We arrived in Connecticut yesterday evening at six, after driving 10 hours a day for four days. We covered 2,459 miles through 12 states and over nine major rivers: the Rio Grande, Pecos, Canadian, Cimarron, Mississippi, Ohio, Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson. I cited those mileage statistics and riverine names to give the journey the quality an epic adventure. Besides, I’m fond of euphonious words like Susquehanna and Cimarron. In actual fact, the trip was fairly tedious, mostly because its object wasn’t to see the country but to get across it as quickly as possible without contracting Covid19. We’ll have to wait about two weeks to find out if we were successful.

It was interesting to observe the difference in attitudes toward the virus west and east of the Mississippi. In the west, as noted in previous posts, most people were cavalier about it, almost displaying their unmasked faces and ungloved hands as badges of honor. I half-expected someone to cough in my (masked) face to show his disdain for my and Leslie’s cautiousness. From Illinois all the way through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, folks appeared to take the pandemic more seriously. A sign pasted prominently on the door of a service plaza in Pennsylvania warned customers that wearing masks and standing six feet apart were mandatory. That was remarkable for a state aptly described by James Carville as “Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in between.” Similar mandates apply here in Connecticut. When Leslie went to our local supermarket, Stop&Shop, virtually every customer had his or her nose and mouth covered and obeyed the one-way signs posted on the aisles (to avoid crowding). She compared the Stop&Shop to the markets in Arizona, where taking sensible precautions was optional. Oh, and I don’t want to forget that when we passed through Tulsa on Wednesday, Trump cultists were already lining up for tickets to the rally the President is holding tonight. They stood cheek by jowl and had pitched tents to await the great event.

I wonder, why this contrast? Is it that westerners see easterners as docile sheep who do as they’re told and themselves as open-range cowboys who’ll be damned before they’re corralled by government restrictions and cowed by a bug so small it’s invisible?  Nope. If the interviews I saw on the evening news were accurate, not all those people waiting in Tulsa called the west home; they came from all over the country. To put it in other terms, you don’t have to be a cowboy to be a cowboy. It’s a state of mind. Geography, however, plays a role. The virus struck hardest in populous eastern states. People in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, etc., had to take the pandemic seriously because other people were being hospitalized and dying all around them. Western states were spared the worst until recently. Arizona governor Doug Ducey, for example, prohibited municipalities from imposing restrictions or mandates stronger than he had — and his weren’t all that strong. To state things charitably, the idea was that some lives had to be risked for the economic well-being of most. Even so, some Arizona officials chafed at his orders. Mark Lamb, Sheriff of Pinal County (which borders the state capitol’s county, Mariposa), refused to enforce them, claiming they were unconstitutional (Lamb wears a cowboy hat, by the way). Well, there’s nothing like a hard right cross from reality to make a believer out of an infidel. Arizona is now a Covid19 hot spot, with hospitals reporting more than 2,000 new cases a day. One thousand medical professionals begged Ducey for a statewide mask mandate. The governor’s response has been an almost-er. He relented on his previous order, announcing on Wednesday that local governments could impose mask and other requirements to mitigate the virus’s spread. And Sheriff Lamb? He tested positive, and now says he would have done things differently had he only known…Which, of course, he should have.

To a degree, then, the prediction that New York governor Andrew Cuomo made weeks ago, during the height of the crisis in his state, has come to pass: “Our reality today will be your reality tomorrow.”

Yet, huge numbers of Americans are unable, no, unwilling, to confront that reality. They have cultivated a contempt for expert opinion, including the opinions of medical professionals; they are willfully ignorant; they believe, despite evidence to contrary, that the pandemic is left-wing hoax designed to cripple the economy and thus undermine the President’s chances for re-election. They lined up in advance to get into Tulsa’s Bok Center arena to cheer on their cult leader, nearly 20,000 of them. He’s rambling along right now, as I type these words. He’s not wearing any sissy mask, and neither are his followers. You’ve probably read that six of Trump’s campaign staff tested positive for Covid19. No doubt, as those despised medical experts have forecast, many in the crowd will also be infected. I hope none of them die, but if any do, I would like to submit their names for the 2020 Darwin award.