Trash Talk of 2020: The Year in Quotes

-- By Tom Phillips 

2020 was an epic year for news, but not for noble speeches. The Quotes of the Year were more like the oaths of warriors in combat: bravado, trash talk, mayday calls, dying gasps and pleas for mercy.     

What they said: 

"It is what it is.."  Donald Trump on August 31, downplaying US deaths from Covid-19 ".. because you are what you are."  Joe Biden, blaming him in the first presidential debate September 29.

“I can’t breathe.”  George Floyd, as he lay dying under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin May 25.  When Biden was declared president-elect November 7, CNN commentator Van Jones broke down on camera, weeping for his children and friends.  "It wasn't just George Floyd," he said through a flood of tears.  "A lot of people …felt they couldn't breathe."

 "Kill me!"  Luis Vasquez, a neighborhood resident who fired gunshots into the air in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, following a Christmas concert on the Cathedral steps December 12.  Police shot him dead.  The gunman's sister said he'd been "damaged" by prison time in the 1990s, and his mental state had worsened in the pandemic. 

Junk Dances 2020

"Plastic Harvest" 
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020

By Tom Phillips 
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

Anika Hunter in "Plastic Harvest" 

In the early 1960s, choreographer Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.

 ''I looked at rooms and rooms .. waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.''  Shortly after, Louis attended a country auction where he bought a bundle of old umbrellas. He opened them up: ''They were all completely eaten away. It was wonderful.”  He had one thought: “It all turns to junk.”  

Out of this, in 1964 Louis and Phyllis Lamhut made a wonderful duet, set in an alley that steadily filled up with the detritus of a shopping spree – heaps and piles of paper bags, filled with goods destined to decay and disintegrate.  They called it “Junk Dances.”  Fast forward to 2020, and choreographer Jody Sperling is on the Down escalator, contemplating the end times of our long national shopping spree.  She calls it "Plastic Harvest." 

---

Today a tsunami of accumulated junk is filling up the whole earth.  And instead of paper bags full of ephemeral objects, we have mountains of plastic bags, filled with plastic products that will not decay or go away.  In 1964 our consumer products all turned to junk.  Today they start out as junk, and turn to toxic waste.      

“Plastic Harvest” is a Covid-era virtual work in progress, a video featuring four dancers in costumes fashioned from plastic bags.  Anika Hunter opens in a tub, taking a bubble bath in a sea of crackling plastic.  As she periodically disappeared under the surface, I thought of the warnings on some bags – danger of suffocation.  Hunter begins and ends her bath reading a book – “So You Want to Talk about Race.”  It’s a crisis, for sure, but not the one that’s immediately surrounding her.  Like the American consumer she appears unconcerned, even as she slips under the waves. 

Maki Kitahara follows in a wide-sleeved kimono made of bags tied and hanging from her outstretched arms as if from a clothesline.  This too is a disappearing act, through a trick of Sperling’s camera that shoots her in a split-screen mirror image.  Turning toward the center she disappears, turning outward she splits into two.  An identity crisis – is it a person, two persons, plastic, or nothing at all? 

Andrea Pugliese-Trager

The grand finale is a whirling balletic folk dance in swirling tutus and puffed plastic sleeves, intercut between Frances Barker on a suburban street and Andrea Pugliese-Trager in New York.  Both wind up crossing an intersection – Pugliese-Trager through a construction zone, Barker past a Stop sign into a weed-strewn vacant lot.  

Obviously, more questions than answers in this work-in-progress, but that’s as it should be.  The camera work is sharp and the split-screens stunning.  It’s all kept driving by Matthew Burtner’s repetitive score, which sounds like the infernal combustion of some satanic micro-mill.   

Besides the dancers, the most striking visual was the unheeded sign that said STOP.   Hey, it's not too late… 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips                                 

Junk Dances, 1964

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Future Bible Stories: King Donald and the Bugs

 The manuscript fragment below was recently discovered by Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's campaign to develop a vaccine before election day. Sources say the project had accelerated to several times the speed of light when engineers discovered they were in a time warp.  The manuscript was discovered stuck to the windshield in the year 4525 CE.  It was damaged during the rapid deceleration that followed as team members worked frantically to return to their present lives. It appears to tell the story of the 2020 presidential campaign, in the language of a latter-day Bible.  

