Joseph Roth at the CVS

Lock Me Up, Lock Me Down

I returned to the country and the city of my birth for the first time since the election. I was reading The Emperor’s Tomb, the last published book of Joseph Roth (we’re not related) before he succumbed to alcoholism and died in exile in 1939. The novella narrates the terminal summers of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy from the perspective of the aristocratic Franz Ferdinand Trotta, as well as the aftermath of "the great war,” which, Trotta comments, “is rightly called the World War, not only because the whole world was involved in it but also because, as a result of it, we each lost a world, our own world." Trotta belongs to a generation marked for slaughter, but by avoiding death in the trenches, he ends up a living specter, outmoded and superfluous, a secularized type of the "Wandering Jew," with whom Roth himself identified.

I’d plucked the book without any real forethought from the remains of my father’s library in my mother’s apartment, a vague memory of having read it in a different era of my life, but no memory of the actual story or the narrator’s voice. As it turns out, the subject of "world loss" has been close to my heart for a while now, even before the great pandemic. "World loss" presents as distinct from ordinary loss—deaths, heartbreaks, losing a job or a home. In a state of world loss, it is our habits of both mind and action, our customs and even the very language we used to use to cope with those ordinary losses that are fading away and no longer hold—both in the sense that they no longer console us, nor allow us to persevere, but also “hold” in the sense of propositions about reality and what might be true or false.

In my return to New York, I don't know how much I was consciously testing or measuring loss—what I was losing by giving up on the city and the country, just for myself, and what simply no longer existed, had been lost not just to me but to everyone there, in common. Was my outsider’s view flawed or prophetic? On the surface, nothing much has changed, yet everything feels askew. Things I failed to notice before—or rather things I'd noted with a side-eyed flinch, or that had left me agitated and depressed without really being able to say why—now pulsated with grim allegorical significance.

Consider a branch of the CVS drugstore chain on 102nd and Broadway, around the corner from where I was staying, and where I stopped shortly after they opened. Almost everything that isn't candy—that is anything a person might need from a drugstore—was locked up in aisles of cabinets, behind shatterproof plastic or glass. To obtain my tube of toothpaste, I had to press a glaring red button triggering a public address system: "Customer assistance required in aisle 3," spoken in the dull but stridently unhuman tones of a robotic era that’s already outdated. I waited for a while, their only customer at that jet-lagged hour, scanned some headlines on my phone; eventually the same dreadlocked kid of ambiguous gender who'd greeted me with a surly nod when I'd entered showed up jangling an enormous set of keys from a lanyard.

They opened the case, watched while I leaned in and took what I needed, then pointed me toward the automatic check out. How long until this person, too, is replaced by either a robot or, more likely, an app that one must download to one's phone, providing various personal data to better customize my drug store experience before being issued a one time code that will open the case, each item now electronically tagged and trackable as it sits in the medicine cabinet?

Here was America now in one neat package, like the box of toothpaste I now held: lock her up, lock him up, lock it down, put the school on lockdown, lock the border up, lock the migrants up, lock the body up, lock your phone, get two factor authorization or facial recognition, we've got this locked up. Relentless security theater that makes everyone feel the pinch of insecurity.

None of this is exactly new. As long as I've been conscious and able to walk around New York City by myself, drugstores locked certain things behind glass or stored them behind counters—razor blades for instance. In high school, one of my teachers told us about an epidemic of slashings among students in public schools in the 1970s. He spoke about a girl in his rookie year teaching 8th grade at the prison-like public school on West 76th street and Columbus Avenues, before it became a gentrified flea-market. Her peers called her "The Gem"—not for her beauty or her sparkle, but for the brand name of the razor-blade she'd managed to keep hidden in her braces, for self-defense. I deduced that razor blades were locked up because less fortunate kids were stealing them to cut each other. After the razor blades came a gradual and ever-lengthening list of things: Condoms, absurdly, used to be locked up at the height of the AIDS crisis—either to encourage abstinence initiatives targeting shy teenagers or to prevent theft from desperate, scared sex workers. Then, in recent years, an increasing number of unexpected items, mostly related to drug use and distribution went into lockdown. In my old Brooklyn neighborhood it was powdered baby formula, apparently used as a less toxic way to cut heroin, cocaine, and cook crack. More recently, Covid-era supply-chain scarcity, inflation and a spree of organized shoplifting in California appears to have spurred the recent tendency toward total lockdown.

