Last weekend ushered in our country’s 245th year of independence from Britain. “Independence” and “Freedom” are two of our country’s rallying cries (as well as the names of the two space shuttles that nuked that earth-killing meteor in the Bruce Willis classic Armageddon.) Well, America is still independent of foreign rule, but is it free? Was it ever, or has that just been a dream?
Like many of my tribe struggling to fully understand the Black Lives Matter movement and the abuses perpetrated on Americans of color that are excused or ignored, I reached for a book. Several sources suggested Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015 Random House), so I started with that. I’m glad I did—this is easily the best book I’ve read on any subject in a long time.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a MacArthur Fellow and a Pulitzer-nominated writer. He’s a sometime contributer to the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the NY Times, and my friend Jon E. reports he’s also the writer of the Black Panther graphic novels.
I didn’t know that he was also a poet, but I thought he must be as soon as I started reading his book. His command of the language, and his care with every word he uses, made me think of Margaret Atwood. I was hooked from the first page.
Between the World and Me is an exploration of Coates’s world as a black man in America, written as an extended letter to his son Samori. The book is thoughtful, deeply personal, and true. By true, I don’t mean this is a history or objective analysis of the black American experience (although it is full of references to real, well-known events that revolved around Coates in his life). It is Coates’s own story of his experiences and beliefs, and it is made powerful by the effort he makes to speak only the truth as he knows it to his son.
A central theme of the book is the systematic authorized brutality on black men and women in this country by police and others. The title refers to the separation he and his fellow black Americans feel from the “real world” of the American Dream. The anecdotes he tells of casual or planned violence done to black men and women start when he was a child in Baltimore in the 1980’s, and continue up to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown in the 2010’s. It was chilling to read these stories, and realize how little has changed in forty years.
Coates’s thesis is that not only is this brutality accepted or ignored by most of those living the American Dream; it is that the American Dream itself requires this brutality in order to exist. His struggles with the American Dream, first to reach for it, then to build a better alternative to it, and finally to transcend it, form the story arc, and his message to his son is that he, too, must find a way to look beyond any dream and understand the reality of his life.
Between the World and Me has won several awards, including the National Book Award in 2016. It was not without critics, including some that found it too pessimistic, ignoring the progress that had been made (this book was released in the sixth year of Obama’s presidency). But I think those critics forgot that the book was his own story, not the country’s. And in this post-Obama world, his more fatalistic view of black people’s “progress” seems to have worn better than his critics’.
I’ve written enough about this great book. I should let the author speak for himself.
On police reform in 2015:
At this moment the phrase “police reform” has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people.
On the pervasiveness of sanctioned violence and murder in the American Dream:
[My mother] knew that the galaxy itself could kill me…. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of “race,” imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.
On the harm that the American Dream causes even to those privileged to enjoy its benefits:
The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
And on his message to his son:
I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance [between black men and women, and the world of the American Dream]. Was it Mike Brown? I don’t think I want to know. But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. It is your responsibility because you are surrounded by the Dreamers. It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food. . .
Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto. — I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness.
I’ve always wanted a rhinoceros. I mean, who hasn’t? I also have wanted to try making a driftwood sculpture, so I had the happy idea of making a driftwood rhinoceros back in the Fall. Initially, I prepared for the project by watching a youtube video of a guy who made his mother a driftwood horse for her birthday – in only two days! I started collecting four pieces of driftwood every time I took Teddy for a walk down by the river. Then, when I had amassed what I thought was a huge pile, and armed with my youtube knowledge, I started the project. I made a rough sketch and a plan for a sort of armature (see below). I had some used pressure treated 2x4s lying around so I used them for the armature by screwing some pieces together. When the proportions didn’t seem quite right, I sawed a little off of each leg, then did it again. Once the proportions were right, driftwood was added piece by piece, with 2 screws going in each piece. I soon found out that my huge stash of driftwood was inadequate, since I had been collecting big pieces and more smaller pieces were really what was needed, after just a few big pieces were in place. I kept taking this as far as I could go with the pieces of driftwood that I had on hand, then going for more walks to increase the collection. That became a very pleasant hobby and I loved finding pieces that looked like a rhinoceros horn or foot or ear. My sole cost outlay was for about 4 lbs of screws in different sizes, from 2 inches to 3 ½. I used a Ryobi Power Screwdriver to do most of the work. Instead of two days, it took me around six months.
