With Pertinence to Masks, Voting, and Other 2020 Drivel
“There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”
Conan Doyle’s reference to an eastern wind would have evoked something very generally understood to his contemporaries, steeped as they were in the Bible. It also bore an optimistic tone which would not prove prophetic once the war to end all wars came and went, leaving the empire anything but a cleaner, better, stronger land.
Interestingly enough, we’ve had our own east wind in this year of anxieties. A Far-East wind. And much as it was with the war to end all wars, it doesn’t seem all that reasonable to assume the United States will be a cleaner, better, stronger land in its wake, primarily because this latest eastern wind has reaffirmed certain proclivities. Tocqueville once very aptly described these proclivities when he wrote, “[N]ot only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
COVID-19 – our eastern wind – has exacerbated this solitude, even as it has created a mirage of bringing us together. This faux togetherness is nauseatingly reinforced every time another Willie Stark wannabe raises a fist and says, “We will beat this thing, together.” Will we? One should be forgiven for having doubt, underscored, perhaps, by the fearmongers who drive the national rhetoric. Their fear, their panic, which has been more contagious than COVID itself, seems disproportionate to COVID’s actual impact, which itself has been disproportionate to our governments’ various and rather inconsistent responses. I hesitate to blame these governments for their incongruity because I understand that they are only reacting to a concentrated neurosis among the nation’s masses, a neurosis which should seem funny to anyone with even the slightest sense of humor. For, somehow, a nation which often cares little about killing a human life simply because it hasn’t breached the birth canal yet has suddenly found sanctity in every human life, if only for statistical sake.
Think about it: in a nation of over three hundred thirty million people, a mere three hundred thousand deaths can only cause this kind of protracted neurosis if everyone has succumbed to Tocqueville’s prediction. What else can explain it?
Certainly, all life is scared. No ifs, ands, or buts. What is also sacred, though, is reason, which must inherently question whether complete economic shutdowns and reinforced panic (reinforced, that is, by our many institutions, both public and private), are proportionate to a disease which, according to the CDC, might (might) account for a twelve-percent rise in deaths in 2020, especially when a twelve-percent rise still accounts for less than one-percent of the population. One-percent is a lot of deaths. But one-percent is not worth ruining the lives and traditions of the ninety-nine-percent.
Such a low percentage, of course, begs to question the nation’s recent fetishes. There’s our social distance fetish, never minding, for a moment, that the qualifier is unnecessary. There’s also the hand-washing thing. But do we really need less germs? Seems like we might need more. Most importantly, there’s our mask fetish, which should be proof that there is no right or left anymore – there is only a single, undifferentiated flock of sheep of occasionally different wool.
A week ago, give or take, this mask fetish again took center stage – had it ever left us? – when our enfant-terrible President, our own man in orange, was airlifted by Marine One to Walter Reed because he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. To be sure, this was a development which resonated with our schadenfreude-obsessed populace for various reasons, often articulated by some form of, “That’s what he gets for ignoring the science.” Or, “That’s what he gets for not wearing masks.” One particular gentleman told CNN, “I don’t want him to die… yet.”
And to think, this vitriol all stems from the fact that, at one point in time, President Trump dismissed mask wearing as nonsense, shortly before he, too, caved to the “science,” whatever that means… Trust the experts, they implore – presumably the same experts who once told us the world was flat, black people were inferior, and eggs were and then were not and maybe are once more somewhat good for you. Admittedly, I, too, often lament how little we leave to the experts; in fact, I’ve often sympathized with Catherine the Great, who wouldn’t subscribe to the superior talents of cobblers and shoemakers in matters of government. But to presuppose that our experts are not somehow infected by the age’s democratic proclivities – those which Tocqueville foretold – is naïve.
Has mask wearing prevented the surges we’ve seen? What of the other science, like that reflected in this paper, which may momentarily be found here, in which previous experts questioned the effectiveness of masks against sub-molecular particles? How many experts – more importantly, how many people trusting the experts – have bothered to reconcile the old science with the new? This is not unimportant, primarily because many of the President’s critics were quick to say that his just desserts resulted from his nonchalant mask wearing. But masks don’t protect us, the experts now say, in a Kerry-esque flipflop; they protect other people.
So, which is it?
Perhaps masks help. Perhaps they don’t. They certainly aren’t a fix-all deserved off the mass campaign being waged by the media. Again, the argument here, like above, isn’t that masks should be discarded, but that the accepted wisdom is alarming, disproportionately encouraged, and religiously, even piously, defended. Religiously defended. Think about that for a moment:
Americans don’t religiously defend religion, but they religiously defend masks.
Recall, here, Orwell who wrote, “Bugs are bad, but a state of affairs in which men allow themselves to be dipped like sheep is worse.”
And yet, to question the sheeplike behavior of a nation of fervent, even feverishly, democratic people is dangerous, especially in this day and age of magic boxes and interwebs and a narrative-obsessed mass of people quick to recede into the solitude of their own respective hearts. One simply has to sit back and count the numerous advertisements which not-so-subtly display mask wearing to recognize the width and breadth of this craze and how widely it’s been accepted.
Note, though, that this is the same media, obviously, which nauseatingly reminds us of other societally important things, like hate is bad, love is good, and everyone should get out and vote.
This last bit – the bit about the voting – is most alarming. Does anyone rationally believe that everyone should vote? Why do news outlets, broadcasters, and interweb authorities constantly encourage us to vote? To register? Granted, many suffered long and hard for the franchise, and they unquestionably deserve the right to vote. But the right to vote does not denote the need or imperativeness for actually showing up and voting. The people who feel otherwise do not feel that way because they have reasoned themselves into such a position, but because they’ve been told by a neurotic nation, and reminded by institutions which have a certain self-interest, that they must. Hence, they’ve allowed themselves to be dipped into a fervor – a muzzle-wearing, world-changing, brow-beating fervor – at all times.
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Contrariness, for the sake of contrariness, is, it should be noted, a heresy of its own.
But fading the public seems to have served sharps in the desert for a long time, a point which dovetails nicely with a certain conservative tenet, which says that people are fallen and depraved and therefore obstructed by self-interest from right reason.
So, perhaps certain alleged, societal heresies aren’t heresies at all – like omitting car restraints, and not-discouraging smoking, and refusing mask, and not voting, and opposing the mandating of public education, and perhaps many other things as well. Embracing or omitting these practices may well be dangerous, but they are enterprises which an allegedly free and ordered people should be able to volitionally choose or not choose on their own, without our institutions reinforcing the collected stigmas to the contrary.
That our institutions have failed us seems inarguable, but their failure seems to be the fault of the masses who, like sheep, wander with the wind, eastern or otherwise.
