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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Old: Acts 20:35 “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Now: “It’s vastly more blessed to have.”
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Published: Apr 26, 2020
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Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
It’s Sunday. Let’s start with some glorious music: “QUARANTIFICAT,” performed by the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg, from the “Magnificat,” by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
View from My Window was launched on March 22. The idea is simple: take one photo from your locked-down home and share it. To quote the founders: “Every day, through our windows, we have the same view.” The message is one we hear every day — stay home, we’re all in this together, we’ll get through — but Facebook is a powerful megaphone: In a month, this Facebook group has 2 million members.
My sampling is small — a quick spin a while ago, a look at three “top recent posts.” (One of them is today’s visual. The contributor writes: “The view from our home in Gippsland Australia on a crisp Autumn April day. The land around here is green, fertile and very hilly.”) What I saw was exactly what I feared — this is house porn.
I don’t say this because I live in East Harlem, which is a poor but charming zip code that’s certain to be less so when the gentrifiers develop it. I call it house porn because, although writing design pieces is a sidebar to my journalism, I seem to have done a lot of it. In the 1980s, I often wrote for HG, stopping only when Anna Wintour became its editor and Tina Brown, my editor at VF, didn’t want that and boosted my contract by $30,000 to make up for my loss of income. I wrote for Architectural Digest for a decade. For Buzzfeed, I wrote “Before the Gold Rush,” a bend-the-Internet piece about the Trump triplex in Trump Tower. I now write an occasional short take for Elle Décor. So I’ve seen house porn, up close and personal.
But you don’t need an expert to get the idea of View from My Window. The contributors are overwhelmingly white.They have manicured lawns, gardens, water views. Set the psychological and interpersonal difficulties of the lockdown aside — it doesn’t suck to be these people.
Some of you have written to tell me that the pandemic incarnation of Butler is “essential,” and of course that pleases me, especially because I have a shitty immune system and going out and pitching in could make my daughter a witness to my Zoom funeral. But the facts are the facts — I’m a third responder. I’m white. I have some money. I work alone. In a way that’s not so attractive, the last month for me has been a masked staycation.
I have a plan to do more. Insofar as I have a personal goal beyond survival, I want to finish my novel and sell it for a shit-ton of money and have it make millions of readers laugh and cry and then have it become a movie that turns an unknown kid into a mega-star — and at every stage of that good fortune, I want to give a chunk of it away. Because I think that’s what there is for third responders to do.
Today, I’m featuring a piece by Charlie Warner that deals with his awareness of white privilege. And then I hope you’ll read a short story that dramatically poses Charlie’s question: Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”
Long ago, in a universe far away, Charlie Warner hired 19-year-old Bob Pittman as the program director of a major radio station (Pittman went on to be the Co-Founder of MTV and the COO of America Online; in 1998, he hired Charlie, and the AOL sales force quickly became one of the 25 best sales organizations in America — the first media company to make the list. Charlie has been the Leonard H. Goldenson Professor of Local Broadcasting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism; he now teaches in the Media Management Program at The New School. His book, “Broadcast and Cable Selling,” has been used by 70 universities and many broadcast, cable and digital sales organizations, and is considered to be the book on selling in the field. A personal note: With few exceptions over the last decade, Charlie and Julia Bradford and a few others and I have collaborated on a New Year’s Eve dinner.
Here is “I’m Guilty.”
I am 88 years old, white, immune compromised, live in the Upper East Side in a townhouse, and am still alive. I don’t feel grateful because my wife and I have the resources to have food delivered, have lots of masks, and to take a car service to my doctors’ appointments. No, I feel guilty because if I lived in Queens or the Bronx and were black or brown, I’d probably be dead.
The Covid-19 pandemic has magnified America’s inequality, and in no city in the country is that inequality more prevalent than in New York, the epicenter of Covid-19 deaths. In the past I didn’t think much about inequality or being in the one percent — it was a natural state of being. But now I feel guilty for the first time in my life. I have a heavy, gnawing sense that it’s immoral to be a preppy and in the one percent.
Even more frustrating, I have no idea whatsoever what to do about my guilt. I become paralyzed when I think about it — I do a Scarlett O’Hara. Should I give more to Meals on Wheels? Should my wife sew more masks? I don’t know. I’m stunned, immobilized by my guilt.
The only time I seem to come out of my guilty torpor is to rant about the total, mendacious incompetence of Trump and his back-to-work demonstrators. Trump and his Republican thugs can read the Covid-19 numbers. They see that a disproportionate number of deaths are 75-plus black and brown people who are almost certainly on Social Security and Medicare.
In my head I can hear the thugs saying, “Hey, if we open up the country and go back to work, a lot of great things will happen: 1) Trump’s failing hotels will fill up, 2) oil and gas prices will go up (take note Charles Koch), 3) more Democrats will die, and 4) we’ll save a trillion dollars on Social Security and Medicare. What’s the downside?”
That warped, evil thinking turns my guilt into rage, at least temporarily. Knowing that Trump and his Republican thugs want me to die in order to take away my vote and to save money will keep me alive at least long enough to vote in November. I will vote, and I won’t feel guilty about it.
And now…“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Ursula Le Guin’s story won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974. Her greater pleasure: “It has a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality.” The question the story asks: Everyone in Omelas is happy, but their happiness is at the expense of a child locked in a broom-closet-sized room with a locked door and no windows. How do the happy townspeople live with that?
Were this story written today, the premise might be flipped: How can the one percent enjoy their lives when their fortune is built on oppressing the great majority of the planet’s population? But that’s a question for for another day. Please click and read.
ESSENTIALS AND DISPATCHES
Everything, all in one place.
UPDATE: EO Hand Soap is available again.
UPDATE: I spoke with a NYC lung specialist. He endorses Vitamin D, but warns you not to double/triple dose. In large doses, Vitamin D becomes toxic.
