Dashing Through the S̶n̶o̶w̶...Hope

   There was a piece in Esquire that seemed to override much of the violent news of the past few weeks, that of people wondering what the heck happened to their beliefs, to their ideals, and to their country.  But more than that, what had happened to their lives?  Wrote teacher Matt Breen in a piece titled 300 Job Applications Later: And now for me, the consequences aren’t so physical.  If I get evicted or I can’t pay my rent, I’m not gonna be homeless.  I’m just gonna have to pack my shit up and move back in with my family.  But for me, that’s not what the issue is.  The issue is that for someone trying to make it, it feels like I just totally failed at it, you know?  The rational part of my brain is like, ‘Well, you didn’t create the coronavirus or have your boss lay you off.’  But at the same time, we live in a capitalist society, where if you cannot produce any kind of work product, like, what’s your purpose then?  I feel aimless, I guess.  I was building a life for myself here, and it just feels like it’s gone.  It’s not gone; I know it’s not gone.  It feels like it’s gone.

   This is something the New York Review of Books termed a restitution narrative, aptly described in a review titled Cancer Under Capitalism: The restitution narrative, he wrote in his influential book The Wounded Storyteller (1995), is the one favored by Western capitalism: it is the story told in the TV commercial urging its recumbent viewer to buy cold medicine or the hospital brochure printed in calming colors; its plot is the ill person healed by the marvels of modern medicine, declaring, “Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, but tomorrow I’ll be healthy again.”  The chaos narrative, told from within the period of illness, “imagines life never getting better” and struggles for coherence.  But in the quest narrative, illness is a journey: along the way the sick person gains something—usually insight, meaning, or understanding—through the experience of suffering.

    With all the news being fed to us from every direction, it fall onto us to decide what we want to believe or not believe, and often that can scare us.  Our "world" will be changing, be it from a divisive vocabulary which does nothing to calm us down (liberal or conservative, alt-right or alt-left, with me or against me), or from well-funded "sources" trying to get your monies (vaccines or no vaccines, invest here, buy more guns before they're taken away).  But there is a line.  Destruction of property or theft, the harming of others, hatred turning physical: one has to ask if this is really our country (much as the UK is asking the same thing).  And into the picture comes news that the coronavirus is now in its 4th variant (Brazil began using its military to get patients out of the Manaus region not only because the hospitals there were running out of supplies, but because they feared a new variant on the virus could be emerging from the Amazon).  So do we choose sides and if so, who do we trust?

Editorial: HeraldNET Everett, WA.

    A piece in The New Yorker talked of "stolen valor," that of politicians and others falsely claiming military service and of receiving medals, something so disgusting to actual veterans that there are now several sites specifically set up to fact check such claims.  In the piece, the candidates mentioned were running for sheriff and it was only through some digging that it was discovered that neither candidate had been given the war medals they claimed: Politicians lie to get us into wars; generals lie about how well things are going; soldiers lie about what they did during their service.  In 1782, when George Washington awarded ribbons and badges to valorous Revolutionary War troops, he was already worrying about pretenders. “Should any who are not entitled to these honors have the insolence to assume the badges of them they shall be severely punished,” he wrote...But it’s only recently that lying about military service has been considered a particularly heinous form of lying, one with its own name: stolen valor...The lies that people tell shift with the appetites of the era.  Veterans of the Second World War placed themselves at the sites of iconic battles, even when they were stationed far away.  People falsely claiming to have served in Vietnam often used the war to explain some failure or trauma in their personal lives—their homelessness or their struggles with addiction.  With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq came a surge in young men who said that they were élite commandos; in the weeks after the raid that killed bin Laden, phony seal claims doubled, according to one researcher.  Culture shapes lies, too.  “When ‘Rambo’ came out, everyone was a Green Beret.  After ‘The Hunt for Red October,’ everyone was a submariner,” Don Shipley, who investigates fake Navy seals, told me.  Then came the assault on the Capitol...

   One does have to wonder what the rioters and mob leaders were afraid of?  Was it a fear of losing control in some form...race, a government "leader" who encouraged them, money and taxes, jobs, guns, a party to stand by them, or life itself to an unseen virus (although very few wore masks)?  The Economist wrote that political theorists have tracked mob rule for over 2000 years: The 19th century saw the world's ruling elites reconciling themselves to the face that democracy was the wave of the future.  How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.  Optimists thought that extending the franchise was not only right but also a way to tame the mob.  Benjamin Disraeli thought that voting would help assimilate people: just as owning property makes people more sober, so exercising democratic rights convetrs them into responsible citizens.  Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.  Most members of the British ruling class favoured introducing democracy in measured stages because they made a sharp distinction between the respectable middle- and upper-working classes, who would vote responsibly because they owned property, and the unrespectable classes...

