7-Opinion

Opinion

K

ing George III probably 
assumed 
that 
George 

Washington 
would 
go 

the way of Oliver Cromwell. To be 
fair to America’s colonial monarch, 
it was a reasonable assumption. 
Across history, such astronomic 
victories in the field were rarely 
followed by voluntary concessions. 
Many Europeans — and even 
Americans — suspected that in 
the event of a Franco-American 
victory, Washington would retain 
his power, perhaps even becoming 
America’s king. Across the waves, 
King George III wondered the same. 
He evidently asked Benjamin West, 
a famous American painter who 
was in London at the time, what he 
thought Washington would do if the 
rebels were victorious. West said that 
he believed the Virginian planter 
would return to his estate at Mount 
Vernon — to civilian life. King George 
was stunned. “If (Washington) does 
that,” he said, “He will be the greatest 
man in the world.” 

West’s prediction was correct. 

America’s 
independence 
was 

formally confirmed through the 
Treaty of Paris in September 1783, 
and in November 1783, the last 
Redcoats in the nascent republic 
sailed out of New York Harbor. A 
month later, Washington resigned 
as 
commander-in-chief 
of 
the 

Continental Army. “Having now 
finished the work assigned me, 
I retire from the great theatre 
of Action,” Washington said in 
Annapolis, Md. “And bidding an 
Affectionate farewell (... I) take my 
leave of all the employments of public 
life.”

Of course, Washington later did 

return to public life, becoming the 
first president under the United 
States Constitution and serving 
two terms (after which, to a similar 
surprise of many, Washington again 
voluntarily gave up his power). But 
that Washington returned to public 
office after having supposedly given 
up “all the employments of public 
life” in 1783 does not dilute the 
importance or power of that moment. 
After leading the Continental forces 
through eight years of war against 

the Crown, he could have become 
an American warlord. Instead he 
became an American citizen. 

As of writing this article, Donald 

Trump is desperate. He has still 
refused to concede to Joe Biden, the 
rightful winner of the presidential 
election, which we know produced 
a fair and correct outcome. Rather 
than admit defeat with the grace 
and dignity befitting of his office 
— something all of his one-term 
predecessors have done — he has 
peddled baseless conspiracy theories 
about how the election was “rigged” 
or “stolen.” None of it is true, of 
course, which is why Trump’s half-
baked lawsuits are getting slammed 
in the courts. 

After 
four 
years 
of 
our 

commander-in-chief’s 
constant 

ridiculousness, perhaps we should be 
accustomed to this sort of behavior. 
But it is nonetheless disheartening 
to see an American president 
behave like a 4-year-old who lost a 
board game and to see millions of 
Americans support this obscene 
disrespect of our republican process. 

But 
it 
goes 
beyond 
mere 

disrespect for American democracy, 
too. Trump’s refusal to publicly 
recognize defeat, while not in itself 
a barrier to the transition of power 
— Biden will be sworn in on Jan. 20, 
2021 whether or not Trump makes a 
public concession — can cause very 
real and lasting damage to the nation. 

For one, it undermines faith in 

American democracy, both at home 
and abroad. Americans need to 
know that our electoral process is 
trustworthy and fair, and republican 
government only works because 
the losers recognize defeat. When a 
sitting American president calls that 
process a scam without evidence 
— and his base, along with scores of 
Republican Party lawmakers, abet 
these nonsense claims — it puts the 
legitimacy of our form of government 
in jeopardy. What’s more, it damages 
America’s image on the international 
stage. Americans have long regarded 
the U.S. as the paragon of democracy, 
an ideal that we have long prided 
ourselves on and often used to 
inform our foreign outlook. If we 

can’t manage a smooth transition of 
power at home, how can we expect 
the world to still see us as a model of 
democracy? 

There are also some serious 

practical consequences of Trump’s 
behavior. In rejecting Biden’s status as 
president-elect, Trump has evidently 
refused to share information about 
COVID-19 that would aid Biden’s 
transition team. Per CNN, the 
Trump 
administration 
directed 

personnel at the Department of 
Health and Human Services to not 
speak with Biden’s advisers. “Unless 
it (necessary information) is made 
available (to us) soon,” Biden said, his 
administration could “be behind by 
weeks or months” in addressing the 
pandemic.

