by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the 31st annual Memorial Day
concert from PBS and their Washington, D.C.-area affiliate, WETA — and it
proved unexpectedly moving, a truly wrenching experience on the eve of the
SARS-CoV-2 pandemic’s death toll in the U.S. heading for 100,000 (more
Americans dead than perished in the Viet Nam war and all America’s wars since). I was wondering how they were
going to do the concert since the attempts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2
have led to the cancellation of all
public concerts and other mass gatherings (though at least some sports,
including golf and stock-car racing, are proceeding but without spectators in
the audience — and golf takes place over such a wide landscape it can be played
with people still maintaining the six-feet-apart “social distancing” that has
become the norm). What they did was have the invariable hosts, Joe Mantegna and
Gary Sinise, broadcast their parts from a small set in southern California
instead of an outdoor stage at the U.S. Capitol, while the singers (Trace
Adkins, Cynthia Erivo, CeCe Winans, Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara) performed
either in private spaces or outside the Capitol, but without an audience.
Winans, from a family of gospel singers, performed Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me”
from inside a church, but there was no organ player and the only two other
people we saw were her two backup singers, a man and a woman, standing six feet
behind both her and each other.
Adkins sang “He’s Still a Soldier” and “Let It Shine,”
nice, straightforward songs celebrating the military values and the
indomitability of the American (or the human) spirit. Erivo did “Hero”
(bringing spiritual truth to a usually hopelessly banal song) and a powerful
version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that tapped not only the Simon and
Garfunkel original but Aretha Franklin’s gospel-rooted cover (though, like
Aretha, she did only two of the song’s three verses). Renée Fleming was trotted
out to sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” and, as the show’s closer, “America, the
Beautiful,” and though she did both well enough, only at the end, in the
unwritten codas, did her voice soar into the upper reaches of the soprano range
at which she is truly at her best (and though she’s been singing for quite a
long time her voice is still in excellent shape). Kelli O’Hara did a version of
James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” (which I remember liking “in the day” far better
in Blood, Sweat and Tears’ cover — with David Clayton-Thomas’s intense singing
— than in Taylor’s original, just as Melanie’s wrenching cover of Taylor’s
“Carolina in My Mind” did far more for me than his rather bland original) that
was the best vocal performance of the night. It helped that O’Hara was backed
only by acoustic guitar and piano, and the musicians were actually in the same
room with her — so she didn’t have to deal with a backing tape piped in from
elsewhere. The use of pre-recorded backings not only gave a weird karaoke-like
air to the show, they also frequently drowned out the vocals because WETA’s
sound engineers aren’t used to doing this sort of live mixing — though Erivo’s
voice cut powerfully through the over-loud backing.
They also had a wide
variety of movie and TV stars broadcast single-sentence tribute to the heroism
and valor of America’s servicemembers and their willingness to sacrifice
themselves to keep the rest of us free, and they gave General Colin Powell the
chance to give two short speeches
during the concert, one paying tribute to the veterans of Viet Nam and one
celebrating President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — which was, after all, a
memorial to fallen soldiers in America’s bloodiest war, and in which Lincoln
questioned the whole idea of war memorials: “But, in a larger sense, we cannot
dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave
men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our
poor power to add or detract.” And the producers of this Memorial Day concert
included film clips from previous ones, as well as a supposedly recently filmed
performance of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” by the National
Symphony Orchestra (the official symphony of Washington, D.C.) with Jack Everly
conducting. (Everly has conducted the Memorial Day concerts since their
founder, Erich Kunzel, died. The National Symphony generally carries two
conductors, one for the hard-core classical concerts and one for the “Pops”
stuff.) The provenance of the “Fanfare” was unclear — though the piece itself
was written in 1942, during World War II, and once when it was played at the
Republican National Convention my husband Charles couldn’t help but comment,
“Don’t they know it was written by a Gay Communist?” — but there were also some
elaborate tribute sequences from previous concerts included as part of this
one.
Actor Sam Elliott was heard paying tribute to D-Day veteran Ray Lambert
from the 2019 concert — the one that commemorated the 75th
anniversary of that event — and Laurence Fishburne was shown paying tribute to
the Tuskegee Airmen, the separate squadron of African-American fighter pilots
who saw action as fighter escorts on bombing raids during World War II. By far
the most powerful of the tribute segments clipped from previous War Memorial
concerts was the one delivered by actor Esai Morales in 2015, who paid tribute
to Romulo “Romy” Camargo, son of an immigrant to the U.S. from Colombia who
settled in Crystal Springs, Florida. Romulo, Sr. was the town pediatrician and
Romulo, Jr. decided to make the military his adult career after his older
brother Jorge graduated from Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Romulo,
Jr. married his childhood sweetheart Gabriela just before he went into the
service in 1995 — they were together long enough to have at least one child —
and he trained to be a Special Forces Ranger in 1999. In 2004 he deployed to
Afghanistan as a non-commissioned officer and in 2005 was leading a company
there when they were ambushed and Romy was shot in the neck, permanently
paralyzing him. The rest of the story is an inspiring if tragic tale of love,
devotion and excellent care as he worked his way through to live his life
despite his injuries, and among the real heroes of his story are his wife —
whose dedication and commitment to him are really extraordinary — and the doctors,
nurses, therapists and caregivers from the Veterans’ Administration who worked
with him for years.
