Incoming Feed Items

Fuck you Facebook. That was the first thought I had when I woke up this morning. Followed by: What ministry is Mark Zuckerberg volunteering to manage for the dictators of the world? All I could think of is how Orwell's Ministry of Love is about hate. So what are we creating here? The Ministry of Empowerment to ensure the oppression of the most vulnerable? Lovely. But maybe you, dear reader, have a better Ministry name for their new organizational identity?

Fulvia Fringuellotti and Thomas Kroen

Billie Sweeney is a trans journalist who was an editor for the New York Times until last year. Here, she recalls the losing battle for the soul of the paper of record.

As I was picking up my car from the mechanic last week, the maskless man ringing me up from behind the plexiglass gestured to my mask and asked a by-now familiar question: “Are you sick or trying not to get sick?” He said it with kind curiosity, with none of the ridicule or hostility that so often meets people “still” wearing masks in public. I happily replied that I was trying not to get sick.

He then shared the following information with me: others at the shop had been pressuring him to remove the plexiglass barrier that barely separated him from the customers, but he refused. A friend of his this year died of “it”; the mechanics at the shop are constantly out sick with “it”; and one mechanic lost his leg due to a blood clot after being intubated for three months with “it.” Not once was the word “Covid” mentioned, but we both knew what we were talking about. It had ravaged people he knew, and he wasn’t willing to get rid of the last protective barrier that separated him from the customers who come in sick all the time. In his own way, he insisted on continuing to acknowledge the pandemic by protecting himself the best way he knew how.

My 101 year-old grandmother, Letizia, is currently living in 1930’s fascist Italy under the reign of Benito Mussolini. She bikes to the outskirts of Florence most days to forage forgotten vegetables for her underfed siblings and huddles with them each night in bed to stay warm. She is Roman Catholic and so unthreatened by the recently adopted Manifesto della razza, which stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship as Nazism was emerging elsewhere in Europe. But she is desperate to escape her family and the deteriorating economic conditions in Florence, and she’s pregnant, so she absconds to Zurich to marry an American Jew.

We know she is in the midst of this because she mutters it under her breath in Italian, the only language she remembers, while living in the Memory Care unit of a geriatric care facility in Los Angeles, California. It is 2024 and nobody there speaks Italian except for her children who visit her when they can. Our favorite nurse speaks Haitian French which works for a while until Nonna forgets French, too. English is long-gone. Multiple waves of Covid have passed through her facility, and her own body, but somehow she endures each infection even as others in the facility do not. It is unclear what, exactly, is being cared for at Memory Care.

I laughed when I saw the caption on Them Magazine’s most recent post about queer mutual-aid efforts in the wake of the devastating North Carolina flooding: “You know our systems are broke when 5 gay DJs can bring 10k of supplies back before the national guard does.” The same self-deprecating spirit has suffused my organizing in Clean Air Club, too: why is a group of unserious and untrained queer artists doing a better job at public health than the CDC, the credentialed public health experts, and the doctors combined? Something’s not adding up.

Many people in the Covid-cautious community have noticed this, of course, and rightfully pointed out the injustice of it — the entire weight of pandemic public health is being carried on the shoulders of some of the people most marginalized and harmed by Covid’s spread. We’re living and dying in the midst of widespread institutional failure, and we are picking up the pieces without any support. The only way to cope with how bleak our conditions are is to joke about it with one another; to laugh at the fact that the heroes are indeed in uniform, but the uniform is bedazzled and worn by someone doing the splits in full drag.

Blaming people has gotten an especially bad rap during the pandemic. Public health officials emphasize the ineffectiveness of blaming people who won’t wear a mask, encouraging us instead to sympathize with their desire to “return to normal.” ACT UP New York chastised us to fight “institutions not individuals,” forgetting apparently that institutions only survive on the backs of millions of people willing to support them. And it’s commonplace today to hear organizers and activists portraying blame as antithetical to the bonds of community, tearing apart a social fabric we worked so hard to weave together. In sum, individual blame is widely regarded today as a toxic manifestation of all that is corrosive to moral life.

I recently sat down with Johanna Hedva to discuss their long-awaited essay collection, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom.

Johanna is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches and now lives in Los Angeles and Berlin. Their work has received international acclaim, none more so than “Sick Woman Theory” which took the world by storm and upended our notion of chronic illness, politics, and everything in between.

I was lucky enough to attend UCLA at the same time as Johanna and get to witness and immerse myself in their many groundbreaking performances and installations around the city. We share this history, an affection for theory without preciousness, and a desire to see writing about disability move beyond the constraints of ableist expectations. Below is our conversation we had to mark the release of their stunning new collection.

The best description of integrity that I’ve ever come across is in Hannah Arendt’s searing account of the Holocaust, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” In it, she writes not of the Nazi regime’s unfathomable political failures but rather on the surprising personal failures to which most ordinary citizens gave in quite easily. They were living in the midst of “the total collapse of normal moral standards,” and they chose complicity with evil rather than rebellion against it. The bureaucracy of evil depended on ordinary citizens, and most were shockingly willing to step into line.

