What Can I Say

WHAT CAN I SAY? I don’t think America must or wants to listen to from one other middle aged white guy proper now. I don’t know what to say about what’s happening in the streets of virtually every metropolis within the country, and I certainly haven't any capability to plumb the depths to which the present short-term resident of the White House would possibly yet sink. I guess all I can say is that I stand with life, with my fellow humans, who are available in quite a lot of shapes, sizes, colors, and personalities. No one must be strangled to death in the street for any cause ever. How is it “controversial” to say that? And how is it attainable that it has to be said then defended in the first week of June within the yr 2020? I was born in 1964, into a rustic having precisely this similar dialog because the Civil Rights Movement gathered steam, and super progress has been made within the half-century or so since then, but nonetheless this? And it’s not, I don’t assume, a coincidence th at systemic inequality has as soon as again come to a head in the midst of the ongoing CORVID-19 crisis. In her Paris Review article “How Pandemics Seep Into Literature,” Elizabeth Outka wrote: The xenophobia woven into a “Chinese virus” and even the “Spanish flu” units up complete groups for denunciation. Factual medical descriptions of contagion, disease, and contamination morph into toxic discriminatory metaphors of ethical uncleanness and danger. The early-twentieth-century horror author H.P. Lovecraft channeled into his postwar/postpandemic writing his prejudicial and homophobic beliefs that immigrant hordes and deviants were tainting pure Aryan blood lines. After the influenza pandemic had swept via his home state of Rhode Island, Lovecraft populated his stories with proto-zombie figures rising from the lifeless in the midst of pandemics or wars, bent on additional destruction. Lovecraft transforms a miasmic blend of diseased atmospheres and deep-seated prejudices into monsters that may be seen and killed with impunity, a move that suggests the dangerous methods anthropomorphizing the menace could masks vicious discriminatory impulses. Confine people; show them terrible things occurring, depart them to guess what may happen next; inform them “we simply don’t know” when or even when we’ll go back to work, to restaurants and bars, or sport evening with friends; blame some or all of it on some or all “others;” and the way can this not go terribly, terribly incorrect? And the approaching financial melancholy hasn’t even began yet. Ultimately, although, when one group is advised that those persons are all murderers and anarchists and one other group is informed that that these people are all murderers and fascists and different groups are told to take a facet and stay there lest the complete world collapse round us all, nicely, how can this not go terribly, terribly incorrect? I occurred to be flipping by way of the TV final week, ea rly within the morning, and determined to rewatch the HBO documentary Studs Terkel: Listening to America. Even before what occurred in Minnesota, I was moved to write down this quote: In all my books, this is the premise, that is the idea: that individuals are principally decent, individuals do have an innate intelligence, however day after day you name upon malevolence, day after day you call upon smallness, day after day you name upon trivia, and also you make that the headline, one thing should occur to people. Studs Terkel was proper, and that interview is no less than twenty years old now. Something should, and something has occurred to folks. So then, as writers, what do we do with all this? I’ll dip back into the Paris Review and Wayne Kostenbaum’s thoughts on “The Writer’s Obligation” for a minimum of somewhat assist: Mask and task are two nounsâ€"two behaviorsâ€"I love. From Oscar Wilde come masks; from the Marquis de Sade, and from Yahweh, come tasks. After Eden, masks and duties. In Eden, we had neither. Literatureâ€"the respite of the fallenâ€"is the process of making do with mask and task, diverting ourselves with duties that mask our disenfranchisement. I don’t know… what can I say? Keep writing. â€"Philip Athans Follow me on Twitter @PhilAthans… Link up with me on LinkedIn… Friend me on GoodReads… Or contact me for modifying, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting. 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