35, I check the time as I arrive at Sunrise Plaza, Bridge Street. People. Jesus! People moving about. Few, not one out of ten, are wearing masks, but almost all of them wearing gloves.

I do it. Do the whole list except for my brand of coffee (Bustelo) and paper towels (nothing but twelve packs; not ready for that). Otherwise, I score.

Check-out. Trouble. After several attempts w/ my TD card, am told that payment is “declined.” I gno for a fact that there are more than enough $$ in that account. Market Basket offers to hold my cartful ($120.93 worth) while I figure out how to pay for it. I call the magic phone number on the back of the card and I’m told there’ll be a wait. It could be a long one. Brainstorm: I drive straight down Bridge to Merrimack, bang a right at Kearney Sq. and a left onto Central, another right onto Middle and there I am at the ATM, corner of Middle and Central, where I take two hundred, and return pleased as hell with myself and pay cash for my groceries. Got milk!

Now we wait and see if I’m incubating.

April 19, Patriot’s Day

There is a scene in HBO’s biopic of John Adams captioned “April 19, 1775, The Aftermath of Lexington and Concord.” In it, Adams is there at the tail-end of the events of the day, and is witness to some of the carnage. After this we see him return to his farm in Braintree, slumped in the saddle, looking worn-down by the experience. Abigail comes out of the house to be with him. His voice is heavy with resignation when he says to her, “There can be no mistaking Britain’s intentions now.”

That “now” at the end of the sentence sounds like closure. British troops have been in Boston for nearly a full year, since May of ’74; the port is closed, killing the town’s economy. Behind that is a full decade of repeated confrontations between the colonies and Parliament over the same issues of taxation and representation. “Now” all that is in the past, Adams is saying. Whatever comes next will be something else, a departure. Today is the 245th anniversary of that day, Patriots’ Day. The novel coronavirus, the pandemic, the lockdown are spreading a sense of departure among us. It’s unmistakable. Not possible to say just yet how radical that departure will be, how great the disruption, to use the current buzzword. The patriots took another year plus to decide on independence. For sure, it took more than resignation to get there. We live in interesting times.

April 20

Another scene. This one from a film version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1945). It’s a brief bit of dialogue between Dr Armstrong (Walter Huston) and Judge Quincannon (Barry Fitzgerald), on first acquaintance. It starts at the eight-minute mark and runs for about thirty seconds:

“Half my patients are sick because they’re trying to escape reality.” “And what’s your answer?” “I build them islands of imagined security.” “Don’t you believe in medicine, doctor?” “Do you believe in justice, judge?” [laughter]

There’s more to the scene but that’s the sense of it, the interplay between isolation and security. What could be more relevant to our situation?

The movie takes place on an island, except for the opening where all ten guests arrive by boat. Each of them has a cover story—their “imagined security”—and each has a criminal secret that leads inevitably to a failure of imagination. This island is a trap. It offers no security. These “ten little Indians” have been lured to their no-exit location, first to admit their guilt then to atone for it. At least for them there is a cause, a crime, that accounts for their fate. The comfort of fiction, and no doubt the reason even the wildest fictions find an audience in the time of COVID-19.

April 21

You’ve Had Your Time. The title of the second volume of Anthony Burgess’s memoirs runs through my head nearly every day.

April 22

The COVID-19 pandemic is acting as an accelerant, speeding-up issues and situations already trending before the virus began its work. And that’s sure to be ongoing. Late in March, I’m shooting around YouTube, per usual, and come across an interview broadcast just five days before in France. Paul Jorion and Gaël Giraud, two writers unknown to me, are sharing their opinions with le grand public “on the economic consequences of the epidemic.”

Giraud is a novelist eager to explain the “paradox” of fiction, that it tells Truth about our collective predicament by dramatizing incidents and events in the life of individuals. Not an original thought and only incidental to the point.

Jorion on the other hand is bang on-topic. Wikipedia tells us that he is an anthropologist and sociologist by training. “He has also written seven books on capitalist economics.” Now he has a message for us Americans, about our economic future. There won’t be much of it. Jorion reminds us that at the end of the Second World War, the United States held 75% of the world’s economy. In 1945, all other national economies were wrecked or exhausted, in no shape to compete with the America all revved-up with the war effort. Jorion then says, “I wouldn’t be surprised—Je n’serais pas étonné—if at the end of this epidemic China is holding 75% of the world’s economy.” Nor is he in doubt how this was brought to be. “Sabotage,” he doesn’t balk at using the world. Donald Trump’s‘ “sabotage’’ of the federal government is responsible for our spectacular unpreparedness. Belgian-born Paul Jorion is 73 years old.

On the same day I watch the interview, I find a piece in The Guardian by Julian Borger, ‘’US AWOL from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size.’’ A week later, early in April, there’s the report that Chinese engineers back in February argued for the creation of a new www to rival the one dominated by American firms. This was in Geneva at a meeting of the International Telecommunications Union. When we come out the other end of this pandemic, we Americans are going to have to learn the world all over again.

