Desultory Diary Number 39: We've Been Shot!

 On 4/20/2022, that is, two days ago as of this writing, Nirmala and I received our second Pfizer booster, against SARS-CoV-2 which means that we have received four vaccinations each. Nirmala has been fine; I, however, had a nasty reaction. We received the shots around 5 P.M. That evening we ventured out to attend a concert at Shriver Hall--the first time since the pandemic began two years ago. (The performance by the Danish String Quartett, which consisted of a, Schumann quartet, a John Adams piece, followed, after intermission, by that brilliant hyperemotional show-stopper, Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet. Yes, it 'brought down the house.' What joy it was to hear live music again!)

That night I slept well and had no complaints. The next morning. on a scale of one to ten, my sense of well-being went from 9 (few persons my age register a ten) to 5, and continued to head south. (I suppose those little autoimmune devils worked from 9 to 5, Pacific Time as it were, doing their best to make me sick during eight hours of sleep. They succeeded.

Nirmala went to work as usual. I wasn't too bad when she left.

I couldn't wake up! I can't remember ever feeling so lethargic in the morning. My eyes were bleary. I had muscle pains, especially in my back. I felt like a dog--a dog whose puppy years were well behind him.

Usually when Nirmala works, I am quite productive. (I usually stay home, since my vision loss makes driving difficult.) I read a lot, maybe write a poem, practice the piano a bit, and, before I know it, Nirmala's home. 

On that morning, however, I couldn't do a thing; well-being and I had parted company. I didn't want to be alone; I counted the hours and minutes until Nirmala was due to return.

When she finally came home, I didn't have to tell her I was sick, my face silently did the talking for me.

I don't want to give the impression that I was deathly ill, just very annoyingly ill. My personality, however, demands that I keep busy. And for one day, I couldn't accomplish anything. I'm writing this on the second full day after receiving the shot. Things aren't back to normal yet--fatigue is now the chief symptom--but I am looking forward to resuming my normal schedule tomorrow. We'll see.

Was all this worth it?

As you can see from my vaccination card, I am well vaccinated against Covid. (Nirmala received her doses around the same time as I.) I received the first dose as a health worker, before the vaccines were offered to the general public. There has been a six-month  interval between boosters.

Receiving the second booster, however, is controversial, at least at this time. The latest Omicron variant, BA 2 is now responsible for the majority of the cases in the United States. It is the most infectious mutation ever; however, it is far less deadly. Although new cases are rising daily, up 52% or a total of 43,000 new cases on 4/22, deaths continue to plummet and hospitalizations are not on the rise. 

The general scientific advice has been, for healthy seniors, to possibly wait to get the fourth dose until cases rise dramatically. (I thought a 52% rise was drama enough.) This is based on the fact that immunity wanes continually after the shot is given.

As a pediatrician, I am well aware of the so-called amnestic response, that is, the rapid rise of a specific antibody after an antibody challenge. This has been proven to be the case in persons who have had the disease. In those that have only had vaccinations, antibody levels may well sink to undetectable levels. However, antibodies tend to rise when the body is challenged by the organism in question. At least that's true for most pediatric diseases. It is probably true for SARS-Cov-2 infections as well.

For instance, even though measles antibodies might become undetectable, one is still immune to that disease after vaccination. For those who have had the disease, however, antibodies usually remain detectable, possibly for life.

In any case I've had it--the shot and the reaction. Memory of my reaction will likely elicit an amnestic response, as it were, if further vaccinations are recommended. Unless, of course, a new deadlier mutation arises for which the Pfizer vaccine proves ineffective.

At the concert we attended on the day we were vaccinated, masks were required; in addition, one had to show proof of vaccination to enter the concert hall. Yes, I'll wear a mask when I have to, but otherwise I think I am only slightly more inclined to wear a mask than are those belligerent culture warriors on the right. (Between the Scylla of contracting Covid and the Charybdis of voting for Ron DeSantis, however, I think I would choose the former.)

If Covid wants to cancel me, so be it. I've had enough.

Die Erde Hat Mich Wieder! or, Life Goes On!

1.

I remember, long  ago, watching a German-language movie directed by Willi Forst. It was made in the 1930s; if I remember correctly, the title was Burgtheater, the name of the famous classical theatre in Vienna. At the end of the movie, a troubled actor returns to the stage and triumphantly quotes a line from Goethe's Faust: die Erde hat mich wieder! The literal meaning is "Earth has me again;" the figurative meaining is  "Things are back to normal; my problems are over!"

Problema resuelto! That's the way my wife and I felt as we ventured to Washington D.C. on April 13, for the first time since the pandemic lockdown, which began two years earlier. (A conservative aquaintance warned us not to go and risk illness or even death. But I felt as if I had been cooped up far too long for the old bird I was rapidly becoming.)

Things had certainly changed in the past two years. Improvements had been made to the Amtrack trains; they were now newer and provided a far smoother ride. (Something's still rotten in the state of America, however; we're not in Denmark yet.) Unfortunately our tickets, purchased prior to the pandemic, were no longer valid. Another change: there were far fewer passangers now. Things were definitely not back to normal.

