Nomadland 2020: Kudos for Focusing on Folk Movies Often Ignore; But It Lets Its Subjects Down

 

"Nomadland" 2020
Chloe Zhao, writer director
Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, and "real people" stars

 

"Nomadland" is a low-budget film about displaced senior citizens, almost all white, who live in their vehicles and travel from one low-paying job to another around the West and Midwest.

 

I have much in common with the folks onscreen. Even though there was much onscreen to love, in the end, I felt betrayed by "Nomadland."

 

First, what I loved: the real people. "Nomadland" features Linda May, Charlene Swankie, Derek Endres, and Bob Wells, three real "nomads" playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Their authenticity and heart burns right through the screen. All of them brought tears to my eyes. I had to stop watching a couple of times, I was so moved.

 

I loved the film's willingness to talk about poor, white people, a demographic that is mostly mocked in mainstream media. We are "white trash," "trailer trash," and, of course, homeless poor whites are really the bottom of the barrel. Too, all the main characters have gray hair and, except for the movie-star-handsome David Strathairn, are not particularly good-looking. I loved the attention that the film paid to Charlene Swankie, a plump and creased-cheeked woman in her seventies. She's one of the most charismatic, interesting characters I've ever seen onscreen, and she is no curvy starlet.

 

"Nomadland" focuses on poor people, living rootless, homeless, isolated lives, working jobs few would want. One job is Amazon factory worker; another is cleaning toilets in a national park; another is harvesting beets. Agricultural labor, which I've done, is backbreaking. I did it when I was much younger and I spent off-hours immobile in pain, waiting for my muscles to recover. What must it be like to do that work in your sixties?

 

What I wish the film had handled better. "Nomadland" doesn't have much of a plot, script, or character development. It's more of an episodic diorama. Here's Bob Wells, telling his story. Here's Linda May, telling her story. Here's Derek Endres, for his moment in the spotlight. We don't stick with one character long enough to get to know him or her in depth. This episodic approach treats the nomads as if they were freaks in a freak show, rather than deep characters worthy of our investment and time.

 

These folks all tell tragic tales. There are a couple mentions of suicide, of poverty and despair. I have to ask: would the character who hit the road after a suicide had responded differently if health care or pastoral care had walked the sufferer through the tragedy to the other side of healing?

 

Have people like Swankie rejected society because of latent conditions like social anxiety, that would respond to treatment, or are they just introverts? Another character spoke of suicide. What if that character had met with a caring professional?

 

In other words, are they on the road because of mental illness? Because of inborn traits like Asperger's or other issues that make contact with other people difficult?

 

The movie never convinced me that this was just about economics. If it is just about economics, then why does the film work so hard to make the nomad life look romantic and enviable? If it's a problem of economics, then how about offering some potential solutions? If there are armies of poor, elderly people driving up and down highways, sleeping in parking lots and dreading that knock on the window from a security guard growling, "No overnight parking," then shouldn't we be doing something about it? And why is there such a huge disconnect between rents and what a retiree who has worked all of her life can reasonably pay?

 

The film never even hints at any answers to these issues. In that way, I do feel that the film doesn't treat its "real" characters as respectfully or compassionately as it might. Rather than treating them as people we should care about, they become superficial curiosities.

 

I've also gotta say that I didn't like France McDormand. I didn't like her performance and I didn't like her character. McDormand acts up a storm. Her face is a series of twitches, grins, grimaces, scowls, and soulful stares. I had no idea what she was reacting to half the time. Perhaps a private dialogue between her face and her fleas.

 

I really disliked her character, "Fern." I had no idea what motivated Fern. Her husband died and she lost her home and job when a gypsum plant shut down. These are tough life events, but many of us go through similar events and eventually find a path back to love and a new home. Why doesn't that happen for Fern? The David Strathairn character offers her what appears to be a sincere and appealing alternative to a solitary life on the road. I found Fern's behavior toward the Strathairn character to be completely incomprehensible.

 

There are a couple of scenes, one, of Fern waving her arms in the Badlands, and another, of Fern walking besides the ocean, that I did not understand at all. The camera focuses, at length, on Fern's face, signaling that something noteworthy is transpiring in Fern's mind. What is that something? Hope? Despair? Pleasure at being in nature? Missing her husband and former life? Worry about the future? Thoughts about what she'll have for dinner? The movie doesn't care enough about Fern to find out, or to communicate its discovery.

Suffering, Compassion, Tribalism, and the Left. Why I Vote "Against My Economic Self-Interest"

 

Suffering, Compassion, Tribalism, and the Left
Why I Vote "Against My Economic Self-Interest"

 

"What's the Matter with Kansas?" a 2004 bestseller asked. Thomas Frank's book addressed why low-income whites vote Republican, "against their economic self-interest." Leftist analysts argue that poor whites are "white supremacists" accustomed to "white privilege;" we suffer from "white fragility;" because of the "browning of America" we experience "white panic;" and we vote Republican.

 

What's the matter with my vote? In the most recent gubernatorial and the past four presidential elections, I voted all five times, but only for one Democrat. Like Frank's allegedly confused Kansans, I have voted against my own immediate economic self-interest. I do not do so because I have floated through life on a palanquin of white privilege. Since Democrats promise poor folk like me both money and compassion, why did I not vote for Democrats all five times?

 

The left advertises itself, not only as the party of economic handouts, but also as the party of compassion. A Google search of "Joe Biden" and "Kindness" turns up millions of pages. Below are the first three:

 

"The Kindness Is The Point. The DNC’s Best Argument In The Time Of Coronavirus: Joe Biden, Unlike Donald Trump, Is A Decent Man."