“Most” is not “all,” though, as there were some who refused collaboration, often at great cost to themselves (up to and including death itself). Though they did not rise up in successful rebellion, they refused to participate in the machinations of Nazism. What separated these people from the rest? Arendt’s speculation is worth reproducing in full:

On May 24, 2020, the front page of the New York Times read, “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss.” The names of some of these deaths were printed below the headline, so numerous that they blended together into six gray columns of grief. A closer look at any spot on the columns revealed a stranger’s name and a few precious and inadequate words about their life, a portal into an entire world unknown and irreplaceable. “Romi Cohn, 91, New York City, saved 56 Jewish families from the Gestapo.” “Lorena Borjas, 59, New York City, transgender immigrant activist.” “Sandra Lee deBlecourt, 61, Maryland, loved taking care of people.” The entries go on and on, all 1,000 of them representing only one percent of the dead. These were the first Americans to die of Covid, and we were a nation in mourning.

I don’t think I’m the only one who experienced a distortion in the ordinary pace of time when the pandemic first hit. I wasn’t a healthcare worker or a frontline worker, and so I was not confronted with the urgency of the emergent; I was teaching in a university and finishing my dissertation, and so my work moved online and time slowed to a crawl. I was lucky that my days were repetitive, their edges blurring into one another rather than welcoming the tragedies that visited so many other families. Things were mercifully uneventful, and I did the best I could to cope with the uncertainty by biding my time. I felt as if I were in a holding pattern, waiting for this thing to pass.

As the months wore on and my life trajectory began impatiently insisting on itself, on its own forward progress, I began placating it with the reassurance that we would resume normal operations after this all ends. I began fantasizing about what I would do after — the dinner parties, the visits to family, the conversations in my ceramic studio that I missed so dearly. All hope was cast ahead into an unspecified future. And the present became an increasingly gaping no-man’s-land.

It’s a common refrain today that those who have given up on Covid precautions should not entirely be blamed. The government has hidden the true risks of Covid infections; lied about its principal avenue of transmission (our shared air); and engaged in a campaign of getting people “back to work” so comprehensively, and so filled with half-truths and misdirections about public health, that it can only be understood as propaganda. And propagandized people, this refrain suggests, are not to blame for what they do not know. It is institutions, not individuals, whom we should go after (see below, for example, a controversial and now-deleted tweet from ACT UP New York).

One of the tremendous frustrations experienced by those of us who are still cautious to avoid Covid is how little other people know about our reasons for doing so. Most people don’t know that we’re back to 1 million Covid infections per day in the United States; that Covid is a vascular disease impacting every organ system in the body; that Long Covid is reaching a public health crisis. There is an entire body of scientific literature on the effects of Covid on the body, publicly available to anyone with access to Google, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. But this is a picture that only a minority of people have decided to see.

Making matters worse, this widespread ignorance doesn’t just exist as a gap in our collective knowledge, waiting to be filled once the relevant discoveries are made. No, this gap has been filled with a substantive not-knowing, a cartoon of what kind of illness Covid is, colored in with empirically false claims that minimize its virulence, severity, and capacity for inflicting disability on us all. “Covid is just like a cold!” “Kids don’t get Covid!” This is an ignorance that has something to say. It is an ignorance that can’t stand itself, so it fills in the gaps and declares itself knowledge.

I think most of us who are still careful to avoid Covid have had some version of the following conversation:

Me: Is there a particular reason you stopped taking pandemic precautions?

Them: Well the pandemic isn’t as bad as it used to be.

Me: Right, and is there some piece of evidence that you looked at and felt was in support of that belief?

Them: No… I just shifted when everyone else shifted.

Me: Does that strike you as a good reason?

Them: Not really. But I have a strong sense that I’m not wrong for doing so.

What is striking about conversations like these is that often they take place with people who are otherwise quite committed to holding evidence-based beliefs. Maybe they have a sign in their yard that begins, “In this house… we believe in science.” Or maybe they themselves are scientists. The point is that they are what I would consider reasonable people. And yet, they hold not only unreasonable beliefs but also unsupported beliefs — that is, beliefs that reveal themselves to have no evidentiary foundation. It’s this latter fact that intrigues me the most.

It’s time for something new. After a year and a half of running Clean Air Club, I’m craving a slower outlet for more long-form writing on the pandemic. My favorite posts I’ve done there have always been the ones that center slow, critical analysis; a new way of seeing what’s right in front of us. But the pace of social media, which asks us to condense, synthesize, and cut, is not conducive to this. Where I have been able to bring a critical perspective to the posts I write for Clean Air Club, I have nonetheless been left with a feeling that they are still truncated and begging for a place to sprawl out — that if only I had more space, more pages, more minutes, I could get the full idea on the page. In the spirit of sprawl, then, I find myself here.

Introduction

Who was Vida Goldstein? Learn more about Vida Goldstein, a leading suffragist, feminist and social changemaker in Australia in the 1900s.

Read Article

Vida Goldstein was many things:

• a leading suffragist (they’re the non-violent form of suffragettes),
• a Victorian (as in the state of Australia),
• the first woman to stand for national parliament anywhere in the Western world,
• a rousing speaker,
• a peace campaigner through World War I and
• a lifelong advocate for social justice. 

Vida is best known for her suffrage work, but her world and her actions were broader even than that. 

Vida Goldstein was born in 1869 in Portland, Victoria, and was a product of her upbringing and the support of her unconventional family. Her sister Elsie, for example, was married to the somewhat eccentric activist Henry Howard Champion, and they ran the fabulously named Book Lovers Library, which was a Melbourne institution until 1936.