Can you hear it? It’s the silent airport, the text-only airport, the airport of the future, the airport of your dreams. This is the progress of civilization. Airports shouldn’t be library quiet. They should be completely silent. Abandoned-church-in-the-middle-of-the-night quiet. Welcome.
There are lots of indignities in the modern American airport. The food, both on the ground and in the air, is somehow both overdetermined and bland. TSA is our contemporary theater of the absurd. The process of herding on and off the planes with all our nicely designed luggage puts the idea of human intelligence into question. The overwhelming presence of coordinated sweatsuit sets does not help matters. All of it makes me feel crazy. And yet, I’ll take it everyday. What I want to change is simply the noise in the modern airport.
Here in wonderful 2026, there is no need to have anything but text-based communication in the airport. No public announcements. No announcements from the gate. No more innocuous “welcome to our city” messages by whomever the mayor of Atlanta currently is. (I always seem to hear this while I’m urinating.) No more well-intentioned announcements about child trafficking. There should be signs saying what’s arriving, what’s departing. There should be signs outside the gates showing the same. There should be text messages delivered silently to your phone updating you on the whereabouts of your flight. If you come into the airport, you automatically consent, along with the TSA body search, to receiving silent text messages from the airport. Like with firearms, all audible alerts should be removed once you enter the premises. If we can make AI happen, then we can make this happen. No phone calls. If you need to talk on the phone, there should be private booths where you can conduct your shameful business. (I feel like this used to be a thing historically.) If people can hear you converse from your booth, then they should stare at you and you should feel shame. If you have a problem with your flight that cannot be resolved via text, there should be slightly larger booths where you and an airline official can discuss the matter, far, far away from everyone else.
Part of my beef is that it there are too many sounds. To begin, there is the modern American compulsion to blast pop music from every restaurant, bar, and kiosk, as if we were all trapped in an endless music video directed by Satan. (His theme song is “Mambo No. 5.”) Second, the public announcements don’t work. They’re too difficult to hear and they don’t inform. Airport terminals are too close together for any of the individual terminal announcement systems not to get hopelessly muddled. And then these announcements get preempted by the larger terminal-wide announcements. I’m always trying to parse the noise, trying to figure out what is relevant information. It’s like trying to unweave a rug with my teeth. They should instead install those digital highway signs, those boondoggles that purportedly announce upcoming traffic accidents and road closures but which in the Land Progress mostly sport bad puns related to safe driving. It’s like a modern WPA program for poets. There are worse uses of federal funds, but still.
The announcements that are given at the gate and then on the airplane itself are so rote that many airlines or flight attendants use the occasion to work on their stand-up material. We’ve all witnessed the “humorous flight safety video.” We’ve all been accosted by the flight-attendant doing a bit. It feels like being trapped with an overly enthusiastic football mascot with slightly less fur. I like it when people are funny. I am not a monster. But this is not funny. It’s annoying and desperate. I know the lawyers require the pinned-back-eyelids transmission of the safety video though it seems like this sphere is ripe for innovation. Perhaps take a clue from the endless, unreadable and unread Terms of Service agreements. Let’s get Apple to work on those flight videos. Perhaps travelers can agree to the terms at the same time they agree not to make a peep as soon as they enter the jetbridge, or whatever we’re calling the entrance to the airport now.
While I’m being picky, the planes themselves should be quieter. These machines are too loud inside. All that groaning and gear-shifting. I shouldn’t have to wear my cubicle-grade headphones to shield myself from the Lynchian industrial keening. Perhaps Delta could explore some better insulation technologies or phase cancellation possibilities. Perhaps a collaboration with some outfit like Yeti coolers. I realize that’s a different technology entirely, but man, those coolers really do work. I feel like this could be a mutually beneficial synergistic collab.
And then finally there is my fellow American traveler, equipped now for 18 years at least with a smart phone and yet none the wiser about using it, or at least none the more subtle. The prevalence of taking phone calls on speaker in public shocks me, as if I’m some spinster witnessing white pants after Labor Day. I am not a monster. But honestly, take that call somewhere else and in a way where no one else can hear it, where no one else is subjected to it. It’s a kind of aggressive rudeness, forcing a private conversation into the public sphere. Of course I have heard middle-aged professionals instigate calls while urinating in the public restroom in my office building, so there are really no limits to a lack of decorum. (Perhaps they are calling the mayor of Atlanta.) Video calls on speaker are just a declension of the same psychosis. I admit to not understanding the appeal of video calls in general, much less while I’m walking between terminals. (I’m pretty sure Short Form Video is one of the Seven Seals, but I’ll save that rant for another day.)
Instead, hear it with me. See it. Feel it. Completely quiet. Just the sound of people walking. I don’t want to put anyone in jail or anything. I just think some strategic social shaming is in order. I don’t think people should be cancelled or whatever we’re calling it now. But I do think that the people who take video calls on speaker should be politely led off the premises and banned for six months. I’m not a monster. It’s just that silence is golden. Or if not golden, then a pleasant ocher. And something we should strive to paint together. No one likes travelling. I mean, maybe the super rich do. But I’m talking about actual human beings here.
I’m of course writing this from an airport. I’ve got my ear plugs in but I can still hear the kids shrieking from one direction and the vacuuming from another. I can’t hear the announcements, but I can hear that emergency door alarm, the kind that goes off intermittently and seems engineered to loosen bowels and yet which effectuates no change in behavior from anyone. The door just makes that sound every now and then like some dispeptic animal. I don’t think my prohibition should apply to small children. I’m not a monster. Toddlers are going to be toddlers. But as the kids get older we should teach them that the proper approach to air travel is a funereal respect. A holy silence so that can people can watch their ipad movies in peace. Air travel is an absurd privilege, one we should accept while minimizing human suffering.
Also, grownups: no traveling with a blanket. Have some self-respect.
Category Archives: plague journal
The clone wars come home
A couple of weeks ago I received a friendly email from a fellow who lavished me with praise for my one published book, a collection of stories called The Portable Son, published by a small press many moons ago. He wanted to present the book to his book club.
