Going viral

San Francisco is turning into a ghost town before my eyes. Companies like Twitter are telling their employees to work from home because of coronavirus. Conventions are being cancelled left and right, and I assume hotel rooms and dinner reservations are, too.

I read an article that Chinatown restaurant owners say they are suffering because no one wants to eat there, but I don't know how much of that is accurate or if that's media hype with a cynical spin to generate clicks. As if San Franciscans are all racists. The other reason I am skeptical about that hot take is that I walk through Chinatown every evening on my way home from work. It's as bustling as ever and the restaurants still have diners in them and the stores are crowded and the streets still team with throngs of people. Sure what I see with my own eyes is anecdotal, but then so is interviewing one restaurant owner who may have other problems on his hands. I'll trust my eyes over a newspaper any day.

What I see is mass hysteria generated by a media that is ever desperate for more clicks. Coronavirus has killed fewer people than a regular flu season. The same people have been affected. Time will tell if it gets worse, or if it becomes a blip on our memory screens in a few months. And while an overabundance of caution is never a bad thing during cold and flu season, we don't all have to turn in to Howard Hughes. The sensationalist stories generated to drive clicks aren't helping matters at all.

The thing we shouldn't forget about viruses is that whether we're talking about a disease or a news cycle, mutations occur. Every mutation brings something new and it's hard to say whether it's good or bad until it happens. But it is fascinating to watch, at least when it comes to the media.

Take last night's Super Tuesday. Up until the big day, the majority of news outlets were telling us Joe Biden was all but finished and that Bernie Sanders was going to win. Then the opposite happens. At least right now, Biden has 563 delegates to Sanders 461. And if we assume that Pete Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar's delegates to go Biden as well, and probably Warren's too, because the democratic party will coalesce around their chosen winner whether the people want it or not,  then we're looking at 617 delegates. Still far short of the total needed, but inching ever so closer to the realm where it becomes mathematically impossible for any other candidate to win. The same news outlets who proclaimed Biden a lost cause after Iowa and New Hampshire are now rewriting that narrative as quickly as they created it. The virus is mutating.

These themes were very much on my mind when I wrote New Roman Times. Perhaps the biggest liberty I took with the Camper Van Beethoven album source material was injecting this sense on a national scale. Actually, considering the book's premise is that North America is made up up multiple countries rather than states it's more accurate to call it a global scale. The novel doesn't collapse a narrative in a traditional sense, but subverts it. That there are two distinct, equally plausible or implausible narratives that compel the reader to either "buy into" one or the other or discount them both.

This is very much the way we interpret the news today. You're either an MSNBC/CNN viewer or you're a FOX viewer, or their online equivalents like Young Turks, or OANN or whatever. Both present the news (or their opinion of the news) through the prism of their own conscious or unconscious bias.

I used to say the only objective news station there was is C-SPAN and to a certain extent I still believe this. Mostly because turning the cameras on legislators is like asking someone to watch a toaster oven.  The exception is of course when congressmen or Senators start grandstanding or trying to get a moment to go viral on Twitter. Steve Cohen eating KFC comes to mind.

But even then, there's a certain banality to it. It's as if the people who manage these so-called leaders come up with stunts like they're teenagers on TikTok. But just like TikTok (and Vine before it) these moments are worthless. They might get the news talking for an afternoon, but they are ultimately so ephemeral, you might as well shout into the wind.

Speaking of shouting into the wind...

On my way to work, I saw a man standing in downtown San Francisco, stoically holding this banner. I crossed the street to talk to him. I told him he must have some brass cojones to hold that sign up here of all places since it is the progressive epicenter of America.

I asked if I could take a photo of him, and he obliged standing against the wall under a CVS and of course, hiding his face. After I was finished he said something to me.

"You'd think I'd get a lot of hatred up here, holding this. But it hasn't been like that. You know what I've gotten? A lot of African Americans coming up to me and whispering that they are going to vote for him. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. I'm shocked. I think there's going to be a whole bunch of people here silently casting their votes for him."

I find that very hard to believe, at least in California. And again, it's all anecdotal, just like the diners in Chinatown. Still, it does make one pause. If for some strange reason he turns out to be right, and a large swath of African Americans in California voted for Trump, it would be a signifier. Of what, I don't know. Journalists are great at opining, but as we've seen over the past few years, they've been wrong more often than right. If it does happen, the only thing I will be able to say for certain is that it would be a case of something going quietly viral. Because no news outlet is going to claim it. Ony the lone man on the street downtown.