A Certain Idea of America, page 17
A personal note. As this is written I have been sick for two weeks. It started when I was finishing a column on Representative Jim Clyburn—I got a chill and noticed that the notepad on my knee was warm. The next night more chills, took my temperature: 101.
It may be a poorly timed ordinary virus, one of the dozen floating out there in America on any given day, or it may be the more interesting one.
But everything you’ve heard about the difficulty of getting a test is true. “There are none,” said my doctor. If he sent me to the emergency room, I wouldn’t meet their criteria. You can have every symptom, but if you answer no to two questions, you won’t be tested. The questions are: Have you traveled internationally? Have you recently been in contact with someone who tested positive?
My doctor instructed me to go home, self-quarantine, rest, report back. A week in, the fever spiked up, the headaches were joined by a cough and sore throat, and I called the local government number, where they couldn’t connect me to anyone who could help.
Everyone I dealt with was compassionate and overwhelmed. On day 12 my doctor got word of testing available at an urgent-care storefront on First Avenue. When I called I was connected to a woman on Long Island. She asked for my symptoms. Then: Have you traveled internationally? Have you had recent contact with anyone who’s infected? No and no. She said, “It’s OK, I’m sure they’ll accept you.” I could hear her click “send.” She paused and said, “I’m so sorry, you don’t meet the criteria.” By now we had made friends, and she was disappointed for me.
I said, “Let’s think together. Twelve days sick, almost all the symptoms, part of an endangered demographic.” Silence. Then a brainstorm. I realized at this point I have known a person who’s tested positive; I saw him recently; no one has defined “recently” because no one knows the incubation period.
I said, Can we do the interview again? She said, “Let’s go.”
She went down the list of questions, and when she said “Have you recently had contact…,” I said, “I believe I can say yes.”
She said, “All right.” Silence as I listened to her tap the keys. “You meet the criteria,” she said, with the sweetest excitement.
And so Tuesday night I made my way (mask, gloves) to the urgent-care storefront, where I was tested by a garrulous physician’s assistant who said his office, or New York health authorities, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will get back to me with results in three to seven days. (Yikes.)
At this point I suppose it’s academic. If it’s positive, they’ll tell me to continue what I’m doing. But if hospitalized it would save time—presumably I wouldn’t have to be tested again. Also it would be nice to think I wasn’t just home sick, I was home developing fighting Irish antibodies spoiling for a fight.
I just want to get out and help in some way. Isn’t that what you feel? We all just want to pitch in.
WHAT COMES AFTER THE CORONAVIRUS STORM?
April 23, 2020
“We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm.” That succinct summation came from the writer Damian Barr this week, on Twitter. He’s right. Some are in yachts, he said, and “some have just the one oar.”
Some will sail through, health and profession intact, some will lose one or both. Some of us get to feel we’re part of a substantial crew. Some of us feel we’re rowing alone.
We can move forward through this crisis experiencing our country as an embittered navy waiting to fight it out on shore. Or, alternatively, as a big crazy armada with millions of people throwing and catching millions of lifelines. Which I suppose is how a lot of us tend to see this country of deep inequalities and glittering possibilities. The latter attitude will be more helpful in getting us through, and, as Lincoln observed, attitude is everything.
We have all been told to be protective of each other—stay inside—and supportive. What is the nightly seven p.m. pot-banging but a spontaneous show of appreciation? But I am thinking of how much we actually just like each other, admire each other, and barely notice. The Washington Post Thursday had a story about the release of forty-three men who lived for a month inside the Braskem petrochemical plant in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania. Braskem produces raw material for face masks and surgical gowns. The workers figured if they got sick it would slow production, so they volunteered to stay in the plant, work long shifts, and sleep on air mattresses. They called it a “live-in.” At one point their families held a drive-by parade so they could wave through the windows.
“We were just happy to be able to help,” Joe Boyce, a shift supervisor, told Post reporter Meagan Flynn. When the story broke they were flooded with grateful messages from doctors and nurses. “But we want to thank them for what they did and are continuing to do,” Mr. Boyce said.
’Murcans, baby.
The subject now is state and regional reopening. We’re fighting about who’s going too early or moving too slowly, which is understandable, as we’re all interrelated and germs don’t respect state lines. But we should try hard not to be harsh in our judgments as each state chooses different times and ways. Opening is what we all want to do. We’ve got to be patient with each other, observe with good faith, hope lifting restrictions succeeds, but be quick to point out—and admit—danger areas and failures.
No one is certain what to do. Everyone’s acting on insufficient information. No plan will come without cost. A lot will become clear in retrospect. The bias should be opening as soon as possible as safely as possible. Don’t sacrifice safe for soon. Have a solid, sophisticated, mature definition of “safe.”
What will hurt us is secretly rooting for disaster for those who don’t share our priors. Everyone is trying to live. It doesn’t help to be a Northerner who looks down on Southerners, or a securely employed professional in a national corporation who has no clue what it means when a small-town business crashes. People who can work remotely probably don’t feel the same urgency to reopen as those who must be physically present, in retail and at diner counters.
Conspiracy nuts who think the virus was a hoax to bring down Donald Trump will always be with us. So will grim leftists who take pleasure in every death of a guy who called the threat overblown.
But we’re too quick to categorize, and ungenerous in our categorizations. Everybody isn’t only the role they’re playing at the moment. They came from something—us. Hate that young guy with the smart mouth in the MAGA hat honking his horn in the demonstration in Austin? In another time and a different struggle he was Audie Murphy, the guy who jumps on the tank, starts shooting, and saves every life in the convoy. Hate the scientist in rimless glasses repeating his endless warnings on TV? He’s Jonas Salk, who saved our children. We’re all more than what we seem. We all require some give.
We forget we are fifty different states with different histories, ways, and attitudes, even different cultures. New Jersey isn’t Wyoming; Colorado isn’t Arkansas. This used to be called “regional differences.” We can’t tamp them all down, and we don’t want to. So people will do things at different speeds in different ways. The thing is to watch, judge fairly, and move to countermand what proves dangerous.
Governors who make the decision should stay aware of the creativity of their citizens. A guy who runs a hair salon shared with me this week his reopening plans: face shields for stylists, masks for workers and clients, gloves, gun thermometers for everyone who walks in. “Robes will be individually wrapped and there will be someone wiping door handles.” He knows business starts only when people feel safe. He’s going to see they do for their sake and his.
I close with the psychology of the current moment. The novelty has worn off. We’ve absorbed the pandemic and the lockdown. We’ve marveled, complained, and made jokes. Now we’re absorbing that the America we stepped away from when we walked into the house isn’t the America into which we’ll re-emerge. It may look the same, but it will be different. A lot more people will need a lot more help. Twenty-six million people are unemployed. And little normalities of life that we once took for granted—some will be gone.
Two examples: Retail has been struggling for years—small stores closing from rising costs and Amazon. Now more will close, or rather never reopen, which will change Main Street and how we experience our towns. The big department stores too are in peril. JCPenney’s stores closed in March, its 85,000 employees furloughed. Since the pandemic, CNBC reports, its market capitalization has fallen 75 percent, and it just skipped an interest payment on its debt. Macy’s is struggling after closing its stores and furloughing 130,000 workers. A ratings agency downgraded its debt to junk status. Nordstrom and Kohl’s too are having a hard time.
We’ve all been thinking we can’t wait to get back to movies, concerts, and shows. Now we’re admitting it may be awhile before we want to sit with a thousand strangers. Warner Bros. just pulled one of its big summer movies from release in theaters; it will go straight to video-on-demand. Universal did the same. It reflects the lockdown but also what ScreenCrush.com called “audience’s increasing dependence on (and perhaps even preference for) home viewing.” John Stankey, COO of AT&T, which owns Warner Bros., said in an earnings call that the studio is “rethinking the theatrical model.”
Imagine an America without the expression “Let’s go to the movies.”
Anyway, what a resettling of things. What effort, patience, and creativity it will take to reach safe haven. How much easier it will be if we see ourselves not as separate ships but members of the most brilliant, raucous, and varied armada.
GIVE THANKS FOR TAYLOR SWIFT
November 22, 2023
Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because its choices tend to vary from sound to interesting. Also I almost always know who it’ll choose and enjoy finding out I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be or I will be displeased.
Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023. This fact makes her a suitably international choice because, when something good happens in America, boy, is it worldwide news.
I have been following her famous Eras Tour since it began in March. Everyone says she’s huge, she’s fabulous, but really it’s bigger than that. What she did this year is some kind of epic American story.
Here are the reasons she should be Person of the Year:
Her tour has broken attendance and income records across the country. She has transformed the economy of every city she visits. The U.S. Travel Association reported this fall that what her concertgoers spend in and around each venue “is on par with the Super Bowl, but this time it happened on 53 different nights in 20 different locations over the course of five months.” Downtowns across the country—uniquely battered by the pandemic and the riots and demonstrations of 2020—are, while she is there, brought to life, with an influx of visitors and a local small-business boom. Wherever she went it was like the past three years didn’t happen.
When Ms. Swift played Los Angeles for six sold-out nights in August she brought a reported $320 million local windfall with her, including 3,300 jobs and a $160 million increase in local earnings. From Straits Research this month: Ms. Swift’s tour is “an economic phenomenon that is totally altering the rules of entertainment economics.”
When the tour became a bona fide record-breaker Ms. Swift gave everyone in her crew—everyone, the dressers, the guys who move the sets, the sound techs and backup dancers—a combined $55 million in bonuses. The truck drivers received a reported $100,000 each.
Bloomberg Economics reports that U.S. gross domestic product went up an estimated $4.3 billion as a result of her first fifty-three concerts.
The tour made her a billionaire, according to Forbes the first musician ever to make that rank solely based on her songs and performances.
When Ms. Swift made a film of the ongoing tour she reinvented how such things are financed and marketed, upending previous models, and when the film opened, on October 13, it became the most successful concert film in history.
Foreign leaders have begged her to come. One said, “Thailand is back on track to be fully democratic after you had to cancel last time due to the coup.”
All of this is phenomenal, groundbreaking, but it’s just economics. Ms. Swift brings joy. Over the summer I was fascinated by what became familiar, people posting on social media what was going on in the backs of the stadiums as Ms. Swift sang. It was thousands of fathers and daughters dancing. When she played in downtown Seattle in July, the stomping was so heavy and the stadium shook so hard it registered on a seismometer as equal to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.
People meaning to compliment her ask if she’s Elvis or the Beatles, but it is the wrong question. Taylor Swift is her own category.
Here I wish to attest personally to the quality of her art but, honey, I’m not the demo, I’m Porgy and Bess, the American Songbook, and Joni Mitchell. She writes pleasing tunes with pointed lyrics. They’re sometimes jaunty, sometimes blue, and famously have a particular resonance for teenage girls and young women. She has said she sees herself primarily as a storyteller. They’re her stories and those of her audience—breakups, small triumphs, betrayals, mistakes. Her special bond with her audience is that for seventeen years, more than a generation, they’ve been going through life together, experiencing it and talking it through. It’s a relationship.
Nine years ago, in an interview with CBS’s Gayle King, Ms. Swift coolly self-assessed. “My life doesn’t gravitate towards being edgy, sexy, or cool. I just naturally am not any of those things.” Pressed for what she is, she said, “I’m imaginative, I’m smart, and I’m hardworking.” She was only twenty-four but all that seems perfectly correct. She’s focused, ambitious, loves to perform, loves to be cheered, loves to strut. Great careers are all effort. She works herself like a rented mule.
In The Atlantic, the writer Spencer Kornhaber captured her opening show. Over more than three hours she played an amazing forty-four songs in Glendale, Arizona. “Somehow seeing her up close made her seem more superhuman.” She has “the stamina of a ram.” She was fearless and inventive. “At one point she induced gasps by seeming to dive into the stage and then swim to the other side, as if it were a pond.”
Friends, this is some kind of epic American thing that is happening, something on the order of great tales and myths. Over the past few months as I’ve thought about and read of Ms. Swift my mind kept going back to phrases that are…absurd as comparisons. And yet. “When John Henry was a little baby…” And a beautiful lyric I saw years ago that stayed with me. “Black-eyed peas asks cornbread / ‘What makes you so strong?’ / Cornbread says, ‘I come from / Where Joe Louis was born.’ ”
There is just something so mightily American in Taylor Swift’s great year.
Am I getting carried away? Oh, yes, I am. And yet I think, isn’t it great that somebody’s shown such excellence that you get carried away?
We end with her recent purported famous romance with football star Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. Is it real, everyone asks. Who knows? Maybe they don’t know. I don’t understand the argument that they’ve come together for publicity. That’s the one thing she doesn’t need more of and could hardly get more of. As for Mr. Kelce, as J. R. Moehringer noted this week in the Journal, his mug is all over, too. Whatever it is, they owe no stranger an answer.
But here are reasons people would like it to be real. Because it makes life feel more magical—the prince meets the princess. Because it’s sweet. Because if it’s real then not everything is media management, which is the thing that deep down we always fear. Because it’s fun. Marilyn and Joltin’ Joe made America more fun, more a romantic place where anything can happen and glamour is real. Also if it’s real it adds to the sum total of love in the world, literally increases its quantity, and the love enters the air and the world breathes it in and, for a moment, becomes: better.
Onward to further greatness, Taylor Swift. Onward, Travis Kelce. Win the Super Bowl this year, make an impossible catch, jump a man’s height to snatch the ball from the air with ten seconds to go, score the winning touchdown, hold the ball up to your girl in the stands as the stadium roars and the confetti rains down.
Leave 100 billion memories. Remind everyone: It’s good to be alive.
Because it is.
CHAPTER 4
ON AMERICA
What is it that keeps our hearts turning home?
WHAT’S BECOME OF THE AMERICAN DREAM?
April 6, 2017
I want to think aloud about the American dream. People have been saying for a while that it’s dead. It’s not, but it needs strengthening. We should start by saying what it means, which is something we’ve gotten mixed up about. I know its definition because I grew up in the heart of it and remember how people had long understood it. The American dream is the belief, held by generation after generation since our beginning and reanimated over the decades by waves of immigrants, that here you can start from anywhere and become anything. In America you can rise to the heights no matter where and in what circumstances you began. You can go from the bottom to the top.
Behind the dream was another belief: America was uniquely free, egalitarian, and arranged so as to welcome talent. Lincoln was elected president in part because his supporters brought lengths of crude split rails to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860. They held the rails high and paraded them in a floor demonstration to tell everyone, This guy was nothing but a frontier rail splitter, a laborer, a backwoods nobody. Now he will be president. What a country. What a dream.
