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