This week, the fiftieth of the lockdown, Stephen and I started watching a British show called The Repair Shop. The premise is that people bring broken possessions -- usually family heirlooms, not particularly valuable in 'the market' but with great emotional attachment -- to The Repair Shop, a barn in the English countryside staffed by an array of expert craftspeople who repair the item in question, usually with astounding feats of detail and intricacy. Sometimes I get a little frustrated watching The Repair Shop, though, when someone brings in what I consider to be a hideous item, stuffy and Victorian, like a ceramic clock that was recently featured, covered with pastel flowers with broken petals. I think to myself, it's not worth the repair, just get rid of it!
I was joking about this idea with some friends (via text) and we concocted a concept for a new show called The Un-Repair Shop, where people bring in old items and the expert says [in a British accent, of course], 'No, sorry, not worth it,' before smashing it with a hammer and releasing the person from the often-onerous ties of ownership. It's a stupid idea, but we thought it was funny for a few minutes.
It was an idea that returned me, however, when I went to the park and was thinking about how the United States passed 500,000 COVID-19 deaths this week. I was listening to the most recent episode of Death Panel about the 'normalization' of death that is increasingly defining this phase of the pandemic: where, for example, our new president marked this milestone with a candlelight ceremony that looked like a set from The Bachelor and the New York Times represented (abstracted) these deaths with a chart filled with dots; where there's a creeping consensus that most of these deaths were (are) somehow expected and are #actually caused by advanced age or underlying comorbidities of the sort (diabetes, obesity, poverty) that we often use to blame the victim; where there's a lot of discussion about how the virus is becoming the 'new flu,' as if the flu weren't one of the major causes of death in the world, particularly for those who can't afford to take time off of work or see a doctor; where the media has focused a disproportionate amount of its attention on the admittedly disturbing, alienating conditions of lockdown for people working from home who must deal with no childcare, increasingly exploitive employers, cancelled vacations, etc. while downplaying the even-more disturbing conditions forcing lower-income people to leave their homes to go to generally speaking the shittiest jobs imaginable and literally dying as a result; where there's been almost no talk by anyone in a position of power to, for example, shut down everything for a few months (with pay) so that THE GOVERNMENT (and not your local drug store chain) can vaccinate as many people as possible to end this cycle, much less to fundamentally address the structural inequities of a system that at this point is ritualistically sacrificing the poor; where we can't even count on the Democratic party to rally behind the cancellation of a non-trivial sum of student debt or a minimum wage of $15/hour, which doesn't make the prospects of M4A or say, DC statehood seem too promising; where, as I saw someone on Twitter point out, we're only two months in and all we hear are apologies for what can't be done.
And as I considered all of this, it occurred to me that we don't need to create The Un-Repair Shop, because we're already living it. The metaphor isn't perfect, but the people of the United States are the ones being brought into the government with the hope of repair, and the experts are responding with a level of disdain that might be farcical if it weren't so cruel.
Or maybe the people will bring the government in for repair and the show-runners will bring a hammer to it, relinquishing us from the burdens of this antiquated form of ownership.
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