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For better or worse, retail gives our world its texture. When it’s gone you feel it.
And people are terrified. That’s the main thing. Everyone seems so scared.
The only good compliment I ever got was at a reception after a lecture I gave at a small college in Missouri. The provost’s wife, who was handing out prizes to the students who had written the best essays about my book, was sitting next to me, and after we had talked about her life, she said, in reference to absolutely nothing, “You know, I didn’t like the book.” “No?” I said. “No.” She thought for a moment. “But you could tell all the words were in the right place.” Then she nodded firmly once, as if that sealed the subject of my attributes forever, which no doubt for her it did. But I
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The stakes of this game are the final number of dead from this virus being 8,000 or 35,000 when it’s over—or more specifically, the stakes are us, whether some of us go on living or stop.
An idiot is in charge of everything.
“I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot. It’s incredible,” Trump says of modern forehead thermometers, per Maggie Haberman of the Times.
Herd immunity is effectively impossible in anything but the very long term—the deaths it would take to reach it would be unimaginable, conceivably in the hundreds of thousands here in America.
There’s such rawness in everyone—the mix is so different than usual, the same amount of anger, but more fear, less certainty, and I think more love.
The foreboding after two weeks of covid is less acute but deeper. At the start it felt the way HIV did when I was young, predatory, fatal, and unpredictable. It seemed like going outside might mean dying, the way that when I was 16 I thought having sex without a condom meant you would probably die.
At the same time, as Rachel said, you can do everything right and if your number’s up, that’s it.
The one cost that we are not even trying to pretend to deal with is mental health. In the middle of writing normal work e-mails I write and then delete long paragraphs saying, but jesus, listen, here I am, talking as if I have rational feelings, but that’s fraudulent, because adjusting to this new situation doesn’t even fractionally change the terrible internal disquiet I am feeling, I’m rational at the moment only by tremendous exertion, and the vigilance is exhausting.
The writer M. F. K. Fisher once said, “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”
body. I will try not to get covid, but I might get it. If I get it, I will try not to die, but I might die. That’s what having a body is. Only when you get sick, or maybe have a child, do you realize what a half-familiar mammal you’ve wound up living inside—that you can no more tell it to stop feeling horrible than you can order your stomach to be flatter or your eyes to be bluer.
Yet he says the thing he finds most ominous is that the mail has stopped—it comes once or twice a week, he conjectures because the sorting centers have been overrun with covid, though who knows under Trump. The hamburglar is probably postmaster general.
In an aerial picture circulating today, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cars wait in a Texas parking lot, neat as legos, for a food bank to open. Football fields of minivans and pickups, motionless and scared as rabbits in a spotlight at night.
Yesterday they took the girls out to do bubbles in one of those little sections of Riverside Park along Riverside Drive. They were having so much fun, Rach said, and lots of single adults stopped to just watch them—you could feel how starved they were for connection or joy, or anything, she said. She sent us a picture and it was true, five or six very different people staring at the two children with naked avidity for their effortless joy.
In the Civil War, the soldiers called marching to the front “going to visit the elephant.” To me it’s as if we’re all visiting the elephant.
Have resourceful ideas during wartime always felt tinged with insanity? I think it must have been so—the recipes for making a cake for 12 with half an egg, the ingenious ways to wrap a parcel with no string. Burnt cork for mascara.
It’s the boredom and the terror in combination that make these days so sleepy and wrong, i.e., the terror is very much not gone. A month of everyone’s lives. When the British were rationing there was a cause, there were young people at a front to pray for. Now we’re all always dully at the front, people dying daily, some proportion of them daily specifically for the cause of Donald Trump not feeling embarrassed to wear a mask and admit he underestimated this disease. It’s almost impossible to remember what the vitality and righteousness of the women’s march three years ago felt like. The
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(As Churchill said, nothing more exhilarating than being shot at without result.)
Stupider people have done worse things to better people than us.
Six is just so small. Nothing bad that happens to you then goes away, not for real.
There’s a saying in Africa about that, which is that every time an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.
