Day 179: War on the People

Sheriff’s deputies have seized Ric’s restaurant and the adjacent storefront clinic. They wouldn’t let the LES DIY take their stuff. Stores of food and beverages and medical supplies are missing—stolen by the landlord and his state goons. They’re probably parading around in my protective gear, right arms twitching, braying about order.

THEY GOT BRUNO—FOR WHAT?The NYPD showed up in riot gear so the First Amendment wouldn’t be exercised. They carried writs that threatened to arrest Anna and the LES DIY doctors for “operating an unlicensed medical facility” and for “operating an unpermitted place of assembly that serves as a public inducement to gather, thereby spreading disease.” Sounds like those public schools they’ve stuffed with sick and hopeless New Yorkers on cots.

They busted Bruno, the tattooed drummer and delivery coordinator. He turns out to have been wanted for years on some old pot charges.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to obliterate a volunteer community service in the middle of a national catastrophe. Incomprehensible.

Anna intends to continue preparing food from her tiny apartment. She can’t stomach the thought of telling the old folks and little ones that they’re on their own. They’re her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—some sick, others merely weak, all helpless. It’s not just about food or doctors. She doesn’t want these people to feel alone.

She’s lovely in battle, even when hopelessly outgunned. I want to share peace with her. We’ve both survived H5N1. If we can endure how other people respond to it, a grand future awaits us.

Day 179 (#2): Exercise Your Rights & Legs

AMERICA'S TOP TEN: OUR BILL OF RIGHTSThere will be an emergency demonstration at City Hall at noon later today. I urge my NYC readers to attend. Be sure to wear protective gear.

Health-wise, that is. I’ve been told to emphasize that no one anticipates civil disobedience. That means no one intends to get arrested. I know I don't.

Join us, as they say.

Day 180: Up in Smoke—Chinatown

I feel like I woke up in the first row at an action movie and the screen opened up to pour forth a screaming cast of thousands.

The day began with climbing, swirling noise—fire engines and patrol cars and helicopters racing around our pillows. I was at Anna’s place near the Manhattan Bridge, on the northeast edge of Chinatown, and there was a major emergency not far away. We couldn’t see anything from her southern exposure but when we heard explosions, we threw on some clothes and headed early to the demonstration at City Hall.

There was a strong eastern breeze and the noise was to the west—like the chaos we all heard on 9/11. Had New York been attacked again?

CHINATOWN COOKS, BEFORE THE FIRESTORM (Uris)Before Anna and I got to Park Row, we started to see people milling around. They were Chinese, wearily sitting on stoops and cars with arms full of stuff, trying to keep track of old people and children. Many were weeping. People carried water to them. Everyone was holding cell phones but no one was talking or texting. Had the city shut the transmitters off? Had terrorists blown them up?

There was a lot of smoke. Cinders circled like snowflakes.

We didn’t want to stare, so we tightened our masks and moved on.

A convoy of National Guards rumbled past us to head up the Bowery, weapons ready … for what? The crowd hadn’t looked criminal.

The uniformed men and women were craning their necks like tourists, pointing out sights. They looked more surprised than sanguine. Had the city come unraveled while it closed our little food service? Was there a mighty displeased Almighty up there?

Our cellular circuits were indeed jammed. No headlines, no messages, no voices.

Near City Hall we found office workers chain-smoking cigarettes. They said that the heart of Chinatown was burning and the city had quickly run out of firefighters. The National Guards we had seen were deployed from Connecticut to fight a mega-alarm fire in the warren of tenements and crooked streets between Canal Street and Park Row, from Centre Street to the Bowery.

Untrained and poorly equipped, those Guards are said to have tried valiantly. What could they do in narrow lanes full of exploding parked cars as flames vaulted overhead from block to block, igniting century-old tinderboxes—each of which might contain hundreds living in bunked cubicles? Fourteen of the Guards we saw are missing.

Of course there was no LES DIY demonstration. Not even the cops showed up.

We stood around East Broadway in a daze, trying to stay out of the way. Helicopters were dumping water as if on one of those fiery windstorms that are devastating Southern California. Chinese women wailed or stood silently near us. Then a brisk line of emergency workers carrying black bags emerged from the ruins: body bags. They were clearing dead victims.

I held Anna as the grim parade approached us. After a few men came a woman holding a small white bag that must have contained a child. Anna twitched as if she’d been shocked and then crumpled into unconsciousness. I carried her to a stoop on Hester Street as if she were a child. We rested as she cried. I couldn’t hear her amid the noise but she trembled like a bird.

A few of the survivors have taken shelter in schools that haven’t yet been turned into flu wards. The East Village is full of smoke and flugitives bearing little bundles. Today, I cherished mine, even as she pleaded in vain for me to take her home so she could prepare food for the old people. Sorry, no LES DIY tonight.

Day 180 (#2): The Edge of Destruction

I can’t sleep. I’m haunted by the fatalism of those city workers who puffed so placidly. They weren’t at all surprised that one of earth’s great Chinatowns was turning into a gargantuan charred pit several blocks away.

