这是纽约时报的英文报道。我在这里摘要翻译一下。只是将主要故事翻译一下。未必准确。我稍后再增加一些我的评论。
https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1251843384232292356
这是酒吧店主乔·乔伊斯的朋友在推特上发的讣告：
他（乔·乔伊斯）轻信了福克斯和特朗普。他们告诉他新冠病毒是民主党的新骗局。他信了。现在，他在贝里奇（Bay Ridge）的一所人见人爱的固定资产失去了主人。一个凄凉的讣告。
乔·乔伊斯在纽约的布鲁克林拥有一个酒吧，酒吧名称是JJ Bubbles。这个酒吧的生意一直都不错，直到4月9日酒吧的主人死于新冠肺炎，这个酒吧在这里生存了43年。
乔在七岁时父亲就过世。他的童年比较悲惨。70年代初期，他从越南战场归来，新结婚。他起初在天主教堂里担任健身教练，为了生存，他在周末去酒吧打杂。他的梦想一直是自己拥有一个酒吧。在1977年，他的这个梦想成真。他拥有了在布鲁克林的JJ Bubbles酒吧。
他把儿子培养成哈佛大学高材生，女儿成为布朗大学研究生。都是美国的名牌大学。可以说，他事业有成，家庭美满。
艾迪（Eddie）是律师也是小说作家，是乔的邻居和好友。艾迪介绍说：乔是川普的铁杆支持者，他的政治观点就是无条件地支持共和党提出的任何主张。他规定在他的酒吧里任何人不准说他希拉里·克林顿，这是他的酒吧的一个不成文规定。
2020年3月1日，乔和他的妻子简计划搭乘游轮去西班牙旅游。他的三个成年子女凯文，埃迪，和克里斯汀极力劝阻他，说在这新冠在世界各地流行的时候，去西班牙旅行不是一个好主意。
可乔说，他虽然是74岁了，但不抽烟，不喝酒，身体一直健康，他看不出会有什么健康问题。
孩子们继续劝阻他。但乔告诉克里斯汀，他反复看了狐狸台新闻，他相信狐狸台所说的新冠病毒已经被控制了。
乔看到了美国的著名电视主播和评论员诸如Sean Hannity经常上狐狸台说“美国人被这个子虚乌有的新冠病毒恐吓的心惊肉跳，这完全是没有必要”。
乔看了狐狸台的这些评论后总会说：“就应该这样，我们应该鞭策川普总统去扫荡民主当制造的这个子虚乌有的新冠陷阱。”
虽然后来狐狸台改变了他们一贯轻视新冠病毒的做法。但是，乔和妻子早已经登上了去西班牙的游轮，已经看不到狐狸台后来的反转态度了。
在3月14日，乔和妻子乘坐游轮从西班牙的巴塞罗那返回纽约。
第二天，就是3月15日，在纽约禁足令下达之前，乔去他的酒吧工作，那是他最后一次在他的酒吧工作。
此后，他和妻子前往他们在新罕布什尔州的别墅居住。
3月27日，乔的女儿克里斯汀给乔打电话，发现乔气喘、呼吸急促，就立即打电话叫了救护车。到医院一检测，发现乔气喘，是因为他的氧气水平已经低到具有生命危险的70%水平。
4月9日，乔死于新冠肺炎。
第二天，也就是4月10日，乔的长期合伙人，JJ Bubble的另一个所有者，Artie Nelson，也死于新冠肺炎，享年70岁！
当然，乔很可能不是在前往西班牙的游轮上感染冠状病毒，在西班牙，大约有20,000人死于与之相关的并发症。尽管乘坐游轮（一种经过验证的感染培养皿）与造访一个爆发全面的国家相结合的做法令人难以忽视。但他的女儿坚持认为，乔有办法避免旅行。“如果特朗普戴着面具在电视上说：‘嘿，这很严重，’我不认为乔不会去旅行。”
克里斯汀还说，父亲乔生病后，他完全符合新冠病毒检测的所有条件，但乔坚决拒绝去做新冠病毒检测。因为他坚信他根本就不可能得什么新冠。克里斯汀补充说：“因为他就不是100% 相信这个世界存在着什么新冠。”
在乔进医院住院七天前的一天，克里斯汀同父亲曾经就新冠病毒是否存在有过一次争论。克里斯汀现在真的后悔她不应该赢了拿次争论，她真的希望新冠病毒就如同他父亲所相信的那样是子虚乌有不存在的东西。
乔在那次争论中说：你不觉得这新冠病毒很可疑吗？ 在你认识的人中，你见到有谁死于这种病毒吗？”
克里斯汀说：“爸爸，在我认识的人中，现在还没有任何人死于新冠病毒。但给我一个星期，我敢打赌。”
一个星期后，乔死于新冠病毒。克里斯汀真的后悔她当初同父亲的赌约。她真的不希望她赢了这个赌约！
刘刚
2020年4月19日
A Beloved Bar Owner Was Skeptical About the Virus. Then He Took a Cruise
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/nyregion/coronavirus-jjbubbles-joe-joyce.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Joe Joyce oversaw JJ Bubbles, a welcoming tavern in a conservative corner of Brooklyn, for 43 years until he died of Covid-19.
Joe Joyce, left, the owner of JJ Bubbles, a popular neighborhood bar in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his family in the 1980s.
Ginia Bellafante
By Ginia Bellafante
April 18, 2020
1062
Decades before he would embark on a cruise to the Mediterranean, confident that the coronavirus would have little to do with him, Joe Joyce was known to the world as a social creature, the kind who would do well on a boat full of strangers.
