The pandemic didn’t fall out of the sky. Looking back, it’s easy to see so many warning signs.
The acceptance of white yoga anti-vaxx moms hosting parties to infect their kids with bizarre diseases is an obvious one. I live in a blue area, so these people were very present pre-pandemic. I very seldom run into them now, but when I do, I see that they’re also anti-maskers. Big Mask is in league with Big Pharma. Death drive is very present in the psyche of the bourgeoisie because they know, deep down, that capitalism cannot continue forever, and they would rather destroy themselves and everything around them than admit this.
Then there’s Americans’ total lack of interest in masking pre-pandemic, even though in Asia people voluntarily masked in order to protect each other years before the pandemic started. Making a collective effort to protect one another? Forget it! I've got crumbs from the table of imperialism I need to lick up off the floor!
Also the poisonous environment of America pre-pandemic. This country was founded by settlers deliberately infecting indigenous people with horrifying diseases in the name of profit and land theft (A very, very blue area in Massachusetts, Amherst, still bears the name of the guy who did this), and nothing has changed. Everyone being sick in so many different ways—from being forced to eat poisonous food, being forced to drive for how many hours each day, never having time to exercise, never having decent health care, never having the most basic health education, always being economically stressed —but then being blamed for all their problems. You have basically lived in Mordor all your life, but it’s your fault for not looking like Legolas, you just haven’t worked hard or smart enough, and you are insane if you question this. (Marxists referencing LOTR is like liberals referencing Harry Potter I suppose…)
We also can’t forget individualism. Every American, deep down, thinks he is a cowboy. The contempt for intellectualism (and science) has also been talked about in America for decades. Liberals are obviously not immune here. At this point they really are just as contemptuous of science as chuds. Their peaceful protests are just a rebirth of medieval flagellants—they're happy to punish themselves for enjoying capitalism, but not so happy to actually destroy capitalism itself. Most doctors have also literally gone mask-off during the pandemic, but some scientists at least (Rob Wallace for instance) are still doing their jobs, still uncovering new ways in which this nightmare is fucking us, and very few people are listening.
“Juking the stats” is a phrase from The Wire (watched it in my liberal days), but we see government officials at every level doing this constantly with covid. It’s become very difficult to figure out just how bad the pandemic is, though there are things the bourgeoisie is unable to cover up—deaths and life expectancy, for instance. Diseases associated with long covid have continued to climb, even if there are shithead doctors out there who claim that long covid is just in your head. (They were also doing this with chronic lyme pre-pandemic!)
So in a way, the pandemic is not really something new. It’s just a massive intensification of factors in American “life” which were already well-established. Disabled people were already being ignored even by Marxists before the pandemic, but now there’s a lot more of them, they’re in so much more danger, and it’s easier to become disabled than ever before.
Barring revolution, I think things will continue to get worse. (There are rumors of nurses striking to bring back mask mandates, which is a positive sign.) I’ve also wondered—if Trump “wriggles out of this one,” and if he becomes president again, will liberals go back to pretending to care about the pandemic? What’s stopping them from saying that Biden did a good job during the pandemic, but Trump is fucking it up now? It would also be a pretty effective way to mobilize large numbers of people against him.
As an aside, the pandemic has taught me that the apocalypse isn’t necessarily what we expect it to be. Had anyone made a film about this pandemic before it started, absolutely no one would have believed it.
Edit: this thread is also about LOTR and the Foundation trilogy.
