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.