1918 Photo
THESE DAMN MASKS
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
17 November 2020
Horton Foote's 1918 , a 1985 movie based on Foote's stage play set in a small Texas town towards the end of the Great War, included the heart-wrenching sound of mothers bawling and cursing god at the deaths of their loved ones killed by the 1918 Influenza.
Everyone in this Foote's fictional Texas town knew a neighbor or relatives who had succumbed to the 1918 Influenza. And now, in El Paso, Texas, we learn from BBC's 17 November 2020 article entitled, 'Coronavirus: Five signs that show how bad El Paso's outbreak is', that, "In the last six months, one El Paso woman has lost six of her family members to the virus as the outbreak worsens. Bonnie Soria Najera told Good Morning America that her uncle was the last to pass away on Sunday. She has also had to bury her parents, two aunts and a cousin. 'They were all being very careful,' she said. 'They did things that they had to do: grocery stores, went to doctor's appointments.'"
The disease was dubbed the Spanish Influenza because Spain reported it while the Allies kept it quiet so that enlistment would not be discouraged. The source was traced to recruits arriving at Army training camps in Kansas. The disease would take more lives than the war itself as it was spread by troops. It was as if the world was at end despite government interventions mandating masking and lessen crowding, and then it was said to have “just disappeared,” most likely due to herd immunity and mutation of the virus, which was invisible to the microscopes of the day although bacteria of the secondary infections killing many of the victims was apparent. And then the Roaring Twenties.
Blaming god for the death of one's innocent child asserts the existence of a cruel god notwithstanding his fatherly kindness from time to time, reminds us of the ambivalent nature of man, and gives us reason to suspect that god was created by man rather than the reverse. Surely it would be seemingly absurd for a supreme being to create human beings in his own image to love yet destroy them unless he were a malignant narcissist who loved himself so much that he could not commit suicide; his word or creation would then be utter hypocrisy, and Logos would be a synonym for Absurd. Perhaps he created mankind defective to fear hence worship him, that is to “love” him regardless of what he does or else be punished here and hereafter by eternal damnation.
Having only one or a family of gods over which one is supreme is accepted by worshipers as within their normal experience at home no matter how absurd, yet there are always “evil” persons given to asking embarrassing questions of the divinely sanctioned authorities. Theodicy does its best to rationalize the absurdity although simply writing it off as god's mystery suffices for his fools. It is little wonder that, for the sake of argument, some clever ancients accounted for good and evil with two gods, one good and one evil, the latter to be finally overcome by the former in a certain number of eons, and then the cosmic conflict would begin again. The order may be reverse, and this age may be the degenerate age to be followed by another generation led from chaos by a man on a white horse.
Atheists might break down and pray when their life is at stake, but they would not otherwise waste breath on unseen deities and symbolic salvations, motivated as they are by the will to live forever despite the hellishness of existence suffered, for instance, in world wars and natural disasters. They even laugh at the ultimate absurdity, the awful truth that life is a death sentence. Desire for it in the form of things just makes one miserable, a positive attitude masks the misery, and some relief may be found before death in virtual death. Existentialists might “just exist” with pleasure, ideally over a glass.
It is also quite natural for humans to look for a cause of terrible events so they can rid themselves of it. It is blasphemy, however, to curse the First Cause aka god when none other can be found. In the event of a natural disaster such as the current coronavirus pandemic, the atheist would naturally look for a material cause, some natural evil. Today we suffer the spread of a lethal virus among the populations that has taken 250,000 lives already. If it spreads this winter like the1918 virus without a vaccine, given the current mortality rate in our large population, it would take 1,200,000 lives, as many lives as lost to heart disease and cancer in one year, overwhelming the healthcare system. That would overburden our health care system for sure, so instead of building out the healthcare system to confront the disease, care must be rationed as it was in 1918 when toe tags were immediately put on arriving patients and only those with the best chance of surviving were attended to.
Cancer and heart disease with over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. each naturally get lots of attention, yet the media does not present us with daily death tolls and graphic images of actually suffering and dying victims of those diseases. We are told bad habits are the major cause of those diseases, so we hope good habits and medicine will virtually eliminate them. We know how they cause death, but we do not know WHY every being ends in nothing including our own. Not that we abhor the means to the end providing that we are the means. We are cheered as we march off to war. We are saluted and kept immortal as memories if we die doing our duty. Moreover, violence, even gratuitous violence, sells especially well if the audience believes it is not at immediate risk. It is as if we are gods, but for an almighty god to kill himself would be absurd.
Let philosophers waste time reasoning why we all must die as wealthy people have their bodies frozen with hope of revival some day. The horror that we might die of a major disease this year or the next is mitigated and mediated by dramatic films and television novellas celebrating the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses who usually save their patients. But this coronavirus is “novel,” and that is news, the details of which must be spilled endlessly from the major media sewers notwithstanding the warning from experts that the river of bad news will sicken people and they will stop watching it along with the advertisements funding it, just as hundreds of thousands of people have already done.