I of course was thrilled to receive any positive commentary from a reader. That’s all I really ever want: unending praise from total strangers. This alone will finally make me feel whole. So I wrote him back and said thank you, but that I was a little confused as to what he needed me to do to effectuate him sharing the book with his book group. It was indeed published moons ago, but it is still purchasable, in handy paperback or ebook form, and if you have trouble with that, you can always email me and I will sell you a copy the old-fashioned way. (That is, PayPal.) He said that he needed my permission and a digital copy of the book, and if that went well, we could discuss further procedures.
And here is where my ears went to a point. I am ripe for random praise from strangers but I am also wary of scams. And I’ve reached the point in my life and in my experience with the internet where I think everything is a scam. The internet itself: one giant, networked scam. I two-factor authenticate my kids when they call, just to be sure they’re who they say they are, the little rascals. And so despite the enormous sinkhole of my own ego, this little email exchange seemed too good to be true.
I’ll send it to my good friend Jim, I thought. He’s good at sniffing out scam behavior. But before I could forward the correspondence onto Jim, I received another email, from another extremely friendly stranger, extolling the virtues of my lonely little short story collection, and wondering if we could collaborate on further promotional ventures and sharing it with his group of readers. So this must be the new scam, I thought.
Then a few days later I received another email from another would-be enthusiast. And this morning I received another. Is this what being famous feels like? Being approached by overly friendly scammers, or what’s more likely, scam robots? The prose in these emails seems real; it has the Sabrina Carpenter effect: it’s almost convincingly lifelike. Is my ego being exploited by artificial intelligence? Well, sure, but see above re: the internet. Isn’t that essentially what has always been happening since I logged on sometime in the late 90s?
I would quote from the emails, but I feel queasy quoting from private correspondence without permission, even correspondence with robots. Yes, I am that old-fashioned. By this point in revising this post, I’ve received nearly ten solicitations from the bots. They’re all remarkably lifelike. They are all just this side of scammy. After the first I have refrained from responding. Apparently I’m on some list, the sucker list.
I am old enough and cynical enough to be unimpressed by artificial intelligence talk. Remember when virtual reality was going to change the world? All world-ending or world-revolutionizing talk seems to spring from some existential insecurity, a longing for the apocalypse. The internet rewards exaggeration. What’s more, I’m embarrassed by my peers who use it for little tasks. I’m not against using technology to save time and effort. I am after all typing this on a laptop. I revere Excel. But asking ChatGPT therapy-adjacent questions feels embarrassing. Using AI to remix old songs for you with new, robot-played instruments is a waste of computing power and your one theoretically precious life. It’s playing in the funhouse mirror. Look how weird my face gets, etc. We must move past the mirror, move through the mirror. Tools must become mundane to become useful.
The internet is a factory of cliches. What are memes but the congealing of a culture’s sensibility. Turns of phrase quickly become commodified. It’s difficult to be online and think for oneself, articulate for oneself. Let’s briefly table whether or not this is ever possible. Being too online makes it well-nigh impossible. What are you asking ChatGPT when you ask it a question? “Give me the average response for everything.” Not the best of what has been thought and said but the normal distribution of what has been thought and said. We came for Orson Welles, and we went home with Mr. Beast.
Anyway, I’ve just decided to let the robot spam sales pitches wash over me. If you are a real live breathing person and want to read my book, you can find it here. Or you can email me and I will sell it to you the old-fashioned way (PayPal). Or even if you are a non-human who wants to read my book. I am capitalist enough to not be completely prejudiced against the robots. But I’m not comping them a copy either. And I’m not going to send $89.99 to some robot to theoretically persuade some invisible robot readership out there to read my delicate little story collection. There’s something that only AI could invent, an audience for my short stories.
I may be desperate for attention, but I’m still redneck enough to fundamentally distrust too much loose praise.
If
What am I going to do if he wins again? I asked myself this question earlier in the summer after the first debate. I didn’t watch it (too anxious), but I immediately felt the ambient political crisis, radiating in waves through my feeds. I am not a politically sophisticated person, but it seemed like B had “confirmed the political narrative” that had developed around him: that he was too old, too mentally furry, to effectuate the gargantuan task at hand. T has always maintained his myth of vigor via the Foghorn Leghorn syndrome: loud sound as a stand in for coherence, or accountability, or wisdom. Bluster is all. I don’t know if the relatively quick trade out for H was the correct choice or not. I do think at that point in the election calendar, there was little else the D party could have done. And while I do think that running another woman ineluctably triggers the vast reservoir of misogyny in U.S. society, shared, I’m sad to say, by all genders, the instant contrast between the rage-faced, verbally incontinent king, on the one side, and the Type A, corner-office queen on the other, is stark.
I agree that there are meaningful policy distinctions to make along the political spectrum, but none of this ever altered my opposition to T, who conveniently encapsulates every human impulse I abhor and who proposes policies I consider wrong, both economically (tariffs) and morally (mass deportations). There’s more to it, but I’ll spare you.
How would I go about persuading my peers to not vote for T? I don’t know. Some people argue that no one can actually be persuaded, but I feel like that’s wrong. People can change their minds. It just doesn’t happen often. It doesn’t happen smoothly. It is usually not the direct result of a well-informed, rational conversation or argument. But people can make a turn. After T won the first time, I resolved that I would never again interact with a T-voting person. But then I quickly realized how lonely I would be, that I lived in the Land of Progress, and that my little bubble of like-minded, aspiring professionals was tiny and not nearly as homogenous as I might hope. And further, that my fleeting hope for always agreeable peers was slightly antidemocratic. What is democracy if not the hell of other people? Politicians spend all this time trying to get people to vote, and then they vote incorrectly and for all the wrong reasons.1 I’m not the best political thinker, but I’m not the worst either.2 I wish there were something I could say that would change people’s minds, but we are literally watching different channels, reading different books, thumbing through different memes. We almost speak a different language.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Chicago attending a lesbian rally for H. I was neither a host nor a contributor. I was just tagging along with a friend, but I was happy to be there, so far from my usual climate. Those lesbians were fired up, and I found this exciting. In my day to day life I am as apolitical as possible, both as a professional prophylactic and as an expression of personal sensibility, and also, yes, as a kind of defense mechanism. I think the phrase is “conflict-avoidant.” Even so, I am not immune to eloquent political rage, which is what the speakers exhibited. A couple of people there asked me what it was like living where I lived, and I said that it was mostly fine but that it occasionally grew awkward, usually when a peer decided to do an in-person re-post of some right-wing meme, a hand-off in the relay race of ideas. For a while this took the form of Hunter Biden fentanyl jokes having to do with contaminated money? (I don’t know. I am tempted to google it but I don’t care.) It takes the form of “well they say that there’s never been a hurricane that started in the Gulf.” It takes the form of the guy showing me “this year’s scariest Halloween costume” and the picture being a Biden mask. These people are eating from an entirely different salad bar. A more combative person might begin arguing. I instead treat these moments as I would a tic from a person who is obviously, helplessly, psychologically compromised, and start politely scanning for the exits.3 Perhaps I am part of the problem with my reluctance for immediate intellectual confrontation. I am writing this on my little blog, after all.