One item about his story that made it even more powerful in
2020 than it had been in 2015 was the use of the term “ventilators” — in the
SARS-CoV-2 crisis “ventilator” has become a loaded term, symbolizing not only
the desperation with which doctors dealing with COVID-19 patients (remember,
SARS-CoV-2 is the official name of the virus in the current pandemic and
COVID-19 the name of the disease it causes) have had to use heroic measures in
last-ditch attempts to save their lives, and the horrible self-destruction of
America’s industrial infrastructure to the point where this nation, which won
World War II largely on the basis of our sheer industrial might, has literally given away its manufacturing base, mostly to China,
so in a crisis like this one — especially one that has interrupted the global
supply chains our economy had come to rely on — we literally don’t have the
capacity to produce the equipment we need. The reference to ventilators in
Camargo’s story came in Morales’s account of how Camargo had to re-learn to
breathe without one and regain
the normal use of his lungs. The segment also mentioned that Camargo has to go
through a four-hour ritual just to get out of bed and clean up enough,
including changing his urine bags and giving him a shower — a process Camargo,
who wrote the narration Morales read, compares to washing a car. Listening to that was a busman’s holiday for me — though I’ve never
taken care of anyone as disabled as he, I have given people baths, helped them in and out of
wheelchairs and gone through long rituals so they could get out of bed,
something most of us take for granted that we can do in a few minutes. I
suspect the reason this particular Memorial Day concert moved me more than some
of the previous ones have is the immediacy of the current SARS-CoV-2 crisis and
the frustration that so many of the usual options open for grieving aren’t
available.
As I’ve noted before, the natural human instinct to cope with danger
is to band together — to assemble, bond, hug — and those are among the things
we are being told most sternly that in this crisis we must not do. There’ve been attempts to assert that we’re
bonding psychologically even though we’re verboten from actually bonding physically — variations on the
phrase “apart but together” have become some of the most annoying clichés of
the SARS-CoV-2 era — but this crisis has isolated us in ways that make it
considerably more difficult to cope with psychologically than a war. I can
remember in previous eras, if a home-care client was hospitalized, I could go
see them, talk to the people taking care of them and get at least some idea of how they were doing. Now the entrances to
hospitals are blocked off with giant Plexiglas windows and huge “NO
VISITORS!” signs, and the hospitals themselves have become black
boxes in which whatever is going on inside them is kept from our eyes. Family
members of COVID-19 patients aren’t even allowed to be in the same rooms with
them as they die — and people who’ve had relatives with long-term chronic
illnesses who were at least counting on being there in the room and able to
hold their hands as they expired are now being denied that one last comfort and
have to face losing their loved ones from the other side of a Plexiglas shield.
The fact that the deaths from COVID-19 happen in secret makes this more like
the Holocaust than a war — last night PBS ran a promo for a documentary on the
last Holocaust survivors and one clip they showed was of a man who would see a
puff of smoke from one of the mass crematoria and wonder if that was anyone he
knew — except even the Holocaust was being perpetrated by one group of human
beings against another, and therefore there were identifiable human villains
you could hate.
Here there is no villain except a sub-microscopic package of
nucleic acid, proteins and a lipid envelope whose sole purpose in life is to
make more copies of itself, no matter who or what it harms in the process of
doing so (which is probably why there’s been even more vituperation against
President Trump than usual — we desperately want someone to blame, and his enemies can say it’s all his fault because he didn’t act quickly enough, while
Trump’s supporters can blame it all on their usual scapegoats: the media, the
“deep state” and “experts” of all kinds). The fact is that pandemics, like
earthquakes, just happen — either
a shift in the tectonic plates can cause a catastrophe or a fluke in viral
evolution can create a killer strain of something — and while the world as a
whole could have been better prepared for this one, you don’t get the
early-warning signals of an impending pandemic you usually get from a
deteriorating international political situation that’s about to degenerate into
a war. So in some respects the examples of heroism the Memorial Day concerts
celebrate are grimly appropriate models for SARS-CoV-2 — especially the
extraordinary sacrifices doctors, nurses and others on the front line are making
to take care of the victims and protect the rest of us — in other ways a
pandemic isn’t like a war at all and treating it as one may lead us to mistakes
(like the “Warp Speed” program President Trump has called for to develop a
SARS-CoV-2 vaccine — which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of science: science
is slow, and some of the biggest scientific
blunders of all time have come about from attempting to rush it) that may do
more harm than good.
