I started my COVID-19 Narrative Project in part to capture the first-personal sense of what it was like to live through the COVID-19 crisis, and in part because I simply enjoy reading stories of this sort. Every now and then, I encounter submissions I wish I’d gotten. Here are two. Continue reading
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Only in Dreams
If you need a break from the Coronavirus Diary for some comic absurdity, then you probably want to hear about this dream I had last night. It featured Irfan Khawaja.
In the dream, Irfan lived in a small but comfortable one bedroom apartment somewhere in urban New Jersey. I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I was headed to his place, but some kids stopped me on the way. They figured I looked like the sort of middle aged guy who wandered through their neighborhood looking to buy drugs, and they told me that this dude Irfan had good drugs to sell. Knowing Irfan, I had two thoughts: first, he is probably not selling drugs out of his apartment (but maybe he’s that desperate?); second, with his history of interaction with the police, the rumor that he’s selling drugs out of his apartment might get him into some serious trouble. So I thanked the boys and proceeded to Irfan’s apartment to ask him about this rumor. I figured that he’d want to know that his neighbor kids were telling random strangers that he sells drugs, whether it was true or not.
When I got there, Irfan wasn’t home. The situation seemed pretty urgent, though, so I thought I had to act fast. I knew that the lock on his door wasn’t particularly strong, and that if I just leaned into it pretty heavily at the right spot, it’d pop open without breaking anything. So I bumped into the door, and sure enough, it opened up. I found some paper and a pencil to write him a note, but I figured I shouldn’t leave any evidence that would incriminate him, whether the charges were true or not. So I wrote the note in Latin. That way only he’d know what I’d written.
Before I left, though, Irfan returned. He was furious to find me in his apartment and proceeded to lecture me on property rights and boundary transgressions. Soon enough, more serious matters arose. I didn’t even have time to tell him about the rumor that he was selling drugs, because he didn’t have time to listen to it. He was, he now revealed to me, leading a team that was fighting Michael Myers — yes, that Michael Myers:
In fact, he was surprised and a bit irritated that I hadn’t already figured out that he was part of the fight against Michael Myers. He had, after all, starred alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in the most recent installment of the Halloween franchise, so it wouldn’t have been hard for me to infer that he was in the process of a career shift. He gathered some weapons from his closet and told me to lock the door behind me and not to break into his place again.
I have vivid and strange dreams pretty regularly. Usually, though, they star people that I’ve interacted with personally in recent days. Maybe because school has moved entirely on-line with the Coronavirus lockdown, er, stay-at-home order, and I’m no longer interacting with the same few dozen teenagers for 40 hours a week, my mind has had to get more creative and work with more distant material. I haven’t even been keeping up with Policy of Truth, I’m sorry to say. So there’s really no apparent explanation for Irfan’s showing up in my dreams.
The rest of the elements in the dream make a great deal of sense to me, but explaining them all might get a bit too personal. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a bit sad that Irfan doesn’t actually have a side job hunting supernatural killers, though.
I hope this dream amuses you half as much as it’s amused me.
contagion requiem
wet market contagion
community spread
Li cries out
then silenced
dead
empty streets in Wuhan
people inside
doors welded shut
how many died?
Xi lies
dictatorship and national pride
crematorium ash flies
the Devil is unbound
the world oblivious
priests consecrate the wine and bread
body and blood of Christ
only to be struck down, dead
the Horsemen have arrived
the job of Christ is no earthly saving
dead in the wards
dead in the hallways
bodies fill the churches
shipped to more-spacious churchyards nearer the Vatican
the conflagration spreads
oh, American decadence!
the stupid vanity of the trumped-up man
stupidly vain righteousness
impeach the man
impeach democracy
‘I win! I shine!’ — ‘You swine!’
a glorious circus all dressed up in right and wrong
interrupted by sweeping death
Emerald City sorrow, Gotham apocalypse
the dying comes and comes
unprepared
machines breathing last breaths
saviors saving only to die
the big boss strips us naked
knocks us unconscious…
we awake in fits
to face reality and find solace as we can
but back to the circus we go
winning and losing, righting and wronging, shining and stinking up the joint
what a show
death smiles
but the end is not yet written
Thoughts and Prayers for Donald Trump
It’s a federal offense to threaten or incite violence against the President of the United States. I would never do such a thing. Nor am I doing it now.
But one has a First Amendment right to pray to the deity of one’s choosing.
As it happens, there is a form of prayer in the Qur’an, used in daily (often public) prayer, which might be called the prayer of execration. In prayers of execration, one petitions God to smite or damn one’s own enemies, and/or His (it helps if they coincide). A famous example is Surah Lahab, aimed at one Abu Lahab, an enemy of the Prophet Muhammad. Continue reading
Neologisms of the Day
Apply these as you see fit:
Bureauontology: the tendency to treat bureaucratic edicts as deontological norms.
Deontocracy: a form of governance under which the preponderance of the laws make no contribution to the common good.
Injustice and Its Victims (Or Not)
Michael Young and I are hanging out at an undisclosed location in New Jersey, riding out the coronavirus by trading barbed moral intuitions with (or at?) each other. We need help. I mean, we need your help adjudicating a clash of intuitions about injustice. I doubt that anything of great significance turns on which set of intuitions is right. But I called bullshit on some of the crap Michael was slinging at me, telling him that I would appeal for a verdict to the Final Authority of All Philosophical Authorities, vox populi. Or at least the voice of a handful of self-selected readers of Policy of Truth, the moral and epistemic paragons of the Internet.
I won’t tell you which of us holds which view until I get some responses. This is my idea of an incentive to get you to respond. Like you care. Continue reading
Socratic Epidemiology
It’s a little known fact that Plato’s truly last and final dialogue was called “The Coronavirus,” took place on a college campus in north Jersey, featured a protagonist named “Khawaja,” and had a soundtrack by Ozzy:
Student 1, walking down the quad: So Khawaja, are we closing or not?
Khawaja: I don’t know.
Student 2: You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?
Khawaja: I don’t know.
“Local Government” Event Canceled
Given the coronavirus outbreak, I’ve decided to cancel the panel discussion on local government previously announced here. I’ve also canceled an event I’d been organizing on political speech in academia, originally planned for April. I’m hoping to re-schedule both events in the fall, assuming that coronavirus worries are resolved by then.
March Madness
If you want to see the unconcealed essence of American higher education in action, pay attention to one simple contrast: As the coronavirus spreads, universities across the land are either closing or contemplating closure. But “closure” doesn’t quite mean closure; it means “continuity of instruction” for the duration of the public health crisis. So faculty and staff are struggling to convert on-ground classes to an online format, in order to maintain “continuity of instruction.” Not easy, not fun, but necessary. Continue reading
Irrelevance Logic
I’ve been teaching Sarah Williams Holtman’s “Kant, Ideal Theory, and the Justice of Exclusionary Zoning” in my applied ethics class. At one point, the discussion turns to norms of privacy. I address a question to the Felician-Franciscan sister observing the class this semester.
Khawaja: Sister, are there distinctive norms of privacy in the convent?
Random student, from out of nowhere: No, there’s no privacy. My sister’s always in my room, and I’m like, girl get out, yo! But she never listens.
Policy of Truth 