I couldn’t help myself, I had to take a picture of me, standing on my head. Commenting on the obvious seems a bit shallow, but I can’t think of anything else to talk about and talking is what I do. I was chatting with a friend earlier and I said, no matter what, everything gets the qualifier of “under the circumstances.” This goddamn pandemic is so insidious, it has infected every imaginable aspect of all our lives, without exception.
This epidemic has turned opposites into truisms, enemies into friends. In the past, I have railed against the downside of social media, fostering a disconnection between all of us, a cold, fleshless absence of touch on every level. Today, it is a life saver, allowing us to embrace each other in the aloneness of our isolation. I have watched Buddhist teachers talk about meditation and being present, something I never would have done before the deluge of #19. Zoom has instantly become ubiquitous. My brother had a Zoom seder on the first night of Passover. In person classes of every imaginable physical discipline are now the new normal on the screen.
Prior to Wuhan, the entire world was ensconced on a trajectory of separateness. The disease of pride was well on its way to infecting every country, every skin color, every religion. The power of the few was fast becoming a high wall nobody could climb. It seemed like a sickness of the soul to me, which made no sense. The people living in the palaces of power had no idea what it was like in our world. Their complete lack of character and compassion was on display in the capitals and board rooms of every country.
Our planet and its human inhabitants are tragically fractured. Nowhere is it more inanely obvious than America. Nobody gets to the office of President in this country without having been totally compromised by a system so corrupt, it tattoos their souls with a putrefying pollution of spiritual poisons. The rest of the inhabitants in the palace have been bought and sold by the same stench of selfishness. The only disease more lethal than this novel virus goes by the name of Trump and I find the civility with which he is treated incredibly pathetic and cowardly. This son of a bitch doesn’t care about a single human being other than himself and he brags about it, spitting in our faces.
While nothing has changed, everything has. It’s that upside down business I was alluding to. Now, I get up each morning and think I must be living on another planet. I get up and open the front door, something I never did before the virus struck. While the coffee is brewing, I take one of the too many glasses of water I drink at the start of each day and I go outside. The view, which is beautiful, is the same it’s always has been, but it just feels different. It’s like Mona Lisa’s stare is off by an undetectable fraction and you think it’s your imagination, but maybe not. It’s what I am talking about and I’ll bet my ass every one of you knows exactly what I mean.
I will tell you how screwed up things are. Bob Dylan just released a 17 minute song, one of the most extraordinary pieces of music I have ever heard. It is called. “Murder Most Foul”, an ode to JFK’s assassination and so much more. It is number one on the Billboard chart, his very first, after so many years and it makes no sense at all to be happening.
There is a possibility something entirely undetectable is going on, at least for now. The heartless, power brokers have kept the rest of us at each other’s throats, a barbaric sleight of hand, and while they steal our future, the unfathomable cruelty of this virus has touched all of us. We are looking through the Covid Prism and nothing is the same. In this country, we have too easily surpassed the toll from 9/11 and there is no one to bomb, no one to blame. Sure, maybe somebody ate a bat in Wuhan, but there is a sense of inevitability about all this, like we have brought all this on ourselves.
This tragedy has shown a blinding light on the inequities all of us are living with around the world. There I go again, speaking in this grandiose fashion about the world and the marked deck we are all dealt. The truth is I am reacting to all of this on such a deeply, deeply personal level. Funny, I always listen to music when I write and the moment I began writing the prior sentence, Dylan came on, singing, “The Times They Are A Changin’ “. OK, I cried. No change that, I’m crying.
Having been born in ’45, I was kind of on the cusp of the Sixties. When it hit hard, I was already wearing a suit, carrying an attache case, working at a television network and pretending to be a grown up. Sure, I smoked pot and wore bell bottoms at night and even lived in the East Village of NYC, but I felt like more of a witness to the times than a participant.
Today, at this moment, it feels to me like the world has stopped moving. We are living this huge, three dimensional board game and all the players are frozen, waiting to see what combination of numbers the dice yield. However, the damn dice are loaded and passively waiting for the numbers is a joke. In a way, the Sixties were about the moment and the Twenty Twenties are about the future, yours, mine, our children and their children. I feel deep within my bones that we are going to grab those dice and put the numbers we want on the table.
Let’s roll em together.
R.I.P. John Prine