Love in the Time of COVID

The dialogue presented here is a record of the woman’s version.

My companion John and I have been isolating now for some time. Like everyone else, we do venture out for groceries (wearing a mask) – and walking our dog Andy in the park (without a mask). I insist on the mask mostly not to spook others, but John says, don’t all those masked people look like spooks?

This is what happens when there is not much else to do: John and I, we argue.

I tell him, isn’t it great that we didn’t catch the bug yet? We have escaped the commotion in emergency rooms, and those aliens in space suits hovering over people in hospital beds and choking them with ventilators? We are alive – not a small achievement at our advanced age…

This is no way to live, he replies. I actually know what he means. He used to drag me to all those meetings about how we need to change this rotten system, and how Bernie might make a start doing this. Well, maybe, but Bernie is history, and I don’t miss the meetings and I pretend not to know how to plug in with the Zoom app. I didn’t spend my life, like he did, being a labor organizer. I don’t’ mind staying put, catching up with some of the books on my crowded shelf, listening to music and watching Netflix.

He calls this escape. Come to think of it, much of my life was about escape in real time. I was born in Europe during World War II and eventually met an American and escaped to God’s country.

Sure, says John. It’s God’s country alright: getting rich by robbing the poor.
What is he talking about?

Did your husband not get rich selling Coca Cola?

Well yes, I admit that Coca Cola is not exactly a healthy drink…

Did I know that the Coca Cola company had financed the assassination of labor leaders in Colombia?

I did not know.

Just the same, whenever he speaks of socialism – I speak of liberty. Hasn’t he heard of Stalin and the Gulag?

He doesn’t miss a beat: and how many people did our Capitalist wars kill since then? How did I feel when we bombed Belgrade in 1999 – did this bring back memories?

Actually, I was born in Belgrade and still remember running from bombs as a kid. And I don’t like to go there, and am liable to burst into tears.

Sure, he says. But Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Libya, and Yemen, and Sudan, and Syria – that ‘s different. Would I cry over those places?

I don’t know what to say.

And what I hate most is the way he patiently humors me with Marxist analysis. He says that yes, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the only way because the Capitalists did everything to sabotage the Socialist effort. They helped the White counter-revolutionaries, they isolated and sanctioned the Soviet Union. But they didn’t succeed ”to strangle the baby in the crib,” as Churchill had hoped. Nor did World War II succeed, as Hitler had promised, to wipe out the Slavish Slavs. John always ends his speech by saying that while the Paris Commune had held out for 70 days, wasn’t it promising that the Soviet experiment held out for 70 years?

But at what price, I insist. Even granted that the Revolution had transformed a country of landlords and peasants into an advanced industrial state that was able to resist the German juggernaut. But the fact of the country’s very advance caused the now educated people to thirst for liberty as well as equality. I have read all about the dissident movement and how they gathered in their kitchens to listen to Radio Liberty and then poured out into the streets to support Yeltsin.

Serves them right, John smirks. So now they’ve achieved freedom for the oligarchs to steal them blind, and equality in poverty for themselves. Welcome to the club.

I hold my ground: So, he admits that Capitalism won, and Marx’s predictions that Capitalism would collapse from its internal contradictions didn’t materialize? Even China went Capitalist while the Soviet Union disintegrated. Was it not because free enterprise works and command economies do not?

That really gets him going: Free enterprise?! You mean the global monopolies on government financial life support so they can gobble up world resources? We hate China because it struggles to balance Capitalist initiative and government control. And we hate Putin because he rides horses bareback instead of licking our asses like Yeltsin did.
We do argue. But I also concede that we are in trouble.

His turn to concede: yes, black lives matter, and native Americans have been wiped out, and immigrants are shamefully exploited, and LGBTQ people should be left in peace, and women – well, of course women deserve their day in court…

Am I detecting a “but”?

John explains: Identity politics are but special cases of the larger, systemic problem. We are all together in a sinking ship, but we don’t seem to be able to get our act together. Instead, we just waste our time rearranging the chairs on the Titanic between the Democrats and the Republicans. This changes nothing.

You are really not worried if Trump is re-elected?

I am just as worried about Biden. They play us every which way, pushing our old scare buttons. The Democrats pushed Russiagate while Trump pushed the yellow peril from China.

Is that what Covid is then all about? We are not in the midst of a pandemic? Aren’t people dying all over the place?

The elderly in nursing homes who are already weakened by other health issues are dying. But most of all it’s the poor and the homeless and the Blacks and Latinos rotting in ghettoes and behind bars. This lockdown is a way to put us behind bars as well.

Isn’t it reasonable to institute safety measures?

The only time our political handlers pretend to worry about our safety is when they prepare us for the next war somewhere. Or right here at home. To get going the same kind of mayhem that wrecked all those other places in the name of democracy.

What is he talking about?

Maybe while we are stopped from meeting in person and only organize on the internet, every single fart we make will be recorded.

That would be compromising…

Funny, funny. So, let Bezos rescue the economy with technological wizardry? Will he worry about bio-hazards among his warehouse workers and electronic sweatshops? And let Big Pharma save us with untested vaccines? And if we have questions, be reduced to jabs for jobs?

So how come the stock market is doing so well?

Like you have investments to worry about? Bill Gates and his friends in Davos do worry about what they know to be a Ponzi scheme. And they have plans to fix the problem: the fourth industrial revolution. Robots will take over the production of goods and services, your smart phone will gently guide your every move, and digital currency will facilitate the payouts – if we behave.

At least street protests have calmed down thanks to Biden. And by the way, who are the ANTIFA?

ANTIFA is a mostly imaginary Anarchist group, very useful as a patsy to blame. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X used to argue about the concept of non-violent resistance. The King insisted that the only “weapon” of the weak is tactical non-violence against the super-armed holders of the status quo. And they both got killed for their troubles.

But didn’t we make progress? Didn’t we vote for Barack Obama?

The latter was a smart tactical move by the other side. Symbolism works. It got everybody off the hook while Obama took care of the immigrants and the kids in the Occupy parks. Just look at the paramilitary police the way they are equipped and weaponized and spraying the protesters – blacks and whites – with tear gas and rubber bullets as we speak!

So, what is to be done – ha, ha, as your hero Lenin put it a long time ago? Revolution?

Unless you believe in salvation through immaculate conception, change, like giving birth, is painful – who am I to tell you that? As to Lenin, he used World War I to spark the Revolution because the Russian peasants saw no point in dying for the benefit of competing empires. It is high time that our soldiers caught up to that as well – as Tulsi Gabbard tried to point out.

OK, Tulsi Gabbard is someone both John and I can come to an agreement about. Isn’t that the point of arguing in the first place? Sadly, our friends don’t talk to us anymore. They call us Trumpites – a guy like John – REALLY? And we feel that they are hypnotized by the media and hopelessly stuck in their bubble of fear…