the tris mccall report

Brad and Megan stopped by. They were on their way from Brooklyn to Brad’s parents’ house in Somerset County. They stood on one side of the fence in our small front yard, and we stood on the other. Hilary gave them two avocados and a bottle of hand sanitizer. I tried to give them a copy of a CD that we’d accidentally double-ordered from Saddle Creek, but they don’t have a CD player. Gift-giving is a vexed and complicated act in 2020. No hugs or handshakes were exchanged. Still, it was nice to see them. It was the first real social interaction we’ve had with anybody since March.

Brad expressed his frustration with the mainstream newspapers. Why were they so fascinated by Confederate battle flag-wavers protesting stay-at-home orders? He’d marched for peace with thousands, and their movement had barely ever gotten above the fold. Editorial priorities seemed scrambled. As a newsroom veteran I could only nod. The long answer to his question is in this piece, which I wrote at the end of 2017, and which I strongly encourage you to read if you haven’t. The short answer is that these ugly stories receive saturation coverage because they sell. They provide editors with a developing angle. The protests are irresistible to mainstream news outlets because they’re the latest leading edge of the larger strategy that has been keeping the news business afloat for the past four years: the one that makes Donald Trump the embattled protagonist-villain of every story.

I can feel sympathy for those editors and publishers. They’re in a tighter spot than it probably seems like they are. There’s a lot of demand for news, but telling this story in a way consistent with the expectations of the news audience is tricky. You can’t interview a virus. This adversary cannot be psychologically modeled. Human-interest stories of perseverance in the face of illness and hardship are inspiring, but they soon become redundant; more importantly, they don’t compel a reader to click on the next article to soothe or exacerbate his outrage. Mainstream news requires a heavy, and for four years, the current President has been reliable in that regard, if in few others.

The trouble is that Donald Trump is not the protagonist of this story. The coronavirus has exposed him as a marginal player with very little understanding of risk or crisis management. Even his press conferences are providing declining news value. In some desperation, editors have decided to make heavies out of some of those making apologies for the President. An angry white man in militia gear screaming at a nurse — that’s ideal, and probably irresistible. In an unguarded moment, the publisher would concede that he understands that running that picture amplifies the rage of the militiaman and gives it a much wider platform than it deserves. But who has an unguarded moment anymore?

Brad has responded by taking the mainstream news and social-media applications off of his phone. That seems reasonable to me. The best sources of information about the pandemic have been local journalists and science writers, who are findable and followable for those who want to put in the extra effort needed to dodge the news algorithms. I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of Stephen Stirling, who has been supplying New York and New Jersey with a well-researched and sober newsletter. Erin Brodwin and Sharon Begley at Stat, a medical spinoff of the Boston Globe, have been tigers on testing. I feel like I owe these people a personal note of thanks, and maybe a box of cookies.

The real revelation, at least for me, has been Dr. John Campbell, a nurse and teacher from the UK who has been posting lengthy, well-sourced videos to YouTube every day, and sometimes several times a day. If you’ve ever had a good nurse explain a medical procedure to you, you know how thorough they can be, and Dr. Campbell is very thorough and very clear. He goes through the numbers, country by country, slowly and evenly, and refrains from making speculative claims; often he’ll say something is “concerning”, and raise an eyebrow, but he’s plainly not doing this to advance an agenda. There are things he believes: he thinks that widespread Vitamin D deficiency has contributed to the spread of the virus and spikes in mortality rates. But he gives the impression that he’d revise his opinion at once if he felt that there was contradictory evidence. He’s been letting the science lead him, rather than pushing the science into the shape of his beliefs. That, alone, has been refreshing.

Campbell is one of an increasing number of people who have studied the limited numbers we’ve got, and hazarded the guess that the infection rate is far higher than what has been reported. In a way, that’s comforting: if there are more asymptomatic people out in the street, that means that the case fatality rate is lower than we’ve assumed it is. But it’s also stupefying. There are already more than ten thousand confirmed cases in Hudson County. That’s at least one for every Jersey City block. Last night the ambulances were back on this block. I’ll keep trying, as hard as I can, to duck the sirens.

The sun shone, the temperature was mild, and Hilary wanted to go for a walk. We hadn’t been outdoors for days. We discussed a few other options: opening all the windows, a bicycle ride (but where?), a drive to South Mountain Reservation. But South Mountain Reservation is closed. We put on our coats and our makeshift masks and hit the street.

First we pulled the car around to a place where we could see it from the house. Then we set off south by foot. Our immediate destination: the garden center between Jersey City and Hoboken. We’d heard that nurseries had been deemed essential businesses. We had no plans to go inside; we just wanted to see how it was faring. We’ve had many lovely times at that garden center. It’s where we’ve picked out our Christmas trees, and gotten our decorations for the front of our building. In a normal year, Hilary would have already been to the garden center several times, and she’d have brought home new shoots and herbs to plant on the terrace. But we haven’t had a normal year in a while.

