A Certain Idea of America, page 16
The Sistine Chapel could never have been produced in any other culture, she said. “Only Christians can do it because only Christians celebrate the body, the bodily resurrection.”
But why do we honor the relics of saints—a hand, a heart, a knuckle? Why do parents keep a lock of a child’s hair? she asked. “The saints were here. They are not ectoplasms. Their souls are in Heaven but they were here.”
Finally, people sense that Notre Dame is most powerful and central in its moments of suffering. “The Greek word for church is ecclesia—people gathered together. On the night of the fire it was gathering people together,” literally, around the church and around the world. “Notre Dame is most potent gathering them in suffering.”
This reminded me of something someone said on social media after the spire fell: Maybe the old church burst into flames so we would look at it and really see what it is.
We did.
ON UVALDE: LET NOT OUR HEARTS GROW NUMB
May 26, 2022
We’re out of words because we’re out of thoughts because we said them all and spent them all after Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland. The shock was the lack of shock you felt when you heard. You indicted yourself: My heart has gotten cold. No, it hasn’t, but the past quarter century it’s been numbing up.
We underestimate how demoralizing these shootings are. They hurt our faith in America (why can’t we handle this?) and the future (what will it be like if this continues?). And there’s the new part of the story that is disturbing, this sense—we’ve had it before—that the police reliably come to the scene but they’ve got some kind of process or procedure that keeps them from fighting their way to the actual site of the shooting. Parents were massing at the school in Uvalde and screaming, “Go in, go in!” They themselves would have, and were stopped. This aspect of the story is not yet clear but you can’t see the emerging videos and not think something went very wrong.
I love cops because I love John Wayne. (Joan Didion: “John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. ‘Let’s ride,’ he said…‘Forward ho.’ ”) If they’re not John Wayne—commonsensical, gutsy, quick, able to size up the situation—I don’t think I love them. I don’t think anyone else does either.
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Conservatives were quick to criticize President Joe Biden in his speech the night of the shootings, saying he didn’t “bring us together” and “heal the nation’s wounds.” But what exactly could he say, could any president say at this point, that will bring us together and heal the wounds? They were faulting him for the impossible. There isn’t a bag of magic-secret speechwriter words, you don’t pull them from a hat and throw the fairy dust on the listeners.
A fair criticism is that Biden’s speech invoked a problem without offering a way through it.
He seems to have concluded that the right response to the moment was to enact what he felt was the audience’s rage and indignation. So he emoted, demanding answers to questions. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” He is “sick and tired.” “Where in God’s name is our backbone?”
But, if I can generalize, it is people of the left whose immediate response to the shootings at Uvalde was indignation and rage. Everyone else was feeling something different, depression and anxiety. Because they don’t see a way out, and they’re worried, and don’t have an illusion that attacking someone will make it better. When the president enacts what one part of the spectrum feels, which he also no doubt feels, everyone else will feel to some degree excluded.
He doesn’t mean to be divisive, he just doesn’t get the other guys anymore. “We have to do more.” What, exactly? What people needed that night was a kindly grown-up plan from someone above the fray. And many would have wanted to be enleagued—marshal the troops unleashed by the trauma, let them be part of something that might make things better.
Normal Americans are not fixated on policy and don’t know the exact state of play on gun law. What bill might help?
Democrats should stop using the manipulative, scare-quote phrase “gun lobby.” The gun lobby is a ghost of itself, done in by internal and external forces, and everyone in Washington knows this. The problem is Americans who feel immediate aversion to gun control because they don’t trust those who would do the controlling. The challenge isn’t “standing up,” it’s persuading.
Pretty much everyone knows we have too many guns in America, more than we have people. Everyone knows too many are in sick hands. If deeper background checks and a longer waiting period after purchase might help, move. I don’t have to be persuaded, I’m for them, not because I think they will solve the problem but they might get us an inch on the yardstick, and that’s something. I suspect a lot of people would see it like that.
But persuade, do the work. It is always the hard work of politics. And yes, move to ban assault weapons again, those sinister killing-machine weapons of war. We have about 400 million guns in America, do we have to keep adding these? Why don’t we just stop?
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday that Texas has a long history of letting eighteen-year-olds have long guns. That is true. He also said cops, after the shooting, told him they’re seeing a crisis in mental health in young people. That’s true too, it’s all around them, all around all of us.
But Mr. Abbott should listen to himself more closely. It is one thing to let an eighteen-year-old have a rifle to shoot rattlers in 1962. It is another thing to allow an eighteen-year-old in the middle of a mental-health crisis to buy an AR-15, which is what the sick Uvalde shooter bought on his eighteenth birthday.
Republicans, you are saying every day that there’s a mental-health crisis and, at the same time, that we shouldn’t stop putting long guns in the hands of young men. Policies must evolve to meet circumstances. You must evolve.
I end here.