 

"Joe Biden's Radical Compassion"

 

"He Can Bring Back Kindness"

 

Leftists often don't live up to such promises. Rather, leftists distribute resources, attention, and compassion unequally. Compare the saturation coverage meted to Trayvon Martin. Wikipedia devotes 71 pages to Trayvon Martin and his killing. Derrion Albert receives three Wikipedia pages. Derrion was a Chicago honor student beaten to death, on camera, with a railroad tie, by his classmates. Consider Jazmine Barnes, a seven-year-old black girl. When media reported that her killer was white, her death received international attention. When it was revealed that her killer was black, she dropped out of sight. The skin color of the officer and of the casualty informs choices about coverage of officer-involved-deaths. Compare Michael Brown to Justine Ruszczyk Damond to Tony Timpa.

 

Mere skin color is not enough to explain patterns of leftist embrace, rejection, and vilification. Asians have recently learned that they can be uplifted in the subject of a leftist sentence and decapitated in that sentence's predicate.

 

The left's meticulous manipulation of who receives compassion and who is cast into the outer darkness appears chaotic, but in fact it is consistent with an underlying mythos. This manipulation of compassion and economic resources occurs in one-on-one encounters, it occurs in local institutions, and it occurs nationally and internationally.

 

There's more at work here than "selective outrage" or simple hypocrisy. There is an underlying rationale carefully serviced to support leftist mythology. Reality, that is, the power narrative, must conform to the leftist agenda, not vice versa. And that is why, though it is often against my own, immediate, economic self-interest, I vote Republican when I do.

 

Recent events prompt me to ponder anew the question of why poor whites like me vote Republican. These events include HBO's airing of "Allen v Farrow," the death of Metropolitan Opera maestro James Levine, and media coverage of the March 16, 2021 Atlanta shootings. 

 

One such event is entirely personal. In my senior year of college, a member of my household violently and sexually assaulted me. Such assaults had happened before. This time, I, finally, ran out of the house. I was working as a nurse's aide, but most of my income went to tuition. I was homeless for a while; I ate from dumpsters and leftovers diners didn't finish in the school cafeteria.  

 

I had purchased a budget-priced, "fancy" pair of shoes for my student teaching assignment. I traveled to this assignment the only way I could: I was hitchhiking. It rained. The glue holding my new shoes together melted, and the soles separated from the body of the shoes.

 

I needed to ask for help.

 

I had gotten the phone number of a women's shelter from a bleary, photocopied flier taped to the wall in a ladies room – that's what we called them, in those naïve old, days, and that's what they were: ladies rooms. Oases for women, just women, where sexual assault survivors could exhale, enjoy female camaraderie, and escape from the background anxiety we feel around men.

 

A friend was allowing me, temporarily, to couch surf in her apartment. I stared at the rotary phone attached to the apartment wall. My guts were in a twist. I was about to tell an outsider, an American (though born in America, I felt foreign), a person with some power, truths I felt dutybound to carry to my grave. My childhood friends and I had been raised by parents who survived immigration and the Depression. Our parents had witnessed World War II, on the front lines of combat, and on both sides of the fences around concentration camps. These grizzled veterans taught us that you have to fend for yourself, your pain doesn't matter, you should never ask for anything, and everyone hates a whiner.

 

The left, in contrast, extends an invitation: "Pay attention to your pain! Take the names of those who hurt you! Be offended easily! Spill your guts. We care. Solidarity forever! There's no need to be afraid or ashamed! Just like in the Trust Fall exercise, close your eyes and fall backwards! We will catch you every time!" To accept the left's invitation and ask for help is a big deal for us.

 

I picked up the handset. I dialed. I stopped breathing.

 

I was mindful of my natal culture's demands for stoicism. I was determined not to cry or even whimper. I was also mindful that I'd soon be speaking to someone not from my natal culture. I'd probably be speaking to what I called, in those days, a "white" girl. Someone from a wealthier background, whose family had longer roots in America. Outsiders called people from my hometown "white trash." I screwed myself up to do what I always did when speaking to outsiders: I tried to sound dignified. Not trashy. I spoke in Standard English, which was not my normal speech. No doubt I sounded as unnatural as I felt.

 

At the other end of the phone line, I heard what I expected to hear: the voice of a righteous, officious young feminist. The kind of enviable, radical cool chick, dressed all in black, who impressed professors and called them by their first names. The young feminist at the other end of the line said something I'll never forget. "You don't sound traumatized to me at all. What you're describing sounds pretty traumatic but you sound calm and rational. Is this some kind of a prank? I don't think we can do anything for you."

 

This young feminist was the Official Helper Person. The person society had tapped to control the faucet of communal compassion. I didn't perform the way she wanted. She never said this, but I could almost hear: "You aren't pathetic enough, incoherent enough, blubbery enough, to satisfy my Messiah complex. You still retain the ability to speak in complete sentences; you still exhibit some personal dignity. Be gone." She judged me, condemned me, and hung up on me. I froze. I just stood there, staring at the phone for a long time.

 

Maybe I did it wrong? Maybe I need to do it better next time?

 

I scraped myself up off the floor and I went to one of my professors, a lesbian with a national profile in gay rights. She has since passed away; the New York Times made sure to call her both "eloquent" and "compassionate" in its obituary. In our literature classes, this professor talked as much about left-wing politics as she talked about any poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. She had said, in class, if we, her students, needed help, we should contact her. Again, summoning every molecule of courage I could, I asked for help. After a rambling, self-involved peroration that addressed nothing I said, she concluded, leaving me utterly confused and empty-handed.