Streets were crowded with pedestrians. Closures of gyms, tracks, and parks have pushed our athletic neighbors right out into the middle of the road. Half of the people we encountered on Monmouth and Newark were jogging, and the other half were doing their best to avoid the joggers’ contrails. Jersey City has perfected the social distancing dance: wide turns on sidewalk corners, waits in driveways as pedestrians pass, crossing the street when all else fails. Nobody wants to agitate anybody further. Yet every odd non-interaction at every nervous intersection is a reminder of the difficulties we’re facing and a powerful reinforcement of our anxieties.

They’d shuttered the garden center. Box shrubs and starter hedges were visible in the outdoor area, but metal gates had been dragged down over the entrance. I wondered if anybody was watering the plants — and then assured myself that somebody must be. Caretakers were bound to come by. No? A sign on the door announced the store’s compliance with restrictions meant to fight the spread of the virus. We walked on. Ten years prior, the neighborhood that contained the garden center was mostly disused factories and rubble; now, a crop of fresh condominiums has bloomed in the vacant lots. A large orange-brown marmot used to live in one of those lots. He’d surface, look around bewildered (but never annoyed), and dive back into his hole. I searched for him on every bicycle ride into Hoboken, and often found him. I suspect he’s decamped to someplace quieter. I hope so, anyway.

Many of the streets in the neighborhood lead to the foot of the great stone Palisade, and gravelly, leafy, overgrown dead ends. Only one road winds up the hill to the southern verge of Jersey City Heights. In the cul-de-sacs, people played catch, throwing the ball from twenty feet away. Others greeted the sun in workout gear and did exercises along the curbs. A woman laced her fingers through a chain link fence and stretched. Daylight is a disinfectant, we’ve been told, and we’ve all wondered what the month spent indoors has done to our health. We considered taking the new stairway up, but decided it was best not to touch railings that hundreds of others must have already touched. Instead, we walked to the end of the road, made the turn, and began the slow climb to the top of the Palisade.

We’re both out of walking shape, and before long, we felt it. I watched Hilary for any sign that she was flagging. Out of habit, I checked her color to see if she was growing pale. After her chemotherapy treatments, I drove her crazy by hovering about her as we traveled home, spotting her on the steps down to the subway station, ready to catch her if she stumbled or felt faint. Yesterday I caught the echoes of those fears, bouncing off the brick towers of Christ Hospital at the top of the Palisade. At the same time, I became aware of a sense of liberation. We hadn’t yet found a Downtown block that wasn’t filled with other people. But nobody wanted to walk on this street. We had it to ourselves. I realized in a rush that I hadn’t been breathing properly; unconsciously, under the mask, I’d been keeping my lips tight and my respiration shallow as a safeguard against passersby. I brought down my mask — a muffler that had been given to Hilary during her treatments — and inhaled, as deeply as I could. It was good, wasn’t it?, to be out in the sun after too many days stuck under a roof, it was good to get commentary straight from the sparrows, it was good, even, to see the junk-food wrappers and crushed cans that have always collected in the weeds at the foot of the Palisade. I told myself it was good, because it had to be.

At the top of the hill, the crowds returned. Palisade Avenue was busy: with runners, with grocery shoppers laden with bags, with patients hurrying to the hospital, with people who’d parked their cars and were hurrying back to the housing projects on the other side of Route 139. We chose our direction by a means that has now become distressingly familiar to us, and not just us — if the sidewalks to the right are filled with people, we go left. I felt a bit like a clump of seaweed on the surf, bobbing here and there, swirled around by chance and currents we couldn’t control, changing directions, getting in the way.

The south end of Palisade intersects with Newark Avenue, the wide diagonal road that leads past the Harsimus Cemetery and connects Journal Square to the Downtown. Even on a gloomy day, there’s always foot traffic on Newark. Yesterday, its wide sidewalks were an open-air training facility: people jogging and cycling up the incline, others stopping to snap photographs from the top to the hill, everybody careful to maintain distance, nobody talking, but all dead set on completing whatever activity had brought them outside. It occurred to us that we could bypass the crowd by cutting through the parking lot at Dickinson High School. The City opened the school lots during their half-hearted attempt to clean the streets, and hasn’t yet closed them. Dickinson is a landmark that everyone in Hudson County recognizes: a great yellow beast, big as an airport terminal, right at the lip of the Palisade. We’d gone past the building thousands of times, but we’d never been on its grounds.

