I think of Anne Frank these days. New message from the Zone.

I take a long walk every day. An hour of power walk to be exact. I listen to music on my forgotten, old recently resuscitated iPad which has 929 songs on it. Today I discovered a compilation from the Loving Spoonful, which I enjoyed very much. There was a time in 1966 when Daydream was one of my favorite songs. Walking and listening to the silly words of early New York rock is a treat these days. Keeps me sane. Sort of meditation, if you focus. It's nice we can still get outside.

Not much new on the Corona Front, except that it's getting worse by the day. I am wondering why we were not better prepared for this pandemic, when great movies predicted it way ahead of time. Very precisely: the source, how it would spread, how (cumsily) governments will react, how there will be a shortage of PPEs.......But every day I am also amazed by the health professionals, the police officers, the fire-fighters, the shop clerks I see on TV and some I encounter (at a distance). They are amzing people, doing their job, because....it's their job. We asked Tony at the front desk, how he was holding up? He said, he feels lucky to still have a job, to have food on the table and he is happy to come to work every day. Says a lot about working people's worries about their future.

Bad news from Budapest. Hungarians are coping relatively well. But Viktor Orban's power grab yesterday, forcing through a law to grant him unlimited emergency powers, Parliament suspended, allowing him to govern by decree, made me really sad. He makes a joke of the opposition, and tries to shut up the remaining and vulnerable independent media. And the finger wagging by the European Commission is a joke: the EU did nothing to stop Orban from establishing a de facto authoritarian state in the last ten years, why would he care even a bit now. Hungarian democracy is sick and there is little hope it will recover any time soon. This crisis is definitely making things worse.

I started watching "The Plot to Save America" on HBO. It's based on a Philip Roth novel. It's about an other America where Charles Lindbergh, the Nazi symphatizer and anti-Semite flying hero beats F.D. Roosevelt and becomes president and befriends Hitler....and it is very scary. It's only in its third episode, but fast becoming a favirite. We are also watching Tiger King on NETFLIX, the documentary about feuding big cat sanctuary owners. It's the craziest thing we've ever seen. But very very American. A must see.

I'd love to tell you how terrible this confinement is, and how we are suffering and all that, but it would not be true. I think about people who had to survive wars in cold basements with no food, no water with bombs falling out of the sky. I think of people, who hid in much smaller places, terrified that the Gestapo will one day break down the secret door and take them away amid beatings. I think of little Anne Frank, who was pulled from her hiding place and was deported to her death. I think of my Father who almost froze to death on the front in 1943. So when I think of all these people, while I am still somewhat terrified of this invisible enemy, I count my blessings.

Washington D.C., The Zone 03.31.2020