 

I approached administrators. I explained. My mother's factory and cleaning jobs, my father's job carrying rich men's bags in a country club, and my job as a nurse's aide had provided the school with my full tuition for three and a half years. I maintained an A minus average. Surely the university had some rainy-day funds it could disburse for a student in my emergency situation? I was told then, and would be told later, in graduate school, and then still later in my search for a tenure-track job, that certain goodies, like meal tickets, tuition remission, emergency funds, and housing, had to be reserved for "underrepresented" populations. I was white, so I didn't meet the criteria.

 

I was not able to buy new shoes that spring. In a pinch, rubber bands can hold shoes together. I ate literal and metaphorical garbage. I earned straight A grades, graduated magna cum laude, and got my first post-college teaching job within a couple months of graduation.

 

For the rest of my life, listening to sermons from rich, white, liberal friends, I would agree. Absolutely, America must thoroughly integrate African Americans into mainstream American life. Absolutely, the fortunate should help the unfortunate; that's one of the foundational tenets of my religion. That's why I put money in the plate every Sunday and a big reason I went into teaching.

 

But, I would add, skin color is not a foolproof method to separate the fortunate from the unfortunate, and, as Larry Elder argues in a devastating YouTube video, leftist approaches have had limited success and may have done harm. Let's try conservative solutions, those proposed by John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, Jason D. Hill, and Walter E. Williams. Black conservative solutions focus less on the virtue signaling of munificent white saviors and more on African Americans' ability to accomplish good things for themselves.  

 

I would haltingly struggle to cite my own experience. The leftist, white savior model forces black people to play small, to beg from whites, the way that I suspected the women's shelter intake person wanted me to beg. To be pathetic in exchange for help.

 

My rich, white, liberal friends would cut me off with the terminal slice of a guillotine. They would take on a tone that was six parts benevolent patronizing, two parts sneering, and two parts threat, and would explain to me that my "lived experience" was invalid because I was blinded by "white privilege" and subconscious "implicit bias." Until I repented and confessed their gospel, I should be shunned.

 

Every adult survivor of child abuse is, I have to guess, haunted by the same realization: I got out, but today, right now, some kid somewhere is hurting. We adult survivors want to rescue kids. At one of my first teaching jobs in a majority-minority city, a black student told me that a member of her family was taking her to the basement and raping her. Using a leather belt, a parent beat a child on the child's exposed buttocks in front of me and other students. A young man cried in my arms. His last caring relative died, he had no idea where his mother was or who his father was, and a family member had kicked him out of his house. He was sleeping on park benches. Gang members were threatening him.

 

I went to my super-leftist and racially diverse superiors and begged for help. These superiors communicated to me that, yes, yes, these tales were "Sad, sad, so sad. Just a sign of how capitalism affects our students." And they did nothing. In each case, I had to seek outside resources. In the case of the homeless young man, it was the local, white, police chief who unhesitatingly stepped in.

 

Compare: after video appeared on social media of one white student singing a rap song that includes the N-word, there was an all-day, all-campus conference, the commitment of big dollars to address "systemic racism," and lengthy, public self-criticism from campus officials.

 

I've never responded to any TV show as I have to "Allen v Farrow," HBO's exhaustive four-and-a-half-hour documentary, and accompanying podcast, examining then seven-year-old Dylan Farrow's accusation that her father, Woody Allen, touched her private parts on August 4, 1992. The documentary plays, for me, as a vindication of every child who has ever been violated, who has ever been disbelieved, and who has ever heard that his or her pain does not matter.

 

Child abuse affects everyone. In 1999, the New York Times, as part of coverage of welfare reform, reported that "Women who were raped or molested as children are more likely to become addicted to alcohol or drugs, to suffer disabling battles with anxiety or depression and to become victims of domestic violence." These women were also disproportionately "hard cases" who couldn't quit welfare dependency.

 

In 2013, the Atlantic reported that "Ninety-five percent of teen prostitutes and at least one-third of female prisoners were abused as kids. Sexually abused youth are twice as likely to be arrested for a violent offense as adults, are at twice the risk for lifelong mental health issues, and are twice as likely to attempt or commit teen suicide. The list goes on. Incest is the single biggest commonality between drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, teenage and adult prostitution, criminal activity, and eating disorders."

 

"Allen v Farrow," given its thoroughness, its high-profile subjects, and its reservoir of social workers, prosecutors, and psychologists, presented the opportunity for a national discussion, something like that kicked off by the 1619 Project, but this time, devoted to child abuse. How many victims? What are the hidden costs? How do survivors learn to thrive in spite of their wounds? Finally, those kids out there who are suffering right now can hope for change. A survivor of child abuse doesn't have to be humiliated by a woman's shelter intake person. A girl who is being raped in a basement, or a boy sleeping on park benches, can assume that officials on a college campus might actually help.

 

And who might lead that change, but those self-deputized "kind" and "compassionate" people in charge of the spigots doling out societal compassion?

 

"Bob" is a prominent Catholic author and Facebook friend. Though I don't always agree with Bob, I do value his Biblical "hunger and thirst after righteousness." Bob had previously lent his considerable support to Jussie Smollett and Althea Bernstein, two African Americans who made dubious claims of being victimized by hate crimes, and Nathan Phillips, the so-called Native American elder who harassed Nick Sandmann and other Catholic schoolboys at the Lincoln Memorial.

 

Even so, I admire Bob's use of social media to urge his thousands of readers to care about the unfortunate. I was, thus, gut-punched by a recent post. Bob's fans repeatedly begged him to provide a social media signal boost for "Allen v Farrow"'s groundbreaking exploration of incest.

 

Bob publicly announced that he refused to watch the program. Watching the program would be comparable to being forced to eat feces. "I don't need to know more. Listening to [incest victims] recount their trauma [will not] help them or me do anything about it."