We found ourselves alone. If this was a shortcut, it was one that didn’t interest our neighbors. The Dickinson grounds was a more varied place than I thought it would be: I saw statues, and picnic tables, and a big red gazebo in the valley between the main campus and the athletic building, and at least one gravestone, right by the main entrance. A beloved teacher, maybe? It felt rude to inspect — this wasn’t my school. From the top of the hill, the view was impressive — I could see down Newark Avenue to the Brennan Courthouse, and, in the other direction, the Harsimus Cemetery and the far Western edge of the Downtown. The sun was as high in the sky as it was going to get; everything felt illuminated, the city wide open, unscrolled and laid flat on the table like a navigator’s map. My shoulders relaxed. For the first time in days, I felt some limited dominion over my own life. We walked over to the big steps that led to the Downtown entrance, only to realize that they were locked.

Well, of course they were; the City didn’t want people using the Dickinson campus as a thoroughfare. Only the parking lot gate would be open. We checked the other exits just to be sure. They were locked, too. Then, right near the top of the steps, Hilary discovered a narrow footpath. It curved away from the school, in the direction of the Downtown, on a narrow terrace atop the slope that fell away, dramatically, toward the street. It pointed toward a stand of trees; both sides were shadowed and aggressively overgrown. We have never missed an opportunity to take a footpath into the woods. Hilary turned to investigate.

I did not immediately follow. The footpath gave me a fantastic view of Waldo Street, a sharp incline flanked on both sides by handsome townhouses. From the top of the hill, I could apprehend the whole thing: a brief and dramatic topographical uptick, an interruption in the grid, the end of the Downtown and the beginning of the rest of New Jersey. The trees in the copse that marked the perimeter of the Cemetery were beginning to bloom. I was just about to take a picture when I heard Hilary cry out.

She’d gotten tangled in a fallen branch. Part of the branch lay at her feet like a tripwire. The other part jutted upward and worried at her legs. I hurried down the path to help her. The branch was covered in thorns. One of them hooked on to her pants; another caught her coat. Disengagement was no simple matter. There were so many thorns on the branch that it was difficult to know where, or how, to grab the wood and detach it from her clothing. I knew she’d been pricked, and I didn’t want to hurt her further. After a struggle, she twisted free, grabbed the branch, and flung it, with some energy, down the slope.

Her thumb bled. She’d been jabbed. I looked ahead, and realized to my horror that thorn bushes crowded the path on both sides. I felt, at once, that whoever had been drafting the day was laying the symbolic imagery on thick, and should probably rewrite with an eye toward probabilism. After that, I just felt dizzy. I remembered all of the times I hadn’t been able to save Hilary from pain: the long drive to the suburban clinic where she was diagnosed, the crushing symptoms brought on by months of treatment, the fears I’d had for her when I felt that those around her weren’t taking care of her, the long fall into misfortune. Wasn’t there more I could have done? In a crisis, is it ever justifiable to stop and look at the scenery?

I steadied myself; not completely, but enough to lead us home. My inadequacy to the moment, which I’d concealed from myself on my way up the hill, was now plainly visible to me. We were out and about in a town where thousands have gotten sick. We wanted to forget that for a few hours, but we couldn’t. When we arrived at home, the first thing that Hilary learned was that the mother of one of her students had died. A week ago, she’d taken a turn for the better and been discharged from the hospital. Then, like so many others, she’d been struck by a bigger wave. Nothing feels healthy, Hilary told me, overwhelmed. Not a walk, not a drive, not the sunlight, not the passage of time. Then she revived. She had a day to finish. I quickened my own pace, and tried to keep up.

Even for nonbelievers, a church service can be a powerful experience. A good service can change your eye level from the gutter to the heavens. It can put you in contact with your community, and with the stories that we tell to remind ourselves that we’re human beings. If churchgoing is part of your life, you are likely missing the camaraderie, the joy of carrying on tradition, the encounters with beauty (because most churches are very beautiful) and the peek behind the curtain of the quotidian at the divine that houses of worship offer.

If you’re down about that, it’s understandable. If you’re praying, hard, for the day that the church doors reopen, I feel that, too. But I cannot not sympathize with the claim, made by some loud and unwise Americans, that church closures represent an infringement on religious liberties. No one is taking away anybody’s right to worship, or denigrating anybody’s faith. On the contrary. Church leaders have taken the initiative to suspend masses and other services because it is the Christian thing to do to be concerned about the well-being of our neighbors. They expect you to carry on Christian practice, and Christian charity, no matter where you’re spending your Sunday morning.

It is natural to confuse church attendance with religious faith. Some churches have abetted that conflation. But when we mix the two things up, we should understand that we’re adhering to a pre-Christian tradition. Many Iron Age religious practices required a temple. There was a strict division between holy spaces and non-holy spaces; even within the temple, there were rooms where ordinary people could go, and other rooms only accessible to the priestly caste. The god, it was believed, was physically present in the central chamber — that was his abode, and the exact geopositioning of the interface between the human and the divine. Sometimes, on special days, the priests would actually take the god out of the chamber, in the form of a statue or idol, and allow the people to touch him. But usually, the god stayed put in the shadows, shrouded in mystery.

