Vaccination Passports? (do Private Lives Matter?)

 If it's vaccine certification today, what kind will be demanded tomorrow? Will the government demand an Alcohol-Free Passport, an I-Don't-Smoke passport, an I-Don't-Eat-Meat (or I-Do-Eat-Meat) passport? 

Will we have to show "Proof of Correct Thought" certification? An "I-Read-Only-Ideologically-Correct-Books" license? 

And how many other health tests and disease inoculations will we have to prove we've had, once we've got accustomed to the COVID one? Maybe the ordinary 'flu shot will be mandatory; maybe a proof of colonoscopy, or of a prostate exam. 

Will nothing be too private, too intimate, not to be a matter of official surveillance and public declaration? And what about a Race Declaration? An "I Am a Racialized Person" certificate so as to get access to extra benefits? 

"We have a right to know whether we're sitting next to an un-vaccinated person," said a person calling in to a radio show. Maybe the solution would be a badge people could wear on their lapel -- like the pink ribbon and white ribbon -- to indicate their vaccine status to strangers. GREEN would mean vaccinated, RED not vaccinated, and YELLOW means "I'm not saying".

That way people could know whether to sit next to you on a bus -- or they could move.

Fake News and Genuine Satire

 

Donald Trump (and his opponents) may have invented and popularized the term “fake news”, but they didn't invent fakery itself. Rather, the Romans started it all when Latin invented the verb “facere” -- to do or make -- from which we get “manufactured”, “made”, and things-made-up (fakes). We got fake news, then, from a venerable source: classical forebears. It used to be called propaganda.

Properly speaking, propaganda propagates a doctrine by a committee (originally, of Church cardinals).

“Satire” means medley (“sature” -- Latin again), and as a literary form it mixes fact and folly for the exposure of the latter, usually with humour. I'm not telling satirists anything they don't already know here; I'm celebrating a literary form and testifying for the Defence in the ongoing worldwide trial of satirists who seize their right to free speech.

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English points out that satire is most popular in eras that like thought control – meaning eras which employ language police to enforce ideological correctness expressed in popular semi-literate political slogans. That sounds a lot like our times, and for that reason I call ours the “Satirocene Era”, when satire is a dominant literary species. It has to be, for it lets us demonstrate resistance to the thought police by tossing as many individualistic incendiary ideas into the mix as we can – ensuring that nobody gets burnt, of course (although if their bluster gets heated that can be entertaining). 

Satire is not fake-news; it's anti-fake news. It's ironic, not literal. Serious world-saving thought-controllers of course hate irony, recognizing it “correctly”, as their enemy.

FJ

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The Face of Pandemic

What's behind the face of the pandemic? What's going on behind all those masks? Our face masks prevent an infection of too much meaning, they keep things decently hidden, things like frank facial expression.

What do all those mouths get up to, behind their curtain of privacy? We're told that some couples have only just discovered the intimate uses of masks, now that they have so many lying around the house ... but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the delicious public freedom of keeping your face half-hidden behind a strip of cloth, and the exhilaration of knowing when you're secretly mouthing f-- you to your boss, landlord, hostile neighbour, tight-lipped criticizing parent ... or whoever else is harassing you.

Oh, the freedom of it. What will we do without masks if the pandemic ever ends? We think we hate them, but when we take them off we'll miss them. The mask has become an old friend, a familiar, rather like an old cardigan you grab on the way out in case it's chilly outside. Why have people always relished the masked ball? The theatre of masque? Because masks symbolize this and disguise that at the same time, provocatively. ("Pro-vocative": "before speaking").

Will we celebrate the end of the masked ball by making a huge ball of shared masks, and burning them on a bonfire? Some people won't, they'll store them away in drawers as keep-sakes from this era. They'll pass them on to grandchildren. Museums will collect them for future exhibits, galleries present Mask Art, publishers produce Mask Lit -- a new genre.

Masks have been around since the days of ancient drama and religious procession, and won't be going away now. Many people won't give them up just because the pandemic's over. Give up the delicious ambiguity of what goes on behind them? No way. Some will decide the pandemic's not that much over. 

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The On-again Off-again Virus Seasons a Challenge for Introverts

You mean I have to take my mask OFF? So ask many folks when the COVID pandemic lets up in 2022. Mass vaccination and lowering infection rates meant losing a lot that we'd come to enjoy, such as privacy and peace and quiet.. Now, hugging would come back. Bad news for introverts. The infections-down bit is great, but the Return Of The Hug … not. 

COVID gave us a blessed escape from near-strangers flinging their arms around us. Then, back to normality, we no longer got to stay far from the madding crowd. It surges up to our doorsteps. And we lose those snaky well-spaced line-ups at stores. Once again people push up behind you and breathe down your neck. Even if it has no COVID germs -- I don't want their breath.

