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The exceptional gets reported. When a young person with a media presence or an athlete contracts Covid-19, it is national news. We all know the format of the story: ‘I Am Young and Healthy AND I GOT PRETTY SICK.” These kinds of stories are produced simply as justification for the theory that was is safest are lockdowns — that everything would be OK if everyone would just stay home. The emergent class of biopolitical warriors — ‘blue checks’ — wield theories as truths and vague speculations as testable theories. They just know what works — and so we should sign up for their podcast or newsletter — or pay their new consulting firm — to keep us ‘safe.’
The creation of taboos has required the transformation of our senses; we re-experience the world at street-level as as a seething hive of viral activity — a seething, intelligent, alien force. Covid couldn’t be A VIRUS; it had to be THE VIRUS (the ‘Thing’ in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’).
As the months pass, the ‘blue checks’ — usually with advanced degrees, apartments in coastal cities — live in an increasingly schizophrenic world: a world in which they must fight off the impulse to interact with others, to hug or fuck, to (dare to!) outdoor dine, to go to the gym, even to walk down the street, all to maintain their own sense of moral righteousness and general sense of propriety. They must take their own medicine; they don’t know what else to do. Some don’t leave their apartments at all; some take incredible precautions to do simple things. Either way, they make sure to wear their fear-goggles: to see the world through their own highly-suspect theories, through the predictions made by their deeply flawed models.
