october 1999

Last week, I covered my nose and mouth with close-fitting fabric like a good citizen and walked to a restaurant in Washington, D.C., where I de-masked at a patio table to greet a friend. I sat with my chair facing the entrance and watched dozens of people perform the same ritual, removing a mask they’d worn outside and alone. It seemed like the most normal thing in the world. Until, suddenly, it seemed very weird.

The coronavirus is most transmissible in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, where the aerosolized virus can linger in the air before latching onto our nasal or bronchial cells. In outdoor areas, the viral spray is more likely to disperse. One systematic overview of COVID-19 case studies concluded that the risk of transmission was 19 times higher indoors than outside. That’s why wearing a mask is so important in, say, a CVS, but less crucial in, say, the park.

One conclusion is apparent following Donald Trump’s four years in office: A sitting president is perhaps the only American who is not bound by criminal law, and thus not swayed by its disincentives.

What’s astonishing is that this immunity has no grounding in actual law. It’s not in the Constitution or any federal statute, regulation, or judicial decision. It is not law at all.

Instead, the ban on the indictment of a president rests on an internal personnel policy developed by the Department of Justice under two harangued presidents: Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In essence, the policy directs federal prosecutors to stand down when it comes to criminally charging a president. This is a dangerous state of affairs, and Congress must eradicate this policy with legislation—and it must do so soon, in case Trump does run for another term.

Over the past few decades, American parents have been pressured into making a costly wager: If they sacrifice their hobbies, interests, and friendships to devote as much time and as many resources as possible to parenting, they might be able to launch their children into a stable adulthood. While this gamble sometimes pays off, parents who give themselves over to this intensive form of child-rearing may find themselves at a loss when their children are grown and don’t need them as much.

Prior generations didn’t need to be as preoccupied with their children’s well-being or future. Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1960s, my brothers and I were as luxuriously removed from our parents’ minds as they were from ours. It was the gilded age of childhood freedom. My brothers and I consumed hours of television and ate staggering amounts of sugar—for breakfast. We vanished each summer morning, biked back for lunch, and then disappeared again ’til dusk. My parents also had a life. My mother played mah-jongg weekly with “the girls” and went out every weekend with my father without calling it “date night.” My dad played squash on weekends at the downtown YMCA and didn’t seem to worry about whether my brothers and I felt neglected.

I cannot remember whether I knew what compulsive hoarding was before 2009. Likely not. That year, the TV network A&E put the disorder on the cultural radar in an unparalleled way with its show Hoarders. The series introduced a public audience to a sometimes-private struggle—the obsessive need to acquire objects, coupled with the fear of letting them go—and offered its participants mental-health resources and extensive cleaning services. But it aimed to horrify viewers, too, with its footage of gawking neighbors and close-ups on maggot-filled refrigerators, set to a horror-movie-esque soundtrack. The show attempts the impossible union of a serious psychological analysis with the flair of television; its appeal suggests a fascination with witnessing people’s pain as well as a shared curiosity about our attachments to stuff. The premiere recorded 2.5 million viewers, at the time one of the largest audiences of a premiere in A&E’s history. Now in its 12th season, Hoarders remains one of its most popular shows.

Last week, the CDC acknowledged what many of us have been saying for almost nine months about cleaning surfaces to prevent transmission by touch of the coronavirus: It’s pure hygiene theater.

“Based on available epidemiological data and studies of environmental transmission factors,” the CDC concluded, “surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low.” In other words: You can put away the bleach, cancel your recurring Amazon subscription for disinfectant wipes, and stop punishing every square inch of classroom floor, restaurant table, and train seat with high-tech antimicrobial blasts. COVID-19 is airborne: It spreads through tiny aerosolized droplets that linger in the air in unventilated spaces. Touching stuff just doesn’t carry much risk, and more people should say so, very loudly.