Waiting for a return to normalcy

This week, my wife mentioned that a coworker of hers uses the word “normalcy” when speculating about the prospect of someday ending our current closure of schools, restaurants, churches and other social gatherings. Although the grammatical construction is a bit suspect, the word couldn’t possibly be more appropriate for our times.

The use of the term dates back to the 1920 presidential campaign of Warren G. Harding. As a Pat Buchanan-styled isolationist of his day, Harding was running against Ohio Governor James Cox at the ballot box, but ideologically, he was really running against the legacies of incumbent Woodrow Wilson and the recently deceased Teddy Roosevelt. Wilson was unpopular, mostly due to the recession that followed The Great War (aka WWI), and Governor Cox was widely viewed as Wilson’s successor. Roosevelt, in spite of his demise, had remained popular but had also represented 19th-century military adventurism, for which the post-war US no longer had a taste.

The election of 1920 is known as the last campaign conducted by phonograph. Before the use of broadcast radio was adopted by the masses, candidates would record speeches that were distributed on twelve-inch, 78 RPM disks to be played on the Victrola in the family parlor. It was on one such disk that Harding famously said, “America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

As much as we might admire the eloquence of the speech (extra points awarded for parallel structure and the use of nostrum and equipoise), Harding’s detractors latched on to the apparent malapropism, “normalcy,” and used it to define him as an inarticulate buffoon; a philistine who was unfit for office. A few of his supporters ran to his defense citing prior uses of the term, but that effort never gained traction. Instead, his popular appeal won the day and “normalcy” was embraced by Harding backers in much the same way that George W. Bush supporters co-opted that president’s (apocryphal but plausible) use of “strategery.”

The return to normalcy that Harding sought, were the attitudes held by Americans prior to the war. The European conflict, he argued, had turned our focus to external matters and prevented us from having a full economic recovery at home. Harding won the election. His short term was marred by scandal and he died in office. His Vice President, Calvin Coolidge became the 30th President and went on to win a second term, but one hundred years later, we too yearn for normalcy or a return to the conditions that preceded the COVID-19 outbreak.

When will it happen? President Trump has set a target date of Easter Sunday, April 12 for us to begin our recovery, but he has done so to outcries by his political opponents of reckless, wanton irresponsibility. In their view, the crisis has been horribly mismanaged and attempts at positive spin by POTUS have delayed decisive action and the delivery of much-needed supplies.

We are all concerned, of course, that the most powerful nation on earth is in short supply of necessities like respirators and face masks. The private sector can and will respond in time, but for now, it appears that the government of the people, by the people and for the people were caught off guard. We the people, it should be noted, are scarcely in a position to make harsh criticisms. It seems that we the people have underestimated our own household’s needs for toilet paper, but I’m confident that the private sector will catch up with that situation as well.

As for normalcy, the President cannot possibly know when the virus will play itself out or when we can return to our jobs, restaurants, and churches. Surely, even he must know that he doesn’t know. My best guess is that he is trying to put on a positive face on the situation, and remind us that these inconveniences will eventually come to an end. That’s what leaders are supposed to do. But to what effect?

In the late 1990s, there was a Japanese scientist and author (more author than a scientist) named Masaru Emoto, who published several books and papers arguing that the molecular structure of water could be manipulated by positive thoughts and prayer. Emoto would expose glasses of water to different words, pictures and music, then freeze them. The water exposed to positive energies and vibrations, he demonstrated, would produce better-looking, more symmetrical crystals. The scientific community remained somewhat baffled by what made one crystal better looking than the next, but it made for interesting reading and Mr. Emoto did well on the lecture circuit until his passing in 2014.

I can’t speak to the value of Mr. Emoto’s research. The more I read about particle physics, the less I know. My best guess is that the COVID-19 pathogens really don’t give a rip about what my attitude happens to be. If they want me, they’ll come and get me. If POTUS wants to give us a bit of hope, perhaps even encouragement, I won’t turn it down, but my money is on vitamin C. As for our return to normalcy, or normality, or chaos-as-usual, we will get there when it’s time. Our new normal may not look exactly like our old normal, but we will adapt. We will improvise. We will overcome. If we can get used to taking our shoes off at the airport, we can handle whatever this throws at us for as long as needed.