Gorgons of Ecstasy

Gorgons of Ecstasy

   Is it redundant to say something that ought to be obvious, to beckon attention to concepts built from facts that people I know to be reasonable have already fathomed for themselves? Reality suggests not.
    The Covid-19 virus--as of this writing--has infected 4,169,071 people across the world, 283,218 of whom have died from the disease. These numbers come unbidden from the Center for Disease Control. Because the United States has always prided itself on being Number One, we lead the world--free and otherwise--with 1,364,956 cases and 80,697 departures from this mortal coil. This disease is the Manson Family of viruses. What I mean is that a lot of people back in the summer of 1969 tried to warn the authorities that a short guy with long hair and a bevvy of females and a few young men were attempting to ignite a race war by killing white people and putting the blame on blacks on account of The Beatles told them to do so, but the story was so deranged and confusing and vast that members of the Los Angeles Police Department back in that late summer of 1969 decided the killers of Sharon Tate and others just had to be the result of a drug deal gone wrong and wasted days, weeks, months sniffing the stench of the wrong sidewalks. 
   And so it was in the early days of the Corona Virus. 
   A country all too happy to blame other countries for its own personality defects decided to wait. The mystery disease had not, after all, affected anyone in the United States. The very fact that the United States was now in the hands of a messianic megalomaniac with strong appeal to racists and survivalists meant that the disease would not dare enter our shores. Our leader had scared off the Mexicans, the Arabs, the  Asians and godless Canadians. How much harm could some bat in a fish market in Wuhan do to a bunch of hairy muscleheads in the greatest goldarned country on the face of North America? We're great again, dammit! That flu bug will vanish, like a miracle from the Miracle Man.
   Eighty thousand dead Americans later, we find ourselves hellbent for leather to "reopen" our country tomorrow, as if somehow the last two months has been some kind of grandiose prison sentence, some illegitimate constraint against our fought and won right to cough recombinant ancestral acute respiratory syndrome death seeds into the gaping faces of people too stunned by the idiocy of it all to stay at home. 
   I'm in business. I like working. I enjoy seeing the work I do help other people. But I am not so conceited--no matter what you may have heard--as to believe that my contribution to the health of our collective economy depends in any way whatsoever on my direct physical participation. So I continue to use other means: telephone, texting, email, video conferencing. Sometimes I just dash out the front door, let out a scream that would give a stroke to a timberwolf, and run back inside. 
    I like being alive. I have a beautiful young wife and a couple of silly dogs who look at me as if I know many things. he dogs, that is. Joyce knows better. I have friends all over the country and they mean the world to me.  That is why I don't go out to some crowded grocery without a mask, touch as many things as possible, pick  my face, shake hands with the cashier, and then make air contact with a whole bunch of other nitwits, anyone of whom might infect somebody else who would then give the virus I so conveniently acquired without symptoms to my young wife or my friends, any one of whom could then in turn join the anonymous list of numbers clicking out the  official DOA tickertape. 
   So if this is redundant, as Walt Whitman could have said, very well then, it is redundant. I contain multitudes of forgetfulness. The pity is that repetition and metaphoric restatements are required at all.