On Alex & Alex

I’m not sure how to start this post, so I’m going to dive right in — all yesterday, I’ve been living in the cognitive dissonance of witnessing (through recorded playback) two events: 1) Alex Honnold completing his free solo climb of Taipei 101 and 2) the murder of Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis.

Two demonstrations of the fragility of life:

One, a feat of impossibility, a demonstration of the incredibleness of the human spirit, something that stretches the limits of what we should be able to do; a celebration, almost, of the literal heights a human can reach when he really pushes himself.

The second, a demonstration of both the absolute cruelty and cowardice of humans (the ICE agents, shooting an unarmed man ten times in the back) and the kindness and bravery of humans (Alex Pretti, in the last moments before his death, protecting a woman from harassment); a life that brought joy and kindness and comfort to people, snuffed out for absolutely no reason at all.

Part of the strangeness of it all, what makes it so discomfiting, is that both of these events have been recorded on video, from multiple angles, and I’ve been privy to both all day through my Instagram feed. Flick, and there’s Alex Honnold hanging from the side of a building from just his legs. Flick, and there’s Alex Pretti holding his arms up with his phone in his hand while an ICE agent confronts him. Flick, and there’s Alex waving at fans through the high-rise window like Spiderman. Flick, and there’s Alex being surrounded and kicked by a swarm of ICE agents. Flick, and there’s Alex standing atop the sphere atop 101 saying, simply, “Sick.” Flick, and there’s Alex, lying lifeless on the asphalt.

As someone living in Taiwan, I couldn’t escape the Alex Honnold stuff — everyone was talking about it. On the MRT ride over to my child’s cooking class yesterday morning, I wasn’t the only person watching the live stream of his climb. I saw friends liveposting photos — they had gone down to 101 to watch his climb. After a week of rain, it was a beautiful, perfect, temperate sunny day. The perfect day for such a climb.

I was too anxious to watch continuously, so I would log on to Netflix every ten minutes on my phone just to track how he was doing, and then, after a couple of minutes, quickly close the app, not being able to handle the possibility that he might fail. It was only later that evening, once my child had gone to sleep and I knew he already succeeded, that I rewatched the last few minutes of his climb. Even then, I felt anxiety churning in my stomach as I watched him. Even knowing the outcome, I feared for him, the mirroring centers in my brain still uncomprehending that a person could do such a thing safely.

When he finally reached the top, he stood there for many moments, looking down. To my own surprise, I teared up. I don’t know why his success moved me — it being real life, there was no soaring orchestra score in the back1, and the commentators were extremely annoying, and for some reason they kept streaming the sound of people on the ground cheering which made for a sort of noise pollution in the moment of his success. He was just taking selfies, saying a couple of simple things like how he could see all of Taipei, etc, but it wasn’t like he was up there saying some profound words of inspiration or anything. He was just taking it in. I was not emotionally manipulated to feel something. And yet I did. I knew he would succeed and yet I felt relieved for him, and I was in awe of him, in awe of what he did and could do (a thing that I do think he is absolutely bonkers for attempting). And I don’t know, maybe there’s something else, my own empathy response, imagining how exhilarating it must feel to get to the top, or my own imagining at how I’d feel were I succeed in something as monumental as this.

Meanwhile, I had learned of Alex Pretti’s murder the night before, his video filling my feed right before I fell asleep on Saturday. At the time, I couldn’t stomach watching the whole video, knowing what was to come. I remember at first I couldn’t even comprehend what I was seeing, didn’t understand that this was footage of a life about to be ended on camera, and once I realized that this was a recording of his actual murder, I had to swipe away. But by Sunday, other recorded angles of his murder had come out, and I watched those to the end, though I had to close my eyes each time the video neared the terrible final outcome. A different kind of anxiety, this time from actually knowing the outcome, not despite it. And again, tears, though this time not from being moved to awe, but to despair, a sense of helplessness, and of course, rising anger.

I am furious. Furious at not just ICE or Trump or the politicians that have been complicit happen or Trump’s supporters on the right, but also at every other moment that came before this that led to this, directly or indirectly. Every murder at the hands of government authority. All the people who have died in ICE custody. But also: Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd. The massacre of entire lines of Palestinian people. Mass incarceration. Japanese internment. Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Slavery. The genocide of the Native American people. Etc. Etc. All the worst crimes of our country (and this is only scratching the surface) that have been sanctioned and supported by people in power. This is just another version of this, though I think it’s also getting more people’s attention because it’s somehow “worse” because it is finally happening to people it “isn’t supposed” to happen to. A white (seemingly) heterosexual man, a healthcare worker who works with veterans, exercising his legal right to carry a concealed firearm (though he had not pulled it out and had been disarmed before he was shot).2

I don’t actually know how to reconcile the two events, the side-by-side experience of being both absolutely buoyed by the feat of a single, ordinary man, and of being absolutely gutted by the murder of a single, ordinary man.

