Upon hearing that his friend Walter Benjamin had committed suicide rather than face deportation into the hands of the Nazis, Bertolt Brecht composed a short elegiac poem, “On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.” “Empires collapse,” he wrote. “Gang leaders / are strutting about like statesmen. The nations of man / No longer visible under all those armaments.”
Brecht could easily have been describing twenty-first-century El Salvador or Honduras, where gang members not only strut around like statesmen, but are indeed officials of a kind of state. Today, another fascism is rising from the ashes of a past that never fully died: a new stage of neoliberal power, presaged by the tragedy of Pinochet and consummated in the deranged and farcical specter of Trump or Bolsonaro—an era of capitalist violence and dispossession perhaps even more savage than the last.
So many of the feelings my pen pals shared with me mirrored my own. I wrote to them originally to process my fears and anxieties during this time. In the end, the respondents helped me remember the clarifying thing about this pandemic — that we're all part of one community of humans. For the duration of this crucible, and beyond, we should celebrate that which makes us most human: perspective, surprise and connection. Letters to strangers — and from strangers — can satisfy all three.
The newspaper deliverymen were on strike. The walkout had been called for midnight on June 30, a Saturday night. Apparently many of the disgruntled workers couldn’t wait. According to the New York Times, something like a thousand men who were due to work that afternoon failed to report for duty. Some had called in sick. Many more just didn’t show up. The Times sarcastically reported three hundred deliverymen “struck by the epidemic.”
The deliverymen were equally droll. As they mingled on the picket line, according to the Times, “There was much horseplay, men asking each other: ‘Well, how d’ye feel, buddy?’ with the answer being, ‘Oh, I guess I shouldn’t have had that mayonnaise for lunch.’”
All told, 14 major papers were left without their usual means of distribution. According to an estimate in the New York Times, some 13 million customers in the city and surrounding area were deprived of their daily newspaper.
The analysis in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ centres on two interlocking social forms: money and the city. As they become dominant, they erode natural rhythms of production and traditional social bonds. This is liberating: cash doesn’t care about birthright, it is ‘concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value’. Yet, there is a hidden cost: money reduces what is uniquely valuable to a number, a price. In the right ratio, fine hand-crafted goods are equal to mass-produced junk. This devalues commodities – nothing that can be bought is unique – while simultaneously accelerating the search for whatever is truly unique and incomparably valuable.
The city accelerates the calculable logic of money, encroaching even on our experience of time.
The reality of the moment is finally sinking in. Karen Nyberg and Megan McArthur, two NASA astronauts, have spent years waiting for this mission. Now the launch is just days away. The rocket is already upright at Cape Canaveral. Soon, it will roar into the sky and dispatch a new crew to the International Space Station.
Nyberg and McArthur, however, won’t be on board. This time, it’s their husbands’ turn to leave the planet. Nyberg and McArthur will be watching from the ground, cheering them on.
Six-year-old Franklin Wong captured the simple frustration of being a student in this city’s Unified School District in mid-March, after his classes were canceled. He wrote in big blocky letters: “I did not go anywhere,” and added an unhappy face in green and red crayon for his remote-learning assignment.
This may be the first time a first grader's homework is headed to a permanent museum collection instead of a parent’s refrigerator door, a novelty that underscores how far into uncharted waters curators are sailing.
“Sing Backwards” is at its best when examining the ruthless mechanics of a junkie musician’s daily life: where to hide syringes — which were hard to come by, and often shared, in the days before needle exchanges — on a tour bus during border searches; the terrifying prospect of going through withdrawals during a snowstorm or transatlantic flight; how the citrus needed to break down European heroin can be found by scavenging lemon slices from abandoned hotel room service trays; and the various black, noxious fluids excreted by junkies in withdrawal, described in enough detail to chill even the most devoted gastroenterologist.
No more transfusions.
No more shots.
This latest sleep
could be the one
that leads into dark wilderness.