In the fourth year of the reign of King Donald, in the second month, the Lord sent a bug to plague the people of the earth, as a sign against the king because he did not love justice.        

The prophet Woodward went to the king, and he was afraid.  The king said, "You just breathe the air and that is how it is passed.  It is also more deadly that even your strenuous flu.  This is deadly stuff."  And the prophet wrote that in his book.  

Then the king went to tell the people. He stood at the gate and told them, "When it gets a little warmer it miraculously goes away.  The King of China is working hard and it's going to work out fine."  And the people went home and did not fear the plague.  

Isadorables

"Butterfly Etude:" Emily D'Angelo, Hayley Rose, Faith Kimberling   Photo: John Link 

A flock of Monarch butterflies – stopping for the night in the Hudson Valley on their way to Mexico --- greeted early arrivals Saturday in Untermyer Park and Gardens, high above the river in Yonkers.  Their visit was unscheduled, but no more an accident than the gust of wind which an hour later lifted the silken wings of three dancers to Chopin’s “Butterfly Etude,” nor the shaft of light from the setting sun that illumined Gluck’s “Bacchanal.” Isadora planned it that way.     

Nearly a century after Isadora Duncan’s dancers performed in Samuel Untermyer’s open-air amphitheater in 1923, Lori Belilove and her Isadora Duncan Dance Company returned for an encore. And if Isadora was ahead of her time, her self-anointed successor Belilove is right on time with this revival.   

Gaga at Breezy Point

9/11 Memorial --Breezy Point 

This summer, amid the national uproar over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a long list of others, I spent a Saturday visiting a friend in the beach resort of Breezy Point, Queens. Wrapped around the western tip of the Rockaway peninsula, this is an enclave of middle-class homes on sandy pedestrian paths, festooned with American flags and sprinkled with Trump signs -- a summer haven for New York City police and firefighters, heavily Irish, overwhelmingly Catholic, 100 percent white.  It was organized as a co-op in the 1960s, with rules that keep it a closed society, a gated community.  

I took a walk by the bay, watching children play in the sand and trading wary nods and glances with the adults.  It was a perfect beach day, a time to relax, but the atmosphere felt subdued and tense.  Some residents had recently been involved in a confrontation with protesting Black surfers in nearby Rockaway Beach.  Others had faced off with demonstrators in the streets. As a stranger with a beard, I was regarded with caution. The last time I visited, in 2017, one guy told me I looked like his dog.  This time there was no conversation.   

It reminded me of South Africa in 1990, in the last days of apartheid, just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. All those white faces grimly trying to milk their white privilege to the last drop, knowing that the outside world was turning away from them.    

These feelings came back at me this week, watching Lady Gaga's new video, "911." 

Standing Up for Evil: The Price of Knowledge in Frost's "Mending Wall"

This is an edited version of an article published online by The Explicator, 9/11/2020. 

  --  By Tom Phillips                               

Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” contrasts two New England farmers as they meet to repair the stone wall between their properties.  While much has been said about their opposing characters, the difference between their farms has barely been noted. The speaker cultivates an apple orchard, his neighbor a pine forest.  These are two of earth’s hardiest and most common trees, ubiquitous North of Boston (as Frost titled the 1914 collection in which the poem appears) and profoundly different in their physical properties and symbolic meanings.  

The apple tree is small and shapely, a tree of the field, sun-loving, deciduous, blossoming in spring and bearing an irresistible fruit in summer and fall.  It was a golden apple that set off the Trojan war, when Paris awarded it to Venus in exchange for Helen of Troy.  In Christian tradition, the apple is a symbol of both sin and redemption. The forbidden tree from which Eve ate in the Garden of Eden becomes “Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree” in an 18^th-century hymn.  

The pine is its polar opposite – tall and straight, a tree of the forests and mountains, a thousand-year survivor bearing hard and inedible cones. In the Bible a member of the pine family, the cedar, is associated with worship of God; Solomon’s temple is hewn from cedars of Lebanon (NRSV, 1 Kings 5). In folklore the pine forest is a dark and forbidding place, a scene of lethal trickery in Grimm’s tales, of murder and mystery in the American folk-song “In the Pines.”  In Frost’s own “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the forest is “lovely, dark and deep” --- a path to oblivion (224).  If the apple tree is a temptation to life, the pine forest is a temptation to death. 

