Part I
In a “normal year” baseball’s all-star game would be history. This year baseball hasn’t even begun. But it will. Sort of. At Oracle Park a masked Dave Flemming will sit in the KNBR booth, Duane Kuiper in the NBC sports booth, Jon Miller in the visitors’ TV booth, and Mike Krukow in the late Willie McCovey’s booth. They will call the game from a bank of TV monitors showing the action on the field, regardless of where the game is played. And in the stands? Cardboard cutouts of fans. With the blessing of the Giants management even deceased fans might attend. Krukow said, “You could have a section with Hank Greenwald sitting with Carol Doda, Herb Caen and Robin Williams. What’s more San Francisco than that?” Some fans have paid to have their images turned into cardboard cutouts and placed in their season-ticket holding seats.
Writer Ann Killian reflects, “The concern about the entertainment value in watching this bogus baseball season doesn’t even extend to competitive aspect of play. What is the point of playing out a meaningless string in a pandemic, where your loved ones could be put at risk?” She concludes, “But the winner will be the coronavirus. As we’ve already found out the hard way, it always is.”
Part II
A 63 year old asthmatic store clerk politely asks customers to wear a mask when they walk through the front door. If they don’t have one, she offers them one, even though they cost the store a dollar each. Although many people comply, she is faced with this:
“Some of them would see our signs, open the front door, and just yell: “F--- masks. F--- you.” Or they would walk in, refuse to wear a mask and then dump their merchandise all over the counter. I had a guy come in with no mask and a pistol on his hip and stare me down. I had a guy who took his T-shirt off and put it over his mouth so I could see his whole stomach. “There. A mask. Are you happy?” I had a lady who tried to tape a pamphlet on the front window about the ADA mask exemption, which is a totally fake thing. It’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s become popular here. She kept saying we were discriminating against people with disabilities. What? Why? How? None of what they say sounds logical. I can’t make sense of half the names they call me. They say I’m uneducated — uh, that’s kind of ironic. They say I’m a sheep. I’ve been brainwashed. I’m pushing government propaganda. I’m suffocating them. I’m a part of the deep state. I’m an agent for the World Health Organization. “How do you like your muzzle?” “Is this going to become sharia law?” “Are you prepping us to wear burqas?” “What’s next? Mind control?”
Part III
Tulsa.
While a black pastor with a megaphone lobbied for reparations to descendants of black people killed a century ago in Tulsa in the Greenwood massacre, crowds of white anti-mask protestors abused him, poured water on him, screamed at him, pushed him, mocked him, and one claimed that he was “the sign of the beast.”
“I won’t get any reparations from the race massacre,” Turner explained. “I’m not from Tulsa. I’m from Alabama. It’s not for me. It’s for the people in this community, who have seen so much damage and suffering. And then for people to call you ‘boy’ and ‘Get out of here you, liar.’ And then the look in their eyes was just so hateful.”
Part IV
Carl Nolte, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle had this to say this morning about San Francisco’s biggest industry, tourism, “I miss the crowds at the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. I miss the slap and rattle of the cable under the street as well, especially at Powell and Geary where the cable runs close to the surface like a steel snake.
The streets around Union Square are nearly empty, as if they were abandoned because of a plague. Which is close to the truth.
I walked through Chinatown. Grant Avenue was as empty as I have ever seen it. There were red lanterns spanning the street, and about half the souvenir shops were open. You can tell tourists when you see them. I counted four between Pine Street and Broadway.
I went on to Fisherman’s Wharf. There wasn’t a soul at the crab stands and restaurants at the heart of the wharf on Taylor Street. No pots of boiling hot water to steam crabs. There were no street musicians either, no old-time Muni streetcars, no jugglers, no man painted all in silver standing like a statue. The Bushman, who hides in some foliage and jumps out to scare tourists, was nowhere to be seen. I always thought he was a pain in the neck, but now that he’s gone, I miss him.
I always thought you had to be nuts to buy one of those Alcatraz Psycho Ward T-shirts, but they added a certain gaudiness to the scene, and I miss them.”
Fisherman’s Wharf
Part V
Our son-in-law, Andrew, teaches second grade. Since the year will begin online Jadyne suggested that he go to the school and meet with each student, one at a time, so that they know he’s a real person, and that he recognizes that each of them is a real person, too. How long will schools open without really opening? We have volunteered to host a small pod of third-graders at our house one or two days a week while the children work on lessons from their teacher (who will be working from home. She has a first-grader, too).
How long will idiots like the woman pictured with the black pastor, the rude customers who insult the elderly store clerk, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers, the pro-Trumpers, have sway over their cowardly Republican counterparts in the administration who have mismanaged the pandemic from day one? How long will Americans continue to be anti-American, failing to recognize that had they worn masks from day one, had they listened to the scientists instead of the conspiracy theorists, the National League, (my choice), would have won the All-Star game, and the Giants would have been well on their way to upsetting the Dodgers in the National League West?