I’d like to send a special note of thanks to all those friends and family members who, after sniggering behind my back that I had gone off my rocker, or had suddenly become an unthinking and selfish Trumpite, sent their sincere apologies for what they said about me, and how I had fallen into mindlessly and obsessively repeating Q-Anon memes.
The elites’ ability to flood our consciousness with fragmentary and undigested information has increased exponentially. And they are well aware of, and quite satisfied by, the sense of disorientation this information overload causes in the majority of citizens. Why? Because they know that a disoriented or overwhelmed person is much more likely to grasp at simplistic “solutions” when they are directed this way.
Our culture’s current obsession with the allegedly “human” qualities of dog, has a lot to do with our generalized retreat from the difficulties of finding enduring comfort and wisdom—and the foundational key to both, dialogue—with the always complex humans around us. That this widespread retreat from what Sara Schulman calls “normative conflict” had an awful lot to do with enabling the assaults on human dignity and freedom committed in the name of controlling Covid.
We live in a time when powerful forces, wielding very powerful new informational weapons, seek to place a wedge between ourselves and practices which have long been essential to the search for self-knowledge, social meaning, and the ability to promote and safeguard human dignity.
For all their talk about following the science, they’d rather be tortured at Guantanamo Bay than actually read it. Given that the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission there is absolutely no social reason to get the vaccine and thus no reason to compel anyone to take it. Period.
The elites that deign to rob us of our bodily sovereignty and so much more in the name of Covid, or whatever other “mortal health threat” that they choose to publicize next through their carpet-bomber control of most media, have all done their homework on the frame game and carefully tailor their communications to fit with its imperatives.
Freedom of conscience is out. The real responsibility of the players, according to the Gray Lady, was to seamlessly parrot the wholly extraneous ideological line of their employer whether they believed in it or not. The truth is they should have never, ever been put in that position.
The retreat into fantasy of our self-proclaimed betters in “cultured” cities like Boston, with “progressive” papers like the Globe is unsustainable. Though most of them are blissfully unaware of it, their penchant for aggressively imposing their delusions on the broader public is robbing them, and the institutions in which they toil, of the social capital acquired of several generations of mostly earnest work.
The trauma is greatly diminished when we stop, breathe and, to the best of our ability, fearlessly catalog the injuries we have suffered, ask who authored them, and, if relevant, what made so many of us acquiescent to these assaults upon our dignity and well-being.
Not too long ago, the cultivation of a wholesale disjunction between one’s inner thoughts and outer presentation was broadly seen as pathological. Now, however, the ability to propagate free-floating images of the self (and with it one’s chosen causes) is now presented as proof of good sense and high intelligence.
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