Morning statistics – Private tranquility amid public turmoil – A morning visit – Visit to my mother – Increase in traffic – Shenandoah National Park, Phase Two – Republican Primary – The irksome case of Gone With the Wind – Evening statistics
Today’s statistics as of 10:00 AM — # of cases worldwide: 7,356,287; # of deaths worldwide: 414,436; # of cases U.S.: 2,046,577; # of deaths U.S.: 114,189.
It will be seen from the foregoing entries that any personal privations I may have experienced as a direct consequence of the virus up to this point have not been great. Many have died; many more have fallen gravely ill; many have lost their jobs; many have endured economic hardship; there has been rioting in the streets of several cities and widespread political unrest; it is quite possible that historians will conclude that our country was fractured during this period to an extent that has never occurred before since its inception. But on a private level I have undergone remarkably little. There have been a few useful items in the grocery stores and pharmacies that at times I had difficulty in procuring and I have been forced to delay purchases of others until the retail stores had re-opened – and that is nearly all. Money has been spent and renewed; payments from pensions and investments have been remitted regularly; the shadow of ill health has not fallen upon me – indeed I am physically as active as ever. It seems likely that amidst every epidemic there are various strata of people who are all but untouched by the turmoil that seethes about them. When I first read The Decameron I thought that the framework for the tales – that of ten well-to-do young people retreating from the plague-stricken city to a villa and passing the time in feasting and telling amusing stories – somewhat far-fetched; now it makes perfect sense to me.
This morning I visited my friends EG and HG, and we used somewhat less caution than before. Most of the time we spent outside in the shade of their garden by the fishpond, but I was also inside their house briefly. We chatted about various topics, the upcoming election in November among them. We are all desirous for a Democratic win, but we know that the outcome is far from certain. There is the issue of Tara Reade, which is none the less pressing for having been temporarily shelved; there are the remarks of Biden indicating that he takes the black vote for granted, which he will have to smooth away; there is the fact that Biden himself does not generate much enthusiasm. And we also spoke about the future of the Republican Party once Trump is no longer a power, either as of November or four years from now. At this point it contains both moderate conservatives and right-wing extremists even more unbalanced than Trump, and it is uncertain whether these fissures within the GOP can be repaired. It was very warm today, over 90 degrees, but less humid than it was yesterday, and the breezes in the shade of the garden were cool and refreshing as we sat and drank coffee together.
Afterwards I visited my mother in the assisted living facility in Chevy Chase. It has a new restriction that all visitors wear face masks – which, however, I had already been doing on previous visits. It was not a long visit, being made chiefly for the purpose of picking up accumulated mail and verifying that my mother’s condition was reasonable. She is very frail and spends most of her day dozing, but she is still well physically and is tended with care. Her caretaker tells me that there have been no cases of the virus to date within the facility, which is very reassuring news.
Traffic on the Beltway was easy by the standards of the time before the lockdown restrictions began, but there is no question that it is heavier than before. In either direction using cruise control was no longer feasible. On driving to the facility along the Inner Loop I was not delayed anywhere, but when I drove back on the Outer Loop I saw a long backup on the Inner Loop just half-an-hour after I had used it. Returning on the Outer Loop also presented no traffic issues, but traffic on I-66 was very slow and I got off of the first exit after the Beltway, using back roads to return home.
Shenandoah National Park will begin Phase Two of its re-opening tomorrow. Trailheads at the boundary will no longer be off-limits, which means that it will no longer be necessary to re-route any of the hike routes that begin outside of the park.
The officials of North Carolina continue to hold firm on their demands that any convention held within their state follow the health guidelines mandated by the virus restrictions and their response to Trump’s withdrawal of the Republican Primary to Jacksonville, FL is essentially “good riddance to bad rubbish.” In their own words: “If the president is genuinely delusional enough to think that demanding a full-scale convention is reasonable, then Jacksonville is more than welcome to host his acceptance speech. Governor Cooper has made it clear that no political event is worth risking the public health of the Charlotte community and the lives of more North Carolinians. Evidently, President Trump’s calculus is different.” It is just possible that Trump’s overweening desire to hear crowds of people chanting his praises may come to defeat its own end. Various state delegates are understandably reluctant to travel to Florida, where cases are increasing at a rate of over 1000 per day. To complicate matters, the business side of the convention and smaller meetings will have to be held in Charlotte to forestall the possibility of lawsuits for breach of contract.
