Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

COVID’s Back, But What About the Bookshelves?

So, it’s back.

We hadn’t expected to see it before cold weather, but COVID’s back here in Missouri. Worse in the southwest part of the state, where so much of the business is tourism, but climbing in mid-MO as well. Our vaccination rate is stuck at just over 40%, about 10% lower than the nation.

Hospitals are reporting that as long as the numbers keep climbing, in almost as steep a curve as last November, they will have to add COVID units.

On the national TV news, many of the news readers act like we’re getting back to normal. Even though COVID is mentioned, the leads have more to do with financial markets. The newsmen and women have gone back to their sets. Red white and blue banners. Glass roundtables. We’ve lost the precious part of the pandemic, when news folks were reporting from home, helping us believe we were all in this together. There was, in those images from reporters’ home sets, a human touch.

Think of the cat stretching on the sofa behind one news reporter or the strangely fabricated wooden wall behind another. Think of the bookshelves, baskets of plants, displays of shells and geegaws, and bright curtains or chairs piled with throw pillows. Homey and real. “After this newscast,” the backgrounds seemed to say, “this reporter will go back to stuff that counts.”

There were random sounds of life—the dog barking or the phone ringing in the background. Sometimes those interruptions made the talker giggle or at least grin a little, like, “They know now I’m not a robot.”

Very early on, somebody told all the news people that they should have plants on their set. So they did. The American Floral Sellers may have been behind the insistence of plants behind news readers, but there was no agreement on the type of plant preferred. We were treated to glossy, big-leaved plants, scraggly, branchy looking plants and bowls of flowers that looked fresh-picked. It was tempting to imagine our newscasters out in their yards just before deadline, cutting bunches of their favorite stems. Or, we speculated, maybe their neighbor brought them over, or maybe their mom.

One anchor couldn’t quite manage a real potted plant, so she had a bowl of white flowers off to the side. Night after night, we watched those flowers for signs of wilt, but it never happened. We couldn’t quite see what variety of plant they were — something from the petunia family perhaps — but as the weeks passed we concluded they were plastic or paper. And, then, after months, she replaced them with something reddish. When it drooped, the white plastic-or-paper came back.

I know they reported on lots and lots of important, world-changing things as the weeks rolled by, but I’ll remember those plants.

Rarely did a brave soul broadcast from in front of a window, so we were treated to interiors plain and fancy. And always tidy. Some folks leaned colonial and others went more modern, but it seemed there was an intelligence behind each background, whether it screamed, “This is my office, really, I’m here a lot,” or “I just moved a few things out of the basement family room and kicked the kids upstairs.”

As the pandemic rolled on, backgrounds got more sophisticated. My husband and I would try to guess which were authentic rooms and which were those backgrounds you can select from a website. Of course, we liked the authentic ones best.

And the bookcases! Some folks put their own publications out, just in case a viewer was looking for something new to read. Many, I might say all, of the progressive talkers had a copy of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson. That New York Times best seller, just out in August 2020, compares India, Nazi Germany and the United States, and seeks an explanation for why privileged groups predictably find ways to marginalize some people. Maybe if we all read it, we could break the bonds that tie us to racism.

To me, the most amusing bookshelves were those with books in sections according to color. Not alphabetical, not by subject, not by author, and forget the Dewey Decimal System. Whenever one of those backgrounds with the color-coded shelves behind the talker came up, I dismissed him (it was always a man) as a Philistine. But, secretly, I longed for a close-up of the shelves where all the orange covers snuggled, divided from all the blue ones, divided from the whites, the browns and so forth. Maybe it was Caste come to life, book-wise, but a most un-useful way to classify books.

At any rate, with COVID back, it looks like those sets may become fashionable again, along with masks, isolation, and more vaccines. May you and yours, dear reader, stay safe!

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History”. Email: margotmcmillen @gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021

Populist.com