Some inaccessible other version of my life
Take heart! You have been otherwise and can be otherwise again
Hello friends. It’s [Staind voice] been a while since the last free Hell World and the most recent two including today’s new one are paid-subscriber-only but I wanted to check in and say hello anyway. Hello.
Monday’s piece was a look back on the debate over Medicare for All and union insurance in the midst of the Democratic primaries pre-Covid.
You’ll recall this was when we were fully entrenched in the debate over Medicare for All and the line from Pete and Joe and them heading into Nevada was that implementing it would somehow rob union members of the “good insurance plans” they had bargained so hard for. In typical Democrat fashion the prospect of helping vastly more people was framed as a necessary taking from others. Around that week I talked to a bunch of union members with supposedly great insurance for a piece which you probably read but I was thinking about this line from an organizer this morning and it’s worth revisiting.
“Healthcare is an albatross around my neck,” he said. Meaning all the time they have to spend negotiating to keep their health insurance it means less time working toward anything else.
“I would have so much more room to push for wage and retirement increases if I didn’t have to worry about treading water on healthcare…”
It also touched on the ongoing idiotic arguments about teachers unions and the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X and the psychotic liberal schadenfreude over the situation in Texas following the devastating storms and the film Nomadland and some other things.
Today’s Hell World is possibly “one of the good ones” although I can never tell until I say that and then someone responds “yeah this was ‘one of the good ones’” so it’s not really clear yet.
It’s about struggling to comprehend the concept of 500,000 dead from Covid and 9/11 and how weird it is that we compare those two things and wanting to be dead and not wanting to be dead and where we were on this day one year ago with the Trump administration asuring us nothing bad was going to happen.
“This president will always put America first, he will always protect American citizens,” Kayleigh McEnany said on February 25 2020. “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism, and isn't that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of Barack Obama?”
“We have contained this,” Larry Kudlow said that same day. “I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”
And then some shit like this:
This coming Sunday is the anniversary of the first American death from the pandemic. The first of 500,000. How do you feel about that number? It just kind of sits there in its grandiose heft for me. Like if you saw a dinosaur come to life emerging over a hill into a clearing its immense stupid body unfurling in front of you you wouldn’t go oh look at its little nose you’d behold it all in its uncanny size at once and be struck dumb. I can’t personally make much sense out of it. 500,000 dead now in under a year. What is that? It makes my brain feel slow and dry like when you’re struggling with an especially dense philosophical text or something or like when your fight or flight reflexes kick in and you instinctively know that you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be. It’s when you go down in the basement. It’s an ejector button for comprehension. You cannot hold the deaths of 500,000 individuals from a pandemic in one country in your brain all at once it overloads the system. It’s Lovecraftian and just as if not more racist.
Also there’s some stuff from our pal Rax King — “Some inaccessible other version of my life.” and George Saunders — “Take heart! You have been otherwise and can be otherwise again.” — and a horrific qualified immunity case out of Texas and a dispatch from a reader in Austin about how it felt to live through the storm.
She had come to my house after her son woke up that morning cold and crying. Their apartment had lost power Sunday, and no one seemed to know when they might get it back. When we were done, I told her that what really worried me, the fear that had begun gnawing at me as I laid in bed the night before, was that this deep Texas freeze was a preview of what life on Earth might be becoming. That we—and, more likely, our children—will face more and more of these catastrophes, and that when we do, there won’t be anyone making sure we can even turn our heaters on…
…Maybe it’s recency bias—Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, and the pandemic’s full on arrival in the United States is not yet even a year old—but it certainly feels like something is coming for us. Like these hurricanes and freezes and fires are really just the first rainbands making landfall. I could be wrong. Supposedly every generation thinks it’s the end of the world. But if there is something lurching slowly toward us, it is coming for all of us, but it’s not really coming for Ted Cruz and those like him.
Anyway subscribe here if you want to read them in full and if not go read the latest issue of The Small Bow instead for now. I’ll be back on Sunday I think with a free issue.
Also check out this very nice t-shirt I just got in the mail.
That’s a good reason to live now that I think of it. To find myself again some day in the pit at an Every Time I Die show getting my dick and balls absolutely stomped in by 300 lb. hockey fans in cargo shorts. That’s living.