I do know that I am tired of the discourse, if we can even call it that. Discourse implies some kind of organization of the rhetoric, where instead it’s just a daily primordial stew of new ingredients reacting to one another in a fractal manner. I am tired of the T show, and the people who continue to watch the T show seem self-compromised in some way, as if in a cult or in the late stages of an addiction, an inner struggle tied up inside their particular circumstances, and not really having anything to do with me. How do I help them help themselves? Etc.
Perhaps I am just a smug, aspirational, paraprofessional, yuppie reboot who is both too polite for aggressive lefty rhetoric and too Episcopalian for the pro-wrestling, redneck stench of the modern right. That might be true, but also I think both sides are still wrong in specific ways, aside from the fact that they offend my tastes. I’ve never listened to the Joe Rogan Experience for a couple of reasons. One, podcasts are like audiobooks. If I’m going to let someone whisper in my ear, I better like their voice. Two, Joe Rogan was the host of Fear Factor, a show that was on in the evenings when I worked at the NBC affiliate in Birmingham, and I found it revolting. That show, if you recall, was about people performing weird stunts in order to get money, which turns out to be a good description of contemporary American society, or at least a portion of it, the online portion of it — doing weird, revolting stunts for clout, online attention, with the hopes of spinning that straw into gold. The Hawk Tuah girl is instructive here: she made an ostensibly offhand joke (conveniently under the eye of Sauron) that went viral and now she has an agent and makes media appearances. It’s the American dream: do or say something that would appall your grandmother but which can be monetized via its appalling attention. We used to make widgets; now we make wisecracks. Anyway, I don’t really care. Get that money, queen. Or whatever the kids are saying these days. (Having teens at home makes me feel old, linguistically.) Anyway, I assume the Joe Rogan Experience is just a continuation of Fear Factor: people motivated to say appalling stuff in his presence for the hope of it becoming a vector of attention and consequently an engine of money. And one reliable way to do that is to stoke everyone’s worst impulses, their darkest paranoias — a fear factory, if you will.
Fear Factor went off the air, but now the air has been replaced by this new show, this seemingly inescapable show, that’s everywhere always at once, and I guess the question to pose to myself is: can I escape the show? This feels irresponsible; it feels like I should pay attention. A thousand tote bags cry out: This is not normal! But the show is slowly making me insane, slowly corroding my sense of proportion and ability to move about the physical world, slowly taking away my ability to do anything outside the show. Entertainment, if that word even suffices, at an industrial scope and scale. Move those jokes down the conveyor belt! We’ve seized the memes of production, but we are still alienated.
1. I know that inflation was bad, but it’s getting better, whether you feel like it’s getting better or not. And what did you think was going to happen when all that pandemic stimulus hit the streets?
2. Precious few people seem to vote for a president based on that person’s foreign policy experience or plans, though that seems to be the area where presidents have the most actual control.
3. That old saw about not talking about politics, religion, or your personal income in social situations: good advice!
Covid Resolutions
For Christmas I received Covid. It even came a little early — in the twilight of Christmas Eve, while watching a holiday movie. I spent the week in between Christmas and New Year’s getting through what appeared to be a mild case of the omicron variant. We all got it in my household, passed around like eggnog. We are all vaxxed and boosted as much as currently allowed, and we all seem to have come through to the other side okay. Thank you for asking.
It was an odd experience, like a mean cold, not as bad as the flu, but a handful of days that ended in chills, that ended in me banishing myself to the guest room bed where I soothed myself with multiple comforters and Netflix. Though I am not the most diligent or focused of creatures, I hardly ever give myself over to binging shows. In my mind it’s an activity that you only do when you’re sick. Or it’s an activity I only do when I’m sick. (What I do when I’m well, apparently, is scroll through Twitter before snoozing on the couch.) I experienced a scratchy throat, an occasional cough, copious snot and sinus pressure, and the aforementioned chills, which were the most conspicuous element, seeming to indicate a low-grade fever flare up in the nighttime. I would awake in the morning from my comforter cave in sweat-dampened T-shirts. Now, two weeks later, I have been released from captivity. I still have some snot and a lower voice, and I’m tired a lot. This could be from Covid. It could be from the feral hours we kept as a family, trapped at home yet freed from any regular schedule. It could be a window onto Long Covid, that obscure fear beyond fear, just another vista to be anxious about. Is it Long Covid or is it just getting older? Are you depressed or merely sad? The only answer is another question.
If New Year’s Eve is Drunk Night for amateurs, then New Year’s resolutions are like astrology for non-millennials. The threshold of a new year seems significant. Everyone acts as if it were significant. But it’s not. It’s just another day, another week, another slow roll through the seasons. It’s the beginning of winter. It’s the season when you can see the squirrel nests in the trees. It happens every year. There are some jobs where year-end is important — in accounting, for instance. Cut-offs are important for contracts and insurance policies, where an artificial demarcation of a span of time is necessary and useful. But in your life, it’s just another year. The only true closing of the books is death.
And yet still, during that week of listless scrolling and watching, I kept thinking: maybe this year I’ll be different. Not resolutions, per se. Nothing that concrete. Only that I would be a better person, stronger, more disciplined, less apt to fall asleep on the couch while reading Twitter, someone who took his vitamins, went to the gym, resisted carbohydrates, lifted with his legs, all that stuff. The truth is I don’t save my life-changing exhortations for year-end. They are perennial, persistent shouts to self. And while I would like to be a completely different person (if just for a little while), I would be happy for one or two almost microscopic changes, if not to improve my life then to prove to myself that change is indeed possible, and that I am not the equivalent of a human locomotive, only moving in one direction when moving at all.