April 23

Every time le trompeur lets go a major brain-fart I think, Well, he’s finally done it, this time even the laziest and stupidest among the lazy and the stupid will see what a gawdawful excuse for a human being he is. And every time, I’m disappointed. Then I think of Earl Landgrebe.

Landgrebe, a Republican, was a Member of the House from Indiana, second district. In 1972, he was reelected by a comfortable nine-point spread (54.7% v 45.3%), defeating Floyd Fithian, a professor of history at Purdue. In 1974, the outcome was reversed. Fithian took the seat by a whopping 22 percentage points (61.06 v 38.9). In between is the story of Watergate, House impeachment hearings, and Landgrebe’s foolish/heroic loyalty to Richard Nixon.

Cut to the chase. August 5, 1974, a transcript of the “smoking gun” tape has been released

proving Nixon’s collusion in the Watergate coverup. Landgrebe refuses to hear the tape or read the transcript. “I’m going to stick with my president,” he says, “even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.” No one was shot. But Landgrebe did shoot himself in the foot. When the House voted to accept the Judiciary Committee’s articles of impeachment, the count was 412 to 3, Landgrebe being among the three voting no. And that is how he lost the election three months later, and how he got 39% of the votes cast in Indiana’s second district.

That’s the relevant number, 39%, the point of the Landgrebe experience. That’s the percentage approval rating Trump hovers around consistently. So today, when he says on live TV that maybe injecting household disinfectants into your lungs is a cure for the novel coronavirus, he’ll have at least one third of Americans take it in without a hiccup. 39% out of reach. They’re going to stick with their president, even if it means death.

April 24

Today, management put up handwritten signs requiring that anyone entering the building be wearing a mask; and of course that applies to us tenants as well. I’ve been following that rule on my own for almost two months. Oddly, today’s the first time I notice men doing work at the grotto [Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto at the former Franco-American School being rehabbed for residences] to be wearing masks. They’re not working on the grotto itself which looks to be done. A barrier and a sign have been put across the stairs leading to the foot of the cross. There was a couple here yesterday doing the stations. Those masked workmen came in with their own supply of boards, wood, twelve feet long or more. These they unloaded and I don’t know what with because they did it behind the roof line of the building between them and me. There’s still a Porta Potty looking silly and forlorn at the School St. end.

Also today, from Huffpost: “Where To Buy Face Masks For Coronavirus, And What To Look For: How to Purchase a Face Mask That Can Help You Prevent the Spread of COVID-19” by Kristen Aiken. Definitely the Day of the Mask.

April 25

Joe Biden said today he doesn’t really care to be president. He didn’t say it in those words and he didn’t say it today—I only read about it today. But he said it, and he said it twice. “Recently, Biden told MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, that even if the Congress sent him a Medicare for All bill, he would veto it. And a week later, he confirmed that position.”

April 26

Lord Manor, where I write this, sits on a piece of real estate that was a different part of my life when it was a different sort of place. In the ‘50s, from ‘52 to ’56, I was a student at St Joseph’s High School for Boys, on Merrimack Street. Every school day during those years I walked from Gershom Avenue, where I lived, to the school, and back again. I figure this means I crossed over the Merrimack on the Moody Street bridge something like 1440 times in those

four years. [5X36=180X4=740X2=1440] It was still Moody Street in those years, starting at City Hall and running clear up into Dracut. Later, the piece of it on the north side of the bridge was renamed Textile Avenue, and later still it became University.

My visits to this place, 321 Pawtucket Street, were off the beaten track in the ‘50s, and certainly occasional. No more than half dozen times, if that. Three-twenty-one was the residence of the Marist Brothers who ran St. Joseph’s in some kind of affiliation with St. Jean Baptiste parish, and an arm’s-length relation with St. Joseph’s High School for Girls.

Unlike Lord Manor, the brothers’ house was situated by the sidewalk on Pawtucket, inline with the other buildings on the street. Where now there’s Archambault Funeral Home’s parking lot. It was a fair to middling impressive brick structure, probably built in the 1870s or ‘80s. Its prime feature was a tower sort of thing that stood out from the facade, forming a vestibule on the ground floor. I never got much further than that on the inside which is why my memories of the place are all about what went on outside. As I remember—keep in mind I’m now in my 82nd year and memory does not improve with age—the lot ran all the way to the Northern Canal, rusticating as it went. There was quite a vegetable garden back there, and I think chickens were kept there, possibly rabbits.

This was the domain of Frère Louis Viateur, a silver-haired gentleman who was probably out of the 1880s himself. A habitant from central casting. He taught French to all four grades at St. Joe’s. Mostly he would have us speaking or explain the rules of grammar; but two times a week he’d come in and tell us to take out a sheet of paper. It was time for a dictée. He spoke a hundred words or so from a French short story which we wrote down. He made sure, I think it must have been deliberate, that there were a dozen or more past participles in his dictation. He never collected those papers. We boys switched papers and corrected each other’s work while he spelt it out, sometimes on the blackboard. I still have trouble with past participles.

I was living the ‘50s in the twilight of Lowell’s Québecois moment. Then came the ‘60s and it all started to come apart. I was away most of the decade, at Georgetown University, doing graduate work in French history. In 1968 I was back, my first year teaching at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass. St. Joseph’s High School for Boys closed that year, folded into Lowell Catholic High School. I never noticed.

