COVID Chronicles XXI: It’s baaaack… Joy and Horror and Maybe a Ray of Hope….

 COVID-19; University Administrative Responses; Junior faculty and women at risk; psychology of pandemic response; psychoanalysis of pandemic response..

What a joy it has been to be back in the classroom the past two weeks.  Frankly, I was unprepared for how much fun it would be.  For a year and a half I have missed the hum and buzz in the background of the classroom as I set up to teach and field individual questions and comments from students while others – many of them – talk in the background.

I had also missed the back and forth of a live classroom interaction – being able to see and read students' body language – to be able to call on them when they are incubating a response but don’t yet have it in final form, but are itching to be engaged.  The classroom feels alive again, even if we are all a bit muffled by our masks. 

It has felt like what being at Opening Day must feel like for true baseball fans.  Throwing off the winter of our long COVID doldrums, we could once again hear the crack of the bats (OK, maybe it was the crack of someone’s bubble gum) and feel the promise of summer following spring (OK, we started early in August to get out of school by Thanksgiving in order to beat what we assumed in spring would an early winter spike in cases – if one were to occur – so it is the cool fall nights that we are looking forward to).

Our stats looked good going into the first inning (to beat this analogy to death).  Eighty five per cent of our faculty and staff are vaccinated as is 77% of the student body.  Our new president announced that we would be the first local school to require immunization before students could register for spring semester.  Oh, there was much joy in Mudville.

But in the top of the second inning, with our best pitcher on the mound, we ran straight into trouble.  Actually it was the second week of school and we had 11, then 23, then 51, then 87, then 123, then 140 cases reported among our students on successive days.  Though our faculty and staff numbers have stayed relatively low, we are suddenly reeling.

On Wednesday, the latest day for which we have stats at this point, I sat with 7 of 8 students in a small seminar class that met for two and one half hours.  The eighth student, the roommate of one of the others in the class, did not come to class because they had “the sniffles” and decided to get tested rather than come to class.  Bravo, I thought, that is the responsible thing to do, though I also naively assumed the chances of their testing positive were nil because the data always lags a few days as we collect it and “the sniffles” hardly seemed to qualify as something to worry about.

Well, you guessed it, the roommate tested positive.  Ugh.  Am I a carrier?  I am masked when I am teaching, but my glasses fog up when I breathe – clearly stuff is getting around my mask.  Am I now passing things along to the students in my (for our campus) relatively large lecture class the next day?  What should I do? 

Oh, btw, two students stayed home from that class because they were in quarantine.

The guidance from the lame duck and tone deaf university Provost arrived on Friday in the form of an email to all faculty.  In it we were encouraged to be flexible in responding to student needs.  We were encouraged to support our students who need accommodations because they are in quarantine and a variety of options were offered but we were explicitly instructed that moving to an all remote zoom class was not available to us as an option without the dean’s approval and our having completed a course in teaching pure remote classes – something most of us have not done (though most of us having been teaching in split classrooms and/or remote only for the past year).    

In other words, we were to be flexible, but the administration would not be flexible in allowing us to make decisions about how to assess what is in the best pedagogical and health interests of our students.

In a brief conversation with our Dean, where I made it clear that I would NOT be asking permission for any actions I would take in regard to making decisions about what is best for my students, she noted that none of us anticipated that this surge would occur.  Indeed, this seems to be a much more virulent uptick in cases than anything we experienced last year, and none of us were vaccinated then. 

I get it.  We are unprepared.  We are making decisions on the run.

I also get it.  I am in a position of privilege.  I am tenured.  I know the Dean personally.  I can tell the Dean what I will be doing without real fear of reprisal.  Everyone in my home is vaccinated.  And I am not caring for an infant at home.

Junior faculty who are not tenured are likely to have children at home.  Some of them have had daycare cancelled without notice because their children’s teachers have tested positive.  If I had an 18 month old that I had to care for alone – without family in the city because I had moved here for a job and I was told that I could not teach from home – and the university could terminate my contract because I am not tenured and we were living through times when there are concerns about the budget – what would I do?

I know that I would lose sleep over whatever it was that I was considering.

The University is mirroring the Culture as a whole in putting its youngest, female members most at risk of additional strain (and illness – we are in much closer contact with young children who are not yet eligible for vaccination) as the pandemic drags on and spikes again.

