Proxy (Culture)Wars

No.73: September 10, 2021

Dear Friends,

It seems impossible to believe that it was twenty years ago.

I can’t see a picture of the events of 9/11 without instant “muscle” memory. The shock, horror, grief, and anger of that day has left what I can only describe as an imprint in my soul. They lack the full intensity of the actual day, but the feelings are there and they are familiar and they are ready to be called back into existence at a moment’s notice.

Twenty years.

My kids don’t know those feelings. I have difficulty comprehending anyone who has never known the divide of “pre” and “post” 9/11. The world changed, and yet after twenty years we have learned the hard lesson that the world really hasn’t changed.

When tomorrow dawns, the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Afghanistan will awake to totalitarian rule by the Taliban. Al-Qaeda affiliates hold high positions in their government. In other words, the date tomorrow morning will be September 10th, 2001. It’s not a comforting thought, but we might as well face it.

A couple of weeks ago, referring to our twenty-year conflict in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden said that our children “have never known peace.”

Representative—and veteran Navy SEAL—Dan Crenshaw thought that was exactly backward: all they’ve known is peace. And that is because of the courage and bravery and skill of rough men willing to go to rough places to keep the darkness where it belongs: in Afghan caves. And now that we’ve let the darkness loose to swallow up the entire country, our children will now likely not know peace. We have emboldened our enemies like never before. No amount of linguistic myth-making will turn them into our “allies,” or “friends,” or “partners in the international community.” Those are lies. Deadly lies.

One of the things that has most surprised me in the two decades after 9/11 was the relative lack of ongoing terrorism on our shores. Yes, there have been a few notable exceptions, but I thought early on that our lives were now going to have to adjust to regular car bombs and suicide vests and mass casualty events. I was very wrong. The projected power of U.S. military might and intelligence expertise really did scatter international terrorist networks. It really did “keep them on the run,” as George W. Bush put it. It really did buy our children two decades of peace.

I believe we will rue the day we squandered that advantage.

Proxy (Culture)Wars

A confession: sometimes I feel as though everybody has lost their minds. I know, I know. That’s an indication I need to get off of Twitter. But seriously, sometimes it is hard for me to know what to write because I feel as though I cannot relate to the white-hot passions people have about various things. The thought occurs to me that I am probably not alone. Maybe some of you, dear readers, also feel at a loss for words at our country’s descent into tribal madness. So allow me to just write what I think, at the risk of alienating half of you (that’s an easy metric in our divided society).

If I squint and tilt my head a little, I can see and understand why somebody might be against taking one of the COVID vaccines. If you’ve already had the virus and recovered, sure. You’ve got some natural immunity. But aside from that explanation, I cannot even begin to fathom the antipathy and rage certain people feel about it. That anger seems a symptom of another pathology.

If you’re addicted to partisan politics, literally everything can be coopted toward one more opportunity to draw a line and distinguish between “us” and “them,” the “good guys” and “bad guys.” And the dividing line can be completely arbitrary, because the actual issue is irrelevant. I believe with every ounce of conviction in my soul that if Donald Trump had actually won reelection in 2020, Hannity and Tucker and the rest of the right-wing media circus would be 24/7 cheerleaders for taking the vaccine. It would have been hailed as the Dear Leader’s unique genius. The sheer greatness of the Man in Full brought us Operation Warp Speed and the cure for the pandemic! Rejoice, all you peoples, and bow before the majesty!

You know that I am speaking the truth.

And you also know that in that scenario all of the anti-vaxx sentiment would be on the Left. It would be the Behars and Maddows shoveling out skepticism by the truckload. You know, deep down, this is true.

The vaccine wars are just a proxy for our underlying political and social hatreds.

Let me put it to you another way. You probably know someone whose Facebook page is filled with memes and posts ridiculing the vaccines. They’re “untested,” “rushed,” “dangerous experimental gene therapy,” and so forth. This person wants you to believe that they oppose the vaccines because they are “untested,” “rushed,” and “dangerous experimental gene therapy.” It is precisely the opposite. They have convinced themselves that the vaccines are “untested,” “rushed,” and “dangerous experimental gene therapy” because they oppose the vaccines. The politics of the moment demand this, you see. This is how conspiracy-theories always work. No one believes that 9/11 was an “inside job” because of all the cobbled-together “evidence” they found at InfoWars. They cobble together the evidence because they already believe 9/11 was an “inside job.” The premise is an article of faith; everything else is an after-the-fact rationalization.

