Coronavirus Journal: Chapter 1

In full-blown hobo mode. All I've been able to do this week is stare at Twitter,
refresh, and stare some more, until I'm too exhausted to do anything but sleep. 

I became a journalist because I wanted to see history with my own eyes.

The realization came to me in the summer of 1989, when brave Chinese students were protesting their government at Tiananmen Square, and then paid a dear price for it. Journalists from the west showed us what was happening, live, and I knew watching it on TV that were looking at a critical moment. Being a history buff already, I set my sights on being a journalist.

Well, we're living through history now. I don't have to go to China, or New York, or anyplace else to experience it. All I have to do is sit in my home, try to keep my distance from others, and hope that me and my family don't either A) become victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, or B) unwittingly pass the virus on to somebody we love and end up killing them.

Just a couple of hours ago, President Trump finally declared a national emergency, but this journal shouldn't and won't be about him. I can write about him elsewhere. Instead, it will be about life in my home and in my community over the next weeks and months as we hunker down and try to survive -- not just the virus, but the economic fallout, and the costs of "social distancing" that we're now being asked to perform in order to slow the spread of the virus. Historians will know the other stuff. We should preserve the tales of real life for them as well. This is my humble attempt.

I'm worried. I'm worried that things will never be good again. I'm worried that I'm raising my son to become an adult in a world in which thriving is impossible, that the work of survival is difficult and mean. 

I worry I'm going to die, penniless, under a bridge, unable to provide for myself or my family.

I worry a lot.

And to be fair, I worry about some of those things even when there isn't a generation-defining pandemic before us. But I worry more, now.

Remember, though, I'm lucky: I have a wife who is more optimistic and resilient than I am. I have a smart and funny child who is going to be a nuisance to keep at home until the storm clears, but that's because he's 11 years old and full of energy and we live in a small house. And for now, we can afford to live a few months even if all our income suddenly dries up. Which -- knock knock -- I hope it doesn't.

We've stockpiled some dry goods, as far as food, but J declines to go into full hoarding mode. For one thing, she says, buying up (say) all the bulk rice at the grocery store means somebody else can't have it, and that's not fair is it? So she's not just optimistic and resilient -- she operates from a place of kindness to others.

I hope we can maintain that outlook over the next few months.

We shall see.

Hindu nationalists are making a hero of Gandhi's assassin

NYT:

Indians consider Gandhi one of the fathers of their nation. But the rise of a Hindu nationalist government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has uncorked many extremist beliefs, and admiration for Gandhi’s killer, among some, has become more open. It is a sign of how much India has changed in the five and a half years since Mr. Modi took power. 

“Gandhi was a traitor,” said Pooja Shakun Pandey, who blames Gandhi for partition and who participated in a recent ceremony worshiping Mr. Godse on the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. “He deserved to be shot in the head.”

If your ideological or religious beliefs lead you to admire assassins, your ideological or religious beliefs are evil and and should be discarded.

Oh, and: Sound familiar?

Prominent Hindu nationalists still invoke Gandhi, but in many cases they are trying to co-opt his legacy — presenting their policies, however divisive, as congruent with his beliefs. One example: a recent citizenship law pushed by Mr. Modi’s government that, critics say, discriminates against Muslims and threatens the secular state that Gandhi had envisioned.

A lot of that going around.

Did impeachment make President Trump more popular?

Seeing a lot of this on Twitter this afternoon:

It's probably good to note that 49 percent approval rating is still mediocre -- and, very technically (but barely) means that just more than half of the country is not in the segment that approves of the president.

Nitpicking aside, it's difficult to tell Democrats -- politicians all -- that they should ignore the political ramifications of impeaching Trump because they did the right thing.

However: They did the right thing. The president did the wrong thing.

And if a process meant to expose and cleanse that wrongness from government instead lodges the president more firmly in office, well, that sucks. But it's not a judgement on whether the president was right or wrong to try and subvert the 2020 election. (Again: He was wrong.) That increase in popularity is, instead, ultimately a judgment on the institutions that put and kept Trump in office, as well as the media and voter infrastructure that can look at his wrongdoing and make him more popular.

There was no perfect way to do impeachment. We will be litigating "what ifs" for decades, though, I suppose. But whatever problems you think there were with the process, Donald Trump deserved to be impeached. That it wasn't successful or isn't popular isn't the point. Sometimes, calling out wrong is the right thing to do, even if the incentives and payoffs indicate otherwise.

Shadi Hamid's 'America is evil' strawman

Hamid, at The Atlantic:

The United States has done terrible things in the Middle East. To even casual observers of the region, this should be clear enough. That, however, doesn’t mean there is a moral equivalence between Iran and the United States. Elevating America as a somehow unique source of evil takes necessary self-criticism and turns it into narcissism. It insists on making us the exceptional ones, glorifying ourselves by glorifying our sins. To suggest that American officials are at the rarefied level of the deliberate, systematic mass murder and sectarian cleansing that Soleimani helped orchestrate isn’t just wrong; it’s silly.