The crucial realization that God does not exist in a statue, or an idol, or in a specific room of a specific building is part of what it means to be a Christian. Christianity erases the arbitrary, man-made dividing line between the sacred and the profane, and reminds us that, to paraphrase J.D. Salinger, all we ever do in life is walk from one piece of holy ground to the next. It’s been a long journey to the cosmic understanding that a religion based on faith requires, and we’re still not all the way there. There are many traditional practices that carry with them a strong remnant of the old idolatrous ways of our forerunners. Some of those practices do work to focus the mind on the divine, and because of that, they shouldn’t be rubbished. But the true value of churchgoing is not unlike the value of going to class at university. You’ll be in the presence of a wise leader who’ll helps you open your eyes and your heart, and can guide you on a spiritual path, and you’ll be surrounded by a congregation of fellow travelers who can uphold you, and quicken your pace, as you take your steps on that path. That’s what church is all about, Charlie Brown, and the music and the prayer and communion and symbolism is there to reinforce your awareness of a God who is always right there with you, no matter where you are.

Church practice also acknowledges that many humans have an easier time encountering God when they’re in groups. But many others do not. One of the most profound elements of the Hindu tradition is the recognition that there are many routes to enlightenment, and sometimes the road that suits you is most easily located when you’re on your own. In his own isolation on the mountain Horeb, Elijah heard God in the still, small voice; you may hear God in a passage of a book by C.S. Lewis, or on a record by Mahalia Jackson, or, as Stuart Murdoch sings so beautifully, out the window, in the trees, before bed and the promise of sleep.

None of this is meant to minimize the pain of those who are separated from the congregations and can’t get to church; that’s destabilizing, and it’s bound to damage religious communities in ways that we haven’t even begun to contend with. It’s merely to say that when we insist on reopening churches — in the middle of a pandemic and in total contravention of the demands of Christian faith — we’re misallocating our emotional resources, and we’re misrecognizing our adversaries. No virus can separate you from God, but disregard for the welfare of your fellow human beings will surely move you away from Him in a damned hurry. Faith is real, but so is mathematics. Those insisting upon a premature reopening are endangering their neighbors and giving Christians, and Christianity, a bad name. That’s a hell of a thing to have to answer for at St. Peter’s gate.

Last night, via videoconference, we played Castles Of Burgundy. This was done at Michael’s insistence — he felt we all needed a game. He rigged up his iPad as a monitor and aimed his laptop at himself so we could see what he was doing. We made our moves virtually, according to the honor system, and followed along on our own boards at home. So it went for more than three hours: Michael and Katherine, under the amber light of their kitchen in Atlantic Highlands, their dog in the corner, affixing little hexagons to the bigger hexagons on their player mat. We did the same. It wasn’t always easy to get a sense of the game-state, or plan moves. But it was fun, and I thank Michael and Katherine for throwing dice with us. It was nice to escape into a cardboard principality.

Those departures into fantasy haven’t been so easy to find. Most of the world wants to remind me of the crisis. Even my innocuous weather application insists on providing me with the latest coronavirus statistics for my region whenever I check to see if we’re going to get a little sunshine. The count is right there, in red numbers, right under the radar map and next to the daily low. Today, I’m told that there are just under ten thousand reported cases in Hudson County, with four hundred and twenty associated deaths. Each day, I’ve watched those numbers rise — not merely the aggregate count, but the mortality rate, which has crept from two percent to something closer to five. A one in twenty chance, a natural twenty on the twenty-sided die, enough, as any Dungeons and Dragons player can tell you, to score a critical hit.

These scary indices are going to keep climbing. We now recognize that serious symptoms of the disease associated with the virus often don’t manifest until the second week of illness. Some of those stricken will be placed on ventilators, where they may stay for another week, or maybe more. Many of those who’ve caused the death rate to inflate in April must have contracted the coronavirus in March. Those who feel their first symptoms today may not appear in the grimmest column of my weather application until May. This is why the discussion of peaks feels woefully premature to me. We’re still dealing with the terrible consequences of last month’s ill-fortune. We haven’t even gotten around to the consequences of our decisions today.