That’s pretty much what I think about most anti-vaxxers—the most vocal ones, anyway. I say “most” because some people are legitimately worried for various reasons. I happen to think those worries are wildly unfounded, but I can understand being concerned about putting something mysterious in your body. I can also understand people with the moral concerns about vaccines; namely, that often vaccines use stem cell lines derived from aborted fetuses. That’s a legitimate ethical question, but entirely inapplicable here. mRNA vaccines don’t use fetal tissue.

The vaccines work. I will not Google and paste a bunch of charts for you here. It is a simple verifiable fact—really, call down to your local hospital and ask—that approximately 95% of people in the hospital for COVID are unvaccinated. The overwhelming number of occupied ICU beds are not taken up by vaccinated people. A friend of mine, a pharmacist at the hospital, confided in me: “Don’t have a stroke anytime soon.” You know why he said that? Because there are no ICU beds in his hospital for stroke victims. They are all occupied by unvaccinated COVID patients, and he indicated that there is a considerable amount of seething resentment among the hospital staff about that fact.

I think you should get vaccinated. There. That’s my “controversial” opinion. If you can save a bed for a stroke or heart attack victim by simply getting a shot, you should do it. You have had, I’ll wager, a great many vaccinations in your life. MMR, Polio, Yellow Fever (if you’ve been to Africa as I have, and holy cow that one was awful), heck, even a flu shot. You probably thought nothing of it. And your body thought nothing of it. A little discomfort in your arm for a few days. I think you may be wildly overthinking this, and you may be overthinking this because this has become a proxy for other political and cultural battles. Distinguish. Separate. Think. Consider. And go get the shot. It’s okay to make whatever President Biden thinks or says irrelevant to the question.

You know who else I cannot understand? Pro-vaxxers. Why in the world are they so terrified of unvaccinated people? I mean, for heaven’s sake, you’re vaccinated. Nothing harms the effort to get people vaccinated like vaccinated people acting like the vaccine doesn’t do anything! It really is insane. Here’s what I recommend: get vaccinated and get on with your life. Stop with the hysterical fear-mongering. Encourage people to get vaccinated, but stop treating it like some kind of religion. In some quarters, it is a cult. Fully vaxxed people literally walk around outside in the fresh air and sunshine wearing masks, shrinking and cowering from the unmasked lepers around them. It is just such a sad and pathetic thing.

And then there is the ridiculous obsession among pro-vaxxers with “case counts.” Oh, no! Cases are rising again! Let me let you in on a little secret: Do you know who is going to get COVID?

Everybody.

Yes, everybody. 100% of people are eventually going to get COVID. That’s what viruses do. Have you ever had a cold? Have you ever had the flu? Guess what? You’re going to get COVID. And that means that the number of cases, it seems to me, is absolutely irrelevant. The only relevant consideration is hospitalizations and death. This is a very, very helpful thing to keep in mind. It is safe to ignore all fear-mongering about “cases rising.” Duh. Cases are going to roller coaster for the rest of our lives. The only thing we need to care about is whether our hospitals can handle the case load. And there is a sure-fire way of making that happen. It’s called a vaccine. Which will, with very few exceptions, keep you out of the hospital, ICU beds free and clear for stroke victims, and doctors and nurses not mad at you. The only thing you’ll suffer is the loss of your performance art of “sticking it to the man.” You’ll live. And there are a million other ways to stick it to the man, trust me. This does not seem like a wise hill to die on—and, yes, that could be non-metaphorical.

Get the shot and get on with your life. Stop living in fear in either direction. Because this is exhausting, isn’t it? Oh, and by the way, little-known fact: did you know that you can get the vaccine and still hate Democrats and vote Republican and resist mask mandates and vaccine passports and government overreach? Weird, huh?

I’ve ranted long enough, so I won’t say too much about that last subject, the new front opening up in the vaccination wars: government mandates. In sum: horrible (and probably unconstitutional) idea that will generate precisely the opposite result intended. What we need is an effort to disentangle the COVID question from the partisan passions on both sides. But, alas, who has the credibility to do that? Who has the trust of a wide enough swath of society to actually persuade the skeptics? I don’t think that person or institution exists.

But I just did my best. And I hope some of you are persuaded.

Miscellany

• Every year I read former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s Tweet thread recounting the day of September 11, 2001. It’s a gripping account of the entire day. It begins with this Tweet. Click the link to read through the whole thing.

  Ari Fleischer @AriFleischer

  7:59am September 11, 2001 American Airlines Flight 11 with 92 people on board takes off from Boston to Los Angeles.

• Remember Afghanistan.

• Spare a thought and a prayer for our nation tomorrow. And be grateful for the many who sacrificed their limbs and lives so that we could have our twenty years of peace.

• Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Grand Central Station” is one of my favorite 9/11 songs, so I’ll let her take us out: