My hands are raw from pasting photos of the Coronavirus on milk bottles. That’s what you do when someone goes missing, right? Wait, you don’t do that for a virus, do you? God, I don’t know anymore.
The virus is still “out there,” as it were, but it’s not news anymore. A pandemic has somehow been normalized. Millions are out of work, upwards of 100,000 Americans have died, our sense of time is said to be skewed. Then George Floyd was murdered and so went any pretence of “social distancing.” Sure, many protestors still wear masks, but at this point, they need them more for the tear gas than the Coronavirus.
It’s difficult to keep track of things. There is simply too much information, much of it contradictory or incomplete. Whatever information contained in this newsletter may well be obsolete by the time it reaches your inbox.
Adam Elkus sums the situation up rather neatly:
The present saturation of electronic media (television, radio, and online communications) also enables rapid and often whiplash-inducing swings of opinion among both elite tastemakers and plugged-in information consumers. These sudden swings, in which everyone is demanded to suddenly accommodate themselves to their group’s new consensus narrative, occur too frequently for anyone to hope to adapt to them. After each swing, the group makes a totalizing demand that the individual publicly submit to the new motto and signal support for it. Failure to do so results in both direct social pressure being suddenly applied to individuals as well as powerful individual fears of being severed from meaningful social connections. But with consensus ephemeral, another swing could be days or even hours or minutes away.
Twitter, so far as I can judge, is the best place to monitor these swings. Yes, it is a bubble of sorts, but so many of the battles fought there spill out into the “real” world, and vice versa. With all the protests and riots, all the consensus narrative looks like a static on an old fashioned television set.
I suppose it’s only human to stare at the static and try make sense of the chaos. I’m not someone who considers themselves to be ideologically bound. If someone hounds me about my political leanings, I just say I’m a “Zackist.” That is to say, I yam what I yam, and one can make of that what they wish. Still, I can’t help but try to pigeonhole the various tendrils of the maelstrom into whatever it is I believe.
I value order over chaos. Rioting, looting, wanton destruction, bloodshed, and anything to do with anarchism is abhorrent. But what good are the police? For one thing, they started this whole mess by murdering Floyd and countless other innocents. More fundamentally, they have become a state within a state.
Back in 1930, José Ortega y Gasset described the worldwide expansion of the police forces as “one of the most alarming phenomena of the last thirty years.” (Imagine if the blighter lived long enough to see the the militarization of policing!) Gasset goes on to warn that as the police grow larger and larger, the government will lose control of them:
Inevitably [the police] will end up by themselves defining and deciding on the order they are going to impose - which, naturally, will be that which suits them best.
The order which suits the police best is whatever keeps them from being held accountable. This is anarchism, too. What good is a government, elected or otherwise, if the laws it creates are ignored by those tasked with enforcing them? We are told it is a dangerous world out there, one packed with a myriad of villains, each more menacing than the last. True enough, though there is little point in fighting crime if those we pay to do it are little more than a state-sponsored gang. Why not pay the mafia to enforce the laws? At least they don’t have the support of unions and most politicians.
A New Standard of Morality?
The latests innovations in moral philosophy come from Twitter, not the Academy. Just look at the new moral standard by which we judge people. For simplicity’s sake, I will call it the Hitler Test, and it works like this: when we are presented with an action thought to be immoral or merely “wrong,” we check to see if Hitler committed the same action. If the old badger did it too, the act in question can be deemed immoral or wrong. In other words, it has “passed” the Hitler Test.
After Donald Trump ordered police to violently clearout a peaceful protest so he could have a photo-op at a burnt-out church, #Resistance celebrities were happy to note the similarities between Trump’s actions and those of Hitler.
The trouble, of course, is the picture of Hitler is photoshopped. Trump, who actually held a Bible like a Price is Right model, was, evidently, not depraved enough for the likes of Debra Messing. The actress needed a photoshopped image of Hitler before she could proudly declare the whole thing a “Dog whistle to white nationalists and Nazis.” Once Trump passed the Hitler Test, she could hit “Tweet.”
I suppose we can’t blame Messing. Trump’s actions have put some Americans in a tricky spot. See Representative Abigail Spanberger’s (D-VA) statement:
It must be tough for an ex-CIA officer to condemn anyone who betrays the Constitution. Having a Bible-wielding Hitler in the bullpen is much easier than having to reconcile one’s time in the CIA with a concern for constitutions.
Caught Gramin’
When I opened Instagram yesterday morning, I was greeted with a dozen or so images of total darkness. For a moment, I assumed there was a sudden interest in Robert Fludd’s depiction of the Nothingness that was prior to the universe. Better yet, perhaps the sun had fizzled out. I soon learned the whole thing was part of #blackouttuesday, the latest trend in social media activism.
Like so many viral trends, this was not without controversy. Some, it seems, were doing it wrong. The sudden surge of white people posting black boxes using the hashtag #blacklivesmatter or #BLM were drowning out all the black Instagram users.
Others suggested the black boxes were a “tactic to divert important information” about #blacklivesmatter. Just who is behind the plot is unclear.
For others, the mere presence of #blackouttuesday photos was troublesome:
Others saw no particular harm in #blackouttuesday posts, but cautioned against the dangers of slacktivism:
Others, meanwhile, know exactly who they’re dealing with:
No wonder Buddhists preach non-action.