Coronavirus diary: Control

The biggest cause of anxiety for me during the pandemic and accompanying social upheaval has been to grapple, once again, with how much of my life - and the life of my child - really isn't under my control.

I say once again, because nine years ago at this time I was in bad state. I'd lost my job a year before and was barely scraping together an income freelancing. Then I ended up with a bout of diverticulitis that killed me and necessitated three surgeries that caused incredible pain, and a lengthier-than-expected recovery. The results broke me, physically, and nearly did so mentally. I only got by thanks to the suport of my wife and family.

So I know that things can go awry, despite your best efforts. I know that we don't always get happy endings. This sometimes puts me at odds with my dad, an incorrigible optimist -- and that optimism has served him extremely well -- but I believe that happy endings are as much about luck as anything. You can do the right thing, but stuff (the country you're born in, a random mutation in your DNA, the weather, some other driver's bad decision) will get in the way. The control we think we exercise over our own lives is mostly an illusion that can be shattered in an instant. Or, as seems to currently be the case, over weeks and months that all bleed together.

The disaster that is 2020 has brought that home, once again.

I don't know that I (or we, collectively) are going to get a happy ending. I frequently suspect not. But as I've noted, I'm given to apocalyptic thinking. I worry that I'm going to die soon of COVID. Or if not, I'll live but die someday broke and miserable, unable to provide for my wife or son. Or that my son will live a life on the margins, simply trying to survive in a world beset with financial depression, pandemics and climate change. Worse: I have no idea how to prepare him for that.

I can do what I can do. And I will. But I can't control what ultimately happens.

It's a cliche to resort to the Serenity Prayer during moments like these. (It's also longer and Jesus-ier than what usually gets quoted.)  And it feels selfish, hypocritical to pray right now, when so often I ... don't. "God, I know we don't talk often, but I need something from you." But there is wisdom there, nonetheless:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it.

There's even more! But this approach is all that gives me peace right now. And maybe a little hope.

We've got to let each other be wrong once in awhile

This bothers me.

SEATTLE — Boeing Co's communications chief Niel Golightly abruptly resigned on Thursday, following an employee's complaint over an article the former U.S. military pilot wrote 33 years ago arguing women should not serve in combat.

"My article was a 29-year-old Cold War navy pilot's misguided contribution to a debate that was live at the time," Golightly said in a statement included in Boeing's announcement.

"My argument was embarrassingly wrong and offensive. The article is not a reflection of who I am; but nonetheless I have decided that in the interest of the company I will step down," Golightly said.

I can't find 1987 polling on the issue, but a February 1991 Gallup poll -- taken about the same time the U.S. was still fighting the first, brief Gulf War -- 56 percent of Americans shared Golightly's position.

That's not dispositive. A lot of people can be for bad things. And the American public's mind has changed since then, for what it's worth: Most favor letting women serve in combat. What's more, Golightly isn't entitled to a plum position at Boeing -- if the PR guy is bringing a company bad PR, well, it's understandable he would step down.

Still, this is worrisome. We have to allow people to change their minds and grow. We have to allow that people might've been wrong about something three decades ago, and not have that be cause for losing a job today. For one thing, there are almost certainly things that you and I are wrong about right now that is going to look really embarrassing three decades from now. Things that will seem obvious then that aren't, maybe, now. Humility dictates that we let people move on from old positions -- if only for the sake of the Golden Rule and hoping we're treated with compassion (or at least fairness) when our own sins are revealed. But there's also a utilitarian, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" aspect to this. 

There are limits to how much we forgive old trespasses, and I can't offer a bright line that explains why Golightly should be given grace while somebody else shouldn't. But we have to occasionally let people be wrong about some things -- and we really have to let people be wrong 30 years ago -- or the cycles of recrimination will never end.

Can movies help us through the dark times?

Alyssa Rosenberg:

Though I initially treated “Independence Day” and “Armageddon” as pure escapism, I emerged from my re-watches of both with a stiffer spine than I’d expected. These late-’90s hits are fortifying to watch right now, and not just because the good guys triumph or because there’s little else on offer with Hollywood on hiatus and movie theaters closed. These movies are a popcorn affirmation of two ideas that we badly need right now: first, that it’s exciting and revitalizing to tackle a challenge of world-destroying dimensions, and second, that there’s something we can all contribute to that effort.

I read Rosenberg's column one morning after watching Spielberg's LINCOLN, which is a different kindof movie -- but I came away somewhat similarly fortified. This week I've gotten stuck in a spiral of doomscrolling through Twitter, unable to pick up a book or even get much work done, obsessed by the way everything is going bad in this country.

Watching a movie didn't make the country be in less-dire shape. But it let me escape the cycle I was in, if only for a few hours, and that helped my brain reset. Watching LINCOLN was valuable, too, because as tough as things are right now, there have been times in this country that have been more deadly and destructive than what we're living through -- so far, at least. People made it through, and even made things a little better than they were, albeit at a terrible cost. Whatever happens, as long as humans survive, they will try to survive -- because, really, what else is there to do? And as long as we keep trying, things can get better.

Don't get me wrong. There's a ton of shit out there. But I needed a good movie to stiffen my own backbone, to not give into despair.

Tonight, maybe I'll watch THE PAJAMA GAME>

Movie night: LINCOLN

Three quick thoughts about Steven Spielberg's LINCOLN:

* This is Spielberg at his most Frank Capra -- trying to inspire us and teach us and make us love what democracy can be, while acknowledging its tradeoffs and pitfalls (albeit with a Spielbergian sheen). It came out nearly a decade ago, after nearly a full term of Obama's presidency, when perhaps it was a bit easier for many of us to feel those possibilities. Now, though, it can feel like it runs against the spirit of our times. But maybe that's an excellent reason to watch it.

