Image from Gratuit
In early May of last year, I drove out to Lost Mountain State Park to sit on a bench near the tennis court where my daughter took tennis lessons two years ago. It was a Saturday afternoon and the place was nearly empty. The courts had been shut down for weeks. I started coming here a few weeks earlier following a powerful instinct to touch the old normalcy of tennis lessons and Saturday trips to the mall and drinks out with friends after work—all of the things that COVID-19 has stolen from me and my family. I sat in the same spot where I once watched my seven-year-old daughter swing her racket at tennis balls and was able to forget, for a few minutes at least, that I was living in a time of plague.
I thought I was alone, but I was wrong about that.
The accountant was a smallish and unobtrusive man about my age dressed in bicycle shorts and a blue polo shirt. He was walking by and asked me if I knew anything about tennis lessons. I explained that my daughter had taken lessons two years ago but that my wife had arranged the details, which I could no longer recall. The conversation quickly turned to COVID.
I don’t recall how the conversation then turned to the value of a human life. I might have instigated it by saying that there are some people who can’t wait to open the country back up, whatever the cost in human lives. Or it might have been the fact that he was itching to say the things he would eventually say, and I was a receptive audience. How we got there is not really important.
“You can most definitely put a price on a human life,” he said.
“That’s cold,” I replied.
“It’s not popular to say it,” he said.
“Unpopular because it is heinous and immoral,” I said.
The accountant shrugged. “Maybe so, but this is the world we live in.”
I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but I shared a story from the summer of 1985 when I worked as a college intern at a daily newspaper in Woodbridge, New Jersey. My first job at the newspaper was to write obituaries, and I was trained to do it with the solemn assurance that for some people, their death notice would be the first and last time they would ever be mentioned in print. During my second week on the job, I was cornered in the copier room by a strange old woman who wanted to tell me about her first job in journalism. This was Jeanne Toomey, who, as it turns out, was the first female crime reporter ever hired by The Brooklyn Eagle in the 1940s. We chatted for a long time and when I revealed that I was writing obits, she told me that one of her first jobs in journalism was to go to the docks in Brooklyn and count the coffins being offloaded from freighters newly arrived from the war in Europe.
“That story always stuck with me,” I said. “I think maybe it was the juxtaposition of those two things, having to sum up people’s lives in a few short paragraphs and hearing that story about the coffins on the docks. It got me thinking….”
“About how to value a human life,” the accountant asked?
“No, that it is impossible to sum up the life of any person.”
“For some, it’s easier than others I would think.”
“Every life is precious.”
“To someone, yes, that is always true. But in the scheme of things….”
The scheme of things. I know exactly what he means.
My new friend knew that he was on thin ice. He knew that in the court of public approval, I would win this argument every time, but still, he kept going. This is the guy who can’t stop himself, who feels compelled to speak. It was probably during his prep school days that he first realized that people would lean in and pay attention if he made an argument clearly and concisely, backed up with facts (and yes, he did in fact attend prep school). He had learned early the thrill of feeling that he was right —factual and confident and convincingly evidentiary—and so he must keep going. What other choice is there?
He had obviously given some thought to this question?
He quoted a Wired Magazine article that estimated the human body could be priced out by its transplantable organs and genetic material to upwards of $45 million. He did not have the itemized list of organs memorized, but he seemed satisfied with himself that he was able to recall the article’s main argument. But I could also see the bead of sweat on his lower lip. He is so full of shit, I thought, but obviously that has never stopped him before. If he has numbers, he just keeps going. So he started in on SPAM—the Superb Person Atomizing Machine, which is an entirely theoretical device that could potentially break the human body down to its basic elements. In this case, he remembered some of the salient numbers, and he rattled them off with obvious glee. The human body is 65% oxygen, 10% hydrogen, 1.6% calcium, and so on. He fired off a few more numbers and then summed it up: The atomizing machine would spit out a pile of elements worth about $160.
But of course, he was missing the point. I knew it and he knew it. There is so much more to a human life than its constituent elements—the hundreds of relationships; the millions of tiny decisions; the stream of conversations, one rolling into the next over a lifetime; the computing power of the human brain; the awesome fact of flesh-and-blood descendants.
He shared some salient details about his personal life—the fact that he has a younger brother who is not as smart as he is, who is on Facebook every day sharing QAnon conspiracy theories. The older sister who lives in Santa Barbara, divorced with two kids. They talk maybe twice a year. "It’s just the way families are these days, distant," he said. "I hate it but what can anyone do about it?"
He said he worked as a data analyst “crunching numbers for the big boys,” whatever the hell that means.