In the early 1970s, back from Vietnam and newly married, he was working as a gym teacher in a Catholic school in Brooklyn when he realized that he needed to make more money if he were ever going to own a house. So he took a weekend job tending bar.
The only child of a single mother who struggled with depression, Joe lost his father when he was 7 — maybe to a heart attack, he was never really sure. At the Tankard Inn, distinguished in the Brooklyn happy-hour scene of the period as a “couples bar,” Joe seemed to find his place in the conviviality of saloon life — the constant company of other people; the distracting kookiness and drama of the regulars; the dutiful marrieds, the swingers. He wanted a bar of his own.
That ambition was fulfilled when he opened JJ Bubbles in Bay Ridge in 1977. The neighborhood was newly famous following the release of “Saturday Night Fever,” the blockbuster showcasing the area as a center of white working-class frustration and epic escape.
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It was a good time to own a bar in southwest Brooklyn; the vibe didn’t accommodate restraint. But even as moods and tastes shifted, JJ Bubbles and Joe Joyce largely thrived — a son sent to Harvard, a daughter to graduate school at Brown, a getaway place bought in New Hampshire — until the cruelest interventions of the pandemic, last month.
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I have heard about Joe Joyce for as long as I have known his oldest son, Eddie, a neighbor and friend, a lawyer turned novelist who was at odds with his father politically but grateful for his contradictions.
Joe Joyce was a Trump supporter who chose selectively from the menu of current Republican ideologies, freely rejecting what didn’t suit him. He didn’t want to hear how much you loved Hillary Clinton, as one regular at his bar put it to me, but he was not going to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged anywhere else.
Last year, Vice Media went to JJ Bubbles and other bars in Bay Ridge to talk to supporters of the current president and landed on some of these ambiguities, discovering for instance the guy who admired Pete Buttigieg as much as he loved Donald Trump. Where these kinds of voters align is not in the right’s hatred of the marginalized but in its distrust of the news. If the “liberal” media was telling us that a plague was coming and that it would be devastating, why should anyone believe it? Joe Joyce had his skepticism.
The longevity of a bar in New York can almost always be tracked in inverse proportion to its snobbishness. Those that cater to the well paid and highly self-regarding rarely survive consecutive presidential administrations. Novelty compels, and the caravan invariably moves on.
JJ Bubbles became an institution for those who remain: transit employees, ironworkers, teachers, sanitation guys, cops, firefighters, civil servants, accountants, retirees from all those occupations who, for the most part, sought their pleasures close to where they lived and in many cases where they had grown up. Neighborhood bars are places of consistency. For the near entirety of its existence, JJ Bubbles kept only two kinds of beer on tap: Bud and Bud Light. Every fourth drink was free.
In his bar Joe Joyce had set the tone for what evolved into an incongruously progressive place. From the beginning there had been a quiet gay presence that eventually grew. In the 1990s, a couple — Jim and Jim — became regulars. They were caring for a friend who was dying of AIDS. That friend started to come as well.
“Bay Ridge is maybe the only red area of Brooklyn,’’ Kevin Joyce, who like his two siblings, worked at the bar at various points, told me. “I wouldn’t say we were in a super-tolerant environment. And yet, things like that happened.’’
A decade or so ago saw the arrival of Billy Baby, who had been selling makeup at the Bloomingdale’s flagship in Manhattan since the 1970s and moved to Bay Ridge from the Bronx. Billy Baby (who is really William Zeoli but called that by no one) quickly became a fixture at JJ Bubbles.
“I said to Joe, ‘There are really no gay bars in this part of Brooklyn, and we need to make everyone feel welcome,’” he recounted. “We didn’t put a pride flag in the window,’’ he said. “But people brought their lovers and kissed and felt totally comfortable.”
Joe was someone who “always had his hand in his pocket,” Billy said. “That’s an old Italian expression meaning you’re always ready to help someone.’’ Joe opened up JJ’s for Billy’s fund-raisers — for a neighborhood community theater, for children’s charities. He supported groups that raised money for food banks and organizations that helped battered women. He worked helping disabled children.
On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy; four years after he opened his bar he stopped drinking completely. He didn’t see the problem.
“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me.
Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.’’ He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”
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Eventually, Fox changed course and took the virus more seriously, but the Joyces were long gone by then. On March 14, they returned to New York from Barcelona, and the next day, before bars and restaurants were forced to close in the city, Joe Joyce went to work at JJ Bubbles for the last time.
He and his wife then headed to their house in New Hampshire. Their children were checking in from New York and New Jersey, and on March 27, when Kristen got off the phone with her father, she called an ambulance. He was wheezing. His oxygen level turned out to be a dangerously low 70 percent. On April 9, he died of Covid-19. The following day, Artie Nelson, one of his longtime bartenders at JJ Bubbles, and also in his 70s, died of the virus as well.
It is possible, of course, that Joe Joyce did not contract the coronavirus on a trip to Spain, where almost 20,000 have died from complications related to it. Although the combination of being on a cruise ship — a proven petri dish for infections — and visiting a country with a full-blown outbreak is hard to ignore. But there was a way he might have avoided the trip, his daughter speculated. “If Trump had gone on TV with a mask on and said, ‘Hey this is serious,’ I don’t think he would have gone.”
When her father began to feel sick, he resisted getting tested. “He didn’t think that he could have it,” Kristen said, “because he wasn’t 100 percent confident that it was a thing.”
Seven days before he was admitted to the hospital, Joe and Kristen had an argument about the emerging public health crisis, which Kristen described as the only dispute she ever had with her father that she wished she hadn’t won. “He said, ‘Don’t you think this is fishy? Do you know anyone who has it? Do you know anyone who has died from it?’ And I said, ‘Dad, I don’t know anyone now, but give me a week and I bet I will.’”
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