Pandemic notes 1.0: First pants, then shoes

by David Benjamin

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.” 

— Abraham Lincoln

MADISON, Wis. — 1) One of Gary Larson’s most memorable “Far Side” images depicts a moron, just waking up and looking at a sign on his wall: “First pants, THEN your shoes”. This cartoon occurred to me almost immediately when Donald Trump began his big pivot — from a belated and puny effort to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic to a grand, self-congratulatory “re-opening” scam.

In the case of this — or any — global plague, the “pants” consist of a vast and redundant testing regime that reveals the extent, virulence, duration and spread of the disease, an army of public-health gumshoes engaged in a national program of contact tracing and a uniform set of guidelines that reduce the nationwide “R-naught” factor (person-to-person transmission) to less than “1.0.”

The “shoes” are the re-opening of bars, restaurants, massage parlors, the University of Alabama football stadium and the staging of MAGA rallies.

The “Far Side” moron in our current mirthless national cartoon is a president who’s trying to put pants on over his Florsheims, and urging us to all do the same. 

 2) I’m nostalgic about the March of Dimes. When I was a kid, the polio virus was still rampant, crippling and killing thousands every year.  Among the most haunting Polio Days scenes were rows of little cocooned children in iron lungs, lest they die, because they could not breathe on their own. 

Among its tactics, the March of Dimes engaged schoolchildren to roam the streets all over the country, rattling tin cans and panhandling dimes from strangers. This universally popular crusade raised millions of dollars for research and hastened the development of a polio vaccine. No television star, no radio, jock,  public figure or politician ever — in my memory — uttered one discouraging word about the March of Dimes. No gasbag with a national bullhorn ever pooh-poohed polio as much ado about nothing, nor did any president of my acquaintance — Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ — encourage me to ignore its danger and overlook its symptoms. No leader of any party, not even Joe McCarthy, ever suggested that polio myelitis was a conspiracy concocted by left-wing spies to undermine the great American free-market system of corporate predation. The March of Dimes was sacred, even to Wall Street, the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan.

Today, however, egged on by Tucker and Sean on Fox, misinformed by a mendacious kook named Mikovits and smitten with a president whose idea of a cure is an ultra-violet enema, a quarter of Americans believe Covid-19 is a Yellow Peril hoax cooked up by Bill Gates, George Soros, Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden and the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu inside a Red Chinese lab in Wuhan. These believers, many toting AR-15s and posing as soldiers-of-fortune (hoo-wah!) will not be deterred or dissuaded. If there were March of Dimes kids among us today — wearing facemasks — one or two, eventually, would be strafed in the street. All of them would be cursed at and spit on. Some would end up infected.

3) Speaking of polio, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had it. His legs didn’t work. He had to sit for his speeches, including one he made on 7 December 1941. 

In his immortal “day of infamy” address, after Japan’s sneak attack, FDR said, in part, “… The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost… Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger…”

I’ve tried to re-formulate that dire and candid warning into Trumpian prose. What if the Donald had been in charge then.

“Nobody saw this coming, okay? So, it’s not my fault. Was I in Hawaii? Not that I don’t like Hawaii! I mean, beaches, pineapples, hula girls! But me? Not there. What about the Navy? Why all those ships together in one place? Nobody knows how many got killed. Probably not that many. Who can believe the Fake News, right? Maybe none at all. And Japan, really? Listen, I’ve talked to President Toto on the phone— great connection. Like we were in the same room. And he’s a great guy. He likes me. He said so. He’s been doin‘ a great job over there. Geisha girls, samurais. I love it there, the food is tremendous, except for the raw fish. I’m not a big fan. But this Pearl Bay thing? I’m not happy, okay? But I’m thinking. Maybe it was an accident. A couple planes got lost. Maybe they thought they were bombing China, okay? The thing is, war? I don’t think so. This will all blow over. Just disappear. Like a miracle. By the weekend, okay? I’ll call up President Tofu. And Hitler. Adolf! Good guy, he’s funny, and he likes me. Not like Churchill, he doesn’t like me. Dunno why. You watch. Me and Togo, we’ll do a deal. Easy. I make great deals, okay? This’ll turn out to be a great day. One of the greatest. The economy? Great! The market? Boom! Like nothing you ever seen before!”

Yada yada yada.

4) We’re winding down now into what might be called a Hundred-Year Election, the sort of watershed moment we saw in 1860 and 1932. In each of those years, the nation was struggling with a crisis that threatened to shred the fabric of American democracy. In 1860, the South was on the verge of seceding from the Union over slavery. In 1932, the Great Depression, in its third year, had crushed the economy. Millions were jobless, starving, despairing and seething over an ineffectual and negligent White House.

In each of those years, the president was wretchedly unfit to cope with the crisis. In 1860, outgoing president James Buchanan was a dithering lame duck who, despite the catastrophic Dred Scott decision and a chorus of Southern insurgents in Congress spoiling for Civil War, declared that slavery was “happily, a matter of but little practical importance.” In 1932, Herbert Hoover was a patrician laissez faire Republican who — as millions went on the dole, as vast encampments of homeless, jobless, hungry, angry Americans came to be known as “Hoovervilles” — kept insisting that “prosperity is just around the corner.”

In each of those elections, the sitting president’s opponent was an untested and somewhat enigmatic figure who, despite a heartfelt affinity for the Common Man, inspired only tepid enthusiasm even within his own party. In 1860, the candidate was Abe Lincoln, who became our greatest president. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt awoke the nation from despair, assured us that “the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” He launched the New Deal, uplifted the nation’s morale, became the most popular president in U.S. history, and… oh, yes, inspired the nation afresh after Pearl Harbor and, by the time he died in 1945, tipped the balance of the Allies toward victory in World War II.

Today, our leader-in-waiting is Joe Biden. In the Covid-19 pandemic, he faces a crisis as grave as those presented to Lincoln and  Roosevelt. He is lightly regarded as a statesman, as were Abe and FDR, even within his own party. He is poised to succeed an incumbent who has criminally bungled his mission and who has responded to his great defining leadership test with cowardice and denial, a Far Side moron whose signature declaration — as thousands die and millions are gripped with fear — is a lie: “We have met the moment and we have prevailed.”

One hundred sixty years ago, and again, 88 years ago, American voters had the good sense and — let’s face it — the sheer good fortune, to discard a dangerously feckless president and replace him with an unlikely savior. 

Question is: Can we possibly luck out again?