Author Archives: Barbara Sutton

How Does a Moment Last Forever?

Back at the start of the pandemic, one strain of the thinking internet’s insatiable need for copy was served by warnings against making a metaphor of the coronavirus. Forget that it came from China, that it was happening in an election year, that Trump had dismantled the National Security Council directorate charged with protecting us against such threats. Don’t take the bait.

Most of these exhortations were against casting COVID-19 as payback from some unknown dispensary of karma. Paul Elie in the New Yorker reminded us that Susan Sontag in the New Yorker had the final word on illness as metaphor in 1978 and again in 1989. She poked massive holes in this human impulse, so we mustn’t narrativize the pandemic as we narativize our individual lives.

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The Best Someone

Sometime during the COVID spring, I was walking behind a young couple and overheard the guy ask the girl, “Did you hear the Luke Combs cover of ‘Fast Car’?” I wasn’t familiar with Luke Combs, but I was surprised to realize that the Tracy Chapman song had remained in the pop vernacular for more than three decades.

As a Black lesbian folk singer appealing to white audiences, Chapman was a pop anomaly. But her song is a perfect slice of Americana. I heard her busking “Fast Car” in the Harvard Square subway station a few times in the 1980s. I remember hearing it once from another part of the station, and the reiteration of “be someone, be someone” in that large space seemed portentous to my young self.

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Urbi et Orbi

It’s hard to believe our COVID summer is already over. In New York, the weeks failed to coalesce as a season, and most people got sick of being told they should be either buying a house far away or pining for Italy while stuck in a state park. The New York Times offered beautiful photos of empty Italian streets but also an update on how businesses in Capri and other Italian tourist destinations miss “the interaction, the energy, the optimism, the shopping style” of rich Americans. (Funny thing: New York City’s small businesses miss “the shopping style” of rich Americans too!)

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Masks

Most of us have a long history of seeing seatback videos or printed illustrations of what to do if the plane you are traveling in experiences a sudden drop in cabin pressure. Usually it’s a mother logically securing her own breathing device before affixing a dangling oxygen mask onto the child beside her. Before March, I doubt anyone watched those videos with anger, thinking “No airline is gonna make me put on a mask!”

As the life-giving conduit of oxygen, masks have long represented protection amid catastrophe. Infantrymen in World War I lived in mortal dread of the shout for “Gas!” Gas masks became the symbolic escape hatch of battlefield carnage well beyond the next world war. Scuba divers and snorkelers, astronauts in Ad Astra—they all seem to “get” the importance of masks. And of course the masks that protect people from contamination on both sides of a medical procedure. From the perspective of science, it’s complete logic, this effort to prevent possible death. It’s hard to imagine politicization.

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Cold Comfort

Early in COVID lockdown this spring, Americans enjoyed watching penguins pause their role as aquarium attractions to temporarily become commanders of the gaze. First they waddled the halls of Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium to have a gander at their fellow marine life. Then another waddle from the Kansas City Zoo ventured to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for a look-see.

Suddenly we thought a lot about animals captive in zoos because we had ourselves become captive. The parallels could not be starker: the primary complaint of zookeepers is the incessant drudgery of shoveling out feces; our own obsession at that time was hoarding toilet paper.

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Alone Together

During the darkest hours of a crisis that is ongoing everywhere except the now open-for-business United States, Queen Elizabeth delivered a message of uplift. She reminded her people that “the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humored resolve and of fellow-feeling still characterize this country.” In America, the only thing we can say about fellow-feelers is that we have two warring factions.

New York City, on the other hand, has always managed to pass as a diverse (if spectacularly unequal) assemblage of fellow-feelers. In challenges before this pandemic—the Great Recession, the 2003 Blackout, 9/11, broken windows policing, the squeegee years, and being told to drop dead by Washington—New York bucked itself up on chutzpah and a paradoxical DNA strand of sanguine and sangfroid. After the nation lost its innocence and New York a matching pair of monuments, our President and his matching Mayor went big on shopping and building back taller than ever to stick it to the terrorists. We would crowd into subway cars and Macy’s elevators and go to two Broadway shows a night.

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Count Yourself Lucky

At a time in this crisis that now seems ages ago, New Yorker columnist Masha Gessen wrote about why she was not a bad person for leaving New York City during a pandemic.

Her daughter had asked if the family was going to be like “those people”—the “rich white people who leave the besieged city because they can.” Her mother’s justification on March 30: “If we got very ill, we wanted to be those people who were not stressing this already overtaxed city, taking up hospital beds that were needed by people who didn’t have the option of leaving.”

The family’s destination was Falmouth, Massachusetts, landing at a time when local residents on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket were asking fleeing New Yorkers to stay away and not infect them.

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Odio, ergo sum

In a speech at Notre Dame Law School last October, Bill Barr, the U.S. Attorney General, made clear that his conservative Catholicism and definition of democracy were one and the same. Like Republican fundamentalists since the Reagan era, Barr decried “moral relativism” as the cause of every social ill, insisting that the Constitution’s framers believed that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”

Leaving aside the question of what Barr means by “free government,” his thinking leaves aside a lot of people in this country. In 2019, Gallup polling found that 21% of Americans had no religion. That’s one in five people whom Barr considers incompatible with free government. I’m sure many in Barr’s audience were hardline conservative Catholics, and I’m sure that the “religious people” he thinks the framers had in mind were not Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.

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The Tripping Point

A recent House Financial Services Committee hearing provided a brief moment of clarity in regard to both Mark Zuckerberg and America’s cultural quagmire. As the Facebook founder answered questions about political advertising and his proposed cryptocurrency, a congressman’s comparison of Zuckerberg to Donald Trump provoked a reaction that went viral.

Zuckerberg’s physical façade is a billboard when it comes to communicating this important point: rarely has he had to put up with anything that’s made him squirm. His forehead, in particular, suggests the Great White Plains of upper-middle-class access to things like high-performance front-load washers. Whatever nasty CSI was unfolding among the world’s demimonde, Mark Zuckerberg—just laundered and encased by central air—continued clacking code on a taut keyboard.

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Are You Being Served?

I was recently sitting between friends, a couple, at a movie theater, waiting out the seemingly endless stream of commercials for Peak TV filler. The he of the couple would lean across me to whisper “Yes” or “No” to his partner in regard to giving some series a go. They were usually in alignment, but when it came to Amazon’s Carnival Row, he vehemently declared “NO.” She worked in theater lighting; “Yes,” she countered. He was resolute: “Nothing—with—wings.”

His reaction owed to the fact that he taught an undergraduate short story writing course in which his students were solely interested in fantasy—lots of dragons and interspecies wing-flappers, lots of GOT homage. (This is a school where the tuition is well over $50,000.) His students explained their decisions as partly lucrative (“there’s a lot of money in YA fantasy”) and partly to express themselves, to put their “rampant imagination” on display. When responding in class to a story about a gender-fluid elf, my friend brought the Wrath of Kahn down upon himself by asking “Aren’t all elves gender fluid?”

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