 

I was aghast.  

 

The New York Times, America's paper of record, declined to post Dylan Farrow's op ed describing her abuse. The Times has published thousands of articles covering sexual abuse by priests. Nick Kristof had to post Farrow's op-ed on his blog. Though the Times refused Farrow space to speak, it granted Woody Allen an op ed in the paper itself.

 

The Times is the woke-est publication in the land. The Times published a couple of articles focused on the quality of films: one devoted to the charming, sophisticated Manhattan viewers discover in Woody Allen's films, one, classified under "Screenland," devoted to the film Mia Farrow shot of seven-year-old Dylan describing her allegations against her father. Can you imagine a Times article discussing the cinematography of the George Floyd video?

 

In "Allen v Farrow" itself, a slew of celebrities are asked about working with Allen. Cate Blanchett said that the accusation of child abuse is "A family issue and I hope they can resolve it." Adrien Brody, who has also worked with confessed child rapist Roman Polanski, said, "People make mistakes. It's not for me to delve into … It's not my place." Diane Keaton, in an interview with Matt Lauer, ironically enough, said, simply, that Allen gave her her career, so she was happy to praise him. Would any celebrity say anything similar if Allen had been accused, not of molesting his own daughter, but of saying the N-word on August 4, 1992?

 

The discomfort I felt about how the Times handled "Allen v Farrow" came into sharp focus when I read a salute to Metropolitan Opera maestro James Levine, who died March 9, 2021. Anthony Tommasini, the Times classical music critic, wrote that Levine built the Met's "orchestra into an ensemble that rivals the world’s great symphonic orchestras … He established a young artists program that has become a model for companies everywhere." 

 

James Levine leveraged the god-like power his fans bestowed upon him to coerce boys as young as 15 to service him sexually. The Met knew all about it and quashed investigations. The Times knew about it, too. A reader commented, "A multitude of sins are shielded and enabled by the transactional ethics of access journalism … a host of music critics knew … Why didn't they turn it over to the investigative desk? … generations of entertainment journalists, for fear of being frozen out, turned a blind eye when they should have shone a spotlight. The road to hell is paved with the blacktop of opportunistic complicity."

 

Note to journalists: One must get huffy about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. One must also remain silent about celebrity sexual abuse. Some pain matters. Some pain does not matter. On March 16, 2021, a twenty-one year old white man allegedly shot nine people at massage "spas" in Atlanta Georgia, killing eight. Most of his victims were Asian-American spa workers. The alleged shooter is said to have blamed his sex addiction for the shootings. We may eventually discover that he is a white supremacist, but as of this writing, no such evidence has been advanced.

 

Mainstream media didn't want to talk about sex addiction, or misogyny, the proliferation of pornography, or how dangerous sex work is. It wanted to blame the shootings on Donald Trump and his "racist" supporters. Whiteness caused the shootings; whiteness that must be destroyed. The left was not just deciding that some pain matters and some pain does not. It was actively purloining pain from female victims and apportioning it to the left's project of demonizing all whites.

 

Ben Shapiro was fearless. He cited statistics showing that African Americans, not whites, are disproportionately represented among those committing violent crimes against Asians. In fact the web had been replete, in recent months, with reports and videos of African Americans attacking and insulting Asian-Americans. One video shows Antoine Watson murdering 84-year-old Thai grandfather Vichar Ratanapakdee. Black-Asian tension extends back at least as far as the L.A. Riots. Shapiro further pointed out that leftists are happy to discriminate against Asian-Americans when it comes to admission to elite education institutions.

 

Courageous feminist Phyllis Chesler insisted, "It’s Not Always About Race." Chesler cited a depressing and overwhelming fact: "Most of the corpses that litter our American landscape belong to women … women presumed to be prostitutes." Statistics support Chesler's point. "According to a recent study, 22 percent of confirmed U.S. serial murder victims between 1970 and 2009 were known prostitutes. And those numbers are climbing – over the last decade, 43 percent of victims were sex workers … Prostitutes make up just over 0.3 percent of the nation as a whole." More statistics on sex worker victims here.

 

K. Lee wrote, "Dear White Liberals: Asians Aren’t Your Pawns." Lee pointed out that attacks on Asian-Americans had been occurring for months, but leftists only showed his family concern when the assailant was a white, Christian male from the South. "You use our victimhood, turning it into your political gains… You sided with the rich NBA players over the freedom fighters of Hong Kong. You sided with Disney and NIKE over the lives and the dignity of the Uighurs in western China. You praised Antifa while they harassed and doxxed a gay Asian journalist. You sided with the rioters and looters that stole, robbed, and burned down our shops and businesses all last summer."

 

Why? Why does the pain of a child raped by a priest matter, but the pain of a child raped by a celebrity matter less? Why does a woman killed by a white supremacist matter, but a woman killed by a sex addict matter less?

 

Your pain matters if your pain can be weaponized to denigrate Western Civilization. A child molested by a celebrity says nothing about how bad Western Civilization is. The molestation of a child by a priest can be used as proof that the Catholic Church, and, by extension, Christianity, is hopelessly corrupt and should be jettisoned. Christianity is one of the foundational pillars of the West. When a white authority figure like a police officer harms a person of color, that victim demands compassion and attention. Police officers are metonyms of law and order. A white police officer's corruption and failure can be used as a symptom of a sick system, one that needs to be overturned. When my student was sleeping on park benches and living in fear of gang members, he was being victimized by black people. His pain didn't matter. His pain could not be used to indict American society.