I was listening intently and nodding my head, but I was also thinking, this man is an insufferable know-it-all, which I suppose is exactly what you get when you flip over the QAnon conspiracy coin to see what is on the other side.
“You can’t do it,” I said. “There’s no way to measure the value of a human being.”
“Sure there is,” he assured me, “I work with people who make these calculations all the time. That is basically the entire insurance industry in a nutshell.”
***
In the late 1990s, I spent ten months working for a church in Camden, New Jersey, which was then one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in America. I noticed immediately after moving there that Camden residents counted the dead. The murder rate was printed in the local newspaper and people would watch the number rise throughout the summer, one dead black or brown boy at a time, their bodies interred at the cemetery across the city line in Pennsauken.
Camden is to New Jersey what Detroit is to America. Fifty years ago, the city was thriving, home to iconic American companies like New York Ship, RCA, and Campbell’s Soup. An old man in Camden once told me that in the 1950s during the Autumn harvest, trucks full of freshly picked tomatoes would line up for over a mile outside of the Campbell’s Soup Factory, and the sweet smell of the vine-ripened fruit would waft over the entire city. When I lived in Camden thirty years later, I had to drive outside of the city limits to find a fresh tomato. By the 1990s, Camden was an economic dead zone, a post-apocalyptic city. On the night before Halloween 1991—Devil’s Night—arsonists set 168 fires across the city. When the fire trucks arrived to put them out, some residents threw bottles and rocks at the firemen. If you called the police to report the kids who broke into the abandoned house next door, they would take 45 minutes to arrive, or sometimes they wouldn't come at all, and you would have to listen to the bangs and thuds from inside the house as they tore the copper pipe and wiring from the walls. The whole city was devouring itself from the inside, stripping copper pipe and wire from abandoned houses, breaking off pieces of metal from abandoned factory buildings. Much of this cannibalized metal would end up into gigantic mountains of scrap on the docks, waiting to be carted away in ships.
Soon enough, after a few weeks living in Camden, I was following the daily death toll as well. I was commiserating with locals about these dead boys, most of whom were killed in the violence surrounding the drug trade. We all wondered if the annual number this year would exceed last year‘s. We all hoped it would not, but this was Camden after all. And soon enough, the act of watching these numbers descended into a generalized awareness of being surrounded by death, permeated by it. There was a pall of grief and sadness that lived in the space between each individual number, a chasm so deep and wide, so unquantifiable, that it paralyzed the imagination – one chasm after the next, one cheap headstone in a line of sight with the last one and the one before that.
As it turns out, Brother of QAnon Conspiracy Nut remembered something he once read about Camden:
“In the 80s, Camden's entire property value was equal to one Casino in Atlantic City.”
***
My new friend from the park wanted me to know that I should be prepared for an uptick in deaths when the economy opened, but the economy must reopen soon, he insisted. Don’t let the cure be worse than the disease. He admitted that he dislikes dumbed-down slogans that are designed to be tweeted or slapped on a bumper sticker, but he more or less agreed with the sentiment.
“There was that Time Magazine article from around the start of the Great Recession." He snapped his fingers twice trying to remember the title. "Can I price a human…. No, The Value of a Human Life, that was it. These guys at Stanford figured out how much it would cost Medicare to extend the life of a person on kidney dialysis. It was $129,000. Well of course I’d have to adjust that for 2020 dollars.”
We all excel at the death math now, the grim counting that must accompany such a novel spasm of mass dying. We‘re all watching ”the numbers“ to see what they tell us. An army of Ph.D-level statisticians and data analysts and the interactive map makers are keeping track and presenting the count in a wide variety of compelling formats. For many of us, it is now a daily ritual to watch the lines on graphs rise and fall and rise again like a punishing rollercoaster ride.
“Actually, it’s probably around six or seven million. That’d be my guess,” he kept at it. “The government values a life at $10 million flat, but that means nothing. I have to look at what a court is willing to pay out in a wrongful death case.”
They won’t actually come out and say it, but some of the people who insisted last year that we open the economy while the pandemic was raging believed that the number of COVID-19 deaths was acceptable given the circumstances. They believed that this was the unspeakable truth that nevertheless must be quietly acknowledged and accepted—a truth known to realists and tough-minded leaders like themselves. A truth known to generals in wartime. They believed that the death rate could be weighed against the economic damage. Cost benefit analysis. Risks and rewards. Blood sacrifices will be made. Burnt offerings. People will die. That is just the way of the world.
There will be no Nuremberg to punish them.
I parted company with my new friend and wished him well. It is not his fault after all. This is capitalism we’re talking about, the scheme of things. Capitalism will turn each of us into a tool at some point in our lives.