Categories
politics

Removing a Video from Facebook is Not Censorship

A friend messaged me recently to discuss Plandemic, the 26-minute video that went viral last week due to its conspiracy mongering. My friend didn’t want to discuss the video, per se — he said he knows the idea that “the coronavirus was planned by billionaires to enforce worldwide vaccinations” is nuts — but he was concerned about major social-media companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo preventing people from watching it. 

In a free country, he argued, all ideas — even (and especially) bad ones — should be out in the open for debate and discussion. 

He didn’t get any argument from me, but he did get it (not directly) from the social-media companies. Travis Andrews spoke to them for The Washington Post and learned the companies took the video down because it violated their terms of service. While the legal language is different for each company, the gist is the same: the companies reserve the right to remove a video if it spreads harmful and misleading health information to the public. 

Of course, they weren’t quick enough. Before Facebook could remove the video, it was viewed over 1.8 million times and shared over 150,000 times.

This was not the first viral video to be taken down for violating “community guidelines” around harmful and misleading health information. This NBC News report, for example, focuses on videos by doctors who “downplayed the risk of coronavirus and asserted that stay-at-home measures were unnecessary. They also promoted a conspiracy theory that doctors were falsely attributing unrelated deaths to COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus.” These videos have been watched more than 9 million times. As Matt Taibbi reported, the videos provoked the American Academy of Emergency Physicians and American College of Emergency Physicians to issue a joint statement condemning the videos.

Taibbi’s article, The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here, explores the issue of coronavirus censorship in detail, connecting several dots, including WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, and Tom Brady’s Deflategate, to make this point:

[T]he functional impact…is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.

In general, I agree with my friend and with Matt Taibbi. The first donation I ever made as an adult was to the American Civil Liberties Union, and I’ve long told my students that when it comes to the First Amendment, I’m an extremist. 

At the same time, I have no problem with these private companies taking down misleading and harmful videos. Among other things, the First Amendment recognizes the right of Americans to be free from governmental interference of speech, but it doesn’t compel corporations or individuals to follow the same rules. Removing these videos from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. does not violate the rights of these citizens. It may reduce the impact of their ideas, but it does not stop them from having or expressing them.

With today’s technology (and access to the computers in public libraries), every individual in the United States is able to record their thoughts, develop their arguments, or post their memes to the Internet, where every node is (by design) equally accessible.

While blocking access to the major social-media networks limits the potential audience, it doesn’t cause any more harm than when someone had a great idea in pre-Industrial Europe and could only post a pamphlet on the door of his local church: Martin Luther’s 95 theses went viral, and he didn’t even have a blue checkmark to help him out.

So yes, while I adamantly support the right of all Americans (all people, really) to express their opinions without fear of retribution from their government(s), I also support the right of private companies to determine their own terms of service (in accordance with their government’s laws). 

The danger is not YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter preventing someone from sharing ideas on their social networks, nor is it the political and social condemnation that comes from airing one’s minority opinions in public (such is life); instead, the danger is a government that silences its critics.

On that front, things don’t look so rosy. 

According to Reporters Sans Borders (RSF), the United States ranks 45th in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, mainly due to “Trump-era hostility.” One item RSF highlights is the placement of an American journalist on the U.S. government’s “kill list.” Another is the U.S. government’s prosecution of whistleblowers. A third condemns the U.S. government’s seizure of a journalist’s phone and email records going back several years. 

If YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter prevent an individual from using their services, that’s their right, but when the U.S. government is the one doing the censoring, then that’s the loss of our right, and we ought to do something about it.

Categories
creative pieces

Penelope: a short, short story

(A couple of weeks ago, my wife suggested I enter a writing contest. The rules required the story to be no more than 100 words, but more than that, they required entrants to write the story in less than 24 hours. To ensure everyone played by the rules, the contest runners assigned each writer a genre, an action that had to take place in the story, and a word that the writer had to include, and they emailed out the assignment when the 24 hour clock began. Based on my assignment, here is my entry.)

Penelope

The poet smells her before he hears her. Her scent cuts through the mucky goat hair, the sour horseshit, and the human piss and sweat. It calls him back to an earlier spring, before he grew blind, when his neighbor’s sister twirled through the heather, stirring the pollen into the air. The poet turns, his nose searching. A warmth moves across his arm and stays, raising his temperature. She speaks a language he doesn’t understand, full of power and beauty. His heart fills with love, and he drops to his knee in prayer. He promises to sing her heart eternal.