I call him Huey. Just as I was writing this it occurred to me that I should help out his species, since they are critically endangered so I gave a contribution to the International Rhino Foundation at Rhinos.org
Trentin Quarantino’s ALMANACK Inside my vault of abandoned and should-be-abandoned blog ideas
I. Norwegian Plague Jokes. After the success of my posts on Norwegian Pig Jokes1, 2, 3, and learning from a frequent commenter about the whole genre of Plague fiction, I had the idea to do something up on Norwegian Plague Jokes. I wasn’t sure I’d find any starting material, but figured if I could find some generic plague jokes, I could just Norskii them up a bit.
I didn’t have any trouble finding plague jokes on the internet; in fact, there were (in my opinion) far too many sites dedicated to them. The problem was that they were uniformly awful—racist allusions to “black” plague or “yellow” fever, juvenile tortured puns on body parts à la boob-onic plague, and even worse. Who knew the concept of the plague would be so unfunny? In all that morass, I only found one joke that I’m even willing to repeat, and that one’s not even funny:
Q. Why were the Egyptians optimistic after the Nile turned to blood? A. Because it was "B-Positive"
(During my brief research, I discovered that the Bubonic Plague had largely spared the Norwegians in the 14th century, until a trader ship carrying wool out of England came down with the plague, killing everyone on board. The “Ghost Ship” eventually ran aground near Bergen, some of the rats escaped to the mainland, and brought the plague with them. Creepy stuff!) (Source)
II. Discomfort Food Upon noticing my own diet’s tendency to drift towards certain kinds of “comfort foods” during this forced isolation, I tried performing some gastronomic calculus to discover the perfect comfort food. I researched the four basic comfort food groups: (1) fats, (2) carbs, (3) sugar, (4) salt, and the comfort-enhancing additives (or “comfort vitamins”, if you will):
I thought a complete comfort food might be: macaroni and cheese made with home-made Cheetos pasta, cooked into waffles, then made into an ice cream sandwich with chocolate covered salted-caramel coffee ice cream inside.
I was going to try making this to test my hypothesis, but I was unsuccessful—I just couldn’t make Cheetos pasta. Every time I bought a bag of Cheetos (which took several days because of curbside pickup), I would eat them before I got around to making spaghetti.
(Cheetos pasta is makable, by stouter hearts than me. See here.) Any report on my own further experiments will have to wait until I get faster ingredient delivery, or stronger will power.
III. T.G.I.C. I thought there might be some mileage in a “Thank God It’s Covid” post, playing off my old “Glad Game“ skills to expound on the up side of a global pandemic that especially preys on old people and the poor. Maybe new technologies developed, or new insights into the human condition, or new heights of human compassion and cooperation, could compensate for the huge suffering and loss.
Nope, in the light of day, this idea seemed pretty much dead on arrival. The benefits of introducing the possibility of eating bats to the world (outside of Palau, who already knew) wasn’t even close to, say, the investment of $288 billion by the NASA moon program that ultimately led to the development of Tang.
Many people have shown heroism on the front lines, but that heroism has been in a battle that could have been so much less dangerous if our political leaders had stepped up, instead of reacting in a way that displayed their moral cowardice, political avarice, and abdication of critical reasoning skills.
Huh. I don’t think I’m currently in the proper place to play the Glad Game.
Thanks for letting me post things that I admit aren’t good enough to post, Dorn 7/01/2020
In these days of self-isolation, social distancing, and a greatly reduced number of activities available to pass the time, various forms of fatigue are an ever-present risk. I’ve succumbed to baking fatigue, reading fatigue, TV fatigue, opera fatigue, and writing-blog-post fatigue. (Calling something you have gotten bored with a “fatigue” gives it so much more gravitas, don’t you think? Plus it’s no longer your fault—it’s like a syndrome, which you picked up from working so hard.)
One of the most prevalent characteristics of everything we do these days is caution. It’s no suprise that everywhere, “caution fatigue” is on the rise.
Caution fatigue is defined by Wiktionary as a “desensitization to alarm signals, caused by lengthy or frequent exposure, and resultant slowed or absent responses to new alarms.”
We’re certainly saturated with alarm signals, with levels of sickness and death from covid that seem to break records every day. Nothing of our former lives, it seems, is without danger—not working, playing, visiting friends or family, not even mundane tasks like reading the mail or gassing the car.
