This Time, the Pandemic is America

Weak apologies + new bombs + live music roundup!

As I write this Aotearoa’s got 44 days of diesel left. That’s counting fuel on the boats that haven’t arrived. That’s also counting contracts for fuel still being refined in countries that are themselves running out of fuel, so we’ll just see, won’t we? There’s an online countdown you can watch in real time. Airlines are sketching out their New Zealand shutdown plans. RNZ has told us to stop gas thieves by parking next to a wall.

Verity Johnson is not the only one feeling the March 2020 vibes. Last weekend I was strolling through CubaDupa with an American friend who’s spent a career in disaster management: “Just like Covid,” he said, waving at the happy crowd. “The last party before everything shuts down.” Not half a block later we walked right past former Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield, humble star of NZ’s pandemic response.¹ I love the man, but I shivered like a black cat had crossed my path.

Here’s the difference: Last time the breakdown was a virus. This time it’s America.

Now one could score Covid as China’s fault, but the source hardly mattered once the virus broke free. My son is keen on the idea that viruses are maybe alive, but also maybe not. This is an odd comfort, looking back: six years ago the world was brought to its knees by either a voracious, shapeshifting bug or an inanimate, self-replicating void. Either way it’s not our fault.

This time the crisis is definitely human. Iran’s the one blocking the Strait of Hormuz, but those shipping lanes were open last month. It’s America that broke the energy supply chain, led by one particular American too stupid to read. Iran blocked the Straight way back in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War. It’s been the big red button on their desk ever since. That’s one reason why no American president until Trump ever pulled the trigger.

America’s always gotta pull the trigger somewhere. Trump’s only the latest. We started this whole show: Eisenhower, saintly hero of D-Day, ordered a coup in Iran in 1953. Seva Gunitsky draws a neat downward line from the Bush Sr.’s liberation of Kuwait to George W. Bush’s war-by-lie in Iraq to this new lark in Iran: “Trump is doing something even dumber but in some ways less radical by operating in the space Bush opened.”

Americans are all operating in that space now. We’re been there so long it’s hard to see through the smoke. We are either New York Times reporters filing breathless updates on the new missile we used to kill kids playing volleyball, or the exhausted masses scrolling past the same old white noise. It’s a bubble either way. The PrSM does an airburst right above its target, see, and blasts the whole zone with “tungsten pellets.” It’s a giant Doordash shotgun.

boom / via nyt

I went down to my local the other night. The Tooth Fairy needed to break a bill so I brought my book and drank a pint. The publican and I chatted as he wiped down the bar. Tony’s Kiwi and Irish both, which gives him a lyric sort of stoicism. The world’s going to hell, we agreed. Just get on with it.

Sorry, I said. For the war.

I didn’t mean it.

On one level this was just that American twitch of self-deprecation we do to make someone sympathize with us. My life is so crazy! etc.

But underneath the comic flopsweat runs two deeper reasons.

The first is learned indifference. Americans on the exhausted left or the shriveled center have spent the last ten years on an ever more brutal course of zen training, learning news cycle by news cycle to separate ourselves from all this shit. We know America does bad things. Our grandfathers, our CEOs, our tax dollars, our bombs. But not me. Not us. Not the sides of America I love, which every year I hold farther apart from the America I hate. We bomb a girls’ school and I’m Peter denying Jesus three times before the cock crows. I tell you I do not know that country.

This sets up the second motive. My apology is really an implicit request for this hard-won separation to be recognized by my Kiwi peers. I said sorry because I need Tony to brush it off. I need him to tell me it’s not my fault. This is not forgiveness, not quite. To ask for forgiveness I’d have to work out my own complicity with this war and all the wars before and all the wars to come. Too much for a weeknight at the pub. Where do I begin? Where does a nation end?

So I said my little sorry. I did my little shrug.

Tony brushed it off and kept wiping down the bar. I said goodnight and walked home under the stars.

See? I’m in the clear.

Greytown gas prices today, in NZD per liter. that’s US$7.50 a gallon, y’all

I’m in the clear until the fuels runs out. America, the world’s largest oil producer, will muddle through just fine. New Zealand, the hermit kingdom so safe in the last pandemic, is now cast to the world’s darkening edge. Paul Krugman just cropped us out of a map of global oil shipments. Luxon’s on the phone begging refineries in South Korea and Singapore not to forgot these distant islands as the crunch comes down.

In the meantime we’ve got American family flying down for the Easter holidays. We should be fine? New Zealand isn’t set to run out of jet fuel until May, but surely they’d start grounding flights well before.

Funny, ain’t it? Last time around the worst part of New Zealand’s isolation was not being able to see our family back home. Maybe this time they’ll get stuck on our couch. Sorry not sorry! //

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Been a on a live music kick lately! Beats the screen, every time. Some notes—

The Warratahs, 21 March at the Wairarapa Event Centre

A small-town show from New Zealand’s venerable country band. I’d call their sound Americana but that’s not right, is it? I was just about the youngest person in the crowd. Barray Saunders does lonesome-in-place real nice, whether that’s Wellington (“Mt Victoria Rain”), a thunderstorm in an Australian hotel (“The Wheel Inside”) or just “Taranaki.” I hoped to hear “Letter to America” but realized with a start that you just can’t play it anymore. At intermission everyone bought a Trumpet ice cream cone. “Maureen” got ‘em dancing. For an encore they came out and played a rousing version of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” which bowled me right over. The crowd remembered it from the actual 1960s, and the grandmothers danced in the aisle. An American song, I thought—we’re not dead yet!—but Pete’s ghost told me to let it go. It’s not about the hammer, bro. It’s about the danger, the warning, and the love.

CupaDupa, 28-29 March in Wellington

CubaDupa is Wellington’s great annual street fair. The vibe is Montessori Mardi Gras, full of DIY costumes, performance art, and live music. Big shoutout to Empress and Lord Woo and all the Wairarapa heads owning the Laundray Stage on Sunday afternoon. The Australian post-punk killers Gut Health made their NZ debut and absolutely tore down the Wellington Airport stage. Think Blondie with two drummers: faster, meaner, cooler, and way less blonde. But my favorite was Debt Club, who ripped it up at San Fran on Saturday night. They’re a charming young Pōneke five piece with a sax front and center. A mate of mine said they sound like an ‘80s sitcom theme song, and he’s not wrong? I hear the unabashed sincerity of early Springsteen and The Hold Steady, plus rainy-day Wellington introspection and indie mustaches. I’ve been jamming their EP all week. Go see ‘em yourself! //

1. For the Americans: Bloomfield was more or less our Dr. Fauci, but buttoned-down and bookish, with a pained seriousness to his daily briefings. He never caught the hell Jacinda did, or Fauci for that matter, and since retreated to well-earned civilian life now. Good on ya, mate.