Meanwhile our state legislature is trying to pass laws that would prevent requiring inoculations and mandatory masking and our governor, who was an early leader – and an admirable one – in responding to the pandemic, fears he cannot lead because his own party, of which he is nominally the head, is at odds with him because they are striking a populist note rather than convincing their constituents that we need to pull together to beat this thing.

A writer in the Atlantic has taken the position that the end game of this pandemic is that COVID is so threatening now because it is novel COVID-19.  Once it passes into the annals of being the same old COVID-19 – once our bodies have learned to how to react to it either through inoculations or through repeated exposure to it – it will likely be like the flu (which was once much more lethal than it currently is) and the common cold – something that knocks us out for a few days, but is generally not life threatening.  We are trying to get from here to there and if we take precautions, we can get from here to there minimizing additional loss of life, economic peril, and creation of new and more problematic strains of the disease.

Oddly, our system of self-government, on a local, state, regional and national level seems, at first glance, to continue to be allied against our doing what is in our best interests.

Fortunately, my department is not going along with the herd.  In the last two days, junior members of the department have begun work on a communication system so that we can share resources, support each other both tangibly (teach each other’s classes if need be, deliver groceries and food if needed) and socially (have each other’s backs if individual choose not to follow stupid directives from the administration).

One of the concerns that I expressed to the Dean was that the administration’s failure to support especially our junior faculty is against our long term interests of the University.  We function best when we support each other in the difficult work that we do.  Fortunately our junior faculty are stepping up and doing that, despite the apparent vacuum in leadership in some parts of the administration.  There is hope yet – we might build a new culture out of the ashes of the old one that mirrors or even outshines what we once had and thought was pretty good - until it was tested.  We might actually emerge stronger from this maelstrom as we cast off old top down ways of doing things and take matters into our own hands.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

  

The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Madness is at Our Core

 Psychoanalysis of the vegetarian by Han Kang; Psychology; Schizophrenia in the Vegetarian; Psychosis in the Vegetarian; Analysis of the Vegetarian

The vegetarian at the center of this story is a Korean woman whose meat-eating family cannot understand her decision to refuse to eat meat.  They are right to be worried – her shift, precipitated by a vivid dream filled with the blood of dead animals – is not just a choice of what she will and will not eat, but the beginning of a slide into madness. 

Young-hye, the vegetarian, could be dismissed as simply being a person with catatonic schizophrenia.  All of the symptoms that are needed are present.  She can become rigid.  She is worried that any activity on her part will cause damage to others.  Though this now rather rare variant of schizophrenia is rarely seen in its full splendor because the major tranquilizers knock out the most characteristic symptoms quite quickly and effectively, the diagnosis is a poster child for the problem with modern psychological nosology (classification of disorders).  As is often the case in the DSM, a term that describes a pattern of symptoms is used to identify a disorder, but then it is also used as if it were the cause of the disorder. 

Young-hye could be dismissed in the following way:  Who is she?  She is a catatonic schizophrenic.  Why?  Because she has the same symptoms as other catatonic schizophrenics.  What causes her to be this way?  Catatonic schizophrenia.  Fortunately this book, unlike the DSM, does not do reduce her to a diagnosis.  Quite the opposite.  It invites us to imagine the person who is at the heart of the madness.

In this book, we come to appreciate the complexity of the central character almost exclusively through the eyes of three important people in her life, each of whom misunderstands her in his or her own unique way.  Each of these people is also, in his or her own way, every bit as mad as Young-hye, though none of them will be hospitalized for any length of time and none of them will be treated.

We get direct access to Young-hye’s dreams and little bits of what she says, but mostly we hear how other people observe her, and we build, across time, our own version of her internal world – and perhaps only become conscious that we have done this when the protagonists badly misunderstand her internal world in the manifold ways that we perceive them to be doing.

At the same time, I think that we become more and more suspicious of our own ability to build a veridical model of Young-hye’s internal world – or we should be.  And, since the central character is mad – and has a particular diagnosis – catatonic schizophrenia – we might begin to question what we know about madness – and we might begin to wonder about own madness.

So – the story is told through the eyes of three people.  Roughly a third of the book is devoted to each perspective and the story generally moves forward in time, though the second and third stories revisit events previously told so that we can understand the perspective of the new individual on what happened earlier.

