A Dyke A Broad #40
The return of Covid in France, its Euro Cup breeding ground, Cuba, plus re-reading Susan Sontag.
Hello from Paris!
I’ve been losing my shit the last couple of days watching the Covid numbers shoot straight up like a billionaire’s rocket as the Delta variant takes hold in France, where not quite 40 percent of us are fully vaccinated.
As of this morning, the government was still trying to cajole, persuade, convince, beg, hector ordinary health care workers into voluntarily getting their jabs. It hasn’t worked. Not counting doctors and nurses, less than half are fully vaccinated. President Macron is expected to announce tonight that vaccination will be obligatory if they want to keep their jobs.
In England, where something like 90 percent of the new Covid cases are the incredibly contagious Delta strain, the enormous crowds who gathered last night to watch the Euro football final seemed to embrace the chance to bare their faces to the virus as they shouted and screamed, inhaling each other’s germy breaths.
Even though I’m thoroughly marinated in Pfizer, it stressed me out just to watch. Chances are, if I get sick I won’t die, or get Long Covid, which you can develop even if your symptoms are initially mild. But the longer Covid rampages worldwide, the higher the risk that a variant emerges which will evade the vaccine altogether.
But now—right now—what weighs on me are all the deaths that vaccines could prevent. Sixty percent remain unvaccinated in France even though over 100,000 humans have already died here. It’s hard for me to imagine what that number means unless I call to mind what it was like to turn on the TV over a year ago and see the bodies stacked up in Italy (last night’s Euro champion), the bulldozers digging the mass graves in New York City.
Eighty-eight percent of people worldwide have not been vaccinated. The stats across Africa are even worse. India is a mess. Like Latin America. Things in Cuba have gotten so bad young people are actually taking to the streets, demanding freedom and calling for the communist “President” Miguel Díaz-Canel to step down—partly for his handling of Covid, but also the dictatorship’s increasing human rights abuses, and the worst poverty since the “Special Period” after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I understand how burnout works, and mental exhaustion, but it provokes a special kind of gape-mouthed, head-spinning awe to see so many people filling stadiums, having parties, or conversely, worrying about micro-aggressions for whatever reason, when the world is flying apart at the seams.
Whatever. Global policy is none of my bees wax, as we used to say in olden times. And my vagina will probably drop out of my body spontaneously if I worry my pretty little head about it.
Far better to stick to my reading and navel-gazing, embrace my irrelevance.
Re-Discovering Susan Sontag
I’ve re-read it twice already, Susan Sontag’s essay, Against Interpretation, which has beautiful lines like this:
…interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)
Of course it makes me think about the continual interpretation of our bodies and our gestures, often defined as identities complete with labels and hashtags. But the essay also inspires me to consider the reverse, what it was like being a child when the world was largely unmediated by language, except for the word, “No,” which only defined what seemed dangerous and what was not. And the rest of the world just existed as itself, pre-interpretation.
I remember, for instance, being four years old or so, and climbing a tree, and sitting on a rough, anty branch like a tiny slack-jawed ape marveling at the leaves and spying on the neighbors as they came and went in their station wagons and Ford pintos. Once, I escaped from the yard, went over to a neighbor lady’s where I heard several women talking in the kitchen, and overwhelmed with curiosity pressed my face so hard against the blood-scented mesh of their screen door that I ripped it open and tumbled inside to my great humiliation and their very surprised guffaws.
They picked me up like a puppy and took me home writhing in embarrassment, and wailing with a small cut on my hand, but also intoxicated with sensation, the sounds I’d heard of hot water being poured over coffee crystals, spoons clinking against cups, women’s voices chatting and laughing, the smell of the rough, irony mesh I pressed against, the mown grass in the day’s growing heat.
None of it was fixed or meaningful. It just was. And I’d drunk it in. All the mystery and joy of it. Like I drank my glass of milk and ate my boiled hotdog and canned corn at dinner before bath, before bed when I’d lie there wrapped in my meaningless flesh, my sister in the other twin, under the windows which were just two squares of light.
In other news
Anti-abortion laws to be enforced by mob rule in Texas
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill outlawing abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat—at about six weeks. Worse, it’s “effectively deputizing ordinary citizens — including from outside Texas — to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.”
Domestic violence—another reason to hate last night’s Euro football final
Data showed that regardless of the outcome, domestic violence in the UK would increase post-match. Looking back to the 2010 World Cup, domestic violence leaped 27.7% when England won a match. A 33.9% increase was recorded when they lost.
Welp, that’s it for this week,
Disgruntledly yours,
(I didn’t even have to make up a name this week—Cagewell came in the mail.)
P.S. I wouldn’t mind at all if you shared this, or bumped up your subscription.
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