Literal Latté

08/22/2024

07/27/2024

Too important not to share everywhere. Trump is promising a dictatorship and a coup to the people who falsely believe he cares about them. Democrats must unite and defeat the felon.

07/06/2024

Rose colored glass

05/28/2024

I'll be reading with Drunken! Careening! Writers! TONIGHT, 7:00 pm at the famous KGB Bar & Lit Mag in the East Village (85 East 4th Street, in the bar upstairs). FREE! I'll be joined by Kelli Dunham, Kevin Holohan, Charles Salzberg, and our host Kathleen Warnock. Hope you can make it!!

05/09/2024

Peace and love 💕

05/04/2024

The force is strong with this birthday boy. Nine years of joy with this cute monster.

04/08/2024

At 3:30 in the afternoon the moon turned off the lights, there was 360 degree twilight, and darkness for a few spectacular minutes. It was as cloudy and extraordinary.

03/31/2024

Always good to be in Bedford

03/26/2024

Great analysis by David Corn of Mother Jones on why Americans so miserable now. —
…the pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that people’s recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.

When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful—even, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.

Forgetting can be useful. This jibes with what I’ve been struggling to comprehend about Trump’s current standing. People yearn for the good old days…even when they were not so good. At the same time, unprocessed trauma creates an unease that affects current attitudes. So with Trump and the pandemic, many Americans don’t want to accurately recall that terrible stretch but the unresolved issues from that horrific time yield a dissatisfaction with the current moment that Trump himself can exploit. Talk about a bank shot.

In part, Trump can (try to) get away with this because there was no post-pandemic establishment of a consensus Covid narrative. There were a few congressional hearings—mounted by Democrats—that examined the Trump administration’s actions during the crisis. But the Democrats failed to turn these sessions into high-profile affairs. And there has been no prominent blue-ribbon commission to investigate what was the worst public health emergency in a century. Accountability has been absent. That has made it easier to forget.

Makari and Friedman explain that “consigning painful memories to the River Lethe…has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts one’s emotional life and results in untoward effects.” In extreme cases with veterans, this can lead to PTSD. (“We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID,” they state.)

Traumatic memories can affect how the brain functions and, thus, how the present is perceived. As they put it, “Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.” We might not recall all the dreadful details of the early pandemic and the specific fears. (Will millions of us die?) “But,” Makari and Friedman assert, “the feelings that that experience ignited are still very much alive. This can make it difficult to rationally assess the state of our lives and our country.”

So if we’re all still reeling from those awful years of death and stress—and that is distorting how we view our current lives—what can be done about it? These two clinical psychiatrists say “you need to do more than ignore or simply recall it. Rather, you must rework the disconnected memory into a context, and thereby move it firmly into the past.” One remedy, they maintain, “is for leaders to encourage remembrance while providing accurate and trustworthy information about both the past and the present.” They see the politics of all this in similar fashion to what I’ve written: Trump, who bungled the response to the pandemic and who spread misinformation about Covid, has “become the beneficiary of our collective amnesia, and Biden the repository for lingering emotional discontent.” Yet they optimistically contend, “Some of that misattribution could be addressed by returning to the shattering events of the past four years and remembering what Americans went through. This process of recall is emotionally cathartic, and if it’s done right, it can even help to replace distorted memories with more accurate ones.”

I’m not certain that during an election year marked by record-high political polarization such an exercise could occur. Any attempt to revist those dark days to set the record straight would face a barrage of opposition from Trump, the GOP, and the conservative media, replete with shouts of “hoax” and accusations of Deep State plotting. See what happened when the Democrats tried to establish an account of what led to and occurred on January 6. There are no longer neutral observers (or observers who are widely considered neutral) in the political media world who could guide an endeavor of national remembrance and reconciliation.

It's clear that Biden and his advisers have decided to steer clear of Covid—as a policy matter and a political issue. He rarely brings it up, and there’s not much of an effort on the part of his administration to promote booster shots or other anti-Covid measures. They seem to want to sidestep the divisive cultural wars that Covid triggered. Makari and Friedman, however, contend that reminding voters of the worst days of the pandemic need not “create more trouble” for Biden. They write: “Our work leads us to believe that the effect would be exactly the opposite. Rituals of mourning and remembrance help people come together and share in their grief so that they can return more clear-eyed to face daily life. By prompting Americans to remember what we endured together, paradoxically, Biden could help free all of us to more fully experience the present.”

I’d like to believe this. And I’d like to see Biden try. As I’ve noted, I am stunned that Trump’s malfeasant handling of the crisis has not disqualified him for a return engagement. Then again, I could say the same thing about Trump’s Big Lie and January 6. We’ve often heard that the first step to recovery is recognizing the problem and resolving to address it. With both Covid and January 6, one half of the political system has no interest in such a process. It rightfully calculates that its survival depends on preventing this. Can Biden and the Democrats do this on their own? That would be quite the task.

While pundits have failed to fully explain the sour mood of the American public, Makari and Friedman have delivered us a smart diagnosis that helps us understand at least part of this unusual and upsetting political moment. (On Sunday, the New York Times published a smart piece that examined the current political impact of the pandemic.) Their article is a reminder that psychology is often crucial for comprehending voters’ attitudes. I wonder, though, if it’s too late to fulfill their prescription. I once heard Gore Vidal refer to this country as the United States of Amnesia. Our problem is that many of our fellow citizens are damn happy to reside there.

03/24/2024

After the rain

01/26/2024

The great god coco devouring the miniature world.

12/11/2023

Come join me and the talented lunatics of Sagging Meniscus Press and Exacting Clam for our winter reading at the venerable East Village Tiki Bar, Otto's Shrunken Head!! THIS Saturday, 12/16, at 5:00pm. Free!** We'll get you out in time for dinner!

https://fb.me/e/45q4M1oux

With Marvin Cohen, Joshua Kornreich, Wendy Walker, Dawn Raffel, James Damis, David Dario Winner, Angela Starita, and Tyler Gore.

Authors will happily sign books for you.

** Otto’s requests a 1–2 drink minimum for guests. Note that they have a variety of nonalcoholic offerings, if that's your preference.

PS You might have guessed that this deranged event graphic was designed by me...

12/09/2023

Dog and wolf meet in Manhattan

11/14/2023

Great glowing ginkgoes! Autumn in New York!

10/25/2023

Halloween in NYC. Every day another treat

10/23/2023

Autumn is blooming on the stoops of NYC

10/21/2023

09/14/2023

Found poem two

09/12/2023

Pot of gold at end of rainbow today

08/10/2023

In Nantucket it’s not just a horse trail, it’s a rainbow unicorn trail!

07/01/2023

Anyone know what this is? Hanging around in Manhattan?

06/30/2023

Late last night, I woke up with a profound insight...
SNOOPY : PEANUTS :: FONZIE : HAPPY DAYS

05/04/2023

May the fourth be with this birthday baby. Eight years old today. He’s no Yoda or Wookiee, but he can high five and he is a pretty good boy.

04/26/2023

Must have been quite a party. NYC garbage stories

04/22/2023

Just me and my shadow

03/04/2023

Two incredible writers.

This new essay collection contains humor and pathos and medical digressions. Also, pranks with pizzas.

01/01/2023

The annual roll your own sushi fest new year celebration!!!!