Categories
politics

Biden & The Second Bill of Rights

Back before the midterm elections in November 2018, the former Obama speechwriter and now political podcaster, Jon Favreau, released a 15-episode arc on the history and future of the Democratic party. In the ninth episode of the series, he presented “The Second Bill of Rights,” a “bold, progressive agenda” that he believes would be supported by any self-professed Democrat.

I wrote a blog post about the episode if you’re interested in some of the details, but Favreau’s Second Bill of Rights looks like this:

  • The right to a job.
  • The right to a fair and living wage.
  • The right to exist regardless of one’s ability to work.
  • The right to an education that supports the improvement of one’s lot, regardless of age or income.
  • The right to the best possible healthcare.
  • The right to form a union that advocates for the value of one’s labor.
  • The right to participate in a fair and balanced economy.

With Vice-President Biden as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, I think it makes sense to compare his policy proposals against the “bold, progressive agenda” that Favreau discovered in his survey.

The Right to a Job

Democrats generally agree that every American who wants a job should be guaranteed one through a program inspired by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Managed locally, the program idealized by Democrats would create jobs in “the Care Economy: care for community, care for people, and care for planet.”

During the primary season, Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed a job guarantee, Senators Booker, Warren, and Gillibrand, and Harris co-sponsored a bill in the Senate to create a Job Guarantee pilot program, and Representative Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal resolution, which is supported by virtually all progressive Democrats and calls for “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”

Vice-President Biden, however, does not support a job guarantee. He told the Washington Post: “As automation continues to grow, it’s possible that down the line we may need to guarantee a job for every American, but we are not there.”

The Right to a Fair & Living Wage

In 2016, the official platform of the Democratic Party included the following:

We should raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour over time and index it, give all Americans the ability to join a union regardless of where they work, and create new ways for workers to have power in the economy so every worker can earn at least $15 an hour. … We also support creating one fair wage for all workers by ending the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers and people with disabilities.

While the platform will be revised during the 2020 convention (however it happens during “these uncertain times“), we can rest assured it will include some kind of call for a fair and living wage.

A researcher at M.I.T. put together a Living Wage Calculator that “estimates the cost of food, child care, health care (both insurance premiums and typical health care costs), housing, transportation and other necessities,” and breaks it down further by state and county, since a living wage in Rutland County, Vermont won’t be the same as a living wage in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York City.

Vice-President Biden agrees with virtually every other Democrat on this issue. His administration would work to “increase the federal minimum wage to $15 across the country,” but he goes further by supporting “indexing the minimum wage to the median hourly wage” rather than inflation. This would link “the minimum wage to overall conditions in the labor market rather than to the general level of prices” and help reduce America’s income-inequality gap.

The Right to Exist Regardless of One’s Ability to Work

Favreau’s survey found that most Democrats support subsidizing income to provide “a foundation of security under a vast majority of Americans,” first through expanding access to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and then through the creation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Interestingly, one of the first major politicians to support a guaranteed minimum income was a Republican, President Richard Nixon, who in 1972 proposed the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) as a way to replace the benefits of another federal program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was designed to help children whose families had low or no income. Despite passing the House, FAP didn’t make it through the Senate, thanks to an alliance between a group of conservative Democrats and Republicans.

In 1974, Congress passed the EITC, “a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income working individuals and couples, particularly those with children.” In tax year 2019, the EITC benefit maxed out at $6,557 for a family with three or more children, provided the family makes less than $55,952 (married, filing jointly).

The thing about the EITC, however, is that the beneficiary has to have at least $1 of earned income (pensions and unemployment don’t count); in other words, they have to work. With a Universal Basic Income policy, every citizen, regardless of their ability to work, is provided with a minimum income that allows them to, in the words of Andrew Yang, UBI’s most visible promoter this primary season, “pick their heads up and plan for the future.”

Vice-President Biden does not support a Universal Basic Income, telling the Post, “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity, your self-respect, and your place in the community. … We must build a future that puts work first.”

