Tag: gene lyons
Get Vaccinated Now, Mask Up Sometimes -- And Keep Using Common Sense

Get Vaccinated Now, Mask Up Sometimes -- And Keep Using Common Sense

Frankly, I've never understood why face masks were ever such a big deal. There's a deadly viral disease abroad in the land; it spreads through aerosolized particles emitted when people talk, sneeze or breathe heavily, particularly in crowded, indoor spaces. It seemed only a matter of common sense and common courtesy to wear a mask at the grocery store.

I don't like wearing socks either. But if they protected me, the people I love, and Maggie the Kroger pharmacist from intensive care or the graveyard, I'd wear two pairs at a time. What persuaded me was during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when Maggie sewed masks for the whole pharmacy staff back when masks were still hard to find. I'd already learned to trust her judgement.

Possibly the dumbest non-Trump moment during the whole Covid-19 saga (ingested bleach lately?) was when a crowd of fools in Idaho made a spectacle of themselves burning face masks to express their vigilant opposition to… Well to what? The existence of viruses? The reality of the pandemic? The tyranny of public health departments?

Politicians prating about lost "liberty" over face mask requirements struck me as similarly childish. The government also requires me to wear pants in public. Is that an infringement of my First Amendment right as an American to exhibit my posterior?

Nowhere near as dumb, because essentially harmless, are the many Americans who vow to continue wearing face masks pretty much forever. There's a meme going around on Facebook asking people if they plan to ditch the fool things in the wake of the CDC's (admittedly clumsy) pronouncement that fully-vaccinated individuals no longer need them.

See, the data's in: the vaccines work.

So far, more than a million fraidy-cats affirm that they plan to go masked indefinitely: MAGA hats for Democrats. Ever in search of ratings-building controversy, CNN news personalities have taken to pretending that the CDC guidelines are deeply confusing and potentially dangerous.

No, they're not. And yes, even the most dedicated worry-warts will gradually shed their masks in coming weeks as wearing one makes you look like a hopeless dork and CNN moves on to the next damned thing.

Even my sainted wife—a worry-wart if ever one was—will eventually lose every mask she owns and neglect to replace them. We'll be finding them in couch cushions and under ottomans for months. She forgot her mask at our favorite (outdoor) pizza place the other night, and I said nothing. See, I'd accidentally left mine in the car.

Everybody at our table was long-vaccinated, so what was the point?

But I'll keep going masked into the Kroger store for as long as they ask. So will everybody else. It's no big deal. That's why all this TV chatter about a one-size-fits-all national policy is beside the point. We live in a strong blue enclave in the deep red state of Arkansas. Locally, common sense compliance with mask mandates has been strong.

Out in the boondocks, however, it's a different story. The New York Times' interactive coronavirus tracker tells me that rural Perry County, where we lived until fairly recently, is at "high risk" for infection. Our friend Maurice says that nobody but him wears a mask at the filling station/feed store that serves as a community hub. As a former college professor, people expect him to be eccentric.

However, there have also been no Covid deaths and no new cases countywide for several weeks running. So you can almost understand why only 30 percent of citizens there have been vaccinated. Most residents of the county are cows.

Almost, that is, but not quite.

Vaccine hesitancy doesn't shock me. Apparently misled by Walter Winchell—the Tucker Carlson of his day—my own sainted mother refused to let me be vaccinated against polio. She had a superstitious nature and mistrusted expertise of all kinds. I finally got the shot after joining the Peace Corps.

Back here in town, masking customs have been evolving steadily since the vaccine arrived. For months, protocol at outdoor restaurants has been to wear one until you sit down, and then remove them. Pretty much the same custom now prevails at indoor restaurants that have recently reopened. Call me reckless, but I have never worn a mask during our daily dog park outing, merely kept my distance, as most people there do.

Dogs, not so much.

Compared to most people, dealing with the pandemic has been fairly easy for my wife and me. I've worked at home for many years, and she's retired. We've always preferred each other's company to anybody else's. We both read a lot, and I watch ballgames on TV. Since getting our shots last February, we've been re-emerging like two box turtles emerging from hibernation.

Take a few steps, pause, and then take a few more: the only national masking policy we really need.
Should We 'Cancel' That Roth Biographer Just Because He's A Creep?

