By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – Covid cases here last week were about 35-percent higher than during the peak of the summer awfulness, bad enough an increase to set a noteworthy record if setting such records hadn’t been our thing most of last month too. If help is on the way it is taking its sweet time. Each new release of an online vaccination calendar sets a new record time for a sellout.
Would that residents were so patient with pandemic protocols as state and national officials are with vaccine rollouts. It’s a broken system, a system quietly broken by bad actors for decades but openly sabotaged these last four. History will not forgive.
Wednesday brought performative rejoicing by poor thespians. The most to be said of the spectacle of America’s new leadership is it’s a tourniquet gradually tightening round a godawful wound pumping fitfully. One fears it should act as an excuse for worst impulses. For those suffering internet poisoning to recede further into encrypted systems and frothy swindles while the formerly vigilant lose their defiance, loosen their masks, and become part of the last wave of Americans to die from COVID-19.
A large fraction of a oncegreat country dying of despair. That’s what is going on, after all, when men crowd indoor areas masklessly. They want you to infer Big John has no fear, but what they’re really implying is Big John has nothing to lose. Many Americans, mostly men if we’re honest, have decided, in an otherwise-pubescent round of magical thinking, I’d rather die than have to cover my face to spare others a virus. There will always be hypemen and hangerson to lionize such figures; history is replete with small, weak men following big, dumb ones to terrible places.
What one hopes changes mostly from last week’s awkward transfer of power is the end of oxygen to the careless who consider themselves brave. It maddens them to be deprived attention. Who’d have thought changing a two-year-old’s diaper would be such a complete strategy for managing 1/3 of American men?
(American women, probably.)
Awkward indeed, pal – was that supposed to be a salespitch for Gallo-Chocolatito 2? More an expression of ambivalence. I’m happy the fight is happening. I should be thrilled it’s happening in this state. I’m not.
Last week’s announcement Juan Francisco Estrada’s March rematch with Roman Gonzalez will happen in Dallas brought strong and mixed emotions. My first thought was to request a credential. I’ll be five weeks past my second vaccination shot by then, safe as safe can be, and there are no trips I regularly make that are rewarding as my trips to Dallas. There are diversions aplenty for me in Big D. When I tire of those, too, there are the remarkable art museums of Fort Worth, including The Kimbell, one of our country’s great architectural achievements. There’s Chocolatito, too, for whom I traveled from this city to Los Angeles for his rematch with Rat King. The drive from here to Dallas is shorter than the flight to Los Angeles, and I would probably fly to Dallas (about 45 minutes, gate to gate).
But what of my diversions honestly exists in Dallas right now? Are the museums even sincerely open? I suppose there’s the joy of telling other men forevermore I was ringside when Chocolatito and Gallo made their extraordinary rematch, a fight that proved ruinously retiring for both. But men trying to impress other men is a large part of what’s made America the world’s most dangerous place to live for 12 months.
A chance to see old friends? Hardly. On the odd chance any of them travels from afar to see a 114-pound Nicaraguan and a 114-pound Mexican, how much do we see one another, masked, spaced six feet apart, unable to congregate safely more than 15 minutes at a time? The solution to this riddle, it strikes me as I type this, is not to defy a virus like a scorned lover but abstain instead.
The fight should be wonderful. The arena will publish a list of theatrical protocols no one observes – because freedom. The ultimate effect thousands of drinking, shouting men in an enclosed area has on the local ecosystem will be ignored then suppressed then forgotten. But in this city, where two prizefights and a bowl game happened at Alamodome the month before new Covid cases started breaking their own records, it’s a less-forgivable act to participate in a superspreader event, however well inoculated any individual feels.
No, I won’t be in Dallas in a couple months. Not in a pandemic.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry