What journalists see when they look in the mirror (and a recap of a weird, weird week)

Reflecting on a week that lasted a thousand years, and the probably more difficult ones to come

It's been that kind of a week, eh?

The painting above is by Thomas C. Lea the Third, an American war artist. In 1944, he was embedded with the 1st Marine Division during the campaigns across the Pacific during the Second World War. His paintings were featured in LIFE magazine, and that's where I first saw it. My grandfather had a book published by LIFE after the war that collected many famous images from the war (and the years leading up to it). I was a kid when I first read it, but I always remembered that painting. It's called That 2,000 Yard Stare, and depicts the look Lea saw on the faces of Marines exhausted by the brutal fighting.

I bet we all kind of look like that this week, eh?

OK, OK, a pre-emptive note to the scolds: no, I'm not comparing my life (or the lives of most of us) to Marines in battle. The comparison is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But I do think that a lot of us are genuinely experiencing some degree of news burnout. The hits just keep on coming. If it wasn't literally my job to be informed about the news, I'd have checked out a long time ago.

The developments over the past 72 hours alone are so staggering that I don't even feel I can recap them here. I'm just going to assume that if you have any interest in subscribing to the personal newsletter of a North American journalist, you probably care enough about the news to know what I mean. U.S. President Donald Trump's illness and hospitalization, and the conflicting messages as to the severity of his illness, is a lot to take in. But trying to wrap our minds around what it might mean is even harder.

There are two entirely different ways in which the president's illness is enormously significant. There is, of course, the impact it will have on the ongoing political campaign, one already so angry and divided that there's an alarming possibility — slim, but real — of a violent, dysfunctional U.S. election and aftermath. Trying to guess how this will unfold is pointless; as I joked with one friend this morning, the last three days have been exhausting — but there's ten times that many days left until the election. As has been noted, amusingly but also tellingly, all across social media, this week, we've had a literal shooting war kick off, the disclosures about the president's income taxes and the release of personal, and awkward, personal recordings of First Lady Melania Trump ... and that seems like a lifetime ago. Trying to imagine what awaits us weeks from now seems pointless. 

And yet, I can't stop trying to imagine it. The effort produces little more than a headache, but I keep trying.

And then, of course, there's the other stuff — the immediate implications for U.S. national security. The good news is, President Trump seems reasonably well. It's too soon to declare his illness mild, especially given the conflicting reports, but he's clearly alive and conscious. That's a start. But it's equally clear that he's suffering from a serious illness, that many of his inner circle have also been exposed, and that it will be days yet before we will have a reliable sense of how any of them are really doing. 

A thought I had the other day, that I'm almost hesitant to bring up here since it's not yet fully formed, is that one of the most frustrating parts of 2020 has been suddenly finding out how much information I never thought I'd need is now proving useful. I've long had a fascination with worst-case scenarios — more specifically, how people plan for worst-case scenarios (and then how those plans fare in the real world). Years ago, simply out of personal interest, I read Canada's pandemic preparedness plan. I was alarmed, to put it mildly, to have cause to refer back to it early this year. I've also read extensively about so-called "continuity of government" — COG — plans. The U.S. government developed fairly detailed plans for how to maintain an effective government during the Cold War, when there was a real prospect of losing the federal government in a surprise attack on Washington. 

Losing the "federal government," you'll note I said. Not just a few key people — the whole thing. The president and cabinet. The Congress and Supreme Court. The various federal agencies and departments, and the many thousands of workers that staff all these various institutions. There's a plan for this. The plan is taken seriously and updated regularly. COVID-19, of course, is not a surprise nuclear attack, but you can be certain that the U.S. government employees whose job it is to plan for the worst have been engaged this week. What if Trump becomes seriously ill, or dies? What if Vice President Mike Pence is only a week behind the president in terms of diagnosis and symptoms? What about Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who's next in line to the presidency?

And so on. 

(If this stuff interests you, by the way, I'd recommend this book. It's not a light read, but it's fascinating.)

This is what I've been thinking about, even when I'm trying not to think about it, for days. I wish I had  hadmore wit or personal charm — newsletter value-add — to bring you. But I honestly don't. I've got news shellshock. And I'm not at all convinced that this week will be much better.

And in that spirit, here's what I was doing this week!

No columns in the Post from me this week. I've been working behind-the-scenes on a managerial project that will probably take me another two weeks to wrap up, so most of my daily toil there isn't publicly visible. But I did have time for some videos!

There was this one, from the start of the week ... in that long-ago era of history now lost to memory.

And then on Friday morning, when things were getting bonkers, I did this one:

At TVO.org, I was trying to keep up with the rapidly evolving situation in Ontario. My cautious optimism regarding the second away has not entirely survived first contact with the enemy. 

On Tuesday, I wrote that Ontario had finally set a metric — a red line — that would govern how it would respond to the second wave. The province has said it will use the number of COVID-19 patients in ICU beds as the metric — more than 350 and the system will not be able to operate. That's good to know, I said, but it still leaves much unknown. "Infections and illnesses are both lagging indicators," I said. "People become infected before they become ill, and they become critically ill gradually. Knowing that the health-care system's red line is 350 COVID-19 patients in ICU is helpful, but what will still be a matter of judgment is at what point to bring out a more draconian round of restrictions to prevent us from hitting 350. ... A few outbreaks in institutional settings — a large school, a long-term-care facility, an industrial workplace — could take a slow, gradual rise in cases and blow up the number dramatically. That would likely result in a rapid and less targeted round of restrictions that might ultimately prove to be too little, too late."

Later in the week, I wrote that the obvious stresses in the province's testing system were alarming. "Testing is our early-warning system," I wrote. "We can’t effectively fight COVID-19 if we don’t know where it is and what it’s doing. Relatively rapid testing, in bulk, is the only way we can monitor the virus in something close to real time. ... For now, as the second wave continues —  it seems to be accelerating, if anything — Ontario faces a bleak scenario for this month: rapidly rising cases in the major cities, clear migration of cases from younger populations into older ones, steadily rising hospitalization rates, and a testing system that is less and less able to provide meaningful information on the virus’s transmission through the public. ... That’s a recipe for only one thing: another lockdown. Perhaps a regional one. But even making that call would require solid testing so that public-health officials could get a sense of the geographic breadth of the second wave. Make no mistake: the only thing between us and another awfully long time inside is an effective testing system."

For those paying attention at home, if anything, the news surrounding Ontario's system got worse this weekend. Not better. So.

Sorry, folks. Honestly. I genuinely am. I want Code 47 to be a fun place. A big part of why I started it was to have the option to let my hair down — well, you know what I mean — a bit more, beyond what even tolerant editors permit me elsewhere. But this wasn't a fun week. And it's hard to head into this one with much confidence the next seven days will be sunnier.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney