Team Fear

‘If it bleeds, it leads” used to be the supposed motto of low-end journalism. As for today’s high-end journalism? If it’s fear, it steers.

The COVID-19 vaccines are rolling out like millions of traffic bollards to stop the nihilistic joyriding vandals that are the virus, and yet we keep being told not to get too excited. The least religious people in the land have been warning us that if we didn’t adopt their strange new rituals, habits, and dietary restrictions — covering our faces in public, shunning sinful trips to the beach, consuming alcohol only in the proximity of a sacred snack — the virus would smite us for our wickedness. Science had nothing to do with any of this. So it came to pass that in one of the best-educated (and hence least religious) corners of the country, Brookline, Mass., masks are still mandatory outdoors, until May 21. If outdoor mask-wearing is a useless precaution, it will be no more useless on that date than on May 20, or indeed than it was on May 20, 2020, but Blue America receives each nonsensical new government edict as reverently as if it were carved on stone tablets, then erased and re-carved as necessary. These tablets, they’re a lot like Etch A Sketches.

Why were New York restaurants forced to close at 10 p.m. for months? Does the virus get up at 10:15? Did it make sense to squeeze all would-be diners into a shorter time window? No, but subjecting ourselves to numberless little inconveniences constitutes a pagan offering of reverence to the corona­virus gods. This is why, on April 26, Washing­ton, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser banned dancing at weddings: It’s an appeasement ritual. Fully vaccinated couples can’t hit the dance floor, surrounded by other vaccinated people, even outdoors. Don’t have too much fun, is the message. Think of each new day as the Academy Awards — a gala of lugubrious hectoring.

In a time when it might have been rather useful to have calm, dispassionate public messaging, the highly credentialed have instead been urging us to feel what they are feeling, and what they feel is terror. “I’m speaking today not necessarily as your CDC director . . . but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky tremblingly said on March 29. “I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. . . . Right now I’m scared.”

Would it be too much to ask a scientist to speak to us as, I don’t know, a scientist? I already have a mom, and she was afraid I’d suffer a life-shattering injury in T-ball. Since when do scientists tell us to plug in to their feelings like Luke Skywalker turning off his viewfinder and feeling the Force? Walensky begged us to remain under house arrest a bit longer. Hey, 62 weeks to slow the spread, right?

Or maybe 112. On May 9, Anthony Fauci said, “I hope that next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now.” “Dramatic difference”? Has Fauci read the news lately? We’ve already had dramatic improvement. Daily cases are at their lowest level since September. But then we were heading into flu season; now we’re heading out of it. Also, in September we had zero vaccinated Americans. Today, that figure is a bit higher: 152 million. We’re in the mopping-up phase. If the virus is the Nazis, the spring of 2021 is the spring of 1945. The Wuhan Hitler is barking at aides in his concrete condo as tanks roll in from every side.

By next Mother’s Day, Fauci expects, there’s a smidgen of a chance that life might be pretty normal? So buckle up for another year of fear? That sounds awfully convenient given that (a) Fauci loves appearing on TV so much, you half-expect him to show up on Floor Is Lava, and (b) he stops being bookable the moment we stop being afraid. As for Clueless Joe Biden, on April 21, he warned that “we still have more to do” if we want to celebrate Independence Day “in small groups.” Erm, Americans don’t actually need a presidential permission slip to gather in small groups, which most of us never stopped doing. Today we’re into large groups. Some 73,000 people flooded into AT&T Stadium in Dallas for the recent Canelo Álvarez–Billy Joe Saunders boxing match. We’re going to get out and boogie on the Fourth of July, with or without Biden’s say-so.

The day of Walensky’s “impending doom” remark, the seven-day average of new cases in the U.S. was 65,252, according to the New York Times. Forty days later, that number was 41,057 and falling fast. More than 46 percent of the American population has been at least partially vaccinated, and many Americans on top of that have already been infected with the disease. In the U.K., where the virus has more or less been snuffed out, 53 percent of the population has gotten jabbed. What the U.K. picture looks like now is what the U.S. will look like in a few weeks. Maybe even by Memorial Day.

But large sectors of Americans can’t handle the good news. Some people just can’t let go of their masks, their phobias, their dogmas and superstitions and rituals, and they’re resentfully watching the rest of us get on with our lives. I guess it’s not surprising. They’re living in a past that isn’t coming back. So they get bitter. They cling to their masks or their new fake religion or their antipathy toward people who aren’t like them as a way to explain their frustrations. Pity them, laugh at them, ignore them.