I did not stay up to watch the ball drop. Normally, watching team AC (Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen) get tipsy amuses me enough to wait for the Times Square spectacle that I’ve remained awake to watch every single year since I was allowed to stay up until midnight. This year, their tequila shots in the virtually empty asphalt triangle, with lame guests “teleported in” fell flat. As did most of 2020. The weight of the year sent me to bed long before the un-dynamic duo’s unappetizing antics. In some ways, I did want personally to see the year out. To make sure it left. In others, in one of my favorite British phrases, I just CBA. It did not deserve the effort. The man in the White House had long since morphed into a giant scary jack-o-lantern; I didn’t need to wait for the witching hour to witness any transformation.
They hype over seeing the malicious 2020 out, and welcoming a surely gentler 2021 rivalled the hysteria of the anticipated Y2K apocalypse at the turn of the millennium. Yet when I woke - or I should say when Romeo The Cat woke me - at the dawn of a new day of a new year, things felt very much the same. Covid-19 kept me largely inside, the seditious tangerine terror tore on about inanities, and the ills highlighted (but not created) in 2020 remained tangled dilemmas that one faintly festive eve would hardly solve.
I lay in bed until Romeo ratcheted up the “come feed me” volume, trying to find some significance in at least one of the plagues that befell us in the year now gone by. Surely the novel coronavirus had to carry more than death and destruction in its wake; there had to be some larger meaning in the pandemic.
Perhaps it served as a “controlled burn,” that, according to National Geographic, “maintains the health of a forest.” Sent as some sort of cosmic weeding out of dead wood and undergrowth that would allow for the greater good of the plants and animals to survive? This seems unlikely because it acted more like a raging forest fire, taking out large swaths of life and livelihood indiscriminately. There seems no method to Covid’s madness.
Perhaps it was meant to unite us; to remind us that despite artificially and arbitrary borders, different languages and customs, and equally artificial and arbitrary religions, we are, as Michael Jackson and friends reminded us, the world. We are one. We share more than we differ. We suffer together and can surmount problems together. But this sounds like so much fantastical fodder when we witness what actually happened. Despite heroic efforts by millions of long-suffering front line workers and behind the scenes laboratory scientists, others managed somehow to politicize and weaponize the virus. Unity occurred on some levels and in some places, but subterfuge, mistrust, and stupidity ruled in others. I sensed no warm, fuzzy, uniting patriotism that prevailed after the 9/11 tragedy. It divided more than conquered.
Perhaps it was sent, like Moses’ final plague, to disrupt the gestalt enough to remove the forces that threaten it the most. Like a well-seasoned cast iron pan across the head because the gentle taps on the shoulder didn’t garner enough attention. I felt at times that its sole purpose was to blow the orange tornado out of Washington, DC. But, as in the bible story set in Egypt, while the plagues that preceded it were bothersome, and certainly in some cases deadly, this one struck with an exquisitely cruel and far-reaching vengeance. No lamb’s blood smeared atop door frames could persuade this plague to pass over certain doors. It was an equal opportunity killer.
I have friends in England from my time there at the Shakespeare Institute who study the Black Plague as it shows up in Early Modern literature. I do not know that they have found any meaning in that pandemic. As Shakespeare penned King Lear in his down time while the pestilence shuttered the theaters, we find, and may continue to find, that people have created amazing things during lockdown. Innovations abound and many may linger. But I’m not sure that any of them outweigh the cost of the quarantine.
As I write, Britain returns indoors as a new, virulent strain outruns the rate of vaccinations. We in the US await what promises to be a tumultuous tomorrow in Congress, and wonder if the National Guard will need to extricate the giant painted baby from the White House in an orange straight jacket on January 20.
And I realize that I’ve written in the past tense, as if Covid left the building with 2020. But alas it is in the present. I wish I felt more hope at the advent of the new year. I do feel certain that my search for the meaning in this sweeping scourge is futile. Bad things happen. Good things may emerge, but sometimes the storm that precedes the calm has no more rhyme or reason than any other natural disaster.