 

Similarly, in my recent online discussion with an Atheist, I insisted that to understand child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, one must understand child sexual abuse period. Yes, talk about priests. And include talk of celebrities like Jimmy Saville and Michael Jackson who got away with child sexual abuse in plain sight for decades. Include the high status granted films by Woody Allen that depict his obsession with sex between teen girls and old men. The Atheist would have none of it. He wanted to talk only about abuse in the Catholic Church. That is not a pro-child or anti-abuse position. That is simply an anti-Catholic position. It is an exploitation of children's pain to attack an institution one hates.

 

We're not talking, here, about compassion. We're talking, rather, about the callous, calculating, systematic, exploitation and commodification of pain. Like the Hindu goddess Kali and the Aztec Coatlicue, who both wear necklaces of human skulls, leftists festoon themselves, ornament themselves, with human suffering, through virtue signaling. Last summer, they used black squares as social media avatars to show support for BLM. Now, they use a frame saying "Stop Asian Hate." Note that neither action requires any work, investment, or preparation, or actually helps anyone. Always, they select, from life's all too abundant menu, a form of suffering that can be commodified, not just as an ornament, but as a battering ram to tear down their ogre, Western Civilization.

 

The left is not loyal to the tribes it, however fleetingly, patronizes. Decades ago, the left championed working class white ethnics like Joe Hill, Emma Goldman, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. The left became disenchanted with white ethnics when too many advanced through bourgeois values like hard work and obeying the law. Ethnics remained true to their church and their folk identities, and refused the all-erasing identity of "worker," as in, "Workers of the world, unite."

 

The left's betrayal of the working class is never so clear as in a not-to-be-missed Triggernometry interview. Jodi Shaw was a library worker at elite Smith College, where tuition, room, and board run $78,000 annually. In July, 2018, Smith student Oumou Kanoute accused employees of harassing her because she is black. An investigation found no evidence of racist harassment, but those Kanoute accused, including a janitor, a police officer, and a cafeteria worker, were damaged by her allegations. Kanoute doxed the cafeteria worker, who has a chronic illness, which flared up from the stress of a false allegation. Strangers phoned the worker at home and told her she should die. She had to be hospitalized, and when she sought other work, her potential employers identified her as an alleged racist. Shaw outlines how Smith turned on its innocent workers, out of fear of its elite, Woke, student body.

 

The fickle favoritism the left shows African Americans turns on a dime. Witness Juan Williams, who was betrayed by the left for saying that he feels anxiety when he sees Muslims on airplanes. More recently, in March, 2021, Alexi McCammond, a 27-year-old African American journalist, was fired from her job at Teen Vogue before she could even begin working. McCammond, when she was a teenager, had posted tweets critical of Asians, including an Asian teaching assistant who was not helpful to her. Given the timing of the Atlanta spa shooting, in this instance, leftist fealty to African Americans was trumped by leftist exploitation of Asians' pain.

 

Jesus was asked to provide the way to get to Heaven. He responded that one must love God and love one's neighbor. Jesus was asked, who is our neighbor? Jesus responded with a parable about a Samaritan, that is, a member of a despised outsider group. This parable smashed tribalism in a way that no other text ever has. Its ethic is echoed in Genesis. One loving God created two ancestors, Adam and Eve, for all mankind. As the Talmud explains, God did this "so that people should not try to feel superior to one another and boast of their lineage in this wise: 'I am descended from a more distinguished Adam than you.'"

 

Other ethical systems reflect a tribal mindset. "Be good to people who are members of your tribe; apply a lesser ethic to those not members of your tribe" is a common precept. Jesus' words and Genesis are revolutionary.

 

In his essential book, "Dominion," Tom Holland, himself an atheist, demonstrates clearly that the universality of Judeo-Christian ethics remade the world. A key to this reformation was the Good Samaritan parable. We are not best understood as members of competing tribes. We are best understood, all of us, as brothers and sisters, children of a loving God. That concept has fueled liberation movements across the globe and throughout history for the past two thousand years. There is no other concept that can compare to it.

 

We are entering an increasingly secular, post-Judeo-Christian world. The left has dragged the golden calf of twisted tribalism to center stage.  

 

There is a velvet rope around the leftist Kumbaya campfire, and a roided-out bouncer ejects anyone who doesn't meet the left's criteria. The left picks and chooses which pain, and which victims, deserve leftist balm.

 

Why do I vote against my economic self-interest? The right doesn't lie to me like that telephone feminist at the women's shelter did. The right doesn't demand that I surrender all dignity before I deserve compassion. The right doesn't say to me, or, these days, to anyone, "The color of your skin, and the flavor of your ancestry, and the skin color of the person hurting you, exempt you from the terms of our contract. Your coupon for kindness or justice or even just simple human decency is void."

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

As a "Person of Color," I Received the COVID-19 Vaccine Quickly and Easily

 

Credit: Malte Mueller Getty Images Source

As a "Person of Color," I Received a COVID-19 Vaccine Easily and Quickly
 And I Don't Think It's Fair

 

How do you feel about set-asides for minority identities? Scholarships, employment opportunities, contracts for government jobs, slots at elite colleges like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, appointments in presidential cabinets, and other wish-list items that you can never claim unless you are black, Hispanic, Native American, a woman, gay, trans, or a member of some other population that has been tapped by the magic wand of preference?

 

In polls, blacks and women tend to support Affirmative Action more than whites and men. This makes sense: if a quota benefits you, you favor it, and if it disadvantages you, you reject it. But while about forty percent of whites voice opposition to Affirmative Action in a recent poll, about thirty percent of blacks oppose it, as well, and that percentage has gone up, not down, in recent years. Prominent black opponents of Affirmative Action include activist Ward Connerly, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and author Shelby Steele. It seems counter-intuitive that black people, who stand to benefit from Affirmative Action, would oppose a stance that promises them access to money and power.

