In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear and despair. John Kelly in The Great Mortality, and quoted by Talia Lavin in CQ Magazine.

…but Zoom has changed everything and I feel much less isolated for it.

First, some numbers as of the morning of April 28. There are 1,002,498 known cases of COVID-19 in the US with over 57 thousand deaths. New York still is the hot spot with 295,106 cases and 22,668 deaths while California has dropped to the fifth hardest-hit state with 45,219 cases and 1,795 deaths. On March 17, San Mateo has 64 cases and two deaths and today we have 1,099 cases and 141 deaths, so I think we are doing pretty good, considering. The Six San Francisco Bay Area counties, with about seven million people, were in the first group of counties to quarantine – and one of the first groups of government entities to work together – and it seems to have worked. If you are interested in more detail, the New Yorker has a fascinating article on the difference between the reaction on the East Coast and West Coast which has resulted in wildly different results.

Even before the coronavirus quarantine, Michele and I watched a lot of TV, and, as you can imagine, we are watching even more now. After a while, all that TV runs together, that is not to say that it isn’t good, much of it is good, some is excellent, but after a while, it does all run together. Still, every once in a while something stands out and for me right now, the one that stands out is Unbelievable. It is a true story about tracking down a serial raper that fits in with my belief that men have pretty much fucked up their self-assigned role of running the world and it is time for women to take over. Unbelievable stars Kaitlyn Dever, who I first saw as the old beyond her years Loretta McCready in Justified, Toni Collette, who was the ditzy mother in About a Boy, and Merritt Wever, who I have seen many times but she is so good each time seemed different.

Unbelievable is really two stories, interwoven but separate, one takes place in Washington, near Seattle, and the other is in Colorado and features two terrific women detectives and is the main story. After the first episode which starts with the rape of a young woman, played by Kaitlyn Dever, and is hard to watch mostly because of the mishandling – and mishandling is a gross understatement – of the subsequent case by a male detective and his male boss. The second episode starts three years later and features Toni Collette and Merritt Wever doing the kind of job the men didn’t do three years earlier and I spent most of the remaining episodes wanting them to become one story. The difference between the professionalism of the women and unprofessionalism – for lack of a better word – of the men is stunning (and it is an actual, true, real, story). Check it out.

On the women should run the world front, I would also recommend Long Shot. It is a RomCom, starring Charlize Theron as a Secretary of State getting ready to run for president and Seth Rogen as…uh…Seth Rogan. it is a much more subversive movie than it first appears. Also on the women should run the world is a list of best-action-movies in Glamour. When I clicked through to the list, I realized that they were all woman-centric and I wanted to pass it off as a gimmick except that the first movie was Mad Max: Fury Road which should be on the top of anybody’s best action-movie list (to double-check, a random search gave me #25 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, 44 Edge of Tomorrow with Emily Blunt and #9 V for Vendetta with a shaved head Natalie Portman).

One of the programs we watched and liked was Unorthodox, which also featured a female protagonist. and it answered a question that I’ve long wondered about. Why do Orthodox Jews dress like they still live in a shtetl in 1895 Eastern Europe? I was brought up in the exact opposite manner, “assimilate, look and act like everybody else, blend in…”. The Jewish Orthodox community in New York does not want to assimilate because they believe God brought on the Holocaust, the Shoa, because the Jews were losing their specialness, their Jewish separateness as the Chosen People. Most of the New York Orthodox community are Holocaust survivors or descendants of Holocaust survivors and their attitude seems to be, we’re never going to do that again. I don’t agree, obviously, but it is a coherent theory so I feel a little better. As an aside, I am aware that during the 1920s through the early 30s, the Jewish Community in Germany was one of the most assimilated Jewish populations in the world and it did them no good and may have contributed to the Holocaust (but that is a data point I choose to ignore). End aside.

A couple of days ago, President Trump Tweeted LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL! and my first thought was “Clueless Trump, surely he was around when saying that about Vietnam became a joke because we heard it so often.” I wondered why he would say something so tainted with failure. It must be because he is stressed and frantic. He should be stressed and frantic, after all, the pressure on him is horrendous. It is unimaginable really, and Trump, the perpetual optimist, and promoter, is desperately trying to find some light somewhere. But we are still nearer the beginning of this collective nightmare than the end. To be fair to Trump, he is in an impossible situation, we are expecting the Federal Government to come in and save us and it might have been able to do that if the disaster were confined to one area, like Sandy or Katrina. But it isn’t, the whole country is under siege at the same time and it is impossible for the Federal Government to back up everyone everywhere and, short term at least, this is just going to get worse.

Still, President Trump’s leadership has been capricious at best, and, rather than becoming the lead agency, under Trump, the Federal Government is becoming irrelevant. To fill the void, local governments are banding together in regional alliances. These two maps show conditions only fourteen days apart, fourteen days in which it became apparent that the Feds were not going to be the cavalry riding in to rescue us.

This is what happens when there is no reliable National Leadership in a crisis, people and groups start banding together to find solutions. Leaders rise like cream in milk. Trump has said that he wanted to be President because the United States is no longer respected but, ironically, both internationally and domestically the United States is less respected today than it was four years ago. Sad.

We had our first takeout a couple of nights ago. It was from Fey – Michele’s favorite local Chinese restaurant (mine is Crouching Tiger) – I drove up in front of the restaurant, opened the trunk door with the remote button, the woman who is the maitre d’ during happier times came out to the street – wearing a mask and gloves – and put the food in back, then I drove home. The only connection to the outside world that I had was the bags full of tasty Chinese food including Chicken with Chestnuts, Fried Cumman Lamb, Green Onion Pancake, Cold Cucumber in Sichuan Spicy Sauce, and Beijing Eggplant (it had been a while since we had Chinese food and we wanted everything). I thought that getting takeout would be sort of the equivalent to going out, but it is more, it is a way of saying “We want you to stay in business, this will end”.