We went to D.C. to attend a perfomrance of The Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare Theater. Upon arrival in the capital, we tried to take the metro to Gallery Place, where the theater is located, only to discover that our senior metro cards were no longer valid either. We attempted to get new cards, but left the queue due to lack of time. Shylock was not going to wait for us!

We had to show our vaccination cards to get into the theater. Masks were required during the perfomance, which was well attended. It seemed that the stage had become a theater in the British sense of that word, and we, hermetically sealed behind our masks, were about to watch an operation.

Well, it was an operation, at the end of which we were restored to life. Yes, die Erde hat uns wieder!

2.

The performance was excellent.

I have always been fascinated by the beginning of the play. Antonio, another merchant of Venice and Shylock's foil, is sad. The play opens with Antonio saying the following lines:

In sooth I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me, you say it wearies you,
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
what stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn:
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
That I have much ado to know myself.

Having been acquainted with the night for most of my life, I know well what Antonio is talking about.  He realizes not only that he is weary of being depressed, but that his friends are tired of his lugubriousness as well. Nobody wants you when you're down and out; some of his friends probably do not abandon him to himself because he is a wealthy and influential person. His mood often makes him behave as a 'want-wit' and who wants to be friends with a mope? The reason why he is so sad is a mystery to him; it has been a mystery to me as well. Regarding inner cliffs, Hopkins wrote, "Hold them cheap/ May who ne'er hung there..." Very true, but this was written over two centuries later, when much more about the inner workings of the psyche wERE beginning to be known. Those who try to console Antonio assume that he is suffering from an external problem, economic worries, for instance. It is only in modern times that we have theorized that the problem might lie inside, in our very genes. 

It is often interpreted that Antonio suffers from a homosexual crush on Bessanio, for whom he risks so much. If this intepretation is correct, and it is a reasonable one, we must remember that Antonio is unaware of it. The Stonewall Riots occurred centuries later; the concept of a homosexual identity was not an Elizabethan concept. If Antonio suffered from repressed sexuality, it is reasonable to assume that he wasn't aware of its cause.

In the performance we saw, Antonio's repressed nature was expressed with a beautiful gesture. To show his gratitude that Anonio is ready to sacrifice a pound of flesh for him, Bassanio gives him a manly hug. Antonio hesitates to respond. He gives him half a hug, and only after a poignant moment of hesitation, closes the embrace. That second or two of hesitation was, I think, very effective theater. Later on in the play, however, Bessanio gives him a passionate--and anachronistic--kiss, which I thought was dramatically a bit over-the-top.

The staging was minimal, and thus very Shakespearean. Much was left to the imagination; I think it would have been better if that kiss had been left up to the imagination as well.

Performances of this play have become problematic in this post-Holocaust age. Antisemitic references abound. One must recall, however, that Jews had been banished from England since the end of the thirteenth century. There were virtually no Jews in England at the time this play was written. Shylock was based more on Marlowe's Jewish villain, Barnabas, more than on prejudice on Shakespeare's part. Neverteless, the antisemitic references in the play must be qualified, since, despite the unspeakable crimes against Jews in the past century, antisemitism is alas alas alas very much still with us. 

The director toned down the antisemitism by casting Shylock with a very talented African American actor, John Douglas Thompson, who gave a very poignant performance. Not only that, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, was incapable of creating a caricature villain such as Marlowe's Barnabas. Shylock's anger is well-founded: Antonio has treated him like a dog. The latter is as unaware of his monstrous behavior as he is unaware of the source of his depresssion. No wonder Shylock views him as his enemy. That the other characters have no objections to Antonio's vile behavior in an indictment of the way humans often behave towards members whom they consider to be aliens.  

3.

Probably because this is a problem play, most performances today go to great lenghs to portray Shylock as  sympathetically as possible. There is a limit, however, to this approach. We must not forget that Shakespeare meant Shylock to be a villain. His villainy gives the play its dramatic drive. However, with such a great author, things are never simple.

I consider Shylock to be a Brechtian figure. Brecht believed, correctly I believe, that society shapes the individual, and that the individual doesn't emerge intact as Venus mythologically did, having arisen intact and unchangeable from the brain of Jupiter. Nor does the individual remain static during its lifetime. To believe otherwise, as many do, especially in the United States, is to ascribe to what I call 'toxic individualism.' ('Don't tread on me?' Time will do the treading, either with an abrupt kick, or, more likely, graduallyand inevitably.)

Brecht also believed, obviously with reason, that we live in a corrupt society. It is therefore virtually impossible, according to the playwright, to be truly good in a world where evil is no stranger. 

Let us apply this philosophy to Shylcok. We have great sympathy for him, due to the self-righteous abuse he receives from a Christian society that isn't even aware of the evil it does against him. But we lose sympathy for Shylock when he chooses to do evil himself. He did not have to persist in his demand for a pound of flesh; he could have walked away a richer man, with more ducats than he initially loaned out. (Similarly, according to Brecht, Mother Courage ddin't have to live off war.) Demanding a pound of flesh puts Shylock in the category of such evildoers as medieval torturers. Yes, society created a monster; but Shylock is a monster, nevertheless. If Shylock is simply a decent man who is driven to anger by the evil done to him, the play loses its dramatic spine and becomes a flabby concatenation of words. And The Merchant of Venice certainly isn't that; it might not be Shakespeare's greatest play, but it still remians one of the greatest plays ever written.

