Category Archives: plague journal

Covid Resolutions

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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

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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

plague journal,

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

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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

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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

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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

plague journal,

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. 

Blogroll Thanksgiving

literary lint, plague journal,

I still love reading blogs. At this point in internet history, that’s like grinding one’s own wheat, but still. They’re so reliably idiosyncratic. 

I first started reading blogs in the mid 2000s, back when lit-blogging was in its hey day. Most of those blogs are long gone, which is fine. Nothing gold can stay, etc. As blogs went out of fashion, that same impulse-to-post migrated to other modes. Every now and then someone writes an article saying “Blogs are back!” but these strike me like the occasional articles saying “Short stories are back!” It’s probably not going to pan out, and that’s okay. It’s still worthwhile even if it’s not a pillar in the media-social-entertainment-streaming mega church. 

“Knitting is back!”

I liked Medium when it came out. Its writing interface was so pleasantly smooth it felt like the Ferrari of web applications. But reading on Medium has only gotten worse. Sometimes I am allowed to read articles, but sometimes the machine wants me to sign in, and I lost those credentials long ago. Sometimes the articles are part of magazines-within-Medium, which is confusing because on Medium everything looks the same. Somehow Medium gave users a template via design deprivation, and the result is even more seamless and generic than all those old blogs that used the default, blue banner WordPress theme. (This is coming from a person who is using yet another WordPress theme, so I’m all for design decisions that call for the least amount of motion.) It all looks nice but it feels a part of the same big box store. This claustrophobia is only exacerbated by the articles, which read like self help. Seven things you need to do every morning to win your career and beat depression. It’s LinkedIn with better taste. 

A kind of blogging manifests itself on Twitter, but it’s disjointed and comes with all the problems of Twitter, previously whined about here. I feel like no one admits how tweet threads are a terrible reading experience. It’s the writing equivalent of temporary housing, put up after a natural disaster, and people go on living in them for decades. Twitter seems best for jokes thrown into the stream, but because the stream is endless and unknowable, it’s the worst place for jokes. Perhaps one day Twitter will simply be press releases and anger. 

I subscribe to some newsletters, the most blog-like blog substitute. It’s handy having them delivered to your in-box, but they feel like work. They’ve already posted again? For some reason, having posts line up like a To Do list in an RSS feed reader is a pleasant accumulation, but a list of unread emails is a job. I don’t know what this means. It probably says more about my ability to manage time and tasks than it does about delivery mechanisms. 

After all this time and all this reading, what even is blogging? I used to know. Like so many topics, I used to have strong feelings about it, and now I shrug and make a sandwich. It’s simply public writing. Anything more categorically detailed than that is up to the individual author. These blogs interest me for the same reason why any writing interests me. Part of it is the communicated information, the nutritional content. Part of it is the range of topics covered. But more often than not I just like the sound of that person’s voice.

So here are some blogs I like: 

Kottke. My First, My Last, My Everything. Consistently the best part of my internet. If there is ever an Academy Award-like award for internet writing, they should name it the Kottke. 

Scripting News. Dave Winer, developer, outliner, opinion haver. Your smarter uncle, who knows much more about the internet than you do and is not going to put up with your BS. An indefatigable blogger. 

MacWright. Written by Tom MacWright, a software developer in California. Much of the technical discussions go way over my head, but he has so many interesting projects, using the web, illustration, and music. An inspiration.

Maggie Haberman’s Twitter feed. Okay, I am breaking my own rules. Sometimes I feel like I am in a submerged house and the water outside my windows is the News of the World. At some point you’re going to open a door, a window, a doggie door, etc., and your house is going to flood with the News of the World, but you get to choose which windows to open and how fast you’re going to flood. The best way I’ve found is to open the Maggie Haberman mail slot. A lot of water is going to come in the house, but it’s reliable water, it’s run-through-the-treatment-plant water, it’s not going to give you dysentery, and it will take longer, relatively speaking, for your house to completely fill with the News of the World. 

Marginal Revolution. Don’t read the comments. Run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two academics. I immediately shut down whenever I see posts that include graphs, but otherwise an interesting view into how the other half lives, that half being the Economist Half. Remember it’s called the Dismal Science. From time to time I feel it necessary to aerate my own views with non-bananas opinion and info from different neighborhoods. Don’t read the comments. 

Freddie deBoer. Bracingly well-written. These days the focus is mostly on his new book The Cult of Smart. 

Subtraction. Written by Khoi Vinh, who used to be the web design guy at New York Times and now works for Adobe. I think? I don’t know. What is this, LinkedIn? It doesn’t matter. He has interesting stuff to say about design and technology, though these days the posts are mostly about movies and domestic life in Brooklyn. 

