Let’s face it: we’re slipping and sliding into the maw of hell. Against all previously rosy predictions, the Covid-19 crisis only promises to get much, much worse.
The United States, holding on tenaciously to its status as a superpower, is rapidly being shown up as being more “third world” than the several third world countries it has loved to mock and deride. When Vietnam, a country you once tried to bomb into oblivion, does better than you in controlling a health crisis, you need to wonder what exactly it is that you’ve been doing with all those very expensive medical schools and research centres and why it is you lack even the most basic infrastructure to deal with, well, anything.
How much worse could it possibly get than a global pandemic that has no known cure, is deeply contagious, bounds across borders with the alacrity of bedbugs and the invulnerability of roaches, and about which so little is known that scientists are left befuddled and, all too often, have to admit that they were just wrong about what they once thought they knew? How much worse could it get than a global pandemic that, in less than six months, has demolished entire economies worldwide and left millions desperately scrambling for basic survival? It’s not that the virus is exposing inequality because, let’s be honest: we’ve always known about that. The difference is that it’s forcing us to confront the inequality in our lives in unprecedented ways.
So how much worse can this get? Well, we’ll just have to wait till next week to see, when all our previous “knowledge” is once again overturned. With many diseases, our knowledge expands with the passage of time. With Covid-19, knowledge shifts and changes and is often sharply contradicted one week to the next: Children don’t seem to get it, so hurrah! No, wait, children do get it, and with weird and horrible results. It’s like a bad flu for most people. Oh, whoops, actually, we now realise this virus has a “long tail”: debilitating effects that last lifetimes, even in seemingly healthy people. Handwashing is the most important act because of surface contamination. Actually, no, surfaces are not as key as aerosols.
And so on.
In all this, masks remain the most visible signifiers of the deep divides around the pandemic, with many refusing to wear them at all or not always, and many others insisting that everyone should.
Should we all wear masks all the time when not in our homes, or not? And should we wear them constantly when outside, or is it okay to whip them off or, as so many do, and dangle them stylishly from our ears (so they imagine, and they are wrong because it just looks silly)? Perhaps wear them around our well-defined arms, quietly picking up sweat and germs from nearly every surface we glide by?
As you’ve probably gathered from my tone, I think everyone outside should wear a mask all the goddamn time unless, obviously, they’re eating or drinking or with people in a place that’s not adjacent to other people. And if other people come nearby, make way for them (this is especially meant for the woman who stayed firmly in the centre of the park table when a friend and I wanted to share it: girl, this was not your dining table). This is not an article about the science of it all — for that, I’ll lead you to an excellent discussion on my Facebook page, and I admonish you to pay special attention to Laurie Pea’s words, in a couple of subthreads.
I’m not here to revive the debate on whether or not to mask (everyone should, all the goddamn time) but to focus on a word that comes up a lot when commentators and policy makers focus on how best to get the public to take all necessary precautions during a health crisis: Shame.
In an Atlantic piece titled “The Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks,” epidemiologist Julia Marcus cautions us against shaming people who don’t mask up, suggesting that this only pushes them to abandon the practice altogether. She begins with the example of Aubrey Huff, a former Major League baseball player who, ah, how can I resist this, huffed that he wouldn’t wear a mask and was promptly rebuked in what I imagine were the strongest of terms by several online respondents. Marcus writes that he claimed to have been shamed. His actual response is a bit more complicated:
…the liberal lefty, soy-boy professors and the blue check mark crazy cat ladies were in unison guilt-shaming me…Now, if you wanna wear a mask and live in fear the rest of your life, it’s certainly your prerogative, but the vast majority of well-adjusted, sane, common-sense people that aren’t sheep, that can reason for themselves, agree with me. I understand that the Corona virus is real. And if you have pre-existing conditions, or you’re an old person — and I know this sounds insensitive but somebody has to say it—you are morbidly obese, then stay the fuck home. Just because that is your plight in life doesn’t mean the whole world has to shut down.