I need only to look out the window at our little beach to see the throngs of non-mask-wearing, non-social-distancing swimmers, sunbathers and partiers increase every day. The virus is still here, moreso than ever if one thinks about it, but they’re just tired of thinking about it.
Kathleen told me once of a accident she saw, where a woman pulled out from a stop sign in front of an oncoming car, and was immediately hit. When asked why she pulled out when the approaching auto was clearly visible, she said, “I had been waiting at that stop sign for a break in the traffic for like five minutes. I just got tired of waiting.” That poor woman was suffering bad from caution fatigue.
I can see how caution fatigue could have some evolutionary survival value. If any situation is unavoidable, now matter how depressing or dangerous, perhaps it’s better to be able to step back from it, try your best to function without focusing too hard on the tiger in the room. Maybe it’s a variant of the instinct that is seen in everything from humans to flatworms, that tells you that if something doesn’t work, eventually you’ll have to try something else. Even so, we’re hardly at the point yet where we can’t go on as medical experts say we should. Four months without seeing a movie or eating my favorite Nick’s sausage is annoying, but it’s hardly cause to abandon all common sense, yet.
I am hoping that the country will be hit with a new wave of fatigue soon: “denial fatigue”. It must be hard to continue to deny the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears concerning the seriousness of the pandemic. I’m really hoping that those working so hard at denying it will soon tire of their labors, and start behaving in a way that will make living in a post-covid world safer for me.
Even in parts of the country where the number of cases is still just in the hundreds, and the number of deaths is in the tens (like my own home county), one can’t really avoid seeing the signs everywhere—shops are closed, masks are required in grocery stores, public buildings and parks all literally bear large warning signs.
Sure, it’s easier to deny the evidence when you are surrounded by like-minded people, and you haven’t been personally impacted by the threat. You may be able to dismiss the warnings by as conspiracies by foreigners, or scientists, or worst yet foreign scientists to make you believe something untrue. But not to believe even your own doctor on an issue of your health and safety, what an effort that must take! Surely many covid-deniers must be close to worn out from the hard work of covid-denying!
So that’s how I get through a day when it seems so exhausting to take care not to get infected—I hope for a time over the rainbow, when others are equally tired of denying the need to distance, to wash, to mask. I really think that when everyone does it, being careful will become easier and less fatiguing for all of us, and maybe as an added side benefit, less people will sicken and die!
thought it would be interesting to see how the coronavirus pandemic compared and contrasted with famous pandemics of the past. The most famous pandemic I knew about was the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, so I started looking around for books about that. I especially wanted books written around that time, where the disease was a current event, rather than a historical analysis of a distant calamity.
The first book I found was America’s forgotten pandemic: the influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby. It came out in 1976, so didn’t meet my criterion of a contemporaneity, but at least it was a book I could get ahold of, from the trusty Internet Archive, my go-to source for all old books.
Trouble was, the thing was so dense and so dry that I just couldn’t get into it. I’m sure it is very scholarly and informative, but it wasn’t at all what I was looking for in light epidemic reading. So I kept searching. The second book I found had more of a reputation as a good read (it’s touted as a “New York Times Bestseller”), The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry. Sounds like a thriller from the title! And it’s available digitally from the local library!
Unfortunately, I guess a lot of people stuck at home had the same idea, so the best I could do was get on the wait list for a copy of the epic story. I am currently at position number 69 on the list. So while waiting for my turn with this e-book, I decided I had to expand my search further back in time. This time, I struck pay dirt, in A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame.
This is the story of the Great London Plague of 1665, written “by a citizen who continued all the while in London”. Daniel Defoe published this book in 1722, more than 50 years after the plague. Indeed he was only five years old in 1665, but he claimed that he was publishing an actual journal of someone (perhaps his uncle) who lived through the plague. The debate continues to this day whether this is a book of fiction or not.
The London plague of 1665 was certainly a whole different kind of catastrophe than our coronavirus epidemic. A quarter of the city’s population died from the plague that year. Much of Defoe’s story is grim and sometimes horrifying (there are descriptions of pain and despair sometimes to the point of insanity, and lots and lots of dead bodies, if you are horrified by such things), but the book also brought out some thought-provoking parallels to our own pandemic.
