Volume 5, Issue 62: Whitecaps

"Listen to yourself, you sound demented."

My upcoming novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, will be released on May 20. I believe you will like it. I hope you will pre-order it. Send me your pre-order receipt and I’ll send you a book plate and enter you into a contest to, like, hang out with me. Details here.

The pandemic does not have an anniversary, because how could it? My friend and old editor David Wallace-Wells, who was/is the foremost chronicler of the Covid age, wrote this week that the pandemic had so many different stages that we have had no choice but to flatten it, to turn it into one collective experience that we all went through, processed and then moved on from, though of course nothing could possibly be further than the truth. In the early days of the pandemic, one of the most common refrains, along with “flatten the curve,” was we’re all in this together. But that is the exact opposite of what we were. I’m not sure we’ve been remotely together since.

Unofficially, I’ve always considered March 11, 2020, a date we’ll hit the fifth anniversary of this coming Tuesday, the start of the American version of the pandemic. Obviously, it had hit China and swaths of Europe, most notably Spain, before then, and there were segments of the country, specifically the Pacific Northwest, whose Covid story began earlier than the rest of the country’s. But March 11 was:

• The night that Utah Jazz forward Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid minutes before he was supposed to take the floor for a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder and days after he famously touched every reporter’s microphone as a way to mock the NBA’s new Covid protocols. This would led to a shutdown of the NBA and, less than 24 hours, all American sports, including the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament.

• Tom Hanks announced on Instagram that he had tested positive while filming the movie Elvis in Australia, in a moment memorably satirized in the hilarious ending to the Borat sequel:

• Then-President Trump addressed the nation live in the Oval Office, as he sniffled and slurred and made it vividly clear that, as the most dangerous public health threat of the last 100 years landed on American shores, the worst possible person was going to be President as it happened.

Our family, with the kids on Spring Break from school, was on vacation in Florida on March 11, 2020, and I remember, with everyone else in the house asleep, watching that speech, followed immediately by the Gobert and Hanks news, and realizing oh, we’re screwed.

As David Wallace-Wells points out in a different piece, five years later, the overarching societal takeaway from Covid these days seem to be something like embarrassment—like we all got too excited, that we overreacted, that our deepest fears early in the pandemic were replaced by a sense that all that tumult was for nothing. DWW notes how wrong this is, how the misery and death that ultimately resulted from Covid would have been considered worst-case scenarios during most of the pandemic itself:

Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths with a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.

In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected, but as early as March 2020 Donald Trump and Deborah Birx (who helped run the White House’s Covid response) appeared to be referring to Ferguson’s figure to claim credit for avoiding more than two million deaths — a success they explicitly attributed to shelter-in-place guidelines, business closings and travel restrictions.

Five years later, though the world has been scarred by all that death and illness, it is considered hysterical to narrate the history of the pandemic by focusing on it. Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics now run the country’s health agencies, but the backlash isn’t just on the right. Many states have tied the hands of public health authorities in dealing with future pandemic threats, and mask bans have been put in place in states as blue as New York. Everyone has a gripe with how the pandemic was handled, and many of them are legitimate. But our memories are so warped by denial, suppression and sublimation that Covid revisionism no longer even qualifies as news.

To even bring up Covid now is to be, plainly, annoying. I guarantee you all the five-year-anniversary pieces that will run this week, including this one, will be among the least-consumed pieces by everyone who produces them. People’s eyes glaze over when you talk about Covid. People do not want to talk about it. Part of this is of course human nature; no one wants to marinate in their lowest moments. Part is also the natural course of the virus itself. There was a time in which I was terrified that anyone who had Covid was going to die; now, if I were in the middle of a conversation with you and you told me you had Covid, I probably wouldn’t even move from where I was standing.

That, of course, is a fallacy as well: The reason I am not scared of Covid anymore is because of the multiple vaccines I’ve taken to protect myself and others from it. (Also, I’ve had it.) Just because I am no longer afraid of it does not mean I was wrong when I once was. But that is a difficult dichotomy to hold in one’s mind. If something never happens to you, or you survive it, being scared of it feels silly. Making fun of how Y2K concerns is common now, but if we hadn’t have been worried about it in the years leading up to it and thus prepared for it, it would have been a disaster. No one gets scared in retrospect.

But that doesn’t mean Covid wasn’t still the biggest thing we have all lived through—even if you didn’t lose someone to it, as millions and millions of people did. As DWW points out, we live in Covid’s wake every day. Acting otherwise isn’t just fooling ourselves; it’s actively harmful.

