The Final Solution: In Solitary

The Fortress of Solitude in Action Comics #846, February 2007 (Art by Adam Kubert)

Is it odd that that you can talk on the phone and zoom, but never see anyone in person? The phenomenon possesses a mythic quality. If you recall Orpheus was specifically told not to look back at his beloved Eurydice, but he couldn’t help himself and lost her. You might equate that to those impatient and restless souls who don’t realize that they and everyone else are walking time bombs. If you’re carrying the virus and symptomatic then giving into the desire to really “see” someone instead of merely experiencing them in cyberspace may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. At first it was all a lark and some people even said they preferred zooming to actually seeing people. After all, it was easy. You didn’t have to go out of the house. Then when the reality set in, you began to realize video images cannot take the place of the human almost sexual need to be to be in the presence of real people. Virtual reality may be a craze, but it’s not a substitute for real life and so like water pressure building, the pipe starts to feel like it’s going to burst as the pink cloud passes and one's faced with the fact of the long trek ahead, made even more difficult by the solitariness of the journey. 

The Final Solution: Dr. Seuss and the CDC

Theodore Seuss Geisel (1957)

The Cat in the Hat may turn out to be the King Lear of the coronavirus era. You may recall the immortal first lines of the Dr. Seuss classic, “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” Would it be wrong to say that the pandemic threw cold water on all of humanity’s dreams and made literally everyone have to stay home, where if you were lucky enough, you might be entertained by such a delicious lord of misrule as the magnificent feline genie who mesmerized generations of children. Remember what it was like when you got sick as a kid? On the first day it was almost fun. You didn’t have to go to school. You could watch TV without restrictions, particularly if you had parents who were employed. But then as time passed, you started to get bored, impatient and eager to see your friends. Besides that you were tired of feeling sick. If you’re following Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor who’s been diarizing his battle and his obvious discomfiture with the length of time, it’s taken for it to pass—together with his worry about his family and wife Cristina (who’s come down with COVID-19 too), you might recall how interminable illness could seem as a child, when the days were long, lonely and filled with things like nausea and chills. Suffice it to say that the world has been reduced to the condition of the kids in The Cat in the Hat. Whether your suffering from corona or not, you’re stuck. You can’t go out, even when the sun finally does shine. 

Sperm Count: Prostitution in the Age of Coronavirus

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Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum

Didacticism is the country cousin of symbolism. Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum based on the Gunter Grass novel is rife with both. Oskar (David Bennent), the central character, willfully engineers his stunted growth by falling down a staircase at the age of 3, thereby becoming a self-appointed gnome. He’s actually fully conscious at birth, possessed with an unearthly agency, a man who only appears to be a child. In fact, one of the most disconcerting scenes in the l979 movie may be the sight of Oskar consummating sex with a grown woman—particularly with contemporary audiences so sensitive to images of pedophilia (the film was banned in both Oklahoma and Ontario because the then 11 year old actor was depicted having sex with his 24 year old counterpart). But the symbolism is more layered. Beginning at the end of the l9th Century, The Tin Drum is a magical realist history of The Third Reich with Oskar representing a countermanding force of resistance. He literally marches to the beat of a different drummer. At one moment in the movie his erratic drumbeat usurps a Nazi rally turning the martial music into a Waltz. “Once upon  a time there was a gullible people who believed in Santa Claus,” he says. "But Santa Claus was the Gasman.” Amidst the often obvious schema are some unsettling ambiguities. Whenever someone attempts to take away his drum, Oskar’s screams shatter glass. It’s obviously a clarion call. Yet there’s an odd mixing of metaphors in the depiction of Kristallnacht when glass is also shattered as Nazi thugs destroy Jewish businesses and houses of worship. Schlondorff weaves a tapestry of associations, a portrait of Hitler is substituted for Beethoven with Beethoven replaced again. Goethe is juxtaposed to Rasputin, as enlightenment is contrasted to demonism. And Oscar has two fathers, Jan Bronski (David Olbrychski) the Pole and the cook, Alfred Matzerath (Mario Adorf), the German. Danzig (Gdansk) which the Nazis annexed on September 1, 1939, functions a little like Vonnegut’s Dresden as the center around which the film’s universe rotates. Poles, Kashubians, Germans and a Jew Sigismund Markus (Charles Aznavour) all inhabit the city in an increasingly unholy misalliance. Potatoes and voyeurism count amongst recurring leitmotifs as do clocks. Despite Oskar's machinations, the march of time is both relentless and irremediable.

The Final Solution: Is Coronavirus Transformative?

Coronavirus is not necessarily transformative. You may find out that despite the apocalyptic feeling the world is coming to an end (at the very least the familiar world of barber shops, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys you once knew), that you still wake up, look in the mirror, still self-absorbed and still not necessarily liking what you see. Perhaps instead of experiencing a raising of consciousness amidst crisis, you may very well find yourself plunging down a succession of rabbit holes, deeper and deeper into yourself. The same obsessions may haunt you. You still want to go on porn sites all the time to see the naked bodies of creatures you will never be able to have and you continue to be made jealous when lo despite everything there are still people who remain a rebuke to your own piddling existence. You may very well cry out “schmuck” when you see that despite all your over-the-top efforts to persevere for the company,  the dunderhead who once occupied the work station next to you has gotten the coveted promotion, even though the firm is conducting all its activities on-line and everyone is working at home. He will be your now socially distant boss! Despite the collapse and the threat that the world is not going to go on, it keeps going on and while you’re busy looking at life under the aspect of eternity, someone not only doesn't have your back, but is doing things behind it.

The Final Solution: The Ice Age

What if this is metaphorically the beginning of a new Ice Age in which dinosaurs like the President finally become extinct? If the giant reptiles who ruled the earth weren’t wiped away by a cataclysmic event then there might never have been human kind. So there is hope, but how much destruction will need to perpetrated in order for the current species at least to get the point? When Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia precipitously opens his state to such needed businesses as tattoo parlors while mayors in cities like Albany and Augusta find their protests falling on deaf ears, one wonders at the almost biblical quality of the governor's defiance. The coronavirus has become like the Golden Calf for that part of the base now marching in the streets as pandemic deniers. The Holocaust deniers occupy sit one pew behind. The problem is that there's little innocence anywhere. In the current environment no one is unaffected, no man is an island. What if those who doggedly resist even White House directives (like the Georgia governor) prevail and little covens of viral activity begin to explode. These hotbeds of disease could possibly undo all the progress made by states like New York. The current situation requires both individual and collective responsibility, lest all the dinosaurs and the gentle animals that are their prey are all swallowed up into a viral abyss. 

Diasporic Dining: Coronavirus and Michelin Ratings

During the course of the current crisis, have you ever caught yourself having frighteningly awful thoughts—like for instance hoping that the daily death counts will minimize so you can shop in the supermarket without feeling like it's a dangerous activity? Now here’s another thought. You know you always walked by a restaurant if it were empty? Well, once people start going out again the bad restaurants will suddenly be in demand, precisely because they’ll provide lots of social distance, a much more coveted commodity than good food. The problem is that once people hear about a good bad restaurant they’ll flock to it. Now the once coveted reservation in the haute cuisine establishment will be easy to get and it will suddenly be the haute cuisine establishment that affords more social distance. A new universe is on the horizon at least from the point of view of restaurant going in which diners will have to actually monitor the vacillations in a topsy turvy universe in which unpopularity is directly proportionate to desirability, where the reverse used to be obviously the case. Talk about changes. With these new grading factors in effect, how will coronavirus affect a restaurant’s Michelin rating?