Should We 'Cancel' That Roth Biographer Just Because He's A Creep?

As a rule, I read few biographies, and certainly not of authors, people whose most significant life events are spent alone. In my case, Churchill, Swift, and Dostoyevsky are the exceptions that prove the rule; world-historical figures who can't be understood outside the context of their times.

So I'd already decided not to bother with Blake Bailey's ballyhooed new book, Philip Roth: The Biography—even though Roth was a friendly acquaintance who'd given me help and encouragement way back when. After all, his novels were semi-autobiographical; his memoirs a veritable hall of mirrors.

I agreed entirely with what Bill Clinton said in awarding Roth the National Medal of Arts: "What James Joyce did for Dublin, what William Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Philip Roth has done for Newark." (Actually, historian Eric Alterman wrote the lines.) Roth rendered the city's dense particularity universal through the stories he told.

To know Roth at his best, read his 1997 novel American Pastoral, a penetrating portrayal of the "the indigenous American berserk" of the 1960s.

Actually, it was Newark that got us acquainted. I'd reviewed his baseball book The Great American Novel, stressing that he wasn't so much a "Jewish novelist"—a label he resisted—as a "New Jersey regionalist."

New Jersey, the Smart Aleck State.

He wrote asking how somebody in Arkansas knew all that, and urged me to expand upon the theme. The result was an essay called "The Artificial Jewboy," about growing up Irish-Catholic among Jews in neighboring Elizabeth. (One character in American Pastoral, a former Miss New Jersey, has my exact biography, right down to St. Genevieve's parish.) My essay contains more clumsy sentences and awkward kicks at the stars than the rest of the book it's printed in. But Roth saw something worthwhile and helped get it published. I've remained eternally grateful.

He'd even helped me see an aspect of my wife's character I'd taken for granted. After a long lunch at his country place in Connecticut, we'd gone for a walk in the woods. An excellent mimic, Roth could be terribly funny. He got Diane in a single take. What he liked most about her, he said, was her reserve.

"She doesn't care how famous I am," he said. "She's trying to figure out if she likes me in spite of it."

He thought that she hadn't yet decided.

That's Diane, who tended to be leery of literary narcissists based upon a couple of hard-drinking celebrity authors we'd encountered along the way.

Through her daddy the coach, I told him, she'd grown up knowing famous ballplayers. Roth respected that. Groupies are the bane of all famous people.

Anyway, although we'd lost touch years before he died in 2018, I figured I had no need to read his biography.

I knew he'd had a couple of terrible marriages; for all his perceptiveness, he appeared to have terrible judgement about women. Or maybe it was a two-way street, as in my experience of life, it normally is. He'd always had fierce critics among feminists and professional Jews: the very fiercest have tended to be both.

A literary provocateur, Roth was far too easily provoked.

How bitterly ironic, then, that his seeming need to win arguments even after death led him to choose an authorized biographer who, within weeks of his book's successful launch, stood accused of rape and everything short of child molesting by a chorus of women—many of whom he'd pursued starting when they were his eighth grade students in a New Orleans middle school.

Faced with those accusations, which Blake Bailey and his attorney vigorously (if none too persuasively) deny, publisher W.W. Norton abruptly took the book out of print. At one level, the affair resembles Roth's novel The Human Stain, about a professor hounded for using the word "spook" (in the sense of "ghost") to describe missing students who turned out to be Black.

Is it right to "cancel" a book because the author's a creep? Put that way, no. The book exists independent of its author. As Eric Alterman puts it, "Many writers are terrible people. (I am perhaps not so great, myself.)"

I'll second that.

Or at least I would have before reading Eve Payton Crawford's Slate essay about Blake Bailey, her eighth grade teacher who raped her when she was a college girl of 19. "You really can't blame me," he said when she cried. "I've wanted you since the day we met."

She was 12 that day. "I still wore underwear with Minnie Mouse on them," Crawford writes. Along with an exhaustively-reported companion piece titled "Mr. Bailey's Class," Slate depicts a sexual predator in action, flattering young teens and becoming deeply involved in their personal lives for years before making his move.

A very sick puppy who made the mistake of soliciting fame, and the fate of whose Philip Roth biography interests me not at all.

