"No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all."
— Camus, The Plague
I am the epitome of the decadent Westerner.
Like a cicada with a Honda Fit I have emerged from fifteen months of a worldwide pandemic having spent the time doing my salaried job, watching Netflix, strumming a guitar and drinking beer on the front porch of my house, eating delivered meals, and, every fortnight, writing overlong missives about games and bike rides and occasionally about the stupid risks I have taken with my largess. It’s no wonder fundamentalist religious groups from exotic lands such as Alabama want me dead. The wealthiest royalty in Europe during the Black Death enjoyed uninterrupted access to food and shelter but weighed it against a pack of murdering relatives and disgruntled office seekers with private armies, and worse they didn’t have anything resembling modern medicine or microwave popcorn, the poor benighted bastards.
It’s strange to wake up one morning in the midst of the ninth worst pandemic in recorded history and—oh, I’m sorry, I can’t just throw out a number like that and move on like it’s a matter of course. The top five—the undisputed heavyweights of pestilence—are the three bubonic plagues of the sixth, fourteenth, and nineteenth centuries in positions one, three, and four, the 1918 influenza at number two, and in the number five spot—and the capacity of this fact to incur shock is a testament to the fact that the politicization of disease is nothing new—HIV/AIDS. But still, if there was an event for germs at the Olympics—and let’s hope there isn’t—Covid-19 wouldn’t medal but it would definitely make the team. So as I was saying, it’s strange to wake up in the middle of this bonafide world-historic catastrophe to find a treasure chest of options, any one of which Justinian would have traded several of his servants’ testicles for. They have come to me (and most of you if we’re being statistically honest) by accident of birth. Rub my belly for good luck.
That said, Amazon Prime is not a substitute for, say, your mother who died alone in the middle of a forest of beeping machines and plastic hoses or your brother who now suffers debilitating fatigue and shortness of breath on his long-haul to places unknown. Pandemics are Acts of Nature, and like a volcano or a hurricane or a tsunami, the damage they do is chaotic, touching some lightly and blasting others with their full fury, without rhyme or reason. And when I say “reason,” understand that while we’re pretty good at the how, the why is certainly an eternal mystery. If you have so far escaped the fire—which burns still, mind—I encourage you to thank your lucky stars and practice empathy for those who have not.
But let’s put a hard stop on the moralizing, am I right folks? I didn’t crack my laptop open to tell you to be a better person; that would be like me telling you your house smells like cat shit. My point in bringing up the digital Shangri La in which many of us have hibernated during the crisis is by way of introducing my testimony into the record—I like to think of myself as a modern day Boccaccio except that my stories of pandemic came mostly off the Internet.
What impressed me most about the Covid-19 pandemic, what stood out to me as its most singular quality, the feature by which it will be remembered down through history, has been the sheer mind-numbing stupidity of our response—humanity’s to be sure, but mainly I’m thinking of the United States. It’s both fascinating and deeply alienating to watch your country behave in a way that makes it seem at once not at all like the country you once knew yet simultaneously like a grotesque hyper intensification of the country you know all too well. All the know-nothing-ism, the star-spangled ignorance trotted out for the television cameras, the fetishization of something erroneously called “freedom” as though the fundamentalist worship of individual license could possibly be the foundation of anything more substantial than an orgy or a week-long bender. All this is the axle about which we turn when making that familiar one-word joke, accompanied perhaps by a Neanderthal hunching of the shoulders and a furrowing of the brow in an effort to cause it to overhang one’s eyes: ‘Murica.
None of this should come as any surprise to anyone. If American culture is about anything it’s about mechanization, commodification, and relentless repetition, whether we’re talking about Ford automobiles or McDonalds or—an eternal American favorite—personal grievance. Think of the profusion of (likely Chinese-made) flags on display in abundance at the Capitol on January 6: the Gadsden flags parted from their identification with the Continental Marines caught up in a sober life-or-death struggle against an oppressive monarch and wedded instead to the notion that the fight against tyranny is a fight for convenience; the Confederate battle flag, about which the less said the better; and a particular red, white, and blue flag, like the American flag but dominated by a block-letter invocation of the flatulent name of that great wobbling flesh blob game-show hosting huckster that still haunts our country like Hamlet’s Ghost crossed with QVC and Guinea worms. You know who I mean; I won’t soil this page any further. All of these symbols, repeated at regular intervals like logos on a red-carpet backdrop, well what could be more ‘Murican than that?
It’s ironic that one of the most prominent modes of communication among those who would see democratic government swept aside is the meme, that concise and infinitely-repeatable little packet of snark consisting of an image and a terse punchline which, as often as not is the most recent in a long line of variations on a theme. “Meme,” a word coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, comes from a Greek root meaning “imitated thing,” a root which also supplies an origin to the words “mimetic” and “mime.” Dawkins proposed the term as a rubric for his notion that ideas are essentially self-reproducing objects, spreading from person to person like, well, a virus. In the ecosystem of digital networks, mimesis operates literally at the speed of light. The frequency of repetition is beyond what any industrial nation could ever have produced, and all of that quantity produces a qualitative shift—something more like an infection than an idea.
