Rugged Communalism
Friends, this is the penultimate essay from Thacher Report. I published a new piece today which I'll send out next week and hopefully get this email synced up by then with Medium. I've also been experimenting with podcasting, because the world needs more podcasts. Please stay tuned.
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Rugged Communalism
Zachary Thacher
July 2020 — Vermont
“Want to live? Come with me!” yells the hero as he dodges a [sword / bullet / grenade]. He reaches out a hand to the trembling swimsuit model with two PhDs. She grabs on and they [jump out of the airplane / leap off the building / swim from the submarine].
You get the picture. There’s always this moment in popcorn movies where the usually male hero saves the always female plot point, I mean, character, and even if it’s beyond stupid, we’ll still scoot up in our chair and grip the armrest as we worry if this one guy can actually pull off an absolutely crazy feat to save his love interest’s life. It’s just impossible. But he does! Every time!
It’s the story we tell ourselves about saving the woman and also The World. Telling the alternative and more true vision of world saving, where a small town of gender-neutral farmers bike to work, dispense non-profit equal-access healthcare and like to help build each other’s houses to keep living costs down, isn’t quite dramatic enough for audiences. Yet.
What we want is the Lone Ranger, Sly Stallone, Steve Jobs, Thor, an occasional Wonder Woman, an occasional Black hero, but more often than not a white straight male, sometimes literally called Captain America, the one man who disregards everyone else and takes on all the risk himself because he alone can forge his own destiny and in doing so, redeem the world. And by the world, we mean humanity.
Americans aren’t the only culture to get in line behind a man and follow him to the chosen land to start a new way of life that requires killing off those who disagree, it’s nearly universal to human experience. But folks, my sense is that we’re only telling half the story.
Beyond the gorgeous woman, we rarely think about who else the hero is really saving or why. It’s the individual whom we [worship / obey / seek direction from], but it’s always the community whom the hero is seeking to save. And thus it goes with Covid.
Brace yourself because it’s into the gutter we go as I mention our era’s chief agonist. Emphasis on agony. Trump has an over 85% approval rating by Republicans. This is a party that’s entered the “house lights on, everyone please go home” era. Membership is shrinking — because really, who wants to be associated with a party that’s dedicated to the twin pillars of… Racism and Mass Poverty, and as far as I can tell, instead of, say, the Constitution and Opportunity, and has zero ideas for surviving a global viral pandemic, accessing low cost yet high quality healthcare or avoiding environmental devastation.
But there are still scores of millions of them and they are as great at suppressing votes as they are at voting. And they all still overwhelmingly, blindingly follow their big white man into [hell / Fox News / mass starvation].
The point is that we focus so much on the individual, that we don’t think about what animates his purpose, which is, ostensibly, saving us. All of us. Focusing on the community is the beating heart of all dramas, even if its depiction is not dramatic itself.
So let’s turn the camera around to us, the plot’s ultimate MacGuffin.
Here’s what we’re saying.
Around the dinner table, in late summer 2020, this is the debate by folks who would, if they thought about it, like to bike to work and eat pesticide-free local food and forget about violent gender constructs and see a good doctor for cheap and enjoy low cost housing, not because they’re Black homosexual Latinx feminist transgender Spanish-speaking Jewish Communists who wear face masks in public and know a lot about photovoltaic panels, or whomever it is that White Republicans want to oppress, but because, even if they are all those Black gay farmy things, they, we, care about each other. And by each other, I mean, everyone. Everywhere.
Which, if you think about it, is the point of all religions. To sanctify life. What do you see when you pray to God, who is invisible? You see other people. You see us.
What we discuss at the table is what you discuss at your table. It’s probably not film criticism, it’s school. Every conversation, no matter have far it stretches, snaps back to school. (And I don’t even have kids. Yet. Still searching for my beshert. Email me.)
What will do in the fall? We punctuate that sentence with a question mark instead of the forlorn acceptance of a period because most school districts aren’t telling people like it is, and this includes all colleges and universities.
Let me tell you like it is.
We can’t open. At all. We’ll be shut. Even though schools are places you go to learn things, and even though they indebt most of us, drive income inequality and segregation via property taxes, overpriced housing and tuitions that outpace inflation, despite all this wonderfulness, or perhaps because of it, they have no solutions. If they say we’re opening, or half opening, or partially opening, what they won’t admit is that they’ll close down before Halloween. Which is also canceled.
Why am I so pessimistic? Because it is super obvious that concentrating hundreds or thousands of people in confined spaces makes Covid dance like it’s on TikTok. You don’t need to be a supermodel with a PhD in epidemiology to get this.
Which gets me to part 2 of the conversation. The more enterprising of these families, those with sagacity, insight and resources, which is to say, privilege at the expense of other people’s poverty, they will band with a few other similarly privileged impoverishing people, hire a teacher, who will always be a young woman with school debt and no economic options and no healthcare, and start up a homeschool like the Evangelicals.
These relatively affluent people will go their own way. That’s what I’m telling you. The government or school district or universities will say we’re now in Phase 3.29 and that means you can go to school for 62 minutes on alternating Tuesdays and here’s the Zoom password and we’ll wipe down every desk according to CDC guidelines and local wind patterns, but none of that matters. The schools and superintendents and governors will say all they want— note how I left out the Trump Administration whose hands are kind of full right now committing seppuku—they will post website updates and send emails, but the lesson is clear. If you have the resources and have little kids, hire a teacher for your backyard. If you have the resources and have big kids, send them to work on a farm, or teach them how to sew clothing or some other skill removed from others. What will everyone else do? I’m not sure. Earlier I mention Republicanism leading to mass poverty. Hope not, but it’s happening.
If we as Americans, The People of the constitutional preamble, if we are the plot point of the movie, then those who can pull it off, we have to be the ones to ignore all the others and blindly, courageously take great risks to forge our own destinies, and we’ll have to do that alone, meaning without government, but also, we can only do that together, meaning with each other, or at least with those who agree with us and don’t try to talk politics about a virus, which will happily jump into your mouth no matter what you’re saying.
People. You can’t go inside, anywhere, you can only be at home or go out for a brief trip to a supermarket or farm stand. You can go to a more empty park or discover nature, which conveniently is everywhere outside the cities, which are no place to be. That’s it. That’s all you can do. Stay home. You can definitely go to your synagogue and church and mosque and temple and movie theater and Disney theme park (which I’m arguing share similarities). All we need are 650 million proven vaccine doses so we each get two shots. At that point you can relax. Should be any year now.
Rugged Individualism has always failed as a model for governing hundreds of millions of people. But I don’t mean to rebuke all Republicans, we need to adopt their independent go-it-alone swagger and I-got-this resourcefulness, but we can only do that with an entirely Democratic communal perspective and solidarity with everyone else, no matter what they look like or whom they prefer to cuddle. Really. We can do this. I hope. Stay home.
Love,
Zachary