ERASING THE SCAMDEMIC

During the winters of 1988–89, I could see the World Trade Center towers five miles due east from the wood-framed windows of my parquet-wood-floored, nine-foot ceilinged, hillside, brick, pre-War, 30-unit Kearny, New Jersey apartment building, which sat above storefronts. On multiple Saturdays or Sundays, I arose in the dark and drove my wife’s heavily dented, stick-shift, green Toyota across the Meadowlands into Manhattan to play 6:30 AM pick-up ice hockey at the outdoor Lasker — the locals called it “Alaska” — Rink, which sat in a small, bedrock-outcropped, hardwood-treed valley near the North/Harlem end of Central Park.

Alaska attracted an unusual mix of dozens of players: White guys in their twenties and thirties who had played college hockey and now worked on Wall Street alongside Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood males in their teens and twenties. The sounds of skates scraping and sticks smacking black biscuits and accelerating, gliding, circling, swerving, back-skating and stopping hard, making snowy mist, while feeling frigid air inside my nose were very pleasing.

Three adjacent, spirited games, which began at dawn, were separated only by a few traffic cones. Most weeks, train-wreck-like, head-on collisions occurred when guys from different games skated at full speed in opposite directions with their heads down as they single-mindedly carried pucks beyond the cones’ boundaries. After crashing at high speed without bracing for it, they would lie on the ice, dazed, sometimes with their helmets jolted off their heads. In hockey, as in life, we occasionally focus too much on some immediate concern and disregard the bigger picture. And vice versa.

The fifty or so guys who normally showed up paid $3 to play for an hour-and-a-half on a clean sheet of ice. It was great, informal fun.

When we finished playing at 8 AM, the rink keepers conspicuously tried to hurry us out of the large, cinderblock-walled, open floor plan, bench-intensive locker room. Chill, Parkies: it takes fifty guys a few minutes to remove skates and sweat-soaked gear and to briefly discuss what had just happened.

In the biochemically-induced, chilly-cheeked, post-exertion euphoria, and wearing a fresh, dry, long sleeve t-shirt, I carried my bulky hockey bag and sticks two blocks to 110th Street in the early morning light, threw my gear into the back seat and breezed, via post-apocalyptically deserted West Side avenues, out through the Lincoln Tunnel and home—twenty minutes total—to share a big, hot breakfast with my lovely young wife. You don’t need much money to have everything you want.

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Shortly before my third Alaska winter, I called the Parks Department to find out when sunrise hockey was starting. The guy who answered, laughed. I asked why. He said there wouldn’t be any more early morning ice time. The Parks guys weren’t ever supposed to have opened the rink before 9 AM. During the preceding, hockey-at-dawn years, two key-holding Park employees had shown up before their shifts and pocketed the off-the-books admission cash.

It’s funny that it took the rink’s manager at least three years to learn of his employees' on-site side hustle. I had found out about this setting from reading a slice-of-life article in The New York Times’s Metro Section. I guess the boss read The Post. And there were no surveillance cameras back then.

Learning of the scam, I belatedly understood why the Park workers had been in such a hurry to clear the locker room. I also remembered that each week, as soon as we left the ice, one worker revved up the Zamboni ice-cleaning machine and transformed the surface from skate-gouged and snow-covered back into the pristine, glassy sheet it had been when the Breakfast Club sessions began.

Before the boss arrived, The Park workers had to remove any trace of each week’s 90-minute unofficial Winterfest. In retrospect, I see the Parkies not as small-time profiteers, but as public servants who facilitated the highest and best use of the resources they stewarded. I hope they didn’t get fired.

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America now feels like 8:20 at Lasker Rink on a Saturday morning. The multi-year, in-your-face viral Scam has been erased without a trace. The government-driven boredom, oppression, depression, overdoses and other substance abuse and the lost life experiences aren’t mentioned.