“Time has stopped,” says Jon Lovett of Pod Save America. People are comatose; people are down; people are tired; people are sleeping. It’s a shit show, it’s a clown car, it’s a dumpster fire. It’s Groundhog Day. It’s bad vibes; it’s a coup; it’s matcha season; it’s the end of the world; it’s just pandemic; it’s the end of time; it’s spring; it’s 2020.
Life is simple: Don’t go anywhere and be afraid.
“Freedom” is the sleight of hand the profit-makers pull, because they have encouraged enough people to think that freedom doesn’t mean freedom from want, or fear, but being able to own an AR-15 and say racist stuff. “Freedom” is how they dump poison in a river. As long as most Americans don’t have access to those truer, less tangible, and deeply unprofitable freedoms—choice, education, destiny—then not wearing a mask will be what freedom feels like for some of them.
even the Democrats (not notable for their political savvy, a shortcoming in a political party, it turns out) destroyed him in the 2018 midterms,
People are waking up to that at least. When you read about Nazi Germany, this is how it happens, like Hemingway’s description of how you go bankrupt—gradually and then all at once.
If the Trump era ends I think what will be hardest to convey is how things happened every day, sometimes every hour, that you would throw your body in front of a car to stop.
As Marshall McLuhan said, the price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
As Graham Greene said in The Quiet American, innocence is a kind of insanity.
He’s the obverse of Maya Angelou’s great observation: “Black Americans have had to study white Americans. For centuries under slavery, the smile or the grimace on a white man’s face or the flow of a hand on a white woman could inform a black person that you’re about to be sold or flogged. So we have studied the white American, where the white American has not been obliged to study us.”
Libraries are a good institution. I loved the library when I was little and I love the library now.
Hard work was what I thought made you successful. But I don’t know. Is success in a corrupt society admirable? And even if it is, who said what was success? When did I agree to that?
As John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead.
that Trump wasn’t the joke we thought he was at first. We had Goldwater, Buchanan, Palin, Cain, Schwarzenegger, the whole motley warm-up act, and still didn’t see him coming.
One rallying cry since the death of George Floyd has been to “defund the police”—an unfortunate phrase, because the right has immediately started saying stuff like “Imagine calling 911…and NO ONE IS THERE. That’s the future liberals want.” In fact the idea of defunding the police is to reallocate some of their budgets, a huge line item for every city and state in America, to (for instance) mental health professionals, so that when a homeless person is erratic, we can help them, not shoot them.
The fact that goes around is that to pass a million seconds would take you 12 days from now, while a billion seconds would take you to the year 2050.
relive the Obama years, when, despite hope being advertised to us so often, there actually managed to be hope somehow.
Still, it’s remarkable that without even trying, America always, unless perhaps there’s a Native American available, assigns its bloodshed and death to black people first.
Trump introduced his Secretary of the Interior this morning. “He loves the Interior,” according to the President. Honestly it’s an incredible qualification for the job.
The various candidates don’t matter any more. Harris is qualified and smart. What remains to be seen is if she can help Biden win, the only thing that does matter.
When I think of them these days, the billionaires seem like mass murderers to me, one and all, Carlos Slim, Tim Cook, Sheldon Adelson, even the supposedly generous ones, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates. It’s not generous. Just give all the money away, Bill. Don’t let it sit there moldering as you decide like some pharaoh how you personally think it should be disbursed—as if that money has anything to do with the little tiny particle of existence that is you.
the fretting of people like me, with enough saved up not to have to worry about food or shelter, complaining from the inside about a bourgeoisie that should be incinerated.
England is run by an old Etonian who looks like a munitions company designed a pig that acts like a human.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is probably skinning a rat alive to keep his instincts sharp.
The whole Republican convention, every speech and gesture and carefully decorated setting, feels like it’s leading up to a one-time opportunity to buy a timeshare next to a swamp full of crocodiles.
So we might have lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the election and the Court at one fell stroke. Roe v. Wade. Voting rights. LGBTQ rights. All of it, gone, possibly for good.