At the end of the play, the director has Jessica and Shylock recite a portion of the lovely kol nidre, presumably to further elicit  sympathy for the Jewish characters. It doesn't work. One can't escape the fact that Shylock is a villain.

After the performance, we headed for our favorite Chinese restaurant. (The theatre is situated in easy walking distance to D.C.'s China Town.) We have been subscribers to Shakespeare theatre for many years; after each performance we usually have a meal in China Town. Due to the pandemic, however, we hadn't been there for two years. What a pleasant surprise it was for us to see that our favorite waitress was still there! (The last time we were there, the lockdown was about to begin. We were the only ones in the restaurant. We noticed that many of the surrounding resturants had disappeared.)

After a rich cultural experience followed by a rich culinary experience, we headed home. What a great day we had! I can truly say, pace Antonio, die Erde hat mich wieder!

Might Privelege

 He acted like a child. A spoiled child. A child of Might Privelege.

I don't think I have ever watched the Oscars; life, after all, is sometimes boring enough. But the Slap  that Went Round the Tuned-in World, namely the whack Will Smith gave Chris Rock while many (millions?) watched in shock, horror, delight or whatever, was another matter. The video clip was hard to ignore, for a while even Putin had to take a powder. 

For those of you who live on a different planet, I shall summarize the incident. Chris Rock, the MC of the Oscars this year, made what, in my opinion, was a very mild joke about Will Smith's wife. Mr. Smith seemed unfazed until he took a look at the hurt expression on his wife's face. Then he rushed onto the stage and slapped the unsuspecting Mr. Rock. Smith went back to his seat where he told Chris Rock, on national televesion, to keep his 'wife's name out of your  f-ing mouth!' Chris Rock remained the professional, and didn't initiate an adolescent donnybrook. Later that night, Smith was awarded an Oscar of his own.

Smith's fury and furious behavior made headlines. Unless you are really living on another planet, you know this already. Most commentators were 'shocked' at Smith's egregious behavior; Rock's professional demeanor thorughout was mostly--and deservedly-- praised.

I would like to discuss the incident from a different angle, one  that, to my knowledge, received no attention. I would like to discuss what I call Might Privelege.  

Race matters, of course, but in this case it matters relatively little. Both Rock and Smith are very famous and very wealthy. Their income level and name recognition puts them in the elite group of the rich and famous. 

If a so-called nobody did what Smith did, he would have been led away by the police, and probably would have been charged with assault. (This is a 'thought experiment' of course, for a so-called nobody would not have been able to attend the Oscars.)

Mr. Smith can therefore be said to have 'Might Privelege'--his high position in society enabled him to get away with egregious behavior. (True, he has recently been banned from the Oscars for ten years, but thisbslap in the face didn't come along with hands that took away his Oscar. There was thus no fitting consequence to his action.)

We have something to celebrate, however. The incident happened to have occurred between two famous African-Americans: race was, relatively speaking, at least, not an issue. I am convinced that many observers saw the event as something that occurred between two human beings; their ethnicity wasn't important. White people certainly would have viewed the situation differently in the past. We have made enormous racial progress, though the day when the color of one's skin doesn't matter at all is still far off. (But that day is coming, as Dr. King said, the arc of history bends toward justice, although the angle of inflection is proving to be a lot smaller than a lot of us would like.  One day people will realize that the immense effort and self-deception needed to maintain a lie is no longer worth the effort to maintain it. Well, maybe.)

Might Privelege now can be had by people of all races. It is a version of class privelege--Have you noticed, for instance, that just about every victim of police brutality against African Americans has been from the so-called lower class? In these cases, race matters indeed, but so does class. Afican Americans can be victims of prejudice no matter their class, but if they have might privelege. they are unlikely to be shot.

Let us dissect Smith's behavior further. Let us forget about his race and his Might Privelege for a moment. What happened happens alas! all too frequently. Smith behaved as a man--usually a man--who flies into a rage. The rush of cortisol from his Flight or Fight response swept all restraint away. When this force is directed outward, as what happened in Smith's case, agression, even murder, can be the result. When rage is directed inwards, depression, even suicide, may follow. Maturity demands that an adult control his impusles and act accordingly.   That Smith gave into his impulses while millions watched demonstrates not only Might Privelege, but a shameful lack of maturity as well. Chris Rock, in contrast, acted with restraint.

That Smith forgot his better nature so egregiously, resulting in a slap that will always be part of his legacy is a shame. Even if he puts such behavior behind him and acts wisely in the future, the image of his slap will always be there to haunt him. Just because he acted as a belligerent adolecscnt, however, doesn't mean he will always act that way,; he might well improve in the future. His clean image is sullied, proabably forever. I thus feel sorry for him. But not too sorry. Those with Might Privelege, in comparison to those without it, are able to get away with a lot. 

Some day people might be judged by the content of their character. no matter their race, gender, or class.  That day has yet to arrive.