The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

ON this day, there were 693,274 index card-sized white plastic flags. They were neatly arrayed in 149 sections, and a light breeze stretched out many of them so the messages they bore could be read by passersby. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. Summer humidity had given way to a fresh cooler wave that made early autumnal temperatures feel a bit like San Diego.

And anytime the weather in Washington, DC, feels like San Diego, that’s a really good thing.

But visitors to the vast field of white symbols fluttering in the breeze in the shadow of the Washington Monument were not reveling in the weather.

Most were openly crying. Emotion had simply overwhelmed them.

In a city full of memorials, a new installation honouring America’s COVID-19 human losses has surpassed all others but the superlative Vietnam War memorial in its emotional punch and impact on visitors.

Each four by six-inch pennant carries a message from a family member or friend of a corona-virus casualty. Often, only the name appears. Sometimes, longer messages are crammed into the small space. Many are heartbreakingly poignant.

This powerful art installation, entitled “In America: Remember,” is the creation of a Maryland artist whose genius has made a more powerful statement than any politician ever could make about the tragedy of a pandemic that still claims hundreds of lives in the US every day.

Spread out on several acres of Washington’s national mall to the north and west of the Washington Monument, the neat sections resemble the somber, orderly pattern of the Arlington Memorial Cemetery across the Potomac River in Virginia. On a recent weekday morning, perhaps 50 visitors navigated the memorial, many overcome by feelings of grief and loss.

An elderly woman crouched low, gently fingering a plastic memory and speaking softly to her dear departed one. Nearby, a young mother and her daughter ran toward the memorial in an exuberant gambol, only to suddenly halt, smiles disappearing, at the sheer scope of the nation’s loss.

Many of the messages memorialised the elderly, with numerous loving odes to grandparents lost to the virus. Others lamented lives cut cruelly short.

It’s simple enough to add a new tribute to these overflowing fields. Patient, polite volunteers explain the process to visitors at tent stations around the memorial’s perimeter. There are a couple of newer sections, yet unfilled, at the edges, and a few people are slowly, painstakingly pushing their metal standards into the ground as they commemorated those lost.

This exhibition is not a cemetery. It is a solemn, temporary remembrance that will soon be moved indoors at a nearby museum. But the installation’s quiet dignity represents a stark contrast with the pointless political polemic that fills up Washington and much of the US these days. There’s no blather here.

It is nonetheless tempting to wish that politicians like Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron De-Santis and Texas Governor Greg Abbot could be compelled to spend some time here. Perhaps they would gain a greater appreciation for the misery their indifference and callow ambition have helped to foster.

As if to underscore that point, the south portico of the White House is clearly visible from these fields of the fallen. It was from that lofty porch that Trump appeared in a photo op after returning from a hospitalisation due to his own bout with COVID-19, waving to the cameras and continuing to downplay the severity of the pandemic.

Trump should certainly speak out much more forcefully on the need for the public to get the vaccine and observe responsible health practices, as should his disciples. Hopefully that time is coming.

Hopeful signs in virus fight

Meantime, there are encouraging signs that the US and other large nations are actually coming to grips with this public health catastrophe. Companies such as AT&T and YouTube, as well as nations like China, have moved positively to limit the spread of the virus. The telecom giant is beginning to require vaccinations. YouTube has pledged to excise nonfactual nonsense about the dangers of the vaccine. China has said no foreign visitors may attend the upcoming Winter Olympic Games.

Some states and public health providers have instituted mask and/or vaccination mandates for all employees.

Numerous news articles have reported that the percentages of employees fully vaccinated has risen quickly since imposition of these requirements, often to a figure well over ninety percent.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have recalled that General George Washington’s decision to require smallpox vaccinations for his Continental Army was a significant factor in America’s Revolutionary War success against the British. Public resistance to other vaccines such as smallpox again in the late 19th Century and polio in the 1950s were controversial and contentious in ways similar to what we are witnessing now with the public outcry on the COVID vaccine. The US has been here before.

In many ways, the US is still defined in the minds of many Americans – and millions of others all across the world – as the 19th Century land of rugged individualism and solitary defiance. From James Cagney to John Wayne to Clint Eastwood, American movie heroes have followed their own compass and resisted the tide of public values conformity.

That’s why they are so intriguing and even inspirational to movie-goers. Daniel Craig’s James Bond, returning to movie screens tomorrow in a COVID-delayed opening, routinely frustrates his bosses with his defiant individualism.

Americans idealise individual freedom. So do many in countries around the world. But citizens do not have the right to pursue their own values in a fashion that causes harm to others well-being and, more broadly, to entire communities.

Over a century ago, a legal case presaging what we’re seeing now made its way to the American Supreme Court. In 1905, the high court ruled against a cleric who refused to take the smallpox vaccine. The Court ruled that the Constitution did not allow Americans to always behave however they wished.

“Real liberty for all could not exist,” said the court’s majority opinion, if people could act “regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

It’s fair to speculate about what the current US Supreme Court might rule in a similar case. Maybe we will find out.

Major League is back

Major League Baseball in the US launched its “second season” on Tuesday evening with the sport’s most celebrated rivals facing off in Boston. The Red Sox beat the Yankees 6-2 in a game that was never really suspenseful. Now the Sox will face the champions of their own American League East Division and defending AL champion Tampa Bay Rays, who earned the best record in the AL this year.

While American baseball may have ceded its position as the most popular US sport to football over the past decades since a devastating 1994 players’ strike that forced cancellation of that year’s World Series, it still exercises a strong hold on sports fans in the US, particularly outside the state of Florida where the Miami Marlins and the Rays find it persistently difficult to attract large crowds to their weather-proof stadiums.

As a consequence, the two Florida teams rank near the bottom in a list of baseball’s top 30 payrolls. The Marlins, with a 2021 wage bill of $58m, ranked third from lowest in payroll – and dead last in attendance. Despite winning 100 games, the Rays were 26th in payroll and 28th in attendance at their rather dismal Tropicana Field concrete dome stadium. That’s the bunker where fly balls sometimes get caught in the steel grid that supports the stadium’s bulky superstructure.

The Rays still win on the field, thanks to a superlative organisation that survived the defection seven years ago of General Manager Andrew Friedman to the Los Angeles Dodgers. There, he oversees by far baseball’s largest payroll ($267m) and largest attendance, in addition to a lucrative regional cable TV deal that sustains the team’s aggressive pursuit of more and more talent.

Payroll spending still broadly correlates with on-field baseball success in the only major American sport still without a salary cap. Other AL playoff teams include Houston (4th in payroll), Boston (6th), and the Chicago White Sox (15th). In the National League, the Dodgers are joined by St. Louis (9th), San Francisco (10th), Atlanta (12th) and the Milwaukee Brewers (19th).