An explanation of the decreasing frequency of journal entries – Trump still dominates the GOP, despite their struggles – Some manifestations of anti-Confederate sentiment – The progress of spring – A visit to the theatre – Evening statistics
When I began the journal, writing a daily entry was almost a matter of course. Every day seemed to bring in some new development: generally an unfortunate one, to be sure, but at any rate it was something worth recording and it provided an element of variety. Now, in our so-called recovery phase, there is less to record, at least with respect to the COVID virus. Are all recovery periods from epidemics as long and drawn-out as this one, I wonder? There are many accounts of plagues and epidemics throughout history, but accounts of the transition from these back to normality are much harder to track down.
Yes, various events have occurred during the interval between this entry and the previous one: various hikes, of course – scouting for a hike in the Camp Rapidan area that I will be leading for CHC at the end of the month, leading a loop from Colvin Mill via Lake Fairfax and the Cross-County Trail. Various legal experts continue to predict dire consequences for Donald Trump as a result of various criminal investigations (the Manhattan hush money probe, the Fulton County investigation into attempted election fraud, the January 6th community investigation, the investigation about the classified documents Trump stored in his private residence). These investigations having taken months to complete and the experts have been maintaining the aforesaid predictions for months on end, without seeing a single one of them come to pass. The GOP is becoming increasingly jittery about espousing Trump, especially since he has recently described the January 6th rioters as “patriots” – a statement that has reinforced the decline in his approval rating among the populace at large. But, as the Republicans have belatedly come to realize, they are stuck with him. “Ignore it, deflect it all you want,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research and managing partner at the polling firm OH Predictive Insights. “This is, right now, going to be the Trump show . . . The oxygen is just going to be sucked out of the room focusing on Trump.” “The press likes him – he’s the story, he’s conflict,” said longtime GOP strategist Beth Miller. “How do you continue not to write about him?”
Then, too, the revulsion against the long-standing legend of the heroic Confederacy is in recent days being carried to unusual extremes, some of them rather ludicrous. For example, the road running through Fairfax that used to be called Old Lee Highway has been renamed to Blenheim Boulevard, taking this new name from that of a substantial farm whose main house is still standing in the neighborhood and is maintained as a historic site. Since Blenheim, like the majority of substantial households beneath the Mason-Dixon line, was a slave-owning farm during the days of antebellum South, I do not see what advantage this name-change confers. Similarly, when I recently went along the Appalachian Trail between Rtes. 522 and 55, I noticed that the signpost for the Mosby campground had been taken down, so that the turnoff to the spur trail that leads to the campground has become barely noticeable. Mosby is quite a sympathetic figure, to my mind. He disapproved of slavery in general and entered the Civil War without enthusiasm. Although he was an effective soldier for the Confederacy, he displayed no nostalgia for the antebellum after the war was over, refused to cater to Southerners who resisted the Reconstruction, became a firm friend of Ulysses Grant, and said openly that the cause of the Civil War was slavery and nothing else, in the teeth of all of the excuses that various apologists for the secession maintained. Although he kept a slave during the Civil War, he seems to have treated the man well – sufficiently well, at any rate, for them to maintain a friendly correspondence with each other after the war up to the 1890s. I don’t see the advantage of eradicating his name from the trail, particularly as the subsequent absence of signage makes the campground more difficult for hikers to locate than it was before.
Spring progresses with the riotous profusion that is characteristic of the region here. Many bushes are already covered with leaves, hellebore is in full bloom, the tendrils of the willows are newly green. Pear trees and cherry trees, hyacinth and forsythia are all flowering; the crocuses, first blossoms of the season, are nearly gone by now. Every year I see this transformation I am struck as much by its relentlessness as by its beauty. Each day at this time of the year sees a new change and any wish for a brief halt to provide sufficient leisure for savoring a particular stage of this process is a wish made in vain; the growth can be contained by no one.
So there is no shortage of new developments. But they are not, or at least not directly, COVID-related. The only episode this week on a personal level that marks the waning influence of the disease is my attendance of a theatre performance – the first one I’ve been to December, 2021, and even that one was at a church that contained a much smaller number of seats than an ordinary theatre. This one took place at the Klein Theatre (formerly the Shakespeare Theatre), which can seat nearly 800 people. I wore a face mask, both in the theatre itself and on the Metro rides I took back and forth to the city. (As noted earlier, it is much easier to use public transportation to go downtown than to drive there.) But I felt démodé, like one who has clung to a style of dressing months after it has gone out of fashion, for not many others were taking this precaution. Evidently people have become sufficiently confident to revert to pre-pandemic behavior in this respect, although personally I do not think that the data justify this conclusion.
It is true that the hospitalization and death rates from COVID continue to decline. As of this writing there are fewer than 17,000 COVID patients in hospitals throughout the nation, a much smaller amount than there had been a year earlier. At this point the death rate is under 300 per day, also a significant decrease. But it is still fairly substantial. Over the past twelve months we lost slightly under 42,000 to influenza, which works out to about 115 per day. Thus even at this reduced rate, which has been in effect for only a few weeks, COVID is still more than twice as deadly as influenza.
Returning to the theatre visit, I received the evening program in rather an unexpected fashion. Instead of a printed program of several pages I was given a single page with QR code on it, which I scanned with a phone – adjusting the phone’s settings, of course, to use the theatre’s Wifi – and thereby downloaded the program to view on the phone’s screen. Doubtless such a procedure, although a novelty to me, will become standard practice in future.
As to the play itself, it was a performance of King Lear. Since the play is a favorite of mine and it is difficult for me to resist the temptation to be profuse on the subject, I will defer my impressions of this interpretation to another entry.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 681,603,603; # of deaths worldwide: 6,812,235; # of cases U.S.: 105,608,305; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,148,828.