So as I say, none of this should come as any surprise. And yet here we are, or at least here I am, still being shocked, which I suppose says something about the eternal naivety of my heart in spite of the poisonous influence of my brain, which keeps telling me that history states with great authority and depressing pessimism on the inevitability of saviors. For everyone who gets a Joan d’Arc, someone else gets—usually entirely undeserved—an Edward II.
Now, I did remark that this was not the first pandemic to be politicized in some way—I suppose all of them are to some degree. But I think it’s fair to say that typically such events are used opportunistically to bludgeon some group on the margins—gays and Jews are always popular targets—or to castigate those who have not shown sufficient deference to a religio-political hegemony, whereas now the argument seems to be with the virus itself. How can any sustained political force be applied simultaneously to the denial of both preventative measures like masks and social distancing as well as the remedy scientists have worked so hard to produce using all of the arts of our age? Those are the same arts that give us the power to spin tales of tracking chips and autism juice and spread them to literally millions of others in the blink of a synapse. The contradictions of this position are like a riot of mushrooms reaching up from greasy rotten clumps of dead intellect, but as Canute so astutely pointed out, you can’t stop the tide.
So how long until our institutional nihilism eats itself?
Presumably if we just wait long enough the infection—the intellectual one, not the biological one—will naturally burn itself out and we’ll be able to get back to the important business of watching the long-awaited next season of Better Call Saul. Unfortunately, we’re trapped in a Manichean system in which everything resides on one side or the other of an unbridgeable gulf. We can’t expect our political reality to suddenly become multifarious—we don’t have a parliamentary system and it would take an act akin to a revolution to produce one; not that would solve our problem so much as introduce a whole slate of different problems. No, our system produces bifurcation naturally, as an expression of winner-take-all elections. If you possess a majority you rule, so the best (legitimate) strategy is to create the largest coalition possible. There’s nothing to be gained from throwing in your lot with the third-largest group; definitionally third place is worthless. Your options are to win with the largest group or to try to expand the second largest.
The flip side of this reality is that governance—actual governance, not televisual grandstanding—is only possible through compromise. Just as in a marriage both parties must be willing to compromise in order to move forward. So what happens when one party arrives at the conclusion that the whole project of governance is illegitimate? In a certain sense that party has already won: by throwing up obstructions—a power that is theirs by definition—they make governance impossible. Game over.
Ultimately, this is the reason mask-wearing—of all things—has become such a flashpoint. Much has been made of opposition to masks during the 1918 pandemic, but, at least according to my own admittedly half-baked research, the significance of the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco is much overstated. For starters, it was largely limited to San Francisco; some mentions of the group were made in papers throughout the United States, but these were generally reprints of articles from the San Francisco Chronicle and appear not to have spawned independent activity. The League appeared in January of 1919 and although they held largish meetings for a while, they appear to have evaporated within a couple of months. The impact on national politics was negligible. For the most part public health officials suggested that people wear masks and people did.
Public health, however, is a function of public government, and masks are necessarily tools of government. Since they hide the face they are open to interpretations—however absurd when considered in the light of day—of dehumanization. Moreover hyperpolarization demands all things which enter the public eye be assigned a partisan value, usually without any allowance for shades of meaning or purpose, and so masks became—to some—more important as symbols of a political philosophy already identified with all of the negative qualities of every binary pairing worth considering, and prophylaxis is a benefit with no room left to exist on the political playing field. It’s helpful, I believe, to consider what the reaction would have been in a more harmonious time had scientists told us that masks would be more effective if they were emblazoned with swastikas—we might all have paused for a moment. Presented with a political landscape in which the opposition is definitionally evil, masks, an expression of the governmental approach to national health, are de facto symbols of government—itself a project of the opposition—and therefore evil as well.
All of this is unpleasant to write about because it’s difficult to lard my sentences with foolish jokes, on the grounds that there’s not much funny about self-inflicted wounds. We’ve all been lucky—in spite of inept leadership through much of the crisis, culminating in a nearly complete abdication of responsibility by the then-ruling party in the several weeks following the election—the profusion and strength of national and international institutions beyond mere government has proven another boon of our modern age. The scientific community continued to work according to its time-tested methods and processes and produced—in record time—effective vaccines against our real enemy: the Covid-19 virus. This is something for all of us to be thankful for in spite of the inevitable reinterpretation of the vaccine as yet another partisan signifier. We’re still arguing, but we’re doing it at the twenty yard line now instead of the fifty.
The pandemic is not yet over; far from it. But we’re someplace very different from where we were this time last year. A couple weeks ago I tore down the plastic cube I’d built in my band’s rehearsal space, a moment that felt like a watershed. My wife and I ate our anniversary dinner in a restaurant with close friends, and that too felt like an inflection point. All of this is possible because of well-considered collective action, and there’s good reason to hope that the virtues of this solution will eat away not only at the biological infection but also the intellectual one. We should be so lucky.
Hey folks, thanks as always for reading. Please:
If you know anyone who has lived through a pandemic recently you may wish to:
Also, I have an ANNOUNCEMENT!
Ok, I’m a liar. I’m not going to tell you what the actual news is, just that I’ve got some coming soon—maybe as soon as next issue if the stars align properly, which they probably won’t. But, bate your breath and sit rigidly in your chair because I’ve got something fun in the works. In the mean time, take care; see you in a couple weeks.
Brilliant piece.🌟🌟🌟🌟