Alex Honnold’s feat should feel extremely frivolous: it’s this guy doing this thing that absolutely NOBODY needs for him to do. It will literally effect zero meaningful change on anyone else’s life than those around him, and if he died doing it, he would have died for absolutely nothing! And yet for some fucking reason, I felt inspired by him! It was as if I had witnessed a man landing on the moon (which, actually, perhaps is also quite frivolous?)!

Meanwhile, Alex Pretti’s death feels intolerable. It matters for so many reasons: because his death represents the way fascism continues to encroach upon the rights of people in America; because he was a hero who died protecting a woman — his last words were “Are you okay?”; because he lived a life of service to his patients and made people’s worlds better for it; because no one should be callously murdered, even if they aren’t stellar citizens, even if they don’t have dozens of family and friends attesting to the worthiness of his person and life.

*

I am rambling a bit here3, not entirely sure what my point is.

I am thinking of how strange it is to live out here in Taiwan, at a remove from my home country, the country whose goings-on I’m still always tracking from afar. How, if I were not American, I would think “Wow this country is filled with state-sanctioned terrorists who kidnap and murder people off the street, I should never visit it.” How for most Taiwanese, the thought they gave to America this past weekend was simply that this American rock climber was in here to scale our tallest building (and hopefully give us some great PR in the process).

One of the things I keep thinking about is how, back in 1947, the flashpoint for the 228 Massacre and the start of the White Terror period in Taiwan — the period of martial law that included the state-sanctioned suppression of the civilian population (through imprisonment, execution and simple “disappearances” of many tens of thousands of innocent people) — all started when Nationalist authorities harassed a woman selling contraband cigarettes and hit her. This led to an angry crowd which led to soldiers shooting and killing a man. Which led to more protests. And then violent suppression resulting in more deaths. And on and on until somewhere between 10,000-20,000 people were killed (and this doesn’t factor into the hundreds of thousands killed or imprisoned during forty years of martial law).

What I mean to say is, Taiwan is not a stranger to fascism, to totalitarianism, to the ways in which civil discontent can be violently suppressed. Obviously. And of course, I truly, truly hope that in America, we can turn this ship around, to stop the descent into further madness. I truly hope what I’m witnessing isn’t a replay of history.4 It’s just a strange thing to be an American sitting here, in Taiwan, enjoying the quiet peace here, marveling at the specter of human optimism and awesomeness, knowing that everything at home is burning down.

The Measure by Nikki Erlick

I listened to this on audiobook because it had an interesting concept (one I thought about writing about before!) that also seemed to be the perfect type of book for me to listen to, something high concept and entertaining with fairly straightforward language. Plus I really enjoy Julia Whelan’s narrations, she’s so great with voices, lol. Anyway, it’s about a world in which one day everyone gets a box with a length of string that tells them how long they’ll live, and how this affects a cast of characters, and how America descends into a world where short-stringers are persecuted. It features a slimy politician who does a few pretty heinous things and suggests some very discriminatory laws and practices. There are protests and romance and friendships featured, and for a book with so many characters, I felt I got to know them all reasonably well. I liked it well enough (didn’t love it — there were some instances where I felt the author didn’t trust the reader and explained the obvious too much) and was thoroughly entertained, and I liked that she thought through the implications of such a thing not just on a personal level but on a governmental level. That said, I wonder if, because our current government resembles an evil dystopian government so much, that this mild version of a somewhat bad politician didn’t shock me nearly as much. It was just like, Oh, they found another horrible way to discriminate at the work place! But they weren’t like, rounding up the short-stringers and then throwing them in camps to freeze and starve do death or shooting them on the streets for protesting. Anyway.

Heated Rivalry (HBO)

I’m late to this spicy gay romance between hockey players, I know! So far I’ve only watched one episode because the episodes after don’t have Chinese subtitles for my husband! I liked it but wasn’t like obsessed with it the way other people seem to be5? I’ll still probably catch up with it eventually, but now my husband and I have to find something else to watch together.