Models remain shaky. That’s an understatement, really: we continue to work with models that aren’t tethered to solid ground. Because antibody testing has been inadequate, we’ve got no clear idea how many asymptomatic cases of the virus there are. I imagine that many people secretly hope they might be one of those cases — perhaps they brushed up against the pathogen in mid-March, or even earlier, developed adequate antibodies while in state-suggested quarantine, and will emerge from isolation virtually bulletproof. This strikes me as a secular version of the Rapture fantasy that has poisoned Christianity for self-righteous dispensationalists. According to this faith, the elect will ascend to the Kingdom of Immunity without tasting the sting of coronavirus. This is nothing for anybody to count on or even to wish for. We don’t even know whether antibodies confer absolute resistance to the virus for those who’ve had the disease; there are disturbing indications from overseas that they may not. Our best bet is still not to get it.

I believe that’s possible. Evasive action remains available to us, and I trust that some uninfected people can still dodge the pathogen. Unfortunately, in the New York metro, that’s getting harder to do. We may not have a comprehensive picture of where the virus is, but we’re beginning to piece together the puzzle from the testing we’ve done. What we’re learning isn’t pretty, and doesn’t augur well for the immediate future. On Wednesday, The Atlantic reported that the test-positivity rate in New Jersey has been a terrifying one in two. On the other side of the Hudson, it’s even higher. To put that in context, the test-positivity rate in Italy, which we think of as a country rife with coronavirus, is only fifteen per cent. This suggests that America has many miles to go before the pandemic begins to burn out, and hints that the only reason we think we’ve hit a plateau is because testing has been so patchy.

People have been reading this page. I’ve been writing these daily dispatches in order to ground my own thinking and stay sane, and I intend to continue posting them for as long as I can. If they’ve been helpful for you, or if they just provide a momentary diversion, that makes me happy. I do think it’s possible, though, that I’m bringing my readers down. If I am, I apologize — this is intrinsically depressing stuff, and it would be dishonest for me to pretend otherwise. The moment I feel hopeful, I promise I’ll register my optimism here.

You may believe that the White House is in an indefensible position. They don’t agree. Or maybe deep down they do, but they’ll do what they can to hang on to power, even as they’ve proven, decisively, that they don’t know what to do with it when they get it. Deflection has been the name of the game since long before the inauguration, and it continues to be the President’s go-to strategy. The developing plan is to point the finger at China, and attempt to galvanize popular support by blaming an external enemy. Once again, the Trump Administration proves that it never hesitates to close the barn door once the horse is long gone. It’s never wise to underestimate the degree to which Americans want to rally around the chief in a time of crisis, but I’m getting the distinct feeling that people are damned tired of the excuses.

The Slurpee of accusations now pouring forth from the administration’s apologists comes in several sizes. The smallest and most palatable is the charge that the Chinese Communist Party dithered while the coronavirus spread, and refused to tell the world the truth during the critical early days of the breakout. I don’t doubt for a second that this is correct, but it doesn’t begin to absolve the Trump Administration for its own inaction. The medium-sized Fribble of charges involves the suspicion that the virus didn’t come from markets after all, but instead escaped from a biological facility in Wuhan. This is not implausible. If it’s true, it’s important to know. Establishing a point of origin may help us construct a better transmission model. But now that the pathogen is on the loose in America, wagging fingers at lab techs feels like a great waste of energy. There’ll be plenty of blame to go around once we have the time and emotional energy to assess what went wrong, and I reckon that even the world’s biggest Sinophile will assign much of that blame to the CCP and related Chinese institutions.

The large-sized Solo cup of accusations suggests that China deliberately created the coronavirus as a bioweapon, and either directed it at the West or simply let it loose to ravage the planet. Neither science nor logic supports this, but that hasn’t stopped certain people from hinting at it, and hinting hard. From there, it’s just a baby step to the Xtra Large version of events: the complicity of Bill Gates, and the Democratic Party, and the proliferation of Huawei-installed 5G network towers, and for-profit vaccines concealing microchips, and QAnon, and Baphomet, and all the rest of it. For the moment (although this may well change), Administration officials won’t be attaching names of political opponents to the purported Chinese plot to decimate the planet. Instead, the President and his supporters will attempt to elide the reasonable critiques and suspicions with the widescreen sci-fi/horror movie stuff that there’s never any evidence for. To those who demand subtlety, they’ll be subtle about it. Red meat will be thrown to those who respond better to outright xenophobia, and who tend to ride tractor-trailers straight over logical inconsistencies. In all cases, the bottom line will be the same. Don’t look at us — China did this.

The trouble for the administration, though, is that they can’t make any part of their argument without admitting a grievous intelligence failure. Whatever happened in China, it’s clear that the Trump Administration didn’t pick up on it until it was too late. Every time the President or one of his associates attempts to shift the blame to the Chinese government, they underscore their own negligence, and their self-inflicted unreadiness to meet global challenges. Gutting the State Department, marginalizing scientists and other knowledgeable people, appointing cronies to oversight positions at intelligence agencies, and, in general, disengaging from the world outside our borders — these actions have consequences, and we’re learning exactly how dreadful those consequences can be. Three years of systematic weakening of the supports on which American international oversight rests has led, inevitably, to a collapse. The authorship of that collapse is not Chinese. The dots are not difficult to connect. Inadvertently, the White House is helping people connect them. 