Yeong-hye is the vegetarian.  She is initially seen through the eyes of her husband Mr. Cheong.  This third of the story is told in first person, but we barely get to know Mr. Cheong.  He is so intent on being ordinary that he has all but stripped himself of personality.  He has chosen Yeong-hye because she, too, appears so ordinary that she would never attract anyone’s attention – including his.  He is, therefore, free to live his life unencumbered by her.

This sounds strange and perhaps Korean-typical to my western ear, but it is also not all that different from the ways that some of my (mostly male) patients have presented over the years.  They turn out to be much more interesting than they allow themselves to be at first, but the effacement of self cannot, I don’t believe, be attributed entirely to our stereotypes of the orient.  That said, this man’s inner life cries out for us to imagine him as devoid of any special attention – except perhaps our revulsion that his central wish is to live a life that is entirely unremarkable.

This book could easily be read as a feminist tract – there are essentially no good men in this book and the vision we have of a society that caters to these dominant but ineffective men is revolting.  But it is not just revolting to our feminine selves.  The men, despite being in positions of power, are far from happy.  Their attempts to deny the passions that would make their lives human is deeply disturbing.  And Young-hye’s father, whose abuse of Young-hye both as a child and as a vegetarian is harsh and disturbing, lives a life that is far from enviable.

When Yeong-hye has a dream – a vivid, horrifying dream – she decides to become a vegetarian.  This is horribly unwanted in Mr. Cheong’s life.  It is as problematic to him as her decision not to wear a bra – but much more public and therefore disruptive.  He is ashamed both that his wife does not wear a bra and that she refuses to eat most of the meal at a company dinner that he has finally been invited to, and then he enlists the aid of her family to convince her to become normal again – to eat meat.

Here we learn that Yeong-hye has more to her than the bland appearance and bland life that Mr. Cheong describes.  Her father is and always has been brutal and dictatorial.  He attempts to force Yeong-hye to eat meat – and she, through clenched teeth, refuses.  We realize that control over what goes into her mouth, the most basic control an infant has, may be an important symbol of her assertion of herself as something other than the property of her father – or, perhaps, her husband.

After a tense standoff with her family, Yeong-hye uses a knife to cut her wrists, and she is carried to the ambulance by her brother-in-law.  We never learn his name, but the next segment of the story, while told in the third person, is told from his perspective. 

The video artist, married to Young-hye’s sister, In-hye, has been derided by Mr. Cheong as a do nothing who sponges off his wife and pretends to be artistic.  When he takes over the narrative, we don’t disagree with Mr. Cheong’s perspective, though we do have more access to and sympathy with the artist’s aesthetic perspective.

The artist has a perfunctory relationship with his wife.  He realized quite early on that he was much more interested in her sister than he was in her because of her sister’s physical features – he imagines her to have been his truly intended, but this thought disappears from his consciousness until the sister becomes a vegetarian and he witnesses her being forced to eat meat and then cutting herself in his home.  There is something enlivening to the artist about her plight – and taking her to the hospital covered in her blood.

Even more exciting is the Mongolian Mark – a blue birth mark that is common to most Asian people – but one that generally fades.  When the artist learns from An-hye, his wife, that her sister Young-hye’s birthmark has never faded, the artist becomes obsessed with imagining it – and imagining painting flowers all over Young-hye.  In his imagination, the painting of the flowers is ethereal, not pornographic.  But he is also terribly aroused by the thought of painting her and of filming the painting and of filming her having sense – a non-sensual sex – with someone who has painted flowers all over him.  There is a deep split within him between his high minded aesthetisicm and his visceral sexuality - which is complicated by the ways that both use the same sensual pathways.  One and the same thing is both (in the western vernacular) holy and profane. 

That he could get his sister-in-law to consent to all of this seems very far-fetched.  He offers to check up on his wife's sister, now that Mr. Cheong has left her, and his wife is surprised and appreciative that he would do something to help her in any way (she is the bread winner in the family – and appreciates that her husband lets her work outside the home, but we continue to see him as more of a leach than his wife appears to).  When he goes to Young-hye's apartment, the artist discovers that Young-hye prefers to be naked at home, and he discovers that she is amenable to being painted.

