Relaxing the grippe, gradually

by David Benjamin

PARIS — As long as I’m here, I’m using this city as a barometer of America’s recovery from a long and lingering malaise.

In the expurgation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, France is slightly behind the United States, while both countries— every country — remain vulnerable to a discouraging relapse.

The difference favoring France is that it had just one plague to purge.

America caught Covid in the midst of an existing pestilence. The Tangerine Creature from Mar-a-Lago had been sickening souls and poisoning family Thanksgivings for more than three years when the next scourge descended. Discovering an immediate affinity with another parasite, the Infestation from Jamaica Estates befriended his fellow traveler from Wuhan. Together, by omission and commission, they wreaked havoc across the land.

An American friend who’s visiting with us here regards the persistence of the Trump Cult with veritable despair. He’s hardly the first to assert that the sacking of Capitol Hill marked the eclipse of the American experiment in democracy. No one growing up now, my friend lamented, has any concept of responsible citizenship. The civics of civil discourse has been eroding ever since Richard Nixon and George Wallace campaigned openly and won, on a platform of white racism. Caucasian panic has since remained the prevailing ethos of Republican politics, doggedly sustained from Reagan to Atwater and Cheney to the Beast of Bedminster — who turned nativist nostalgia from a cynical political tactic into an armed cult of Church Militant vigilantes.

Our friend believes it’s too late to stanch this nihilist plague. But I objected. We’ve both seen evidence that, in both America and France, the virus is slipping its grip. Beyond Covid, there are signs, I insisted — less empirically — that our other mortal outbreak is fading, too.

When we arrived here, I saw a city hurt by an 18-month upheaval of normal life. But Paris’ vitality was unbowed. Along rue de l’Odeon, where a dozen proprietors had surrendered to the plague, entreprenreurs had seized the moment and moved in, with cunningly dressed windows and post-Covid merchandise. As we walked familiar streets, I noted more survivals than demises, including — thank God — Aspasie et Mathieu, a cubbyhole on rue des Carmes with its sweet hostess still selling flamboyant scarves, red suspenders, ladies linens and Stetson hats, handing out butterscotch drops with every sale.

The quais along the Seine are bustling again, with picnickers and strolling lovers, as crowded bateaux mouches glide past on the river.

There are, of course, empty spaces. We lost an oyster palace on rue St. Jacques and kissed goodbye the cozy Café BoulMich. Fear still hangs in the mercantile air. I see more masks in Paris than in Madison, because the vaccination rate here is lower and the trauma seems fresher. Politically here, as in America, recovery remains touch-and-go. The French are typically unanimous in their contempt for president Emmanuel Macron. But in France, since Charles de Gaulle, voters seem only to elect a president in order to vent their hatred on a fresh target.

President-hating in France is traditional and comforting. It lacks fervor. I think of the meat sauce at a restaurant we visited this week. It’s been on the stove, simmering over an eternal flame, daily replenished for years, always hot below the boil, ink-dark and velvety-dense, never volatile and — finally spooned up and dished out — ineffably satisfying.

The French, mind you, weren’t even that enthusiastic about de Gaulle.

Little by little, Macron and Covid — weary at last of afflicting the electorate — will decline together. Storefronts will unboard and fill, as masks become more a courtesy than an obligation and normal bourgeois arrogance takes hold once again as the national attitude.

In the USA, by contrast, we seem to love — well, like — or new president, not feverishly or violently, as do the zealots of the Thing from Trump Tower. In January, Joe Biden stepped onto a tinder plain, littered with the bones of civilized discourse and roamed by the dogs of a race war that seems never to end. Quietly, he began to gather broken bottles and crumple profane banners. Rather than building a bonfire for previous vanities, he lit a low-lying firebreak that hugs the earth and obeys the breeze, denying fuel to a wildfire that towered and raged for four years in all directions, to no purpose, in a vast waste of heat, life and energy.

Biden’s forebear has lost both throne and voice. To those who opposed him, he is attaining irrelevance, although we fear him as we do a recurrent nausea. More significantly, his believers are showing signs of fatigue. He’ll always be, to them, a god, a celestial cuspidor to contain their thrills and suspicions. But gods — like pandemics and hurricanes — pass among us rarely and those that do, not for long. By the grace of Zuckerberg and Dorsey, he’s been swept from our daily feed, as — simultaneously — the Covid curse has slunk down gradually from the peak of our fears.

His true, true believers want him back. They say they expect him back. He will be, by the magic that built an imaginary Wall and won a phantom Nobel Prize, “reinstated in August.” But while they deny his descent and rage against the remedy that has rendered him toothless, mute, off-orange and more Bozo-comical than ever he was, they resist an inkling that they struggle in vain. The raving rallies have shrunk, their raving become redundant, their amplifiers unplugged.

Forty-Five’s Faithful echo Covid’s best hope of killing another million — that an incurable mutant will spring from his twisted helix. There are bumptious variants — a Nikki, a Kristi, a pudgy Ron, an upstart Josh — already polishing their proteins. None seem nearly as voracious or contagious as the Patient Zero of Jamaica Estates. These pretenders are neither terrific, tremendous nor telegenic. Worst for them, they are mortal Republicans and not the god to whom the mob has pledged its million souls. Without him, constantly spouting and blindingly aglow, the center cannot hold. The zealots, xenophobes, homophobes, gynophobes, negrophobes and Jew-baiters will retreat to their traditional American underground — like dormant viruses, lurking in the blood — awaiting the sudden, incurable breakout of some great Bacterium, some Microbe from Hell, some Implacable Impaling Protein to once more overwhelm the body politic and drive us back toward insanity.

Looking around Paris, I still see everywhere the signs of a disease more vast and stubborn than any I’ve ever seen. I see anxiety behind people’s eyes. I know the sickness has ways to elude the best of remedies. We’re still not well either here or back home, but — regardless of our weakness and the drumbeat counsel of despair — I feel the pins and needles, just under the skin, that tell me we’re starting to heal.