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Cathedral City, March 15, 2020 – as the COVID-19/coronavirus outbreak gets worse, and many of us begin to practice a more exclusive form of social distancing than we had ever been accustomed to, introverts are having a field day. This introvert marked the occasion by downloading a digital copy of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, describing the Great Plague of London in 1665.
Reading it, with all the descriptions of the etiology and transmission history of the London plague year, put me in mind not only of this year’s Covid-19/coronavirus contagion, but also of that personally-consequential-for-me year of 1981, the year I graduated from high school, the year I matriculated at Vanderbilt University, and the year I learned what it meant to be a “deterred applicant” when my anticipated career in the United States Navy foundered on the rock of the so-called 123 Words declaring “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.”
Yet, if I was deterred from serving in the United States Navy because Ronald Reagan had decided to repay the debt he owed to that fascist Jerry Falwell and his crew of triumphalist, Protestant evangelical Nonconformist heretics, 1981 was consequential in my queer life for an even darker reason. As I was preparing to go off to college, parallel stories ran in both the Los Angeles Times and in the New York Times on the same July 3 of that year, headlined “rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” Even at 17, I could feel the chill wind of some great impending disaster. I had an inchoate sense that something terrible was about to befall the queer nation.
As summer gave way to fall that year, as I picked up the pieces of the naval career I never had, and as I inwardly came to terms with the fact that I, too, was a queer boy, the news just got worse and worse. All around the country, gay men were getting sick and dying of complications from what at first was known as GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. It was not until well into the epidemic, when GRID began to appear in straight people with no same-sex sexual history that it acquired the name by which it is now known: AIDS. But whether GRID or AIDS, this apparently new pestilence wrought terrible execution in at risk communities.
Yet, AIDS remained largely outside the consciousness of straight America. Its targets tended to be members of marginalized communities: queerfolk, natives of Haiti, intravenous drug users, and sub-Saharan Africans. For white, straight, Reagan America, these communities were nothing but diseased pariahs who could be easily ignored because of their lack of apparent political power. It took Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of conservative America, until 1986 publicly to utter the word AIDS. And it took the death of Hollywood idol Rock Hudson to jolt the Reagan White House into awareness that something was happening, even among the Hollywood community among whom the Reagans had been accustomed to move before the California electorate so unwisely elevated him to the governorship in place of Pat Brown in 1966.
The early years of the AIDS epidemic, those years before AIDS was reduced to a relatively manageable disease rather than being an assured death penalty, scared a lot of queerfolk very badly. If, in 1981-1982 I had been making preparations to come out as a gay man, the AIDS pestilence put the kibosh on such plans, causing me to withdraw so deep into the closet that I still carry a vestigial aroma of cedar with me. My lengthy self isolation in that closet meant that when I emerged, Narnia looked a lot different than I expected. The AIDS crisis tried the queer community as if in a refiner’s fire, Malachi 3:2-3:3. Much of what we learned about the politics of homosexuality we learned by metaphorically taking it to The Man. The pestilence was, for the queer nation at large, a protracted version of the three days of Stonewall.
The COVID-19/coronavirus outbreak is qualitatively different in certain respects. While it certainly recapitulates the AIDS crisis in terms of the suddenness of its emergence, and in terms of the pestilential aspect, it is more frightening than the AIDS epidemic insofar as the intricacies of transmission make it a helluva lot more dangerous. With AIDS, the intricacies of transmission, intravenous drug use aside, essentially required one to be a receptive partner in sexual intercourse. More vulgarly, you essentially had to get fucked for the intricacies of transmission to work against you. With COVID-19/coronavirus, the contagion does not require intimate personal contact, and may well be airborne.
While this was the fear of the epidemiological community during the early months and years of the AIDS crisis, HIV never mutated to become airborne. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is remarkably delicate creature that does not survive outside the human body. We learned, rather quickly, that you can’t get AIDS from sitting on a toilet seat, for example. On the other hand, we have no such assurance with COVID-19/coronavirus.
With more and more cases of COVID-19/coronavirus attributable to so-called community transmission, i.e., the physicians have no idea what the etiology of a particular case is, and with the virus not being limited to particular ethnicity, drug use, sexual orientation, or other “at risk” “discrete and insular” Footnote Four communities (United States v. Carolene Products Co., (1938) 304 U.S. 144, fn. 4 at 152), but apparently targeting the entirety of the population, irrespective of race, religion, sexual identity or orientation, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, all of us have just cause to be, if not scared shitless, at least somewhat concerned for our own physical well-being.
The response of the Trump administration to this latest health crisis has been feeble and tepid at best. At worst, the administration’s indifference, xenophobia, and cruelty merit the descriptor of “treasonable incompetence.” To this administration, the coronavirus crisis, which is in the first, pestilential, stage of its evolution, must represent a godsend. The American public has supinely accepted invasions of civil liberties and diminutions of civil society that at any other time in American history would have led to mass street protests. But now, given that the American public has been habituated by Donald Trump to a constant experience of low-level dread, we’ve lived down to P.J. O’Rourke’s mordant characterization of Americans as people who would happily scrap the Constitution to find the missing kids on the sides of the milk cartons.
And while we are drinking our milk from cartons from which the missing children’s faces stare at us across our Wheaties or our cornflakes, we forget the words of that great history of pre-conquest England, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which reminds us of the danger of appeasement or scrapping liberties. “For once you have paid the Danegeld,” that is, the money paid to the invading Danes to induce them to go away, “you can never get rid of the Dane.”
Closer to our own time, Benjamin Franklin sounded a similar warning: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." As the Trump administration’s bungled, treasonably incompetent response to the COVID-19/coronavirus crisis has led to the progressive shutting down of many of the activities of our civil life, together with the fraying of many of the institutions of our civil society, including our public institutions of self-government, and as we become more and more habituated to well-meaning, but unmindful-of-the-future public health and political authorities circumscribing essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, we find ourselves in danger of losing both.
The Trump administration, with its acknowledged fondness for authoritarian rulers of every stripe, will happily fan the flames of fear and contagion to lay the groundwork for a government in Vladimir Putin’s image. Such a thing should not be allowed to happen, even if we have to cough and wheeze our way to the courthouse where the trial of Donald Trump and his organized crime family is occurring. For what could be a godsend to Trump may have to be the spark that becomes the flames of a second Lexington and Concord in which the Trump organized crime family and its corrupt enablers pay the forfeit for their treasonable incompetence and destruction of American Liberty.
Citoyens, la patrie et en danger.
Ou sont les guillotines? Mort aux responsables!
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city council, and who practiced law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views set forth herein are his own.
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