One of the virtues of this book is that what I am writing here that sounds pretty preposterous actually makes sense.  Young- hye is open to the world at this point in a way that mirrors the artist’s openness, and also seems more genuine.  The artist is conscious of trying to represent something, but he doesn’t quite know what.  Young-hye is not trying to do anything except perhaps to live in the moment and to accept what that moment has to offer – as long as it is not meat.  At this point in the book, she seems serene to the point of being close to enlightenment - especially through the eyes of the artist, but also through the eyes of the third person narrator.

Long story short (which is weird to say about a book that is less than 200 pages), the artist paints Young-hye, then another artist, and video tapes all of this.  The other artist refuses to have sex with Young-hye, because it would be pornographic, so the artist paints himself - presumably in order to be able to realize his artistic vision - but also because he has been sexually rebuffed by Young-hye because he is not painted.  He and Young-hye have sex in all their painted glory and In-hye discovers the videotape of this the next morning and calls the health authorities to take them away.  The artist considers killing himself by throwing himself off the balcony, but does not.  He is briefly hospitalized, but Young-hye is now deep within the clutches of the mental health system and is hospitalized at a long term care facility.

It is now time for the last third of the book, told in the third person from the point of view of In-hye.  She divorces the artist, who becomes a marginal person, barely able to care for himself who is estranged not only from In-hye, but from their son.  He is too ashamed to object to the divorce.

In-hye becomes the caregiver for her sister who begins to refuse to eat not just meat, but food of any kind.  She believes she will become a plant and be able to live on sunlight alone.  We no longer see this as a sign of being enlightened but as a symptom of being mad.  In-hye reflects on how she was able, as the older sister, to duck the violence from their father, and to watch what happened to Young –hye without intervening.   This leads her to feel less guilty – though there is certainly plenty of that – than a deep sense of empathy with Young-hye – so deep that she herself becomes suicidal and begins to have the kind of burning images that have haunted Young-hye’s sleep.

This book supports Harry Stack Sullivan’s one genus hypothesis – that we are all, including those who are most disturbed, first and foremost human and therefore more alike than different.  In fact, it goes Sullivan one higher, suggesting, I think, that that we are all first and foremost mad, and in that way more alike because we are fringy rather than alike because we are mainstream.

Setting this book in a collectivist culture that values conformity makes this point all the more stark.  Setting this book in a culture that views mental illness as deeply shameful because of its profound aberrance from the norm drives home the point that we can’t escape our essential humanity – and therefore madness.

This book is written by a Korean woman who spent some time learning her craft at the Iowa writer’s workshop.  It is translated by an English woman who was more intent on translating meaning than slavishly transliterating language, so it has been called, by some, an adaptation rather than a translation.

Just as it is hard to know Young-hye because we see her, largely, through other’s eyes, so it is hard to know the author as a representative of her culture when we hear her in loose translation and when she has learned her trade outside of her culture.  What is the Korean position on madness?  In what ways does this book represent that?  I don’t know.  The book was, not surprisingly, not well received in Korea, where it was seen as transgressive.  It has been awarded a Man Booker prize in translation, perhaps in large part because of its transgressive nature.

I think that Mr. Cheong is intended to be (I’m not sure to what extent by the author and to what extent by the translator) the stereotypical Korean man.  He is focused on fitting in and, in the process, creating a space for himself that allows him to become so invisible that he can do what he wants to do without interference from others.  This may sound foreign, but I continue to think that this is actually a way that people – perhaps men more than women – operate much more frequently than we might imagine.  I think the author and/or translator wants to point out that this way of being – far from being healthy – is deeply pathological.  Mr. Cheong cannot empathize with his wife – he all but berates her for the manifold ways that she interferes with his ability to serenely detach from the world – and when she doesn’t support him in his effort to do this, he divorces and abandons her – presumably to search for someone who is actually as bland as his wife appeared to be.

The artist, rather than being driven by an internal vision of himself as Mr. Cheong is, devotes himself to being open to the world.  This openness means that he is not a reliable partner to In-hye and it resolves into a position of being as unempathic towards her as Mr. Cheong was to Young-hye.  And let’s not even talk about Young-hye’s father and his crazy wish to force people to conform to the types of behavior they should emit.  If Mr. Cheong is remote and clueless, the artist is sensitive, but only to what the world evokes in him, not to what is occurring inside of others in the world around him.