What Makes March Madness So Deeply, Beautifully American

What Makes March Madness So Deeply, Beautifully American

To give you some idea, my personal Road to the Final Four, as the TV announcers call it, began in junior high. My buddy Don and I were apprentice basketball junkies, shooting buckets and getting into pickup games every afternoon. New Jersey kids, we became obsessed with the great Jerry West—"Zeke from Cabin Creek," they called him—and his West Virginia Mountaineers.

There wasn't much college basketball on TV back then, but we followed West's exploits from WWVA radio in Wheeling, which came booming in after dark. West Virginia was to us a remote and fabled land. We reveled in tales of Jerry West's carefree backwoods childhood, so different from our own. (Basically a fantasy too: West had a troubled family, and has struggled with depression all his life.)

After the games, WWVA played country music. I became probably the only kid in school to own three Hank Williams albums, not to mention Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys. By day, I listened to blues musicians like B.B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland on WNJR in Newark. This led indirectly to my enrolling at the University of Virginia, to marrying an Arkansas coach's daughter, and eventually following her home from school.

Speaking of remote and fabled lands.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. West's Mountaineers made it to the 1959 championship game, losing by one point to California. My own fascination with what's now called "March Madness," however, was only beginning. To me, the NCAA men's college basketball tournament is the nation's premier sporting event, and I'm so glad it's back.

For sheer Americana, nothing tops it. I still feel great gusts of Woody Guthrie-style patriotism just reading the first-round matchups. The Creighton Bluejays vs. the Gauchos of Cal Santa Barbara: An Omaha Jesuit school playing an elite public university with its own beach. Or how about Iona College (New York) vs. Alabama (Tuscaloosa)? Oregon vs. Virginia Commonwealth? I could go on.

As somebody whose imagination has always functioned geographically, one of my favorite rituals is the pregame player introductions. I mean, how often does Muscatine, Iowa see its favorite son (Joe Weiskamp, Iowa Hawkeyes ) featured on national TV? He has three teammates from Cedar Rapids, one from The Bronx, and another from London, England.

"This land is your land, this land is my land…"

For no particular reason, I've always pulled for the Hawkeyes. Also the Kansas Jayhawks, Oklahoma Sooners, Rutgers, and Virginia. For reasons I probably needn't explain, I've always enjoyed watching Duke lose.

By now I guess it's clear that I watch more college basketball on TV than is entirely consistent with sanity. Always have. The good news is that the coach's daughter thinks this relatively normal behavior. It beats a lot of bad habits men are prone to develop.

For that matter, Razorback basketball did more than anything else to make me an Arkansas patriot. Back when we first moved to her hometown, I felt like a stranger on the sports page. It was all football, all the time. Twelve games a year, 353 days of talking about it. Snore.

I wasn't sure I could hack it living here.

Then Coach Eddie Sutton arrived from, yes, Creighton University, and the local sporting culture has never been the same. He recruited three wondrously talented black Arkansas kids, Sidney Moncrief, Ron Brewer, and Marvin Delph—the so-called "Triplets"--they soon made the cover of Sports Illustrated, and everything changed. And not just on the sports page.

The basketball Hogs became the national team of Arkansas; I became a local patriot. Nobody here will ever forget U.S. Reed's 1981 miraculous half-court buzzer-beater defeating defending National Champion Louisville. Reed's feat led to the diverting spectacle of Texas Coach Abe Lemons—the sardonic Will Rogers of college basketball—"Calling the Hogs" on national TV.

Nearly every serious fan of March Madness has similar memories. Here in Arkansas, of course, we still savor the 1994 National Championship, all the sweeter for defeating Duke in the title game. I'd written a profile of Nolan Richardson for a local magazine, predicting big things for the then-embattled second year coach whose first Arkansas team had struggled with players unsuited to his full-court style.

My reasoning was simple: Having attended many basketball practices in my day, I found his well-organized and uniquely challenging. His physical presence and personal charisma made his players fear and love him. He knew talent when he saw it. Not everybody does. He'd won big everywhere else; he'd win big at Arkansas. Simple as that.

Anyway, it's been years since the coach's daughter and I have missed watching a Razorback game together. We even watched Arkansas win the 2000 SEC Tournament in a Manhattan hotel room, arriving fashionably late to my own book party.

And if your team loses? Pick another. There are 64 of them, from sea to shining sea.

