COVID and the Lack of (Public) Self-Reflection

Eddington, My COVID memoir, and Radical Self-Honesty

From AP, 5/28/2020: Click here for source

Recently, I at last watched the new controversial “COVID” film, Eddington, by Ari Aster, which explores what happens when COVID hits a small fictional town in New Mexico called Eddington; consequently, the anti-hero, aka the town sheriff, doesn’t believe in the virus, in masking, in any of it, while his arch nemesis, the town’s mayor, very much does; this leads us to some delicious conflict.

The film is, in the end, highly silly and bizarre, mixed with some really genius and juicy satire about the COVID era, aka 2020. Roughly the first third of the film was based in a thick dose of realism and we see how nutty the BLM riots and protests become, the absurdity of some of the mask mandates, the social justice explosion amongst everyone but especially young people, the irrational fear of what was happening, what could happen, and of course, perhaps most interestingly, many of the ridiculous, over-the-top conspiracy theories sprouting from both political sides and from all generations and angles. (A Boomer, for example, is convinced the U.S. government purposefully implanted COVID for “population control.”)

In this way the film forces one to face the uncomfortable mirror and to reflect on just how insane the year of 2020 was, with the “Racial Reckoning” after George Floyd’s murder—racism being proclaimed by once-respectable media as the “real virus,” allowing millions of young people nationwide to violently loot, riot and protest in the streets during a global pandemic (40 people died across the country as a result), and right after excoriating MAGA folks for gathering in much smaller numbers. I don’t know if we’ll ever experience in my lifetime more lying, hypocrisy, snake oil and contradictory bullshit than we saw from major media such as The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and more during that crazy time.

As a result of what happened, police departments all across America were cut, and many cops retired in protest, many remaining cops doing what some call The Blue Flue, responding slowly and lackadaisically to calls to show Americans what having fewer cops actually looks like. Well, the result was predictable for anyone with a functioning brain and any commonsense at all: Crime, especially murders, skyrocketed…and the worst hit were, of course, Black and brown folks in lower-income communities. Typical. This is always where social justice (white progressive) theory crashes hardcore into Black and brown inner city reality. Not only did (mostly white and young, progressive) social justice warriors not help the very communities they claimed to care the most about: They actually caused severe and irreparable harm.

Look, it was a challenging time. Trump was in power. He gave us “free” money but he denied the (to be fair, ever evolving) science. He contradicted official edicts from the CDC…but then again many times the CDC said A and then B turned out to be true, which is fine, because science is fluid and ever changing and we received more data, but it was confusing. We were all engaged in the biggest experiment of modern times, after social media which in the end will probably be worse over time.

No one saw this thing coming, yet we could have and should have been more prepared. It was like George Bush in 2001 having not prepared for 9/11 knowing that Bin Laden was planning an attack. Trump did a lot of things wrong; he said a lot of stupid things on TV, like suggesting that people drink bleach, saying that masks weren’t necessary, gathering with other politicians sans masks. But he also gave us money and eventually fast-tracked vaccines. Biden, too, made a lot of dumb mistakes: Racializing COVID by prioritizing Black citizens over white and other ones; supporting many states and cities in keeping schools closed for way too long; using executive power and force with social media to blatantly suppress Conservative or dissident voices; acting in a dictatorial manner when it came to employment and forced-masking; etc.

I was there, in New York City, during COVID. As many of you know, I was at that time unfortunately living in East Harlem, which became violent, scary and distorted beyond normal times. I wrote a memoir about that time which you can read HERE. While some have bought, read and reviewed my memoir—Two Years in New York: Before, During and After COVID—I did notice that the book, which came out in 2024, received a lot less attention than some of my other books. The memoir (which is actually technically a “fictional memoir”) is a fast-paced book which reads almost like something of a thriller.

I was thinking about this fact—that not as many people have bought the book—when, after watching Eddington, I was looking through mixed reviews of the film on Amazon Prime and I saw that a reviewer had said something astute: He said, basically, that he felt it was a Big Ask for a filmmaker in 2025 to ask Americans to look back and reflect in any serious way on what actually happened in the wild, raucous summer of 2020, how disturbing and insane that moment actually was, and, really, a moment that had been coming since roughly 2012, and which crashed, finally, sometime around 2022.

