My closest friends for whom this blog was intended will have heard much of it before. I tend to repeat myself. I try to boil my inchoate experiences down to the essentials and then plot them out for revealing connections. Why did this or that seemingly insignificant experience mean something? Students of literature acquire these habits of looking for clues and reshuffling the narrative, as in those crime series where the detectives are always examining and reshuffling the images of victims and suspects on their pin boards.
I want to juxtapose two encounters from the plague year. Both involved interacting with strangers in a political conversation. In the first, the encounter was planned but in my opinion not at all successful. The second encounter was accidental and much more interesting. The first took place on a beautiful October Saturday on the run up to the November 2020 election. An academic friend asked me to keep him company when he passed out election propaganda for the Democrats in a nearby neighborhood. It was a perfect fall afternoon. The streets were irregularly laid out and leafy. What could have been finer than a stroll through an area of middle class and working-class houses.
The first thing that struck me as odd was the near absence of people outdoors and the dearth of signs signaling their presence indoors. We were expected to follow a minutely detailed itinerary sent by the Democratic National Committee. Each street, each house, and even the direction in which we proceeded were all set in advance; and we were expected to confirm and provide input. The one thing omitted, in fact systematically excluded, was political conversation with the citizens. We were to leave the material on the door, knock, and keep our distance. The houses of non-Democrats were altogether off limits. This would have seemed artificial and perverse, except that there were so few signs of inhabitants anyway. Sometimes during the first pandemic summer I had gone on late evening walks hoping to catch that moment when the houses would light up from within. They rarely did. Had my city been evacuated? Was I in the Twilight Zone?
There was one exception on the fall day. Two women, one older middle aged, the other perhaps her mother quite old, paraded along the sidewalks behind a double baby stroller which seated, not a baby, but two small but healthy and full-grown dogs. The absurdity of this sight seemed somehow emblematic of the preternaturally emptied neighborhood. Why were there no children playing outdoors? No signs of activity in the houses? The strategy of the election campaign seemed to match the circumstances of the empty public spaces. Somewhere inside those unilluminated dwellings the residents in hiding were receiving the only directives that counted. Our job was simply to remind them to act on them. We were more like secret agents than public representatives. Debate or discussion belonged to a bygone era.
The second encounter was in mid-January. I wanted to celebrate my birthday with my young friends and with Victor D., a labor historian that I wanted the students to meet. I invited them to the train station waiting room. I brought the usual thermos of hot cider and rum as well as some homemade pizelles, thin waffles spiced with anise that were a good compliment and easy to pass around. When you’re trapped indoors and isolated for long periods, it doesn’t take much to generate a festive mood. We were enjoying the conversation about working conditions, past employers, politics, and the current situation. The waiting passengers were obviously interested in our conversation and since we were seated at a distance from one another, nothing kept them from joining in. We didn’t agree on everything. There is more working-class opposition to immigration than academic liberals who ascribe it to pure racism admit or realize. The conversation was more of a dialogue than anything I had seen on that fall day. It left me with the sense that people in fact do crave public discussion and debate. Public spaces exist and we should seek them out for any political conversation that isn’t guided by Robert’s Rules. It isn’t by accident that AOC, the most effective voice on the left, worked in the hospitality sector. Bars and churches have always been centers of agitation and information.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 