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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: The problem is men
By
Published: Apr 14, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
CAPTION: Nancy Pelosi, daughter of Big Tommy D’Alessandro, Jr., a Maryland Congressman and Mayor of Baltimore from 1947 to 1959, at John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball. She was 20.
Yesterday began as a good candidate for worst-day-ever. Heavy rain here. Wind so strong it threatened the tent hospital in Central Park. And bad news, a spoonful at a time.
from the Times:
“Now is the time to call your loved ones and tell them all the things you want to say,” one doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell hospital said he tells his coronavirus patients before they are intubated. “I’ll come back in 15 minutes.”
Then this:
A shortage of face masks and N95 respirators amid the coronavirus pandemic has led the Department of Veterans Affairs to tell hospitals to decide which employees get masks and which don’t, according to internal memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
By noon, I was much in need of wisdom, so I called K, who is invariably reliable in that department, to talk about what I think of as outrage exhaustion. “It’s PTSD,” she said, “and we all have it. I accept that. But to accept it isn’t to say I’m giving up. It’s not an invitation to hibernate. It’s work — conserving strength and building it.” I took that as a cue to say: “Building strength, in case we have to claw our way to Election Day… or survival.” She winced at the verb. I knew what she was thinking: how like a man.
The day changed. I read What Do Countries With The Best Coronavirus Responses Have In Common? Women Leaders.
And then… I didn’t see it, but the moment was everywhere. The President was spraying madness in every direction at the press conference when Paula Reid of CBS asked a question: “What did you do in February?” He batted it away. She pressed. He ducked. And then: “Tens of thousands of Americans are dead… How is this rant supposed to make people feel confident in an unprecedented crisis?” And #TrumpMeltdown started trending.
Then Kaitlan Collins, a White House correspondent for CNN, called him out: “You said when someone is president their authority is total. That is not true. Who told you that?”
And I thought, as I often do: the problem is men. White men. As Mario Puzo wrote in “The Godfather,” the Bible about patriarchy: “One lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” And they won’t give it up easily.
The essential book about the epic battle of our time is Philip Slater’s The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture. Note: He published the book in 2008 — he called the future. Samples:
Currently, the world is in the middle of an adaptive process, moving toward a cultural ethos more appropriate to a species living in a shrinking world and in danger of destroying its habitat –– a world that increasingly demands for its survival integrative thinking, unlimited communication, and global cooperation.
The Controller doesn’t see misfortune simply as a problem to be solved. His first thought is to find out who to blame.
Innovation comes from outsiders. Those most deeply committed to, and successful in, an old system will be the last to notice a radically new idea, and will be most resistant to it. When change comes, it’s the outsiders — those uncommitted to the status quo — who are poised to catch the wave.
The wall was a central metaphor for Control Culture…Unfortunately there’s no way to insulate yourself from the bad things around you that doesn’t at the same time insulate you from the good things around you. A wall protects but it also imprisons. Every fortress is also a jail.
Parents who instill macho values, habit and attitudes in a young boy today may be sentencing him to a life of failure, frustration and irrelevance — to be one of the drudges, the grunts, the expendable bodies in a world that demands flexibility and receptivity…. Modern men have been trained in macho skills over many years and at severe cost, only to discover that those skills are no longer of any use to anyone. Strutting, boasting, fighting, destroying, and killing just don’t seem as important to the world as they used to.
I broke the rear view mirror some weeks ago. But after my daughter and I had dinner last night, we decided to play cards tonight. And I remembered something I wrote on June 19, 2015, in Paris: We played poker at midnight — we couldn’t sleep, and we were using potato chips for chips, and there was a light breeze coming through the large windows, and I think we were all as happy and in-the-moment as a family can be.
And I thought: Our sisters, our partners, our daughters — it seems too simple, and maybe it is, but if we get out of their way, if we support and champion them, they can save the world.
Very much looking forward to poker tonight. I’m going to take my daughter for everything I’ve got.
FAVORITE NEW JOHN PRINE ANECDOTE
“After a show, he’d always have ice cream and pretend it was someone’s birthday and get a cake.”
JOSH RITTER: 7 PM ET TONIGHT
The “Silo Session” tonight is mandatory. Seriously. Josh will play all of “Animal Years,” his landmark/breakthrough CD. Every song classic. To preview, click here. And tonight — at 7, not 8 PM ET — click here.
TODAY’S QUOTE
Hunter Thompson: “Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely, in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting “holy shit, what a ride.”
THE DAILY POEM
Stanley Kunitz, who was 95 when he was named Poet Laureate for the second time, was a lifelong appreciator of women. Like: “I think I’d rather sleep forever/than wake up cold/in a country without women.” And this, about his daughter: “I like the sound of your voice/even when you phone from school/asking for money.”
Here’s “Passing Through,” written to mark his 79th birthday.
Nobody in the widow’s household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren’t for a census report
of a five-year-old White Male
sharing my mother’s address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I’d have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.
Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours:
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.
TODAY’S MUSIC
Future Islands, “Seasons Change”
March 4, 2014, on Letterman.
The singer is Sam Herring.
There are those who think this is one of the 10 best live performances ever.
I am among them.
A NOTE ON CONDOLENCE NOTES
I wrote about condolence notes and suggested that you read Rilke’s book The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation for a guide. My friend Preston Bealle is a Renaissance man. No surprise that he’s a master of the condolence note. Here’s his email:
I kind of specialize in them. They take time, but they are important. They live for decades and are reread. When my father died, he was 59 and I was 19. I’m still not completely over it. He was a star in a number of ways, and a lot of letters came quickly. I learned from them.
Way too many said “so when my husband died” or “when my mother died.” I did not care about their stories, not right then. Wrong message at the wrong time. I’ve never, ever used that device with anyone else.
What I cared about was “Here’s how Jim changed my life.” Or “Jim was hilarious. I looked forward to every encounter because I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to say.” Or “Jim had the best practical jokes I’ve ever seen.” And so on.
So I send letters like this:
1) How I got to know the deceased (let’s say “him” for simplicity).
2) How I smiled to see him coming, he always made me feel better.
3) A story they don’t know that illustrates why he was so wonderful.
4) Something funny he said or did.
5) He was about other people, not about himself. Explain why you say that.
6) And finally, how successful his life was, closing with a comment i invented for one guy and now use quite often. “When he was 20, if he could’ve sat down and seen a movie of his life ahead, his accomplishments, the family he built and loved, the people whose lives he changed, the friends who will now miss him, he’d have said wow. Wow. I’ll take it!”
That last line is especially true for someone who died on the young side. The family wants to know that his life was so good that even dying young, it was just what he wanted. He wouldn’t have traded for someone else’s life even if it was 20 years longer.
I’m told my letter does not fail to get the whole family crying, and laughing. I always mail them on paper. If they are local I rush them to the mailbox myself. They usually ask me for the digital file so they can send it around to all the relatives. And while it’s now something of a formula, it’s real, it’s not plastic. It’s always about THAT GUY in a measure of detail. And it’s never, ever about my own experience with death and how I “understand” or “sympathize.” Nobody cares at that moment.
ESSENTIALS AND DISPATCHES
Everything, all in one place. Click here.