This made me suddenly realize—as if waking up from a dream to reality—that Americans don’t want to look back at that time. They just want to “move forward.” It’s ironic, isn’t it: The same society that for the past 10, 15 years has been incessantly saying that we need to look back at the horrors of American racism, American slavery, was now saying, about the Pandemic, where everyone lost their fucking minds, Oh…but we DON’T need to look back at that.

Why are they doing this?

Well, that seems easy to answer: It was a fucking shocking, highly embarrassing, and incredibly stupid historical and political moment. No one sane or rational or, say, above the age of 25, would ever want to return to that summer or those couple years. It was a disaster on every level: Crime went through the roof; the nation was more polarized than ever before; we witnessed authoritarian strains in government from both Trump and Biden; media was despicably dishonest, untrustworthy and became a shell of what it once was. It was just a very humiliating, bizarre time. And people don’t want to reflect on that.

This at least partially, I think, explains to me now why so few people have read my COVID memoir. Of course they haven’t: I’m asking them to lift the boulder and, once again, see the nasty worms and insects crawling underneath. And who wants to do that?

Well, I do. Many serious artists, writers, thinkers do. That’s why Ari Aster made this film. It’s a semi-brilliant satire—the first third of the film, that is—which explores all the chaotic and malevolent forces at work in society during a very strange and unusual moment.

(And by the way the final hour-and-a-half, roughly, oddly and humorously turns into a bad Cormac McCarthy novel a la The Road or, more aptly, No Country for Old Men. This segment of the film was somewhat fun and entertaining but also absurd and seemingly unconnected to COVID or the first third of the movie. Aster had something really intriguing there in that first third, but then he decided to pivot. Maybe he was wrong to do so…but also maybe I’m just an idiot and I don’t see the full artistry here. Maybe it’s a little of both.)

This made me think about Americans and America more generally, both broadly as a population and interpersonally as individuals. This is our way, is it not? Americans have never been a people who “look back.” For one thing, we don’t have much history to look back on. We’re a very young nation. We’re not like Europe, Asia, Russia or the Middle East, who have thousands of years of history. Even Native Americans didn’t cross the Bearing Strait and enter into North America until much later times, relatively speaking, compared to African, Europe, Asia, etc.

If you think about America’s angry, teenage-like break from Britain—the smartest thing we ever did—and the fast expansion westward, destroying forest, animals and Native Americans along the way, you already see, from the Puritans in the 17^th century and on, the idea, the feeling, of looking always forward and never back. From New England westward across the continent. We left England (Europe) behind, metaphorically, and decided, almost unconsciously, to “head west young man.” Always looking to The Future. Rugged individualism. Manifest Destiny. God’s country, meant for Americans. (Who destroyed the Natives.)

In a very similar way I think most Americans on an individual level do not like to look back and reflect, at least not when it comes to the hard stuff. But as anyone who understands basic psychology understands: Without facing the past, the hurt, the pain, the suffering, you cannot truly grow into the person you’re meant to be. That doesn’t mean you need to wallow in your past. And I think Gen Z very much has the wrong idea re pathologizing absolutely everything, diagnosing everything and everyone, giving everything a glaze of therapy-speak, using psychological terms constantly to place themselves in tidy little boxes which “explain” everything.

But. I also think that if you can’t honestly face your past, you’re doomed to never truly change. This is a crucial tenant of AA. Everyone has heard of the 12 steps. The 4^th step is where you write down your resentments towards everyone you have resentments towards…and the key piece here is then writing down what your part in that issue was. Because we inevitably find that we almost always do have a part. And if you don’t have a direct part (say you experienced child abuse) then “your part” might be holding onto that anger, resentment and pain for the past 25 years and allowing it to dictate much of your behavior patterns. The idea here is to forgive your abuser, forgive yourself, and move on. (Not that easy, I know, but this is the idea.) *(And this doesn’t mean liking, respecting or befriending people who harmed you. It just means facing, owning and letting go of the past so you can move on.)

In the 5^th step you read this list to your sponsor. And in the 9^th step you actually meet up with the people on your list and “make amends,” letting folks know you know you did wrong, that you promise to be different now and in the future, and asking if there’s anything else you can do now or later to make up for what happened. You keep it only to yourself; you do not mention any of their (potential) past wrongs. This is about you, cleaning your own side of the street. What they take responsibility for or don’t is up to them alone.

