There are, however, other ways to view the cluster of attributes that have led to vaccine resistance amidst the worst public health crisis in national history. Hillary Clinton's deplorables, whether by accident or choice, are behaving in ways eminently consistent with widespread established traditions. For example, if the U.S. is in fact deeply enmeshed in a culture conflict unprecedented since the Civil War, then it makes sense to refuse to cooperate with what MAGA voters view as an occupying force. Maintaining behavioral autonomy becomes a priority as the occupying force tries to assimilate you. It's a lesson and strategy straight out of the Bible, whether Jews in Egypt or Christians in Rome. People are willing to risk dying to maintain cultural identity. When this blueprint for sacrifice is laid out time and again in the U.S.'s most important religious text, the behaviors are more than understandable. They should have been expected.
The unvaccinated being relatively unmoved by the prospect of loss of life can be viewed as self-sacrifice to continue a cultural identity. Unvaccinated status, if one believes lack of vaccination sabotages the "conquering" of Covid, can also be viewed as an act of death-spreading aggression. Spreading disease becomes a weapon to take down the evil progressives, who currently control the House, the Senate, and the White House. Keeping Covid humming damages the economy, which can be considered a strategy to degrade the occupying power.
Since the "culture in power" is, at the moment, pushing the narrative that vaccination reduces virus spread, not getting vaccinated becomes a rational revolutionary act. Risking one's life in the pursuit of taking down an incompetent, corrupt, un-Christian occupying force is a reasonable and rational strategy. If one buys the unvaccinated as spewing more death and destruction than the vaccinated, the deplorables wield real power.
A Lack of Discussion
Now that the Delta variant is the dominant virus, I don't much buy into the "unvaccinated spewing death" guilt messaging. In the days ahead, I'll get into that and many other curious messages being promulgated by U.S. institutions and media. For now, the point I want to make as an introduction is that for many of the unvaccinated, their actions have firm origins in American traditions. Bluntly speaking, Pickett's Charge and getting nailed to a cross set high profile, deeply embedded examples of self-sacrifice for cultural identity. The unvaccinated are defining themselves as separate from what they perceive as an occupying cultural force. With that separateness may come, consciously or not, actions that sabotage the occupying force through any available means, including self-sacrifice.
Everything I've just laid out is simple and obvious, but reality is not being framed, or even discussed, using the phrases and language I've used above. I have never seen the U.S. media stringently avoid certain topics and questions as deliberately as in 2021. Future blog entries will discuss the very strange communications mores that have emerged in the United States. What's become increasingly obvious is that Fox News has no monopoly on the "state reporting" propaganda game.
Pivoting Perspectives
One perspective on all of this is that the unvaccinated are indeed the "deplorables" -- the great unwashed who, through fear or sheer ignorance, are holding back the sacred societal effort to defeat the devil, in this case Covid-19. This perspective requires defining the unvaccinated demographic as some combination of willfully irresponsible, evil, and irrational.
Another perspective is that the purposefully unvaccinated are, consciously or non-consciously, political actors trying to impose their will on a regime in the only way they know how. They are not solely or mainly uneducated hillbillies unable to grasp science.
To me, the fascinating aspect of all of this is that the first perspective is how most U.S. media are defining the situation. The unvaccinated are irresponsible fools gumming up society's Covid battle due to fear and ignorance. Yet I find the second perspective more Ockham's Razor worthy. It requires fewer suppositions and unlikely causes/effects. It puts the vaccinated and unvaccinated on more equal intellectual terms. The second perspective also better explains what I'll explore further in the weeks ahead. I think that the U.S. and corporate framing of the pandemic, the language used, and the topics NOT discussed publicly are best interpreted in the context of the second perspective.
I'd argue that both the behavior of the unvaccinated, and the framing of the reporting/discussion involving them, is more usefully described by the second perspective, namely that this is an occupying cultural force scenario with the language and reportage used by the state consistent with what would be employed to dampen a revolt.
Conclusion
I don't think I've said anything particularly surprising or erudite. I've just stated the obvious. More than anything, I guess what does surprise me is that these topics aren't omnipresent in the U.S. media. Regardless, however, of how strongly I can or cannot make these points of perspective, I think that this is a rich taking off point for my investigation of propaganda in the Age of Covid.
In my opinion, we may be on uncharted media ground, with the pandemic providing moral cover for some of the most dishonest and manipulative U.S. journalism I have witnessed in my life. And, as I will demonstrate, it is not subtle.
Bob Dietz
August 24, 2021
