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.

No Need to Apologize, Gary, You Got it Right the First Time!

At one time you would occasionally see a man wearing a T-shirt with the phrase “I read it for the articles”. The “it”, in question was Hugh Hefner’s men’s magazine, Playboy. The statement was a joke, intended to provoke, whether spoken or not, the response of “yeah, right you do”. For the first thing that comes to mind when one hears the name of that magazine, or sees its familiar rabbit’s head logo, is the photographs of nude models and celebrity actresses that have been its selling point since Marilyn Monroe’s appeared in their premier issue just under sixty years ago.

It was an amusing joke but I found it funny for entirely different reasons than the ones intended by those telling the joke. The only reason anybody would feel compelled to offer such a lame excuse for buying a girlie mag is societal and cultural disapproval of such erotica, which disapproval more or less vanished within the same decade the magazine was launched. What I find downright hilarious about it all is that it was the articles all along which were the most disgusting and evil thing about the magazine. It was in the articles that Hef’s morally corrosive message of sheer, self-serving, pleasure-seeking hedonism, i.e., “The Playboy philosophy” was preached, poisoning the souls and minds of those who read it. By comparison, the pictures were considerably more wholesome. “I only look at the pictures” should have been the more respectable thing to say.

I mention all of this because a recent Playboy interview has made the news and, judging from the content of the interview, the angry response it has received and from whom, this would appear to be the first article they have ran that was actually worth reading since their interview with William F. Buckley Jr.

The interviewee was British actor Gary Oldman. He is a well-known actor with whom it is probably safe to say most people are familiar. He first became famous with his portrayal of Sid Vicious, the bass guitarist of the Sex Pistols in a 1986 biographical film. At one time he was best known for playing bad guys, like Count Dracula in the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version of the story or the madman in Hannibal (2001) who made Dr. Lecter look sane and sympathetic by comparison. More recently he played Commissioner Gordon in the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films, took on a more Sirius role in the film versions of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and put on a Smiley face to star in the film version of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He will next appear in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, scheduled to be released next month.

So what did Oldman say in this interview with Playboy's Contributing Editor David Hochman to twist so many people’s knickers up into knots and over which he has taken on the new, humiliating role, of self-debasing perpetual apologiser?

Towards the end of the interview, Oldman makes a remark about how he can understand why Mel Gibson would want to finance his own movies, leading the interviewer to prompt him further about this, at which point he goes off on a rant about political correctness, about how it is crap, and how people can’t take a joke anymore. Going back to Mel Gibson he says “I don’t know about Mel. He got drunk and said a few things, but we’ve all said those things.” Expanding upon that last remark, he questions whether the policeman who arrested Gibson has never used racial epithets, and says “It’s the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy.” He then defends Alec Baldwin over the incident where he called someone who was harassing him a “fag” before again returning to Mel Gibson and saying:

Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him—and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, “That fucking kraut” or “Fuck those Germans,” whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going, “Isn’t that shocking?”

Shortly after this he tells Playboy that the interview has gone badly and that “You have to edit and cut half of what I’ve said, because it’s going to make me sound like a bigot” which, of course, they did not do.

Well, there you have it. The Anti-Defamation League immediately denounced Oldman’s remarks as “anti-Semitic.” It’s notorious director Abraham H. Foxman said “it is disturbing that Mr. Oldman appears to have bought into Mr. Gibson's warped and prejudiced world view” and Oldman wrote a grovelling open letter of apology to the ADL. Foxman’s response, predictably, was to say that it was not good enough. “At this point, we are not satisfied with what we received. His apology is insufficient and not satisfactory.” On Wednesday, Oldman appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live to apologize yet again.

Well, listen up Abe Foxman and you listen up good. You did not deserve a single word of apology from Mr. Oldman because he had every right to say what he said, and moreover he was right in saying it. We all remember the incident in which Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving and went into an anti-Semitic tirade. Some of us, remember what preceded that incident. Gibson’s arrest was in July of 2006. Two years previously he had released the movie The Passion of the Christ, a film that you, Foxman, had complained might spark “anti-Semitism” because its portrayal of events of Christ’s trial and crucifixion was true to the New Testament. Some of us also remember, Foxman, that your pogrom against Gibson began before you had ever seen the movie. The year before the film came out you went to Gibson expressing “concern” that the film might be anti-Semitic and then acted shocked when he turned down your request for an advanced viewing of the film. Oh, I am sure you were very polite and civil in your request. I’ve read your ex-post facto self-justifying account of how you “reached out” to Gibson. Look up the expression “concern troll” to see why I am not impressed. I also remember that at this same time Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, an ultra-traditionalist Catholic was being dragged through the mud in the press over his unconventional views of the Holocaust. Perhaps you expect us to believe you had nothing to do with that? Well I’m not about to buy your ocean front property in the middle of the desert either. Gibson, from his remarks to the press at the time, was clearly under the impression that somebody was putting pressure on him to denounce his father. It is not that difficult to put two and two together and come up with a pretty good idea as to who that might have been. To expect a man to turn on his own father to appease your wrath is the kind of arrogance for which I find the Greek word hubris to be insufficient. Lets call it chutzpah shall we?

When someone is put through all that nonsense it should not shock or surprise us if negative feelings towards the Jews start coming out when he gets drunk. Frankly, it would be more surprising if they didn’t. Oldman was absolutely right to come to Gibson’s defense and, rather than apologize, it would have been better if he had directed some of that colourful language he used in his interview in the direction of the Anti-Defamation League. For that is all that the ADL, which has for far too long gotten away with cloaking its bullying behaviour under the guise of “reaching out” and its Christophobia behind the mask of “tolerance”, deserves. As for what he said about who runs Hollywood, in its haste to evoke the old “old anti-Semitic canard” canard against Oldman, the ADL and its like-minded supporters perhaps failed to notice the lack of the definite article before “Jews.” Had Oldman said “in a town that’s run by the Jews” it might have been anti-Semitic, i.e., the idea that the ethnic group as a collective is in charge of Hollywood, but he said “in a town that’s run by Jews”, which merely suggests that the people in charge happen to be Jewish. In Hollywood, that is a basic and obvious fact. See Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood which, according to Oldman’s grovelling letter he has just been reading, or Ben Stein’s article of a few years back entitled “Do Jews Run Hollywood? You Bet They Do…And What of It?”

What a pity that Oldman did not stick to his guns when he was right all along.