"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs -- it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I."
-- Orson Welles as Harry Lime
in The Third Man (1949)
I don't think I'm going to catch the virus. I'm fit. I rarely get sick; it's been at least a decade since I've had anything like the flu. I've never had respiratory problems. I don't fit into any of the groups considered to be high risk.
If I do get it, I don't think it will make me very sick. I probably won't show any symptoms.
This is what I (magically) think. I have no reason to believe any of this, and part of me genuinely believes it's bad luck to write a column where I say I don't think I'll get the virus because doing so can only increase my odds of getting the virus. (Because the coronavirus reads the newspaper.)
I don't want to end up like those people who denied the reality of the virus on social media only to become memes when the virus murdered them. That would be embarrassing, especially since I believe in the coronavirus and worry about it a lot. I just don't think it will get me.
The virus probably won't get you either. It won't get most of us.
Not because we are particularly virtuous, but because that's the way plagues work. Or at least the way they've always worked. We wouldn't know about the Black Death if it wiped out everyone. Plagues are not discreet; they always leave witnesses alive to tell the tale. Most of us will be witnesses.
Most of us will get to see the end of this, to follow the plot through to the end. We will get to look back, to sort and assess and force our collective experience into parable. (We are the meaning-seeking animal.) We will decide who were the heroes, who behaved decently, and who were the cowards: who was helpful and who got in the way.
I don't know that there will be war crime trials or a Truth and Reconciliation Committee but perhaps there should be. Looking at some of the people pushing cures--like Alex Jones (whose "reputation is amazing," according to the president of these United States) and Jim Bakker--and I think of Harry Lime, the charming monster played by Orson Welles in Carol Reed's The Thin Man (1949).
Lime is one of the most fascinating characters in the movies, a rogue-ish entrepreneur operating in post-war Vienna, stealing penicillin from military hospitals, diluting it, then selling it on the black market. Lime was invented by Graham Greene, who wrote the novel that formed the basis of Reed's movie. Greene may have based the character on his friend Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who, in 1963, would be outed as a double agent who passed secret information to the Soviet Union through World War II and the Cold War.
If you have seen The Third Man (and if you haven't, you should), you will no doubt remember the scene on the Ferris wheel where Lime tells his old friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) about his scheme and offers him a job. Martins, shaken, asks Lime if he's ever seen any of his victims.
"You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things," Lime replies. "Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax--the only way you can save money nowadays."
Lime is the clear villain of The Third Man, but most people who watch the movie end up liking him. (In fact, the character is so fascinating that Welles was brought back to reprise him in a British radio series that was set before the events of the film.) Welles' performance is charismatic and, God help us, his argument seems, if not compelling, at least comprehensible to many. Is it that much different from suggesting that we might have to sacrifice 200,000 people for the sake of the economy? After all, from the God's-eye view, they're just so many dots.
There are people determined to try to exploit this pandemic because there are some who see everything in purely transactional terms. Every crisis also presents opportunity, and there are people who will willfully and knowingly tell lies to grow their Twitter followers or to impress their Facebook "friends," much less advance a political agenda or make a little money.
And there are a lot of people who somehow lost the thread, blindly reposting whatever disinformation helps them sleep or scares them most.
I try to follow the best practices, though it's not always easy to determine what those are. I am staying home, mostly, and not really interacting with anyone other than my family and my appropriately distant neighbors and their dogs. (I slipped and nearly shook someone's hand the other day; he pulled away, smiling, and we stepped back and bowed to each other.)
When I go out I pull a gaiter over my mouth and nose. Not because I think it will protect me from the virus I'm not going to get anyway, or even because I think it might be effective in preventing an asymptomatic carrier from passing the virus on, but because I know there are people out there who for the time being are, with good reason, scared of seeing unmasked faces in the liquor store. It is merely courtesy.
I don't like wearing a mask. I don't think it will make any difference. (And I know you can find people on the Internet arguing that wearing a mask is less safe than not wearing a mask, but on the Internet you will find people arguing that the earth is flat and that Nickelback is the greatest rock 'n' roll band ever.) But I wear one, cheerfully, as a signal of solidarity to my fellow human beings who are anxious and confused and--unlike my special self--in actual danger of contracting this virus.
It is no problem to pull the gaiter up over my nose for a few minutes as I make my way amid the suckers and the mugs.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 05/10/2020