Putting aside the fact that “soy-boy professors” is actually an intentional and hilarious way to desex academics (the preferred nomenclature, as Walter Sobchak might put it, is “toy-boy”), Marcus avoids calling Huff’s entire rant what it is: a steaming pile of ignorance and thoughtlessness about “the whole world” that he claims to care about. His anger about having to wear a mask isn’t that of a child who can’t comprehend but that of an adult who clearly has information and knowledge at his disposal. Not all mask-denialists are Covid-denialists: Like them, Huff’s problem with wearing masks is not that he doesn’t believe the virus exists, or that it has disproportionately awful effects on many kinds of people: it’s that he doesn’t care that there are people who are particularly vulnerable to it. The problem is not that Aubrey Huff was shamed but that he doesn’t care people about those who are not exactly like him (white, fit, athletic, wealthy).
Marcus draws analogies between the public health messaging and the earlier AIDS epidemic, and that analogy deserves a separate piece, forthcoming soon. But for now, I’ll simply state that AIDS is nothing like Covid-19. For one thing, Covid is far more lethal in that it doesn’t even require active conjoining in order to be transmitted: you don’t have to fuck or suck anyone to get this virus. You can quite literally just breathe it in from a person standing not too far away, and the science on that is becoming a lot clearer and a lot more frightening. There are, at this time, only two things we know for sure about Covid-19: we know very little about it and there is no cure.
Yet, Woke Wallahs like Marcus and many others in organising circles admonish us to not shame people, as if those refusing to wear masks are so very sad about being shamed that they might not take the proper steps to protect themselves. But who in their right mind refuses to engage in a simple act that could save countless lives, not just their own, because of how they’re made to feel about it? And when can we finally call them out on their stupidity and thoughtlessness?
Allow me to illustrate my irritation with an example: A group of us are walking on the edge of a major road at night because the car broke down. We’re trying really hard to stay together and safe and as far from the road as possible, because it’s dark and it’s hard to tell when a car might come whizzing by. We really need to stay away from the edge and keep our eyes open.
One person insists on breaking off and walking on the road, because they’re bored and irritated and want more space to walk. The rest of us chide them, strongly, about not being a fool because we’re all also tired and don’t have the time to mollycoddle this person into staying off the road. That person refuses, insists they will not be shamed into doing what we say. They’re not concerned about the safety issue, but whine endlessly about how bad they feel for being shamed. It’s not their act that they see as having consequences: what matters to them is how they feel about how others see their behaviour.
A car ploughs right into them, killing them instantly. And because it’s a dark and stormy night, it loses control and skids into the rest of us. As Wes Low puts it, “It’s the classic trolley dilemma: Either you possibly kill five or more people, or you wear a mask. Really hard to figure out, this one.”
Should we descend into a society where people constantly shame those who don’t mask up in public? I often find myself clucking my tongue at such (and since this can’t be seen behind my mask, I do it more often, and I’m usually far enough away that they can’t hear me), but the most I’ve gone so far is to hold my cane straight out or to the side if they come too close (I’ve never been so grateful to need it). I have no desire or energy to shame people in public and, besides, as someone who uses a cane, I know a quick getaway from an angry, frothing and contagious target is unlikely.
But perhaps what we’re really thinking about is not “shame” but “accountability.” Huff is smart enough to know he wasn’t being “guilt-shamed”: he was being criticised. And we live in such excessively Woke times that a white, wealthy, famous athlete who begins his rant by snarkily calling out a vast swath of “the liberal lefty, soy-boy professors and the blue check mark crazy cat ladies” can suddenly claim victimhood for himself and have that status affirmed for him by a Deeply Woke Harvard epidemiologist.
Surely we can be critical of people for being wilfully ignorant and refusing to think about others without us being waylaid and, well, guilted about using Shame?
People writing about disease love metaphors, so here’s one for you: the mask is a condom for your face.
If you’re not masking up during a completely unpredictable and utterly unique global pandemic because you don’t like being shamed into wearing cloth around your face, you’re as much an ass as the Trump supporters who whine about “individual liberties” and whom you probably like to mock and deride.
Mask the fuck up, fools, because I still care about your goddamn lives even if you don’t.
“Wallah” is Hindi for “person.”
Many thanks to Evan Thomas for his point about the car ploughing into everyone else.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Jean Béraud, After the Misdeed, c. 1885.