One thing getting Covid has done is improve my mood. After 21 months, it finally happened. I look at the colored map of the United States on the New York Times website each morning. It’s growing more and more purple as the omicron variant burns through the population. Perhaps this will be the final fire that can move us toward endemicity or normality or something at least different than succeeding waves of anxiety. Emptied of despair, perhaps we can withstand winter. Winter has recently been a season simply to get through. It’s the trudging part of the year. I think part of this attitude was triggered by living in a slightly colder climate with small children. They’re sick all of the time and it’s too cold to take them outside anyway. But it’s hardly ever cold in Mississippi, not really. And the kids are older, heartier. It’s mostly a season of dampness. So instead of projecting — next season will be better! — instead of always anticipating improvement just around the corner, I wonder if I can just enjoy January. It sounds ridiculous. But the panic attack of the holidays is over, we have lived through the plague, or at least the current iteration of the plague, life has continued on, thankfully; perhaps I could burrow into something like appreciation. I know this sounds like a desperate bid for optimism or joy, but I am running out of topics to be worried about. Or perhaps I’m just bored by them. They seem exhausted. I am exhausted. It’s like the websites that you continually visit even though you long ago stopped receiving any thrill by reading them. Why do I keep going there? Is it simply because the browser autofills the URL? Close those tabs of despair! Find something to do with your time besides make yourself feel bad. And don’t wait for astrology — the one true date where your resolutions will be aligned. If you need cosmic order, just go back to church. It’s less embarrassing.
Dare to be optimistic
Here are a handful of headlines from a single website, the internet arm of a once glamorous, still respectable glossy magazine:
Getting Back to Normal Is Only Possible Until You Test Positive
How Easily Can Vaccinated People Spread COVID?
Parents Still Have a Thanksgiving Problem
The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants
What Collective Narcissism Does to Society
You’re Boosted! Now What?
The Pandemic Is Still Making Us Feel Terrible
America Has Lost the Plot on Covid
Why Are We Microdosing Vaccines for Kids?
How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall
The Self-Help That No One Needs Right Now
Nine Pandemic Words That Almost No One Gets Right
Why Are Americans Still — Still! — Wearing Cloth Masks?
Did Pfizer Peak Too Soon?
We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic
Fully Vaccinated Is Suddenly a Much Less Useful Phrase
‘Post-Vax COVID’ Is a New Disease
Six Rules That Will Define Our Second Pandemic Winter
Sorry, a Coronavirus Infection Might Not Be Enough to Protect You
Brought to you by The Atlantic, or as it’s now known: Slate for Middle Managers. Whenever I am feeling just slightly optimistic, about either the state of the world or the slow Nothing-like progress of the plague from one county to the next, I visit the Atlantic’s website to have my mood brought down a register, or several. Did I read all of these articles? No. I am not that masochistic. Are the headlines the same as the articles they tease? No. The headline writers are a different breed than the actual article writers, meaner, kept in captivity, fed only when they achieve the day’s required click-rate metrics. Headline writing has always been a combination of a striptease and a poke in the eye, but the Atlantic headline writers have ventured into a new realm of insult provocation during the pandemic. Over and above the content of the underlying stories, it seems like the Atlantic headline writers really want you to feel terrible, feel guilty for your relative level of safety, and feel anxious about the state of the pandemic. They’ve become the shrieking hall monitor of the national mood. If the primary rhetorical mode of the Right-leaning Fox News network is aggrievement, then the corollary for the Atlantic, more Left-leaning or perhaps just more BMW-leaning, is anxiety. The first tells the viewer: they think you’re a rube and they’re coming after you. The second tells the reader: you’re doing pretty good and it will never be enough.
Yes, I understand the past 1.67 years has been a veritable disaster along every metric one could possibly conceive, and I understand that various glimmers of progress or hope or improvement are highly contextual and that circumstances are not better for some people. But as of mid-November, there are some solid signs of progress in the continental United States. Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 have been finally approved. Boosters are widely available. Two new antiviral therapeutic treatment drugs are approaching emergency use authorization. If you are an American parent with school-aged children with potentially immunocompromised grandparents, the viral probability statistics that invisibly govern your life have just become much more favorable. If you have perhaps been threading the needle of normal, it just got easier to darn the socks of civilization. Of course, if your children are still in the eating-with-their-fingers demographic, then your life is still not normal. And yes, I don’t know if we as a society will ever return to a pre-pandemic normal. No doubt we will fall into some new kind of normal, equal parts fear, paranoia, Facebook science (sorry, Meta science), slightly more wizened knowledge of our shared infectability, and TSA-like security theater. Will I always wear a mask in the local grocery store? Will I do it to protect myself and my neighbor or will I do it to hide my frown? Too soon to tell.
I will admit that I was feeling good at the beginning of the summer, an optimism that was crushed by the delta variant. I had heard of a potential timing danger with regard to the vaccine rollout, that the vaccines, despite being widely available and effective, would not be taken up by a large enough portion of the population, so that a more virulent mutation would develop and spread, which is essentially what happened. Thankfully, the vaccines are still effective against this variant, but there are even more sick and dead than there should have been post Easter 2021. Three cheers for America, the best of all possible worlds.
But then life got weird again, just in time for the kids to go back to school, and concurrently, the Discourse Machine, or the Despair Machine, or the Metaverse, or whatever you want to call our ongoing online virtual media sidecar to life, chugged a Four Loko and got busy. Life is not yet normal. Cue the headlines above. I realize Covid has not made the progression from pandemic to endemic, but conditions have improved, and there is a horizon glimmer of further improvement, like an undulating oasis. And I find myself daring to feel optimistic, or perhaps I am just daring to tire of despairing, tired of drilling down to see the 14-day percentage change in case loads in my tri-county area. I went to a small concert two weeks ago, my first since Before. And I’m planning to go to another. These events are not without risk, but then nothing I do is risk-free. I am always weighing, measuring, even when it’s subconscious. I’m not trying to be careless, but I am trying to care less. Because I’m 600 days older and death is not an abstraction.