 

Let's up the ante. How would you feel about benefitting from a set-aside if it were not for a slot at Harvard, but, rather, if it were a question of life-or-death?

 

Given a recent experience, I think I understand better why almost thirty percent of blacks oppose Affirmative Action. Unseen hands gifted me with quick and easy access to a COVID-19 vaccine. Why? I believe I was incorrectly classified as a "person of color." This access bothered me, not least because a friend, "Rocky," needs the vaccine more than I do. I begged Rocky to take my slot, but he declined. He wanted me to get it.

 

By February 1, 2021, only 7.7 percent of the US population had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Only 22.5% of especially vulnerable and needy people whom the CDC prioritized to receive the vaccine had been vaccinated. That means, as of February 1, 2021, 77.5% of those most likely to die from COVID-19 were yet to be fully vaccinated. This includes elderly people, the obese, those with cancer, Down syndrome, weak immune systems, diabetes, smokers, and pregnant women.   

 

I assumed I'd be waiting my turn, while continuing to wear my mask, to wash my hands, and to isolate socially, as I had been doing since the pandemic began. My willingness to wait was not rocket science nor was it dramatic self-sacrifice. When it comes to both respiratory viruses and civilized life, we really are all in this together. We'd all immediately feel the lack of sanitation and sewer workers, and we'd quickly feel the lack of ER personnel like nurses. We need grocery store clerks. We all probably have an older relative, or a very fat friend, or a pregnant one. Aware of our own superior vigor and our loved ones' greater vulnerabilities, it comes naturally to us to stand back and let the more vulnerable person get the vaccine before we do. And there was another reason I wasn't sure I needed to rush. In December, I was sick for three weeks, and there were enough anomalies about this mystery illness to make me think it might well have been a relatively mild case of COVID-19. I assumed that if I had had it, I may have gained some immunity, and I could afford to wait for a vaccine.

 

Finally, I really didn't want to press for a vaccine because doing so sounded like a Mad-Max-style competition. Paterson, New Jersey, adopted a "first come, first served" approach. Residents from all over New Jersey came to Paterson's International High School site. Elderly people set up tents or maybe just lawn chairs and sleeping bags and camped outdoors through the frigid night in a dangerous city in order to secure a spot in line. Police blocked off vehicular access. Mayor Andre Sayegh was pressured to close access to New Jerseyans from other towns and allow only Paterson residents to be vaccinated.

 

One night, on WNYC's "Ask Governor Murphy" radio broadcast, an elderly woman, sounding desperate and afraid, phoned in to tell the governor that she and her husband had paid decades-worth of New Jersey's highest-in-the-nation property taxes. Now, she said, she and her husband were old and frail, and they needed COVID-19 vaccines and could not get them. That call broke my heart.

 

In the 1997 film "Titanic," Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), a rich man, grabs a lost little girl and claims to be her father. With the girl as his human shield, he gains a precious seat on a lifeboat, and saves his own life. The scene is so notorious, but also so funny, that it's become a GIF.

 

We don't want to be that Cal Hockley guy. We want to be the heroic Father Thomas Byles. Byles remained aboard, helping third-class passengers onto lifeboats. After all the lifeboats had been launched, Byles then prayed with and heard the confessions of doomed Titanic passengers. I didn't think I was consigning myself to the icy depths of the North Atlantic by waiting patiently for my vaccine. I knew I was taking a risk, but it was a risk I felt, as a responsible citizen, I was willing to take.

 

But it was a risk I didn't have to take. It was late January, 2021. While vulnerable populations were perched over their computers for days at a time, clicking "refresh" hundreds of times, while parents of Down Syndrome children were driving hundreds of miles in search of vaccines, and while grandparents were begging for help from tech-savvy grandchildren, a written invitation to receive a vaccine slid silently under my door. The highly effective Pfizer vaccine was available to me. No waiting, no line, no pressure. I just walked a few minutes from my front door, and rolled up my sleeve. For the second of this two-dose vaccine, I urged Rocky to take my place. He, manfully, refused. He wanted me to get it. I did. I felt like garbage. I was well aware that I was taking the place of someone who needed the vaccine more than I. I now have – yes, it's a thing – vaccine guilt.

 

I live in a majority-minority city in a majority-minority apartment complex. I estimate that about 90% of my neighbors are black or Hispanic. Governor Phil Murphy, along with all other public officials, has been under extraordinary pressure to prioritize vaccinating black and Hispanic people, and his administration is doing just that. In fact, even before any vaccines were authorized, news outlets reported that "Health experts want to prioritize people of color for a COVID-19 vaccine."

 

In spite of powerful efforts to push non-whites to the front of the vaccine line, black people are receiving fewer vaccines than Americans who are not black. The Woke insist that this disparity is yet further proof that the United States is a white supremacist wasteland that dooms blacks to lesser lives. This was nowhere more clear than in a February 12, 2021 cartoon by white cartoonist Andy Marlette. Marlette depicted a bent and elderly black man, leaning on a cane, gazing mournfully at two water fountains, a superior water fountain for white people and an inferior one for blacks. In this case, the fountains represented vaccine access. This image harkened back to the bad old, pre-Civil-Rights era in the Jim Crow South. America was still 1950 Mississippi, the KKK was still lynching, no one had died to free any slaves: in Marlette's dystopian cartoon, vaccination-rate disparities proved all this true. Shame, shame, shame.

