Pandemic notes 3.0: Dying for the Democrats

by David Benjamin

“The gap between stated voting support for Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. grows by about 2.5 percentage points in Mr. Biden’s favor when a county has extremely high levels of coronavirus-related deaths relative to when it has low levels.”

— “The Upshot,” New York Times, 28 July

MADISON, Wis. —  1) Reluctant though we must be to admit it, the more people die from Covid-19, the less likely Donald Trump will be re-elected president. These tragic losses are the bleak harbinger of our best hopes. Thousands of Americans are dying for Joe Biden.

The grim corollary to this reality is a sin that stains the soul of every liberal, progressive, Never-Trump and Democratic voter. All of us, of course, are appalled by the callousness of a president pathologically incapable of feeling other people’s pain or empathizing as they mourn the friends and relatives killed by the virus. But Trump’s opponents harbor an unequal but opposite vein of cruelty, almost by necessity. We know that as the White House’s bungling of the greatest public-health crisis in a century turns ever uglier, as more people die, then more irresolute voters will drift away from Trump and forsake the Republican Party. There are studies now that prove this hypothesis. 

Secretly, Trump’s foes are obliged to rejoice, with all due guilt, as the number of Covid-19 victims climbs steadily toward five million souls. We must shiver with a shameful satisfaction at forecasts that 300,000 people — Americans, co-workers, neighbors — will die on Trump’s watch before the election. Everyone with a conscience, on the political right or left, hopes and prays for a serum or a safe vaccine that will stop this scourge, revive a crippled and fearful economy and restore a semblance of normalcy to society. But, if you’re a Biden voter, you’d just as soon this medical godsend waits ’til after November 3rd.

2) If you don’t know how bad Covid-19 is in the world of sports, you’re not paying attention. The honchos of all major league sports are whistling the same tune past the graveyard of our pastimes. Baseball is back, but in a ghostly and tenuous caricature of itself. Already, one team, the Miami Marlins, has had to bow out, as a third of its expanded roster staggers into a two-week quarantine. The collateral damage from the Marlins outbreak was a hitch in the schedules of at least three other teams. What? You think this won’t happen again?

Even if a wave of Covid infections doesn’t sweep through the Major Leagues and abort this silly 60-game exhibition season, what’s the point? Baseball is playing with itself in empty ballparks, in games that are meaningless and lifeless, as players who aren’t yet sick tussle listlessly for a shot at the Big Asterisk, a phony-baloney World Series trophy that will embarrass whoever backs into it. 

Even fans desperate for the vicarious thrill of victory and the agony of televised defeat are coming to realize is that it’s not the games themselves that lend magic to baseball, basketball, football, etc. The secret sauce is not even the players, as gifted and glorious as they might be. The element that lifts and electrifies our beloved spectator sports is the spectators. The fans make the game. They are a wall of sound, a dynamo of emotion and a barometer of every fright, every ecstasy and every heartbreak. Without fans, raving and jumping, arguing, cursing and cavorting in vast, boiling throngs, bigtime sports are exposed for the worst of their motives. Covid-19 has revealed baseball, the NBA, the NHL and all the others as a cynical corporate exercise staged in oversized TV studios to mitigate the fiscal angst of a handful of millionaires.

Covid has only begun to work its mischief on bread and circus. Its next target is football. One media analyst estimated the chances of seeing Division 1 football at 50-50. My estimate is lower, because I’ve been watching the attrition of scholastic sports as a sort of canary, high-school football in particular. School boards and high-school athletic directors have a better grip on the Covid crisis than Roger Goodell and NCAA chief Mark Emmert. This week, following the cancellation of football season among a number of Wisconsin leagues, the Madison schools simply wiped out all competitive sports for the rest of 2020. Zap. With the danger of viral transmission inherent in these activities, this is a prudent decision. 

The NFL and the NCAA, despite their insatiable lust for football revenue, will eventually face the same decision. If they are prudent, they will consider four fundamental factors: spit, snot, sweat and blood. 

All four of these irrepressible fluids carry Covid-19. All four fly around football fields, basketball courts, hockey rinks and wrestling mats in gobs, clouds, coughs, gasps, snorks, expectorations and general miasma. 

But what if… Well, let’s say the grid gods stick to their guns and play — fewer games behind plexiglass walls, in empty stadia, without cheers, no marching bands, every roster absent those players who’ve gotten sick, gone into quarantine or just plain said they won’t go out there because they love their grandma. 

Who will take these pseudo-games seriously? A Rose Bowl with no parade? A silent Super Bowl with 60,00 cardboard cutouts in the stands? The Big Asterisk casts its shadow on every field, darkens every highlight and diminishes every hero. 

3) I’ve been assembling a personal lexicon of words that have slipped into the vernacular since the onset of the outbreak — once-esoteric terms like “R0,” “herd immunity,” “comorbidity,” “ARDS,” “oligo-symptomatic,” “messenger RNA,” “spike protein” (which would be a cool nom de guerre for a professional wrestler), “horseshoe bat,” etc.

So, the other day, I decided to choose my top three pandemic words.

As soon as I heard the term “cytokine storm,” I loved it. This is literally a case of the cure being worse than (or at least as bad as) the disease. A cytokine storm is defined as “a deranged immune response” in which an army of proteins called cytokines don’t just attack the virus but get carried away and start destroying the body’s cells and tissues, evidently because they can’t tell the difference. Cytokine storms are hardly unique to Covid-19. One study showed, for example, that about four-fifths of people killed by the H1N1 flu were the victims of cytokine storms. 

“Superspreader,” which went viral after the mask-optional Trump rally in Tulsa that killed Herman Cain, is one of those words with staying power. Now that it’s in circulation, people are going to apply “superspreader” to contagions other than epidemic illness. Wall Street analysts and horse race tipsters could be superspreaders. The word might well apply to a social media troll whose lies, gossip, pitches, or harebrained notions sweep the Web and captivate millions of the gullible. For example, whoever it was that posted the YouTube video of those quacks calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors,” who promoted hydroxychloroquine, demon sperm and alien DNA — viewed by 20 million idiots in a matter of minutes? Now, that guy was a “superspreader.”

My favorite Covid-19 word comes from Japan. “Kotonakare shugi” translates literally as “no-problemism.” It’s a syndrome unique to dear leaders who live in mortal terror of taking responsibility in a crisis, lest they lose an election or risk the mockery of the masses. A president whose brain is riddled with kotonakare shugi, for instance, would babble daily that everything’s fine, don’t bother me because miracles happen if you look the other way, and this will all disappear — just you wait and see! — even as millions fall ill, hospitals overflow, doctors suffer nervous breakdowns, nurses sob with grief, thousands die alone and society, slowly and surely, crumbles.