American Wasteland

“They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. Cities exploded—a whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.”
—Narrator, The Road Warrior

One of the things recent events have taught me, or perhaps just reminded me, is how unpredictable the future is. The arrow of time points in one direction, and is inscribed with neither the destination nor the mileage, and anyone who claims—usually from within a digital cubbyhole on a 24-hour news channel—to have divined these particulars is irrefutably full of shit. It can be easy to forget this amidst the glories of the Information Age, which I’m told is when we now dwell. Turns out being inundated with torrents of “information”—free-floating, context-free shreds of data, usually of mysterious provenance much like dog food—is not in fact the key to enlightenment, though the sickening excess of the stuff truly is the road to the palace of wisdom: perhaps we can’t pinpoint the exact moment where we crossed into “too much,” but we can be damn certain that we’re there now. 

Writing about current events is like writing about sewage. Not just because it’s greasy and brown and smells like rotting fish and has mysterious lumps bobbing about its inestimable depths, but because by the time you get finished griping about the dead cat that just went floating by, there have been six more. It’s hard to identify which of the many decaying carcasses represent an inflection point. I’d hoped January sixth, along with the inauguration of Joe Biden two weeks later, would be one—that the toxic fog would lift and those of us poisoned by the Trump cult would find themselves face to face with incontrovertible facts that would force some glimmer of reflection and reckoning. Briefly, this appeared to happen. But now, a month later, it’s clear that the people that brought us this madness have chosen instead—like the Seekers upon discovering the UFOs were not coming to rescue them—to simply redouble their efforts. Right now a sizable number of U.S. congressmen and congresswomen, as well as a not insubstantial number of senators, are actively working to diminish and normalize the physical invasion of the U.S. Capitol by an army of nihilists. It’s a disappointing outcome, to say the least.

Far be it from me to go issuing predictions, but if we don’t put a cork in this bung, things are going to plop out that will make the last four years look like the good old days.  

“Got a cracked timing case cover. lt's broken a couple of teeth off the timing gear. The radiator's damaged at the core. lt's got a cracked water pump. lt's got a fractured injector line.”
—The Mechanic, The Road Warrior

You don’t need me to tell you we’re in a tight spot. The U.S. is rapidly closing in on half a million dead. That’s like losing Atlanta or Kansas City. We’ve never seen anything like it in our history save for the Civil War, and we’ll probably top the 620,000 deaths in that conflict before it’s all over. It’s pretty much impossible to overstate the significance of the Covid-19 pandemic here. 

And yet…

A friend recently told me they were surprised I wasn’t more skeptical of coronavirus vaccines, given how critical I’ve been of Donald Trump. This statement is like a seesaw with a toddler on one end and a walrus on the other. I’m not even going to address the walrus, but it’s certainly reasonable to ask: why trust the CDC or any of the other organizations pushing for mass vaccination?

Well, one answer is civilization. You may recall learning in seventh grade how the development of agriculture meant that people were freed from the relentless pressure of food gathering and could begin to specialize. That’s still the case—I am a computer programmer; I do not know how mRNA vaccines work. I don’t understand the science behind the vaccines. How could I? It took me three years to get a master’s degree in computer science, a field in which people are often referred to as code monkeys. I don’t have time to acquire an additional degree in microbiology.

Fortunately for me, my broad public education bequeathed to me a basic understanding of how science works. I understand the ideas behind the scientific method. I have a rough grasp of how peer review works. I know that if I really wanted to, I could go to Google Scholar and actually read the papers—they’re right out in the open, almost like nobody has anything to hide. 

Moreover—and again this is a gift of the specialization that allowed us to go from chasing down gazelles on the savannah to watching the world go by from the window of a 747—we have science journalism, and more broadly, journalism itself. Just like with science, I understand that this is a field in which people are educated at great effort and expense, and I value that. I know that journalists hew to a comprehensive code of ethics and I’ve seen what happens to people—Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, to name two—who skirt that code.

Donald J. Trump exhorting his minions to invade the seat of his own government

This is not to say that either of these fields are free of blemishes. There’s corporate influence and even blatant corruption, but to assume that the fix is in you have to believe in a conspiracy involving at least tens of thousands of individuals. To perpetuate some sort of conspiracy involving Covid-19 vaccines you must assume that the entire scientific community is either complicit or ignorant of a giant rent in the fabric of their universe, and that the science journalism community is equally compromised. To believe in such conspiracy is to court nihilism, just as much as invading the U.S. Capitol courts nihilism. It is to say that there is no authority in our society capable of speaking on the subject of vaccination without vanishing in a cloud of doubt, and if that’s the case, we’re through as a civilization and probably as a species.

But that is what is happening, and it’s entirely galling to watch as detractors undercut the work of thousands of conscientious scientists by dressing up as mock scientific organizations. You may have heard of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), the collection of quacks who fed hydroxychloroquine horseshit to the Rube in Chief last summer, resulting in a several weeks-long aneurism for the whole country while people wasted a lot of effort debating this completely groundless flimflammery as though it were anything other than a nationally televised medicine show. 

America’s Frontline Doctors certainly sounds like a group we should be paying attention to, but that’s entirely because they’re aping America’s Frontline Physicians, a coalition of six large physicians’ associations—the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Physicians, the American Osteopathic Association, and the American Psychiatric Association. AFLDS, on the other hand, is a coalition of (as far as I can determine) one crackpot doctor. But they have a website, a logo in the form of a red, white, and blue Caduceus, and a photo of a bunch of people standing in front of the Supreme Court in matching white lab coats, and so presto! Medical authorities!

AFLDS is a veritable case study in how to co-opt the symbols of a trusted institution in order to undermine it from the outside. “The AMA and other sources of medical information,” they tell us, “have lost their independence.” But turn to the list of speakers at AFLDS summits and count the references to mainstream medical and educational organizations. It’s a weird intersection between scientific discourse, signaled by the occasional blob of large words with Greek roots, with right-wing shibboleths like “cancel culture.” I can’t say that I had the strength of will to look through every doctor flogged on the AFLDS’ website, but the dozen I examined are a notably unpublished bunch. No worries though—just send them a wad of cash and they’ll make you a member, which entitles you to access their “exclusive” trove of research papers. Because we all know that exclusivity is the key to veracity in medical science.

“We're going to crash or crash through.”
—Pappagallo, The Road Warrior

The threat is existential, if these grifters are allowed to continue gnawing away at the foundations of our civilization to feed their bottomless appetites for grievance and—let’s face it—money. The Capitol invasion was not the beginning of this, and sadly it was not the end. I don’t know about you but for the most part the past couple of weeks have been a welcome rest. It’s a delight not having to hear the grating orange voice that plagued us daily for the last four years, but the reprieve is over. Trump’s eggs are hatching and already a thousand wriggling orange grubs are vying to take his place. 

For God’s sake, don’t let them. All of the energy we expended getting to this point—it’s needed still. It’s not enough to simply elect a champion and then walk away comforted by the idea that your jousting is done for you. Do all the things: call or write your representatives, send money to organizations fighting the good fight, join groups doing the hard work of rooting out this malfeasance. I’ll be honest, I’m not one to give great advice on how to do this sort of thing—my election contribution was to buy donuts for strangers. But if you’re reading this it’s very likely you did something to help get us to this point, so the path forward should be clear enough: do it again. And again. And again. 

Thanks for reading as always. If you liked a word or a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph or, God willing, the whole blasted thing, please click the like button (I use likes to buy food for my family), or encourage a benighted friend or colleague to give it a read. If you haven’t subscribed, please do that as well. See you again soon!