First Things: Home to America's Worst COVID Writing

Like it was ever in doubt.

(if you’re so inclined, elsewhere on the Internet this week I was writing about watching Don Hertzfeldt shorts in quarantine and picking the best Mass to stream while at home)

We had some fun last week checking in on all six previous subjects of G.O.T.H.S. and how they’re handling the current global pandemic (not well!), and I wanted to take a moment this week to check in with First Things, America’s shittiest Catholic magazine.

We ran through the history of First Things as part of the larger piece on Sohrab Ahmari’s career, but to recap: First Things is a magazine of conservative Catholic political commentary, founded by George W. Bush’s pro-life advisor in 1990. The magazine has always been hypocritical, shallow, poorly written, and concerned only with amassing power for power’s sake. At least twice in their thirty-year run, they have openly advocated for ending American democracy and replacing it with dictatorship by the Catholic hierarchy. What I’m about to say next will shock you: their writing on the COVID pandemic is not great.

FIRST THINGS WOULD LIKE YOU TO DIE

Diocese across the country have suspended public celebration of the Mass; the best tools we have to slow the spread of the coronavirus right now, according to epidemiologists, include closing churches, stopping large gatherings, and general social distancing. But digging mass graves and consigning thousands and thousands to preventable deaths is a small price to pay for continuing to celebrate the sacraments, right? Well, that’s what R.R. Reno wrote in First Things on March 23rd, responding to Andrew Cuomo’s quarantine measures:

This statement reflects a disastrous sentimentalism. Everything for the sake of physical life? What about justice, beauty, and honor? There are many things more precious than life. And yet we have been whipped into such a frenzy in New York that most family members will forgo visiting sick parents. Clergy won’t visit the sick or console those who mourn. The Eucharist itself is now subordinated to the false god of “saving lives.”…A number of my friends disagree with me. They support the current measures, insisting that Christians must defend life. But the pro-life cause concerns the battle against killing, not an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.

I know what you’re thinking, “there are many things more precious than life” is a new poltical direction for the Catholic right, and a new direction for First Things, who was overall relieved to have their pro-life at all costs, pro-religious-freedom main man Donald Trump in the White House. Even more baffling is Reno’s point that “pro-life” doesn’t apply to deaths from a pandemic, it only applies to “the battle against killing”, a standard that appears to have been designed by Reno alone to exclude the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans that could be prevented with appropriate precautions and policies.

This is completely insane to me. Has Reno declared himself the arbiter of who lives and who dies from this pandemic? How many deaths has he decided to be okay with? He answers at the end of his piece [emphasis mine]:

The defining moments of the coming weeks and months will not be those of sickness and death, as much as those sad realities will anguish us. Modern history shows that epidemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters can take life, often on a vast scale (tens of millions died from the Spanish flu in 1918-19). Yet society goes on pretty much as before. I worry that this will not be the case in 2020. Imbued with the illusion that, if we but muster our collective will, we can master nature and tame death—an illusion Pope Francis warned against in Laudato Si’—we risk going mad. We are being seduced into adopting methods of “total war” to fight COVID-19. I fear that, if we continue down this path, our wartime mentality of mass mobilization will have untold consequences, many that we will deeply regret. Wars, not epidemics, turn the wheel of history.

Whatever you do, according to Reno, don’t shut down restaurants, don’t move classes to online, and above all, don’t close the churches. Changing society isn’t worth keeping your friends and family from getting sick or possibly dying. It’s not worth trying to support our health care workers through this period of unbelievable strain. It’s not worth helping other sick people with other ailments who need a functioning health care system in order to stay healthy. BUT, if there’s a war? Well, okay, that actually turns the wheel of history, we can maybe close a coffee shop for that.

Reno’s idea of intelligence or wit can be best summarized in a one-liner he wrote for First Things in 2019: “I recently contacted my bank to announce that I now identify as a billionaire and expect to have my accounts adjusted accordingly.”

