After a four-day drive across this great and troubled republic, we landed in Arizona on Dec. 6, and found that our county here, Santa Cruz,  geographically the smallest in the state at 1,238 square miles, has the second-highest vaccination rate for one dose — 89 percent. This compares with 66 percent for the entire state (56 percent for fully vaccinated). The anti-vaccination tribe is strong here, but I’ve observed that the spread of Omicron seems to have persuaded a lot of people to mask up and for businesses, churches, and other venues to issue mask mandates. Governor Ducey has tried to prohibit such requirements, but the virus’s spread has made his pronouncements irrelevant, like the fulminating of a daft king whose subjects have stopped listening.

After a couple of weeks in our small town of Patagonia, we traveled to Phoenix to spend the Christmas holidays with my sister and younger son Marc, daughter-in-law, Erin, and grandchildren Livia, Ana, and Sofia. They flew in from their home in Florida. We all had a fine time, climbing Camelback Mountain, visiting the aquarium, riding horses in the Tonto National Forest; however, Covid hovered over us. On the day before Christmas, Livia, who is 18, woke up feeling headachy and feverish, classic symptoms. We scoured the neighborhood for a testing site, found one that couldn’t give us results for four or five days due to the holiday, and then went on a pilgrimage for a home test kit and a thermometer. The latter was easily obtained, but the former required trips to three pharmacies before one was found. Livia’s temperature was normal, and she tested negative for the virus. Crisis averted.

The pandemic is approaching its 2d anniversary. Two years is of course not a long time, yet the days before the pandemic struck now seem to belong to a distant era. Like many people, I’ve wearied of it and grown fatalistic — if I get Covid, I’ll get it, so I’ll just try to carry on, hoping for the best. Meanwhile, despite 800,000 deaths in this country alone, members of the GAM (Great American Moron) tribe continue to refuse getting vaccinated, and to believe that the pandemic is some sort of hoax perpetrated by a U.S. government intent on depriving them of their sacred liberties. This evidences a different kind of virus — a disease of stubborn ignorance infecting not only the uneducated but people who ought to know better. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, in a fund-raising email to his supporters, called for Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, to be thrown in jail. And, mirabile dictu, the supreme GAM leader, Donald Trump, was booed by tribal members when he urged them to get vaccinated.

I was reflecting on this phenomenon after waking up at 5 am to watch the launch of the James Webb SpaceTelescope on Christmas morning. A French-built rocket roared aloft from the launch site in French Guiana, carrying the scope from “a tropical rainforest to the edge of time” in the words of a NASA announcer. The JWST, up to 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, will voyage to a point in space one million miles from Earth, from which it will peer back 13.6 billion years to the birth of the first stars and galaxies. The scope is an incredibly complex engineering marvel, 20 years in the making, and a testament to the human drive to  probe the deepest mysteries of the universe. Although its construction was a collaborative effort by NASA and the European and Canadian Space agencies, it was mostly a U.S. project. Watching the Ariane rocket soar into the overcast skies, I pondered a terrestrial mystery: How could a society that produces engineers, technicians, and scientists capable of designing and building such an instrument also produce millions of idiots who defy commonsense measures like vaccinations, who think the 2020 elections were rigged, and who believe in conspiracy theories so outlandish a nine-year-old would laugh at them.

 

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