We are in the zombie apocalypse, which my students have been writing about for well over a decade, so young people are mentally prepared.
― Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker
Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite writers going back to the ’80s, had a good idea: Write about the current crisis feeling like a time of the zombies. That’s a thought many of us have had often in recent weeks. I mutter zombie jokes to my wife any time we brave some foray away from our small corner of lockdown. One of us is amused.
But Moore, being a certain kind of honest-to-a-fault, teetering-on-the-brink writer, decided to include in the same piece some rumination on listening to the sound of Donald Trump’s voice. I just found out about this an hour ago, seeing Lorrie Moore trending on Twitter and assuming she had the virus, and I like many of her fans am reeling.
Sometimes it’s better not to say the quiet parts out loud. Sometimes it’s not wise to go on record to say you’re reassured by the voice of a man urging on people an inadequately tested drug that can in some cases kill people (all, apparently, so he can make money on his stock investments).
Here’s the opening of her piece. “So sue me: I sometimes find President Trump’s voice reassuring.”
I’m in the camp, and it’s a big one, that finds that same voice nauseating – not in a metaphoric sense, but in an actual, stomach-churning, might-have-to-hurl sense. This is the voice of a con man, a very dangerous huckster. My best friend from college, my mother, on and on – they all talk to me of the horror of Trump’s nightly 5 o’clock Follies, the lying, the cheap attacks, the complete lack of dignity.
But Lorrie Moore has gone full Winston Smith on us, as in, end-of-the-book Winston Smith: “He loved Big Brother.”
Look, I’ve loved Moore’s writing a long time, and I’m sure she’s getting jumped right and left for this, so I don’t want to pile on, but even in giving her the benefit of the doubt, or trying, her words jar.
Also in the opening paragraph, in some odd mockery of actual analysis, she mentions his “primitive syntax, imperfectly designed for the young foreign woman he married.”
Read the piece and decide for yourself what you make of it. For me it’s sheer horror. This on the same day that Paul Krugman comes out in the Times, both guns blazing, to argue that “American Democracy May Be Dying,” a point I’ve been making myself.
For me, this one is going to be an example I cite to myself of: Always ask myself one more time, is it really a good idea to put these words out there for other people to read? Maybe I just delete that graf. Or that tweet.
– Steve Kettmann
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