Experiencing the Coronavirus Pandemic as a Kind of Zombie Apocalypse, by Lorrie Moore – The New Yorker

So sue me: I sometimes find President Trumps voice reassuring. Not what he says. Not the actual words (although once in a while one of his incredibles reaches inside my chest cavity and magically calms the tachycardia). Trumps primitive syntax, imperfectly designed for the young foreign woman he married, always dismays. But during a coronavirus-task-force press conference, when one hears him on the radio, from another room, his voice has music. Sorry. It does. A singers timbre; it is easy on the ear. Trumps is a voice you use to calm down people you yourself have made furious. (His foremost mimicsAlec Baldwin, Stephen Colberthave not captured its pitch, its air, its softness, which they substitute with dopiness, which is also there.) For the first ten minutes, before his composure slackens and he becomes boastful and irritable, he actually just wants to be Santa Claus in his own Christmas movie, and the quality of his voice is that of a pet owner calming a pet. I hear it!

And for those ten minutes the animal part of me is soothed. The part of me that understands only seven English words and wants a biscuit in the shape of a bone wags its tail.

The first time the stock market heard him speak soothingly, at a press conference in March, it shot up happily. Exactly like a happy dog. The second time, the market was not so fooled. The third time, it was tired and seemed to say, Really? The anxiety of quarantine, sheltering in place, economic downturnthe anxiety itself is getting tired, and when anxiety gets tired it turns into despair. And now? Trumps almost daily voice has lost some of its velvet. It has gone a little scratchy, like an old record, as if he may have a sore throat. The hospital ships are magnificent and unbelievable. The recovery later this year will be just incredible. The experts are tremendous.

So what are we dealing with? Let us not make everything about Trump. (Although a germophobe brought down by a germ is a weird irony that one could talk about for a long time.) Sometimes, while we are socially distant, this all can still feel strangely like an active-school-shooter drill. Using a real but amateur shooter? Let us hope so, since the nurses office is in chaos. Still, as with active-shooter drills, the P.T.S.D. of the enactors is real, and we have no choice but to follow instructions. Things are slowly being put in place, but other things are a mess. Most alarming are the statistics on ventilators, respirators, masks. The nurses office.

If one looks up the 2003 SARS outbreak on the World Health Organizations Web site, one sees descriptions that are very like those for this new coronavirus, which is a close relative. Symptoms (respiratory distress), sources (bats, civets). This go-round, the term SARS has become simply the coronavirus (a general virus listed on the can of Lysol, which kills 99.9 per cent of germs); Trump has tried to call it the Chinese virus, because of the Wuhan tie. Regardless, it is SARS again, mutated only slightly. Why no medicines were developed for the first SARS virus, why no wartime effort was brought to bear on it back then, remains a mystery (though in 2003 the Bush Administration was very busy invading Iraq).

Meanwhile? We are in the zombie apocalypse, which my students have been writing about for well over a decade, so young people are mentally prepared. Is a virus not a kind of zombie, a quasi life-form moving in and out of inertness? It is zombie time: the virus cant be transmitted when all of its hosts have died. So we are all social-distancing; that is, pretending to have died, lying very still, so the virusthe shooter in the schoolwont get us. Nobody here but us chickens.

But such weird non-zombie sadness in the world! As we work remotely and remotely work and others lose their livelihoods entirely. Who knew our socioeconomic structures were so flimsy? On our laptops, we spend a lot of time participating in group e-mails and Zoom parties and solitary tours of YouTube. Perhaps, like me, you have Google-stalked Brian Stokes Mitchell, and have listened to him sing This Nearly Was Mine, from South Pacific, thirty times in a weekend. No? The performance takes place at Carnegie Hall, its stage the very throat of civilizationand of civilization now momentarily shuttered. It is also a song made for quarantine, with a bit of quarantine written into it. Perhaps, after all the listening, and realizing that you are learning all the wordsdo not the hours fly as day flies from moonlight?for a moment you feel that you and Brian Stokes Mitchell have somehow always been soul mates (were you not born the same year?) and that you need to tell him of your feelings to make him understand (a verbatim phrase from your seventh-grade diary).

This is the mad dash of love in the time of cholera, the exaggerated eccentricities of isolation. One friend writes in an e-mail that with his new leisure at home he is exploring the blades of his food processor and slicing everything in sight. Another friend writes that she meets in a neutral room of her house once a day to have tea with her daughter, who is home from college. To provide a sense of variation and caf society, they use different tea sets and meet in different neutral rooms.

The musicians who have Zoomed their concerts and made amusing videos to cheer us up (shout-out to the talented Chris Mann!) show the human spirit at its most resilient. People are indeed incredible. And music may be what will keep us sane if misty-eyed in the apocalypse. The more maddening world where everyone seeks advantage over someone else and pits his or her children against the children of others will ultimately have to bow down to a different, more democratically uplifting one. As the comedian Rob Schneider has remarked, not even intending to be funny, Ive seen people handle death with more grace and more dignity than people running out of toilet paper. But wickedness brought on by panic can be swept away by other breezes. Even without the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, I sometimes think I hear them.

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Experiencing the Coronavirus Pandemic as a Kind of Zombie Apocalypse, by Lorrie Moore - The New Yorker

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero