Increasingly, I think, the American public operates in a mild dissociative state. I wrote about it here. It is almost as if people are afflicted with a kind of PTSD - only one where the trauma is generalized, relatively low grade, but ongoing.
Any of us who have questioned the Covid narrative have had to put up with an inordinate amount of hectoring, name-calling, ridicule, and ostracism. I remember when I signed on the artist appeal as part of the Milosevic Defense Committee, and the abuse and anger I faced whenever this topic came up. People who had no history with the region, knew little of the political landscape, would nonetheless wax irate, furious and near tears that I would hold such outrageous positions.
The Covid narrative has generated the same near-hysterical indignation. The narrative, as it has been constructed by the WHO, CDC, and more likely a dozen or so billionaires (including Bill Gates) is so rife with contradiction and illogic that one might think cracks would begin to show.
That many who accept the word of authority in general, might at this point start to question why none of this story makes sense. But no. Not in America anyway. (or rather, to be more precise, there is a pushback, but it keeps to a low profile lest the little Cotton Mathers of the haute bourgeoisie put one in the stocks).
Leave it to America to make the flu into a morality play. However there are clear signs of people waking up. In Europe certainly.
And not only Germany, doctors and health care professionals in Belgium, too. But the governments are sticking to the story they were handed.
In Norway here I still cannot drive to Sweden. Why? Who knows, there is no reason provided. The PM uttered something about better safe than sorry, and staying the course. Everything is discussed this way, in infantile baby talk, gibberish and slogans. Anti-democratic edicts delivered as if by a kindergarten teacher.
Someone wrote to me on social media the other day and said “Not everyone gets to live in Norway. Here we are surrounded by death”. Now he lives in Los Angeles. In a nice westside area. He is not surrounded by death. Or rather only in his hallucinatory inner theatre of the mind is death present, surrounding him.
But this language has a quality I associate with Hollywood. Its kitsch image-making. Never mind it’s literally not remotely true. But this is a version of something that I think happens all the time now. This man is in his own private movie.
It is a movie made of diverse parts; there is something from all the various post-apocalyptic zombie films (and TV, think Walking Dead), there is something of Norman Rockwell in there, or even Thomas Kincaid, there is Dr Phil and Oprah and the cheapening of emotion. The snarky pedestrian thoughts of a Bill Maher, too.
This is what has come to pass for public intellectuals and intellectual discourse. All are almost impossibly banal. There are parts from a dozen disaster movies, too. I mean literally all the way back to Towering Inferno. And there is, perhaps most significantly, a quality that is harder to define or outline, but which I associate with JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon.
Covid the virus is an overdetermined symbol — and one that only makes even a tiny bit of sense if it is located in these personal streaming sites in your brain. (and I recommend Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production).
There is a tendency toward fetishization, too, and hence the ubiquitous appearance and opinion of celebrities. Its bordering on surreal much of the time: Hip Hop moguls are asked about climate change, Silicon Valley billionaires voice opinion on overpopulation or vaccinations, soap opera stars offer thoughts on stem cell research.
Nothing is investigated, really. It is all driven by whatever is most lurid or sensationalized. The ruling class has clearly encouraged, if not mandated, a certain line of thinking on the pandemic. The ruling class has profited enormously from the lockdown, and is quite happy with a semi-permanent state of crisis.
In fact it is likely that this was at least partly all planned. I mean what does one think those billionaires at the Bilderberg meeting talk about? Or at DAVOS or the like? The ruling elite anticipated crises in Capitalism, and the lockdown certainly provides cover for massive plunder or pensions, real estate, and really, most everything.
There is a veritable mania, now, concerning testing. And yet even the NYTimes admits the tests are virtually meaningless. But no matter. We must test more!
Magical thinking permeates the climate discourse, as well. Never in history, or never since the Enlightenment, have so many people pretended to know so much. For the educated thirty percent (white and reasonably affluent) it is the era of the TED talk. Nothing dare last longer or be more demanding than a quick (and entertaining) ten minutes. The fires in California have come primarily from downed power lines (badly out of date and rarely serviced), but exacerbated by homeless encampments (rarely mentioned) and fireworks — and of course the drought that has extended backward a decade.
Already there has been significant psychological harm done to children. The clear lesson is to fear the other. That humans are contagious and potentially lethal. Intimacy is officially discouraged.
I cannot imagine that message were I fourteen or sixteen. Growing up in the sixties the idea was to promote intimacy, feelings, and to exactly *not* fear emotional openness. The English speaking west has gone from Paul Goodman to Theresa Tam.
The resurgent Puritanism is not restricted to odd ducks like Tam. Even bourgeois pundits are noticing. This is Zoe Williams in The Guardian:
There remains, in public life, a rich seam of puritanism that you notice only when times are so bleak that you could really do without it. A sense that frivolity is immoral, even if it is 95% of your economy; a feeling that they had it coming, all those people dedicating their lives to the generation of fun. Puritans tend not to announce their disapproval except in the most roundabout ways, so you can rarely pin it on them. But standing on the precipice of a year that ends without dancing, bears, dancing bears, playhouses, ale houses, music or Christmas, all I can think of is how happy Oliver Cromwell would have been. It is like all his cancelled Christmases come at once. He would be dancing (not dancing) in his grave.”
This is a lament from the privileged class, but perhaps that’s actually a good sign.
The ruling class don’t wear masks or have travel restrictions imposed on them.
There is no longer even a pretense. The rich are entitled to special treatment. The rich deserve a clean depopulated world where they can cavort on the green, frolic in elysian fields by murmuring brooks, and to not be troubled by darkies and riff-raff. Remember it was a mere hundred years ago that Belgium brought Congolese from their African home, to be paraded in human zoos. Those they hadn’t already murdered.
Covid is the final act in the transference of wealth to the top 1%. And culture is being destroyed along with everything else. Cinemas are closing, permanently, theatres, too, permanently, and museums. Galleries and other art spaces are shuttered, likely to never reopen. Something like 30 million jobs have been lost. There is an acute desperation across America.
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