(Last) Weekly Roundup: Hemingway In A 3-Way Quarantine Edition
Thank God we didn't have the Internet during the Black Plague, or the Spanish Flu. I don't think we would have survived. This relatively mild (by historical, not personal, standards) pandemic is exposing every fault line in our society. The notion of Two Americas has never been more explicit to me than now. We have the odd schism of Non-Essential People, who "work from home" and have Zoom Conference Happy Hours, and Essential People, for whom life is exactly the same except now it completely sucks. In-between we have the millions of people who are now unemployed with no end in sight. Other divisions: New Mexico is using this as an opportunity to close all gun stores, while Colorado is insisting that they remain open. You can infer a lot about what the rulers of these individual states think is going to happen in the near future by this difference in action.
The Uniparty knows this is Trump's fault --- they just haven't settled on the cohesive narrative yet. You can watch it coming together in real time, like some sort of congealing grease. Trump's China travel ban was widely panned as racist, criticism that is now being argued in retrospect with a lawyerly approach to reasonable doubt. as to what Biden et al. meant at the time.
(If you want to truly understand how our media works to skew public perception, compare the "fine people" situation with the a kid-gloves treatment given to Elizabeth Warren's self-identification as Native American.)
It's not just Trump's fault, of course: it is also the fault of "Trumptards". The Atlantic released a breathless piece eight days ago about how red-state types were ignoring the obvious threat of COVID-19 while the decent blue-state people were sheltering in place. Not discussed: the fact that people with guaranteed government, union, and investment income lean overwhelmingly blue, while self-employed people tend to be red. Also not discussed: the fact that the current Ground Zero for COVID-19 infection is the delightfully diverse and progressive city formerly known as New Amsterdam.
The plain fact is this: Paid quarantine is a luxury, one that much of the chattering class (including your occasionally left-of-center author) enjoys. Therefore we are being browbeaten with what amounts to Wuhan Porn. One wonders what Hemingway would do in a situation like this. Wait a minute: turns out we know what he would do. He'd go three ways with it.
This rather amusing tale of Hemingway's summer spent with both wife and mistress doesn't paint Papa in the best light --- but adultery is the Original Sin of truly selfish acts, and its practitioners never come off well in the macro lens of history. Yet it's easy to understand what drove Hemingway to act the way he did. Even as he reassured F. Scott Fitzgerald about his wiener dog, Hemingway worried about his own ability to close the deal. As virtually all sane men do, at one point or another in their lives. Becoming a famous writer made it easier for him to assauge, but not eliminate, those doubts. So he took every opportunity he could. It's less easy to empathize with the cruelty he showed towards his child's mother, but one also has to consider that marriage is frequently different from boxing only in the sense that there's a referee in boxing to stop the match before someone dies --- and that we have no idea what transpired between Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway prior to this sad state of (literally) affairs.
Today's quarantine three-ways appear to be quite different, but perhaps that is reflective of changing dynamics and power relationships in modern society. Or it could be the fact that Papa Hemingway, with all of his bluster and insecurity and arm's-length safety from the violent delights which informed everything from his literature to his late-years assumed persona, was still probably more of a man than most of us.
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We're in the middle of unveiling a new website right now, so here's the cached version of last week's column.