It's also ... not what is happening.

American criticism of the Soleimani assassination generally hasn't suggested that America's bad guys are as bad as Iran's bad guys. (I'm not sure how to do that moral balancing, anyway, but that's not what the criticism has been.) Instead, the criticism has been that Trump's decision didn't make Americans safer, and that it might have been a dangerous and unnecessary escalation of the low-level conflict that could lead to a shooting war the United States seems ill-equipped to win.

 That's a different critique. But it's the one most critics of the president are making. Hamid's piece doesn't really make sense.

Fixing 'The Rise of Skywalker': A slightly better story

I saw The Rise of Skywalker last night. Didn't like it. But I can fix it.

Star Wars

Episode IX

The Return of Palpatine

The film opens at Leia's funeral. Rey is at the foot of Leia's deathbed, grieving, when Kylo makes a force connection with her. We know from TLJ he was hesitant to kill his own mother. Now he is overcome with grief -- a grief that will push him further to the dark side.

He tells Rey of an old Sith legend -- about Darth Plagueis the Wise, who uncovered the secret to eternal life. He can still save his mother. He will find the final resting spot of Emperor Palpatine, aka Darth Sidious, and extract the secret there.

Rey realizes that Ren in possession of such power would amount to a final victory for the Dark Side, and final defeat for the Resistance. So she, Poe and Finn race Ren to Endor. Finn discovers the draft-dodging ex-Storm Troopers. Rey and Ren meet on the Death Star ruins and battle - it appears Rey will win, but Ren escapes with Palpatine's Sith books (like the Jedi books Rey has) to go to Exegol.

Rey tracks Ren, thanks to their force connection. Lando and Chewie summon allies. The First Order and Resistance make their final meeting over the planet. Ren, meanwhile, uses the Sith books to summon Sidious back to life as an experiment before raising Leia - but Sidious proves even more mad and more evil than we remember, debilitating Ren with a bolt of lightning just as Rey arrives. Palpatine turns his attention to Rey, preparing to kill her, when Ren summons his last reserves and together with Rey they use their force powers to kill the Emperor at last and for real. Ben succumbs to his wounds.

Up above the planet, the Resistance and their allies win.

The movie ends with Rey's pilgrimage to Tatooine. As she visits Luke's home, she looks up and see the Force Ghosts of Leia, Luke, Han, Annakin and Ben -- a happy, united family at last.

This solves several problems with TROS:
• Shoehorning Carrie Fisher footage into the movie.
• Too much plot.
• Retconning Rey's parentage.
• It brings back Palpatine in a way that makes sense instead of as a seeming afterthought to fix plot holes.

Dear Disney, I'm available for future script consultations. 

Criterion Queue: 'Dark Victory' and Bette Davis

Three thoughts about Dark Victory, appearing now on the Criterion Channel:

• There's a reason there was a song called "Bette Davis Eyes."

• They don't really make movies like this any more, that end with the beautiful, aesthetically perfect death of the protagonist. Maybe on cable TV now and again? (Makes sense: "Dark Victory" was remade as a TV movie in 1976, starring Anthony Hopkins and Elizabeth Montgomery from "Bewitched.") Maybe Martin Scorsese was onto something.

• There's a reason there wasn't a song called "Ronald Reagan is a skilled actor of remarkable nuance."

Things that trouble me: Loving your enemies

Just saw this posted by a prominent African American attorney in Philadelphia:




And I get it. There's a history in this country of "Christians" using their religion to subdue black people. I'm reminded of this:

On display now at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves. 

What's notable about this Bible is not just its rarity, but its content, or rather the lack of content. It excludes any portion of text that might inspire rebellion or liberation. 

"About 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing [and] 50 percent of the New Testament is missing," Schmidt says. "Put in another way, there are 1,189 chapters in a standard protestant Bible. This Bible contains only 232."

A religion that contorts itself to maintain the mastery of its adherents is bad religion. It is propaganda parading around in the garments of faith. But I'm going to resist the temptation to say the people who do such things aren't "real Christians," because let's face it: Christianity is whatever its adherents actually do.

On the other hand: Loving your enemies is really fucking hard to do. Almost nobody is inclined to try, and very few make the attempt.

And I'm convinced that the proportion of people claiming to be Christian who really endeavor to love their enemies is exceedingly small.

I'm maybe not the person to lecture on this. My own faith is ... shaky. I can best be described as agnostic-with-one-foot-still-in-the-faith. But I believe Christianity's ideal is a challenge for adherents, not because of its sexual ethic, but because it requires us to love the most unlovable of people, in the most unlovable of situations.

That is an extraordinary demand. That so few of us follow it make the meme above seem pretty reasonable. But I hate that it is so.