Both pines and apples were part of the everyday world of Robert Frost, the New England farmer.  They were also the property of Frost the classical and biblical scholar, who saw his poems as dialogues with the whole history of literature, sacred and secular.  In “Mending Wall,” he uses the symbolism of the apple and the pine to underscore the qualities of the two farmers.  He also uses it to mimic and challenge a foundational text --- the dialogue between the serpent and Eve:  

Eve and the Serpent -- Henri Rousseau

            “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?”  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”   (Genesis 3: 1-2)

Frost begins by identifying the people with their plants.  “I am all apple orchard and you are all pine,” says the crafty narrator.  Personified as the fruit, he becomes not just the tempter but the object of temptation.  The speaker extends it further when he teases, “here there are no cows.”  No females will intrude on this encounter.

On a literal level, all he wants to do is talk – about the absurdity of keeping a wall between an apple orchard and a pine forest.  He mocks his neighbor’s fears: “My apples won’t come across and eat the cones under your pines.”     

My Life with the Cops

                     Run chillun run, the pattyroller git you --                                                                                  Run chillun run, it's almost day. 

                                                       -- Slave song 

One evening in the 1940's, a young James Baldwin took the subway downtown to 42nd Street, just to see what was going on in midtown Manhattan. A policeman asked him what he was doing there, then told him to go back to Harlem where he belonged.  

One evening in the 1950's, a young Tom Phillips walked out of a bar in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, in the poorer section of town around the railroad station.  Emerging from a parked patrol car, a policeman asked me what I was doing "in there."  I said I was having a beer.  He informed me that everyone else in the bar was black.  "So what?" I said.  At this he grew defensive.  He had nothing against black people, he said, he'd "worked with them for many years."  It was just that I didn't belong there.   

Neither of these events would be likely today.  Black people are common on 42nd Street, which has become an urban extension of Disney World.  And the poorer parts of Roslyn have been torn down to make way for parking lots and condominiums.  My classmate and teammate Sam Brown, whom I saw in that bar that night, now lives in Roosevelt, farther out in a suburbia that has become more segregated as it has grown more affluent.  Such are the changes over time, but the basic principle remains: each race has its place.  And the cops will let you know it.  

4th of July Special: What America Means to Me

--   By Tom Phillips 

"Flag"  Jasper Johns, 1954

Huddled at home, trying to focus on something other than the din of illicit fireworks, I meditate on my high-school essay question:  What does America mean to me?  

I used to think it stood for Freedom.  Americans do enjoy an individual freedom of speech, thought, and worship that is nearly absolute. This is what keeps me here in my native land.  But Freedom is a tricky term, understood in many ways.  

For white supremacists, it has meant freedom to practice slavery, then segregation and discrimination, unequal justice enforced by racial terror.  For African-Americans it means the hope of freedom from white supremacy: Freedom to vote, to walk or drive through any neighborhood, to run for exercise rather than for your life. 

For Franklin D. Roosevelt, it meant freedom from want, freedom from fear.  For conservatives in the 21st Century, it means freedom from taxes, from caring for the poor, even freedom to endanger others' lives by not covering your face. 

So Freedom's just another word to fight about.   

Think of US as an acronym for Ultimate Struggle.  Ever since the English set foot in Virginia and Massachusetts, the country has been torn between two irreconcilable world-views.  Let's call them the System and the Movement.  S & M. 

Viral Spring #20: Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie 

                           your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

In this apocalyptic time, as America is revealed in all her shame and beauty, an old man dreamed a dream: 

I was walking the wrong way on Grand Central Parkway --- a road without a sidewalk -- making my way against a tide of traffic speeding into New York.  My clothes were filthy, my shoes battered.  

A voice said stop, wake up, before you get hit by a car and killed.  But another voice No, keep going, walk the walk.  I kept going.   

The first voice said watch out, here comes a truck.  I walked through the truck and it vanished. Then I knew the dreamer was not a bum going the wrong way, but a spirit bound for glory.   

Viral Spring #19: Dreams and Visions

                           And afterward. 