I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it. How do you do that? I tell the young, I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him, and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That it is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby—it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing.
Uvalde is a town of about sixteen thousand people and if I’m counting right about forty places of Christian worship, all kinds, Evangelical, Catholic, Mainline. I keep seeing the pictures—a group of four middle-aged men in jeans and T-shirts, standing near the school, arms around each other, heads bent in prayer. And the women sitting on the curb near the school and sobbing, a minister in a gray suit hunched down with them, ministering. And the local Catholic church the night of the shootings—people came that night, especially women, because they know it’s the only true thing and they know they are loved, regarded, part of something, not alone. I don’t mean here “the consolations of faith,” I mean the truth is its own support. Consolation is not why you believe but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it. I am so glad for the people of Uvalde this weekend for only one thing, that so many have that.
Once I saw a painting—outsider art, crude, acrylic, made by some madman. There were splayed bodies on the floor and ghost-blots above each body, which depicted their souls. They were shooting upward—happy, free of gravity, rising toward Heaven.
Haven’t seen the painting since, think of it a lot, want it to be how it was in that classroom, all the children’s souls free and going home.
CORONAVIRUS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING
February 27, 2020
Punditry 101: You have to write about what you’re thinking about. All week I was taking notes knowing I’d be looking at South Carolina, Super Tuesday, and this week’s debate. I was thinking about polls and Representative Jim Clyburn’s beautiful remarks in support of Joe Biden. They were beautiful because they were highly personal without being manipulative, which is now something unusual in American politics. But my mind kept tugging in another direction. So I’ll write what I’m thinking, and it may be ragged but here goes.
I’ve got a feeling the coronavirus is going to be bad, that it will have a big impact on America, more than we imagine, and therefore on its politics. As this is written the virus is reported in forty-eight nations. We’ve had a first case with no known source, in California, and the state is monitoring some 8,400 others for possible infection. Canada has thirteen cases. There have been outbreaks in Iran and Italy; in Rome, there are worries because Pope Francis had to cancel a Lenten Mass due to what the Vatican called a “slight indisposition.”
There’s a lot we don’t know but much we do. We know coronavirus is highly communicable, that person-to-person transmission is easy and quick. Most who get it won’t even know they’re sick—it feels like a cold and passes. But about 20 percent will get really sick. Among them, mortality rates are low but higher than for the flu, and higher still among those who are older or impaired.
So it’s serious: A lot of people will be exposed and a significant number will be endangered. And of course there’s no vaccine.
We live in a global world. Everybody’s going everyplace all the time. Nothing is contained in the ways it used to be. It seems to me impossible that there are not people walking along the streets in the U.S. who have it, don’t know it, and are spreading it.
Americans are focusing. If you go to Amazon.com you famously find that the best face masks are no longer available, but check out the prices of hand sanitizers. They appear to be going up rather sharply! (Note to Jeff Bezos: If this turns bad and people start making accusations about price gouging and profiteers, public sentiment won’t just be hard on manufacturers, they’ll blame you, too. Whatever downward pressure can be applied, do it now, not later.)
If you limit your focus to politics, to 2020 election outcomes, you find yourself thinking this: Maybe it’s all being decided not in the next few weeks of primaries but in the next few weeks of the virus, how much it spreads, and how it’s handled.
If coronavirus becomes a formally recognized worldwide pandemic, and if it hits America hard, it is going to change a lot—the national mood, our cultural habits, the economy.
The president has been buoyed the past few years by a kind of inflatable raft of good economic news and strengths. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 8,581 points from the day he took office to the beginning of 2020. Unemployment is down so far it feels like full employment. Minority employment is up, incomes are up. He’s running for reelection based on these things.
But the stock market is being hit hard by virus-driven concerns. If those fears continue—and there’s no reason to believe they won’t—the gains the president has enjoyed could be wiped out.
As for unemployment, if the virus spreads people will begin to self-distance. If they shop less, if they stay home more and eat out less, and begin to cancel personal gatherings—if big professional events and annual meetings are also canceled—it will carry a whole world of bad implications.
What I notice as a traveler in America is the number of people who make a traveler’s life easier, and whose jobs depend on heavy travel—all the people in the airport shops and concessions, and those who work in hotels. There’s the woman whose small flower shop makes the arrangements for the donor reception at the community forum, and the floor managers, waiters, and waitresses at the charity fundraising dinner. Local contractors, drivers, the sound man who wires the dinner speaker. Many are part of the gig economy, operating without the protections of contracts and unions. If the virus spreads and events are canceled, they will be out of jobs. And that’s just one sliver of American life.
In a public-health crisis the role of government is key. The question will be—the question is—are the president and his administration up to it?
Our scientists and health professionals are. (I think people see Tony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health as the de facto president on this.) Is Donald Trump? Or has he finally met a problem he can’t talk his way out of? I have written in the past questioning whether he can lead and reassure the nation in a time of crisis. We are about to find out.
