Joseph Sabino Mistick: Coronavirus is the one big issue

Two hundred and ten thousand dead and counting. Millions infected, with millions more to come. The staggering toll of the coronavirus in America was the opening topic of the vice presidential debate between Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris and Republican Vice President Mike Pence.

“The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,” Harris said early on, referring to our nation’s abysmal failure to control the coronavirus. And she accused Pence and Donald Trump of keeping Americans in the dark about the deadly virus from the beginning, instead of coming clean so they could protect themselves.

As Pence tried to defend the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, the cold numbers could not be denied. It was hard for Pence to argue that Trump and he have a winning strategy to fight the pandemic, now that Trump has contracted the virus along with his wife and staff members and political allies.

Many of them were likely infected at a Rose Garden announcement of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, where a cluster of attendees paid a big price for following Trump’s cavalier lead, taking no precautions against the deadly virus. The White House became a covid-19 hotspot, and what should have been a happy time turned into a nightmare of quarantine, isolation and suffering.

Harris and Pence debated other things, too. All of them are important, including Trump’s case before the Supreme Court that would gut Obamacare and strip 20 million Americans of their health insurance, Trump’s tax cut and Biden’s promise to restore those taxes on the wealthy, climate change, jobs, crime and racial injustice.

But try as we might, it is hard to focus on anything else for long, because the coronavirus is always around, lurking in our past and threatening our future. Trump and Pence would like this campaign to be about anything but that, and most Americans find it hard to think about anything else.

There was a distraction well into the debate, and it created a chance to chuckle during an otherwise grim affair. A fly landed on Pence’s perfect white hair and stayed there motionless for nearly two minutes.

Social media erupted, cable news commentators riffed on the fly and there was cyberchatter about who would play the fly on “Saturday Night Live.” Before long, people were making Twitter accounts for the fly.

While the debate was still plodding on, a picture of Joe Biden holding an orange flyswatter was retweeted thousands of times. And the following morning the fly’s appearance at the debate made the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers.

According to a Zen master who understood the absurdity of life, there are times when, “Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh.” Heaven knows we need reasons to laugh now, and that fly came through for us.

But when the moment passed, we were right back where we started, facing the biggest issue of this campaign and our times. Two hundred and ten thousand dead and counting. Millions infected with millions more to come.