                       I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
               your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
                       your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

I dreamed that I was fighting for a new America, a better America, in a rebellion that had just been named the "Green Patriotic Uprising" or something like that.  I was in a school gymnasium, waking up at dawn next to a young woman who was my wife or girlfriend.  She told me the name of the uprising; and I said -- OK that's what they call it, now let's go fight it!  I was gung-ho, as they say.   
 

We were to move out at dawn.  My assignment was to run to the front lines pushing my upstairs neighbor, a fellow septuagenarian and a long-time activist, in a wheelbarrow.  She wanted to fight, but had a bad leg and couldn't run.  I grabbed the wheelbarrow with Myra lying down in it and began to run, full tilt along a narrow wooden track, with the rest of the force close behind.  But the wheel got caught in a crack and stuck.  I was holding up the charge, so I worked frantically to free the wheel.  Then  it occurred to me that neither Myra nor I had any kind of weapon.  How did we expect to fight?  

Then I woke up.                    

Viral Spring #18: If I Had a Hammer

-- By Tom Phillips
                            
Thirty-one years ago this spring, I was in Tiananmen Square amid a huge peaceful protest -- the largest the world has ever seen, the center of a nationwide movement for democracy in China.  As the protests built across every major city in China, the mood was euphoric; it seemed impossible for the ruling communist party to ignore the pent-up demands for personal and political freedom.

Americans are feeling the same euphoria today, as young people -- black, brown and white together -- turn out en masse in peaceful protests against racism and police brutality, and a president who embodies these abuses by denying them. With his poll numbers falling and ex-aides blasting him in public, it looks like a rout to some. "The Trump Regime is Beginning to Topple," headlined the Atlantic a few days ago.  

                                            

                               If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning

                               I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land..  

Viral Spring #17: White Bodies Up Front!

Brooklyn,  6/4/2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Something turned in me over the span of a day last week, maybe because something is turning for America.  

On Thursday morning I opened the New York Times to the most gut-wrenching piece of arts criticism I've ever read. Wesley Morris, a young black man who is the paper's critic-at-large, wrote of  a song that came up on the radio and left him weeping at his kitchen sink. The 1985 song by Patti Labelle is about the end of a long, bad relationship.  If you don't know me by now, she wails, you'll never know me.

Morris's composure broke not over a failed romance but the police murder of George Floyd, and Morris's own feeling that another relationship is ending -- that if we whites still don't get it, after all these years, we never will.  

Here's what he heard in Patti Labelle's lament:    

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …

I finished the article shaken.  If black people give up on us -- who were raised to think of them in just these ways, who struggle daily to beat back our pre-conscious ideas, whose very perceptions are still twisted by a racist culture -- what is next?  Is there any hope?

Viral Spring #16: Masters of Deceit

-- By Tom Phillips

President Trump is kneeling on the neck of American democracy, and we are gasping for air.  The only thing in his way is the US Constitution, and that will be his next target.  

A classic coup d'etat is in progress, with all the earmarks of tactics school children learned to watch out for in the 1950s.  FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote a book on the truth-defying tricks of the Soviet communist party -- the "Masters of Deceit."  

The KGB's playbook -- adapted from the Bolshevik revolution -- was designed so that a small, determined group could seize power over a large nation, and make it look like the people's choice.  The key was co-opting legitimate protests, turning them violent, creating chaos and confusion, and then presenting the party as the only force that could restore order.  And both the KGB and CIA used this tactic during the Cold War, fomenting unrest as a pretext for seizing power in countries as big as Indonesia, Iran and Afghanistan. 

George Floyd

Now it's come home to America.  Following the police killing of George Floyd, multiple sources reported violence instigated by  young white men, heavily masked, smashing windows and setting fires.  Local people then took the opportunity to pillage, helping themselves to a sliver of America's luxury consumer wealth.  And TV News did its part, constructing a lurid loop of riot footage to accompany the news night and day  -- a misleading mashup that makes it appear the entire country is in flames.     

Just before he called governors to demand a military crackdown, our president talked by phone with Vladimir Putin.  The White House says they had an airy discussion of G7 invitations, the successful US space shot, and steps they're taking to fight the pandemic. Pardon my skepticism but I think there was another item on the agenda.  