Be that as it may, we do not hear of anyone cursing god for the Covid-19 death tallies, and very few preachers dare to say sick people are being punished by god for their evil deeds. Nor is the virus itself cursed. Salvation is forthcoming in the form of a vaccine. In the meantime, avoid people if you are afraid, and if you want to curse someone, curse people who do not wear masks or, to be nice, just blame the fatalities on the failure to wear masks, making the victims complicit in their own deaths while mourning them, in order to assure oneself that something can surely be done to avoid contracting the disease.
“Wear a damn mask!” screamed a woman whose friend she said had died of Covid. We feel for her and offer our condolences. We refrain from burdening her with questions a detective in a homicide case might ask. Was the deceased subject to underlying conditions? When and where did the transmission take place? Was her friend wearing a mask or not when he contracted the disease? Was the person who transmitted the disease to him wearing a mask at that time? How far apart were they? What sort of masks were worn if any? How were they worn if worn?
We leave these questions and others unasked for obvious reason. The poor woman is hurting and grasping for the cause of her friend's death, and she has listened to Joe Biden time and again telling people they should wear masks and if he is elected there will be a nationwide mandate. Why, president Trump is obviously responsible for slacking because his people run around maskless. He dared to wonder why Joe Biden wore a mask outside when no people were near to him.
Does not Joe Biden never fail to wear a mask or dangle one on camera and tell people masks are not political statements but wearing them will bring people together under him as everybody's president? This is a not a partisan issue, he says, meaning his party should have no opposition. This is an apolitical national issue, putting America first, which is what he accused the President of politically doing. Does not everyone know that Joe Biden is inclusive and President Trump is divisive, a liar and malignant narcissist who cares for no one but himself? Everyone should know from Joe Biden that the president's handling of the pandemic is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, that his current delay of a transition to Joe Biden will cause many more to die, so he is impliedly not only a murderer but a homicidal maniac. Joe Biden said he would lock down the country if he had to because his favorite scientists recommend it. Shutting down businesses is not anti-business because it is good for the economy, he likes to say. He shall find other companies if some companies do not cooperate with him. The bottom line: Do what you're told! Be patriotic and wear a damn mask!
Of course the President-elect has good intentions, but good intentions are not good enough despite what Kant says.
Religion worships power and politics distributes it. Politicians are necessarily divisive; the wheel would not roll without resistance. No less than Carl Schmitt, the great advisor to the National Socialist German Workers' Party, said that human interests are so diverse that you have to lie to get a majority. Pick an enemy and fight to the death, just as advised by the Bhagavad Gita. General Paul Ludwig Hans Anton Von Beneckendorff und von Hindenberg, who as president of the Weimar Republic took the advice of his advisers and appointed Adolf Hitler its Chancellor, said that the electorate should get out of the way after the election. Hitler's lieutenants chuckled in the wings as Hitler promised something for everyone as long as he was in power.
Fortunately, in light of the gullibility of people who hypothetically deserve the leaders they elect, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden are little Hitlers. Yet their rhetoric is rife with ambiguities and absurdities. It's just that President Trump is politically inexperienced and his contradictions of his own self and facts are all too obvious. Joe Biden is hacked out of political granite and is well smoothed by professional divisiveness. He seems to be a nice guy, really, but that does not mean power will not corrupt him absolutely. He may become yet another scoundrel taking refuge behind the mask of patriotism. He is already getting resistance from his own advisory group and party. Welfare capitalists, meaning capitalists who believe treating labor well will make everyone richer, are pushing back, and that is a good sign if not masking a fraud on workers.
Thus has the politicized mask become a symbol of the Absurd, rendering the outlaw robbing people of their civil rights a benevolent member of the Antisocial Socialist Party. Yes, indeed, please do wear a mask when it is reasonable to do so, but do not have faith in it or try to shove it into other people's faces with national mandates. We mourn the deaths of relatives and friends and people generally, but that is insufficient reason to lock people up in their apartments against their will, risk the lives of so-called essential workers, and destroy the free lifestyle of the nation so many people died for. Pray that it will not be long before we stomp on these damn masks and proceed to the Roaring Twenties.
xYx
and runs rampant wildly, needing to be held back: your image of the Rider on the White Horse !
You are far too intelligent and wise for our small world here. To avoid being absurd, I'd say perhaps abandoning Reason for good might be a solution in the long run. Who cares anyway what happens after we're gone? Let some one else bear the brunt. Is that why the Bhagavad Gita you pinpoint may also have wished for the safety of "detachment" in whatever we do, be it in the act of destruction or joy: "In heat or in cold..." Thanks very much for a well-balanced essay.
It is a wonder that life is progressing as well as it is with the ignorance of the electorate. Some so vehemently believing that their candidate is some kind Savior of everything. We do have a slow-moving government. A blessing when we have such dissension as we've had with a totally inexperienced failed businessman trying to run things for the people by making deals for himself.
On the other hand, no one wants our government start giving out freebies to losers and slackers as though they deserved something for nothing. To my mind, everyone would benefit from a shot of intelligence: an inoculation against idiocy. And I would add that an inoculation toward violence as a way of solving problems.
Masks work when it comes to limiting the spread of airborne viruses. Like you have said in your article, it's up to everyone of us decide how we are going to use that information and not fly off the handle every time we are questioned why we do what we do.
Ron