AFTER THE COVIDIAN AUTUMNAL TORRENT
7 min readMay 8, 2020
[a short fiction & prognostication]
- By the time interim President Nancy Pelosi (attired in a long, flowing kaftan dress & simple mask, both a deep royal blue) took her seat — by the time President Pelosi silently looked on as the presiding Chief Justice, John Roberts, standing in the Senate chamber (attired in a formal, conservative gray mask & the de rigueur black judicial robe), quietly swore in the 47th President of the United States — a lot had changed in the American political landscape. Hell, a lot had changed in its physical landscape; but I shouldn’t want to wax lyric about renaissant green nature and all that other woke eco-crap. Yes, coyotes & deer were seen roaming (peacefully, by most reports) the hills & streets of Pres. Pelosi’s Frisco — a bizarre enough footnote spangling our post-covidian NatGeo weltanschauung. Well okay, look: pristine waterways were seen in our land; & hey listen: flurries of turtledoves were heard in suburbia. A transient spate of killer hornets notwithstanding, the erstwhile grainy air had largely cleared. Globally speaking & locally discernable, the famously retrograde & arguably renegade human report card was lately (albeit accidentally) improving. Judging by her latest atypical tweets, even young Greta Thunberg was growing (in her own words) “a little bit optimistic.”
- I need hardly mention: our derelict species had paid dearly for those salubrious creaturely resurgences. By the time Bernie & Joe joined Pence & Trump in the outlandish national gallery of fallen pols, an expectation of maximum weirdness in the American plotline had unmistakably become the ironic norm. Ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play — sang the poet of a prior century. But we in the 21st (I can honestly say) were belatedly chastened & playing no longer.
- Divided by harsh politics throughout spring & summer, by autumn a prevailing somber seriousness had sunk into the national mood deeper & deeper, week by week, while farcically steep Himalayan Fauci curves (describing numerical deaths in this state & that city — undulant peaks that arose & gained fame & subsided in long deathly waves, ghastly & antithetical to those olden, anthemic, nice as Norman Rockwell, saccharine amber waves of grain) — while Fauci curves (I was saying) ascended to lethal heights, plateaued, then slowly dipped throughout our shadowland of fatality, in that singularly dire Covidian-American autumn into winter (our newest hyphenate): by year’s end, collectively we’d peered into the abyss.
- I don’t mean to sound trite, but no sooner I noticed how #MalströmMeditations had become an apparently trending hashtag, somehow I abruptly developed a rude & guttural guffaw. “Will we hit 200K dead by Christmas?” asked Brian Williams in early November on The 11th Hour. Gentle Reader: we will. We did.
- But by the time — crouched in my shaded corner of downtown Los Angeles, gazing at my trusty android screen, always watching — like every other troubled & fixated citizen, like every pensive soul & each sentient being — watching, watching, forever watching . . . & on that day we were watching the President-elect (who’d donned an Earth-tones silk dashiki & one of those new, transparent masks) . . .
- But by the time I heard with my own acute ears (taken in like a healing balm for the distraught) those formal, archaic, spare yet suddenly gleaming, rich, downright orotund words —
I, Kamala Harris, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States —
by that time, the swirling whirlwind & rapacious torrent of the American autumn of 2020 finally (I — with myriad other pundits & paupers — sensed & was growing convinced) had begun to subside, was apparently coming to rest at an improbable place & in a way one could maybe, frankly manage to call damn satisfying, after all. - With a little friendly help from a pandemic catastrophe, brazen nature had accomplished what had proven impossible (as if unthinkable) for our notorious, incorrigible & spiritually narcoleptic, GOP-laden US Senate. We’d closed the book on Donald J. Trump. The Moving Finger wrote FINITO (its own October Surprise); & neither Evangelists’ piety nor AG Barr’s wit could cancel that word from the world’s exhausted parchment. Which brings us to the noon hour of February 25, 2021 (in lieu of the standard January inauguration — for the short but fraught Pelosi Interregnum with its bevy of candidate deaths nixed November & necessitated a late-January election). So: the first-most Zoomed Inauguration unfolds in the Senate chamber, with interim President Pelosi hushed & looking on, as Senator Harris takes the oath.
