The Fabulist by Mark Chiusano

Author:Mark Chiusano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

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One way to think about George Santos’s second run for elected office is that this time around he wasn’t the raw-material novice offered up as tribute in an unwinnable race. Instead, he was a coattail candidate, the happy recipient of a lot of accidental forces of history that he did not create but deftly rode. The coat he was clinging to was less a garment and more a kite: Nassau County and Long Island in general had become a seething hurricane of angry and annoyed citizens primed to vote red no matter whose name was on the ballot line.

First on the list of grievances was COVID-19, and the reaction to that pandemic two years into it. New York was ground zero for this international disaster, served by three metro-area international airports, some of the nation’s first confirmed cases, and over eighty thousand deaths. At first, many New Yorkers were like Choolfaian, vocal about their solidarity with essential workers, and willing to mask up and social distance to #StopTheSpread. The virus’s danger, as it rampaged visibly across the state, was too real to act otherwise. And though Manhattan offered the nation its visuals of an empty Times Square and people banging pots and pans, Long Island was just as central to the COVID story. It was host to the powerful Northwell hospital network, whose leader, Michael Dowling, became a sort of unelected COVID czar in New York. Long Island also was home to huge percentages of the first responders, from police to fire to EMTs, who were suddenly getting plaudits for their service on this new and invisible front line. The first nurse to get the official vaccine in the whole United States, at least according to Northwell, was a Northwell employee and Long Islander, Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican immigrant who herself lost an aunt and uncle to the virus. She lived alone, and once made a pact with a health care friend of hers that if one of them caught it bad, the other one would come over, move to the basement, and quarantine. Lindsay hoped the jab, as she called it, would be the beginning of the end.2

But as the vaccines rolled out across the region, a restiveness took hold. The shots were amazing and practically without side effects, and it was supposed to be a summer of fun. Then people started to get sick anyway. It was all still happening. And the messaging from the highest levels was neither consistent nor airtight.

There was, for example, Andrew M. Cuomo, the prickly and man-of-action governor of New York. Though he was slow in the crucial early days to shut down the state in the face of the health threat, he soon did an about-face and became the nation’s reigning governmental pandemic fighter, turning his daily COVID briefings into must-see (and sometimes hammy) TV as he auditioned for the presidency or at least a great book deal. He charmed the MSNBC voter and sold posters featuring his cute pandemic catchphrases, urging New Yorkers all the while to stay the course.

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