Leaders in crises function as many things. They are primary givers of information, so they have to know the facts. They have to be serious: They must master the data. Are they managerially competent? Most of all, are they trustworthy and credible?
Or do people get the sense they’re spinning, finagling, covering up failures, and shading the facts?
It is in crisis that you see the difference between showmanship and leadership.
Early signs are not encouraging. The messaging early this week was childish—everything’s under control, everything’s fine. The president’s news conference Wednesday night was not reassuring. Stock market down? “I think the financial markets are very upset when they look at the Democratic candidates standing on that stage making fools out of themselves.” “The risk to the American people remains very low.” “Whatever happens we’re totally prepared.” “There’s no reason to panic, because we have done so good.”
It was inadequate to the task.
I wonder if the president understands what jeopardy he’s in, how delicate even strong economies are, and how provisional good fortune is.
If you want to talk about what could make a progressive win the presidency it couldn’t be a better constellation than this: an epidemic, an economic downturn, a broad sense of public anxiety, and an incumbent looking small. Especially if the progressive says he stands for one big thing, health care for everyone.
The only candidate to bring up the threat of coronavirus at the Democratic debate the other night was Mike Bloomberg. This is how you’ll know the fact of the virus has hit the political class: Politicians will stop doing what they’ve done for more than two centuries. They’ll stop shaking hands. It will be a new world of waving, nodding emphatically, and patting your chest with your hand.
Some kinda world, when the pols can’t even gladhand.
It would be extremely reassuring if a temporary armistice were called in the cold war between the White House and congressional Democrats. If the virus is as serious as I think it is, no one will look back kindly on anyone who acted small.
OUR NEW CORONAVIRUS REALITY
March 19, 2020
This is a quick piece that touches on where we are, where we may be going, and an attitude for the journey.
The screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan once said the films of Akira Kurosawa were distinguished by this dynamic: The villain has arrived while the hero is evolving. That’s what made his films great, the sense of an implacable bad guy encountering a good guy who is alive, capable of changing, who is in fact changing because of and in order to beat back the bad guy and make things safe again.
The villain is here in the form of an illness. A lot of the heroes of this story are evolving every day into something we’ll look back on months and years hence and say, “Wow, LOOK what she did.” “What guts that guy showed.” People are going to pull from themselves things they didn’t know were there.
But now, at this stage in the drama, most of the heroes are also busy absorbing. We are all of us every day trying to absorb the new reality, give it time to settle into us.
It’s all so big. We are discovering the illness as we experience it. We don’t know its secrets, how long it lasts, how long its incubation, whether you can be reinfected.
As for the economics: As the month began we had functional full employment. By the time it ends we will not, not at all. In the past week layoffs and let-gos have left state unemployment claim websites crashing. This is not “normal job disruption”; it is a cascade. The Treasury secretary reportedly said unemployment could hit 20 percent.
The market gains of the Trump era have been all but wiped out. Investors are selling gold. From this paper’s editorial Thursday: “American commerce is shutting down right before our eyes with no end in sight.” Flights are empty, hotel occupancy plummeting.
Where we are is a hard, bad place, stupid to deny it. Where we’re going looks to be difficult.
It’s a cliché to say we haven’t ever had a moment like this (a plague, a crash), but it’s true. As for New York, twice in twenty years we’ve been ground zero, epicenter of a national tragedy. Will we get through it? Of course. But it will change things, and change us, as 9/11 did.
The governmental instinct is right: Stabilize things while everyone’s absorbing. Whatever is done will probably be an unholy mess. Do it anyway and see where we are. In the long term the best plan—the only plan—is one that attempts to keep people in their jobs. Meaning, look to European models on how to help businesses hold on to their people.
There are a million warnings out there on a million serious things. We add one: Everything works—and will continue to work—as long as we have electricity. It’s what keeps the lights on, the oxygen flowing, the information going. Everything is the grid, the grid, the grid.
A general attitude for difficult times? Trust in God first and always. Talk to him.
Every time America’s in trouble I remember Adam Smith’s words. He wrote there’s “a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Especially a very great and prosperous one with a brilliant system and a creative citizenry.
And see this: We are surrounded by nobility.
Mike Luckovich had a cartoon this week of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Only it wasn’t Marines—it was a doctor, a scientist, a nurse, and a first responder anchoring Old Glory in this rocky soil. It was hokey and beautiful and true. In the next few weeks and months they’ll get us through and we should thank them every way possible. That includes everyone who can’t work at home, the cops and firefighters, the garbagemen and truckers, the people who stock the shelves and man the counters. A nurse told me Thursday that hospital workers all see themselves as sitting ducks for infection, but no one’s calling in sick. A journalist friend said maybe this will reorder things and we’ll start to pay people according to their real importance to society.
