I have to admit, I’ve been sort of delaying this post.
Not just because the semester’s already invading every spare minute, but also because there are a lot more eyeballs on my writing these days. Of course, I asked for that attention by putting this open letter into the world (425 signatories and climbing!), but I’m also keenly aware that the slightest ambiguity in any turn of phrase is liable to invite accusations of ACX being the work of a) a Chinese spy, b) a CIA psy-op, c) a “boba liberal” who just wants the white kids to sit with him at lunch, d) all of the above, somehow. (I am perversely curious to see the conspiracy theory that combines all these options into one ideologically incomprehensible supervillain.)
That being said, a wise man once said that “fear has never been the best part of who we are.” That wise man was Bruce Springsteen, whose wisdom is probably best established in places other than the source of that quote. (I have a piece coming out in Red Letter Christians soon about Bruce’s Kirk-Cameron-Joint-By-Way-Of-Terence-Malick ad for Jeep.) I hear you, Bruce. So, with your perennial reminder that the following represents the views of no one other than a thirtysomething assistant professor obsessed with the end of the world . . . away we go.
That the doomsday clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight is probably no surprise to anyone. Personally, I think doomsday is more likely to occur at high noon, right when the sun’s heat maximizes global heating, but science isn’t perfect. What is perfect is the fact that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ announcement finds global civilization not only still holding national celebrations of traumatic brain injury, but also generally seeing how close we can get to 12 am/pm without flinching.
In New York, Andrew Cuomo took a break from idly toying with his nipple ring to decree that indoor dining will resume on Feb. 12 and that Barclays Center would reopen on Feb. 23. The decree comes even as the vaccine supply dwindles faster than it took for the good governor to write his book-length autohagiography.
Meanwhile, across the planet, the B.1.1.7 variant continues to both incite lively debate—is it only more contagious, or both more contagious and more lethal, or more contagious, more lethal, and more vaccine-resistant?—and somehow elude the highly active fantasies of the Very Responsible People who want us all back to normal as soon as possible. An unnamed head of an unnamed American university recently sent a cheery email to staff and faculty of that institution, announcing that in-person instruction for the fall was now the university’s official default position. British border control fetishists, on the other hand, must be very happy that their preferred mode of fixing everything—secure our happy island!—is taking precedence over making sure immigrants get vaccinated. Now is probably not the best time to troll the guards at Buckingham Palace, but travel restrictions aren’t going to do much good with Britain descending into a post-Brexit nativist purgatory. They may not do much good to anyone at all, since it could take seven years at our present vaccination rates for the global pandemic to end, if it ever does. All of the above, of course, brackets the further possibility of another pandemic kicking off in the interim.
Punishing foreigners, maximizing tuition profits, tossing essential workers in front of shrimp pesto covered in COVID, desperately pretending that the impending worst case scenario isn’t a damning indictment of the way we live now: it’s business as usual for late capitalism!
There’s a slight possibility that I’m just indulging my cynical side here. Maybe the current ratio of travel restrictions to immigrant outreach in the UK is really where it needs to be. Maybe Daddy Cuomo’s estimation of New York’s ability to handle a Nets game, or a Valentine’s prix fixe menu, is spot on. Maybe the variant will ultimately become a tertiary footnote in the 10-volume history of COVID-19. But I doubt it.
It continually astounds me, the human capacity to pretend that manifestly unworkable strategies for facing our present crisis can be made workable with just a bit of elbow grease and positive thinking. This goes for the legislative branch’s approach to the Capitol riots as much as it does for the pandemic response of mayors nursing an unhealthy attachment to his local YMCA. As fun as it was to watch Bruce Castor audition for the role of Lionel Hutz in the live-action Simpsons reboot, let’s face it: the second impeachment trial exemplifies the old adage about insanity and trying the same thing again. I don’t mean that a second impeachment trial isn’t worth attempting, per se. Rather, I mean that it makes absolutely no sense to include among that trial’s jurors two stochastic terrorists who were involved in the impeachable offense itself. The usual bromides about letting the voters kick ‘em out fail, completely and utterly, in the face of the fact that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have not been stripped of their titles and sent looking for job openings at OANN.
And why not? It wouldn’t be polite, you see. Decorum forbids it.
Self-righteousness is as unpleasant as it is unbiblical, so let me say that I am not exempt from inertia’s seductive power. I mean, I’m a college professor. Defaulting to the same thing every semester, with minimal adjustment, is how we avoid being buried in lesson-plans and Benedictine mendicant levels of self-excoriation. I’d like to take Naomi to eat overpriced tiramisu at a restaurant with an unjustified Zagat rating just like everyone else. But . . . my God . . . don’t we all want to end this interminable dream sequence, this psychically lacerating farrago of slaphappy fascism and mutating disease and spiraling natural disaster? And if we do, shouldn’t we start figuring out how to wake up from it for good, rather than hitting the snooze button again and again?
Just over a year ago, in one of my first pieces for this newsletter, I was reflecting on futurist Jamais Cascio’s contention that the apocalypse isn’t an “event,” but an “environment,” a present progressive state of being. Building from this premise, Cascio asserted that the best response to that environment would be what I called “therapeutic apocalypticism,” an ongoing ethos of mutual support and emotional openness that allows everyone to process perpetually living on the cusp of civilizational collapse. I had mixed feelings about the total value of such an approach, noting, “Therapy is, after all, ultimately about the individual’s sheer resilience, not humanity’s. If apocalypse is reducible to a tapestry of individual traumas, then it’s not hard to see how the corollary response would remain focused on the personal and psychological, not the political; on coping, not revolutionizing.”
Little was I to know how long that tapestry of trauma would be in 2020!
A little more than a year later, I can’t help but double down on my initial response to Cascio’s thesis. All around us, we’re already seeing coping become the dominant “solution” to our manifold emergencies. Opening indoor dining may well contribute to the self-care of isolated (probably middle-upper class) New Yorkers, but I don’t know how it does much more than provide a temporary salve for a psychological strain no candlelit dinner can fix. Putting the world’s worst Sunday School teachers on the impeachment jury may keep some kind of peace, but I don’t know whether it’s a peace worth keeping. The human species urgently needs to try new modes of organization, new expressions of democracy, new way of accounting for value.
Until that catches on, I guess I’ll join all the other human suckers and write another newsletter in a week or two. Maybe this time it’ll work.