Putin, the former KGB whiz kid, is today's Master of Deceit.  The President of the United States is his Apprentice.  Their playbook comes courtesy of the KGB and CIA, which manipulated the world for decades, fooling journalists like me into reporting phony crises that resulted in the rise of client regimes. Now they'd like you to believe those black-clad masked invaders are just irate citizens; that what you see on TV is what's happening in America. 

Do yourself a favor, America.  Walk out into the real world today and see how it compares with the president's fever-dream.  

Then try to breathe. The worst is yet to come. 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

Viral Spring #15: Old Movie, New World

-- By Tom Phillips 

Omar Sharif as Dr. Zhivago 

With nowhere to go this Viral Spring, we've been staying home, watching old movies we missed the first time around.  I skipped "Dr. Zhivago" in 1965 because I thought it was sentimental claptrap, and it is.  But it's a cultural icon, a landmark for my generation.  Sometime in the not too distant future Hollywood will make a blockbuster tear-jerker about love in the Pandemic of 2020. 

 No one alive can remember anything like it -- a political crisis, wrapped in an economic crisis, inside a global pandemic.  It resembles 1918, with the Russian Revolution bundled in World War One and the flu pandemic.  Paging Dr. Zhivago... 

Then as now, politics comes first.  The pandemic will be over in a year or so.  The economy will follow the nation's health into recovery.  But the political crisis will not be resolved in 2020.

Viral Spring #14: The Glamour of Evil

-- by Tom Phillips 

Yes Sir, Boss: Parscale models campaign gear

When President Trump's  campaign manager Brad Parscale called his media attack machine the Death Star, Democrats mocked him for invoking the Evil Empire from Star Wars, and scolded him for joking about death while the world is in the grip of a Pandemic.  But Parscale didn't apologize, and won't.  "Laugh all you want," he tweeted. "We'll take the win."  

It's the Democrats who are being naive here.  They don't understand that evil and death are part of the president's appeal.     

Viral Spring #13: The Death Star

-- By Tom Phillips 

Inside the Death Star 

Listen up, everybody:  Brad Parscale, President Donny's campaign manager, has an important announcement,  Brad?  

"For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time." !!!!

Thus tweeted Parscale last week, shortly after the President threatened to sue him over a poll showing him ten points behind Joe Biden.

The last guy who boasted about an attack before pressing "fire" was Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary for George W. Bush -- who in 2003 called his machine "Shock and Awe." It was supposed to be so awful that the invasion of Iraq would be over almost as soon as it began, with Iraqis panicking at the sight of American power.

Like Rumsfeld, Parscale is super smart and super confident. He says Joe Biden won't know what hit him. So what can we expect from his video game?

Viral Spring #12: Life in Stir

   -- By Tom Phillips

In 2011, a 59-year-old North Carolina man held up a bank, then waited for police to come and arrest him.  He was sick, uninsured, and wanted to go to prison to get health care.  Here in New York, many young black men say prison is the only place they've ever eaten regular meals.

Prison offers educational opportunities and a chance to make long-lasting friendships. It also gives you freedom to think and create.  Many authors have found inspiration behind bars -- from Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet to Eldridge Cleaver and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  And Martin Luther King  made his most profound and moving plea for racial justice in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  

Not to romanticize incarceration; it's a drag at best, violent and life-threatening at worst.  Boredom and rumination are your worst enemies -- with little to do in present time, you can get hung upside down in the past.  It takes discipline to stay in the present, and not think about the future -- i.e. when will this be over?  It ain't over 'til it's over.

 But now that we're all under house arrest, those of us who have our own living space should count our blessings.

Plaque near Thoreau's cabin site, Concord MA  

Chief among them is the radical simplification of life.  Work has dried up, travel is out of the question, restaurants and bars are closed, meat is scarce, parties are banned, money sits in wallets with nowhere to go.

In a way our souls have transmigrated to an earlier America: e.g.Walden Pond in the 1850s.  Like Henry David Thoreau, we sit in our cabins, alone or with a lone companion, contemplating ourselves.  And like Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, we must rely on ourselves.