In-hye, who becomes more sensitive to her feeling states, becomes overwhelmed by them.  Her son senses this – tuning into her suicidal thoughts – thoughts that In-hye doesn’t quite let herself acknowledge that she has.  Figuring out how to live within the confines of a culture, a family, and the parameters of our own mind, is incredibly challenging.  This book helps us appreciate just how difficult that can be.

I don't know whether it might not also be suggesting that enlightenment might be greeted as madness if it comes in the form of a woman, a vegetarian, or perhaps just by virtue of its being an aberration from what we expect.  Further, enlightenment might become madness as a result of our efforts to treat it - to drive it from the person, rather than helping them embrace and explore what it means to be serenely unaffected by the world; to realize, perhaps in part as a result of being traumatized and feeling angry and aggressive in return, that we are violent creatures and that we should consider trying to re-work ourselves in ways that might be considered to do violence to who it is that we are expected to be.  The danger of the diagnostic system that I referenced at the beginning of this post is that when we reduce our patients to being the symptoms with which they present and we then work to eradicate the symptoms, the patient can experience us as trying to eradicate them, which is, I think, how Young-hye experienced the mental health system.  In so far as she did, this was a re-enactment of her father's attempts to annihilate her and exacerbated her difficulties rather than helping her recover. 

As we sit in a world that is ravaged by a pandemic that we can't seem to take seriously enough to kill and by an environmental crisis that may be beyond repair, this book seems to offer an interesting perspective on our seeming inability to accept how radically we may need to rework ourselves in order to save our species - and how unlikely it may be that we can do something that will be viewed as madness by so many of us.  In-hye's final, empathic connection with Young-hye's dreams - something that is clearly too little too late, should be a warning to us that we need to here those among us who are having nightmares and acknowledge that we share them - before it is too late.

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COVID Chronicles XX – The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the “Time In Between”

 

We thought that the pandemic had come to an end and was winding down.  Or, more precisely, we hoped that was the case while fearing that we were, in fact, not there yet.  The 2020 Olympics - put off until 2021 - loomed as the moment when the world would celebrate a return to normalcy after the “games” had been put off for a year.  But the “games” – a euphemism that implies something fun, lighthearted, gay and childish – rely on fans in the stands waving national flags and cheers and celebrations to maintain that façade – and they have been strangely absent.  Early on it seemed that Jill Biden and Francois Mitterand seemed to be the only fans actually at the games, underscoring the games geopolitical and elitist background and function.  The heat and exhaustion caused by scheduling in the tropical summer underscored the economic foundation in American Television as a prime driving force.  And the presence of a spate of new sports – from skateboarding to surfing to karate underscores a seemingly desperate desire to captivate any and all audiences and to bring even the renegades under the umbrella of the IOC.

I grew up loving the Olympics.  Essentially the only time that my mother and grandmother would watch sports on TV (though my grandmother did take me to see Ernie Banks play for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field when I was very young), there was a sense of togetherness both as a family and as a nation as we watched the US team compete against others.  The politics was played out in front of our eyes as the Eastern Bloc Countries would mark down our athletes best performances and our judges would retaliate, and the low scores would get thrown out and somehow it seemed that, generally, the best athletes would somehow be given the medal.

Of course, what was on display were the cultural differences – and our culture was held up on our TVs as the best.  Our approach to sport was based on the myth that kids would play what they want and the good ones would rise to the top as naturally as cream rises to the top of milk.  Our culture, we told ourselves, values freedom and competition and those who compete in the games are our young meritocratic nobility.  The Olympics – and other forces – spawned legions of soccer Moms (and Dads) (I was one of the latter) sitting in sling chairs, rooting on their children on weekends and – for the select few – driving them around the country to compete with other selected ones to fight for college scholarships and/or to toil, largely in anonymity, and, for those who had the greatest gifts and toiled the hardest, they would be rewarded with trips to far off places and the accolades and cheers of family, friends, and country.

Their culture, by contrast, was painted as the heavy handed state identifying talented youths and shipping them off to sports camps to be used as propaganda hounds.  Shot full of performance enhancing drugs, these half human half cyborg monsters would compete against our lovely lads and lasses in a contest of good versus evil – so that we could root for our kids – with their compelling back stories told in detail – and feel justified in our otherwise unseemly haul of medals.