"We want to get back to normal", say extroverts, and people in the media. Oh no we don't, says the introvert. Lockdown meant privacy, working from home, sitting quietly with a good book, escaping the misery of public transport. Freedom.

Remember before COVID when self-appointed media therapist-advisers told us how to "survive the stress" of Christmas, Halloween, Mother's Day, back-to-school and every other normal event in the calendar? These things were treated like major threats to mental health. Then came the Pandemic, and the experts told us how to "survive the stress" of losing all the days we had previously been told were driving us insane. Now we had isolation, mask-wearing, social distancing, peace, quiet, privacy … Oh, wait: to some those are the cure, not the disorder.

In the peace of isolation and privacy we lost resilience to noise, full parking lots, packed shopping malls ... but that's what we got pitched back into when things got 'back to normal'. We no longer have an excuse to avoid things we don't want to do. How many crack under the strain? We've become agoraphobes -- soft, meditative and less combative -- and a new Social Problem looms: People Experiencing Pandemic-Loss. 

A new syndrome the mental health media pundits can tell us how to survive: Post Pandemic-Loss Disorder. 

But wait, introverts, there's a remedy: if you get vaccinated, just say you didn't. Then people will give you a blessedly wide berth. (You'll be not only dangerous but a criminal -- doubly insulated!) It will be almost like old pandemic times.

So that's a way out after all -- hug the plan to yourself.

A mask story:  “Masquerade”, The Writers and Readers Magazine, March-April 2021, p. 114. https://thewritersandreadersmagazine.com/

Media Obsession With Mental Illness is Driving Us Insane

Public health, university and non-profit "experts" continually tell us how depressed we are -- which makes us depressed. The possibility of suicide is waiting around every corner, they imply. After hearing constantly repeated media warnings about an imminent worldwide nervous break-down, no one wants to be left out. An induced demand for inclusion is created -- and demand for more government services. 

For media outlets, mass anxiety captures followers. It gives the depression industry something to be interviewed on talk shows about. If you're not depressed, the talkers imply, it's because you're suffering delusions of mental wellness. Everyone needs therapy, government-financed.

Actually, you can be sad and well. Sensible reasons for depression do exist. Acknowledging them is not "illness", it's realism. There are real disasters (just google "Afghanistan", "Ukraine", "Myanmar", "Brazilian rainforest" … and that's only this week's horrors). Acknowledging them is not a sign of illness, it's a sign of being awake. 

Mental health means building mental hardiness -- the emotional maturity to deal with bad realities. Mental health advocates who chip away at resilience by telling everyone they are traumatized, dependent and unable to cope, are not helping. In British Columbia these advocates demand free mental health services in a province that doesn't even have free dental care or free birth control. Researchers and practitioners don't even agree on what the definition of "mental health" would be, but we know what healthy teeth are. We know whether we're in the midst of an unwanted pregnancy or not.

Rotting teeth and unwanted pregnancy themselves cause depression for any normal person. Let's put the health care dollar into things we can fix, before we get hypnotized by that favourite media question, "how do you cope with stress?" Having publicly-funded dentistry and contraception when your own income is too low to afford those things would be one way to cope. Who wouldn't be depressed, with abscessed teeth? Only a mad person.

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People-not-experiencing-adulthood: 'Failure to Strive'

Once, "they came, they strove, they conquered" was an attitude toward growing up, but no more. That old elitist-sounding Shakespearian-Roman literary stuff is totally out of date -- especially in schools. 

Among secondary school students a large proportion (compared to earlier generations) self-identify as disabled. They call themselves stressed, traumatized by life, neuro-variant, or "marginalized" and "challenged" by substance use. (Since schools have been medicating students for behaviour problems for years, it's no surprise if drug-taking comes naturally to them in adulthood.)

Do these students, falling back on the picturesque rainbow of disablement in all its shapes and forms, experience what we might call "failure to strive", a condition analogous to infants' "failure to thrive"? As they approach adulthood do some remain infantile? We're told there's an epidemic of drug use among them. This used to be called "substance abuse" but is now called "people experiencing addiction", as if the experience just happened by itself, like the weather.

Striving used to be considered a requisite for success. Now, in schools it is considered elitist, maybe even colonialist, and has been replaced by counselling, alternative medication, and lowering of academic standards so that no one fails. Striving is demanding. Contemporary education often is not. 

The latest demand of teens approaching graduation, or those "aging out of care", is for a universal minimum income. No striving needed for that. Is the problem not true disablement, but that we are producing a generation of people-not-experiencing-adulthood?

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