À la Descartes, Sentio ergo sum.

Intubation

Sometimes it seems like all I can feel anymore is numb. The numb-ers are so abstract to those of us isolated from the madding gadding crowd of those infected. We listen to those who are in charge of keeping us all, every one, from joining their ranks, while every day since April 2, America has seen at least 22,000 new cases, 1,000 of them brief, ending with another life extinguished, another solo performer become an outcast, for good. Those numbers are now projected to rise to more than 3,000 deaths/day by June, the month of Weddings.

Only this year the Bride wears Black.

Cogito ergo sum is not quite right, is it? It denies existence to those of our fellow creatures who we believe do not think, insist don't feel; whereas we, who know we can do both, instead put a premium on not feeling, therefore being human means my barbaric heart makes me a lonely hunter, my lost soul but a commodity to be monetised, while I'm asked to maintain a constant faith in an uncertainty and despair that is only deepened by our shared but lonesome plight's intractable nature being ignored as we watch those in charge substitute delusional pipedreams of returning to a blighted normal, a fact which eviscerates any hope that there are any tattered remnants left of humanity's much-lauded inventiveness. As all the talk of "opening" the economy, as though it were a theater closed for cleaning, instead of the can of worms it has become, evokes no hope, since it's occurring in the face of remorseless tragedy, that proffers instead, in one way or another, a palpable bleakness, one accompanied by such humorless savagery that one finds oneself hard-pressed to keep from developing a blackly poetic resignation.

Yet it's a mostly miscomprehending public that's been tuned in to the less than optimistic airing of human nature and its grim, persistent laughter in their face as the reality that it’s a blundering world and a sad one is day-to-day drilled into a polity beset by a seemingly unending quarantined loneliness.

As we contemplate the world-wide depression that will inevitably be left in its ruinous wake, memory of our recent wars should cast a precognitive shadow over the pre-corona narrative as we glance back at a continent weighed down by American-caused misery. Even as we blame China for it, the virus has presented other nations not only an opportunity to call into account the moral slippage of our country, but the record of a far larger, seemingly uncontrollable, escalation; a greater moral confusion, since it is we who repeatedly and remorselessly send our graceful assassins soaring across other nations' boundaries, delivering mayhem throughout the landscape of a Mideast teetering on a knife’s edge. This is the haunting presence of the hegemon; its sharp metallic bite felt at every turn. What ensues is our history. And it is a chronicle steeped in blood. Murder is our business; our job has for the entirety of this century been to do away with "dumb animals", "stirred-up" Muslim men and women, for whose destruction our working lives are spent putting together the engines of death because the jobs they are providing support our own families.

A scathing indictment of capitalistic drives and consumerist values, the indulgences of our travelling class put us on a par with Marie Antoinette, in whom one imagines a woman who is at once a victim and an aggressor; just one of many cogs so ingrained in an aristocratic system that they could neither see the angel of death stropping its blades on their doorstep nor hear Madame LaFarge clackety-clacking her knitting needles in anticipation of the end of their world.

Now an equally inexorable force is busily occupied with liquidating pockets of humanity. It has been harnessed by our own leader, whose main preoccupation now seems to be to unleash biological warfare onto his own citizens while his Himmler revels in the Kusch job of devising the facilities in which to dispose of the growing piles of rotting corpses hidden in basements, stuffed in refrigerators, until they can be surreptitiously slipped into body bags. While countless chimneys of the industrial machine bellow out black smoke in the distance, the remains of the latest victims are burnt into ashes, their carbon co-mingling with that of the cretaceous while their disarmingly noisome and clever leader exudes a certain glacial superiority that is distancing, immune as it is to finding anything about our dilemma that is in the least bit poignant. No, his stubborn, maskless face insists: "We are most assuredly not in this together".

Squirming under his unsympathetic gaze, all we can do is take swipes at the hypocrisies of a crumbling infrastructure of demockcracy, ersatz finance, and a carbon dioxide-saturated world of speed and confusion, where one is continually reminded that our Grand Poobah himself stokes the chaos in the world, using it to leverage his own advantage over the now-enforced disconnection between people.

But trapped in their isolation, he knows they are not like him: the solitary. Seen through his own eyes as an heroic, even romantic, individual who addresses the rabble through wires and transmitters, microwaves and silicone chips that connect him to distant people. Communication is one way. Hell for him is having to listen to others. His rule, he insists, should be absolute.

While subject to it, you must not announce, you must not experience, much less act on, your real feelings. (Which are valueless). In this Danse Macabre even intimacy is socially distant. Seen only through the looking glass darkly, faceless, carefully counted unknown someones, have to be sacrificed on the altar of Manifist Destiny, only this time the native Americans are our loved ones, selected as the scapegoats, as we say - and the sins of the country are projected onto those individuals who are then hospitalized or triaged.

 DNR, DNR, our tender mercies only go so far.

Thereby the healthy rid themselves of the evils that were blocking the economy's continued existence. In a way, re-enacting a primeval fertility rite. In a way. In the way. There's but an article of difference.

Getting us through all this tragedy is the reign of the machines. AI “machines”, or a mechanical breathing apparatus, while mechanical toys and radios, cars, guns, radar snares, snapChats and FaceTime, we rely on electrical plugs to connect not only our devices to our vices but to each other. Yet the electro-mechanical contacts contracts emotions, renders them feigned as we all become the star in our own Truman Show and the mechanical and inorganic replaces the vital and organic, and heartfelt reads as pedantic. A deep digital divide that separates Insiders and outsiders.

NEXT!

The outsiders include most obviously us.

You cannot escape the unsatisfactory alternatives of debilitating emotion or electronic etiquette, submission or denial, acceptance of the new normal or delusional thinking. It seems that we are driving straight into a deeper tragedy than the divisive idea that the shutdown stifles the economy so that hypocritical insiders can justify reopening, thereby condemning sincere outsiders to die by the thousands. The deeper, more poignant tragedy is that neither scenario works. We cannot survive if we mingle in this new world infected by contagious pathogens to which we have no immunity, but the alternative, a socially distanced world of stifling lies and mask rules and sanitary swipes, repels us.

Phlegma in zee tubes.

But you can’t evade these painful alternatives. You can’t evade the rule, the domination, of the virus over how we live now (like Trollope's?). Nor of how we will live a few months or even years from now. You'll have to play by its rules - the new reality of life in our Peter Pandemic society. Even though that is awful. We still long for the innocent and spontaneous expression of our emotions, but down that road lies disaster. We need new rules to live by for life to go on even though they invite the corrupt to exploit them. But all social mechanisms corrupt. That doesn't mean we don't have to have them. We humans, despite our distinctly anti-social tendencies, are social animals. We, as humans, must live with other people and therefore must play by agreed-upon rules. We cannot bow out of this game. Yet despite this fact, we cannot win it, either.