How Covid Re-Engineered America Into Regressive Infantalism

A Late Night Lamentation

Link here.

It never gets less strange; It gets more strange, over time. That sudden switch flip in March of 2020, when being a good American meant walking around, unironically, in a face diaper, even if, and especially if, you were the President of the United States. This mass theatrical, mass enactment of the collapse of American identity, into a nation of mindless idiots. A nation of mean, angry, frightened, hostile, public health worshipping accusers—the modern day equivalent of the medieval witch-hunters, who made sure they won the game whether the accused drowned or didn’t.

The mask was a symbol of self-worship and accusation—an inversion of adulthood. As though a cruel, absurdist playwright had written the script for the end of everything, including, and especially “science” and “public health.” The triumph of the baseless accusation, and the rise of contagion mania as national religion. Being a good American meant promoting, with this paper thing over half your face, the new big idea that death was everywhere, on every surface, in every air space, and you (the good American) would do your part to “fight” it. To render the world death free and risk free—un-liveable.

I can’t locate myself. I know I have not died but I don’t know what to call this.

Of what were they so petrified that it called for the destruction of the nation?

It was a drawing. A drawing that became animated by mass media indoctrination to represent the new threat, for nothing fuels national identity so much as rallying behind a common enemy, no questions asked.

Research, thought, knowledge, discernment—all threats to the new American ideal.

If, after Pearl Harbor, American-ism meant enlisting in the war, likely to face death, this end stage national psychosis reduced it to an absurd expression of paranoia, using the symbolic “mask” to express a fear of death so great the brain shuts down entirely. And this was pre-programmed by decades of softening, poisoning, and coddling, until Americans were large, waddling babies, with diapers strapped on their heads—a silent, deranged cry for state sponsored infantalization.

Prior to this, only a few, fringe deviants openly identified as infants, fetischising their helplessness, ordering adult sized diapers, bottles and cribs.

The mask really was a diaper. That was the hidden symbol.

I see it now, more clearly. It was the implosion of personhood— a mass regression to the terms of infancy.

“If I wear the symbol of helplessness, will Mommy come and pick me up, take me away from life itself, with its ancient contract of risk—will she make it all go away, this frightening ordeal called life?”

To be a good American, a year later, meant posting photos of your naked arm, with a band aid, sometimes in bright colors, like children’s bandaids. To be even better was to have died, ideally “of Covid.”

The only ones who weren’t frightened were the actual children, who wondered why the adults vanished behind diaper masks, no longer radiating either distinction between themselves and the toddlers, or a shred of confidence.

No more adults—the adults were scared, so how could they be adults? They were now showing the children at all times that life was not safe.

There was a looming risk over the nation; The risk of being killed by a drawing.

From An article in a journal called “The Conversation: Academic Rigor, Journalistic flair.”

I was thinking about Humphrey Bogart tonight.

His American visage: Fedora hat, cigarette, contempt for risk avoidance.

Bogart, a descendant of three Mayflower passengers, who appreciated the vase-throwing, off-the-hook jealousy of his third wife:

“I appreciate a jealous wife. When she stops being jealous, that’s when you have to start worrying,” he said.

Would he have worn this mortifying Covid “mask?”

Likely he would consider death to be easily preferable to such a degradation; Such an imaginary, symbolic enactment of risk reduction.

Bogart wearing a Covid mask would have ended the whole premise of “America,” which he embodied.

“America” was about one thing first and foremost: Action.

Action-ism. Taking the action that caused the encounter with the risk that was in the very DNA of this country.

But silently, over decades, the NWO dweebs and geeks were plotting their revenge against that America: They would hoist their flag, one cold day in March, 2020, decades after Bogart’s death from self inflicted risk (cigarettes.) Their flag would demand a cessation of life and all her contracts: Love, death, joy, and everything in between. All that would remain would be risk reduction, piety, silence, obedience, and petty cruelty.

I knew those dweebs. I was forced to witness them in their natural habitats, AIDS conferences around the world, between 1987 and 1997. I remember their Birkenstocks, glum expressions, and conference bags. I knew they were the most dangerous Americans ever to exist, for their hatred of risk, of life, and of truth. If they could peddle and sell their imaginary “threats,” they could rule the world, despite entirely lacking charisma, creativity, or originality.

Even the most blood-thirsty Bolsheviks were more redemptive, for they at least made contact with their kills, and their killing nature.

These people would only project symbols, images, drawings, and dead phrases, around which colossal money flowed, until no man, woman or child was safe. Not from “Covid—” from them.

What could be more dangerous than a priesthood that re-draws all the laws of nature?

How they came to be believed, funded, elevated, never mind believed, is a mystery that will never be solved.