The truth (whatever that might be) is, of course, much more complex.  The narrative I have related above continues to be spun, with the Russian and Chinese political machines as the bad guys and their athletes the hapless victims of the relentless drive of authoritarian regimes trying to pretend that their system is superior when they are clearly cheating in order to achieve a competitive advantage, while we have wholesomeness and light on our side.

Of course, we are also a waning super power, at least in some areas.  Our pursuit of leisure is now being mirrored by people in multiple countries, especially as the middle class spreads (like a virus?) from our own country to others.  And the prisoners of that system – the kids who are sent away to tennis “schools” - toil away at sports that they are adept at, but engage in with wildly varying passion.  And there are kids who are talented and privileged enough to devote a considerable amount of time to pursuing areas that may eventuate in competing on the world stage.  And the sheer variety of sport (How many ways can we use to propel an object with a racquet or a paddle?  How many ways can we come up with to advance an object towards a goal line with rules that determine how this particular way of doing that is different from this other way?  How many ways can we come up with to celebrate the manifold ways we can twist our bodies through space?) is both staggering and somehow reflective of our desire to create order out of a world that once presented infinite challenges to our ability to survive.

But the truth of the matter is that our ability to survive hinges now not so much on our ability to navigate space and forcing an object over a goal line as it does, perhaps, on limiting and capping our desire to do the very things that have propelled us to this place of unimaginable wealth.  We are wildly successful at managing the challenges as they were constructed in their old form.  We can kill the wild beast, grow the needed crops, and utilize the resources to create an economy that, at least for some of the population, affords the leisure for athletic, but also artistic and intellectual pursuits and especially the latter fuels our ability to achieve new levels of success.  But our doing this without limit is, ironically, now what imperils us.  And our failure to individually and collectively rein in our striving to overcome, to achieve, to have and consume more is likely to be our downfall.

Individually, we don’t want to impose discipline on our actions.  We don’t want to wear masks or to take shots that will protect us – but that also remind us that we are dependent on others.  Somehow it is better to depend on them when we become sick because we have not taken what has been offered to protect ourselves from complete dependency.  Collectively, we feel threatened that, if our economy does not continue to expand, we won’t have the necessary capital to attend to our needs.

Failing, however, to curtail our actions leads us to have a communal celebration of what we have individually accomplished – we build huge stadia that stand largely empty and hold only the select few to observe our triumphs.  Collectively, we may well drive ourselves off a cliff clad in what we believe will be a suit of armor that will insulate us from the perils that building that suit has caused. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not stating this from a position of being above it all.  I have toiled throughout my life to achieve my own certainly more limited Olympian heights.  I have followed the received wisdom of how to construct a life – how to build a base for my family to thrive – and how to dedicate myself to helping others achieve the same goals.  I have not, like my sister, opted to live in a tiny house, close to the land, using minimal resources to survive.  I have a large carbon footprint.

I am struggling with the overarching message of the Olympics as much as anyone else – I deeply believe that my investment in my individual well-being will be good for all.  And I don’t think that the Elon Musks, or the Henry Fords, or the Henry the VIII’s of this world have or had an evil plan to subdue us or knew the costs of working our way out of being at the mercy of the natural world that can be cold and unforgiving and that will, in the end, be the death of us all.  But we are increasingly conscious of the costs of maintaining what has become more clearly visible as an illusory narrative.

Closer to home, I will be back in a classroom in two weeks.  At this moment, the plan is for me and for my students who are vaccinated to be unmasked – and those who are not vaccinated to wear masks.  Students will be required to attend class in person.  There will be no zoom alternative.

Of course, this week the CDC has acknowledge both breakthrough cases – people who are vaccinated are seeming to be increasingly vulnerable, especially to the delta variant – and that vaccinated people, even when they are not infected themselves – can be carriers.  I don’t want to teach behind a mask.  I don’t want to teach over Zoom – especially to a mix of people in person and on screen.  And I don’t want my students to continue to experience a surreal college world – where they are there virtually in person.  Aargh.

This second summer of COVID is beginning to look more and more like an all too brief intermission in a very long playing and very dark drama.  Perhaps we need to have the denial of our interconnectedness pointed out to us again and again and again….

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For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.