John Fetterman and "Nothing is Allowed to Just Be Bad" Culture
what if suffering a massive brain injury is... not good?
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Awhile back a reader sent me this commercial for Parkinson’s disease. I know that sounds weird, a commercial for Parkinson’s, but it honestly plays as exactly that, an advertisement for a devastating, degenerative neurological condition that not only robs people of their mobility but also is known to induce dementia and severe depression. While not necessarily itself fatal, Parkinson’s patients average less than 15 years of lifespan after diagnosis. And yet if the advertisement’s sponsor Parkinson’s Canada is to be believed, the right way to approach the disorder is with #swagger, by acting as though an objectively bad, unhappy condition should itself convey a kind of shit-eating public confidence. Different people respond to challenges in different ways, and no doubt some who are diagnosed with Parkinson’s will respond with an upbeat spirit and sunny outward attitude. Good for them, obviously, when that comes organically and naturally, when it’s an authentic individual response. But this commercial suggests not that it’s merely valid to react to a famously devastating condition with a committed positivity, but that an affected upbeat and self-celebratory performance is the way to act when you learn you have Parkinson’s. In that, it’s an example of a modern disease I find harder and harder to avoid.
The commercial is, among other things, part of our culture’s relentless assault on dignity, an expression of the mandatory trivialization of everything; we have completely given up on the idea of quieter virtues that derive strength from privacy and restraint, choosing to turn everything into fodder for self-defensive portrayals of whimsy and self-deprecation. Instead of withdrawing into ourselves and drawing on our inner reserves of resilience, utilizing silence, exile, and cunning in a fundamentally internal response to difficulty, we’re now taught to surface absolutely every part of our various struggles for the consumption of others, and to treat them as sheepish jokes in order to make that consumption more frictionless. More generally, “Got Parkinson’s? Why aren’t you dancing???” is an obvious example of our culture’s current addiction to aggressive, mandatory positivity - yes, “toxic” positivity, if we must - and a version that’s become inescapable in disability contexts in particular. It’s why I have had strangers tell me that the psychotic disorder that’s ruined my life is my “superpower,” why I’ve been called self-hating for straightforwardly admitting that I reject my condition and don’t want it, why the idea of autism as a legitimately debilitating condition has become bewildering to many, why the most severely afflicted in any given patient population have been gradually gentrified out of the discourse about those conditions. And it’s why a severe neurological crisis for a national legislator has been taken less seriously than it should have been, until quite recently.
Last week, a major New York profile and some ancillary reporting raised alarms in Democratic circles regarding Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke in 2022 on the campaign trail and later received inpatient care for depression. The recent reporting suggests that Fetterman has been frighteningly unstable, given to delusions and erratic behavior. Of course, strokes range considerably in their intensity and negative effects, and there are certainly people who come back from them and achieve very close to full recoveries. And yet a stroke is by definition a life-altering event, and looking back over the past several years of coverage of Fetterman, it’s remarkable how much of our media seemed intent on swiftly moving on from concerns over his level of impairment, even suggesting that there was something inherently untoward about asking questions about a sitting United States senator’s mental acuity. Surely partisanship played a major role in that. But I also think the contemporary addiction to treating all medical conditions as identities - and thus not subject to negative attitudes - played a major part in minimizing Fetterman’s condition. Mandatory positivity towards disorder and disability casts a chill over fair questions about a given public figure’s mental competence and physical composure.