Editorials

Rummaging around in dusty file boxes is one of the more accessible entertainments in the COVID II period. Since us old folks can’t decide which medico-pundit we should believe, we mostly stay home.

Here’s a normal dialogue with self:

Well past 65, do we need a third shot? Or would that be disgracefully First World, when there are whole countries which haven’t had any shots?

Maybe it could be restated: do we deserve a third shot? But the operative word is still need. And must we stay home forever?

We’ve been watching University of California San Francisco medical school’s COVID Grand Rounds religiously online on Thursdays in search of guidance, but the professors have mostly taken off for the summer. The head honcho, one Dr. Bob, tweets, but it’s nothing like the same. Our fave, jocular and avuncular Dr. George Rutherford, is no tweeter (of course not).

Dr. R. earned my eternal gratitude when I was laboring over the momentous decision of whether to use our balcony tickets to see Tosca at the San Francisco Opera after they announced that they were abandoning socially distanced seating. He is listed on the opera’s website as their adviser on matters medical.

Would the benefit of three hours of pleasure be worth the risk? 

I decided to go straight to the source. Dr. R.’s email address is right there on the UCSF website, so I emailed him, and much to my amazement (he doesn’t know me) he wrote right back: 

Yes, I think it will be safe. Everyone will have to have to be fully vaccinated (and prove it) and will be masked unless eating or drinking. The ventilation meets CDC standards. So, while it may be stuffy (especially with masks), I think it will be safe. If you really wanted an added layer of safety, you might wait until later September after you receive a third dose of vaccine (which you should). Cases are going down in the City, and I’m comfortable (as is SFDPH) with the precautions the Opera is taking. 

I forwarded his letter to my daughter the soprano, and she replied that it was like getting email from a rock star. 

I decided reluctantly to return the tickets, for that added layer of safety. I will wait until the magic date of September 20 to decide if I need an indoor music experience.. Tosca, alas, will be over, but I did see Faye Carol outside in Martin Luther King Park last week. 

As of now, Kaiser tells me (via online pronouncement) that just being old is NOT enough to qualify for a booster shot. I expect Kaiser and the CDC will change their collective minds at least twice more before September 20. That’s science for you—that’s the way it’s supposed to work, despite too many Americans preferring necromancy or prayer for advice.. 

So I’ve still got plenty of time for research into lost times in my old files. 

What I can’t help noticing is how themes repeat. The principal concern in my blessedly long life is symbolically illustrated by the character who appeared from time to time in the New Yorker cartoons of my childhood, when I was still too young to read the long-winded articles. He was an old guy with white hair and beard, dressed in prophetic robes, carrying a sign that said something like “the end of the world is at hand.” All my life we’ve worried about that. 

I remember seeing in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section when I was a bit older the quip that the problem with the modern world is that there are going to be too many people on earth in the long run or too few too soon. 

We still worry about over-population vs. nuclear holocaust, but meanwhile we’ve had a steady stream of OMG moments with persistent themes: racism, environmental disaster, climate change, foreign wars, terrorism, disease including pandemics, religious conflict, human rights abridgement...same old, same old. Eruptions of such problems are like the flying embers in wild fires we’ve been hearing about later. You extinguish them in one location and they flare up in another. With concerns like these, a decision about whether to risk hearing Tosca indoors seems trivial indeed. 

Over the years, as I experienced some major end-of-the-world moments of fear and many minor ones, I’ve been tempted to invoke these lines from Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach: 

“Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another! for the world, which seems 

To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 

Where ignorant armies clash by night.” 

But though these words are compelling, we still seem to be here, mirabile dictu. There have been lots of bad times before this in the history of the human race, but we’ve gotten past them 

A treasure I unearthed in my rummage is one of the beautiful broadsides that the wonderful Cody’s bookstore used to produce. At the bottom of the page it says: 

"January, 1991: In these darkening times, Cody’s offers this poem to our community." 

The poem’s title is appropriate for this week: W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939. 

That September date was a real end-of-the-world moment, but Auden’s vision was not Arnold’s. You should really read the whole poem, but here’s the last verse: 

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
“Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.” 

Now, without the internet, I couldn’t even remember exactly what we were all upset about in January of 1991. I looked it up, and I did figure out that it was the very beginning of the Endless War in the Middle East, against which people like us started marching on January 25 of that year. It’s been 30 years and many more marches since then. 

This was not the first Thirty Years War in the history of the world, nor will it be the last. but for now the armies are no longer clashing in Afghanistan. President Biden has announced that The War (including the last and longest act) is Over. 

The Important Persons (Auden’s words and caps) complain that they could have managed the exit much more elegantly. Whiners include not only the usual suspects in the right wing media but the New York Times and the Washington Post, who should know better. 

In the face of all the tensions which continue everywhere and which will always be with us, we might instead keep in mind more lines from Auden’s poem: 

There is no such thing as the State 

And no one exists alone; 

Hunger allows no choice 

To the citizen or the police; 

We must love one another or die. 

The more things change, the more they remain the same.