Unequal sympathies / Daily delights

Today: Zito Madu, a journalist and author of The Minotaur at Calle Lanza; and Jennie Rose Halperin, digital strategist and librarian at NYU's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.

Issue No. 223

Safe and Beautiful World
Zito Madu

Luscious Things
Jennie Rose Halperin

Safe and Beautiful World

by Zito Madu

A rush of essays, articles, posts, and news reports on the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson presented the actions of his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, as chilling, unimaginable—the act of a deranged, unstable lunatic who must be roundly condemned, lest we become a violent society with no respect for human life. As I read this avalanche of moralistic responses I kept saying to myself, What the fuck are these people talking about? Where is this safe and civilized world—now potentially shattered—where life is precious and humanity is respected?

Whenever someone prominent but highly unpopular dies unmourned by the public, whether it’s a CEO like Thompson or the late David Koch, or a politician like Henry Kissinger, certain people inevitably rush in to scold the rest of us for our brutality and stupidity, seizing the chance to display their own pure, superior ability to recognize and cherish the value of a human life. This is obviously laughable. Brian Thompson lived in a country in which just yesterday at a private Christian school in Wisconsin a 15-year-old girl went on a shooting rampage, wounding several and killing a classmate, a teacher, and herself; it was the 83rd school shooting in the U.S. so far this year. It’s not possible to live in such a country and consider the murder of Brian Thompson as anything so far out of the ordinary. Rather, it is incredibly insulting to pretend that this fantasy place is the same one that you and I live in, this peaceful country that would be in danger of sliding into dystopia if killing and violence were to be normalized and accepted. 

There was once a time when kids could go to school without the fear of being shot, in fact generation after generation of kids grew up in the United States without ever experiencing the trauma of an active shooter drill. But modern life in the U.S. means closeness to death and violence everywhere you go. We have seen people killed at concerts, movie theaters, grocery stores, bowling alleys, dance studios, and banks. The government supports mass bloodshed abroad; the militarized police have near-impunity to abuse and kill whomever they please, so long as the violence is aimed at some marginalized person or group. Death may come from a bullet, a chokehold, or forced social conditions that make people’s lives so desperate and impoverished that illness and death come too soon, a category that includes people who are denied lifesaving treatment and are left to die—sometimes even when they’ve paid for the protection of medical insurance. 

That so many journalists, pundits, and politicians came out to advocate for our shared humanity—but only in the context of Thompson’s life—doesn’t challenge the brutality of a hierarchy in which some have the right to live and others do not. Instead, these writers chose to validate that structure, drawing attention to the empty space where a larger empathy should have been.

To see the killing and mass indifference to Thompson’s death as a sign of moral decline, while ignoring the normalization of the death and suffering of every victim beneath him, is to advocate openly for the idea that there are those who deserve life and those who don’t. It is to show that your idea of the human begins and ends with those at the top. There aren't enough rhetorical tricks in the world to hide the bad faith in an argument for humanity that starts and ends with the most privileged. 

That Luigi Mangione has the background and education of someone in a protected class has complicated this argument for certain writers, whose narratives demand that wealth be considered virtuous, and criminality as the exclusive province of poor and marginalized people. Few are prepared to say openly that it’s this argument itself—and the obvious and false hierarchy it underpins—that is degrading humanity and pushing the world into dystopia: the idea that it is “those other people” who die in the darkness and silence of what is normal. When the brutality was turned against a millionaire CEO, that tacit arrangement was both violated, and revealed. 

HYDRA SPEAKING

Miles Klee is in a fine new episode of You're Wrong About discussing the Cola Wars, in which among many other entertaining facts he shares the unbelievable recipe for "French Wine Cola," a 19th-century remedy for morphine addiction. Highly recommended.

Luscious Things

by Jennie Rose Halperin

How much pleasure there is in just sitting around, writing, eating and reading. How nice it is to contemplate new things for a change, and how good it would be to do that every day. 

—Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries is a catalog collected from her journals over the past 15 years, sorted sentence by sentence in alphabetical order and only lightly edited. Many of the characters from her works of autofiction are scattered through the text, so when I read it in March it felt like dropping in on a group of old friends. It’s a slow read, non-narrative, and often confusing. But I still loved it and sank into it like a warm bath, giving in to Heti’s writing and letting her life’s work wash over me.