Too bad that much of the damage: the broken relationships, the inflation and economic stratification/mass impoverishment, the learning losses and dropouts, the addictions, the weight gain, the unmade memories, the vaxx injuries and lower marriage and birth rates, et al. remain. Most people fail to connect the lockdowns, the wasted trillions of Covid aid, the shots and contemporary problems. This blissful ignorance helps them to pretend that the Scamdemic never happened and to avoid the guilt they should feel for internalizing, supporting or tolerating the mania.

But just as the openly secret sunrise hockey scam undeniably happened, so did the viral scam. Except there’s no magic machine to smooth over the Scamdemic’s effects.

When someone, like me, persists in bringing up the Scamdemic, people become aggravated and peremptorily say that “we didn’t know” how bad the virus was and that “we did the best we could” to deal with it. This is, of course, preposterous. But I don’t say that. Instead, I ask questions that have no good answers. This angers people.

Notably, political candidates don’t talk about the worst, most broadly experienced exercise of peacetime public policy and the worst abuse of civil authority and deprivation of civil liberties since slavery. Nor does the media ask the politicians about it. The silence is deafening.

Via their Covid giveaways, Trump acted foolishly, and Biden, Congress and most Democrat governors acted opportunistically and thus, enabled the Scamdemic. Together, they created the inflation that they now either complain about, understate or blame others for causing. They ignore the human costs of the lockdowns and the failure of the shots—unconstitutionally mandated by Biden—and the injuries or deaths caused thereby.

Scamdemic actions must not be memory-holed. Both Trump and Biden performed poorly, albeit in different ways, when it mattered most. Harris also sold the Scam. Mike Pence, the test-o-manic Covid czar, did a terrible job, too. A political system that yields such major party candidates as these four is deeply dysfunctional. But that’s been true for as long as I can remember.

The public hasn’t, since 2020, held politicians or bureaucrats accountable for their lockdowns, closures, masks, tests, shots and bankrupting, ineffective potlatches. The worst Corona abusers: Cuomo, Whitmer, Hochul, Pritzker and Newsom, were nonetheless reelected. Cuomo would still be in power—he might even have become the Democrat standard bearer—if he hadn’t gotten too touchy with some women. Ultimately, his Covid overreaction, which affected the daily lives of 22 million New Yorkers—meant much less to voters than did his creepy one-on-one behavior.

As with everyday people, politicians and Public Health bureaucrats think that admitting they were wrong about all things Covid would make them lose face and self-esteem. Such an admission would come too late to undo the harm they caused.

But they should apologize anyway. It would enable people to take them a little more seriously going forward. Paradoxically, admitting they lied might help to restore some of the credibility they lost. Though, as throughout the Scamdemic, I know I’m expressing a minority view about the value of candor.

Generally, the Scamdemic shows that those who rise to the top of the political and bureaucratic heap should be humble and should interfere less in peoples’ lives; they either don’t know what they’re doing or willingly sell out their constituents to please donors or for other political or personal gain. Or it shows that they take their orders from the Deep State and thus, it matters little who’s ostensibly in charge.

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Zambonis quietly and efficiently turn beat-up ice into a beautiful, clean sheet before dumping the harvested snow on a mound outside the rink. Even those who aren’t skaters or hockey players like watching the ice resurfacing process. It’s satisfying to see, in a few minutes of swath-by-swath passes, something thoroughly damaged turned into something smooth, shiny and new. If only life were so easy.

While few want to discuss the Covid overreaction, its effects can’t simply be wiped away and glossed over, such that those who came upon the sunrise hockey scene at 8:20 would have no idea what had just happened. No magic machine can erase the social, psychological and economic damage that the Covid managers caused. These bear lasting discussion.

Skating on bad ice sucks. Skate blades fail to grip and cut a rough, snowy substrate and they glide much less well. Instead, steel gets caught in ruts, causing skaters to lose edges and control. Handling and passing the puck also become more difficult. By living in a world chewed up by the Covid overreaction, even Americans who won’t ever skate or play hockey are learning, figuratively, how snowy ice feels. They’ll move clumsily through this messed up context for a long time. Many will fall and struggle to get back on their feet. Some will lie there, dazed, not knowing what hit them.

Though they should have seen it coming.