BirdFeed. Written by Tom Cleary, a pianist/composer/professor. Illuminating discussions of jazz piano and music theory. He often writes songs that pedagogically parody other jazz standards, which is highly informative to me, a non-good piano player who likes to walk around pretending he’s some nascent Ahmad Jamal. 

Craig Mod. Another smart person with projects. Mostly I read him through his newsletter. He just wrote a book about walking the Japanese countryside and toast. He makes me want to go to Japan. 

Emily Gould Can’t Complain. Another indefatigable blogger, though her most recent form is via this newsletter. I’m a sucker for details of domestic life in Brooklyn. Please tell me about your bodegas, your parks, your stoops. I like it best when she reviews the movies she watches with her kids. 

Do the Math. By Ethan Iverson, formerly of the jazz trio the Bad Plus, now a solo musician with multiple projects. He’s been writing for years, interviews, music criticism, philosophical notes to his students, ruminations on crime fiction. I love all of it except for the book stuff. Crime fiction isn’t my bag. Really at this point in my life the main topics I am excited to read about are jazz piano and Brooklyn parenting. A piano in a brownstone with kids’ drawings scattered all over it would basically be my ideal social vector. I don’t think Iverson has children, but for a while there, earlier in our pandemic year, he was posting daily reinterpretations of TV theme songs while various stuffed creatures lounged around his piano. Pure sugar.

Easily Distracted. Written by Timothy Burke, history professor. An oldie that I still visit. Back in the day, I read him because I was an aspiring academic. Now I read him to feel the force of his prose. Academia and politics mostly. 

Gin and Tacos. I don’t even know who this guy is, and I don’t remember how I found him. Smart, well-written, humorous. Sometimes the river of garbage gives you another gem. 

James Fallows. Is it still a blog if it’s for the Atlantic? Who cares. I have broader issues with the Atlantic as a web publication, but I always enjoy Fallows. His notes are pithy and informed. His series on Trump as he was cruising toward the election way back a thousand years ago was a helpful historical documentation of wrongs perpetrated, norms destroyed, etc. Sometimes he posts photos of interesting-looking beers. There was also a parody Twitter account run by a “Fames Jallows” for a while that was (altogether appropriately? somewhat paradoxically?) also informed and adept and worthwhile. The internet is a weird system.

Seasonal Affective Disorder

plague journal

Where I live it never gets cold, not really, not life-threateningly cold. But it’s all relative. Wherever a person lives becomes a range of normal, and the fluctuations within that realm, meteorologically, psychologically, politically, become variations around the mean. Finally it’s non-hot here, a sunny morning in the 50s. Walking the dog I was reminded of what I think of as winter light, a brighter, brassier version of sunlight. The sky is a deeper blue. The nearly translucent, still-green leaves are yet somehow greener. The light echoes off the windshields of passing cars, an almost blinding brightness. It seems a brightness borne from the seasons. It strikes me in its occasional arrival as a kind of coded providence. There was an invisible line somewhere between early adulthood and middle age where I could no longer withstand the cold without complaint and a constant feeling of doom. I don’t just get cold; I feel threatened. It’s coming for my neck. It’s somehow greater than discomfort, though not quite existential. Obviously. But the winter light is the forgotten gift, the season’s lagniappe, special dispensation. I am not religious, and yet. In the cluster of gray days and clammy cars, you can warm yourself in a temporary rhombus of sunlight. I feel like an idiot talking about the weather, and yet. It’s like a blues song for the middle-aged, trying to cheer oneself up with found change. Small joys, low noise, morning sinuses clear. One shouldn’t need permission to feel happy, and yet. Nameless sparrows playing in a pothole of leftover rainwater. Relief briefly floats through like misremembered lyrics to some camp song from boyhood. I’ve got peas like a liver in my stool. And yet the song still sings. I hope there’s sun on the other side of Tuesday.

The Crying of Lot QAnon

plague journal, ,

Life is an asteroid field of memes, allusions, bad jokes, true controversies, fake controversies, new celebrities, movie reboots, etc. It’s too much to understand, and as I get older, I have to mete out my attempts. I held out for a long time figuring out who Jordan Peterson was, and I feel better for waiting. One can avoid a good deal of discourse garbage just by maintaining indifference. 

Such was the case with QAnon, which I had told myself to avoid. Maybe it will quickly go away, I said, like fidget spinners. Nevertheless, it persisted, and it hit enough planets in my internet reading galaxy that I finally felt compelled. To attempt to summarize it as briefly as possible: QAnon is a conspiracy theory that posits there is a coordinated deep state, Democrat-run ring of child-murdering pedophiles, and President Trump has been picked to reveal and destroy this cabal. We are able to glimpse into the clues regarding this cult via “Q drops,” cryptic messages authored by “Q,” an anonymous government operative with extremely high security clearance. Followers of Q amplify and explicate these messages, and it has become a large enough cultural force that a couple of Q supporters are on the verge of being elected into seats of Congress. 