Many will refuse to. They’ll continue to absolve the President of the catastrophes that happen on his watch, and the administration will feed that interpretation by advancing the argument that it is beset by unprecedented horrors beyond its control. But I hope that a few critical thinkers will begin to appreciate the uselessness of public officials who begin their public addresses with the dreadful phrase “no one could have foreseen”. The Presidency is, as Michael Lewis has pointed out, a risk management position. It is the entire job of the White House to foresee. If members of an administration cannot or will not do the work of foreseeing threats, they may as well just pack it up and go home. Pandemics, in particular, are events that we expect our leadership to anticipate, and do their best to mitigate. If we’re asking China to do that job for us –if we are outsourcing our intelligence to an ideological and geopolitical adversary — we’re sunk.

I don’t see the ascendancy of Donald Trump as a radical break with past politics. Instead, I look at it as the culmination of sociopolitical trends that have gnawed away at what used to be called civic life. The Trump presidency, in my view, is a symptom of those trends. An insidious one is the growing cult of victimhood. In press conferences, in rallies, and, as far as we know, in the Oval Office, Trump plays the victim: of the press, of his critics, of the experts, of the Deep State, of the FBI, of overzealous prosecutors, of women and minorities, of you and me. Now he is poised to present himself — and, by extention, the country — as a victim of China. He’ll be supported in these efforts by millions, many of whom also see themselves as victims, and who view the President as a proxy for their frustrations. Yet victimhood is not a position from which executive governance is possible. Victimhood cries out for redress — and for the President, there is no redress. It doesn’t matter who has wronged you, or what impediments you face: you have a job to do, and you must put your head down and do it. The moment your hand begins to shake on the tiller, it’s time to retire.

I wrote elsewhere that authoritarianism is always an expression of weakness. The authoritarian is insecure — he acts to restrict the latitude of the people he governs because he doesn’t really believe he’s got their support. He worries about his legitimacy. Xi Jinping is an authoritarian, and much of what he’s done since he’s attained supreme power, from the expulsion of journalists and suppression of dissident voices to mass electro-surveillance and the institution of concentration camps in Xinjiang, reeks of the worst sort of insecurity. This should make us sympathetic to the Chinese people, who are saddled with brutal leadership, and who, like all people everywhere around the world, deserve better than what they’re getting. Unfortunately, I anticipate that the administration’s vilification of China will lead to lousy treatment of ordinary Chinese, and Chinese-Americans, too. We’ve already begun to see this happening. Even during the worst, most jingoistic days in the wake of 9/11, authorities took pains to distinguish between violent Islamic fundamentalists and the millions upon millions of Muslims who were nothing of the sort. Somehow I doubt this administration will be so circumspect. We’re hurting right now, and confused; it’s hard to rage at a particle, so it’s natural to want to attach a human face to the threat. But the very last thing we need is collateral damage.

A little more than one month ago, we visited New York City by train. We went to the Downtown Eataly to get the focaccia Barese that is just about my favorite thing in the world to eat: checkerboard-sized squares of bread with oil, olives, and cherry tomatoes. I can’t remember what else we bought. We entertained leaving the Oculus for a walk on the river. But it was cold, and the mood in the station was frantic. Everybody felt the storm coming. We returned to New Jersey and resolved to return to Manhattan when we could, even if it was just to get a sense of the scope of the tragedy.

We have not been back. On the recommendation of the hospital, our April appointments at Sloan-Kettering were pushed back to June. Museums and theaters are closed; even churches are closed. There’s been no good reason to cross the Hudson, and plenty of good ones not to. I can’t remember the last time I went a month without stepping foot in Manhattan — even when I was away at college in New England, there was always a reason to take a day or overnight trip to New York City. There’d be a show to play or to see, a friend to visit, a bridge to bicycle over, a section of an outer borough to explore. During Hilary’s treatment, we took long walks from the hospital district to the train stations that are Hudson County’s primary interfaces with Manhattan: Harlem to Christopher Street, Yorkville to the World Trade Center. We’d stop somewhere for lunch, or we’d stop to sit in a park, or we’d appreciate the architecture on a random block in the east Thirties, or we’d just let the rhythms of the city wash over us, lift us up, and carry us toward shore. We are Jersey people. But the hardest distancing we’ve had to endure is the one that has taken us away from New York.

