Like millions of others scratching for something to entertain themselves during the lockdown, my family and I have watched Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. For the few of you who don’t know the show, which became a national craze, it’s about a man improbably named Joe Exotic, who is behind bars (and quarantined) in Florida for the attempted murder of Carole Baskin, an activist who worked to shut down his roadside zoo, with its hundreds of big cats.
It’s riveting, not least because the ratio of freak to regular Joe, of weird to normal, is so skewed toward the remarkable that it’d be implausible as fiction. The facts, however, support the evidence of your lying eyes, and you’re glued.
The show illuminates an almost instantaneous change in our behavior that has taken place since the coronavirus arrived.
Chad Chronister, sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, himself a binge Tiger King watcher, has reopened the cold case of Don Lewis, a local millionaire who disappeared 23 years ago and who Mr. Exotic says was murdered and fed to tigers by Lewis’s wife, the same Carole Baskin. (See, I told you there was a lot of weird.) Tips for the sheriff are sluicing in from a locked-down public all watching the same show.
Everyone except the overworked heroes of the healthcare sector are living similar lives now. We who are not doctors, nurses, and other medical staff have only a few things left to do, so we are doing them all — washing our hands, stewing in our homes, going out for walks, veering away from oncoming pedestrians, returning home to experiment with quarantine cocktails in virtual happy hours, and eating too much.
On a walk recently, a neighbor commented to me that the dullness of life today is a measure of how rich and varied it used to be eons ago in February. But there is a profound irony, which is that we were more atomized before social distancing began than we are now. We’re all holed up and separated from each other, but we’re all also experiencing the same things, enduring the same frustrations, in the same boat. Before the pandemic whittled our activities down, there was far less common ground between us.
We aren’t exactly back to the days when the whole nation tuned in to the evening news so Walter Cronkite could tell us what was happening. But there is now more of a shared way of life.
Parents are spending far more time with children. Out on those walks, one sees fathers shooting hoops with sons and daughters in the middle of the day when they’d normally be at their offices. Neighbors stop 6 feet or more apart and ask about each other’s health. Strangers make way for each other with a renewed politeness that germinated in an understanding that society will function a lot better if we treat each other considerately.
Some idiot joggers still brush sweatily by on narrow trails, and a few shoppers lurch across your face to snatch the last package of wipes that you were about to take from a supermarket shelf. But these are exceptions that prove the rule of our new way. More often, runners loop off the track to give you (not just them) more space, and shoppers stop and wait at the end of an aisle until the only other customer in it has emerged and left it vacant.
The common culture has curtain-twitching aspects, an intensified instinct to peer at what other people are doing. A common culture with shared assumptions is also a little nosier. There is more to watch outside our windows when neighbors are at home, more people whose ordinary behavior is suddenly of greater interest than it used to be. Doubtless, there is also more willingness to report transgressions to officialdom rather than shrug and mutter that it is none of our business. Hence the flood of tips for Sheriff Chronister.
Like a flash of lightening in the night, the coronavirus has given us a glimpse of a way of life half forgotten, but which we recognize during a brief moment of illumination. It’s a narrower life, a slower life, a more claustrophobic life — and we’ll leave it behind without regret when the threat has passed. But it is fascinating in what it shows about our swift adaptation, and in how it recalls a not-so-distant past — as fascinating as the freaks at the other end of the spectrum on Tiger King.