 

Many insisted that blacks did not want to get vaccines because the Tuskegee Experiment made blacks distrust mainstream medicine. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study took place between 1932 and 1972. It involved 399 black men with latent syphilis who were merely observed, and not treated, for the disease. Doctors could have treated the patients with penicillin, but they did not, because they wanted data on the course of untreated syphilis in black men. This study is monstrous. Those who carried it out were criminals. It stopped in 1972 after word of the study became public. Revelation of the study lead to the creation of strict standards for scientific experimentation on human beings. In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology.

 

Those who attribute the discrepancy between black and non-black vaccination rates to trauma from the Tuskegee study insist that the entire US medical establishment is a white supremacist, criminal enterprise, comparable to the monsters who carried out that study, that black people risk their lives seeking medical care, and that their vaccine wariness is well-founded. Are these assertions true? Let's examine them.

 

Are black people the only victims of unethical scientific experimentation? No. One need only mention Harvard and MIT's 1944-1956 experiments on helpless, institutionalized, mentally retarded children. Harvard and MIT scientists fed these children radioactive breakfast cereal. The work was "funded partly by Quaker Oats Co. and the US Atomic Energy Commission." "I feel just as good about it today as the day I did it," one researcher said in 1993. One child reported, "They told me I shouldn't have kids and I shouldn't get married. They said I might have a defect, that I had something wrong with me." In one photo, all the children fed radioactive breakfast cereal are white males. Institutionalized white children were similarly experimented on in the University of Iowa's cruel and unethical 1939 "Monster Study."

 

Between 1956 and 1971, that is at the same time as the Tuskegee Study, NYU and Yale University professors infected otherwise healthy institutionalized white children with hepatitis. "Studies involved feeding live hepatitis virus from others' stool samples to sixty healthy children. [NYU Doctor Saul] Krugman watched as their skin and eyes turned yellow and their livers got bigger. He watched them vomit and refuse to eat. All the children fed hepatitis virus became ill, some severely."

 

White males were used in the notorious Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study. White males were of course exposed to radiation during military service. "We were used as guinea pigs," one such veteran reports.

 

White women have not escaped routinized malpractice. Female "hysteria" was once treated with hysterectomies. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and a progressive heroine, regarded people like my Slovak, immigrant mother as racial "undesirables" whose reproduction should be controlled by science. Major scientists one hundred years ago shared Sanger's opinion. Tens of thousands of people, black and white, were sterilized by force, including two white Virginia women, Carrie and Doris Buck as well as Polish and Italian immigrants, and French Canadians living in Vermont.  

 

The horrific history of lobotomies; the application of B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning to homosexuals; Thalidomide; the over-prescription of mind-altering drugs to children; the opioid crisis that has ravaged rural, mostly white communities, killing 70,000 Americans in 2019 alone; Louise Wise Services' unethical separation of twins put up for adoption in order to study heredity v environment; Dr. John Money's horrific and deadly malpractice on David and Brian Reimer, the related abuse of children like Keira Bell: there is no lack of populations, black and white, affected by malpractice. In fact Johns Hopkins researchers estimate that iatrogenic conditions, that is, health-care-caused problems, are the third leading cause of death in the US, after heart disease and cancer.

 

All of these horrors are but a drop in the bucket compared to the crimes committed in the name of "science" in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The fallout to these crimes is not limited to Europe or Asia. I personally know an American woman whose Polish-Catholic mother was subjected to grotesque Nazi medical experimentation, and an American man whose uncle was imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp and suffered grievously there.

 

Why bring up this nightmarish material? Here's why.

 

Powerful voices in the US now insist that black people choose not to be vaccinated because of the Tuskegee study. These voices insist that African Americans alone are the only population that has ever suffered in an unethical study. They insist that American medicine is thoroughly white supremacist and that African Americans know this and know that they risk their lives when seeking conventional medical care. National Public Radio insists, "In Tuskegee, Painful History Shadows Efforts To Vaccinate African Americans."

 

Yes, white supremacy is evil. That much is true. But this much is also true: the above history of unethical medical science, including, as it does, millions of white victims, is a story of science and scientists run amuck. New Atheists like Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker insist that we don't need God. Science provides all the ethics we need. Alas, this is not so. Ethical science requires human fealty to an ethical system informed by the Ancient Greek Hippocratic ideal of "first, do no harm," which, itself, began with a vow to Greek gods, and the Judeo-Christian tradition.

 

Blacks are not the only ones who can recount anecdotes of mistreatment, errors, and callousness in health care institutions. I myself was experimented on by doctors when I suffered from a little-understood vestibular condition. Though my participation was voluntary and abided by ethical standards, I was treated like the guinea pig that I was. At one point I was strapped into a chair in a tiny, completely darkened booth. The chair began to rotate, randomly, both clockwise and counter-clockwise. I was told to stare at a pinprick of red light, the only light in the booth. I was terrified and demanded to be released. The researcher would not release me till she was done gathering her data. Around and around my strapped-in body spun, helplessly.

 

Think that's my only unhappy medical anecdote? Think again. I have plenty more, and worse. My mother told and retold the account of my Slovak immigrant grandmother crying out in pain as she died of cancer in an American hospital. My mother accused American doctors and nurses of not giving my grandmother adequate pain-killers. This happened before I was born, but I heard these stories so often, and in my mother's compelling style, that I can see my grandmother writhing under harsh fluorescent lights, and cold American doctors passing her by as she screams.

 

Because of such stories, and my own lived experiences, I am terrified of doctors. What's the difference between me and the many African Americans who fear doctors so much that they won't get a COVID-19 vaccine? Here's the difference: there is no industry dedicated to cultivating my ethnic paranoia, persecution complexes, and the chip on my shoulder.