And the metaverse makes me feel bad. It wants me to feel bad. It wants me to worry, despair, feel anxious, Read More, and Share with my Friends. The metaverse wants to spread. Perhaps the delta variant wasn’t the viral mutation I needed to worry about.
One Stab Down
In Britain they call it a jab and that slang has drifted over so that everyone is now posting selfies of their vaccine jab, but it’s not a jab. It’s a stab, and I got my first last Friday.
Canton, Mississippi, high school, twenty minutes north of town, a place I’d never been. When the vaccines first started, it seemed like a conspiracy of the state visitors’ bureau. The shots were scattered to the distant ghost towns. Explore Mississippi! But not anymore.
I had my paperwork, my confirmation printed as well as saved on my phone, a full tank of gas, photographic identification, a mask, a robot map guide talking to me, and a recent trip to the restroom. I hadn’t been this nervous since dating in high school. I grew terrified of arriving too late.
A National Guardsman checked me in at the gate. Another sat in the bed of a pick-up truck underneath a beach umbrella, flicking through his phone. When I reached his long end of the driveway, he pointed to the line’s entrance. The high school sat inert in the afternoon distance. Our line of cars quickly bifurcated. They seemed long but not epically long. I couldn’t yet see the end point, the shot point, but it didn’t feel too long in that ambient way long lines feel long, like when you amble into a new ride at Disney and you can feel the unseen weight of the line coursing through the tunnels of entertainment structure, the dawning self-knowledge that you’ve just trapped yourself, your entire family, in a line. I’ve heard anecdotes of families going to Disney this spring, since Disney is capping attendance. It’s really something that under normal circumstances there is no real span of time at Disney when it’s not crowded. What a feat of human entertainment, I suppose. “There aren’t even Fast Passes.” That is, you don’t have to buy your way out of the line into a better line, the line above the line. I haven’t fact checked this. This is just the word on the street — on Dad Street.
It was unseasonably warm even for Mississippi, but I kept my windows down, A/C off, out of some perverse need to feel real air. I find myself waiting later and later each year to roll the windows up and turn on the artificial coolness. I remember as a teenager riding around in the summer night feeling the coolness through my windows, the only time in the summer that it ever got cool. Perhaps I am perpetually trying to recapture that sensation. Is there anything better than riding with the windows down? Perhaps I really am part dog. We made it through a kink in the line and that’s when we saw the nurses.
Two of them, one for each line. They wore laminated tags that said VOLUNTEER. I wondered if that was to preempt anyone giving them grief. I found it sweet of them to volunteer, borderline foolish, but I was grateful they were there. We were in the parking lot of the football stadium, curling between the high school and the stadium proper. The first guard had given me paperwork, which I dutifully filled out on my steering wheel, making sure to press hard so that the ballpoint pen worked but not too hard so that I wouldn’t accidentally honk my horn. This is how road rage incidents begin, I am sure, the hurried completion of deposit slips in transit.
I got the nurse in red scrubs, masked, long brown hair, deeply tan, warm in disposition. I am positive if I had 90 additional seconds of conversation I could have gotten her to call me “hon.” I live to be called “hon.” I also live for small talk, theatrically holding the door for strangers, earnest disputations about the weather, and dropping by people’s houses. It’s taken the pandemic for me to realize who I truly am. She verified that it was indeed my first shot, that I was not currently symptomatic or otherwise positive, that I was who I said I was. Afterward, she said I would have to wait for 15 minutes in another line, the line after the line, to ensure I didn’t have an adverse reaction. “If you need assistance, just roll down your window and get someone’s attention.” There were tables under smaller, tailgating tents, clumps of bottled water, and what looked like a box of donuts. A couple of other volunteers were milling about, moving by with lanyard immunity. It was like a street festival but with less trash. She confirmed that I wanted to receive the shot in my left arm and placed the checked-out paperwork underneath my windshield wiper.
My next stop was the tent. But there were two, the first one and then farther down, a tent beyond the tent. I didn’t know which one was the shot tent, or if they both were. We were moving away from the nurses, away from the un-uniformed, into the realm of the Guardsmen. I pulled into the first tent, slowing down, pulling up my sleeve. “Oh you’re good, you’re good, pull on down, the next tent,” the Guardsman said. Inside the tent were several fatigued Guardsmen milling about, sitting, dealing with the paperwork. An industrial sized fan whirred away inside the orderly visqueen.
I pulled down to the second tent, the last tent. It was farther away. It seemed the farthest point away from the field, the school, civilization. I was two cars back, not even in the tent, when a Guardsman approached my vehicle. She confirmed my name. “You’re receiving in your left arm?” I concurred. She was tall, masked, hair intricately braided but held back in a bun. She wore a gray-green shirt, fatigue pants, and boots. She was muscular. She had the aura of strength. Tattoos snaked down below her short sleeves. I could not tell what they were. She quickly came back with a needle. Wait, I wasn’t even in the tent. She’s going to give it to me now? Already? Aren’t the nurses supposed to give the shots? I had my sleeve rolled up, my arm positioned on the open door frame. “I need you to relax the arm by your side, hold your sleeve up with your right hand. Relax.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I did as I was told. The shot stung briefly. As a grown up I don’t mind shots. My only requirement is to not look directly at the needle while it’s going in. I just look to the side like a distracted animal. Part of this adult ambivalence is no doubt from being a parent and having to put on a brave face for the children, especially when hauling them to a clinic for their yearly flu shots. I remember taking the babies to get their vaccinations. The doctors gave the shots in their heels, and after a slight delay, the babies screamed indignantly. They were offended that we had taken them from their soft cribs all the way across town for this.
She was tall, beautiful, masked. She placed a band-aid on my arm. She had the broad shoulders of a person of consequence. She had been transported from a distant land of better physique and vaster organization, sent here to the realm of the sweaty and pudgy to help us find a way to live. I could see into the final tent. More Guardsmen, paperwork, fans. A trash can full to overflowing with syringes, interlocking gears of sheet-checking, shot-administering, moving people through the line. Here it was: the numinous engine of incremental progress, slow but moving, the quiet beat of life drumming underneath the afternoon sun. We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. No faces flinched at my masked face. No one said, “Well those people were in nursing homes.” No one said, “He did have diabetes.” No one said, “Everyone should just live their lives.” No one said, “Do you know anyone who’s actually had the virus?” No one said, “The doctors are saying all those deaths are Covid because they get money.” No one said, “It’s just like the freaking flu.” No one said, “If you’re scared, then wear your mask, I guess.” Girl, there’s a better life for me and you.