Unlike Heti, I’ve never been disciplined about diarying, but this year I decided to take a cue from poet Ross Gay’s wonderful The Book of Delights, a diary of lyric essays on “delights,” which he kept for an entire year. It’s a strange, irreverent collection of memories with titles like, “That’s Some Bambi Shit.” “Sharing a Bag.” “Kombucha in a Mid-century Glass.” “Micro-gentrification: WE BUY GOLD.” “The Sanctity of Trains.” 

–did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.

Following Gay’s example, I thought it would be a useful exercise to transcribe the delightful every day myself, in order to invite more pleasure into my life.

It was such a terrible year in world events that this practice sometimes felt self-indulgent, but another book I read this year, Becca Rothstein’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, helped me quiet that feeling.

“All things are too small, but some things are less small than others,” she writes. “Even if paucity is inevitable, we can still fight emptiness with fullness.” My personal book of delights helped me to feel more full, to be more generous with myself and the people around me. Over the course of the year I began to look forward to recounting each day’s delight. I noticed that I did something delightful nearly every day, just so I could write about it. I did miss quite a few days, so I’d often write about the day before, or several days at once—a paragraph, a sentence, occasionally just a word.

Looking back, I had a good year: I got to know a new city, spent time with friends, traveled, and took a lot of long walks. My book of delights captures a few big moments, but it’s mostly tiny joys: the heat in my chest in a sauna, the color of the leaves on a bike ride, watching the sunset while crossing the Manhattan Bridge, finishing a Thursday crossword puzzle, surprisingly good bagels in Maine, putting flowers in my hair at a wedding. The tough stuff lodges in the brain, a hulking mass of bullshit, but the little joys don’t always stick around. It’s a small rebellion against the darkness, the sweet remembering, the parts of a whole.

Here are some favorites.

There’s a line in the Book of Esther: “Also Vashti the Queen threw a feast for all the women.” B decided she had to throw her own “Vashti’s Feast,” and even though we’ve only met once, she invited me. What a joy to be among new friends, to meet new people in a new city! We lounged on floor couches, chatted, shared our dreams and expectations, journaled, danced, lit candles, ate so much fruit: pomegranates and kiwis and star fruit.

N, B, E, and I took a road trip to the expansive ocean beach: horizon and water and sand, rocks and sticks and shells. The air was warm and we left our shoes on the rocks and walked and walked. We got near the jetty and played for a while, made a little playground of natural objects, a seesaw with a rock as a fulcrum, a branch like a balance beam, tall objects to jump off of while holding hands, slippery sand billowing out like clouds. I took a picture of B and E on the seesaw and I keep looking at it with a full heart. E’s arms are in the air and he is smiling as B pushes hard with his legs to launch him off into the air, but they are both too big.

E visited and we walked all the way to Coney Island and rode the cyclone. Everyone in line was freaking out, but we crossed our arms over the lap bar and held on to each other, laughing like goons. We took a rest on the beach, and I read Proust while he dozed, our thighs touching. We drank the last of our water before we got on the train and collapsed in the air conditioned car.

I read Proust most of the day!

We spent the evening in the garden sprinkling mustard powder on the soil so the invasive jumping worms would leap into our hands and off the plants. Without the mustard, it’s difficult to tell which worms jump and which do not, but we had a lot of fun trying to figure it out!

I have never seen a baby this small, much less held one. His parents call him a stomach that sleeps, which is a little disturbing but delightful.

A terrible day, uncertain, terrifying, and disappointing. But the night was beautiful and warm, what used to be called unseasonable for November. I stood on the balcony at the party and got a miraculous view of the city skyline, so big and bright that I couldn’t even take a good picture of it.

A and I hiked from Cold Spring to Beacon and the weather was perfect, the company a joy. I kept thinking of this quote I read years ago, [which I had to look up]: “Regardless of the scale and the nature of the chaos… there are certain things that we will not lose. The world will always be beautiful. We will always make art, we will always sing songs, we’ll always be family, and we’ll always love one another. There are really important pieces about what it means to be a human being that are not on the table to change in the future.”

Today made me think of the old Yiddish saying, “Life is with people.” Here we are, here he is, here I am.

It's not too late to give the scintillating gift of FLAMING HYDRA!