Intimacy in a Pandemic

Whatever else we say of the COVID pandemic, we can safely say this: It’s changed us.

Two years ago we showered in the morning and rinsed our hands before eating. Now we wash our hands maniacally, as if we’ve committed some blood-soaked crime to be scrubbed away with soap and water.

If we dare step outside our homes, we stay six feet from other human beings. Social distancing, once imagined as a neurotic fear of nearness to others, is now a mandate.

Face masks in banks are no longer signs of a robbery in progress. They represent our desire to stay well, and our willingness to protect others from us. The idea of “school” has been reinvented with “virtual” and “in-person,” and our assumptions about work have made the same move.

For some the overwhelming feature of the pandemic has been isolation. For two years, I’ve been home, and almost nowhere else save for critical healthcare appointments and the occasional moment with my toddler granddaughter. My days begin with a cup of “Joe” and end with “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Polio survivors in the 1950s often endured life in so-called “iron lungs.” For these wretched folk, television was redemptive, bringing a connection to the larger world beyond their six-by-three-foot life-saving tomb. I’d never have identified with this experience had it not been for the past 23 months. While I’m not suffering as they did, I’m finding my interchange with the world where they found theirs: television. It takes me into the world and, more importantly, it comes into mine with a power and intimacy I’m only now recognizing.

Take Rachel Maddow, for example. She comes into the homes of millions of Americans nightly. Her voice is as familiar as what we’d hear at a family dinner. Her smile is infectious. When we say “Rachel,” everyone knows who we mean. She’s my companion every weekday evening.

No wonder that I felt a tinge of panic when, earlier this week, she announced a brief (2-month) hiatus to focus on some projects that are wilting for lack of her time. I understand. But I’m not sure I approve. Who’s going to fill her place in my evenings? Who else can analyze America’s political landscape with her genius? With her bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and her doctorate in political science from Oxford University, she knows whereof she speaks. I can’t imagine understanding the world without her nightly visits.

Besides, I have three personal connections to Rachel. First, we met once.  She was incredibly gracious. If I was a little awe-struck, she immediately put me at ease. She asked about my experience in the AIDS community as someone who had studied AIDS in-depth (she did, for her doctoral thesis). I was grateful to be in her presence; she spoke as if the honor were hers. Amazing.

Second, we share a political legacy. Asked once what it meant to be a “liberal” she said it was simple: “It means I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform.” Me too.

And, third, she’s stepping away from her nightly visits to my home in part to work on a film adapted from “Bag Man,” a podcast she hosted about the 1970s scandal and resignation of then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. It was Agnew who unwittingly changed my life.

Agnew was Nixon’s vice president, and he was found to be accepting bribes and cash influence while in the vice president’s office. Literally. Men came by with bags full of cash to support Agnew’s causes and candidates and lavish lifestyle. Then the truth slithered out, and he was offered a choice between prison and resignation. He took resignation, thereby opening a position that Nixon filled by plucking Congressman Gerald R. Ford from the House of Representatives and having him confirmed in December of 1973. (Stay with me here.)

Then came Nixon’s own scandal (Watergate), and eight months after he had been chosen as Vice President – August 8, 1974 – Ford became President. He’d come from Michigan, my home state. He knew our family. He knew I’d organized some events. And before the winter holidays of 1974, I had been named the first woman “advanceman” in White House history. Thanks to Spiro T. Agnew, I had become a footnote in history.

I don’t expect to show up in Rachel’s “Bag Man” film. But I’m counting on her to show up in my home each weeknight evening come April. I can endure two months of isolation while waiting for her return but, like the pandemic itself, her hiatus needs to come to an end.

Besides, what Rachel has brought to me, and to so many, isn’t merely a casual intimacy in her conversational style. Its genuine insight based on knowledge. She sees the immorality of the Moral Majority in historic perspective. She saw the seeds of White Nationalism and the violence of January 6 long before others. She’s wise, and I will miss her wisdom.

I totally understand the need to have a break, to re-sort priorities, to chase deferred dreams, to make a difference in new ways. I get it, and I support it. No one deserves it more than her.

But evenings at home are going to be a bit lonely without house calls from Dr. Maddow.