The Meaning of the Mask

 

Last fall, a virus that was common enough among Chinese bats managed in some way to jump to humans in Wuhan, the capital and largest city of the province of Hubei in China. The question of exactly how, whether it involved mad scientists working in a lab, a plot by the Communist dictatorship in Beijing, or merely the barbaric cultural practices of the notorious “wet markets”, became a topic of hot debate. The virus, which usually produces either no symptoms at all or a disease indistinguishable from the ordinary flu, can, like all other colds and flus, turn into a potentially fatal pneumonia under certain circumstances.  In this case, the pneumonia is the particularly nasty form known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, first identified almost twenty years ago. Those who are above retirement age and who have two or more other serious health conditions are, as with other colds and flus, the ones most at risk from this virus. By the end of January, the virus had spread beyond China, in this case definitely due to malfeasance on the part of the Chinese authorities who had sealed the inflected province off from the rest of their country while deliberately allowing international travel in and out of Hubei. In March, the hopelessly corrupt and Communist-dominated World Health Organization declared the spread of the virus to be a “pandemic”, a truism, since the word “pandemic” simply means that an infectious disease is being experienced around the globe, like every seasonal cold and flu. The mob, however, never noted for its ability to think clearly – or at all – influenced by the malice of the media, took the word to mean something along the lines of “the next Black Death” or “the super-flu from Stephen King’s The Stand” and dropped the dem from pandemic turning it into a panic. 

Governments around the world, seized on the opportunity to give dictatorial powers to their public health officials, who of all bureaucrats are the least worthy of enhanced powers of any sort since they are medical doctors, who have long had the reputation of having the highest percentage of tyrannical, full-of-themselves, jerks of any of the professions. Those public health officials, proceeded to live down to this highly negative assessment of their character, and imposed an experimental and thoroughly draconian new form of quarantine on most countries. Whereas traditional quarantines are imposed upon the symptomatic and those known to have been in contact with the symptomatic, for a set and limited time, this new quarantine was imposed upon everybody, healthy and sick alike, for an indefinite period of time. 

In imposing this new form of quarantine, the public health officials issued “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders, closed all public facilities, and shut down all businesses except those which sold groceries and medicine or were otherwise arbitrarily declared to be “essential” by these autocratic “experts.” These measures were generally called “lock-downs”, although many of us who had more sense than to be in favour of them referred to them as “house arrests”. Both terms evoke the image of a police state. They caused immeasurable damage – economic, psychological, spiritual, and, yes, physical, for the medical health profession used the pandemic as a pathetic excuse to fail in the treatment of non-COVID-related conditions – as many of us, right from the onset, could and did say would happen. 

After a couple of months of this nonsense, the public health tyrants began to slowly ease up on these restrictions. Businesses were allowed to re-open, provided they followed a long list of new regulations aimed at promoting “social distancing” within their buildings. The number of people allowed to gather for social functions was gradually increased. Restaurants were given permission to re-open their dining rooms at a reduced capacity.

In a famous scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the character of Johnny Fontane, widely believed to have been based on Frank Sinatra and portrayed in the movie by Al Martino, goes to his godfather – in this case, in the literal sense, as well as the more obvious one given the nature of the story – the title character of Don Vito Corleone, portrayed by Marlon Brando. The crooner whines and complains that the head of a motion picture studio won’t give him the film role he needs to salvage his career. Don Vito, after slapping him and telling him to act like a man, advises him to go home, eat and rest, and in a month he would have the role. When Fontane says that this is impossible because they start shooting in a week, Don Vito utters in response one of the most familiar lines in all of cinematic history “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” The audience had been tipped off in advance to the double meaning of this phrase when, only a short time prior to this, the Don’s youngest and favourite son, Michael, played by Al Pacino, had used it in explaining how his father conducted his business to his girlfriend Kay, played by Diane Keaton. Later in the film, it is made quite clear when the studio executive, after telling Don Vito’s consigliere Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall, that Johnny Fontane would never get that role, wakes up one morning to find the head of his very expensive race horse lying beside him. 

In the midst of the far-too-slow re-opening of our countries, those who took all of our rights and freedoms away from us back in March made us an “offer we can’t refuse”. We can have our lives back, they said, and everything else they took from us, we can see our friends and families again, we can have access to public facilities again, we can go to Church, the library, the movies, etc., and basically resume our normal lives, provided we wear a mask. 

It is truly appalling to see the extent to which the public have taken them up on this offer. I am not referring merely to the number of people who have started wearing masks, even out of doors, but to the enthusiasm with which they have embraced the making masks mandatory. It makes one wonder whether anyone reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four anymore. Those of you who have read that classic dystopian warning against totalitarianism will perhaps recognize the part of the novel to which I am alluding. In Orwell’s novel, the totalitarian state in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, lives, is entitled Oceania, a vast super-state and one of three between whom the world is divided, an allusion on Orwell’s part to James Burnham’s theory that the world was headed towards a geopolitical realignment around three regional loci of power. The extent to which the state of Oceania, represented by the figure of Big Brother, controls the thinking of its citizens is illustrated by the fact that at any given time, Oceania is allied with one of the other two super-states, Eurasia and Eastasia, and at war with the other. When the identity of the ally and the enemy switches, the Ministry rewrites history, and the controlled populace accept against the evidence of their own memories that “we were always at war with Eastasia.” The relationship between the totalitarian regimes of Orwell’s own day, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, which went from being enemies to being allies to being enemies again all within a short space of years, was, of course, the inspiration for this. 