You can make an argument that so much of the current madness is a direct result of our desire to pretend that Covid didn’t happen—to punish ourselves for changing as much as we did during Covid. The department responsible for our health and safety is run by a lunatic vaccine denialist; our long overdue clear-eyed look at systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder led not to widespread change but instead craven opportunism and then a backlash that has now been weaponized by the new administration; the silos we retreated into Covid are now the only places many of us live. That desire we all have to return to “normal,” whatever that means, has led us to willfully overlook so many things that are obviously not normal. If I’ve learned anything from Covid, it’s that once people lived through an entire planet shutting down because of a virus in the air that can kill you, it’s difficult for anyone to be shocked by much of anything after that. Including, I suspect, another public health disaster. Right now, there’s bird flu, and measles, and lord knows what else. But, you know, shrug: Whaddya gonna do, you know?

We’ve all changed, and we encounter that change on a daily basis, in every aspect of our lives. Here’s a fun game: Pick 10 random people in your life, and ask yourself is this person different now than they were before March 2020? I bet every single one of them has changed in ways ranging from substantial to dramatic. Some of them are familiar life changes, just sped up; I have friends who got married during the pandemic, (more) friends who got divorced, friends who lost their parents, their spouses, some lifelong companions. But most changes were quieter, subtler. The pharmaceutical executive who left the city and now lives on a farm upstate. The writer who got laid off and now works at a restaurant—and has never been happier. The carpool mom who was disappeared for most of the pandemic and returned … different, more conspiratorial, more hostile, more furtive and darting. There was a massive, debilitating disruption in everyone’s lives at once. It shifted us all, in countless directions.

I see it in kids, too, constantly. How could you not? My children were in the third and first grades when the pandemic hit, and they spent nearly two years staring at computer screens and calling it school. They suffered in ways that we’ll never be able to unravel, and mine were the fortunate ones who had two parents who were able to stay home with them; most kids weren’t so lucky. I remember asking Wynn’s teacher, at a conference in the fourth grade, if she saw differences in her students who went through Covid than those before.

“Oh,” she said, looking away, “basically in every possible way.” She then turned back to me, picked up a pencil and held it with a fist. “It’s big things, but it’s also little ones. Look at this. This is how kids hold pencils now. It’s because they were all at home the year they usually learn how to hold pencils. Now multiply that by everything.”

Or just look at yourself. How different are you? What did you learn about yourself? About what matters. About what doesn’t.

Everyone has pivot moments in their lives, when nothing is the same after that moment than it was before. But Covid was a pivot moment that happened to everyone on earth at the exact same time. It is no wonder that we are still reeling from it. And it’s equally no wonder that we continue to collectively try to act like we aren’t. But on this anniversary, this five-year mark, it’s vital to remember. It’s less important to reflect on what it felt like on March 11, 2020, or whatever the moment that the enormity of what was happening finally hit you was. Instead, remember who you were in the months before then … and how different that person is from the one you are right now. I know we don’t want to think about it. I know we all want to move on. It’s perfectly natural. I’m still pretty sure it’s the biggest thing that has happened to the world since I we arrived on this planet, and that we’ll still be dealing with its aftermath when we leave it.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality. (This was a good week for pieces, there’s some good stuff in here.)

1. America Is Now Sports’ Global Villain, New York. When do they start blacking out our flag on tennis broadcasts?

2. My Annual World Series Winner Draft With Mike Petriello, MLB.com. A blast every year.

3. Best Picture Winners, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Anora.

4. Picking MLB’s 2025 Ultimate Bandwagon Team, MLB.com. I think I landed on the right place here.

5. MLB Season Preview: Bold Predictions for Each Division, MLB.com. Always fun to have Cubs fans mad at you.

6. I Contributed to a Washington Post Post-Oscars Discussion, The Washington Post. It is hard to write things on a group chat. (I am famously terrible at texting, but really bad at group chats.)

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we recapped the Oscars and discussed “Me” and “A Bronx Tale.”

Morning Lineup, I did Friday’s show.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I previewed the Cardinals position players.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, the guys and I did a spring check-in.

HOW CAN I HELP?

As established, we’re compiling the stories of individual people who are trying to find ways to make the world a little bit better in whatever fashion they can, no matter how small. Send yours to howcanonepersonhelp@gmail.com. Today’s entry comes from Matt Willis in Lawrenceville, Georgia:

I have had a bird feeder for many years, but decided at the beginning of this year to add a few more. It feels nice to help other living creatures even in this small way. I am also working on letting go of my resentment at the squirrels who empty the feeders quicker than I would like !

We have gotten so many of these already. Please send me yours.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Russia Is Not Winning,” Graeme Wood, The Atlantic. A very helpful reminder of how that war is actually going three-plus years in.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! (Got some more of these out this week, stand by.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“King of Carrot Flowers, Part 2&3,” Neutral Milk Hotel. Every couple of years I listen to Neutral Milk Hotel obsessively for about a week. I’m a little different after that week is over.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Also, there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Also, currently working on a Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride Playlist.

And hey: GREAT ILLINI WIN LAST NIGHT. The Leitch gentlemen enjoyed it.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Best,
Will