What is new is the sense of an accelerated death spiral. To walk into a CVS now, or "Carceral Vibes Store"—as a young friend calls it—is to enter at the tail of an absurdist teleology: "When they came for the razor blades, I said nothing, for I did not need to steal razor blades." The same principle applies to crime and borders. Who would protest the incarceration of serial killers or serial rapists? Who would deny that a constituted nation state needs some way to account for the goods and people crossing its imaginary lines? Sure, there were always political theorists like Michel Foucault for whom every state apparatus only served one single purpose—that of ever-tightening domination over citizens' bodies and desires. In this view, there are no compromise formations, only tendencies toward ever greater control or ever greater liberty: Either society is accelerating toward fascism or its headed for utopian anarchy, or it’s reversed, a roller-coaster with dystopian anarchy at one end and ever-more-utopian managed technocracy at the other. If this view seems juvenile, it's because largely it is.

Or rather was: back when the United States had a bi-partisan commitment to a liberal constitutional order that, no matter how clumsily and slowly, often with unintended consequences, promised certain compromise formations might hold in relatively stable equilibria, subject to intelligent modification and experiment. Now that walking into a drugstore is already to be treated as a potential criminal, the United States of America can no longer claim to be such a state. It has lost faith simultaneously in both governmental and communitarian solutions to social problems. At such a point, the only thing left is punishment, threat of punishment, intimidation and sanction.

Recourse to the lock is the rule for the contemporary Right, even as they have done everything to promote a culture of corruption and impunity at the highest levels. But it had also been the way of the identity politics Left, who adopted and promoted a language of symbolic incarceration and the social death-penalty of cancellation, policing the borders of the workplace and the school with a vigilante fervor that too-often matched the citizen militia border patrols of Texas and Arizona. But all of this feels now like political mimicry of "non-ideological" corporations like CVS. They had already broken the commons, squeezed out the family-run businesses, and promulgated the division of citizens into consumers and shareholders, without regard for any other social or civic identity. The carceral vibes emanating from the drugstore isn’t part of a Foucauldian dystopia of state control, but evidence of what happens when profit-maximization and consequent income inequality is carried to the extreme, even amid ongoing societal breakdown. Trumpism appears as a virulent symptom of a state and a society that had already lost faith in itself as both state and society.

Accompanying this deeper plunge into lockdown mode is the American penchant for accelerated technological solutions to problems that appear to exist only in the minds of human beings frightened of face to face interactions of any kind. Just as the answer to every social problem is the lock and key, for these people the answer to everything is greater automation. They are like the lawyer in The Emperor's Tomb who advises the Trottas to convert their home into a boarding house once the post-war hyperinflation wipes out the family's savings: "He was a realist: in other words, obstinate as only fantasists are. He could see only the practical side of a project and lived under the impression that everybody, no matter what sort of people they were, was equally capable of carrying through practical projects." The cruelty of such a proposal is implicit but clear in the conversion of a home to a commodity. In the same way, Joseph Roth’s realist and the tech entrepreneur peddle the belief that we can monetize those most intimate aspects of ourselves without losing ourselves. Ask the citizens of Barcelona and the users of dating apps how that’s worked out.

The same morning I walked into the drugstore, I read an op-ed in the New York Times by one of these "realists," a long-time tech-enthusiast, criticizing Trump's shortsighted trade policy because it would set back the mainstreaming of AI driverless cars that the columnist already enjoys riding around San Francisco—a city where the gap between rich and poor has long ago reached or surpassed the levels of places like Delhi or Sao Paulo. The columnist is silent about what will happen to the actual living taxi drivers immiserated by artificial intelligence, or, for that matter what will become of a social fabric once woven from the fibers of countless non-violent, and non-transactional daily human interactions. The Emperor’s Tomb turns out also to be a story about the surprising friendship across classes and ethnicities that develops between Trotta and an illiterate Jewish taxi driver—of horse-drawn fiacres, in this case—from the Galician provinces of the Hapsburg Monarchy. They meet through Trotta’s distant cousin, a Slovenian peasant, an itinerant seller of roasted chestnuts. The friendship carries all three men to Siberia, where they survive the war as prisoners of the Russians.

Sentimental? Sure. If the Austro-Hungarian Empire really was the multi-ethnic paradise Trotta remembers it as, why did it fission so spectacularly over a few short years? But nations, empires, and even cities and neighborhoods are sustained by sentiments. What feelings does the United States of America now offer those who live in its territories? Where is the voice that will drown out “Customer Assistance in Aisle 3”? The same Hapsburg culture that produced Joseph Roth as its greatest elegist and designated mourner, also —in 1923—had given the world Martin Buber’s I and Thou, a passionate theory of relationships that spoke out against the tendency to treat our world and the people in it as so many chips, so many usable, manipulable, and replaceable things. In its own way, Buber’s ethico-religious philosophy was a different kind of mourning text that arose in the aftermath of world loss. As the United States heads into darkness, which voices will cry out from behind so many locks, and who will hear them?—FB

For Tom and Vince