April 27

The warrior’s life has been described as long periods of boredom broken by short, sudden bursts of terror. Lockdown, “home isolation,” feels like that.

April 28

Major fall-out in several directions from Dr. Trump’s advisory on household disinfectants at last Thursday’s presser. First direction was his own. It looked for a while like he’d decided to give it up, withdraw from his daily confrontations with the White House press corps on the advice of his team. They were having a negative effect on the polls, Parscale told him. But character will out. The lights and the cameras and the hostilities, they’re life.sustaining to him, his native environment. So he’s back at it, and of course he denies ever saying that

flooding the lungs with a disinfectant would destroy the coronavirus. Likewise, one day to the next, he made the statement and denied the statement about having 5 million daily tests available ‘‘very soon.’’ I keep hearing the voice of Julie Kavner, “They’ll say anything when they’re courting.” (Sleepless in Seattle?) Fenton thinks Trump is totally innocent of contradictions. “He thinks in seven-second intervals, like anything feral. How can he know?”

Best one-liner came out of the mouth of Nasty Nancy, the Speaker. “They call that embalming.”

Most astute observation came from nailbender at Daily Kos.

This time. Trump did not use denial, he didn’t claim that he’d never made those remarks about injections. Instead, he said it was “sarcasm.” He just wanted to know “what would happen.” Nailbender writes that Trump’s cover story, his explanation one day for what he said the day before, is no less heinous than his ‘‘lethally idiotic’’ clinical propositions.

“Let that sink in,” nailbender writes. “He was just making an incredibly cruel, tasteless and sickening joke—without even a hint that he was trying to be funny—in his comments to a nation that is reeling from death, isolation, insecurity, and dislocation, a nation that is seeking solace and reassurance.” Criminal indifference is the charge.

Say he’s not lying this time, if only for the novelty of it. “How is that even slightly less sick than the homicidal misinformation that he actually intended to say, and did indeed say, yesterday?” Thing is, I suspect that half of what Trump says, maybe more than half, he says just for that purpose. Damn the consequences for us individually, and to hell with what it does to our collective fabric. He needs to know how far he can go. He needs to move the finish line one joke at a time.

April 29

The data stream has become so dense it’s a challenge having to decide who or what is taking the lead, what the daily headline is, what the chapter titles are, and what the title of the book. There is no doubt the virus itself is in charge. Joshua Lederberg said in the last century that only a virus could dictate terms to us humans, and now novel coronavirus has done just that. Then too, H. G. Wells predicted it in The War of the Worlds, in 1897. There’ve been two movie versions of his novel in my lifetime. Aliens from another planet invade the earth, and nothing we throw at them will stop them. But one-celled organisms do. Aliens have no immunity in our biome.

Have we made ourselves alien? Has capital become an invasive life.form for which we behave as vector? Life is the organization of signals. That’s the definition information technology has brought us to. Do we even know that? We don’t realize it, maybe that’s the title, The species that got ahead of itself. And died there.

April 30

I’m struggling for visual recall of the looks Angela Merkel would give our president when now and then they got into the same frame and we got to see them together in the dailies. That interests me just now because I’ve seen the stats on how the Federal Republic of Germany

made out in its handling of the novel coronavirus. That’s the state Germans live under, and note that it’s federal.

Angela Merkel The awful truth (but not for the Germans): Germany, population 83.02 million [2019] COVID-19: confirmed 159K, deaths 6,126 Berlin, population 3.769 million [ 2019] COVID-19: confirmed 5,638, deaths 125

I’m not quoting our stats because it’s too depressing just thinking about them, and because they’re available online any number of places.

There’s no point getting into a rant about our situation. But we need to be sure that the point is made clear: This didn’t happen to us; it was made to happen. That it was made to happen when Trump delayed a positive reaction by his administration to the threat of a pandemic because he was convinced in his own mind that the virus was part of the Democratic Party’s vendetta, a continuation of impeachment by other means. It was about him. And, too bad for us, it was part of the plan of the gods, apparently, that his pathology fell in line with that virulent contempt most Americans have for the role of the state in all this. Quite a few are gathering in defiance of “sanitary ordinances.” Some of them are armed.

Check-out “Education and Career” in Wikipedia’s entry for Angela Merkel.

May 1

When good people make for bad citizens.

No reason to doubt there were “very good people” in among the armed cohort at Lansing, Michigan, yesterday. Strictly speaking Trump had that right, as he did in August ’17 and the “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville. Problem is Americans don’t put any space between private and public. They’re idiots. The origin of “idiot” survives in “idiosyncratic,” and “idiopathic.” It means “personal,” “private,” and by extension “f.off” Not what’s needed in a time of collective threat.

May 2

The German case comes up again with this piece, “Even German Conservatives, Corporations Make Green New Deal, Climate ‘Top Priority’ after Pandemic.” What it says it that public policy in Germany is defined by a view to Germany’s survival. Here in the States, policy is directed by a claque of grifters bent on sucking up as many dollars as can be had. Here in the States, we’re on our own.