There aren’t enough firefighters and their equipment is falling apart. Those school buses the city sends to the suburbs must be returning empty. Mountains of garbage and armies of rodents show how well the Sanitation Department has fared. The handful of cops is preoccupied with busting a community group—the LES DIY. The next time I hear people yelling, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the Idaho National Guard.

I’m scared. After six weeks of Round 2, the pandemic seems to be intensifying. Is it time to try to flee to my bungalow? The volunteer firefighting system upstate has faltered with so many key members ill or dead. Ambulance corps rely on untrained volunteers. Some counties lack ventilators. Deep, sustained snow could bury them. Tens of thousands of otherwise-healthy folk could die for want of fuel and food. That’s just in one state. I don’t want to drag Anna off to die in an icy bungalow.

If H5N1 doesn’t blow over soon, everything we’ve seen so far is the prelude to a catastrophe no one pictured. (Except two artists did in 2009: Here’s Joseph Nechvatal’s video study of a virus on America, with Stephane Sikora.)

Day 181: An Epidemic of Dangerous Management

The media are bursting with reports of disorder, like cells unleashing ripe viral particles. It’s as if the emperor’s clothes dissolved overnight—at least in the eyes of elite bloggers and reporters who thought till now that half-dressed sounded better than half-naked.

Foremost are big-media reports that “a shadowy group” of antivaxers (whose name the government doesn’t even want to disclose!) has threatened to unleash a doomsday denial of service attack on the Internet unless the world’s governing bodies agree to answer a very long list of questions about H5N1 vaccine research and development. If this is true, could a group of techies break the Web?

SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL 1906: THE AUTHORITIES GUNNED DOWN EARTHQUAKE VICTIMSSkip the somber expressions and corporate blather on TV and watch this lively discussion of how a catastrophic Windows blowout, a denial-of-service attack on the DNS system, or even general failure by a key ISP could impose a global blackout on all human systems. In theory, nothing might work after such a collapse—not even telephones. Unless our leaders can rehabilitate the carrier pigeon, they might have to meet up in person to begin talking about how to restore the Web. How would their flights even take off and land without the Internet? (Don’t miss the ending, in which three visionaries try to keep straight faces while they try to imagine that the American Internet Czar saves the day.)

Until a digital cataclysm takes place, we‘ll all just surf a tsunami of stories about crime. Heroic accounts of medical workers and bureaucrats scrapping to keep us alive have been replaced by yarns about opportunistic criminals, smugglers, black marketeers, thrill killers, and especially that Oklahoma mother who advertised on Craigslist for someone to infect her children because she thought God wanted them more than her husband did. Suddenly people are the problem, not some virus.

Mayors and governors are issuing shoot to kill orders. San Francisco ordered that its citizens be gunned down after the Earthquake of 1906 (which real estate promoters quickly rebranded as “the Great Fire”). During a smallpox outbreak six years earlier, San Francisco authorities moved to quarantine only Chinese people. They forced Chinese-American travelers to undergo an experimental vaccine.

But why are grim tales replacing promises of aid and vaccine distribution? Is it because no one wants to read about things that never happen? Few believe the government’s claims and promises these days.

Fear is the ticket. Immigrant bashing is Page One. (Make that home page.) I’m less scared of desperate foreigners than I am of American citizens who work so hard to make aliens sound worse than H5N1.

Souls on Trial

The state is reacting to stress like a bad immune system, breaking out in hysteria and hives instead of solving problems. We get mobilizations, rules, uniforms, complaints about enemies near and far. People become uneasy. This is what Germany must have been like in the 1930s.

I wish Tom Paine were here. This great revolutionary—who gave our country its very name—began The American Crisis with the chilling line: “These are the times that try men's souls.” He went on to argue that “panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before.”

God, I hope he’s right. An uh, esteemed Congresswoman from New Jersey just condemned me as one of 10 “extremist antivaxers” on her shortlist of Americans who ought to be silenced. This rabid Stalinist robot disguised as a conservative compared me to that loutish character Alan Krumwiede, from the movie Contagion. She didn’t even read what I said about H5N1 and vaccines. Antivaxers who sent me angry emails at that time will recall my saying that I looked forward to a vaccine. You might want to forward her a friendly copy of your irate email. Better yet, call her up and read it aloud. She may need the help.

I’ve heard from Nina’s friend from Tennessee. It turns out that she was laid off months ago, so my plea for help was sitting in the bank’s voicemail system until a friend who hadn’t been purged hacked her accumulated messages as a favor. Evidently everyone at the bank was so stressed and scared by the pandemic (plus cascading market crashes and layoffs) that no one noticed Nina was breaking down until her paranoia erupted at work. She accused her boss of poisoning the weekly cupcake harvest.

After 46 minutes of her wild talk, the bank escorted Nina out of the building. (It dumped the rest of her group two weeks later, keeping only the sweet-toothed boss.) Nina has since called her friend twice, saying very little from an untraceable phone. I’m told she doesn’t sound better but hasn’t gotten worse. She’s said to be “certain about all the wrong things.” It’s horrible and sad.