The Bluestocking, vol 272

Sit on the throne, shout a bit

Happy Friday!

It’s been a busy week, so a slender newsletter this week. I am ready for the weekend.

Helen

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Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Fatal Distraction (Washington Post, 2014)

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer -- beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone -- he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.

I found this piece because someone was tweeting about a recent case of a child who died in a hot car. They were calling for the parents to be prosecuted, because it was undoubtedly negligence and what kind of person could do such a thing? Several people replied with a link to this article. It’s utterly harrowing—I don’t even have a small child, and had to stop reading at one point to exhale—but also beautifully told, exploring how such incidents happen, why (otherwise safer) rear-facing car seats make the risks worse, and why manufacturers haven’t created products to avert these scenarios.

It also contained a section I found extremely wise, and which I think applies to many other situations where people become extremely moralising about tragic accidents:

“Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.

Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. “We are vulnerable, but we don’t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”

That reminded me of Jennifer Senior on the father of a 9/11 victim who became a 9/11 truther, or Anne Applebaum on Jaroslaw Kaczyński’s inability to accept that his twin’s death in plane crash was an accident: “Perhaps, like so many people who rely on conspiracy theories to make sense of random tragedies, Kaczyński simply couldn’t accept that his beloved brother had died pointlessly; perhaps he could not accept the even more difficult fact that the evidence suggested Lech and his team had pressured the pilots to land, thus causing the crash.”

One practical suggestion that came out of reading around this subject: If you’re dog-tired and have a small kid, put your phone or bag in the back seat with them. Then you’re less likely to get out of the car and walk off without noticing they’re still in it.

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Quick Links

1. “Not long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comforts of story time. What [Hannah] Gadsby did was give the audience permission — moral permission — to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch.” Brutal review of “It’s Pablo-Matic,” an art show curated by Hannah Gadsby dedicated to dunking on Picasso (New York Times).

2. “If you’ve read popular nonfiction books in the past twenty years, you’ll have come across malcolms, even if you didn’t know what they were called. A malcolm is a lengthy anecdote used to begin a chapter, before the author gets to the actual point they’re trying to make.” Stian Westlake owning me, specifically, here (Medium).

3. ‘Entire generations now know Anthony Hopkins not as Hannibal Lecter but as Thor’s dad, King Odin of Asgard. “They put me in armor; they shoved a beard on me,” he told me. “Sit on the throne, shout a bit. If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it.”’ Hopkins on the MCU is up there with Ian McShane’s comment on Game of Thrones (“tits and dragons”) . God bless older English actors who don’t give a shit. That said, the writer of this deep dive into the future of Marvel gets his own zingers in: ‘Most plots boil down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy,” and the stakes are nothing less than the fate of the world, which come to feel like no stakes at all.’ (New Yorker)

4. BBC Newsnight had Mizzy as a guest to talk about Andrew Tate. Here’s why that was an . . . odd call (twitter).

5. Another entry in the THIIIIIIIIIIINGS register.

See you next time!