   One piece in The New York Review of Books summed it up in this fashion: Today, it cannot be denied that the major developments within Anglo-America—from deunionization, increased corporate clout, and the outsourcing of jobs to extreme inequality and white supremacist upsurge—cannot be explained without reference to the rise of China as a manufacturing giant and aggressively nationalist world power.  In other words, understanding the contemporary world requires a truly global perspective—and not just one that merely adds the history of “democratic” India and “authoritarian” China to preexisting narratives of Western eminence.  It means forsaking the whole structure of preconceptions on which a parochial West-centric view has long been based.  It is not easy to stop beating the old drums. 

   Whatever the reasons, insomnia is on the rise; said Discover: Dubbed “COVID-somnia,” research around the world paints a picture of populations struggling to sleep under the weight of this global event.  One study published in the journal Sleep Medicine documented a 37 percent increase in insomnia in China.  Others have shown similar results in Italy and Greece.  Although it hasn’t been as well documented in the U.S., according to experts, chronic insomnia is becoming epidemic.  If left untreated, its impact could be long-term, especially considering that insomnia is about more than just lack of sleep.  It may stem from deep-seated neurological distinctions.  ...the brains of insomniacs show increases in “cortical excitability” compared to sleepers, according to Rachel Salas, a specialist in sleep disorders and professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University.  “In insomniacs the neurotransmitters responsible for helping the body wind down at night remain excited,” Salas says.  When it’s time for sleep, the outer layer of the cerebrum is still actively responding to stimuli.  Basically, she says, “There’s still too much processing going on in the brain.”

   My wife's mother used to talk about her WW II days as a child, huddling with fear in the maze of corridors of London's subway system, the Tube.  Her main fears were her memories of the German V-1 rockets Londoners termed Doodlebugs, rockets one witness described this way for the BBC: A doodlebug was really a bomb with wings.  It looked like a small aeroplane and had no pilot - a bit like a cruise missile, but slightly bigger.  Thousands of these doodlebugs were launched against London.  I remember them very clearly.  They made a sound like a lorry engine going very fast.  They kept flying until they ran out of fuel.  Then they simply fell to the ground and exploded.  Whenever we heard a doodlebug everyone looked up and followed it with their eyes until it had gone over past where we were standing.  If the engine stopped before it got to us that was the time to worry!  Sometimes a doodlebug dropped to earth immediately and sometimes it would continue to glide, gradually losing height.  Very scary!

   Tom Harrison tried to capture these witnesses' voices and thoughts in his book Living Through the Blitz, where he writes of the struggle...of avoiding the imposition of one's own ideas and accepted attitudes as they had become in the seventies, on to what had been written down some thirty years before...It amounts to a form of intellectual pollution: but pollution by perfume,..Samuel Johnson saw it another way, back in 1758, when he could not decide 'whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie.'  Still, here are the words of one 24-year old ambulance attendant's diary during those times: Fortunately the body can only endure so much so I shall probably get over these reactions if I can keep my mind active.  But it is humiliating to be outclassed in courage by every child.  I am a coward from the neck down, so to speak.  And later on in the book Harrison throws in this quote from Karl Marx: The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test.  As exposure to an atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes extreme judgement on social systems that have outlived their vitality.

    In a few days our government will change, or perhaps will return to normal as a new President is inaugurated.   Windows and doors are being repaired at the Capitol and the FBI continues to arrest more of the people involved in the destruction.  But the true effect of witnessing this breach of our Capitol may have been not physical but mental, images now engrained in our heads as surely as former President Kennedy being shot, or the Saudis flying planes into the Twin Towers.  Our memories and reactions of these events will be remembered differently by each of us, but it would appear that something has been shaken in our country...where we go from here will be up to each of us.

Addendum:  I didn't want to end on a somber note so here is a hats off to just some of the new inventions that appeared (virtually) in the recent Consumer Electronics Show (facemasks with Bluetooth earbuds built in?)...from Smithsonian.