My Corona Diary (Work-in-progress)

By Larry Blumenfeld

By the sixth year of Trump’s first term, there was no talk of elections. The “rolling pandemics,” each representing a new viral strain, left only precious time for anything we used to call a regular life, let alone politics. Besides, who could be against the side of “survival”? Here was a cause that at last united all of us even as it lured us into previously unimaginable degrees of selfishness and separation.

The medical and military officers, pretty much the only people out on the streets save for brief “green-light” days, were hard to tell apart. The all wore the same uniforms. They all had the same blank expression on their faces during the twice daily alerts broadcast over ALEXA, the state-run video-streaming system. Trump’s nightly program, a revival of his “Apprentice” series, was the most watched show. He’d handed over daily duties of governance to the generals and doctors that directed nearly all labor and information so that he could “lead by entertaining,” he’d said, as if that wasn’t what he had done all along.