It’s been getting harder, I’ll admit: harder to get up in the morning; harder to accomplish tasks for work, such as they are; harder to start updates like this and then finish them. It’s been five or six weeks since I began sheltering at home; other than walking the dogs, the only time I leave the house is to pick up groceries or go to church, where I am involved in livestreaming services. During that time I’ve dealt with the stress of maintaining hygiene when I go out–washing hands, not getting coughed on, etc.–but last week I started getting stressed out just from being home all the time: I wanted to get out, to go somewhere, to do anything. So, I get the stir-craziness of people who want to get things back to normal by any means necessary (of course, the “protests” and such are almost entirely ginned-up by people who have direct financial interests in getting things going and won’t have to face the risks of being on the front lines at retail and service businesses; the same people who got crowds out yelling about “death panels” during the debate over the ACA have decided that a few thousand preventable deaths are now just the price of economic freedom).
But realistically, I just don’t see how it’s going to be possible without rigorous and reliable testing and a stronger social safety net in general. I miss live music and movies, too (contrary to what I said in my last quarantine update, the local drive-in didn’t open as it was deemed non-essential at the last minute), but they’re not worth taking my life in my hands. The government can and should have done much more in ensuring that people wouldn’t starve or be evicted while shelter-in-place orders are maintained. I’ve lost income, too, but I’m fortunate to be able to do at least some of my job from home. In any case, I have a lot more sympathy for someone who has to get out and go to work to keep essential services going than I do for someone who can’t play golf right now.
So, I haven’t made quite as much of the time on my hands as I might have; the schedule we keep our kids on isn’t very conducive to finishing my own work, but even when I have the free time to do my own thing I don’t always have the energy. I peruse Facebook and Twitter; sometimes I watch TV, but not as much as you’d think; I window-shop online, filling virtual shopping carts with sale items and then letting them expire, deciding that I don’t really need anything that badly. It has given me a new perspective on science fiction works about people living in bunkers and shelters, and the psychological effects of that isolation: in short, it’s harder than it looks. Although I didn’t feel like digging into it too deeply last week, I’m sure that my newfound interest in Logan’s Run–about a self-contained community of people living in isolation, looking for distractions, while the social forces around them convince them that old people are expendable, and really who is going to miss them?–is not entirely a coincidence (that’s another blog post that I should have been able to put together in a day or two that limped on for a week and a half before I finally finished it).
Comparisons between the current coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and the influenza epidemic of 1918 have also caused me to rethink some things: a few years ago, I wrote about the phrase “purple death,” and how its appearances in pulp fiction and serials may have been a reference to the 1918 epidemic. To further the connection, I’ve been thinking about how teleconferencing software like Zoom, Skype, and Facetime has finally realized and mainstreamed the “video phone,” a mainstay of science fiction and pulp storytelling that never really caught on with the public in the twentieth century, no matter how much it was advertised or how many times we were promised that the technology was just around the corner. Video phones, a natural extension of both television and telephone, appear early on in science fiction (a number of early depictions of television portray it as a two-way device: Fredersen uses one in the 1927 film Metropolis, for example); how useful such a device would have been for those who were quarantined during the influenza epidemic (or similar quarantines for polio)! Even the telephone, already in widespread use in 1918, had limits: you couldn’t just call someone up and chat for hours. But for a pulp writer, stuck inside, a technology that allowed him to see friends and family face-to-face without any risk of spreading infection: well, in that situation it’s not hard to see the video phone as a practical solution to a real problem instead of just unbridled technophilia.
Finally, since I live in a neighborhood that is basically suburban in character even if not literally in the suburbs, I’ve given a lot of thought to the self-containment that has always been a part of the promise of the suburbs. With its fenced-off yard, each suburban home is essentially a module in itself, and it could just easily be on the lunar surface or anywhere else as on earth. This was part of its appeal from the beginning, and the connection to space colonization is not accidental: as detailed in Ken Hollings’ fascinating book Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, “An ever-expanding, subdivided tract of land, the suburbs constitute the location for a project that will connect humanity directly with outer space, with the future and with its own emergent inner self. . . . In its self-contained isolation, the suburban colony becomes a model for life not just on this planet but on all the others too.” The suburbs are a template for the domed space colonies of Asimov, Heinlein, and the Jetsons. More to the point, as Hollings continues, “At the same time, this self-contained isolation will eventually establish the suburbs as a complex psychiatric community where aberrations such as alcoholism, schizophrenia and sexual deviancy can be studied in clinical depth by an increasing number of sociologists, psychiatrists and cultural anthropologists. It will also supply the pharmaceutical companies with a growing number of customers for a new generation of drugs.” This is more like what you get when you read Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard.
Why is this on my mind? The Atomic Age has a double meaning: yes, the splitting of the atom, for warfare or for civilian power, is the obvious engine for the growth and change that drove images of the future back then. But atomization, disintegration into discrete particles, each cut off from its neighbors, is implicit as well, a metaphor for the breaking of bonds that hitherto held society together. I fear that is what we are experiencing now–not collapse, necessarily, but at least drift–without some form of connection, well, what are we left with? I should acknowledge that in the scheme of things, I’m pretty lucky. Suburban self-isolation is a privilege. Things could be worse. As we’ve been reminded, I’m doing my job by staying home and avoiding the spread of infection. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m looking forward to the day the bubble opens, I can take off my helmet, and step out into the sun again, breathing deeply.
Medleyana 