A Series of Random Thoughts
And a welcome to spring
About 16 or 17 years ago, when I was a baby journalist working at The New York Times as a news assistant, I overheard a copy editor telling another editor about his surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. I frequently saw editors with wrist wraps and back massagers and other special tools to help with the strains of working quickly on a computer, so this was a common problem. This editor, flexing his newly painless hands and fingers, explained that the surgeon had cut a ligament in his wrist so that his nerves and tendons could pass through the carpal tunnel—it’s an actual little tunnel moving from your arm to your hand—more freely. “That’s what they want, apparently, to be free,” he’d said. For a long time I just thought this was a weird, half-made-up memory that passed through my mind to provide me with a metaphor for life’s tough’s moments, but it’s a real surgery that’s called “carpal tunnel release.” In some cases, there’s a swollen or too small ligament constraining the nerves and tendons below it, and that’s what’s causing pain and loss of motion. Compression, and then release. I can imagine the almost painful relief that comes with that sudden freedom, the loss of unwanted pressure.
I’ve felt something like that since Trump lost re-election and then, especially, since Biden was sworn in, a sense of loosening many tensions at once. All of the worry and pain and anxiety that had been focused on Trump broke free. There are still really bad things happening, and more bad things will continue to happen. The border crisis is unsolved, racism still exists, Covid is still raging around the world, the Chinese government is accused of genocide against the Uighurs, and we could make a long list. I just feel that I can actually think about these problems and potential solutions now, instead of constantly being pulled back to put out the Trump fire in my brain. That’s what authoritarians do: suck all of the oxygen toward themselves.
But it’s also meant my attention has zoomed in a million different directions. I offer a few disparate thoughts on culture that have helped ground me in reality in this weird time.
I’d heard many good things about Ted Lasso, the Apple TV series about an American football coach who moves to England to coach a team that plays what the rest of the world calls football. Since this was a sitcom about sports, I thought it combined two of the things I dislike most in the world, and so I avoided it. What no one told me was that Ted Lasso is about the triumph of pure goodness, and a complete rebuke of the past five years. Lasso is, fundamentally, a good person, and this is the reason that all of his mistakes become learning opportunities, and all of his losses become wins. But what struck me most about the show is that it is, in some small ways, an antidote to the toxic masculinity that’s causing so many specifically American problems right now.
I’m not sure I fully gathered this until I had Crazy, Stupid, Love, the 2011 rom-com on in the background. (I love romantic comedies and find them comforting, even when they’re terrible.) Crazy, Stupid, Love is insidiously bad in a way I hadn’t noticed on my first viewing. The movie is primarily about the separation and impending divorce of Cal and Emily Weaver, played by Steve Carell and Julianne Moore, and is secondarily about Ryan Gosling at peak hotness, and thirdly is the vehicle that is probably most responsible for giving us Emma Stone, but there is a C plot about the Weavers’ 13-year-old son, Robbie. Robbie has a crush on his neighborhood baby-sitter, a 17-year-old named Jessica. Jessica repeatedly tells Robbie that his overtures make her uncomfortable and asks him to stop. Cal Weaver tells his young son the same thing that men tell boys in too many romcoms: Never give up. And so, Robbie slowly wears Jessica down. Her discomfort turns into shrugging acceptance. That kind of message seems innocent, but it’s part of the same messaging that says that women tell you no until they mean yes. Never give up, ignore her rejection, and eventually she’ll give in. Gross.
I don’t think it’s spoiling much, because you figure out in the first episode, to say that Lasso’s character is getting a divorce on his show, too. As in Crazy, Stupid, Love, the separation is his wife’s idea. The marriage just isn’t working for her any more, no matter how hard Ted tries. By the time you meet his wife in the series, you’ve watched Ted’s optimism go to extremes, and if you thought at any time in the first few episodes that someone like that might be hard to live with in real life, this is your proof. Ted’s wife comes for a visit to England, but the trip just reinforces for her that things aren’t the same, and her marriage is over. “I promised myself I would never let quit anything in my life,” Ted says to his wife. “But you’re not quitting Ted, you’re just letting me go,” she replies. It’s a quick injection of her own viewpoint, a reminder that she’s a person with her own needs and desires, no matter how good a guy Ted is, no matter that he’s the protagonist. Ted is hurt but he listens and honors her perspective, as he does with almost everyone else in his life. It’s a small act of radical empathy, squeezed into a sitcom. I can’t stop thinking about it.
I’d mentioned on Instagram that everyone should agree that 2020 just didn’t exist, and a friend of mine called it The Blip. The Blip used in this way comes from the Marvel comic universe, and refers to the five-year period in the Infinity saga after the villain, Thanos, wiped out half the universe, before the Avengers undid his genocide. Half of all life disappeared for five years, the other half mourned them and aged, until, suddenly, the missing half returned as if they’d never left.
The return of the blipped people (the blippees?) has been part of what the most recent Marvel works—WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, both on Disney Plus—have been dealing with. There are a million traumas, big and small, logistical and existential, unfolding. In WandaVision, the grief of one Marvel character traps an entire town—they can’t leave, and almost all of the drama unfolds inside Wanda’s house. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier takes a broader view, exploring the consequences of medical inequities and medical racism on a global scale, but it touches on the same real-life moment in uncanny ways.
It’s remarkable that these two stories were both filmed before the Covid shutdowns began. But it’s not surprising that comic books provide a good source for the language and storylines that help us understand our current state. Fiction always provides a good avenue for exploring our most fraught subjects, a kind of safe space because it’s not real, but comics take an even bigger step away from reality. The characters aren’t real, and also could never be real, which makes them even better sources for working out our national angst. The Falcon and the Winter Solider resurfaces the storyline of a character called Isaiah Bradley, who’d been introduced in a 2003 comic by Robert Morales. In the comic, American military scientists are trying to recreate the super soldier serum that created Captain America, and they experiment on Black soldiers to do so—it’s based on the real-life Tuskegee experiments. Bradley is the only survivor, a Black Captain America who served as Steve Rogers had, but did not attain the hero status Steve Rogers had.
I first read about the Bradley story ten years ago, when Gene Demby wrote about it. At the time, we never would have guessed that a story as depressingly realistic and indicting as the Isaiah Bradley one would have made it into a movie or TV show. But here it is, on a Disney Plus series, exploring the contours and consequences of power and racism in the U.S. On the show, a villain, Baron Zemo, says that Captain America’s iconic status prevents people from seeing his flaws, but the reverse is also true. “[C]omic-book characters are iconic and long-lived, and the world in which they were created is dramatically different from our current one,” Demby wrote. “Writers routinely revisit stories to deepen their mythologies and, sometimes, to try to correct the errors of the past. Because these characters live throughout history -- many of them are a half-century old or more -- they don't have the luxury of living outside of it.” The series is moving forward imperfectly. But the fact that Marvel is exploring these stories now, after the year we’ve had, proves Demby’s point.
What I’m Recommending:
Food and Wine has a recipe for something it calls carrot cake marmalade, based on a carrot yogurt dish at a New Orleans restaurant called Molly’s Rise and Shine, and you should definitely make it.
Cute Animal Pic of the Week:
A few months ago, we helped get an adorable, weird little puppy ready for his forever home, setting him up with foster care and vet care until he could be adopted. I think Goose is finally home now.
