So, here in the UK, the traditional weekend briefing of 'with a heavy heart...' is happening. The pattern: restrictions - promise of salvation - briefing that all's going well - briefing that it's not - restrictions. It's been present throughout, I believe. Driven by 'behavioural scientists'.
A few data points:
- Euro 2020 (I presume they didn't change the data in order to fuck with us a tiny bit more - I mean, why not?) started last night, and I've never seen the place so flat ahead of what is normally the closest we get to any kind of national 'moment'. I have seen no flags on display whatsoever (save for a lone Turkish one). Really unusual. (And, of course, Euro 2020 brings domestic vaccine passports in to active use.)
- There are so many free lateral flow tests knocking around that local authorities are going door-to-door and park-to-park in some areas to hand them out. Yet apparently the US FDA has just warned against their use.
- The variants are the problem, and the risk is that they (a) will lead to 'cases' among the unvaccinated, and (b) portend future, more extreme mutations among the same group. Now, this seems pretty anti-scientific (personally, the only mutation-worry I have is that the more people are vaccinated, the higher the risk of leaky vaccines leading to mutations, as with Marek's disease in hens), but it links for me with one of the two places I'm trying to go with this.
1. The best fit to the data of the last 18 months is that anxiety is the whole purpose. This, in turn, is the best fit for the mask phenomenon: we can't see human faces; those of us who wear masks feel a little hot, a little deoxygenated, a little aware of the non-normalness of his; they are, of course, a visual reminder all around us. Testing serves this end also - both in the obvious sense of statistic creation, but also with 'Operation Moonshot' - the idea that there should be a test before any significant social interaction. Even I, who have never been tested and will only be if and when I'm forced to be, find myself wondering if (a) I should offer to test myself before meeting someone particularly anxious, or (b) if they'll ask me. A English tournament summer where no flags are flown in advance is another small symptom, I think.
2. I don't know where this is all going, and I don't speculate or theorise too much. Architects for Social Housing have some good Marxist analysis about this as being - essentially - the combined death and birth throes of two capitalist epochs. If data is the new raw material of capitalism, then vaccine passports and endless DNA from nasal swabs would fit fairly well. The timing - if 2007/8 is 1929 - fits reasonably well. What I feel relatively confident of, though, is that we'll need an enemy. I've wondered on this - identity politics and 'liberal' virtue signalling have (to me) fairly clearly served the purpose of divide-and-rule within the exploited classes. (To be clear: I strongly support racial, disability, gender, etc. equality, as well as speaking kindly to fellow humans; but I do not support how they have been politicised.) The Chinese or Russians
could be our more-than-rhetorical enemies, but the relationship with the former is so symbiotic, and potential war so destructive, that I have my doubts. (Although one could make the opposite case; but it seems like destruction has been achieved from within instead.) So the obvious thing to do is to create an anti-woke enemy within. And who better than the selfish, anti-science unvaccinated? Albeit there is the problem to be resolved that so many of them are just so damned... black (and Asian, here; the 'Indian' variant that was predominantly reported as hitting South Asian communities might help with that one), but scarcely an insurmountable one. I avoid the audio-visual elements of the media assiduously, but I did see a newspaper front page in the supermarket last month that did send an actual shiver down my spine:
*I haven't figured this out at all, so in case the image doesn't load, the headline is a Daily Mail one, saying: NOW VACCINE REFUSENIKS THREATEN FREEDOM, and the date is 18 May. The Mail has been a strange mix throughout all of this - the paper most willing to publish somewhat sceptical articles, but also sometimes its usual hateful self. Not sure exactly what's going on there.
Unusually for this type of speculative thinking, we're likely to get some information relatively soon with some kind of truth-value to it. In the first instance, we shall see who acts as a vector for the frustrations and anger of the population when 'freedom day' is cancelled ('postponed') - the government, or the unvaccinated. (Either way, of course, it will be internalised among many of the traumatised.)