HBO Max has pulled the Gone With the Wind movie from its streaming library, at least temporarily. Both the book and the movie are among the most vexatious in American art. The movie features at least three brilliant performances (by Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, and Harriet McDaniel), it is the highest-grossing movie in history (when using adjustments for inflation), and in addition it became a landmark by procuring the first Oscar for a black actor in American film. The book on which it was based was written by an author of great narrative gifts: a prose style which, if not particularly eloquent, is swift-moving and uncluttered; a background that was carefully researched without ever becoming obtrusive; vivid characterizations, including a heroine with a fascinating blend of courage and conventionality, generosity and meanness, sexual allure and frigidity; descriptions of a city under siege that may be unsurpassed on American literature; and even occasional flashes of wit (e.g., “Mrs. Elsing was . . .a thin frail woman, who had been a beauty, and about her there still clung a faded freshness, a dainty imperious air”). But the rose-colored views of the values of the ante-bellum South and their aftermath during and after the Civil War become impossible to sustain, even by the author herself. Margaret Mitchell is a kind of antithesis of the prophet Balaam: she comes to bless and she remains to curse. The more she reveals about the morals and manners of that society, even and perhaps especially by what is intended as praise, the more repellent it becomes. The putative moral anchor of the book, supposedly representing the best that such a society has to offer, is gentle, shy, self-effacing Melanie Wilkes; and Melanie is a racist through and through. At one point Ashley Wilkes tries to turn down an offer from Scarlett to work at Atlanta in one of her mills, well-aware that she is love with him despite their both being married to someone else and anxious to avoid the awkward encounters such an arrangement would entail. He intends to find employment in the North instead, but he is dissuaded by Melanie, who uses the following argument for his acceding to Scarlett’s request and living in Atlanta:
“Beau [their son] can have lots of playmates and go to school. If we went North, we couldn’t let him go to school and associate with Yankee children and have pickaninnies in his class! We’d have to have a governess and I don’t see how we’d afford –”
It follows that the black figures in the novel whose lives revolve around pleasing and protecting their owners and who continue to regard them as their owners even after slavery is abolished evoke a very different reaction than Mitchell intended. No doubt there were many in real life who continued to hug their chains after the institution of slavery was abolished, but figures such as Mammy, Uncle Peter, and Big Sam inspire pity and even a kind of terror in their resolute refusal to live among their former masters on terms of equality. Especially chilling is Big Sam’s reaction to the Northerners who make at least an attempt to treat him with civility:
“But all dem Yankee folks, fust time dey meet me, dey call me ‘Mist’ O’Hara.’ An’ dey ast me ter set down wid dem, lak Ah wuz jes’ as good as dey wuz. Well, Ah ain’ nebber set down wid w’ite folks an’ Ah is too ole ter learn.”
In general, the presentation of master/slave relations completely represses the brutality and exploitation that was a commonplace feature of the ante-bellum South. No slave gets beaten; families are never broken up; the masters are all indulgent parent figures and the slaves are all grown-up children. Mammy devotes her entire life to being nursemaid to Scarlett even when Scarlett is well into her twenties. Uncle Peter does the same for Pittypat Hamilton up to and including the latter’s old age. Nonetheless Margaret Mitchell occasionally gives herself away. Perhaps the most revealing moment occurs when we see Scarlett’s horrified reaction to the recruitment of several slaves, including some from her father’s plantation, for building breastworks to protect Atlanta:
“Oh, Rhett, if there’s no danger, why are they digging these new breastworks? Is the army so short of men they’ve got to use darkies?”
Scarlett may subscribe, theoretically at least, to the notion instilled by her mother of being kind and affectionate towards her slaves, but nonetheless she regards them as a different and inferior species altogether.
“The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.” George Orwell’s comments on the art of Salvatore Dali are equally applicable here. Unfortunately no one is likely to pull down the walls built by Margaret Mitchell and those who have adapted her work to film. They are both likely to cast their gloomy shadows on our literature and our film for a long time to come.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM — # of cases worldwide: 7,444,644; # of deaths worldwide: 418,126; # of cases U.S.: 2,065,580; # of deaths U.S.: 115,129. Our death toll from the virus is now more than 100 times that of China, where the virus originated.