The Right to an Education, Regardless of Age or Income

In 2016, Senator Sanders changed the conversation around education in the country by proposing a “College for All” policy that would guarantee tuition and debt-free public colleges, universities, and trade schools to all. He took the policy further by calling for the canceling of all student-loan debt and expanding the federal government’s coverage of non-tuition costs (books, fees, etc.) by expanding Pell grants, tripling Work-Study programs, and more.

For the 2020 election, Senator Warren showed support for such a policy by offering a plan very similar to Bernie’s, canceling student-loan debt for 95% of Americans and making two- and four-year public colleges free for all Americans.

When Favreau conducted his survey in 2018, he learned that most Democrats support “providing every individual — if they have the ability — with a free college education, and erasing the economically-crippling burden of a generation’s worth of student-loan debt.”

Vice-President Biden holds a more conservative position on higher education than Senators Sanders and Warren, but he does take strides towards the Democratic consensus.

The Vice President’s proposal would provide “two years of community college or other high-quality training program without debt for any hard-working individual looking to learn and improve their skills to keep up with the changing nature of work.” In addition, he would “make public colleges and universities tuition-free for all families with incomes below $125,000.”

When it comes to the student-loan-debt crisis, he would expand the income-based repayment program to limit student loan payments to 5% of a person’s discretionary income, and those making less than $25,000/year would not have to make any payments on their balance or accrue interest on their loans. If a person made 20 years worth of on-time payments, their loan would be 100% forgiven. In addition, he promises to strengthen the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to make it actually work.

The Right to the Best Possible Healthcare

Polls routinely demonstrate that healthcare is the most important issue for American voters. According to a Politico/Harvard School of Public Health survey taken a month before COVID-19 dominated the country’s attention, the two top issues for American voters of all parties were lowering the cost of health care and lowering prescription drug prices.

Democrats are divided on the best way to achieve these goals. Senators Sanders, Warren, and others support some version of “Medicare for All,” where the goal is to provide universal healthcare for all Americans. In fact, according to the Politico/Harvard survey linked above, 71% of Democrats and 53% of all Americans support “changing the health care system so that all Americans would get health insurance from Medicare.”

Contrary to the desires of more than two-thirds of all Democrats, Vice-President Biden does not support universal, single-payer healthcare. 

Instead, he calls for giving Americans a choice between private insurance companies and a public health-insurance option similar to Medicare. His plan also calls for capping the amount of a family’s contribution to the costs of health insurance to 8.5% of their income and increasing the size of the tax credits to provide “more generous coverage, with lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.”

Unfortunately, all the public option does is “compete against private insurers in our current broken, market-based system, ultimately perpetuating the unequal coverage, underinsurance, and prohibitive out-of-pocket costs we see today.” It reinforces the notion that healthcare is not a human right, but a profit-generating enterprise that capitalists ought to have access to.

When it comes to lowering prescription drug costs, Vice-President Biden’s plan allows the government to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies, opens the border for individuals to purchase drugs from other countries, limits launch prices on drugs with no competitors, locks drug-price increases to the inflation rate, and improves the supply of generic drugs to the market.

Vice-President Biden’s plan supports women by expanding access to contraception, protecting the constitutional right to an abortion, restoring Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and rescinding the gag rule that prevents foreign aid from going to organizations that provide information on abortion services.

The Right to Form a Union that Advocates for the Value of One’s Labor

Favreau’s survey of the Democrats found that a majority of the party supports “making it easier for workers to form a union, penalizing employers who fire the workers who try to start a union, and revoking the ‘right to work’ laws that weaken unions in several of our united states.”

According to Tara Golshan, a political reporter at Vox, while Senators Warren, Sanders, and Harris focused their union messages on “an increasingly progressive working class that didn’t see a champion in either Trump or Clinton in 2016,” Vice-President Biden’s strategy involves winning back the white-union households that voted for President Trump in 2016.

The Vice President’s proposal, which his campaign titles “The Biden Plan for Strengthening Worker Organizing, Collective Bargaining, and Unions,” calls for holding executives personally accountable for interfering with organization efforts and violating labor laws, preventing federal dollars from flowing to corporations that engage in union busting, and penalizing companies that negotiate in bad faith.

The Vice President’s plan also seeks to make it easier for workers to unionize and provides a federal guarantee for public-sector employees to bargain for better pay, benefits, and working conditions, which several states actively forbid from them doing.

Finally, he promises to create a Cabinet-level working group that focuses solely on promoting union organizing and collective bargaining.