FIRST THINGS READS LIKE MY HIGH SCHOOL XANGA

Reno is also keeping a daily “coronavirus diary”, which is unbearable and begins like this:

Thursday. Sunny day. Chilly, but the air is cheerful. I won’t bore the reader with my Lucy-cappuccino-dog walk routine, though I will say that I hope the coffee shop survives. A musician friend reports that a few years ago a glam rock band, The Darkness, put out a song, “Easter is Cancelled.” Who could have imagined that life would imitate art in quite this way?

By way of comparison, here is the opening of Brent DeCrescenzo’s original 2000 review for Pitchfork of Radiohead’s album Kid A, one of the funniest pieces of music writing in recorded history and still preferable to First Things’ bullshit:

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose

At least Pitchfork was covering one of the most influential albums of the decade, and not the inability to get into a coffee shop by one annoying editor of a magazine with a circulation of 29,000. Here’s Reno on 3/31:

Zoom meetings, blessedly short. The business of the magazine goes forward. Lunch. The sun seduces me. I put on my cycling outfit and go down to the building’s basement to take out my bike. Over to Central Park. Rhododendrons and cherry trees are in flower. The trees are lightly veiled with budding leaves, a halo of ethereal green. Others are walking and biking, but not many. 

He also makes a wry reference to the fact that hospital tents in Central Park still sit unusued, perhaps not realizing yet that hospitals in New York are currently using refrigerated trucks for morgue overflow, and that mass texts have been sent out in the state (as well as my state) asking for any medical personnel to show up and start helping. I close my tab in frustration and go back to reading Pitchfork.

FIRST THINGS THINKS THIS IS ALL A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY

Here’s Peter Hitchens writing for the magazine earlier this week:

Good heavens, this is hard to write. To experience a national humiliation and shame is one thing. To describe it is far, far worse. It is like making a public confession of weakness and defeat. My beloved city, Oxford, is closed and silent, like a large, well-ordered cemetery. This is what the end I have long feared actually looks like. We love Big Brother. I try to argue against the closure of the country, and a few listen, but in general I might as well be reading Russian verse to an audience of koalas.

Yes, Big Brother has taken over, all in the name of keeping deaths out of the “millions” and in the “hundreds of thousands”, an unacceptable payoff for Oxford being quiet. Closer to home and with slightly (SLIGHTLY) less idiotic metaphors, here’s Gabrielle Kuby writing for the magazine on Friday:

The government’s remarkable interventions in citizens’ lives are accepted without resistance. What’s more, the more severe the measures, the more responsible these governments’ behaviors appear to be…Up to now we’ve been doing everything they say—staying home and washing our hands after each potential contact with the invisible enemy. We communicate almost entirely online—never in the flesh, and always disembodied—a direction we were already headed in anyway. How long will this mandatory break last? Nobody knows. Experts don’t know if the immune system will be resistant once someone has recovered from a virus attack. The immediate aim is to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. For this the probable collapse of the globalized economy is accepted.

Kuby threads the needle of hitting the Tim-Robinson-In-A-Hot-Dog-Costume “we only look at porn on our phones” rant, as well as chiding our government for telling people to stay inside, literally the thing that we know works based on past pandemics (and which we may not have had to do to the same extent if our big wet president had his shit together earlier). Why are we all doing what they say?! Is this Jade Helm?! ARE WE WILLING TO SACRIFICE OUR ECONOMY JUST TO KEEP OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM FROM COLLAPSING?

I’m not sure what Kuby thinks about squaring her Catholic faith with being willing to let our health care system collapse so the stock market will keep growing unsustainably. I’m not sure what Kuby thinks the economy would look like in the absence of a functioning health care system, where if you get sick, you just up a die. I’m not sure what she thinks that will mean for the labor market, or business continuity, or consumer confidence. Actually, I’m not sure that Kuby “thinks” at all, I think she just is trying to hit a word count, like everyone else at First Things, which brings me to my conclusion:

CONCLUSION

First Things is a nonessential business. For the good of everyone’s spiritual welfare and in the interest of maintaining appropriate social distancing, please shutter it during the pandemic, and then also after the pandemic abates.