Gummies and Orange Soda

March 18, 2020: Chicago, IL

Something that I do on every vacation: Ransack a bookstore till I can barely fit my backpack under the seat in front of me. When I returned from Morocco a few years ago with two books in each jacket pocket and a carry-on too dense with printed pages for any scanning device to work, I was openly mocked by a CBP agent. “You really like books, huh?” No pithy response from yours truly: Just, I do. Yes, sir. Recreating the vacation experience, then, meant hewing to that tradition as closely as possible, so when I came across a chain book store not yet shut down while running an unavoidable errand, I bolted in like a maniac.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, this vacation has afforded me the opposite of my usual frantic perpetual motion, and Tess and I kicked back to recreate another vacation staple: the spa. During a pre-staycation Walgreens run, we picked up foot masks and three successive Aveeno hand masks: Repair, Nourish, and Radiate or something like that. With all the hand washing and sanitizing, my always dry skin is an absolute wreck. We applied step one while watching Chernobyl and dining on Taco Bell.

Chernobyl, HBO’s loosely fictionalized history of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe, is a fascinating series in its own right: A requiem for victims of an enormous tragedy, a reflection on an event pivotal in ending the twentieth century’s dominant geopolitical conflict, and a warning to our still heavily nuclearized planet. But it is perhaps even more valuable for its parallels recognizable in the global handling of Covid-19: a culture of fear and obsequity that stymies early identification of and reaction to a disaster; political bashing of scientists and credible experts, as if they are the ones with an agenda; the unmatched ability of totalitarian regimes to marshal the full resources of the state for an overwhelming response.

That’s my political post for the year.