“Proceed to the wait line,” she said. “After fifteen minutes, they’ll let you go.”
“Thank you so much,” I said.
“Have a blessed day,” she said.
And so I did.
Once there was a city
I wasn’t planning on writing about infrastructure again this week, but as of March 5, approximately 5,000 people in Jackson, Mississippi, are still without reliably running water. That’s three full weeks without. And this is an improvement from the nearly 50,000 earlier. Jackson city metro only has about 160,000 people.
The situation has dragged on long enough so that friends outside the state have messaged me to ask if I’m okay — a version of “just what’s going on down there?”
On February 27, Angie Thomas, a famous writer originally from Jackson who still lives here, decried the situation on Twitter :
For over 10 days now, around half the residents of Jackson, Mississippi have not had running water. And nobody is talking about it on a national scale. I am begging the national media to please pay attention. There is a crisis happening in Jackson. If you wanna talk to the people who are on the ground, doing the necessary work then I can connect you to them. People are struggling, and since Jackson is majority Black, poor Black folks are getting hit hardest. But NOBODY is talking about it. . . . For those asking why I haven’t connected with national media people I know — I HAVE TRIED. But sometimes it takes a bunch of folks making noise for things to happen.
In the week since, there has been subsequent coverage in The Daily Beast, CNBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the Today Show. From my cursory investigations, it looks as if the Today Show coverage specifically was the result of Thomas’s tweets.
Thomas is correct that there has been little media attention given to Mississippi. This whole time I’ve been much more worried about the situation in Texas, because, yes, it seemed quantifiably worse, but also because it was everywhere on the news. The crisis was broadcast, whereas here it just existed.
There is an echo in this lack of coverage with Hurricane Katrina, where there was a well-publicized catastrophe in New Orleans and a much less well-known catastrophe next door on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It’s a Rodney Dangerfield problem. New Orleans is the more glamorous tourist destination, home of fond memories, better on camera. When it goes, producers reach for the Mardi Gras B-roll. No one knows where Waveland, Mississippi is, relatively speaking.
So an increase in national news coverage to the plight of the state’s ruinous infrastructure is probably a positive occurrence. It certainly can’t make anything worse. But then there is a cynical part of me, a small, persistent voice, beeping like the run-out battery in a household smoke alarm: nothing will change, nothing will change, nothing will change.
Just who is this news being broadcast to? The rest of the country might perhaps be struck with a dagger of sympathy for the situation in Jackson, but they’re not going to actually do anything. Well, that might be incorrect: Thomas sent links to aid organizations and churches who are delivering water to people, so in all actuality that might result in cash in the hands of people dealing with the immediate effects of the crisis. So I’m tripping my cynical alarm too quickly there. But in a slightly more telescoped view, that’s a temporary act of goodwill. Unless those people move to Mississippi, get on the city council, come up with a plan to completely revolutionize the city’s water infrastructure (and hey, come on down! please!), the attention isn’t going to fix the problem.
Is the audience ourselves? By which I mean the people already living in Jackson? Perhaps. And that might make us feel better, feel less alone, feel understood, but this is a symbolic victory rather than a structural one. The city needs physical change. The pipes are literally broken. And that state of decrepitude persists independent of how the citizens feel about how the rest of the country sees them. Positive vibes won’t change the material situation.
Will the national coverage shame our city leaders into effective action? Perhaps. I don’t know. I have a hard time measuring the incentives of shame any longer in this post-Trump era. But the infrastructural problems are so vast and so old that it feels overdetermined to spend one’s energy shaming those currently in office, an easy out for our angst. In reality it’s a shame spread over hundreds of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t fix the problem for decades. Instead of shame perhaps we should pass out bondo and duct tape.
I admit that I have no idea how to fix the problem. I am just observing. I am just typing. I am attempting to describe the situation. I am trying not to complain. I choose to live here. On the one hand it’s good to have more people in the country understand what’s happening and on the other I know that there are people working on the current problem with dedication and diligence. But my point is that it’s a larger problem, one that will outlive this weekend’s news cycle, this weekend’s moment in the jet stream of sympathy. And it’s a problem that needs more than a temporary, emergency fix. Sometimes I think the entire city should just start over. We should recognize that civilized life is simply not viable on this plot of land. The city should pack its bags, leap frog over the suburbs, and start a new city a little further up the highway. Lord knows there’s enough wide open space. We could leave the ruins of the old city as a monument to our century of mistakes. But then, perhaps the leap away has already happened, and the people like me still living in the city are the dupes. The escape, the rebirth, has already happened. Didn’t you hear? We’re living in the ruins already.
Welcome to the Second World
Is the United States the greatest country in the world? What does a question like that even mean? Greatest by what measurement? Largest GDP, most acreage, greatest in supply of personal freedom? Greatest in terms of human potential?
This is one of those questions that’s difficult to litigate and mostly a distraction. Regardless of the United States’s placement in the hierarchy of statehood excellence, I think it’s more applicable to realize that living in the U.S. is like living in a Second World country. In school we learned about the First World, and we did mission trips to the Third World, but now U.S. reality seems stuck somewhere in between. Everything is both terrible and great, if not simultaneously then in lurches, like a car popping in and out of gear.
