An “average” amount of rainfall – Our current holding pattern – Various reactions to guidelines on the virus – Travel plans – The oncoming election – Trump on the defensive again – Our media’s local patriotism – Fire in Beirut – Evening statistics
It rained steadily yesterday and the rain continued off and on today, quite heavily in the mid-afternoon. We had a good deal of rain in the spring, well above the normal amount for that season, followed by a long drought in late June and much of July, whereas August and this first part of September has seen a return to normal levels. I suppose it will all work out to an average amount of rainfall by the end of the year, but one wishes that it could have been more evenly distributed throughout the months.
In looking back over the journal entries I can see a gradual shift in tone. When I began the journal conditions were changing on almost a daily basis, and although the changes were not agreeable in themselves, they at any rate had the merit of novelty. The early entries, as a result, have a good deal more variety. Now we are in a kind of holding pattern. The shortages we underwent in the early days of the pandemic are pretty much at an end (in this area at least – I cannot answer so confidently for the nation at large). There are occasional items, such as housewipes, that can be difficult to acquire, but most foods and most cleaning supplies can be obtained easily. I have no difficulty in finding flour, yeast, fish, fruit, and so on, as I did in March and early April. The traffic situation appears to have become stable. It is still on the low side compared to what it was before the virus practically cleared the roads. One can travel on the Beltway during rush hour with considerably less chance of being caught in a traffic jam than before. When I drive through Fairfax going from west to east along Rte. 50 in the late afternoon, I do not feel impelled to use back ways to avoid the Kamp Washington intersection, as I used to do during afternoon rush hour in pre-COVID days. However, the times when the highways were more or less deserted are a thing of the past. Again, people have more or less resigned themselves to wearing face masks indoors and I have not seen or read of any encounters between store employees and customers about this issue lately, although of course there are always going to be a few exceptions intent on making a fuss about it.
The restrictions, or at any rate the guidelines, have lasted for months and people are looking forward to the day when they can be eased. When can we invite people to our own houses again? – if not to host large parties, at any rate to entertain small groups of six or eight or twelve. When will we be able to freely visit the interiors of other people’s houses? When will it be feasible to risk using public transportation? When will we be able to travel out of town again? There are no clear answers to these questions at this point. Some people are being bolder than others. Without neglecting common prudence to the extent displayed, for instance, by the attendees of the recent rally in Sturgis, several are resuming social intercourse with a small circle of friends, or using the Metro on a regular basis, or taking flights to other parts of the country. Quite a number walk outside without wearing masks, even though they will wear masks inside public buildings and stores.
I have been more or less middle-of-the-road. I wear a face mask not only in stores and public buildings but when I’ve gone outside, unless I’m hiking on trails that require considerable exertion – where, as it seems to me, a face mask will not be of much use when I am breathing heavily as I go panting up a hill. Also, it tends to interfere with depth perception. I have driven my car with one passenger, but that passenger sits on the right side and in the back. So far I have not driven anyone sitting alongside me in the passenger seat. I will be taking a couple of trips with other people later this month and in October. But we will be driving, not flying – I have not reached the point of confidence to risk going to a crowded airport. (The planes themselves seem safe enough, but boarding them is a different matter.) We will be staying in rented houses, and each of us will have a separate room. It is more expensive, but neither myself nor the majority of my acquaintance are prepared to risk sharing a room night by night for a week or more on end.
And if there are fewer new developments to report on how the virus is impacting our daily lives, political events are occupying a greater amount of space in the journal. That, I suppose, is inevitable during the months just preceding a presidential election. There have been numerous rallies and of course the Democratic and Republican Conventions occurred just two or three weeks ago. The rhetoric is becoming more heated, as always happens during the September and October preceding an election; but in this case it has a certain degree of monotony. Donald Trump’s idea of campaigning is simply to lobby insults at his opponents; there is no attempt to refute their positions or disprove their accusations. It must be said in his defense that this strategy seems to work – at least, it did during his previous campaign in 2016.
Trump is undergoing difficulties, however, on account of the book by Bob Woodward that accuses him of deliberately ignoring the severity of the virus and downplaying it in the knowledge that it was much more deadly than he publicly claimed. This accusation is based not on a few off-the-cuff remarks but upon a series of eighteen detailed interviews held between December and July, all of them on tape. Incidentally, Woodward himself has not escaped criticism for sitting on this story instead of sending the details to his employers at the Washington Post so that warnings could be supplied to the public earlier. But Woodward, of course, is not a public official; his casual dismissal of the responsibility of warning to the American public about the dangers of the virus is merely callous, whereas Trump’s deliberate concealment and evasiveness on this matter is, by virtue of his public position, almost treasonable. At all events, he is on the defensive again, and that is not a good position to occupy a bare 53 days before the election.
There have been fewer references to events outside of the U.S., partly because coverage of events outside of our borders has always been rather sporadic and incomplete. If I have not mentioned, for instance, the fact the lockdown in South Africa caused three million people to lose their jobs in the first week alone or that Great Britain is still struggling to work out the terms of the Brexit from the EU or that China and India have been exchanging shots of ammunition over their border for the first time in 45 years – it is because these stories have failed to make much impression upon the American media, although they certainly are significant enough to the people actually living in the above-named countries. We are more likely to read about a sighting of a tiger running loose in the vicinity of Knoxville, TN (one of the headlines featured in various articles) than about any of these. It seems that a sheriff’s deputy spotted a large feline, probably striped, going about at night. The Knoxville area contains both a zoo and a sanctuary for big cats called Tiger Haven, but neither of them is missing any tigers. It is possible that someone acquired this one illegally and then released it after getting tired of looking after it. The story is an interesting curiosity, but the emphasis on it seems disproportionate in comparison with events like those I have mentioned.
One event that did make the headlines is that Beirut has endured a huge fire that comes just after the devastating explosion that occurred in August 4th, which killed nearly 200 people and caused massive property damage. It is unclear what triggered the fire, but it started in the warehouse area, in an aid agency that was storing food and cooking oil. Unfortunately, the agency’s building is in close proximity to warehouses containing rubber tires and other flammable material. The fire has been less serious in its impact that the explosion a month earlier; so far, at least, no injuries have been reported. As an indication of how much esteem the current administration enjoys, many Lebanese are accusing its politicians of deliberately trying to destroy evidence at the port that led to the blast. And at that, they may be right.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 28,313,440; # of deaths worldwide: 913,090; # of cases U.S.: 6,585,742; # of deaths U.S.: 196,145.