Random Thoughts

April 24, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     First, let me get this out and off my chest.  I'm sick and tired of Elon Musk and his car company and his silly space ideas and his big proposed bullshit solutions to big problems, solutions that never materialize.  Most of all, I'm tired of seeing his weird face plastered all over the news.  He looks like he's from another planet, so maybe he should just go back home, already.  Those of you who don't live in California probably don't see as much of him as I do, because he's based out here and he and his Tesla company are the darlings of local industry.  But I'm reasonably sure you see more of him than is warranted by anything he actually does.  I mean, come on!  Electric cars?  They were around before the internal combustion engine caught on.  Nothing new by way of technology there, folks.    Well, I'm glad we had this little talk.  Now on to some other more important things.

     Like many of you, I've been cautiously venturing out to the grocery store on occasion, to lay in provisions, like they used to say in the cowboy TV shows.  "Where's your paw, Mark?"  "He went into town to get provisions."  This would be a once-a-month kind of thing, with the Rifleman, or Hoss Cartwright, or whoever, going to the mercantile store and buying a wagon load of flour, some sorghum (whatever the hell that is), hard tack biscuits, bacon, and lard.  You know, the stuff you need for everyday eating.  Well, like the pioneers of old, I foray every two weeks or so into my local mercantile, namely Walmart, to get a shitload of stuff.  On each successive trip I notice new virus-prevention safety measures in place, making me wonder why many of them weren't in place a month or more ago.  Yesterday I went, and for the first time I didn't see a single person without a mask.  Great.  Some people wore them sulkily, as if they were children who were only following the rules because they HAD to, but most wore them dutifully and with some hope that they'd do some good.  There are also now, in theory at least, one-way aisles, to reduce the amount of passing too closely with carts.  The signage in this regard is rather subtle, even wimpy, with little one-foot squares on the floor at the beginning of each aisle indicating whether you should not enter, in red, or "walk this way" green signs with arrows.  (These latter got me to singing "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith over and over in my head as I strolled the aisles.)  The thing is, people who grocery shop are not looking at the floor all that much, because, let's face it, the groceries are not on the floor.  The more observant and better-informed-in-advance among us did notice the directional signs, but many--perhaps a third or more--did not, and simply wandered up and down the aisles irrespective of whether they were going the right way or not.  Once a woman in front of me chewed somebody out for this, but for the most part the failure to observe the directional signs went unnoticed, or at least only silently noticed, as we all concentrated on our tasks at hand, and some of us on keeping the hell away from other people.  Even the staff didn't try to enforce the directional signs.  In fact, our friendly Walmart customer service crew seemed to be the least observant of any of the rules; though they all wore masks, they continued to gather together closely in little tete-a-tetes as if the mere fact of wearing masks made them invulnerable and immune.  Or maybe they're just being fatalistic, considering the inherent danger of their low-paid, no future jobs.  Like coal miners of old.  But talk about setting bad examples for the shopping public, particularly because where I shop is under what you might call a triple edict:  a local Palm Springs municipal order to wear masks and keep at least 6 feet away from anyone else; a Riverside County fiat to do the same; and a social distancing order of a similar nature from the California state governor, suggesting masks but not ordering them. 

     These trips to the store have been, as I say, an adventure on a par with Chuck Connors taking the wagon into town through Indian territory.  (This latter comment is not completely a joke, since a good portion of the land in the City of Palm Springs, perhaps half of it, is in fact owned by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, and rented to the local white man, including possibly the land on which Walmart is situated.)  As an observer of the human condition, I have been noticing, for several shopping trips during the virus crisis, that grocery shoppers are a singularly preoccupied lot.  I've only noticed this because I'm on alert, otherwise I'd be just as preoccupied.  Shoppers are on a mission, hunting and gathering, and tend to get lost in thought or mystified while looking for something high on a shelf.  For many, if not most, shoppers, this general approach to shopping has not abated much at all.  It's as if most people are incapable of the potentially life-saving multi-tasking required of them in these times.  One of course wants to buy groceries, as always.  But one also ought to want to be mindful of others, and to steer clear of them.  Not so, at least for the majority of folks.  They just get lost in their little worlds, as they always have done when grocery shopping.  Think about it: when was the last time anybody at a grocery store gave a shit about anybody else except in the most perfunctory way?  Sure, you try not to run into anybody or kick any children, but otherwise, it's every shopper for him- or herself. and the devil take the hindmost.  Today we're in a unique situation where we are being asked to take not only our own health and safety into consideration, but simultaneously the health and safety of others.  It's as if someone asked us to make sure the people driving next to us had their seat belts fastened.  Absurd, right?  Who gives a shit about the person next to you on the road, as long as they don't hit you.

     Now we're being asked to stay away from each other not just to make sure we don't get sick, but to make sure they don't get sick from us, unbeknownst to us.  This latter half of the equation has proved to be too much for many--Republicans in particular, who by definition are not good at empathizing with or caring about anyone else, otherwise they wouldn't be Republicans.  In fact, this characteristic of Republicans (by which of course I mean Trump supporters) has been their hallmark lately, as they hide behind a perverted interpretation of the First Amendment to protest stay-at-home orders and get out and go back to doing what they feel like doing.   Well shit, we'd all like to get back to doing what we feel like doing--going to restaurants, walking closely beside others, not wearing masks.  But some of us, who appreciate the concept of the common good, have decided to subordinate our immediate desires to that good.  Right wingers, led by the example set by their leader, are not only heedless and ignorant of the concept of the public good, but also apparently incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.  Government of the selfish, by the selfish, and for the selfish is their credo as they careen down the highway of destiny.  Can you imagine anyone during the middle ages parading down the streets proclaiming their RIGHT to get the bubonic plague, or to give it to someone else?  People would have thought they were crazy.  They barely understood the disease, or the germ theory of disease, in anything like the way we understand it today, but one thing everyone knew was that they sure as fuck didn't want to get it, and if they could help it, they didn't want to give it to anyone else.

     Well, that's Republicans for you.  As someone once said, you can't argue with stupid.