Month: April 2020

No, this is not a screed about Donald Trump. Although, given the title, you can be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion. Trump is a parasite of a different sort, and he operates on a level that is cruder and less sophisticated and more predictable than even something as simple as a virus—a collection of molecules that don’t even qualify as a life form.

Neither is this about the coronavirus. At least not directly so. It’s about how the virus has been framed in public discourse. It’s about how all threats to the status quo are framed in public discourse. It’s about the metaphors that we choose to talk about these things. It’s about how we are missing the whole point entirely.

It’s about how inconsequential and completely unimportant the coronavirus really is.

Let me start with the curious personal observation that even though I live five miles away from the first documented US coronavirus case, and in one of the first places to impose a state-wide stay-at-home lockdown, I haven’t felt compelled to write about the experience. Other than a few social media updates on the situation early on, and a little bit in a blog post a few weeks back, I have written almost nothing about it at all. Not online. Not in text and email correspondence with friends and family. Not in a journal where I record even my most trivial thoughts and insights. And it was this observation—an insight that I subsequently recorded in my journal—that got me wondering why. Why do I have so little motivation to write about something that has altered almost every aspect of my daily life and the lives of everyone around me?   

My first answer to this question was that maybe I just don’t have anything to say about it. Or, more to the point, I have nothing to say that isn’t already being said; I have nothing of substance to add to the perpetual avalanche of fact, misinformation, speculation, and opinion about the topic that is crashing through each day, burying everything else in its path. Here is a quote from André Gide that is framed on the wall next to me as I write this (one that I lifted from Daniel Quinn’s book, Providence):

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.

So, it might be that my silence is because I am taking Gide’s advice and I think that I simply have nothing unique to offer.

It might be this, but it’s not.

In fact, I have a lot to say about this situation. However, just about everything I have to say about the topic is something that I suspect nobody really wants to hear. And my reticence to say it out loud appears to be a reflexive reaction to my mother’s frequent admonition: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”

So, if you agree with my mom, then stop reading this now.

Seriously.

Last chance.

The coronavirus doesn’t matter.

More precisely, it doesn’t matter in any of the ways that people have been yelling about. It certainly doesn’t matter because of all the personal inconvenience it is causing. And let’s be honest, the inconvenience is the only reason most people care about it at all. It’s such a tragedy! You can’t go to the place or do the thing. You’re stuck at home with your kids. You’re forced to interact hourly with a significant other you really can’t stand. Seriously? You pathetic privileged fuck!

If the coronavirus matters at all, it is only slightly, and only because of what is being brought to light, what is being illuminated in the background as we ever-so-slightly scale back our relentless consumption. The coronavirus is like a black light being swept across cheap hotel room furniture, exposing the stains of a civilization that has been fucking the planet to death while we have been too distracted to notice.

Consider some of the clearly positive effects of the virus that are stark and hard to ignore: clear skies in Los Angeles, no March school shootings for the first time in 18 years, Bank of America’s first-quarter profits down 45%. The drop in air travel and the sharp reduction in highway noise has done wonders for my local soundscape. But these things don’t really matter either. They are temporary, and as soon as those in power give the all-clear, things will be back to normal—and even worse, given the likely economic pendulum swing.

The virus has also shown—as if it wasn’t glaringly obvious already—how absolutely helpless and fragile and fear-driven and docile civilized people really are. Hoarding toilet paper and punching Asian people on the street and bathing in disinfectant and wearing a mask and surgical gloves to get the mail and strangling kids who aren’t standing six feet away from their friends. These things are not evidence of civilized nobility.  

How can you say it doesn’t matter? People are dying, for Christ’s sake!

Yes, people are dying. But not nearly enough for it to make a difference. As pandemics go, this one is pretty wimpy. The Black Death wiped out three-fifths of the population of Europe in the 14^th century. With 8 billion people currently squeezing all of the living juice out of the biosphere, we need something considerably more deadly than the bubonic plague to start to turn things around. We have grossly overshot the planet’s natural carrying capacity for our species, and there is no logical or moral reason that humans should be exempt from nature’s many ways of dealing with population excess. And the belief that humans should somehow be exempt from the natural order of things is the reason the virus exists in the first place: don’t forget that this virus is a product of civilization, a direct effect of a sedentary way of life based on domestication.