Our understanding of what’s happening there is frightfully incomplete. Most of our closest friends live in New York City, but they’ve been shut in; they hear the sirens, and they get the same news reports and anecdotal accounts of horrors at the hospitals as the rest of us do. The numbers are staggering, hard to believe: more than a hundred thousand cases, tens of thousands hospitalized, more than ten thousand dead. That’s just what’s been reported. We recognize that the real counts are higher. Roughly three thousand people were killed on September 11, 2001. We’ve already tripled that number, and we’re still climbing blind. We don’t know how far we have to go. The top of the hill is impossible to see.

I remember the days, the months, and the years in the wake of 9/11: those shuddering mid-tunnel stops on subway trains, the screeching of brakes, the closed businesses and stations, the constant false alarms and overbearing police presence, the stop-searches and the patrol dogs, the rumors, the grayness that descended on a city that had spent the latter part of a decade swinging. But I also remember the upwelling of support from quarters of America where the residents profess to dislike metropolitan living, and, to be frank, metropolitans. Some of that was militarism, and excitement from the scent of blood on the wind and the thrill of reprisals to come. But much of it wasn’t. I reckon that many of those distant choruses of “New York, New York” were absolutely sincere. New York City represents the global aspirations of American society, and the promise of multicultural pluralism, more fully than any place in the nation. When it is in trouble, America is in trouble. Right now, New York asks people from other parts to the country to get serious and stay serious. Calls to reopen parts of society, prematurely and without a full understanding of the threat we’re facing, are affronts to people who’ve already suffered far too much.

I have never rooted for a business to fail. One of the last things I’d like to see is an economic collapse. But the very last things I want to see — pain and fear, sickness and death, and people separated by medical necessity from those they love — are all happening today. We can rebuild the economy; first, we need to survive. From the New York metropolitan area to the rest of the country: now more than ever, let’s get our priorities straight.

In the spring of 2007, our cat got sick. She stopped eating, and wandered aimlessly around our flat in circles, as if she’d been struck. I didn’t know what to do. Uma the Cat had been with Hilary ever since she’d retrieved her from a Baltimore gutter during a downpour in 1991. She was tiny, feral, abandoned, and mewling loud enough to be heard over the storm. She needed help. Hilary took her back to her apartment, and there Uma stayed. Once she was steady enough to be taken to the vet, Hilary learned, to her surprise, that Uma wasn’t a kitten. She had all of her adult teeth. She’d been around for at least a year.

Uma and Hilary were a package deal. They were not sold separately: If I wanted one, I was duty bound to take the other. Along with my other frailties, I’m allergic to cats. There was, at first, much sneezing. But one look at that little face was enough to convince me that the discomfort was worthwhile. I’d like to think we became pretty good friends, but regardless of her feelings toward me, which were inscrutable, she became so integral to my experience that it became impossible to imagine time without her. I’d had no pets as a child, so I didn’t have any experience of life with an animal. It follows that I’d had no experience of animal death.

In the spring and summer of 2007, I began to develop serious symptoms, too. I felt sluggish, disassociated, dizzy, and sensitive to sunlight. My body twitched so much that I had difficulty sleeping. My chest hurt, my belly was a mess, and it often felt like someone had affixed a ten-pound weight to the top of my head. Doctors were unable to diagnose me; all felt that my complaint was psychosomatic, self-inflicted and, in a sense, auto-immune. In the midst of this, we tried to care for our cat. At an animal hospital in Paramus, we learned that Uma’s kidneys had failed, and we’d need to administer home dialysis if we wanted to keep her alive. That night, I had the biggest panic attack I’ve ever had, and I did it in front of an audience: Brad and Steve were over, and instead of the dinner they were expecting, they got to watch me flat on my back in bed as the room spun.

In retrospect, what strikes me most is my reluctance to put a very simple puzzle together. I was losing a best buddy — a fuzzy little fellow who curled up on my lap and purred while I wrote — and I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t even want to talk about it. That night, once I regained my balance, we went out for a bite at the Hamilton Inn (I couldn’t eat, but I did try), and we talked about artistic frustrations, interpersonal troubles, the parlous state of the globe. I avoided the obvious. Our cat was seventeen years old. Her organs were failing. She was going to die, and I was powerless to intervene.

I mention all of this because yesterday I had familiar symptoms of anxiety — shadow symptoms compared to the heart-palpitating ones I was experiencing in 2007, but enough to leave a powerful imprint on the day. Though I wasted time worrying that I’d caught the coronavirus, I knew that wasn’t what had struck me. I recognized the signature of a particular type of panic: the physical residue of powerlessness. After an Easter spent ignoring the crisis, it rapped hard on my consciousness on Monday and demanded my undivided attention. I spent the morning combing through brutal statistics, and worrying that officials were about to pry parts of the country back open. It seemed possible that America was about to repeat mistakes that we haven’t begun to finish paying for — mistakes of a magnitude that we don’t even understand yet. The sense of futility had a grinding effect on me. I fought through it, but there it was, all day long.

