As a non-coastal-dwelling American, the need to know what’s going on in my own backyard has led me to a renewed appreciation for the importance of local journalism in all its forms – and to even wonder whether the current pandemic might end up putting a positive dent in the scourge of parachute reporting and extractive filmmaking we’ve seen in recent years.
And as an expat New Yorker – who once obsessively consumed the now defunct Village Voice and New York Press (never really considering the NYTimes a “hometown” broadsheet) – I realize how lucky I am in this age of corporate consolidation to have not one but two local newspapers, the Santa Fe Reporter and the Santa Fe New Mexican, to keep me apprised of the latest pandemic-related proclamations emanating from the levelheaded governor’s office. (Safe to say, I trust this onetime Secretary of Health – and the US’s first Democratic Latina ever elected state chief executive – over any HIV-outbreak-bungling former gov in the White House.) Not to mention as a cinephile it warms my heart that at least one longtime community booster and arthouse proprietor is doing right by his workers, providing full pay throughout the mandatory non-essential-business shutdown, however long that might last. (And I’m hoping the more than financially capable George RR Martin will also chip in to help out other local arts businesses, as he most notably once did with Meow Wolf – now one of many cultural entities hit hard by the economic disaster.)
Which has made me ponder back to health crises of the pre-internet past, most glaringly the AIDS epidemic, in which frontline reporting and media-making in ground zero areas such as San Francisco and NYC were crucial to keeping communities informed, filling in the void left by an indifferent (indeed often hostile) national government. And here we are again – a new day, a novel emergency, yet the same lack of clarity from leadership. One can debate the various missteps that led to the coronavirus catastrophe, but the root of the Western panic pandemic at least is clear. In the pre-Trump (post-WW2), non-gutted-State Department days, the US – yes, even the government-dismantling Reagan administration – would have grabbed the torch on a global crisis, gathered its allies together and figured out an orderly and decisive plan to address the issue. Now it’s every nation (and state and city) for itself – those commandeered by Trump-like, right-wing isolationist leaders, and also those run by more rational minds who no longer have any partners to work with. In this environment where the world is on fire, instead of working together to get everyone out safely we’re all surreally fighting our way to the exits. It’s a recipe for chaos. Really, what else could we expect?
And yet even as I type this elegy for diplomacy I’m reminded that a panic-shopping phenomenon reveals something much more disturbing than a mere tp shortage – which gets me back to that dirty little AIDS epidemic. For a crisis isn’t really a crisis unless it affects a straight white (preferably rich) population, which unsurprisingly is not psychologically equipped to deal with adversity the way marginalized communities historically have been forced to. (While these folks freak out the pushed aside shrug, “Welcome to our world.”) Ebola was a black African problem, AIDS hit gay men the hardest, and thus these health catastrophes were not worthy of attention until they could no longer be ignored – i.e., when the prospect of contamination of the heteronormative Caucasian community spurred those head-in-the-sand folks to public action. (Even as the stark reality remained that for every Ryan White an untold number of HIV-positive gay and trans people of color were dying in anonymity.) And this, my fellow global citizens, is the real disease of privilege that should make us all very very afraid. And it’s why the local pen and camera wielding journalists that first “woke” me to this truth – it certainly wasn’t the media elite – matter now more than ever.
Image credit: Daniel R. Blume