Viral Spring #11: Poetry in a Pandemic

-- By Tom Phillips

One of my stay-at-home pleasures this Viral Spring has been perusing my friend Bill Christophersen's new book of poems, his fourth and I think his best. Like the ancient seafarer whose song closes this collection, he deliberately steers into the worst kind of storm -- the so-called post-truth moment that poisons the world's discourse today. And like the seafarer he comes out banged up, weatherbeaten, exhausted, but alive and articulate. I wrote something like a review, but since Bill and I are long-time friends and collaborators --  thick as thieves -- let's just call it an "appreciation."  

Rarely does a collection of poetry begin with a headline – but Bill Christophersen is a journalist as well as a poet, and he knows from a header and a lead.  The headline is the title – Where Truth Lies – in three syllables, the crisis of the world today.  The Pandemic is just the latest case in point: we can find where truth lies, only by finding where it doesn't.   

The difficulties of this quest, seen and unforeseen, are the plot of this Odyssey of epistemology, testing experience and language for the presence of truth.  Not much pans out.   

Objects gather dust, lose their emotional charge -- the ferris wheel he jumped at 18 creaks on in middle age ("The Wheel").  Memory bobs and weaves ("Tip of the Tongue"). Fiction sucks with “dark vapors” ("The Rise of the Novel").  Poetry itself prevaricates – “a license to deceive" ("Lies").  Speech loses its nerve and curdles in the throat ("The Right Thing").  

And yet there is a metal that can be truth-tested. He finds it in a newspaper story of murder with a blunt instrument – an aluminum baseball bat ("Being Here Now"). And in the title poem, truth bides its time, conceals itself and finds him -- in dreams and dust-balls, in misread blurbs that morph into indictments ("Where Truth Lies").  He sums up the quest with a spring-cleaning haiku: "Beneath the shag rug /the vanished salamander’s /sooty skeleton."

Viral Spring #10: Culture Wars

-- By Tom Phillips

Sweatshop 

While the Culture Wars rage between conservatives and liberals in middle-American battleground states, here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan they've gone intramural.  Though nearly everyone's to the left of center, in this fifth week of quasi-quarantine some people are starting to lose it with strangers. The main issue is wearing masks, which Governor Andy has ordered everyone to do unless they can stay six feet from their neighbors.  Most people are complying, but not all. 

Masks are mainly to protect others from catching the virus.  Wearing one makes a statement; not wearing one makes another.  Enforcement is up to the individual.  The cops are totally uninvolved.

My wife Debra takes it seriously, and more.  Since masks became mandatory she has turned our dining room table into a sweatshop, turning out cloth masks for family, friends and neighbors.  We wear them religiously on our daily walk in the park.  Those who don't get a long "look" from Debra.  That's her form of enforcement. I just look away.  Others are much more aggressive. 

Viral Spring #9: Hoop Solitaire

-- By  Tom Phillips 

What do you miss most in this Viral Spring?  I asked that question at a recent social-distance gathering with three other people, and got four different answers.  Working, partying, going to church were three.  Mine was: Sports.

April is the coolest month, for both players and fans -- winter sports climaxing just as baseball returns. Pro basketball and hockey teams scramble for playoff spots. The outdoors warms, the boys of summer fly north, and the buzz of spring training becomes the roar of Opening Day.

Not this year.  Baseball, basketball, hockey are all stilled.  Tennis courts stretch empty in the parks.  Playgrounds are closed.  Here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the only sound of sporting life seems to emanate from a backyard on 111th street, where the thump of a basketball on concrete is followed by the clang of a shot off the rim. 

It's me, playing Hoop Solitaire.

I've been shooting balls through hoops for 70 years, starting in a suburban driveway on Long Island.  I hoped to be a star, but I had limited value to my high school and college teams, because the only skill I worked at was shooting.

My game is Hoop Solitaire.  And suddenly, it's the only game in town.

Viral Spring #8: Passion in a Pandemic

Andrea Mantegna:  The Crucifixion 

-- By Tom Phillips

Why do we call the events leading up to Easter the "Passion" of Jesus Christ?  Many people think “passion” refers to the strong emotions Jesus felt during the last days of his life. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word originates in Christian theology, and its first meaning is simply “the suffering of pain.”  Its second definition is “the fact of being acted upon, the being passive.”  It's an idea that takes on new meaning in this Pandemic year, with no defense but distance from a deadly viral foe.