There’s more to the Vice President’s plan, and his campaign proposals are positive on the face of it, but the Vice President has also hosted fundraisers with anti-union lobbyists and supported NAFTA and other union-damaging trade deals. In addition, his paradigm of a union family better fits the unions of his youth (white, working class men) rather the unions of today; in 2017, the Economic Policy Institute found that “65.4 percent of workers age 18 to 64 and covered by a union contract are women and/or people of color.”

To its credit, the Vice President’s plan virtually mirrors Senator Sanders’ “Workplace Democracy” plan. Unfortunately, with his historic support of NAFTA and TPP, the Vice President’s reliability on worker protections is still up for debate.

The Right to Participate in a Fair and Balanced Economy

The Democratic party, according to Favreau’s survey, supports “reversing the consolidation of financial power by strengthening and aggressively enforcing federal anti-trust and consumer protection laws.” The party grew this sense of consciousness through the Occupy Wall Street campaign, which popularized the phrase, “We are the 99%.”

Senator Sanders picked up the mantle of this movement in 2016 (having carried it since  entering politics in the 1970s), spreading its message far and wide and bringing to the modern consciousness such concepts as “the billionaire class”. In addition, Senator Sanders incredible ability to stay on message with this topic ensured that everyone who heard him speak between 2016 and 2020 now understood (and agreed) with the basic premise that the goal of America’s policies seems to be “a race to the bottom,” where the jobs that still exist in this country are lower paying with fewer benefits and fewer protections against environmental degradation and workplace dangers, all for the benefit of the capitalists.

The Vice President union-focused policy detailed above is the closest the presumptive nominee gets to discussing “a fair and balanced economy.”

The difference between Vice-President Biden and the progressive agenda is that the Vice President does not vilify the billionaire class, nor does he see Wall Street as working against the interests of Main Street.

He agrees that there are some bad actors, and his proposal calls for holding them personally accountable for acting in bad faith, but he neglects to connect the interests of the billionaire class with the government’s obstructions to progressive action. Put simply, the Vice President is not, in Bernie’s words, ready to “take on corporate America or Wall Street.”

Biden & The Second Bill of Rights

By comparing Vice-President Biden’s “Vision for America” with Favreau’s survey of what members of the Democratic party broadly support, we’ve discovered that the Vice President is exactly where many of us on the left suspected: ready to take incremental steps that, generally speaking, maintain the status quo while also trying to do some good.

His policies align with his message: a vote for Vice President Biden is a vote to return to President Obama’s America. Unfortunately, President Obama’s America does not align with my personal vision for what the country ought to be. Come November, I’ll hold my nose and “Vote Blue No Matter Who” because I agree with every other sensible American that President Trump has to be removed from office, but I wish more Americans recognized that we need to be making a lot more than incremental progress if we’re to survive the environmental, economic, and health-related cataclysms still to come.

Categories
life politics religion & atheism

The Evil One(s) Behind COVID-19

In her classic work, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman shows how people who lived during the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which struck on All Saint’s Day and did particular damage to Lisbon’s many churches, considered the natural disaster to be a true manifestation of evil. Nowadays, we tend to equate evil with human cruelty and earthquakes with plate tectonics, but there are still vestiges of this 18th century way of thinking among us.

We see it in the lessons of the Presidential Cabinet’s Bible study leader who believes the COVID-19 pandemic is a divine punishment for America’s sins of godlessness, environmentalism, homosexuality, and depravity. But we also see it in the widespread urge to scapegoat Asian-Americans for what the President of the United States has repeatedly called “the Chinese Flu,” as well as the spread of conspiracy theories that hold half-a-dozen people or groups accountable for the pandemic, from the financier George Soros to the Democratic Party to 5G technology to the Chinese government to Bill Gates to the Rothschild family.

This need to find a “guilty” party is as old as the species itself, finding its origin in our species’ proclivity to see agency behind every natural phenomena. In his book, The Natural History of Religion, the philosopher David Hume wrote, “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.”

Evolutionarily speaking, this instinctual urge to imagine what caused certain phenomena has benefitted us. It allows us to detect the difference between the wind’s rustling of the grass and a predator’s stealthy movement through the plains, but even more, it allows us to see elements of the natural world as being in possession of agency — or as Daniel Dennett, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, puts it in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, we adopt the intentional stance when it comes to describing and predicting the behavior of others.