In Winter Storm, Saving The Calves Requires Tough (And Tender) People

In Winter Storm, Saving The Calves Requires Tough (And Tender) People

OK, so you've got to shovel the car out and keep the water faucets dripping. You may need jumper cables to get the fool thing running. Not that you really need to go anywhere.

At least you're not a cattle rancher. Because your country cousins aren't getting much sleep this week. Stubborn beasts that they are, a million cows out in the boondocks are deciding that conditions are just right for giving birth. Ten below, thirty mph winds and driving snow? Perfect.

Of course, it's not really a decision. Back last spring when they were bred, winter seemed far away. Even so, there's nothing like a blizzard to send a cow into labor. Lovely Suzanne, the sweetheart of my small herd, chose just such a February night to deliver her first calf on windswept high ground near the hay ring. I feared that the little heifer, wet from afterbirth, would freeze to death before morning.

Fortunately, the pasture gate was close. So I picked her up, backed out the gate, and kicked it shut. Then I carried her to the barn about 50 yards away. Suzanne anticipated my intentions, ran clear around the barn and was waiting in a stall before we got there. I don't know which surprised me more: her intelligence or her trust. We named calf Violet, and she grew to be the image of her mother, sweet-natured and lovely.

Along with blizzard conditions and the coldest temperatures in 20 years, what got me thinking about Suzanne and Violet was a Facebook post a friend sent me depicting an old boy on the frozen steppes of Oklahoma, wallowing in a hot tub with an Angus calf he'd saved.

Posted by Lacie Lowry, an Oklahoma City TV journalist, at last reading it had drawn 1153 comments, mainly photos of rescued calves in unusual places: laundry rooms, kitchens, snuggling by fireplaces with children and dogs, even the occasional cat. Calves in pickup cabs, calves under hair-dryers, calves wrapped in comforters and blankets, even one calf wearing pajamas. Calves saved by farmers and ranchers all across the blizzard-battered Great Plains.

Trump voters most of them, it's worth remembering if you're an animal-loving Democrat prone to holding grudges. Decent folks, doing their best.

"The thing about cows," my Perry County neighbor Micky Hill once told me, "is they're always planning something." He'd been recounting the saga of the Milk Bandits, half-grown twin heifers who'd taken to stealing their younger siblings' milk.

"Daddy seen them calves was poorly," he said. "They just wasn't growing up right. Then one evening right around dusk, he seen them full-grown heifers sucking on mama cows. Not their own mamas. Other cows."

"So we took and put them in a borrowed pasture by themselves for a few weeks. Sure enough, the calves started thriving. Then come hay-feeding time, so we put them all back in together. Everything was fine for a little bit, but then the calves started looking sickly again."

"So one night Daddy slipped out to the barn after dark. Turned out them two heifers were chasing the Mama cows around until they'd get one cornered. Then they'd each take a side, grab an udder and lift the cow clean off the ground to where she couldn't kick or run away. They'd flat suck her dry in maybe half a minute, and then start in to chasing another one."

"And the thing is," he said "they knew to wait until dark."

The Milk Bandits had earned themselves a one-way trip to the sale barn. Likely somebody wanted them for breeding purposes, but there are no guarantees.

Like all mammals, cows definitely have minds of their own, and complex social lives. Researchers at Sydney University in Australia are just now discovering how complex. Doctoral candidate Alexandra Green has been recording and studying bovine vocalizations. She's catalogued some 333 separate sounds. She can identify individual voices without having to look.

"Ali's research is truly inspired," says her professor. "It is like she is building a Google translate for cows."

So what was I thinking when I sold Violet and her younger brother to a fellow from the next county? Well, that I couldn't let her breed with her father Bernie. She rode off down the road crying out, as they do.

However, by spring, Bernie had worn out his welcome. Trampling fences, fighting other bulls, breeding the neighbor's cows — the usual bull stuff.

Violet's new owner offered to return her as part of Bernie's sale price. Deal! If I live to be 100, I'll never forget Suzanne and Violet's reunion. Mother and daughter spotted each other from a distance as Violet stepped off the trailer. They galloped together, crying out with joy, and remained inseparable for days, nuzzling and licking each other.

I like to cried, as country people say, clearly not tough enough to be a real rancher.