Viral Spring #7: A Little Night Music

-- By Tom Phillips 

President Trump is not the only one tweeting in the wee hours. With the campus of Columbia University emptied of people by the Coronavirus, a congress of American Robins has flown in for their spring break and mating season.  At midnight they perch in trees and bushes, on fence posts and statues, and sing their little heads off.  

Viral Spring #6: Comes the Revolution

--  By Tom Phillips 

Newsweek Photo 

Somebody tell Bernie --Socialism is here.  

The White House last night said it will authorize $100 billion in emergency funds to reimburse hospitals and health care providers for treating uninsured people.   Universal health care, courtesy of the Coronavirus.  

The government is sending guaranteed income checks to everyone, and paying our medical bills.  And by the way: Immigrant farm workers, documented or not, are now classified as "essential workers" by the Department of Homeland Security. They are "critical to the food supply chain."  

Democrats could never win these battles -- the opposition was too entrenched.  So the revolution comes from the right, tinged with fascism.  

Viral Spring #5: Chickens Home to Roost

--  By Tom Phillips

Socio-economic effects of the Coronavirus in the US:

The society that had everything in the 1950s, the envy of the world, has become the society that has nothing -- at least, not what it needs.

Viral Spring #4: Gimme Shelter

-- By Tom Phillips

Following the advice of anxious family and friends, I have decided to curtail my reporting jaunts in the neighborhood, and concentrate on sheltering in place. I still go for walks, but plan them so they can be solitary or with my wife. I hang out the window to join the ovation for local health care workers at 7 p.m. each night.  I read the papers, go to classes and conferences via Zoom or Google Hangouts.  And we watch TV, something we rarely do in ordinary time.  At last I'm getting my money's worth from the cable company.   And TV has changed my life. 

Today I watched Governor Andy Cuomo's daily briefing -- an hour-long monologue with Power Point graphics popping up before he even starts talking about a topic. He knows what he's going to say and likes to underline it with a simple caption like STAY HOME. 

Cuomo's soaring popularity shows how quickly perceptions change in a crisis. This is the same governor whose autocratic, power-grabbing, know-it-all, Andy-centric, self-aggrandizing antics have made him so tiresome to New Yorkers in his interminable third term.  The difference is that in a crisis, autocrats become assets.

Since when does a governor of New York get to appeal for National Unity?  Since when does a governor of New York tell other states to send medical supplies and personnel, and promise to return the favor when the pandemic comes to them?  Since the breakdown of the federal system is when.

Cuomo begins with obligatory praise for the president's help, then details how thoroughly the federal government has bungled the crisis -- telling the states to fend for themselves and then sending FEMA in to outbid them for medical supplies.  When are we gonna get those ventilatahs??  When the US gets its act together, probably not in time. 

Since when does a governor share his family life with a national audience?  Not since Mario Cuomo spoke to the 1984 Democratic Convention has any politician's devotion to his mother been so widely shared.  Not to mention Andy's tender care for little brother Chris -- a sweet guy, and strong, but "not as strong as he thinks he is." Stay home, bro, says Andy.  And that means you too, America.    Amazingly, I'm convinced, shamed into compliance. Andy has done what my family and friends couldn't do... keep me off the street. 

If he were running for president, this is how he’d do it.  But I believe him when he says he’s not.   A good Democrat, he would rather see the party lose than tear it apart.  There’s always 2024.  The problem is, he won’t have the virus as his running mate.

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

Viral Spring #3: Cuomo's Moment; Darkness on the Heights

-- By Tom Phillips
   

One by one, the lights are going out in Morningside Heights, as restaurants close, grocery stores and pharmacies limit the number of customers inside, and other businesses stay open, but with reduced hours and only to hand things off at the door.  For the first time ever, customers have to line up outside West Side Market... and live without the late-night luxury of Koronet Pizza.

Suddenly, we know several people sick with the coronavirus.  One is in a hospital in Brooklyn.  Her daughter is not allowed to visit.

