Where were you on August 29, 2020? I remember dried salsa roja, turned verde by oxidization, on a laminated wine list. “This menu has been sanitized for your safety”? Too much to ask of a tacky taqueria in Washington, D.C. It operated however it could out of its formless veranda. The place was all over the place. You’re greeted (outside), told to wear a mask to be escorted (all the while outside) to your seat (still outside), where you can entertain maskless a table of six (yes, outside). Just don’t show your face when you stand up. A mongrel of federal and local edicts.
Toothless as Jay Varma’s grin. Now we’ve learned that, while I squinted through bifocal fog to read my shabby-hour sangria options — and many suffered tragedies just as serious — New York City’s public-health czar practiced sexual healing on his wife and, “like, ten people.” A Covid Caligula. Look at those permanently tensed zygomatic muscles. Like Melpomene’s mask. Doctor Dionysus at hugger-mugger bacchanals. The Atlantic’s Kristen Brown shows generosity of spirit: “It’s not clear whether Varma personally violated any COVID rules.” Bawdy but above board, maybe. Besides, the city’s early pandemic directives “discouraged — but did not forbid — group sex.” Lawful lechery. If only the old blighter had been more open about his need to, as he put it, “blow off steam,” America might have shown understanding.
That so? I mightn’t have felt quite as magnanimous when queueing up outside Safeway as if in a Soviet bread line. No comrades there: Six feet apart or under was the message. You might feel much less magnanimous if you recall being told politely about the “surprising intimacy of the live-streamed funeral” or the public-health imperative of mass protest and of “twerking in defiance of Big Oil.” Don’t begrudge the doc’s need for R and R; remember that his ilk — and the unserious lot who authorized or supervised them — continue to expect to be taken seriously. Conservatives often idealize the distant past. Everyone else tends to forget the recent one.
“We’re not going back” is a bold line when you’ve hardly a plan. Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is bolder. It doesn’t even recognize a starting point: We don’t know where we’re going, except that it’s not back to the Great Interregnum between the First (2009–17) and Second (2021–24) Democratic Republics, and it’s certainly not where we’ve brought you so far. Memory is fitful as a cat. Remember that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (long time no see) and his administration — which has a vice president — presided over much of this sordid charade. And by the time they let the federal emergency declaration of 2020 expire, it was 2023. Remember that when it mattered enormously, those who are now again pleading for your vote screwed, so to speak, up.