Just Another Day in COVID-City

I'm not among those suffering. I am one of those lucky 70+'ers whose likely to be hunkered down for the Summer but I can work from home and we have access to enough victuals to carry us through.

I'm not among those suffering alone ... No Eleanor Rigby, here. I have a partner and a dog ... M for a very long time (some friends wonder if M's suffering being with me?) and Maisie for a couple of years, now. I'd like to think that I rescued M from her Mother in 1965 and Maisie from being euthanized in some W. Virginia Dog Shelter. I think of myself as a decent sort, as old Professor Higgins opined on himself, "an ordinary man ..."

I just read a piece from a psychiatric colleague who noted that our Elected President seems to place no value in the expertise or the health of Medical Staff. I suppose Trump only admires those who don't get caught by the virus and thinks of those who do as weak as Sen. McCain.

His writing certainly hit home. It fascinates me to watch how each segment of the population in an autocratic state becomes targeted due to some narcissistically pragmatic need of the would-be-Despot. Indeed, this administration has shown no respect for any expertise ... nor for any extant structures or organization that predates his rule ... not for the generals, not the heroic soldiers, not the Goldstar parents, not the economists, not the House, not the Meat-Packing workers, not the Judiciary, the Senate, NATO or WHO and now neither OSHA, CDC or ...  quelle surprise! ... the Healthcare World. It brought to mind the prose of a German Post-War cleric who famously wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

I tried for many years to write about the administration. I started a FB Group named Free Citizen Therapists more than three years ago to provide a forum for therapists to discuss the need to balance the rights of public figures to their private lives (The Goldwater Rule) with the rights that the electorate has to expect the Mental Health Community to clue them in on when a leader was dangerous ... and dangerous in a way that threatened people. I joined other therapists in writing a book on The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. And while I think those writings may have helped get the word out, it has become rather unavoidable to at least consider that there's nothing more to do with this storm except ride it out.

For the moment ... at least at this moment on the last day of April 2020 ... I've given up. I have little doubt that I will be re-energized sometime soon but, today, I feel helpless to do anything to help the Doctors, Nurses, CNA's and Staff of the Hospitals to stay safe in Trump's America. I don't know what to do for the Meat Packers who are being threatened with intentionally induced poverty (no job? no unemployment, either) if they don't join the active troops in Gen. Trump's Wartime Army, conscripted to Kill or Outlive COVID (TWACKOC).

So, if y'ever wanna find me, I'm here gettin' old and puttin' on the COVID-15 ... those 15 pounds that most of us are gleaning from grazing like the cows and bulls being slaughtered, today, wish they were doing. I'm doing my work and having a snack. Then a little more and another snack, maybe some lunch. I call it the COVID Bovine Diet.

I have nothing really to complain about and, as Thomas Merton wrote some 60 years ago:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself.

This much I know: I've lost a step here and there ... but I'm OK.

DON'T ASK FOR WHOM THE MICROWAVE DINGS; IT DINGS FOR THEE ... & ME!

I saw the skinny black cat, this morning. I don't know it's name but it's the very same cat that struts in front of the french doors in the dining room driving Maisie the Pooch to bark and to do so as if she were tough as "a junkyard dog." My mind, though, didn't turn to the dog but immediately to the street cats of Brooklyn in the early 1950's. Skinny cats waiting for Wednesday -- or was it Thursday -- when the horse-drawn fishcart would ride up W. 5th Street, stopping to disembowel fish for waiting housewives of the Post-War era.

I don't know what to call the Coney Island that I remember -- not the Coney of rides and sideshows and hotdogs that I wasn't permitted to eat but -- the neighborhood peopled with Mr. Goldman the Plumber, Schneider the Painter, the Johnsons and Engles, Perry's bald Dad, Sam, who drove a hack, Stevie's Dad who worked for the NY Subway System and the holocaust survivors next door. 

Coney Island was the neighborhood I was born into -- no choice, there. I was the fourth kid and the only one born after Dad came home pretty angry from Korea. We lived upstairs from Mom's parents, he was a clergyman with a following and a pretty-open-door policy to the poor and scholars, alike;  Grandma cooked and baked and interpreted dreams from a 15th C. dreambook that my brother later would translate.

So, why was I remembering those cats and not the half-dozen furry quadrupedal friends who have agreed to live with M and I during the past 55 years. We have no cat, now, just Maisie the Pooch. Can't rightly say "why." Still, my next thought was of the isolation that I remember first experiencing downstairs in my Grandfather's Waiting-Room/Living-Room/Office where he would greet his visitors and where he would teach me the biblical stories and wisdom of our people. It was a daily thing, learning with him while my older Sibs would be off in school and Mom would be upstairs. I can't say that I know what Mom was doing. The war had been tough for her. Not only was her husband not there to help tend to the three kids born before and during WW2 and not there, now, but off in a factory printing table-cloths and wall paper. More than that, Mom had lost dozens of people in her native Hungary which she had left in the early 1920's. Mom did a lot of sketching. She'd wanted to be an artist -- I'd say that she was -- but Cooper Union wasn't in the cards for the daughter of Rabbi Adolph Klein.

It was in Grandpa's room that I first remember feeling deep sadness. I wrote about that experience in 1998 (1998/2016-Oedipal Paradigms in Collision):

As a child, two to six years of age, I daily visited an aged and bearded scholar whose self-appointed task it was to instruct me in the reading, writing and lore of my forebears. This grandfather of mine would sit at his desk; I would stand at his knee, trying to steal glimpses of the surface of his desk, of the pens, of the books — with their pages crumbling and browned — that laid upon this surface. I felt bathed in a warmth that I cannot articulate. He frequently would say that learning should be sweet; so it was. He seemed to possess the ages, to be one with the past. Perchance, it can be said that the Old have no present or future in the eyes of the Young, only a past. For two hours each day, he would recite stories told to him by his mentors. These stories from the ancient Writ and, possibly, the voice of the old man telling them had the tone and feeling of lullabies that might attend a child being lulled to sleep at mother’s breast, a warm and quiet symbiosis.

Occasionally, a visitor would knock at his door. At times, it was one of his adherents coming for spiritual counseling or advice. Sometimes it was another bearded and precisely-speaking old man, while, at still other times, it was a poor person coming for their dose of warmth and a cup of tea. The scholar would get up responding to this knock on the door, welcome this stranger and appear to thoroughly forget the young fellow not quite tall enough to reach the desk. I was not introduced to the visitor; try as I might to break into these conversations between the old man and his guest, it was not to be. After the interloper left, the grandfather would gather-up his grandson from behind a certain chair in the corner of the room and would proceed with the lesson. My earliest recollections of questions surrounding existence and non-existence, attachment and terror, seem to emanate from behind that chair. These concerns must, in actuality, be more ancient still but the older memories are no more. There was, or so my memory would have it, no doubt in my mind that this man loved me, and yet it was equally obvious to me that the flow of this love ceased in the presence of another. 

The lone cat? Me in Coney Island, I suppose. I'm waiting for the big kids and my Father to come home from wherever big people go so I can go upstairs, away from Grandma's cooking and baking and into Mom's kitchen for quiet nights in the years before television came to our home. Maybe? Feels right that the lone cat and my loneliness as a child are connected somewhere in my psyche.

Corona! Corona! It's been 6 full weeks of M and I and Maisie in the house. We stay in except for a few airings ... drives to nowhere. I remember a bridge in Niagara Falls, Canada. It goes half way into the river just above the Falls ... and stops. Corona, Corona! We're doing OK. We're not among the sufferers. We're comfortable at home ... warm ... well-fed. I get to see the people who before 6 weeks ago would visit my psychoanalytic office. Patients and Supervisees. Nice people. Good people. I see them on a video platform. A name appears in my virtual waiting room and, at the time of our appointment, I welcome them in. I until 6 weeks ago spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the offices I share with my daughter in town. I suppose the plants are all dead there, now. "Where have all the Flowers gone?"

At least one night each week, I attend a Support Group for therapists. I feel angry, there, but don't blow up at my colleagues. I tell them that I am not particularly interested in discussions of Technology or theoretical presentations on patients' traumas. "I've come here to talk about OUR traumas ... People ... Patients ... Psychotherapists." "Our" is the key word. COVID has demonstrated to us how similar we are. COVID isn't a very discerning bloke: He'll kill you or your Mother. Makes no difference to COVID ... though he does seem to have his eyes focused on people over 70 and the vulnerable.

He reminds me of all the despots who see no subjectivity in another. Despots are not racist or agist or sexist. There's them and their adoring sycophants and there's everybody else. Oh, yes, they use race or religion or gender, as it suits their need to split the country into With'me and Agin'me. But they're really so psychically primitive as to have no other alliances ... no tribes to which they belong. They are, that is to say, pre-racist ... pre-Tribal ... pre-Sexual, for that matter ... lost in a sadistic form of Narcissism that knows only Me and Not Me.  I've been living in Trump's Amerika for 3 years ... or is it closer to five years if one considers the Sermon on the Escalator, the one that was satisfied demeaning Hispanics and demonizing the Chinese. Five years of listening to a Little Rich-Boy-who- Would-Be-Emperor. I got really scared when he told an interviewer, after the Khan incident, that he sacrificed a lot by giving thousands of people jobs. What horrified me, you might ask. I suppose it was the idea that someone who thought that paying someone for a day's work, as the Bible demands, was not an exchange ... good labor for good pay ... but a gift that Pharaoh gives to Slaves. Could Amerika fall into this hole? I thought not until election night.

I feel no small amount of shame for not realizing that important constituent parts of our Democracy could well be destroyed by on "Stable Genius" and his minions. Who would've guessed that a McConnell or a Barr would sign on to such an agenda? They were Amerikans. Maybe I disagreed with them but they couldn't possibly -- or so, I thought -- sell the Country that gave my family citizenship Down the River. Who would've thunk it?

M and I, two over-70-year olds, feel hot rage about the administration. M mutters at the TV; I do, too. I find myself writing nasty polemics about the President. I'll close with one:

The Butcher of Queens 

(54,000 deaths into Git-on with Armageddonald)

We're on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Driving at a petty good clip.

The Driver knows the destination

He's told us where he was going all along.

We keep not listening well-enough

And we keep forgetting.

We're driving on the BQE

While people are dying in droves at St. Elizabeth's.

The Driver told us all along.

From the beginning.

He told us where he was headed.

Hearing Aids aren't covered by Medicare.

The Driver told us

That giving people jobs

Was a sacrifice.

He told us, too, that

"Soldiers who get captured?

They're fools.

I am America.

America is First."

We're driving on the BQ Expressway.

The Blaupunkt brings us Jared's voice.

"Nothing is yours anymore.

Nothing is the People's

Not Of. Not by. Not for.

Get your own ventilator!

These are ours, not yours anymore."

We're on the BQE and

We pretend to be surprised.

When the Butcher of Queens is driving

When Aunt Sadie is dying alone

When we're being driven on his BQ Expressway

And we're sitting in the back seat

Together but all alone …

When Jared is singing on the radio

And the Bible thumpers are calling him God.

Hey!

Now is a particularly inopportune time

To begin reflecting or imagining

A Respirator

That's still in China

marked:

Gefahr! Achtung!

PROPERTY OF THE BUTCHER OF QUEENS

Et FILS!

Enough, for today. The Microwave is beeping; musta left something in there.