Tom's Restaurant is closed for the duration. The Hungarian Pastry Shop went dark today.  Everyone with a second home or children in the countryside has left town.  A young couple in our building were packing their vacation gear and their big dog in a car Saturday, hoping to head for the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  The beaches there are closed, but you can't really close a beach, right?  I don't know, I said.  But driving with New York plates, you might get pulled over and quarantined. Rhode Island is already doing it.  Who knows where they'll crack down next?

The rest of America finally has a reason to persecute New Yorkers.  We may replace Asians in the role of chief scapegoats, reviled and spat on in the streets, or locked up until we prove ourselves healthy.  Only because Fox News is itself based in New York can we be confident that what they call the  "Chinese Coronavirus"won't turn into the "New York Coronavirus" on Fox TV. 

Viral Spring #2

    -- By Tom Phillips                                   

                                                        You know something's happening

                        But you don't know what it is -- 

                                                   Do you, Mr. Jones?

New York City now is the "epicenter" of the viral spring, with 23,000 cases of Covid-19, and at least 365 deaths. This is in a city of eight million, and we still don't know anyone who knows they have it.  But we met online with our sidelined hospice singing group last night and heard the news: two people dead in the synagogue of one of our members. A nurse died at a hospital where another member works. Co-workers are angry -- blaming the lack of personal protective equipment.  Some nurses are already exhausted, feeling desperate.  

Outside, people walk in the empty streets to avoid passing on the sidewalk. A cylindrical hut has sprung up on 113th Street, outside the entrance to St. Luke's hospital.  It's a triage center, ready to separate patients into four categories: (1) those needing immediate lifesaving interventions; (2) those who need significant intervention that can be delayed; (3) those needing little or no treatment: (4) those who are so severely ill that survival is unlikely.  

The system was developed in the wars of the last century, when many of the wounded had to be given up for dead.  

Viral Spring

all the merry little birds are

flying in the floating in the

very spirits singing in

are winging in the blossoming...

and everybody never breathed 

quite so many kinds of yes

                       e.e. cummings 

The traditional flora and fauna of the Upper West Side couldn't care less about a coronavirus. While humans huddle in their homes, birds, bees, dogs and rodents enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime springtime  of clean air, quiet streets, and parks with fewer people.

At the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine,  the albino peacock shakes his tail feathers and brazenly charges an eager photographer who moves too close for comfort.   "OK, OK," says the human, backing up hastily.  I thought we were friends.

Corona Journal

-- By Tom Phillips

Things you never thought you'd see:  The world's greatest city, cowed into silence, emptied out by a virus.  This was the scene at Tom's Restaurant on 112th Street at 11 p.m. last night. The everlit neon sign, emblem of Jerry Seinfeld's Upper West Side enlightenment, extinguished.  The nighthawks of  the counter back in their nests.

Closed

Meanwhile three New Yorkers duke it out in the political version of a playground feud.  Bill the Mayor, Andy the Governor, and Donny the Class President each vies to turn this Coronavirus Crisis to his everlasting advantage.  

Bill opens with disastrous blunder. New York should do like San Francisco, he says,  Shelter at Home.  Andy responds with a Bronx cheer.  You jerk, New York don't imitate San Francisco!  Don't tell people what to do.  

Donny from Queens, the wannabe bully who cries every time somebody challenges him, comes up with his latest brilliant idea: He'll borrow a trillion dollars from his father and just hand it out to everybody on the playground!  This idea he stole straight from his enemies, Brooklyn Bernie and the Yang gang.  Donny thinks it will assure his re-election as Class President, which everybody knows he cheated to win the first time.  

Donny's secret is well known.  He borrows money and doesn't pay it back.  

Meanwhile New York's introverts stay home and work on their projects.    

Checkout girls from places like Burkina Faso keep working at West Side Market, handling money all day, three feet or less from their customers.  Who's gonna get sick?  

Homeless people sit on street corners all night.  Donations accepted.  Three guys from Central America huddle on a heating grate outside Columbia, drinking vodka from a bottle, talking it over in Spanish.  St. Luke's is filling up with Coronavirus cases.  Everybody knows we don't have enough beds, not even half the capacity of a place like Italy. Why is that?  

Don't ask Donny.  Somebody asked him -- why is it celebrities are getting tested for the virus, but there's no tests for ordinary people?   

Donny's answer: That's just the "story of life."  

More to come. Worse to come.  

--  Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips