The Drapes Are Going to Kill You….
If everything is a crisis, then nothing is a crisis — until now. We are engulfed in a genuine crisis of the very greatest magnitude — health, economic, political, racial. And yet it is hard to grasp the scale of this moment because we have devalued the meaning of language to describe trouble, let alone, catastrophe.
What do we call this? The apocalypse? That is defined as “an event involving a destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.” How about when there are four such events at once?
We have already been conditioned to be afraid. Commercials and scientific reports from one interest group or another describe the toxic content of fabric (the drapes), sugars, clogged gutters that are a threat to your home and just about everything any one of us confront in daily life is presented as risky. Take a pill. In the small print, it can kill you.
There are real dangers in cigarettes, alcohol, pollution, guns, violent crime, opiates, scams of the elderly and so much more. The reality is that anything consumed to excess — even water — is not good for you. Rubber bullets can make you blind. Non-lethal gas fired at protestors in an enclosed space is lethal.
In recent years, especially as society has been converted to clicks as a measure of engagement, public figures, businesses, the media and the medical universe have deployed words to stimulate, scare and attract attention. Reassurance is not, as the saying goes, sticky. In (my) book business, “The End of…” and “The Collapse of…” come in handy to the point of useless cliché.
I read four newspapers a day and leading weekly magazines. If I made a list of headlines, the overwhelming majority emphasize the downside of situations either present or forthcoming. The most tepid of these is to predict a “test” or “raise questions”. Yes, there is always much to be worried about and to regret and we need to be forthright about all that. And up to a point, that is necessary.
However, when Donald J. Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017, he framed his inaugural address around America’s “carnage” that we elected him to mitigate. In fact, we were in a period, by historical standards, of relative progress in many ways. Our first family was of color, a paragon of dignity and the first administration in modern history to be completely devoid of personal or political corruption. The economy had revived from the lows of 2008. The mortality rates of major diseases like cancer were dropping. The chasm of racial and economic injustice was still vast, but misleadingly, perhaps, seem to be narrowing.
As of the start of June 2020 carnage is everywhere. Trump, himself, and circumstances that he cannot control and has certainly mismanaged have actually contrived to create conditions, for the moment, that are as perilous as any in the last (take your pick) 100, 75, 50, 20 years. It is being said that when the history of the Trump presidency is written, how will it be explained that the matter that got him impeached — only the third time in history — was his phone call with the new president of Ukraine, who months earlier was a television comedian?
This is also an age of visual immediacy. Everyone has a camera and we can see what in the past would have required time and skill to present on the pages or on screens. The scenes unfolding in hospitals starting in March, the long, long lines of cars at food banks, the unemployment numbers in the tens of millions, the nightly Skype interviews with people whose lives and livelihoods are in turmoil are collectively horrific.
How best to capture in words the full enormity of this season? Perhaps it is the pictures that can do a better job than words since the ones that are now accurate have been exhausted before they became so truly relevant. Is this “Armageddon” — “the place where the last battles between good and evil will be fought?” Is it the “End of Times” as the end of the Soviet Union was incorrectly deemed “the end of history”?
No. This period will finally come to a close, maybe in November when democracy has it’s say — never before in modern political history has the vote been more important — and our wizards of science devise a way out of the pandemic, as happened two generations ago with polio and a generation ago with AIDS. We will need to manage the damage, some of which may, when it comes to all that has been lost, be irreplaceable.
Perhaps as a consequence of what is now devastating and catastrophic, our language will move beyond the jargon of incessant crisis and find ways to vividly portray the world around us without the exaggerations and hyperkinetic exclamations intended to frighten us and sell us the goods.
