Thursday, August 12, 2021

Missouri: COVID-19 Unfolding, Part 8888: Redshirts

 

Captain Kirk and a cadre of his expendable redshirts. Source:

 

In Star Trek fandom lore, a "redshirt" is an expendable character in a series episode, usually an extra without a name credit. Instead, they might be identified on the cast roll as "First Ensign" or "Third Security Guard." 

The red-shirted extras are the characters who stand a good chance of being killed off by the local malevolent alien that the Star Trek crew encounter on its travels. 

 

Star Trek redshirts dead. Source: Wikimedia
Star Trek redshirts dead. Source: Wikimedia

Captain Kirk and his officers are safe from death or long-term disability. Naturally.

 

Star Trek redshirt mask meme. Source: ScreenRant
Star Trek redshirt mask meme. Source: ScreenRant

 

To the elected leaders and anti-protection propagandists such as Trump, DeSantis, and Parsons - let's call them all corona collaborators - we are just redshirts. We are expendable. 

What's the payoff for the corona collaborators? 

In the short term: To amass or protect their power. 

COVID's public health protections offer no less a convenient common enemy than the usual threats to The God-Fearing American Way of Life: Communists, radical socialists, and immigrants.

The payoff to DeSantis, Trump, et al is only in the short term because, inevitably, their political capital will crumble when the number of dead or wounded redshirts reaches some as-yet-unknown tipping point. 


Monday, August 9, 2021

Missouri: COVID-19 Unfolding, Part 8888: On Watching The Walking Dead

Carlos Flores, "Refogios," exhibited at the Chamizal, El Paso, Texas. October 2016.
Carlos Flores, "Refogios," exhibited at the Chamizal, El Paso, Texas. October 2016.

 

I'm visiting Missouri for a time.

My hostess, Kate, has Netflix. All 10 of the past seasons of The Walking Dead are there. 

In October 2016, nearing the endgame of the ever-more appalling Trump campaign and its collateral hate-mongering, I abruptly abandoned The Walking Dead in the middle of Season 7, Episode 1 - in angry disgust at what felt to me like firsthand, sadistic, slow-motion, elongated mental torture, especially, perhaps, because I personally knew women and men who had been terrorized, in real life, by people exactly like this Walking Dead character. I never returned.

Until this month. 

August 2021. 

With the second tsunami of COVID surging over our land, largely the result of too many Americans who opted out (and continue to opt out) of the two most powerful weapons against our real-life viral undead: vaccines and masks. 

So as soon as I saw all 10 seasons of The Walking Dead on Kate's Netflix menu, I knew.

The Walking Dead was exactly what I needed. Need

I knew it because: 

I first started watching The Walking Dead in Opelousas. One day, after I had binge-watched the series for some days or weeks, I was in the Opelousas Walmart, and I experienced a fascinating phenomenon. In rounding the end cap from one aisle and into another, my mental antennae bounced up. My brain snapped into alert mode, my senses at the ready for ....... what? 

Oh. Zombies, apparently! 

I laughed at myself, but it made me think.

Watching the fictional The Walking Dead had awakened something in me. I had already discovered how the constant tension and fearful suspense of each episode had been cathartic in releasing real-life tensions I didn't even know I had.  

But this new phenomenon at Walmart - the alertness, the readiness for what might happen - it felt good. It imbued me with a feeling of power. Weird, but ... there it was.

The magic is still there today. In watching The Walking Dead upon my return to Missouri, in this second tidal wave of COVID, it empowers me. That short-lived thrill at the beginning of July, when I relished a summer of dance and live music and meeting with old friends - dead. So, too, is the mourning for what I thought the summer would be. 

In its place, thanks in part to The Walking Dead, is a pragmatic acceptance and a calm determination to just deal with it. I've had the vaccinations. I never stopped wearing masks inside stores. If reliable medical sources tell me a third booster shot is appropriate in the future, then I'll get it.

I walk out of stores where too many employees and too many customers have naked faces.

Not out of fear, hell no. 

No, I carry a pragmatic, calm determination out of the acceptance that:

  • The viral undead are just going to do what all viruses do. They don't give a fuck about our faith in a deity, about our age, about our level of fitness, our gender, our politics, or what news channels we watch. They have only one mission: Infect, reproduce, and spread.
  • At least 50% of the people I encounter on the outside opted out of the vaccines or masks. At this point, I don't care why.
  • I walk among infected hosts every time I leave my safe shelter.

During this madness, I turn to my Cs: practical caution, confidence, calm, and courage. The Walking Dead boosts my mental game. I walk as if I were carrying a sword like Michonne's.


Michonne and her sword, The Walking Dead.
Michonne and her sword, The Walking Dead. Credit: AMC


Note: But when I get to Season 7, I'll skip the first five episodes. I won't willingly expose myself to abuse again, neither in real life nor make-believe.


 

 

 


 

 

Sunday, August 1, 2021

Word of the Year: Joy 8: Here and Now, Boys

 

Parrots, Kansas City Zoo, Missouri. September 2018.
Parrots, Kansas City Zoo, Missouri. September 2018.

 

In Island, by Aldous Huxley, mynahs sound a chorus throughout the land. The birds' refrain consists of two messages: 

Attention! 

Here and now, boys, here and now! 

 

Character Susila MacPhail explains:

 'That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.'"


When I catch myself in a fruitless exercise of rewriting my past or fretting about a future, I say aloud: Here and now, boys, here and now! 

Look around you, girl. Live where you be now. 

It is inside moments, even in fearful times, where I can see joy.

If I choose.