fiction 2008

With much fanfare, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue in August to what it called the 1619 Project. The project’s aim, the magazine announced, was to reinterpret the entirety of American history. “Our democracy’s founding ideals,” its lead essay proclaimed, “were false when they were written.” Our history as a nation rests on slavery and white supremacy, whose existence made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. Accordingly, the nation’s birth came not in 1776 but in 1619, the year, the project stated, when slavery arrived in Britain’s North American colonies. From then on, America’s politics, economics, and culture have stemmed from efforts to subjugate African Americans—first under slavery, then under Jim Crow, and then under the abiding racial injustices that mark our own time—as well as from the struggles, undertaken for the most part by black people alone, to end that subjugation and redeem American democracy.

Days after finishing Cheer, Netflix’s popular new docuseries about a cheerleading team’s pursuit of its 14th national championship in 19 years, two scenes keep replaying in my head. In one, an athlete named TT arrives to practice with a back injury sustained at an event with a club cheerleading team, and Navarro College’s head cheerleading coach, Monica Aldama, forces him to practice, punishing him for failing to put her team first. As practice wears on, TT’s injury is exacerbated while catching female cheerleaders as they plunge to the ground. By the end of the scene, he’s sobbing.

In the second, an athlete named Morgan clutches her ribs and writhes in pain on the floor. She was injured on the opposite end of competitive cheerleading’s basic tandem: repeatedly falling from great heights with only the arms of her teammates to cushion her. She’s ignored by the coaches and, afraid to tell Aldama that she’s injured, confides in a teammate that she might sneak off to the hospital for treatment in between practices. At the ER, Morgan refuses treatment because the muscle relaxers she’s prescribed would keep her from participating in that afternoon’s practice. She leaves, against medical advice and with a warning that more stress on her ribs could damage her organs or kill her, and returns to the gym. When told that Morgan had been to the ER, Aldama appears annoyed. Morgan practices.

“personally i believe wanting bangs is almost never about wanting bangs and if u want bangs u should go to therapy first,” the writer Allie Wach tweeted in February 2018. This personal belief was retweeted 15,000 times and received hundreds of replies. They were mostly from women tagging a friend, without explanation, to come see this truth universally known but slightly-less-frequently acknowledged: Cutting off the front of your hair is the ultimate expression of self-delusion, a desperate attempt to right something deeply wrong with a pair of scissors.

This trope of emotional-distress bangs is almost upsettingly widespread. No one specific age group seems to be more familiar with it than any other. The millennial fashion site Man Repeller has called “Should I get bangs?” one of the top three “existential questions that have plagued the human psyche since the dawn of time.” The New Yorker has printed a quiz titled “Are You Emotionally Stable Enough to Get Bangs?” Teenage YouTubers make videos like “having a mental breakdown and cutting my own bangs,” and Michelle Obama referred to her own bangs as a “mid-life crisis” in 2013. (I’ve given myself bangs more times than I can count or recall.)

College-sports fans have generally become desensitized to the cognitive dissonances of the NCAA’s amateurism policies. The rules, which prevent the payment of cash or other “extra benefits” to student athletes or their families, are necessary to retain the purity of amateur competition, according to the association. Without such restrictions, supporters argue, NCAA sports would devolve into just another minor league of professional sports, with capitalism becoming the athletes’ sole driving source of loyalty to their university. These guidelines usually operate in the public consciousness as a low hum—background noise that doesn’t distract from the compelling sporting events that audiences allow themselves to enjoy. But every now and then, the humming erupts into a roar. And in those moments, viewers are forced to confront the system they have embraced. Odell Beckham Jr. delivered one of those moments last week.

Image above: Workers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's biocontainment unit practicing safe procedure on a mannequin

At 6 o’clock in the morning, shortly after the sun spills over the horizon, the city of Kikwit doesn’t so much wake up as ignite. Loud music blares from car radios. Shops fly open along the main street. Dust-sprayed jeeps and motorcycles zoom eastward toward the town’s bustling markets or westward toward Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital city. The air starts to heat up, its molecules vibrating with absorbed energy. So, too, the city.

By late morning, I am away from the bustle, on a quiet, exposed hilltop some five miles down a pothole-ridden road. As I walk, desiccated shrubs crunch underfoot and butterflies flit past. The only shade is cast by two lines of trees, which mark the edges of a site where more than 200 people are buried, their bodies piled into three mass graves, each about 15 feet wide and 70 feet long. Nearby, a large blue sign says in memory of the victims of the ebola epidemic in may 1995. The sign is partly obscured by overgrown grass, just as the memory itself has been occluded by time. The ordeal that Kikwit suffered has been crowded out by the continual eruption of deadly diseases elsewhere in the Congo, and around the globe.