Because he was almost two decades my senior, Stan Isaacs seemed the right person to ask what it was like to have been around during something as consequential as World War II. He barely was a teenager at the time, but might he have pondered what would happen if the bad guys won?
“I mostly wondered,” he said, “when the war was over, what they’d put on the front page.”
That conversation was years ago. But I had been thinking, these last couple of months, about what they’re going to put on the front page when this modern plague is over. Then came the New York Times dramatic Sunday cover. Isaacs, who was among my newspapering mentors and heroes at Long Island’s Newsday, surely would have appreciated the Times’ powerful text-only presentation—the numbing, seemingly endless list of American victims of the coronavirus.
In condensed type over six grey columns (and continued on two more inside pages) was a roll call of names, ages, hometowns, occupations and personal anecdotes of 1,000 people—and those a mere one percent of the pandemic’s U.S. toll. No photos, ads, news articles, references to other sections of the publication. Just miniature obituaries. The rival New York Post summed up the effect as “unusual, chilling…heartbreakingly sweet, one-line anecdotes of the lives lost to the virus…”
U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS was the sobering headline.
It was the day’s essential information, and there was no getting away from it. It was not a plot or a hoax or alarmist. It was cold, hard fact, to be dismissed at our peril. Cutting edge journalism.
My friend Bill Glauber, who can cover anything that moves and these days works for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, recently messaged, “Tell your journalism students to take notes. I tell all the younger reporters that 20 years from now, some kid is going to ask you what it was like in the 2020 pandemic. You will have a hell of a story to tell.”
Since we all began living on Coronavirus Standard Time in mid-March, the best ink-stained wretches have been telling the story every day on front pages. Reports of how the virus has devastated nursing homes. How the search for testing and a vaccine is going. How supply chains are disrupted, jobs lost, bankruptcies declared. How social distancing is crucial. How weird, unscientific treatments are being pushed by the president.
We have been kept up to date on how mandated quarantines are crushing the travel industry while shelter-in-place rules meanwhile cut down on pollution resulting from reduced traffic. How demonstrations have broken out against the medically wise lockdowns regarding bars, restaurants and houses of worship. How black and brown people, poor people, have been hit hardest by the disease. How students have been disoriented by remote schooling and colleges are frantic over losing enrollment. How traumatized doctors and nurses are searching for coping mechanisms while operating in fear that a second wave of infections is coming. How the sports and entertainment industries are pining for the clearance to return.
How people have died at a staggering rate.
World War II ended. Pretty soon there was other news on the front page. Pretty soon there was some degree of certainty about the future. Pretty soon life was “normal” again.
Surely that will happen again. In the meantime, we know where to look to see the current state of affairs.