The Ancient World
Nostalgia for January
I am thinking about the ancient world. I am thinking of the world of the Greeks three thousand years ago because the Australian comedian Alice Fraser, one of my favorites, has named two of her shows Mythos and Ethos.
I am thinking about the ancient world because when I eagerly snap on Alice’s new standup special, Savages, which just dropped on Amazon, I am cast immediately into the ancient world of last year. Or, more to the point, the ancient world that could have been five weeks ago.
Ooh, look! There are people sitting shoulder to shoulder in a theater! Without gloves or masks! There’s Alice, walking through the audience to climb onto the stage! There she is, taking the face of a guy in the front row in her bare hand! Just to make people laugh!
I have heard much of this routine before, on a podcast, but it still is a pleasure to watch. Alice Fraser is funny the way an ex-lawyer raised Buddhist with a dying mother is funny — that is to say, deep but silly — but I am overwhelmed at watching how this brand-new thing seems incidentally to depict a very old world.
A world in which grocery shopping is not performed in a homemade hazmat suit. A world in which I don’t have to persuade myself that a coffee filter tucked into a bandanna affords more protection than burglar bars against mosquitoes. In which every trip outside does not end with an elaborate disinfection ritual. A world in which we don’t need to keep our closest friends and grown children a point guard’s length away. Already a late January trip to Mexico, flying on airplanes, breathing on strangers and being breathed upon, feels like a relic from the time of Xicontecati the Younger.
I retired from journalism last year and was happy to go, but sometimes I felt I was letting the team down by leaving. I am in awe of the heroic work being done by my former colleagues in impossible conditions. The AP is showing what it’s like to live and die under lockdown and quarantine, and paying a terrible price. At least one reporter is infected and recovered; at least one is infected and dead.
So I am massively irritated at the way the question of who has the authority to restart the economy is sometimes treated in the press. As if it’s a serious question. As if any governor, or any president has the authority to make us go to the theater, or the ballgame, or the bar or the barber before we are ready.
Does anyone here remember what New York was like in the days after 9/11? After we realized death could come for us in an instant, so it was time to take control of our lives and do the things that mattered? When we wondered if the city would wither in the face of millions of individual judgments that it was too dangerous to live or work here? The city prospered, although its rebound owed as much to the galloping financialization of the national economy as it did to the determination of New Yorkers to show the bad guys who’s boss. And then we went back to our regular lives, albeit with a growing suspicion of The Other, and a widening gap between the rich and the poor.
I wonder about the world that emerges from this. There will be a time when most of us shed our emergency agoraphobia and kiss on both cheeks again. But what will we have learned? Will we look at the air and water that has gotten noticeably cleaner in our absence and decide we need to be serious about protecting them? Will we look at empty city streets and decide we need to rethink how much space we surrender to private cars? Will we look at the struggle to bolster the economic lives of millions suddenly deprived of a paycheck and realize maybe we shouldn’t need a national calamity to extend support and health care to those who need it?
I don’t know. I just want to be able to hug my kids again.