And now we are all drained pale.

They had no danger about them, no personality—but they had got hold of a new battering ram, which they built, and sculpted, deploying the new American mint: Trillions of US dollars deployed to the dweebs to protect the world from images, drawings, and hallucinations of their own imagined “threats to global health.”

Who asked them? Who needed them?

When Covid “hit,” life stopped. It has remained stopped, though we hesitate to speak of it. We imagine and want so little now.

A Swedish poet* wrote, of the Swedish people in the modern version of Sweden, where risk had been eliminated:

“We look almost happy out in the sun, bleeding to death from wounds we know nothing about.”

When the imaginary plague had passed over, our emotional blood was drained away, we were altered; We sat like people in a waiting room, or people in a play about a waiting room. We could not access our former emotions, reactions, dreams or bonds. This oppressive, invisible slime was over us, muffling our cries, laughter, and even rage.

We learned to muddle along, as partial ghosts—here and not here.

You could read about death, write about death, read about ugliness, write about ugliness, read about lies, write about lies, within a choking, muted range—but to what end?

Could even Arthur Miller have captured an inch of this American tragedy in a bottle?

If Willy Loman’s life as a salesman was tragic, what does that make us?

We’re the people who aren’t even permitted tragedy, rooted in love.

My sister empties her dishwasher, pauses, and tells me about a friend we both adore who has cancer.

He didn’t want to take the shot, but he had to, for work.

You train yourself to walk the tightrope, not look down, not expect anything, not react—just normalize the unthinkable, and get better at losing, until loss itself loses its sting, displaced by a milky avoidance we all know so well.

For a while there, we clung to heroes, the notion of heroes—until that too was pulverized by the governing dweebs, handed back to us as a plate of gravel.

Give them time—they’ll take anything and everything, pulverize it— mock you for your delusional hopefulness.

The restoration never comes. The trumpet never sounds. No patterns emerge, nothing becomes clear. Mass murder folds neatly into this banal, new American nothingness, insistent on the elimination of reaction, of grief. Love is to be eradicated by 2030, if not sooner.

As for “America,” she is nothing but a harpooned whale, waiting to be “pandemic proofed” by Professor Gregg Gonzalves—(one of the architects of my own career destruction,) and allegedly the inventor of “6 feet social distancing.” He’s always angry, always bristling with panedmic/Marxist accusation.

Once he has been permitted to “Pandemic proof” America, she will be an empty shell of her former self, apologizing for all that dangerous talk about freedom, chastened now by Professor Gonzalves, “pandemic prophet” Laurie Garrett, and the rest of their mirthless ilk.

Who wants to live in their dystopic “pandemic proofed” America? Could any Soviet spy during the cold war have dreamed it would end like this—with America harpooned by domestic pandemic terrorists, re-warmed and served back up after being frustrated in their fever dreams of sinking America with their HIV scare? Only problem was, it totally failed to spread. None of their pandemic predictions came true. Still, they ruled the world, sat at their sacred perches, ready to strike for the kill, this time.

Who are they? Who made them seem smart, right, or trustworthy?

They were born and bred in a self fulfilling loop system of monied propaganda, immune from correction, protected from failure. AIDS was the one that got away. Covid was the next 9-11. State terrorism dressed up as a natural event, minting them all as “pandemic prophets,” peddling the unseen/invisible— the unending horrors that could unfold, if Americans didn’t hand over their “so-called freedoms” fast and enthusiastically enough.

The anti-Trump weapon Trump allowed himself to succumb to, after some initial protestations that only fed straight back into the part of the loop that told infantile Americans their fascist President failed to grasp the gravity of the “coming plague.”

And now Olivia Nuzzi holds the guilt bag: She had the chance to alert the nation about RFK Jr.’s true nature, which in turn led to (if you’re insane) a measles epidemic nobody can see, count, or quantify.

Ok Tim, got it.

Only God knows what I would give for an original sentence on “social media,” some nights.

Call this essay anything, but don’t call it depressing; Lamentation is not depressive. Behind, or beneath, my depressive prose, is a mirror image of a civilization that has not agreed to play dead, that still hopes, yearns, and remembers.

Some nights, quite simply, the devastation of the pandemic HIV-Covid prophets must be assessed. Then we shake off and trudge on, through tomorrow’s humiliating waters, exiled for our failure to merge with psychosis.

Writing from “before” still brings me joy—reading of people who sounded like people, bad, broken, tragic, and human. Instead of these sterile scolds everywhere, swearing they care only about the guarantee of a germ free America, in which to raise germ free kids. Once fascism is defeated.

I always get cheered up by the last passage in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge—Alfieri’s confession:

*Tomas Tranströmer.