In order to carry on, writers must fool themselves into thinking that the perfectly turned phrase placed in the proper paragraph can be the lever that recalibrates the whole infernal machine of society. This fiction organizes our time and keeps us motivated. Quite a leap of faith!, since many modern decisionmakers don’t even bother to read. Nevertheless, the word is what we’ve got, so we carry on. These are missives to friends, family, and other sympathizers, not position papers, but if somebody did ask my opinion, I’d like to think I could remain sharp enough to contribute some worthwhile insights. Yesterday, that wasn’t so. I was plain useless — as far from understanding the depth of my feelings and the reasons for my stomach-aches as I was when Uma was sick. Cliff approaching, nowhere to swerve. I’ll try to stay as steady behind the wheel as I can.

It was G.K. Chesterton who wrote, with his customary pith, that Christianity was the only religion that had the guts to make God a rebel as well as a king. He was overstating: as a scholar of the Old Testament as well as the New, he knew that Yahweh was as much a temperamental artist as he was a Lord of Hosts. Yahweh chose as his earthly representative a badass in bondage whose first notable act was killing a slavemaster and running to the hills. The older and wiser Moses won’t kiss ass, either. He speaks truth to Pharaoh and becomes the instrument of divine justice against earthly power. There are hero-kings in the Bible, but by and large, they’re screw-ups, too — the amazing second Book of Samuel lays out David’s flaws in some of the most searing language ever put on papyrus.

Somehow, though, Jesus is different.  Jesus isn’t a Robin Hood figure who wins some and loses some. He’s a righteous man who is utterly crushed and humiliated by the authority he defies.  Jesus dies the most shameful death that the Roman Empire knew how to dish out — crucifixion, a punishment reserved for the lowest of criminals.  Worse yet, Jesus dies alone, abandoned by his friends who scatter like squirrels when the boot comes down. Despite all of this, we’re asked to believe that Jesus is victorious. The stone is rolled away, and the tomb is empty. Mark, in his artistic wisdom, doesn’t give us any more than that; the other Gospelers, worried that we’re doubting Thomases, take greater pains to assure us that He is risen. 

This is the essence of the Easter story — one that continues to resonate for readers and listeners, two thousand years after it was first told.  In good times, it’s an indelible narrative. In troubled times, it’s essential, because there’s nobody on Earth for whom it doesn’t become personal. Even the Almighty, we are assured, had his moments of doubt, weakness, and self-pity. Even God was renounced, and despised, and misunderstood.  His scourging and piercing, which is really played up in some of the more graphic Christian traditions, is a brutal but oh-so-effective metaphor for total rejection at the hands of the crowd.  And total rejection, the Gospelers imply, is what life has in store for the man, or woman, who follows his conscience and acts with compassion and humility.  If the Lord himself is incapable of avoiding a scoundrel’s fate at the hands of the powerful, what chance, really, have you?

The Gospels associate Jesus with the lowly. Beggars, prostitutes, foreigners, petty crooks, the destitute, the tired, sick, and weak: this is what his flock looks like. He says so himself — we are judged by how we treat the least among us, not by how we serve the powerful. We modern sinners find it hard to live by these words. We ignore the cries of those in pain, and slam the door on the immigrant, and hoard our wealth, and sneer at the abject, and celebrate the winner and dismiss the loser, and refuse to give a hand to the man who is down, even as we know in what’s left of our hearts that what we’re doing is wrong. The good news for us, today and on all other days, is that Jesus has ransomed our sorry asses. He has, the story says, stood alone, renounced and loathed, and faced his ordeal, and his rejection, without a buffer. In so doing, he provides an example that has stood for millennia: a reminder that we all will face solitary trials, and the righteous man is not the one who bends to the will of the crowd, but the one who keeps his eyes fixed firmly on heaven, no matter what the cost is. Grace is never found in numbers. Only the individual is holy.

As a typical annoying skeptic, I struggle with the supernatural elements of religion. But my faith in the power of literature is absolute. I have two scriptures: the words of the Hebrew masters recorded in the books of the Bible, and the verses of the poets who comprise the canon of hip-hop. I never cease to be astonished by the many ways that these writers, separated by time and culture and technology, always manage to say the same damn thing. On the best song on his best album, the prophet Kendrick Lamar sums up the Easter message in one tight couplet: everybody gon respect the shooter/but the one in front of the gun lives forever. Society will always celebrate strength, and force, and meanness, and domination; popularity will accrue to the brash, the hard-hearted and cruel. But if you’ve got what it takes to be humble, and grateful, and to stand bravely in front of the powerful armed with nothing but your conscience, you get to hold on to your soul. Without a follow, without a mention, the ultimate triumph is yours.