I was going to make this observation in relation to the pandemic, or perhaps the election of a manifestly unfit crazy person to lead the executive branch, or perhaps the seeming helplessness of the country’s richest state to mitigate annual apocalyptic wildfires, or perhaps the first transfer of executive power that entails a body count, but I didn’t want to rush to judgment. I didn’t want to be unfair or overly critical of my beloved country ‘tis of thee. I am proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free, and also subject to rapid collapse of the basic studs of infrastructure at the most predictable occurrences, while everyone stands around screaming at each other over ginned-up cultural garbage. But then the cold snap arrived and my state of Mississippi, along with several others, were dunked head first into historically extreme temperatures. It began with videos showing snow at the Texas-Mexico border — huh, would you look at that? — and now there are rolling blackouts across that wild west, because the Texas power grid cannot keep up with demand and is having to ration care, so to speak. Whether this occurrence is the result of frozen windmills or Texas’ weird deregulated power grid depends on your side of the culture wars, unfortunately. (Who could have predicted that World War III would turn out to be a culture war? And who knew it would be this annoying?) I don’t know anything about Texas politics or energy infrastructure, so I won’t even daydream aloud about it. But this is a failure of civilization and to justify it via economics or personal responsibility or however is to turn one’s back on the entire notion of civilization. It’s as ridiculous as the rolling blackouts in California in the vain hopes that fallen power lines won’t start another horrible fire. It’s an inability, or a refusal, to take care of ourselves. And it’s shameful.
Of course at the same time, everything is also great! A vaccine was developed, approved, and began to be distributed in less than a year, destroying the previous record and, from all appearances, still happening a little on the slow side. MRNA vaccines to my untrained ears sound like miracle drugs. And there are two of them — and that’s just in the U.S.! There are others in the world, which will hopefully be approved in the U.S. posthaste.
Around the end of last year, there was a rapid string of amazing science news, in addition to the vaccine news: protein folding, SpaceX launching, approval of a cultured meat that does not rely the slaughter of animals, the first implementation of CRISPR, the discovery of new quark particles, and a discovery of what might be the oldest extant example of figurative cave art. (It’s a pig, naturally.) Just this week NASA landed a new rover on a dry lake bed on Mars and it’s sending back sound and images. It’s even tweeting, for the love of God. And that’s just on top of all the normal great American stuff: barbecue, Bandcamp, bagels, and the shiny little computer in my pocket, more useful than a pocket knife, more distracting than a bag of heroin.
I realize not all of these examples are purely U.S.-based. Such is the (welcome, appreciated) nature of globalization. And I know that the U.S. is not the best country in dealing with the coronavirus but also not the worst. It’s somewhere in the middle — in a muddle, in the mud.
And being in the middle is fine, I guess. You can’t always be number one. But what bothers me is the mismanagement of basic competence, the surrendering of civilization. What I want really goes beyond basic infrastructure to redundant infrastructure. I want backups. I want everyone to be prepared. I want due diligence to become a national mantra. I don’t know if you solve this via the market or via the state or via some third stream my brain can’t imagine at the moment, and really, I don’t care. Arguing about method is a culture war quagmire, a bog unto the status quo. I just want us, as a country, to deal with fairly predictable problems in a more effective way. Wildfires, floods, drastic swings in temperature, even pandemics. These are not new inventions. These are not un-considered problems. I will admit that I have a technocratic leaning and a small desire to give up a smidgen of my freedom for some ruthless efficiency. (Chik-Fil-A, anyone?) But I just want the trains to run on time. Or really I just want the trains to run without hopping the track and plowing into the adjacent countryside while everyone does the savage dance in front of the wreckage.
I will be the first to admit that it is not normal for it to get this cold in Mississippi. I will also be the first to admit that thus far I have been extremely lucky. I still have my power, though the power company has sent out warnings of potential blackouts. I still have running water, though the pressure has gone geriatric. But having running water during a cold snap shouldn’t be a matter of luck. We pay a price for living in a society, with our taxes, our bills, and our behavior, and as a result we secure a form of civilization. We fabricate it together. Besides, if I wanted to live according to survival of the fittest, I would move to the goddamned woods.
Just after Trump was elected, I went to a reading by the British writer Geoff Dyer. He had just come out with his book White Sands and was being interviewed by Richard Grant, another British writer, who had moved to Mississippi and written a successful memoir about that weird experience, Dispatches from Pluto. At one point in the back and forth, they said that many of their friends had suggested they would be leaving the U.S. now that Trump was president.
“You know, many of them said the same thing back when Bush got elected.”
“They never left, did they?”
“No, they didn’t. I guess despite everything it’s still a pretty damn good country.”
And then these two Britons, both having found a measure of fame and comfort in the U.S., laughed and laughed.
Trump Kitsch Putsch
Saturday morning, January 9th. I am bewildered by the insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. It seems at once both completely bonkers and also the logical apotheosis of Trump’s political trajectory. That this was always going to happen doesn’t make it any less shameful.
From the images, articles, tweets, sounds, video, there is a paradoxical portrait of the day. It seems absurd, a kind of playacting. I myself previously compared the QAnon folks to Live Action Role Playing participants. There was an aura of a video game come to life, but at some point during the march to the police-lined fences around the Capitol, the actions crossed the Rubicon from online and peer group projection to actual crime, seditious action, destruction of property, assault, etc. They crossed into reality. And as more details manifest, the insurrection appears less like a camp gesture of disaffected whites and more like what it was: a failed but nearly successful domestic terrorist event. Both elements were present. There was the shirtless Daniel Boone Viking helmet guy and the Delta Force extra, kitted out with his zip-tie handcuffs. The event is both revolutionary kitsch and violent putsch.
Jamelle Bouie has helpfully pointed out that this bothness is often present in white supremacist groups. The Ku Klux Klan wear the ridiculous, pointy hoods and use the designation “wizard” unironically. It’s almost as if extremist efforts must begin as practical jokes that go too far, begin to take themselves seriously. And as others have pointed out online, these domestic terrorists reaped the benefit of not being taken seriously as a general rule.
Sunday afternoon. The relentless gaslighting has begun. Turns out, seeing is not believing. The believers themselves crossed into reality on Wednesday, and their reality and the apostate reality was briefly shared. But now that reality is being transformed into something else, a complicated mass hallucination. Only the blind can truly see: Antifa, cancel culture, big tech monopolies quashing free speech. The believers call for unity but not for responsibility.
Grudge Dynasty
One benefit of the Trump era is that it has conveniently encapsulated every behavior I find abhorrent. What might be the most immoral behavior in any given situation? Well, What Would Trump Do? The man is a human superfund site.
One example: the relentless sorting of humans into winners and losers.
