A Journal of the Plague Year 2021–Chapter 230

A Unification Church mass wedding.

Monday, August 30

People today are looking frantically to relinquish responsibility. 

There’s just too much to feel responsible for. There are the unending weather/climate disasters including Hurricanes Henri and Ida—and their link to your gas-guzzler and plastic-bag addiction. The decision about whether you and/or your dependents should get the COVID vaccination. The failed military adventures from Iraq to Afghanistan, which thanks to W.’s administration many Americans supported. The fool’s gold promises of globalization, which said that trade competition and lost industrial jobs would all balance out to everyone’s advantage. And the refugee crises from Italy to the Mexico-U.S. border. Lots of people just can’t take it all and long for somebody else to give them direction.

The novelist Don DeLillo has long understood Americans’ desire to let somebody else for god’s sake make the decisions. Even planning what’s for dinner or what to watch on the boob tube is just too much…not to mention how to find or commit to a mate.

DeLillo’s Mao II begins with a depiction of a 1980s mass marriage ceremony of  Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s followers—an event in which over 4,000 people got hitched to the absolute strangers that Master Moon dictated they should wed. In the vast audience, the father of one bride ponders the bridal parties: “They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fueled by credulousness….They follow the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought.”

Surely this is the impulse at work in some people’s substitution of Ivermectin, a de-worming medication intended for livestock, for the science-supported COVID vaccine. FOX News’s personalities Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham have all recommended Ivermectin as a COVID cure—as they seek a similar blind-faith audience response to that commanded by Rev. Moon and, for that matter, to the loyalty so many have given to Trump.

But Carlson et al. should take warning: Today, Moon’s Unification Church has withered. With no more than a few thousand members, it has split into three, with the largest of these led by Moon’s wife, Had Ja Han Moon. (Moon himself died in 2012 after declaring his church closed.) Smoke and mirrors will only take you so far.

Dinner: cold sliced roast beef, corn on the cob, and a green salad with yogurt dressing.

Entertainment: Episodes of the Italian courtroom drama The Trial (Il processo).

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–Chapter 181

Monday, December 21

Could there be a moment more suited to the work of a particular writer than our current period is to the jottings of Don DeLillo, the poet of unanticipated catastrophe and its handmaiden, paranoia? Way before MAGA and its antifascist dissectors, DeLillo invented a university Department of Hitler Studies for his 1985 novel White Noise. Was it Bhopal or Chernobyl—or maybe intimations of COVID-19—that, in the same work, led the author to give a primary role to an “airborne toxic event”?

And as luck—or possibly the clairvoyance of the Scribner marketing department—would have it, DeLillo has a new novel just hitting the shelves of the few unshuttered bookstores. I don’t have access to the just-published The Silence, but according to The New York Times Book Review, its themes include a technology-dependent humanity abruptly deprived of its fix… and the possibility that the end of days has arrived. It just may be the “eschaton”—a new word to me, thanks be to the Times reviewer.

As my luck would have it, I have just begun reading an old DeLillo work, also suited to our current moment, Great Jones Street. This 1973 effort focuses on a burnt-out rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, who has abruptly deserted his band’s tour and entered a period of self-isolation in an unheated and deteriorating lower Manhattan building. Looking out the window, he sees little other than a crust of brown snow on the window sill, ubiquitous derelicts, and and old woman “bundled in pounds of rags, an image in the penciled light of long retreat from Moscow.” It is, he says, a “time of prayerful fatigue,” of unbroken solitude.

After a few days, his girlfriend Opel arrives. They live mostly in the room’s bed, and “each day passed, detached from time,” as she waits for her drug-trafficking “operative” to arrive. Then Opel mysteriously dies, and Bucky becomes ever more withdrawn from the outside world.

In time, the lost “mountain tapes” are passed along to him. In the vein of Bob Dylan’s “basement tapes,” these are unpolished, “genuinely infantile” recordings of Bucky accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. The songs are “strange little autistic ramblings.” But the fabled tapes offer him a way back, a chance to remake himself, he figures.

There are other themes in Great Jones Street, some of which seem more of its period than of our own. There’s an ironically named commune, Happy Valley Farm, which has stolen from a “top-secret U.S. Guv. installation” a “mind-crushing” drug that everyone now wants. (Does anyone still do drugs so recklessly?) There’s a Timothy Leary/Doctor Robert-like “scientific genius of the underground” who’s called Dr. Pepper. And while our age knows all too well the relentless pursuit of celebrity, Bucky’s is marked by rock stars who, Dylan-like, seek isolation—which only increases the desire of the press and the public to see and hear from them. “The less you say, the more you are,” remarks a television interviewer who traps Bucky in the hallway of his building. 

Great Jones Street putters along until it finally sputters out. It’s more of a mood piece than a real novel, but the mood is appropriate to our wintry period of desolation and hoped-for rebirth. Bucky never returns to the limelight and lives on only in the form of rumors. There may be worse fates.

Dinner: Penne with roasted red peppers and goat cheese and a lettuce, pear, and snap peas salad.

Entertainment: Netflix’ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.