Fortunately, 
federal 
agencies 

will cooperate with Biden’s team 
(with or without Trump’s approval) 
now that the General Services 
Administration — the agency which 
formally 
oversees 
presidential 

transition of power — has confirmed 
that Biden won the election. GSA 
Administrator 
Emily 
Murphy 

certified Biden as president-elect in 
late November, which was inevitable 
given the insubstantial nature of the 
president’s litigation.

While our sore loser-in-chief holes 

up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and 
pursues laughable lawsuits, rational 
Americans understand that the game 
is up. Biden is president-elect and 
Biden will become president on Jan. 
20, 2021. At that time, Trump will 
no longer be commander-in-chief; 
he will return to being just a citizen. 
Trump’s appreciation of history is 
probably as flimsy as his current 
legal proceedings, but he would be 
wise to follow the example of our 
first commander-in-chief. Perhaps in 
a few years, if he and enough of the 
American people so wish, we’ll see his 
return to the presidential arena. But 
right now, it’s time for the president 
to do what is right for America: step 
down, move aside and go home to 
Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago or 
wherever he calls Mount Vernon.

Wednesday, December 9, 2020 — 6
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

SIERRA ÉLISE HANSEN | COLUMN
The Queen’s Gambit shows knowledge 

can’t defeat addiction

T

he period piece and limited 
Netflix series “The Queen’s 
Gambit” 
amplifies 
the 

internal contradictions of addiction 
through nostalgic portrayals of a 
time when the battle for dominance 
between the then-Soviet Union and 
the United States was predominantly 
cultural. Rife with contradictions 
in how its nostalgic renderings and 
pleasingly muted color palettes fail 
to reflect the turbulence of the late 
‘60s, the series certainly paints afresh 
a feel-good, “pull yourself up by your 
bootstraps” narrative. 

Despite this declaration making 

immediate indications of a scathing 
review, I haven’t been able to 
stop watching the show, and this 
column isn’t a review of the series 
as a whole. My tendency to notice 
one storyline embedded in the 
series over all the others is born of 
my foregrounded knowledge of 
addiction’s consequences. But the 
series offers a powerful rendition of 
how self-knowledge, or knowledge of 
the potential for hereditary diseases, 
doesn’t defeat addiction.

From the vantage point of our 

cultural moment, it is critical to 
engage the addiction narrative in 
“The Queen’s Gambit.” We could 
begin with the way the orphanage 
doses the orphans with tranquilizers 
to keep them manageable, and how 
we recently learned of McKinsey’s 
evil corporate scam, where the 
corporation knowingly preyed on 
victims of the opioid crisis by offering 
“overdose rebates” to pharmacies. 
We could begin by naming another 
example from that same legacy 
left by another quintessential icon, 
the “American scam artist,” where 
self-proclaimed 
“rehab 
centers” 

systematically scammed vulnerable, 
low-income 
families 
for 
their 

insurance money.

Even so, let us start with the 

practical and the cosmetic. About 
halfway through the series, Elizabeth 
Harmon’s addiction has clearly 
escalated — the expected trajectory 
of any active addiction from modern 
medicine’s understanding of it. It is 
additionally important that I clarify 
what I mean by this: Through the 
first half of the 20th century and 
beyond, addicts were regarded 
by Americans with characteristic 
ambivalence, perhaps epitomized 
by the United States Narco Farm 
in Lexington, Ky., which opened 
in 1935 and housed both convicted 
drug addicts and voluntary patients 
in an ultimately doomed experiment 
for treating addiction. Still, addicts 
desperate for relief even wrote letters 
to the farm’s directors begging to 
be admitted. This is despite how 
addiction was then ubiquitously 
regarded as a moral failure that could 
be cured by farm work alone. 

Today, 
addiction 
specialists 

use the term “medical model” to 
summarize their understanding as 
opposed to attributing addiction 
to moral shortcomings. But cue 

Harmon downing entire bottles of 
red wine at an astonishing pace with 
a pensive, sultry gaze. Her ensuing 
spiral into substance abuse has a 
cinematic, nearly iconic look to it. 
We might want to step away from 
imagery depicting someone’s bottom 
as a well-choreographed music video 
with only one scene of projectile 
vomiting, where she somehow never 
manages to lose the house.