OK. There is more that I could say, but no one wants to hear about how their wonderful life of convenience and consumable distraction is a direct consequence of smallpox and genocide.

So, let me end on a positive note.

There is a small basketball court next to my apartment. It has been encircled with caution tape and signs sternly declaring that the court is closed due to the social distancing mandate from the State. Yesterday, a few folks, a couple teenagers and their dad and uncle, ducked beneath the caution tape with their basketball and played for several hours while some of my neighbors walked by and gave them the thumbs up. A trivial act of defiance, for sure. Nonetheless, perhaps those in power should worry that our civilized docility might be only on the surface. 

Of all possible places, those places we call home are held to be among the most important. But the modern concept of home is a fairly recent one. I’m not talking merely about home in its trivial sense, home as a place of residence, your house or apartment, the place to which you are currently confined under coronavirus house-arrest, but home in its deeper sense as well, home as a place of origin, that quasi-mythical place that forms the cornerstone in the foundation of your self-concept, perhaps also serving as an emotional anchor during trying times like these.

Places that were of formative value and that carry a sense of personal connection and attachment have probably always been part of the human milieu. But home, as a concept, as a place where you belong (be long: a place of long-term occupation) is a product of an agrarian lifestyle, a sedentary lifestyle tied to specific parcels of tended land, to pastures and fields, to villages and permanent dwellings. Home is a product of domestication—a word that itself derives from the Latin for home, domus. The verb domesticate, to tame, comes from a Medieval Latin word that means literally to make a product of the household. The idea of home is at the very core of domestication as a way of life, and part of what distinguishes the civilized from the non-civilized.

What does home mean to a nomadic gatherer-hunter? If there is anything in such a society that corresponds even remotely to the civilized idea of home, it is either something so expansive that it encompasses entire regions of habitation, or it is something that travels with them, something that involves proximity to specific other people as much or more than it does to a specific physical place, something that moves with the person, a perpetually shifting zone that is determined by the active requirements of the moment, a zone that is defined by the center—quite literally “where the heart is.”

Modern city-dwellers have become increasingly nomadic in recent years. But this is nomadism of a different kind from that of a gatherer-hunter. It is a punctate nomadism in which the person moves from one temporary “permanent residence” to another. Modern civilized life is, for many people, a series of dislocations, leading to a perpetual sense of diaspora. Home becomes nostalgia for a permanence of place that in reality rarely exists, a Norman Rockwell painting of a time out of time.

A while back I was in the car on the way home—or the place I currently call home—and listening to an NPR interview with a small business entrepreneur who suggested that people have become dislodged from traditional social groups due to the digital nature of our world, and to the high level of nomadism, moving from job to job, and that because of this we lack the durable objects of attachment that were available in former times. So, we attach to brands, to products, and to celebrities instead of the things that used to serve as the primary material of our self-concepts: place, family, and friends.

From the entrepreneur’s perspective, this was a good thing, something to be exploited. And the conversation drifted into ways to enhance customer loyalty, and thereby increase a business’ odds for long-term viability. But from a human perspective, this can only be seen as part of the accelerating tragedy that is civilization. Fandom, attachment to marketed consumables such as professional sport teams or entertainment franchises or brands of clothing reflects a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness left in the wake of our deepening sense of alienation, the void created from our inability to establish authentic connections to other people and to the physical world around us, from our inability to establish a coherent and internally-defined sense of self. 

Rewilding, becoming human again, means abandoning these superficial forms of attachment, and embracing a more expansive and simultaneously more penetrating perspective on the places we occupy right now—a perspective that acknowledges the actual physical space around us and the many other living beings who are there right beside us, a perspective that is defined by the center.