Periodic disclosure: I dislike the current president. Further disclosure: Reading up on this particular asteroid was painful. It hurt my brain to conceive of people going through such interpretive calisthenics to find something to believe in that somehow exonerated their support of Trump, a retconning of the most brutal sort. But perhaps this is what all apostates say. 

It actually reminded me a lot of when I was in high school and getting into Phish. There are a handful of songs that the group used to perform that were part of the guitar player/singer’s senior thesis. Back then, without the internet, my friends and I were constantly accumulating bits of information and gossip about which songs were part of this prog rock cycle and what it all meant, etc. (sort of a mix of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia). Of course when you’re an adolescent, this is what you do. You learn about the world by building an analogous one and piecing together knowledge about other built-out worlds. Wrestling, prog rock, comic books. You have to put in the work to become a member.

The QAnon phenom functions as a kind of interactive interpretive game, another version of a Live Action Role Playing game, but here the people who aren’t playing are simply the uninitiated, the ones who haven’t done the research. The Q drops don’t add up, of course. That would be too easy and that would solve the quest too succinctly. 

Another view of the phenomenon is that it’s a kind of internet-facilitated coping strategy for part of the population that feels, rightly or wrongly, left behind by the transformations of the country. I don’t know enough about the topic to know if it’s solely made up of downwardly mobile white people, but so much of the Trump era feels ripped from a late Faulkner novel, the revenge of the Snopes — the disgruntled, the demoralized, the demographically dispossessed. 

It also shares an aura of projection, like Trump’s own insults against his enemies. If there is any deep state-like coordination going on, it seems like it’s occurring amongst the Republican Senate majority, who have collectively entered a suicide pact, so that there is effectively no daylight between them and the president. If there is a secret government conspiracy occurring, perhaps it’s the administration that attempted to collude with a foreign government in 2016 and seems just as eager to more successfully repeat the process during this election. If there is a coterie of people who are subjecting children to nearly incomprehensible cruelty, perhaps it’s the administration that intentionally separated children from their parents at the border, parents who had abandoned their old lives in order to create new, better lives for the very children they were bringing with them. (Imagine the level of evil one has to be to enact such a policy. Imagine the kind of internal moral callousness one would have to harbor to be aware of these incontrovertible facts and still support that administration. There are limits to imagination.)

And if one needed to tie this all together somehow and charge the Democrats with the most horrible, inflammatory offense known to civilization, why not reach for the readymade one — the anti-Semitic blood libel trope, centuries old? It’s a tale as old as time: the truth’s out there, man. 

Finally, what it reminds me of more than anything else is a bad parody of a Thomas Pynchon novel. I remember in grad school when a professor told me to read The Crying of Lot 49. He could tell that my notions of what fiction could be were entirely too provisional. (They probably still are.) So, being the dutiful student, I went to the library and read the short novel and finished feeling partly amused and mostly baffled. Sometimes I think that postmodern literature is a brand of humor, one that you either find funny or not, and for whatever reason (hopelessly suburban? chronically conventional?) I find it only mildly humorous. I went back to my professor and asked, what happens next? Does the novel imply that Oedipa will finally find the solution to the Tristero whenever she finds out who will bid on Inverarity’s stamp collection? And my professor said, No, I don’t think so. She will simply find the next thing, which will lead to the next thing. The book was too open ended, too nakedly conspiratorial (by design) to fit my hemmed in mind, and the QAnon situation feels the same. Each bit of intel just leads to another bit of intel and if these bits don’t congeal into a stable narrative, well, then that is on purpose, in order to throw off the literal-minded such as myself. And if the identity of Q is potentially revealed, well, can that really be the true Q, since by its very nature Q is both everywhere and nowhere all at once? 

Just because people don’t go to church doesn’t mean the religious impulse has completely disappeared. Perhaps a salutary function of the church is that it disciplines this religious impulse, this rage to find order, into generally more constructive ends. The Q stuff feels like a disparate group of people struggling to build a church, assembling a text, and casting for a prophet, and looking for more believers. If it all added up, you wouldn’t have a church. 

I didn’t Do The Research, but I did some research. Here are my sources: 

An episode of Deep Background with Noah Feldman, where he discusses QAnon’s quest-like attributes with a game designer.

An article by Gregory Stanton where he argues that QAnon is quite simply re-branded Nazism.

Episode #166 of Reply All, where the hosts attempt a theory on the initial and morphing identity of Q.

A Slate article gloss of the same.

Tangentially related, here is Timothy Burke’s post about the core of unpersuadable brutalism lurking within our political conflict.