Brats, Tantrums, Human Vectors of Disease

Dorothea Lange, the great photographer and witness of the Depression, the Dust Bowl, Japanese internment camps and the hard lives of Bracero farm workers, had thumbtacked to her darkroom door a sentence from the 16^th-century English naturalist and philosopher Francis Bacon, which read, “The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention,” according to the New York Review of Books.

Both Lange and Bacon would be today, I think, dismayed by how hard it’s become for most of us to get even the briefest glimpse of “things as they are,” fighting our way as we must through sordid tangles of purposefully error-prone and confusing “inventions” of commercial and political propaganda that have compromised honest discourse in much the same ugly way that continents of plastic waste have shamefully compromised the purity of the open sea.

As confusing as this moment is, with false accusations of election fraud, the GOP’s refusal to concede the presidency and the control of the U.S. Senate in the hands of Georgia voters in a January runoff, a few actualities “of things as they are” do make themselves available for our contemplation.

I’ll focus on two — first, the strange and terrible reality of the Republican party, its leadership and many of its most zealous followers, having become contributors to the rising rates of infection and death brought on by the COVID-19 pestilence; and second, the phenomenon of American culture, world view and view of human nature having been divided now into two intractable, mutually repellent camps that know little about each other and would rather know even less.

It’s hard to accept but harder to deny that a large number of politically and ideologically activated people on the right are willing to endanger the health and well-being of millions of fellow Americans by refusing to wear face masks, social distance and stay away from crowds. Have they become a major vector of the pandemic? Are they political brats throwing tantrums, like their president, and infecting people on purpose? Do they hate those of us on the left so much that they are willing to risk COVID themselves just to pass it on to us by helping to increase the infection rate of the population as a whole?

Is face-mask denial a symptom of what some psychiatrists associate with a kind of non-ethnic American “machismo” or what used to be called “rugged individualism,” what’s now known as American Man-Child syndrome?

Ronald W. Pies, MD, writing in Psychiatric Times, observes that he “can think of no ethical justification” for refusing to wear a face mask in a pandemic. “Given that face masks help prevent asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 and may also reduce the chances of anyone contracting the COVID-19 virus, wouldn’t any decent, responsible citizen put up with such a minor inconvenience?”

Dr. Pies is reluctant “to write off the mask refusers as selfish, irresponsible yahoos…though there may be some truth to those characterizations.” Dr. Pies feels that “rugged individualism,” when carried to an extreme becomes “hyper-individualism,” a form of “Don’t Tread on Me” mentality that decays into an “insidious force for social disintegration.” He adds, “in my view, many mask refusers are acting out of a debased form of individualism that some would call ‘toxic masculinity’” even when it motivates the behavior of women.

It’s probably much more complex than just a long-festering hostility between those who hold communitarian values as opposed to those who see themselves as tough-minded individualists, but it’s a good place to start to explore the mutually repellant nature of America’s polarized national culture.

When you boil it down to mask refusers and COVID down-players, like the current lame duck president, callously infecting and sickening an untold number of the rest of us, “things as they are” in America today take on a serious and sinister new form. Whether the refusers and deniers are consciously aware of the public health consequences of their zealotry, whether they play a major or minor role in spreading the disease, the fact of their indifference to the fate of the rest of us, and even their own friends and families, gives a grave sadness and stark poignancy

to the rift in our national culture that America is suffering today.

The right has not only become a vector of disease, but also a vector of hate and alienation.

It’s gotten so bad that the right can’t even accept a five-million person plurality in the popular vote going against them. Election denial is another form of refusal, and a major reason why many on the American left, myself included, have little or no interest in suffering the abuse that would accompany overcoming our sense of rage and disgust and start thinking about the right as a serious partner in a potential new national dialogue. As badly as we need it, their hate of us has staked everything against that, for the time being at least.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it