Sick Time: Pits of the Pandemic

-- By Tom Phillips  

Kolonial: Stefanie Batten Bland 

America is starting to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us.  Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts Center of New York is offering the first fruits of an ugly season --- a piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID health and safety protocols. 

Choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland assembled half a dozen dancers in BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater, in an installation by Conrad Quesen. They begin the drama in separate plastic bubbles, close enough to see each other but barred from touching.  In a recorded introduction, Bland says Kolonial is about isolation, being on display, voyeurism, the desire to touch; finding ways to be with others, and then finding why we can’t be. The 20-minute video performance captures the recurring misery of pandemic life, its constant approach and avoidance of human contact, its multiple barriers of plastic.   

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.  

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 #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.