 

The Woke, like Marxists before them, sniff around other people's pain the way rats sniff around garbage. The Woke are not looking for problems to solve; they are looking for pain to commodify. They want to overturn bad, corrupt, Western Civilization and replace it with their brave, new world. The Woke sneer at the pain of poor whites as an unworthy commodity for revolution building. The Woke focus on exacerbating division between whites and blacks.

 

Me? I've learned, through the school of hard knocks, that I hurt only myself when I avoid doctors. I've learned to educate myself, recruit allies, and develop a courteous and yet assertive stance. I'm still afraid when I go to the doctor; though I am otherwise a teetotaler when it comes to mind-altering drugs, I have a Klonopin prescription, an anti-anxiety drug, that I take when I go to the doctor.

 

Now, imagine if I were black. Teachers, politicians, ministers, NPR, the New York Times, MSNBC, would drum into me, not that my and my family's bad medical experiences were unfortunate but not part of any conspiracy. No. Powerful voices would not be telling me that I am responsible for my own care, that I need to inform myself, recruit an ally, and learn to be polite but assertive. No. I would be told, again and again, with the force of chanted, unquestionable dogma, that I was a victim of a thorough-going white supremacist society eager to use medicine to destroy me. Every white person I meet is my enemy and wields the tools of medicine only sadistically. If I heard that message from teachers, from NPR, from the New York Times, over and over, would I avail myself of a vaccine? Hell no.

 

Why do the Woke tell black people this story? Because it disempowers black people. In the case of vaccine avoidance, this false narrative might just kill black people. Nor is this the only Woke narrative that results in black death. Telling black people that police are all white supremacists out to get them is another death-dealer. Telling black people that standards in schools are "racist" destroys the academic lives of black students. Why do the Woke want to disempower and even kill black people, through false narratives like this and others? Because they hope that weakened people will submit more readily to the Woke narrative of salvation through Woke politics. False narratives of universal white evil and ultimate black powerlessness are the Woke's recruitment pamphlets.

 

And here's a kicker. Research shows that the Tuskegee study, a trope so beloved of the Woke that they mention it every chance they get, is not cited by African Americans as their reason not to get the COVID-19 vaccine. "No, the Tuskegee Study Is Not the Top Reason Some Black Americans Question the COVID-19 Vaccine," reports KQED. In fact, researchers have known for years that African Americans are not rejecting medical attention because of Tuskegee. "The conclusions were definitive … There was no association between knowledge of Tuskegee and willingness to participate" in medical procedures.

 

Why, then, do the Woke cite Tuskegee? Social work professor Karen Lincoln says, "If you say Tuskegee, then you don't have to acknowledge … poverty and unemployment." Well, isn't that convenient. Ignore the poverty that pushes both poor whites and poor blacks away from medical care. Why did I consent to being experimented on by a callous researcher? I was stricken with a vestibular disorder when I was a grad student, and I had no health insurance and no money. Rather than talking about poverty and health care, the Woke obsess on race. Race is more divisive, and division advances the divisive Woke narrative. Also, obsession on race exempts rich white liberals from attention to their own wealth. Every revolution needs someone to hate, and the Woke hate poor whites. Focus on skin color instead of poverty and unemployment allows the Woke their hatred-of-choice.

 

A black woman, Maxine Toler, said that vaccine distribution is proof that America is racist. "You practically needed a computer science degree to get an online appointment." What Toler doesn't realize is that getting an appointment is just as hard for whites as for blacks. The computer doesn't care if you are white or black. Will the Woke tell this woman that? No. The Woke don't want that black woman's problem solved; they want her pain weaponized for the coming glorious revolution.

 

I am tormented by the fear that Rocky will soon die. My morbid obsession is a sign of how much he means to me. Most of my siblings have died, often young, of cancer. (Yes, even white people are subjected to the kind of environmental pollution that results in demographically atypical early cancer deaths.) After two other siblings died decades ago, both my only sister and yet another brother died of cancer in the past six years. Rocky is one of the few people I have left who remembers me from my childhood. He's a good man and he deserves a long life. I beg God to let me die before Rocky. I pray this prayer not because I'm like Father Byles on the Titanic. I pray this prayer because I'm alone and losing Rocky would gut me and I couldn't survive his loss.

 

Rocky was born in a high-crime, majority-minority city. His immigrant parents sent Rocky to the local bakery to beg for bread. Any meat his family saw were the cuts that butchers can't sell. Rocky was malnourished. He caught pneumonia. He was hospitalized for three months. His lungs never recovered.

 

Rocky experiences coughing fits. Sometimes he just puts his head back and struggles for breath. His struggle to breathe terrifies and saddens me.

 

Rocky, with his compromised lungs, can't get a COVID-19 vaccine. Rocky is a white male, an alleged monarch squatting atop a throne of unearned privilege. You won't hear about anyone like Rocky from the Woke peddling their divisive pamphlets.

 

In an angry March 5, 2021 New York Times editorial, black physician Rhea Boyd wrote "To fully expand access to COVID-19 vaccines, health care must name, challenge and eliminate the anti-Black racism that continues to place vital health care services just beyond Black Americans' reach … while the standards of care in the United States are exceptional, and among the highest in the world, it is important to acknowledge that anti-Black racism keeps the health care system from systematically applying that high standard to Black people." Note Dr. Boyd's capital "b" on "Black." Being black is so exceptional that it requires capitalization.

 

Rhea Boyd, I received the COVID-19 vaccine easily and quickly, not because I needed it, but exactly because someone in power, directed by my white governor, thought I was black, or as you have it, "Black." I begged Rocky to take my slot, but he wouldn't. Rocky, despite his lungs ruined by childhood poverty and neglect, hasn't been able to get the vaccine. You want truth? Let's tell all the truths. Let's tell this one.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

At Front Page Magazine here