- This hadn’t been in the cards! Everybody knew the election was gonna be a brutal autumn Joe vs. Donald slugfest. Fate (we thought) & stubborn caveman momentum had ordained a totally masculine brawl. Senator Elizabeth Warren was the final viable lady to bow out — and since that pre-lockdown spring day (soon after the troubling Wisconsin primary) when Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders threw in the Democratic Party election towel (mainly — I’m convinced — out of concern for virus-endangered voters in long, prolonged primary queues), the American male boxing tournament of Joe vs. Donald was a fait accompli! That was seemingly our sole political certainty. But be that as it might (& although it started out that way), we were playing with an irrationally morphing & suspiciously Tarot-esque deck. When both Joe Biden & Donald Trump were put on ventilators in the same week, this double-whammy newsflash lobbed a Godzilla-caliber monkey wrench into every pundit’s parlor. Should we call it “a case of surreal poker”? (Novelist William Gibson coined this phrase for the occasion in a WashPost op-ed. Gibson asked: “Who’d imagined Lady Luck could have her own morbid ideas?”) Yet in the Covidian Era we’ve had to learn the hard way: when Covid-19 deals, she plays for keeps.
- Meanwhile, after a string of false starts, on Valentine’s Day (no less) what had been heralded as a bullseye vaccine was approved & lauded by the National Institutes of Health Special Task Force. A consortium of nine pharmaceutical outfits was ordered by Pelosi to “proceed with mass production, pronto!” Everybody and his stylish uncle was still traipsing around town in a Gucci mask, but since February 14 (for what New York Times columnist Maurine Dowd would soon blithely dub “10 blissful days pre-inauguration”), an inarguable elan of collective euphoria was widely noted, whether red state or blue: a broadly-affirmed suggestion we were finally (as one Daily Beast inkscribe phrased it) “on our way outta the fuckin’ pandemic woods.” Willy-nilly (by every reputable account), our world — brave or not — was (as if in slo-mo), in that 10-day nativity, being strenuously born anew. So it seemed — like the way the camera follows us in slo-mo / the way we look to us all . . .
- Want my opinion, hombre? President Kamala’s laconic oration, an hour later that wintry yet bright afternoon (nationally broadcast from the Rose Garden), got it right & was on the money. For me at least — hunkered down & glued to my android screen, still biding my time till the pending vaccination — the new President’s address sealed the post-Donald deal.
My fellow Americans: you and I have weathered Mother Nature’s apparent trump card: this trying test of our endurance & ingenuity, this fateful coronavirus storm. After grievous losses & costly lessons, drawn together in shared adversity, our battle-tested nation is regrouping afresh, and friends — we’re ready to rebuild.
There was scarcely a dry eye on the business end of that rosy realtime video feed.
[May 8–10, 2020]
© David Raphael Israel
ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play — from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem: On The Seashore (Gitanjali, 1913)
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo / The way we look to us all —
from Paul Simon’s song, The Boy in the Bubble (album Graceland, 1986)
[Afterword]
I wrote & tweaked the above “flash fiction” (directly in Medium) over the noted three days. Early while in progress, I’d appended a subtitle (“In Rose Garden Zoom, new President Seals the Deal”). In end that headline-mimicry seemed discordant. (My Chinese teacher would say: “Don’t paint legs on a snake.”) Incidentally, in the early March 2020 Democratic primary in California, I voted for Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But two days ago when I found myself waxing expansive in imagination (frankly spurred by news of covid-19 infections among staffs of both Pres. Trump & VP Pence), for whatever reason it was Sen. Kamala Harris whom I instinctively pictured as our 47th American President — in a bright post-Pelosi Interregnum / post-pandemic future.
In 10 days, I’ll be 64 years old. I’ve lived long enough to tell it as I see it.
I hope this dystopian fiction might strike a hopeful note in some readers.
5/10/2020
d.i.