The unnamed Narrator of the story started his experience of the epidemic as we did, stuck in his house, afraid to go out for fear of catching the contagion. Initially he passed his time like we did, in some ways: baking bread and trying to hoard-buy meat and supplies.
This difficulty and danger of getting food and supplies was mentioned, but they had their own version of contactless shopping—if it’s too risky to go to the store yourself, just send a servant:
When I first read this, I was grateful that we now have the internet and online ordering and contactless delivery, so I wasn’t put into the ethically questionable situation of sending my servants out to risk their lives for chores that I wasn’t willing to risk mine for. It was hard to suppress the realization that there wasn’t really much moral difference between using people employed by me to perform these risky tasks and using people employed by Amazon, Fedex, or GrubHub, but I did my best!
There were a lot of parallels in the socio-medical response to the plague. The medical experts then, like now, warned the population of the dangers of asymptomatic transmission of the disease:
Social distancing was practiced widely, although the protocols were a bit different, such as the rule (thankfully not needed now) that one should cross the street rather than stepping over a dead body on the sidewalk. I expected to read something of the ancient equivalent of the face-mask, that bird-shaped contraption that plague physicians wore with the beak stuffed full of perfumes, but I don’t recall there being any mention of it.
The almost sacred spot reserved in our daily rituals for hand sanitizer was filled back in 1665 with an assortment of perfumes, aromatics, and smoke-generators. There was scholarly debate about just the right kind of fire to build to create the proper prophylactic smoke haze. Pitch, sulfur and gunpowder were all popular combustants. (This debate isn’t as pointless as it might sound. The plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was carried by fleas, which in turn were carried by rats. Smoke or other smells that repelled insects or other pests probably did increase the safety of a household.)
The narrator wrote movingly about the economic hardships. As always, these fell squarely on the poor. Massive unemployment was caused by businessmen responding to the epidemic by shuttering their shops and staying at home, fleeing the city, or dying.
That the poor were able to find food and work at all, the narrator gives effusive credit to the Lord Mayor and his Aldermen, who undertook their jobs with courage and compassion. The book describes the city government’s work at this time chiefly as distributing charity for the poor, maintaining the public order (such as by locking infected people and their families in their houses), and taking over the task of burying the dead from the overwhelmed churches.
The book tells many stories of the noble work of the Lord Mayor and his staff fighting the plague and its effects. Of the work of the national government (what he calls “the Court”), the narrator is charitably brief. (What parallels one might draw with the current pandemic on our country, I leave to the reader.)
My poor recollection of the history of science received a lesson in this book. The microscope had been invented 75 years before the London plague, and men of science had become acquainted with microbes. The risk of contracting the disease from someone with no symptoms was already well-known, and physicians and scientists of the time attempted to design a test to be able to tell if someone was infected but pre-symptomatic, a side story I found chillingly parallel to the efforts of our own medical community.
The Narrator, and apparently all the intelligentsia at the time, recognized that the plague was a biological contagion, and was spread by natural, rather than magical, means. They also were certain, however, that the plague was a warning sent from God to tell Londoners they must return to the proper Christian path. They saw no contradiction in these two beliefs—as the Narrator put it,
Then as now, the workers on the front lines of the battle against the disease were rightly praised as heroes. The Narrator includes clergymen in his list (indeed, they are the first group he calls out). As now, clergy played a crucial role in the comfort of the afflicted and their loved ones, but they played an even more crucial role back then as the interceders requesting supernatural help on behalf of the Londoners (which, the Narrator reports, was occasionally provided), and in shepherding the citizens back to the necessary proper path (which they were happy to return to, at least for as long as death was all around).
The story draws to the close with the end of the London plague, to the great jubilation of the survivors. Sometimes, the Narrator complained, their celebrations were too early and too carefree, when the grip of the plague had dissipated (the death count was down to “only” 1800 a week!) but not vanished entirely.
Daniel Defoe’s Narrator says he wrote his journal for the edification of any who find themselves in a recurrence of the plague. I don’t know but that the book holds a few valuable lessons for us even now, 350 years later. Plus, it was a fascinating story. If you’re curious, you can find it at Project Gutenberg, here. (It’s currently Daniel Defoe’s most popular book on the site, with more than twice as many downloads as Robinson Crusoe!)
Trentin Quarantino’s 
