Survivor's Guilt

I try not to watch the news from America anymore. The abject horror simply becomes too much, and I've come to realize that basically, the country that I still, at least in a formal sense, call home, has completely given up. I saw, like a lot of people, the chart where four of the deadliest days in American history were in the previous week – exceeded only by 9/11, the 1903 San Francisco Earthquake, the Battle of Antietam, and the (weirdly forgotten) 1900 Galveston Hurricane. Which apparently excluded Gettysburg and the Spanish Flu, but point taken all the same. Meanwhile, my Iowa hometown has frequented among the most pandemic-ridden places in America, and thereby on Earth.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting poolside with a cucumber Italian soda, reading A Dance to the Music of Time, wondering whether to go to the little French bistro with the white tablecloths, now that it's the season for game and white truffles, or whether to keep it simple and just go to the sushi place down the street. And darling, do we have enough Campari for a round of Negronis?

It might (will) sound melodramatic, but I imagine that this is not too different a feeling from that experienced by the great wave of European intellectuals who wound up in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, ready to be recruited by Hollywood and by the newly wealthy universities of the West Coast. Their home countries were ripped to shreds and turned to headlines, even as they had martini-lunch meetings with MGM.

I'm in this weird blank spot on the planet that's been relatively unaffected, despite a recent outbreak in a distant industrial suburb. My job continues unabated. I actually lost weight during the lockdown. Sure, I can't travel, and that's something of a raison d'etre for me, but really, how much of a complaint is that? Does it have any validity? “What a DRAG, I can't go to Sri Lanka this year...” This is where I'd tell myself to fuck right off.

So I tell myself to feel gratitude. But the flipside of that is that with everything I'm grateful, for there is an inevitable sense of survivor's guilt.

I've often been accused of fatalism, owing to the fact that I generally believe that we as individual, atomized humans are tossed about by grand physical, biological, historical, and economic forces that we have more or less no control over, and that the true horror and despair occurs when we are forced to confront our own essential powerlessness.

Meaning that even though I myself have escaped unscathed, what does that mean, when I look around and see nothing but prospects getting progressively dimmer and dimmer? If I were to return to America anytime soon – as I'd been seriously considering before – what would there be to return to? A diseased, economically depressed landscape, riven with political strife, operating solely for the enrichment of a callous ruling class. And then, this is compounded with the horror and the sneaking suspicion that most places aren't that much better off right now.

I try to donate to decent causes, to perform random acts of kindness. All of which ultimately feels less like I'm expressing any kind of agency and more like I'm paying indulgences.

And then I go back and repeat the cycle. I fetch my towel and my sunglasses, and my copy of A Dance to the Music of Time. Iced Americano, this time, though.

I close my eyes, the patterns of the tropical sun dance around beneath my eyelids. The sun's fangs drip with blood.

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."