Sol sol sol Sol

[solution, solitude, solidarity, Solnit]

I have a friend, in retirement a small-holding wannabee farrrmer like me, who was a Professor of 20thC History at Harvard. He wrote The Book on the extent to which intellectuals were successful in resisting Fascism. Ans: 45 years ago, when Fascism was ceding power to market capitalism, a case could be made that writers and thinkers had played their part in the dissolution of the final solution. Now, was fascism arises from the ashes of globalization, not so much?  Ivy League Profs of 20thC European History are not an endangered species like Profs of Anatomy, but there are few enough of them. My pal inevitably knows Tim Snyder and, unless they've recently fallen out over the political significance of Die Weiße Rose, they are friends. There is no doubt about the intellectual stature of either of these academics, both are fluent in multiple European languages and can read archives in several more. I defer to them, or Norman Davies, for analysis of marches and counter-marches in 1930s Breslau. But there is a long tradition whereby very smart, expensively educated blokes sound off on matter-about-which-they-know-little. Linus Pauling on vitamin C, Dick Lewontin on spandrels, John Sulston on climate; The Blob on ethics. Being a celebrity in one field doesn't give you bragging rights across the board.

It is one of the flattening facts of life that shit happens even if you have Tenure at Ivy. Even the best [for some definitions of best] of us can wreck a car or a cruciate ligament. In December 2019, Tim Snyder suffered a series of medical misadventures in several hospitals across two continents.  He nearly died, if he'd been black and uneducated he would for sure have died.  Early in the book he asserts ". . . colleagues were astounded that my wife and I hadn't called in powerful patrons to protect me when I was in the emergency room." But that doesn't mean he didn't (eventually) get better attention and better care than Joe Median. There is no doubt that my late demented lamented FiL Pat the Salt received better than average access to care and services because he had adult children who were articulate and assertive on his behalf. These advocates weren't expert in Alzheimer's or pressure sores but they were not backward in writing letters or making telephone calls.

Tim "book-writer" Snyder was in the news last month, so I checked the Library to see if they had any of his books. That's how I got to read "Our Malady; lessons in liberty and solidarity" (2020) and how got a little TMI about Snyder's lumbar punctures and septicaemia. It's Our Malady because his survival was at least partly due to the active involvement of his wife Marci in [advocating for] his care. Emergency Room? the game the whole family can play! This book is only 30,000 words and could have used every one to document the medical mill that knocked chunks off him and failed for so many weeks to get on top of his condition.

But Snyder chooses to cover the medical trials in quite telegraphic form and then go off on a rant about CoViD death rates, the end of newsprint, the commercialization of health care, the rise of social media and their indifference to truth or human happiness. You, dear reader, and I are as competent to talk about such matters as Snyder. Although, it must be admitted that Snyder can write clearly (if superficially) about anything to which  he sets his hand. His solution to human happiness in the 2020s is articulated several times as "we cannot be ourselves without help, we cannot thrive in solitude without the solidarity of others".  Now Snyder (and I) may be so happy in his own skin as to thrive in solitude. In this sense I had a very good pandemic: I was mandated to sit on my sofa not talking to anyone for month after lockdown month. But solitude is not the majority preference: most people prefer some company, some shopping; some team-sports; some office banter.

Rebecca Solnit has written better [A Paradise Built in Hell; Hope in the Darkness] and with better evidence about how solidarity / society will bale us out when life gets shitty. In the penultimate chapter Doctors should be in charge, Snyder solves all the problems of Western medicine in 4,000 words of platitudes and wishful thinking. Not for nothing did our own Brian Cowen refer to the Health Ministry as Angola because of the prevalence of landmines.  Health care is a story of unending demand-side hardship with never enough supply-side. I don't have a solution but I know that 4,000 words won't do and so should Snyder.

Tim Snyder and his wife Marci Shore [R] are off to Toronto! In a public statement of privilege dressed up as a protest about the dismantling of Academe by the Trump Administration. And it looks like Yale is keeping Snyder's tenured sofa warm with adjuncts for now. The poor bloody adjuncts have to just tread water in Muskopool because there's only room for grade-six-and-above in the lifeboats.

I guess you don't need to call in powerful patrons when they are beating a path to your door. Apparently in 2016, they thought about such an exit strategy "but ultimately felt a moral obligation to stay, to help mobilize the resistance . . .". In 2025, not so much? Last year Snyder & Shore and their 2 kids were granted Austrian citizenship - the chap was born in Vienna while his folks were researching there.