She 
simultaneously 
takes 

incredibly strong tranquilizers, 
but even at the end of the series, 
anyone who has been in or has 
known someone in the throes 
of addiction cannot watch the 
final 
scene 
unfold 
without 

wondering 
how 
Taylor-Joy’s 

complexion 
has 
remained 
so 

lovely throughout. Dare I say, her 
complexion improves significantly 
and 
becomes 
miraculously 

more radiant, with not a trace of 
dehydration aside from the one 
time she downs glasses of water 
during her “hangover match” with 
the Russian. 

Even when Harry Beltik, her 

pursuer 
and 
competitor, 
notes 

changes in Harmon’s skin with no 
shortage of disgust and incredulity 
(and whoever did Taylor-Joy’s make-
up there indeed made her look quite 
a bit more pallid), I’m not sure I ever 
noticed a difference as far as her face 
appearing more bloated. If you were 
to abuse alcohol on the level Harmon 
does in “The Queen’s Gambit,” your 
face would bloat from a combination 
of water retention and weight gain. 
Alcohol has many calories and causes 
a unique kind of bloating — especially 
and very noticeably in the face. 

I have regarded my otherwise 

malnourished face in a mirror, bloated 
to the point where my own gaze didn’t 
register the years-long accumulated 
changes. Remarkably, I didn’t drink 
until my first year of college, when 
I ran cross-country for a small 
Christian school. The act of taking 
that first drink, it turns out, would 
make an incision in my life resulting in 
my nearly losing everything. You may 
believe this to be an exaggeration but, 
very unfortunately, it isn’t. 

Addiction is structural violence 

within 
the 
self 
that 
tentacles 

into obsession, like a magnetic 
field that cannot be reversed 
or deprogrammed — think the 
shimmer 
of 
Jeff 
VanderMeer’s 

“Annihilation” from which you do 
not return the same. You may not 
know this, but here is a haunting 
and predictable piece of knowledge: 
Alcohol 
effectively 
affects 
the 

hominid brain in a literalized reversal 
of its evolution. First, it powers 
down the frontal cortex, then the 
prefrontal cortex and so on. Before it 
can affect the brain stem, it silences 
the hippocampus and therefore the 
acquisition of memories. Then it 
often triggers a stupor and a restless 
sleep before it can impact involuntary 
functions such as breathing. 

Alcohol incapacitated my desire 

for everything else as if a magnet 
had steadily gained strength and 
before I knew it, the temptation had 
become physiologically built into 
my everyday. My relationship with 
alcohol was initially complicated 
because, like many people on the 
autism spectrum, I felt socializing 
was impenetrably stressful, like a 
labyrinth — every interaction was 
a calculus I was notoriously bad at. 
The first time I was legally able to 
consume a glass of wine at a formal 
event, I remember how my anxiety 
shrank to a manageable level — it felt 
like a revelation or a mere fragment 
of the carefree social life I saw others 
enjoying. I wondered why no one had 
ever told me it could feel this good, or 
this easy.

Moreover, this was before I was 

introduced to cognitive-behavioral 
techniques for disarming some of 
my more annoying tics, which did 
not make me particularly charming 
and included: repetitively sounding 
out consonants (“-th” and“-sh”), 
“stimming” 
and 
tunnel 
vision 

for particular subjects that no 
one else cared about (admittedly, 
this hasn’t gone away). Small talk 
wasn’t something I was necessarily 
“disinterested” in — it confused me. I 
tried to understand why people did it, 
and then I tried to replicate it. 

In exuding oddball glamour while 

exhibiting some of the characteristic 
obsession that I can personally 
identify with, Harmon’s character 
makes rigorous, disciplined obsession 
alongside 
fiercely 
unapologetic 

female intelligence seem a glamorous 
performance art. Even when she 
wakes up severely hungover in Paris, 
she whips her head forward and 
instantly collects herself, looking like 
a veritable siren doll with sinuously 
reflective 
red 
curls 
magically 

restored to bouncing perfection — 
just minutes after emerging from a 
bathtub with pitch-black mascara 
bleeding down her cheeks. Every 
man that has been in her life saves her 
more than once; the show is a fairy 
tale without Brothers Grimm body 
horror or any horror to speak of aside 
from its tragic opening scene.

