Five Years

I wasn’t sure that I was going to write anything about my 2020 experience on my Bowie blog. However, it occurred to me that the music of Bowie helped me get through that year, and my decision to turn blogging about Bowie—a once-occasional hobby—into a daily commitment was in part to help get me to think straight and think about something other than death and chaos. Of course, it doesn’t hurt (in a thematic sense) that Bowie had a song about the impending end of the world called “Five Years,” and this is the fifth anniversary of the onset of the pandemic that killed more than 1.2 million Americans alone.

Of course, for the dead, it was the end of the world. But as heinous as 2020 was, it also signaled a larger societal breakdown that is flowering now, five years later. As I am reminded when I find myself one of the few people these days still wearing a KN95 mask, not only did we, as a society, take the wrong lessons from 2020, but we seemed to have made an unspoken agreement to pretend that 2020 never happened. You heard this last year during the presidential campaign when, at a point that America was actually enjoying peace and prosperity, Republicans were asking whether you were better off than you were four years ago. Four years ago, then, was 2020.

2020 was the year of bodies being stored in meat lockers because the morgues were overfilled. It was the year of the lockdown, mass protests, Depression-level unemployment, canceled weddings, empty store shelves, essential employees, remote learning, testing, masking, plots to kidnap governors, George Floyd. And daily, surreal press conferences from Donald Trump suggesting that people take horse medicine and inject themselves with bleach, stop testing to bring infection numbers down, holding upside-down Bibles, nearly dying himself of COVID, and yes, losing the 2020 presidential election. And while only a partisan contingent wants to pretend that that last thing never happened, that seems to be of a piece with our larger societal rejection of our collective experience.

What was I doing during 2020? Aside from listening to a lot of Bowie? Well, when the year started out, I was at the absolute pinnacle of my professional career. I was a senior official in the administration of Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York. I had been part of the administration from the beginning, but by early 2020, I was playing a central role. At the last cabinet meeting during the before times, I presented a plan that was going to reshape how we ran the entire government. It was a plan that was never implemented and today is all but forgotten. Because within days, COVID hit New York like a freight train, and, as Bowie might have said, everything changed.

Within the broad sweep of “everything,” part of what changed was the nature of my job. Instead of forward-thinking planning at the center of government, I took on a kind of intermediary role, largely serving as a liaison between the administration and other elected officials. The main activity of my day for a while was giving briefings, mostly to local elected officials but also to state legislators and the occasional member of Congress. Part of my daily briefing was an update on death numbers. 500 New Yorkers died yesterday of COVID. 600 died. 700 died. More than that. Reciting these numbers had a profound psychological effect on me. I soon couldn’t sleep. Before I actually suffered from insomnia, I never thought of it as a very serious affliction. It is.

As bad as the death numbers were, the reaction of some elected officials made it psychologically worse for me. What I found during that year was that executives—mayors and county executives and others who found themselves having to make executive decisions—took their responsibilities seriously. This was true for both the Democrats and Republicans I was dealing with. I can’t say that I agreed with every decision these executives made, but I can say that the people I was interacting with understood the gravity of their responsibilities. There was one official I interacted with during this time who had been a political rival of Governor Cuomo, but we put that aside during the height of the crisis. During a campaign situation, those of us in politics often think of those on the other side as “the enemy.” Yet when someone close to this particular official died of COVID, I wept for him.

But legislators, by and large, had little to do. They wanted to do something, but the day-to-day government response to the crisis was more an executive than legislative function, so many of the legislators zeroed in on side issues. Many wanted us to throw guardrails to the wind and hurry unemployment checks to their constituents because unemployment, again, was reaching Depression-era levels. Some, ignoring the deadly reality, wanted us to roll back restrictions to allow mass gatherings for weddings, graduations, church services, and funerals. Worse—worse in terms of my own psychology—some desperately wanted to deliver “good news” to their constituents in the form of declaring that certain businesses or business practices were “essential” and thus permissible. It became a dark joke among my colleagues interfacing with elected officials that amidst the death and destruction, several elected officials seemed to view rules about the use of golf carts as the number one issue of the day.

To be clear—that really was an issue for many elected officials. The “dark joke” part of it is that we found humor in the black absurdity of it all. For me, personally, I had a worse one—one legislator, who in other circumstances I liked and respected, was infuriated that the state had not clarified whether mulching was an essential activity. Put aside the misuse of the term “essential” and keep in mind this is what I was hearing in the context of hundreds of deaths per day.

This was a hard year to get through. It’s of little societal consequence but great personal importance that Bowie helped. Bowie had anticipated much of this. Consider these lyrics: “And in the death, as the last few corpses lay rotting…” (“Future Legend”); “A trickle of strangers were all that were left alive” (“Panic in Detroit”); “Nothing remains… everything has changed” (“Sunday”).

Bowie wrote song after song that contemplated societal breakdown. He was less concerned by the proximate cause than the impact on how we related to each other in the face or aftermath of the type of catastrophe that we were actually experiencing in 2020. The whole Diamond Dogs album became part of my pandemic soundtrack.

Art, I think, can help us through difficult periods both by distracting us and by recontextualizing the causes or consequences of the difficulty. Once, during the worst of it, I tried to distract myself by watching a superhero movie—The Avengers. But that movie, too, is about the end of the world. Instead of being uplifted, I found myself crying. After one of my subsequent briefings to elected officials, one such official, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, a personal friend, called me out of concern. It sounded to him like I was not doing well. I told him about The Avengers and how it was really hitting me that there is no Captain America to save the day.

I can’t say that in contrast Bowie’s apocalyptic songs gave me comfort. Comfort is not the function they served. But somehow the realism of what at the time of their release seemed like science fiction songs did something different for me. Bowie anticipated what people do in these situations. I suppose that there being “these situations” is somehow comforting in that while not all of us make it through “these situations,” the larger we—thus far—have made it through. The legislators concerned about golf carts and mulching are no more bizarre than the girl who went off her head or the cop kissing the feet of the priest in “Five Years.” And Bowie was prescient in that song in pegging “you” as sitting through news of the impending end of the world drinking milkshakes, not knowing “you were in this song.” That’s where many of us are today.

None of this was, or is, comforting, but it somehow helped me cry less.