The intentional stance is the ability to treat animate objects in the world as being “agents with limited beliefs, specific desires, and enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires.” Some theorists call this the “theory of mind” — i.e., the belief that other creatures (including other humans) have a mind, which allows us to then imagine what that mind might believe about the world and what it might want, which in turn allows us to manipulate the other’s mind towards our own ends. Lying is an example of this: we imagine that the other person’s mind has a certain belief about the world, a belief we don’t want them to have for whatever reason, and so we give them false information to manipulate their belief and accomplish our own goal; but so is our relationships with our dogs: we imagine our dogs have minds that love us and are loyal to us, and so we act as if that is true.

Humans are not the only animals who adopt the intentional stance — some mother birds will pretend to have a broken wing in order to distract a predator from attacking the fledgelings in her nest; other creatures use fantastic displays to convince potential partners of their fitness and health, regardless of their actual fitness and health; dogs and monkeys will bluff others to get access to a preferred toy; etc. — but humans are the undeniable masters of it.

The entire social fabric of us naked apes comes from our expert ability to adopt the intentional stance. “We experience the world,” Dennett writes, “as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies.”

He continues, “So powerful is our innate urge to adopt the intentional stance that we have real difficulty turning it off when it is no longer appropriate.” Dennett and other researchers postulate that the religious impulse of human beings has its origins in this urge: “Much as our ancestors would have loved to predict the weather by figuring out what it wanted and what beliefs it harbored about them, it simply didn’t work.”

As the COVID-19 virus winds its way through the human species, our urge to provide it with an intentional stance remains — except now that we’re guided by an understanding of viruses as “teetering on the boundaries of what is considered life”, we’re far too sophisticated to give COVID-19 an intentional stance, thus we channel our urge towards the creation of conspiracy theories that allow us to establish some kind of power and control over what is, quite naturally, an uncontrollable situation.

The historical post mortem of the COVID-19 pandemic will surely find fault in the behaviors, decisions, and indecisions of hundreds of government officials all throughout the world, not to mention the willful ignorance of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens and the malicious intentions of dozens of self-serving capitalists and authoritarians, but it will not be able to name a single agent or group of agents as the primary cause of COVID-19, for indeed, its cause is not some evil one who wishes to do us harm, but evolution itself — the mindless, intention-less process by which the living and “the teetering on living” reproduce and survive.

Categories
religion & atheism

A First Epistle

A glorious dance given rise to, experienced — not observed; a joyous movement paired in time; a delightful entanglement — this we all have known: a tapped foot, a nodded head, a tango and a salsa; the swaying of our body within a crowd. Then life appeared. We have seen it; we have testified to it. We proclaim it without doubt.

Some claim it appeared from the Father, His Word come to life. Others claim it appeared ex nihilo: subjectivity as a successful strategy, refined over time and against all odds, demonstrating beyond doubt the success of the strategy. Still others maintain it is all illusion, a temporary sojourn of a bodiless mind into the pixelated details of a river — no life beyond life, no life above life, no life but life; and the confusion of the ten thousand things.

But we proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may share in our joy. We write to you to make our joy complete.

This then is the message we have heard…

In truth, we have heard no message, though we listen for it constantly; instead, we experienced it. It came as the glorious Yes!.

When asked His name, God answered, “I am.” When we experienced it, we did not ask for a name — we only asked if it was real, and in return, we received a glorious Yes!, not through our ears but through our hearts, which engaged in deep communion, sharing a sense of touch where no touching is to be done; we found each other deep in the core of material space, distinguishing each other from the ten thousand things, sharing a sense of the other and of the being together, two undoubtables in the intimacy of a quantum wave…Yes!, and in that Yes!, a declaration beyond doubt that, indeed, “I am.”

We became lost in possibilities but never lost in doubt. Beyond the glorious Yes!, confirmed and reconfirmed at multiple points in time, the only message we discerned was: do your best. The tone was that of a football coach — reasonable, but with firm expectations — and it punished or rewarded based on our ability to meet the expectation. The limit: do your best.

Our failure resulted in punishments, expressed as disappointments; but successes resulted in rewards, received as excessive kindnesses.

We failed more than once. We succeeded more than once. Anyone who tells you different is a liar.