Here he is on the 15th day of December, the day after the electoral college certified the presidential election for Joe Biden:
The closest Trump has come privately to admitting where this is heading, the source added, is to say, “If we don’t win, I don’t say lose. I say ‘I don’t win.'”
It’s not just that he doesn’t say lose. He can’t say it. It goes against his own mental programming. Life is a constant sorting machine of winners and losers and he decided long ago that he was a winner always and so he cannot conceptually recognize loss.
But loss is a way of life. Is it loserish of me to say this or a mere recognition of reality? Games, contests, and yes, even elections, have winners and losers. They actually are binary structures that sort their competitors into camps. Not everyone gets to win the tennis game, etc. Some people can verifiably run faster than other people, etc. But life is not a game. Typically people are shaded into large pools of ambiguity. No one life is purely pancakes all the way down. There is always some rain delay, some grit of disappointment, some betrayal, some collapse of circumstance. Otherwise you’re a robot or lying to yourself or a psychotic.
One change I’d like to make in the new year is to think about Trump less. He’s too much on my mind. I even think about his poor and horrible children. Horrible because they’ve gone from being absurdly fortunate civilians, ostensibly adjacent to an elected official and worthy of ignoring, to becoming cannons in the culture wars, machines in the discourse factory. Of the two most prominent children, one has become an unelected and unqualified White House advisor and another has become a television screamer. If you agree with Trump’s behaviors, then his children are satisfying sequels, I guess. Perhaps it simply comes back to my disagreement with the father. But I also feel sorry for them.
Here is a brief excerpt from “The Real Story of Donald Trump Jr.” by Julia Ioffe:
When a Brazilian journalist asked Don in 2010 whether there was much pressure being Donald junior, he replied, “There probably shouldn’t be. But there is for me, because you want to please someone like that, and he’s a perfectionist. There’s definitely always that shadow that follows you around, like how is this guy, the son of someone so good at what he does, going to act?”
According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody. It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. “You can’t do that!” Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana’s memoir, Raising Trump. “What if he’s a loser?”
Don tells his own story about coming into the world on December 31, 1977. “I like to joke that my dad wanted to be able to claim me as a dependent on his taxes for 1977,” he once told Forbes, “so he told my mom she had to have me before midnight and, if she didn’t, he’d make her take a cab home.” (Ivana wrote about her labor being induced by doctors.)
There are two curses contained here: the child as tax-avoidance device and the ruthless paranoia of that child being a loser. The first is the purely instrumental view of fatherhood. Does Trump love his children? I guess. Probably? But this aside, told here as a joke, and perhaps apocryphal, speaks to a subterranean truth: Trump’s view of other people is purely transactional. What can they do for me? What’s the most they can do for me? His rage at the Governor of Georgia for not calling a special session of the legislature to reverse the outcome of the election in that state has the echoes of a dissatisfied customer. The nomination of Justice Barrett had the same eerie, place-betting vibe. These individuals are investments, he seems to think, that will earn him a return. And when those investments don’t mature as expected, don’t pay him back, he’s enraged. From his point of view, it makes a vicious kind of sense. Why else would he have stumped for that Governor? Nominated that Justice? In this light having children for him is mostly downside.
What if he’s a loser? The statement is such a blatant explication of so many eons of procreative struggle that it’s overwhelming to see it so baldly stated. It took Faulkner nearly 400 pages to write Absalom, Absalom! and Trump boils it down to a haiku. Props where they’re due: the man possesses a kind of idiopathic genius. He’s the most transparently self-interested animal in existence. My dog exhibits a more developed sense of decorum. It seems that Trump Junior has decided that the best way to outrun his father’s shadow is to be even grander, more father than his own father, his father’s disposition distilled into an even more corrosive substance. His whole existence is subsumed by his father’s presence. It must be a horrible way to live.
This reminds me of my old note about Jeb Bush and his helpless aside four years ago about disappointing his own father. Yet another problem of political leadership consisting almost wholly of dynasties is that America has to weather these Oedipal storms. Would George W. Bush have begun the Iraq War if Saddam Hussein hadn’t attempted to assassinate his own president father? Probably. But it’s impossible to know for sure and there is the queasy Shakespearean undertow, the addressing of generational grievances, sons jockeying for favor. It feels slightly less than productive to think of major American foreign policy mistakes in terms of generational grudges handed down, but that’s where we are — a dynasty of grudges, a family tree of resentments. We the people merely live in its shade. We don’t have a royal family in this country but our collective Id seems to want one desperately, so we have all of these mini royal families with their chins and wealth and tragic vacations. Do we have to keep watching this show?
It reminds me of those new Star Wars movies, which I watched recently with my own children. There is a brief moment of dramatic freshness in The Last Jedi when Rey is informed by Kylo Ren that she comes from nothing, nobody, that her parents sold her for booze money, this abandoned child who grew up in the ruins of old Empire weaponry, like so many in the audience. The trick of the earlier movies was the discovery of course that Luke Skywalker was the son of Darth Vader, that he was the correction of the mistakes of his father. The father redeems himself by saving the son and, thus reborn, dies in true tragic fashion. Big, hearty themes, heavy enough to call a moving company. But now we have the sequels to the prequels and of course Kylo Ren has to be Solo and Leia’s son who’s gone and pulled a Vader on them. I appreciate the thematic echo as much as the next middle-aged nostalgist, but combined with the repeating Death Stars, I’m starting to fear a general lack of innovation. One can re-microwave the same leftovers for only so many nights. The charm of the earlier movies was that they showed us new worlds. Now the movies just filigree the franchise. And so the big question: who is Rey and why is she important? Ren’s sister, lover, something else? Turns out she’s a nobody. But then the next film in the series arrives (The Rise of Skywalker), and we learn we’re wrong; we’ve been tricked. She’s actually Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter! And Emperor Palpatine’s not dead! He’s back and he looks just like Mitch McConnell! And there are a bunch of Star Destroyers somehow stored under the surface of some planet! Beats me!
It’s a bad movie but perhaps a better representation of what life is really like: the bad guys never really die, their children are out there making the same mistakes as their parents, we keep re-fighting the same wars like amnesiac soldiers, we keep uttering the same tired jokes, unable to devise new punchlines. In the endless cineplex of modern American society, we are all losers. As another movie from my 80s youth had it: The only way to win is not to play.