Two pandemics

 Kevin Williamson, a conservative writer with National Review and other outlets (and who also happens to be Catholic) remarks from time to time that the experience of the pandemic has not been consistent across social and demographic classes.  In this week's edition of his weekly e-newsletter, The Tuesday (which arrives on the day of the week one would expect), he makes a few observations along these lines, from which I'd like to excerpt.

[The economic downturn brought on by the pandemic] was very hard on those who already were unemployed or marginally employed, who had little savings and little room for error, including something on the order of 12 million renting households who collectively owe back rent that may add up to more than $70 billion, by one estimate. Moody’s Analytics calculates that the typical distressed-renter household owes about $6,000 in back rent and fees, or between three and four months’ rent. There isn’t any good outcome likely there: Many of them will end up being evicted and put into even worse circumstances than they already are, and many small landlords, who often have only modest incomes, will be ruined by their renters’ defaults. There are good reasons not to intervene there, but, for perspective, consider that the Democrats’ proposal to forgive the student loans of nice young progressives who went to Haverford and Oberlin could pay off those poor Americans’ back rent 22 times over. If you’re into that sort of thing.

At the same time: The Dow closed at a record high last week, car dealers and art dealers both are enjoying record profits, commodities prices from oil to soybeans to copper are soaring, and, as though some rank symbolism were needed, the display cases of the nation’s Rolex boutiques are stripped as bare as a San Antonio supermarket after a polar vortex. It is difficult to think of another plague that has been accompanied by quite so much high-end conspicuous consumption.

Some of it is bewildering. I recently went car shopping, and, like any middle-aged Texan with reasonably good credit and a rich fantasy life based on immoderate boyhood viewings of Red Dawn, I took a look at some wonderful customized trucks, mostly from the Rocky Ridge gang. I had no real intention of buying any such thing (the roads are paved where I live — badly paved, nonetheless paved) but I was almost offended at the prices. Cool fender flares or no, there’s no way I’m paying a hundred grand (in the imaginary world in which I’m in the market for a $100,000 car) for a jacked-up Ram pickup. But they don’t need to sell one to me: They can’t keep them on the lot. High-end Jeeps, Toyota trucks, Range Rovers, Corvettes, the Mercedes S-Class, and other rolling emblems of mid-American ostentation are going as fast as they can unload them.

New-car prices are strong because of production interruptions that have taken the slack out of the inventory, but business is booming in everything from flower shops to bicycle builders to guitar luthiers. Some luxury-goods sellers have been hit by the lack of tourists visiting their boutiques on vacation, but even unwieldy global conglomerates such as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton are holding up pretty well — the firm just announced that it has acquired a 50-percent stake in Jay-Z’s Armand de Brignac line of Champagne in a deal said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The wine shops are doing an astonishing trade in $750 bottles of Chateau Margaux, and if you want to buy a new Rolls-Royce or Lamborghini, you’ll be lucky to take delivery sometime toward the end of 2022 — and they’ll act like they’re doing you a favor. Even for a fun-loving capitalist running dog such as myself, this looks like madness.

In a previous newsletter, from several months ago (upon which I am unable to lay my hands at the moment), Williamson was pithier in his observation of all this.  It went along these lines: for many Americans, the experience of the pandemic has been: we are sheltering in place.  Rather than go into the office, we plug in our laptops from a home office.  Rather than send our children to school, they attend Zoom sessions at the dining room table.  Rather than go to the grocery store, we have groceries delivered to our doorsteps.  So things are not the same, but really, on the whole, things are not that bad.  It would be a gross overstatement to describe this state of affairs as disastrous.  The word Williamson lands on to sum up the experience of such Americans, and I think it's accurate, is that the pandemic has represented an inconvenience.

But of course, many other Americans haven't fared nearly as well: jobs, businesses, income evaporated long ago; and only the moratorium on rents is keeping them in housing.    And that doesn't even begin to address the calamities which have fallen on families (disproportionately Black or Hispanic) when a parent becomes seriously ill or dies from COVID-19.  For them, the pandemic has been a genuine disaster.

Economically, culturally, educationally, and still racially, we are haves and have-nots.  When the pandemic began to get traction, it might have seemed that the coronavirus would be a great leveler, as the virus, at least in theory, doesn't discriminate between rich and poor.  But the American experience has been that, in fact, it does.