Some tell you the Son will advocate on your behalf when it comes to the judgements of the Father. Others tell you failure to do your duty will cause you to try again, but from a harder starting point.

But we tell you: do not desire success, nor fear failure, nor seek advocates on your behalf: the disappointment of the glorious Yes! does no harm; the excessive kindnesses of the glorious Yes! bring joy.

The glorious Yes! does not require allegiance, nor demand sacrifice; it does not threaten, nor make bold proclamations; it does not appreciate gifts, nor expect prayers. It is as you are: a successful strategy resulting in a subjectivity.

We have all been so lucky.

Categories
life

Where I’m At With COVID-19

My daughter’s school closed last week, as did mine, as did my wife’s (three different schools; three different closures). My wife and I continue to teach online, working through Google’s G Suite for Education and Zoom. My daughter, a first grader, completes some of her assignments online, communicating with her teacher through SeeSaw, using a variety of online games to work on math and reading, doing yoga with Cosmic Kids on YouTube, and engaging in plenty of independent learning activities, such as drawing, reading, and building with LEGOs. In addition, my wife and I take time away from our students to help our daughter with science, music, gym, etc. (yesterday afternoon, for example, I helped her begin a personal learning project wherein she will, through the development of a coherent slideshow and accompanied presentation, persuade her mother to let us get a puppy — but I digress).

On the second or third day of our schools being closed, my daughter’s schedule called for social studies. I’d received an email that morning from PBS promoting a two-year-old episode of American Experience titled Influenza 1918, which focuses on the 1918 flu pandemic. I asked my daughter if she was interested in watching it for her social studies class. She said, “Yes,” and we sat down and watched it together.

There’s a lot to digest in the documentary. Caused by an H1N1 virus, the pandemic killed over 50 million people worldwide. In one month in 1918 — the month of October — over 195,000 Americans died from the virus (for comparison’s sake, the total number of American military deaths in all of World War I is 116,516). Towns throughout America were forced to bury their dead in mass graves. Children watched their parents die; parents watched their children die. Cousins were lost to orphanages; families and dreams disintegrated.

As I hear the governor of my state declare a “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order, I think back to the Influenza 1918 documentary, and I remember the way I had to describe to my daughter what a mass burial was, and I see my wife in the other room giving me a look like, “What the hell are you showing our seven-year-old daughter?”, but then I think of my daughter, later in the week, days after we watched it, standing in the door of our bathroom, telling me how lucky we are because we don’t live in 1918.

I also think about the day this week when she and I went out for a walk and we came across two of her best friends playing together and I had to tell her that no, she couldn’t go play with them, and how she listened to me, but how she also put her head down and walked home in silence, and how as soon as we entered the house, she ran up to her room in tears, not even stopping to take off her coat, and how I followed her upstairs to comfort her, and how she collapsed on her bed with her face in her pillow and her knees pulled up tight, and how she didn’t even argue with me about it or scream at me to “go away!”, but instead how she told me she “gets it,” she knows why she can’t play with her friends, but how it still makes her sad and she just needs to cry, and how I walked back downstairs to the sound of her wailing into her pillow, and how later, when she got quiet, I was able to go back upstairs and help her take off her coat, and how, after a good cry, she was ready to go on with her day.

I think about my seventy-two year old parents, one of whom is immunocompromised. I think about my father needing to keep himself busy, and venturing out to a hardware store for some item that will help him do just that, but I also think about all the other people in his hometown who have to keep themselves busy and who also need to go to the hardware store to get an item to do just that, and I imagine all of the people they’ve interacted with and been breathed on by, and like a terrifying movie, I watch the virus move from person to person until it touches my father’s hand, which soon touches my mother’s hand, and soon…

I think about my mother just wanting to spend time with her grandchildren, and their governor’s shelter in place order.

I think about my students, teenagers who have already experienced so much trauma, now being forced to stay inside with their families, some of whom contributed to that trauma. I think about my students’ parents, many of whom are single mothers, now robbed of even unsteady employment, and the number of mouths they need to feed.

I think about my coworkers who are home alone, my cousins and uncles and aunts, my in-laws, my friends across the country, and the loneliness, pain, and anxiety that so many of us are feeling.

But then I think about those mass graves, and with my seven-year-old daughter, I feel thankful to be alive.