But let’s rewind a bit more, to 

the moment when Harmon first 
visualizes an upside-down game 
of chess on the orphanage ceiling. 
There is a particularly dangerous 
form of causality being drawn here 
between 
Harmon’s 
blossoming 

intellect — her precocity — and not 
just her tendency toward addictive 
behaviors, but her addiction to 
pills as well. It’s important to note 
the difference: It’s perfectly fine to 
acknowledge that sometimes yes, 
there is a link between an individual 
who harbors some kind of genetic 
predisposition toward addiction and 
their potential for greatness.

Sierra Elise Hansen can be reached 

at hsierra@umich.edu 

MAX STEINBAUM | COLUMN

A return to Mount Vernon

Max Steinbaum can be reached at 

maxst@umich.edu.

O

n Wednesday, Nov. 25, the 
Supreme Court overturned 
New York state’s restriction 

on attendance at religious services 
amid the COVID-19 pandemic, 
claiming that New York infringed on 
freedom of religion. As a result of this 
decision, New Yorkers may now freely 
worship in large numbers, despite an 
increase in COVID-19 cases across 
the United States. This ruling may 
result in more COVID-19 cases and 
more deaths than ever before. Cold 
weather, the gatherings associated 
with the holiday season and the spike 
in attendance at religious services for 
Christmas and Hanukkah combined 
will not help. Furthermore, this 
ruling is indicative of future 
rulings of the Supreme Court. The 
majority of this Supreme Court is 
conservative and will likely rule 
accordingly in favor of exceptions 
for religious practice, as they did 
on Nov. 25. Though not surprising 
given 
the 
justices’ 
political 

views, overturning New York’s 
restriction on attending religious 
services raises New Yorkers’ risk 
of contracting the coronavirus. 
Their decision also showcases that 
this Supreme Court values religious 
freedom over the right to live. At the 
end of the day, no religious sentiments 
should be valued above the health 
of many. Life must trump religion, 
always.

Though 
religion 
should 
not 

come before human life in any 

circumstance, it can also be argued 
that New York’s restriction does not 
infringe upon the freedom of religion 
guaranteed in the Constitution. 
According to the American Civil 
Liberties Union, the First Amendment 
gives Americans the right to practice 
whatever religion they choose, or no 
religion at all. However, restricting 
in-person attendance at religious 
services does not enforce a religion, 
or lack thereof, on New Yorkers. 
Those affected by the restriction are 
still free to subscribe to any faith of 
their choosing: They simply must 
observe that faith safely, given the 
unique circumstances determined 
by the pandemic. Many historians 
also argue that First Amendment 
rights were given not to restrict 
state governments, but the federal 
government, making New York’s 
restriction constitutional through 
some lenses.

In normal times, I would agree 

with the justices in their stance that 
the government should not be able 
to determine how people choose to 
practice their respective religions. 
But we are not in normal times. The 
COVID-19 pandemic has prompted 
government intervention in many 
areas in which the government is not 
usually involved. Cities and states 
have instituted stay-at-home orders 
and mask mandates to minimize risk 
of contracting COVID-19, and these 
orders were deemed constitutional. 
Why, all of a sudden, do individual 

liberties come before national health 
when religion is involved? 

Regardless of the constitutionality 

of the restriction, we can all agree 
that it would likely mitigate the 
impacts of the pandemic in the 
holiday season. Any effective method 
of deterring people from gathering 
in large numbers will contribute 
to the national effort to slow the 
spread of COVID-19. Earlier in the 
year, religious gatherings facilitated 
community spread of COVID-19. 
Combine that inevitable spread with 
the flu season, the cold weather 
and the upcoming major religious 
holidays in the U.S., disaster is bound 
to strike. Though the Supreme Court 
has won the favor of many religious 
individuals in the U.S. with the 
ruling, its decision will likely lead to 
thousands of COVID-19 diagnoses.

Despite the Supreme Court’s 

ruling putting millions at higher risk 
of contracting COVID-19, there is 
some good news: New Yorkers, and 
all Americans, still have the agency 
to make the right decisions for 
themselves and their communities. 
Many places of worship and religious 
organizations stream services so 
attendees can practice religion from 
the safety of their own homes

ILANA MERMELSTEIN | COLUMN
No religion is more important that people’s lives

Ilana Mermelstein can be reached 

at imerm@umich.edu.

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