I’ve always been a deep, sensitive person who wants to connect authentically with other people, and who wants to reflect on the past. My past, especially. Because I want to truly know myself, and to do that you need self-awareness and self-reflection. You need to be able to look back and honestly assess your mistakes and adjust your behavior now so the same mistakes don’t happen again. (Obviously, none of us are perfect here but the idea is to try.)

But I think this tendency, this drive to look back, reflect and assess is very rare, both for Americans as a whole and for Americans as individuals. People don’t want to do that…unless of course we’re talking about slavery or racism without any genuine historical context, for example that slavery has been around for thousands of years, including by Africans in Africa far, far, FAR before America even existed as an idea and therefore slavery is in no way unique to America and, in fact, historically speaking, America started slavery late and ended it very quickly.

Clearly, this lack of self-reflection extends, also, to more recent times. For example COVID. That’s precisely what this film forces you to face. And it’s precisely what my memoir forces you to face.

Interpersonally, I have noticed over the years—especially with Americans—that most average people simply do not want to look back at the past. They want to be here now in the present or only to look forward, or some mix of the two. People use fascinating psychological complexes to do this, mainly the classic one: Denial. If we deny that bad things happened, or that reality went a certain way, or that we did certain absurd things, the cleanest way of handling this in many people’s minds is denial. It simply “didn’t happen.” (Also most of the time there’s no cognitive plan here because the denial is unconscious.)

But of course these people will not and cannot grow. They are doomed to repeat the same behavior endlessly. Freud’s Repetition Cycle. I suppose it’s always been like this, hasn’t it? It’s always the artists, the freaks and weirdos and sensitive, deep outsiders, who want everyone to LOOK, who write the things most don’t want to hear, who make the films, produce the paintings and sculptures and plays.

Art is about psychological confrontation, whereas human existence (particularly American) is about feeling safe, rejecting what we don’t want to be true, and continually avoiding the gaze of What Is. The deepest truth, of course, which none of us wants to see even though we do see it and it’s happening every day around us all the time, even if hidden, is death. That, really, when you break it all down, is what we’re truly afraid of. The total abnegation, the complete erasure of existence. The cessation of consciousness, which is the only phenomenon we actually possess which we can cling onto as making us “human.” Without consciousness we might as well be a seashell.

Denial is something that most of us—myself included—have experienced at least a few times in our own lives. I was incredibly in denial about my alcoholism right up until the very end, which is shocking now, looking back, because my life back then resembled a sort of explosion; there I was, sitting in the crater of that massive bomb and yet I didn’t see the problem.

Over the years I have peeled back the layers of the psychological onion more and more and more, until where I am now, which is something close to totally (figuratively) naked. Yet most people are not naked, nor are they interested in getting naked. They’re more interested in their self-lies and self-deceit and self-denial and, ultimately, self-rejection. “The only way out is through” is something I’ve repeatedly told myself when going through hard times. It’s the truest statement I know. No one here gets out alive, literally and metaphorically. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I agree. And to know oneself truly is to examine on the deepest levels.

Clearly, America is not ready to do that with COVID and with the summer of 2020 and beyond. Instead, they “just want to move forward.” Which means: They have no interest in learning from their mistakes. It’s just like Kamala Harris’s devastating loss to Trump. There has still been no deep-dive, no deep self-reflection on how on fucking EARTH Democrats lost to Donald J. Trump not once but twice within one decade. At a time when power should have been easy to hold onto, Democrats failed dismally. And they’d rather claim “misogyny” than genuinely face why Harris was a horrible candidate, how she was “elected” and why they so badly failed. Only Democrats could lose to Trump twice. Twice!!!

And it wasn’t just liberal cities like SF, Chicago, NYC being overrun with crime during and after 2020. It was just the racialization and polarization of everything. It wasn’t just Trump telling people to drink bleach or Biden censoring speech on social media: It was also a lying media structure, a constant moving of political and ideological goalposts, an obsession with being an “ally” over caring about reality, a terrible political approach from Democrats, a Democratic Party rejection of their own voters, and so much more.

There was, for sure, a reckoning, both during 2020 and after. But the real reckoning hasn’t even fully formed yet. And it’s going to be with us for a generation, maybe two. All of this because we don’t have the cultural GUTS to look in the mirror.

But that’s America for you.