Categories
reviews writing advice

Show & Tell

The prime directive given to creative writers — “Show, don’t tell” — is a shorthand way of saying that good writing reveals through action and dialogue, and not through exposition. It is based on the idea that readers want to interpret a text with minimal interference from the author. For example, instead of being told that a young child is precocious, readers prefer to see how the child acts and talks and then decide for themselves whether there is evidence of precociousness. This prime directive can serve as the boundary between good and not-good writing: good writing shows; not-good writing tells.

While there are instances when a writer will decide it is necessary to tell the reader something, even then, good writers will still use the prime directive to guide how they’re going to tell it. Take, for example, the following passage by Phillip Roth’s Plot Against America:

On a Saturday a couple of weeks earlier I’d gone into the cellar with my mother and helped her empty the cartons full of Alvin’s belongings… Everything washable, my mother scrubbed on the washboard in the divided cellar tub, soaping in one sink, rinsing in the other, and then feeding a piece at a time into the ringer while I cranked the handle to force out the water. … One evening a few days before Alvin’s scheduled return [from a veteran’s hospital, where he was recovering from losing a leg in battle] I shined his pair of brown shoes and his pair of black shoes, ignoring as best I could any uncertainty I had as to whether shining all four of them was still necessary. To make those shoes gleam, to get his good clothes clean, to neatly pile the dresser drawer with his freshly washed things—and all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.

Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America, pp. 131-133

The key element in this passage is the “prayer imploring the household gods to protect” the narrator’s home “from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.” The prayer takes place in the form of the family’s act of cleaning and preparing the clothes of the returning soldier.

To say this is the key element is to say it motivates the entire passage; it is to assert the prayer as the reason the passage exists. As proof, note how Roth tells his reader how the cleaning must be understood: He refuses to leave the significance of the cleaning to the reader’s interpretation. At the end of the passage, if the reader doesn’t understand that the cleaning is prayer, then the passage isn’t worth anything; the prayer is not something that can be left out the picture.

But even when Roth chooses to ignore the prime directive and tells his reader that the cleaning is a metaphorical form of prayer, he also follows the prime directive and shows them, choosing words with strong illustrative power: “all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg” (emphasis added, 133). Imagine this passage without such power: “all of it simply a prayer, a prayer asking for protection from the missing leg.” Not only is the writing flat, but it loses its connection to the story, and in the processes, loses the story’s grip on the reader.

This passage comes in the middle of a novel that imagines what the early 1940s might have been like if, instead of re-electing Franklin Roosevelt as the President of the United States, the American public elected isolationist (and Nazi sympathizer) Charles Lindbergh. When President Lindbergh keeps the United States out of World War II by recognizing Germany’s dominion over Europe, a number of angry Americans (and American Jews—Alvin included) go to Canada to enlist in the fight against the Nazis. After Alvin loses his leg in battle, he returns to the narrator’s family, angry at the world. He resigns himself to a life of crime and disappears for much of the novel. When he returns years later, he gets in an explosive (and climactic) fight with the narrator’s father, a fight that demolishes the entire house.

[ Despite all the family’s worst fears about the increase in brazen anti-Semitism in President Lindbergh’s America, this fight between Alvin and his uncle is the only violence that infiltrates the narrator’s household: one Jew fights another Jew over the ardor of the other’s Jewishness, as if Roth is suggesting that the only anti-Semitism a Jew must truly fear is the anti-Semitism of the Jews.

[Of course, Roth knows the truth isn’t as simple as this, which is why an exiled Jewish neighbor and an exiled Jewish family member suffer at the hands of Gentiles, as if Roth is qualifying himself by saying an individual Jew is most likely to be hurt by other Jews, though no one (in their right mind) can deny the agony inflicted upon the Jewish race by the non-Jewish world.]

The passage of the housecleaning prayer foreshadows the climactic fight wherein Alvin’s “vengeful fury” is unleashed and the “five humble rooms and all that they contained” are destroyed. Though Roth chooses to ignore the prime directive when telling his readers the housecleaning is a metaphor for prayer, he tells them using words that show—even if only faintly—the climax of his entire story. His powerful word choices throughout the passage illustrate its deep connection to the narrative and maintains the interest — and more importantly, the imagination — of his reader.

That Phillip Roth is a good writer, few people need telling. But it never hurts to show them why.