Interestingly, a similar sort of mind-control in which someone is made to affirm contradictory propositions can be found in William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew, where it was put to comic rather than political effect. In that comedy, the Paduan nobleman Baptista Minola has vowed that he will not allow his younger, more pleasant, daughter Bianca to marry, until her older sister Katherina does. This is not an easy hurdle to overcome because Katherina, the shrew of the play’s title, has driven away all prospective suitors with her acerbic tongue. Hortensio, however, one of Bianca’s suitors although not the one that ends up with her, talks Petruchio, who is looking to marry a rich wife and live off of her fortune, to court Katherina. Petruchio is successful both in his courtship and subsequently in his efforts to tame his sharp-tongued bride. At the beginning of the fifth scene of Act IV, Petruchio and Katherina are travelling to her father’s house, and Petruchio comments about how bright the moon is shining. While Katherina initially points out that it is the sun, Petruchio insists that it is the moon, and that he won’t go any further with her unless she agrees. She declares “Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,/and be it moon, or sun, or what you please:/An if you please to call it a rush-candle,/Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.” “I say it is the moon” he replies, to which she says “I know it is the moon” only to hear “Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun”, to which she says:

Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun: 

But sun it is not, when you say it is not; 

And the moon changes even as your mind. 

What you will have it named, even that it is; 

And so it shall be so for Katharina. 

The mask-wearing populace of today resembles both the citizens of Oceania and Katharina in their willingness to accept the necessity of masks today, even though it is coming from the same experts and authorities who told us not to wear masks back in February, March and April. 

This is not a matter about which the body of knowledge could have grown sufficiently within a short period of months to justify a complete turn-around on evidentiary grounds. This particular virus may be new to humans, but the effects of masks on the transmission of viruses has been studied for years. Either the experts were lying to us then or they are lying to us now. Either way, it completely undermines any notion that they deserve to be trusted with the sort of absolute control over our lives that they have exercised since March. 

As far as the efficacy of masks as preventatives of viral transmission goes in itself, the data largely confirms what common sense tells us. There are masks designed to prevent viral transmission and there are masks which are not. The latter, which are the kind that are being made mandatory almost everywhere, are ineffective at preventing the spread of viruses. If air can get through the mask, a virus can. Since the corollary of this is that an effective anti-viral mask will prevent airflow, such masks are not safe to be worn by anybody long term – unless, of course, we are talking about some kind of Darth Vader type apparatus that provides you with a non-external source of oxygen, which obviously we are not. Non-anti-viral masks are effective at preventing the spread of larger particles, which may contain viruses and transmit them through other-than-airborne means and this is what most of the memes and videos and articles in support of masks concentrate on, but the slight benefit in slowing transmission gained in this way, hardly constitutes grounds for justifying forcing everybody, including the asymptomatic, to wear these things. 

The efficacy of masks is not really the issue, however. If it were, and masks were incontrovertibly effective, what we would be hearing is advice to consider wearing one if we are experiencing either a) anxiety about contracting the virus or b) symptoms. This is not what we are hearing. The argument we are hearing from the pro-maskers is that although the masks probably won’t keep you from getting the virus they may prevent you from spreading it so they provide a protection against the virus but only if everybody wears them. This, however, is an argument that is clearly not derived from fact and logic, but crafted to support its end, which is the shoving of masks down everybody’s throat. 

The real issue, therefore, is what the masks represent. Earlier this year, the public health officials, and the politicians who gave them their power and seat and great authority, took away from us our lives and livelihoods, our friends and families, our basic rights and freedoms, showing thereby that in their opinion these were not ours but theirs to give and take away from us as they so choose. Now they are offering all that they took away from us back on the condition that we wear the very masks they told us not to wear half a year ago. We are threatened, if we do not comply, to have everything that had been left to us at the beginning of the lockdown – such as being able to buy or sell groceries - taken away from us. The masks are not, therefore, tickets out of the oppression of the lockdown. They are symbols of the very tyranny and totalitarianism behind the lockdown. The insistence that we wear them is a demand that we acknowledge the claims of that tyranny and totalitarianism and wear a sign of our submission and obedience on our faces. 

In the masks, therefore, the oppression of the lockdown, has been taken to a whole new level. It has increased rather than decreased, grown greater rather than less.   The masks are not there to give us our lives back, as some internet propaganda would suggest, but to force us to grant our approval to their having been taken from us int he first place.