Several days ago there was this remarkable tweet by our CDC director.
There is a lot you could say here. For one, this appears to be a pivot to “forever masking”, we could talk about that. Two, the numerical claim she is making here is nonsense, and it’s unclear where the 80% number even came from, and she was buried in the replies for it. Days later now critical comments outnumber “likes” by a factor of 10 to 1, and I literally saw public health people from three continents commenting upon how discrediting such statements are to the US CDC. And yet, despite being publicly buried for it, she’ll probably say something like this all over again next week anyway, and we could talk about what all that means.
But as I enjoyed myself reading and being encouraged by those 10,000 critical replies (OK, I didn’t quite read them all), I came across this one.
Maybe you are angry seeing something like that but what I actually felt was pity. This poor soul (the adult doing the tweeting) also got buried in the replies… but what I see, when I see someone who actually bothered to write a reply like that on Twitter to the CDC director, is someone who is desperate for affirmation and not finding it in the places he should be finding it. And so we get, on Twitter, “look at me doing the good thing, tell me I am a good person!”. At least that was my reaction. And that’s sad, really, if my understanding is correct, this person is lost and probably lonely.
I don’t read AceofSpades blog nearly as much as I used to (it used to be one of my most frequently visited websites). But Ace (who I’m pretty sure is not a Christian, if you care about that) can do remarkably insightful commentary on what makes people behave the way they do, and I’ll end with a long quotation from this post that, I think, elaborates on the phenomenon above.
It occurs to me that many, many people today lack a stable core. They do not have much by way of a core of fundamental being inside of them. The old pillars that provided strength and solidity to people -- church and family being two of them, friends you actually know in the real world being another, engagement with thought longer and deeper than scrolling through twitter Hot Takes -- are largely absent from many people.
The genetics of their psychology and personality are thus not well-guarded against mutation, and like a virus, they readily pick up pieces of Identity and stray strings of Meaning they find floating in the medium. They incorporate these new pieces of Identity and begin infecting others with it. Suddenly lost and lonely people are all Non-Binary Femme-Trending Anti-Racist Equity-Working Science-Believing Fat-Positivity Graysexuals who believe Black Lives Matter and that Hate Has No Home Here.
And many people have incorporated an exciting, potent new string of personal meaning, the "People of Pandemic" string, into their identity code.
Being a Person Who Is Very Very Concerned About the Pandemic is just as serious (or, just as trivial) a personal commitment and identity choice as being Non-Binary. It defines them. It determines who their kinship group are. It makes a tribe, it makes a culture. It cleaves them from one mass of humanity and connects them strongly with another mass.
It determines what they believe about a great many other things. You automatically know what all Pandemic People think about CRT, for example -- it simultaneously doesn't exist and is critical to teach children.
We live in viral times. People themselves have now become viral in most essential sense of the word. Having no fundamental spiritual DNA, they now mutate dozens of times a year, becoming more virulent with each mutation, and spread their diseased Codes to the other Viruses who look like people.
This pandemic won't end. It can't end. If it were to end, the Viral People whose primary code is being a Person of Covid would themselves end.
The idea of "Covid Hawk" as an idpol category helps to make sense of the evolution of a category of upper-class evangelical progressives -- represented most directly in my own life by my mother. As a boomer raised in evangelical culture, she finds most of these new identity-based communities are off-putting. Jumping into a forum of LGBT Gen-Z types talking about their gender fluidity, or a group of 4th gen feminists tweeting their abortions, say, would be a bridge too far. She can't easily reconcile her cultural roots with showing up at a rally where everyone is wearing pussy hats and holding "F*** Trump" signs.
A temporary solution was the idea of allyship, where a class of disadvantaged people (immigrants, or urban blacks) would become the object of extensive white-knighting by the prog evangelical community. But that wasn't an identity in itself, just a sort of affiliate status. These identities are too well gatekept to ever be fully inclusive.
Covid finally solved that problem. Everyone was now a victim of Trump, but especially the elderly and the immunocompromised. A certain type of (mostly female) personality tends to routinely overestimate vulnerability to infectious disease, to the point where "immunocompromised" or "Covid vulnerable" can be claimed as highly ecumenical identities to the point of universality. Instead of being at the bottom of the woke totem pole (the stereotypical rich white female Karen), you're suddenly in the front lines of a war against "Covidiots", a literal zombie class threatening to infect you. It made intersectionality egalitarian and ecumenical. In a funny way it's the woke-religion equivalent of Paul's ministry to the gentiles, allowing identity politics to become universally accessible to everyone regardless of race, station, or privilege.
Over the last couple years, my mother's awkwardly pro-gay and pro-trans posts (which were often walked back apologetically within 24 hours after scolding from her Bible-college friends) have been completely replaced with full-throated enthusiasm for whatever narrative is being backed by the CDC in any given week. It's a forcefully progressive identity that aging trad-lifestyle Boomers can fully embrace without the risk of "How do you do, fellow kids" cringe.
One point on identity and masking: it's become fairly widely known that liberals tend to overestimate covid hazards. The polls indicate a believed fatality rate of 30% or more. Since many younger people still don't know anyone who's died from the virus, why do they keep making themselves miserable by following the lockdown mantras?
I figure that unless you believe there's a high chance you'll get killed by the virus, you will not put up with everything that's been forced on you. And in a way, it is more comfortable, now, to stay in your neurotic cocoon than to question the authorities and realize that they've been peddling snake oil. So you keep wearing masks and obeying the signs, you still regard other people as hazards, and maybe you blame all your miserableness on the people who just won't do as they're told and do their part to end this.