* The movie almost slides into self-parody though, as Daniel Day-Lewis's Lincoln defuses one tense moment after another with a story, a joke or an aphorism. At times it resembles Chauncey Gardner from BEING THERE guiding America through the Civil War. 

* But the soul of the movie belongs, in large part, to Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, a "radical Republican" who believes not just in ending slavery, but in real equality between the races -- and how he must negotiate curbing his instinct to "radicalism" so that he allay the fears of shaky congressmen to pass the 13th Amendment. The debate between ideals and effectiveness in politics is forever with us. TLJ gives the dilemma a human face ... while somehow being very Tommy Lee Jones.

Today's thought of dread

I'm given to apocalyptic thinking, so bear with me. But.

I wonder if the plans we're still trying to make and the arguments we're having aren't entirely irrelevant to reality, that our ticket is already punched -- the flood is coming, and a few of us might be on the ark, but most of us aren't.

I hope not. 

But.

The 'stock villainy' of Trumpist voters

These tweets from Michael Brendan Dougherty bothered me overnight:

A few thoughts:

First, I had some good - even deep - relationships with a few semi-prominent conservatives before Donald Trump appeared on the scene. Those relationships have been wrecked, for the most part. And guess what? As much as I despair for what is happening in this country, for what he has done to it and how he has been enabled by those former friends, I also deeply grieve the loss of those friendships. I'm not certain if they can be put back together, or if they should, but I have lost something.

Dougherty's phrase "stock villainy" keeps coming back to me. The phrase implies seeing people in one dimension instead of the three. Few people are only good or only bad, and seeing them that way reduces them, dishonestly. And yet: Donald Trump is the closest thing to a stock villain I have encountered in public life. I cannot discern a redeeming quality in the man. I despised George W. Bush -- but hey, at least he gave the world PEPFAR, and he struck me as somebody who might've been a decent person had he not been given the power of the presidency. I can't even give that much credit to Trump. I can only see one dimension in him. I can see only bad. Sometimes I think that's a failing on my part. I'm certain that it is a failure on his.

So what does Trump's stock villainy say about the people who put him in power?

As Dougherty suggested, there's a strong impulse on the left to just lump them all in together as undifferentiated bad, to write them all off. I get that. But I don't think it's true.

Humans are flawed. Humans are selfish. Humans make mistakes. Humans are dumb! Humans often see the razzle dazzle and miss the conman stealing their wallets. And humans sometimes have bad priorities alongside their good priorities. Only occasionally are humans outright evil. Even more rarely, I think, are humans outright good.

We see Republicans through the lens of Trump, and thus impute his stock villainy to them. They should see what we see and act accordingly, right? But many of his supporters are more complicated than that. It doesn't mean they're right to support him. It doesn't mean we shouldn't upbraid them for their support of the man. But it does mean maybe we should approach the enterprise with just a touch more humility than we usually bring to our politics.

We who aren't Trump supporters are more complicated than that, after all. I've said this repeatedly over the years: We are tremendous at spotting the speck in our brother's eye while ignoring the log in our own. 

Where am I going with this? I don't know. If you've bailed out, I understand. I think Trump is a stock villain. I don't think his supporters are, or at least not many of them. We've decided that we can no longer try to tell the difference, or live with the differences. That, too, is profoundly human. But we're going to be stuck in this awful spiral of recrimination if we can't step back, just a little bit. I can defend my values and acknowledge the humanity of Trump voters. Indeed, my values demand that I do so.

Ross Douthat is wrong about monuments

Douthat: 

To repudiate an honor or dismantle a memorial, then, makes moral sense only if you intend to repudiate the specific deeds that it memorializes. In the case of Confederate monuments, that’s exactly what we should want to do. Their objective purpose was to valorize a cause that we are grateful met defeat, there is no debt we owe J.E.B. Stuart or Nathan Bedford Forrest that needs to be remembered, and if they are put away we will become more morally consistent, not less, in how we think about that chapter in our past.

But just as Jefferson’s memorial wasn’t built to celebrate his slaveholding, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs wasn’t named for Wilson to honor him for being a segregationist. It was named for him because he helped create precisely the institutions that the school exists to staff — our domestic administrative state and our global foreign policy apparatus — and because he was the presidential progenitor of the idealistic, interventionist worldview that has animated that foreign policy community ever since.

Douthat is incorrect. You don't have to want to repudiate the good things a person has done to bring down a monument. Instead, you might want to reconsider how those good things are memorialized --  say, in the case of the recent controversy over the Freedmen's Monument: Nobody is against ending slavery, but they are uncomfortable at best with a monument that celebrates that accomplishment in a way that appears to reaffirm the submission of black people. You can disagree with that characterization, but the controversy is not remotely a renunciation of emancipation.

You also might want to bring a monument down after a reconsideration of the balance between a person's sins and virtues. Statues emphasize the virtues, to the near-exclusion of the sins. So even though Ulysses Grant was a greatly effective general during the Civil War -- not an accomplishment to be repudiated -- he also launched an illegal, bloody war against the Native American tribes that lived on the Plains. His legacy is thus much more complicated than a statue honoring him might indicate. You can honor the accomplishment while taking a dimmer view of the man.

I think our current round of statue-toppling is petering out, though I think a more process-driven statue reconsideration business will go on for awhile yet.  Probably, we'll find ways to recontextualize monuments in a way that honors the accomplishments of so-called "great men" without whitewashing their sins. History is nuanced, complicated. Bronze isn't. We have an opportunity to do something about that.