Parochial Perspectives. Parochial Pundits. Parochial Propaganda.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've decried the parochialism that has swamped the United States. I mistakenly perceived the parochialism, spewing from our institutions and citizens alike, as simply a passive result of our uniquely American arrogance. What I've learned during these two years of Covid is that much of what is presented to us and many of our limitations in perspective are no passive accident.
Americans love their parochialism. Some consider it, intellectually, as almost a badge of honor. American institutions are allegedly on the cutting edge of science; American media allegedly propagates what those institutions learn directly into the U.S. intellectual ecosystem. We are the best and the brightest. Plus we have the deepest pockets during emergencies. Doesn't that justify parochialism, at least of a kind?
The fable goes something like this. The U.S. has the most respected experts, the most money, and vast organizational abilities that allow it to analyze and adjust to scientific challenges like Covid-19. The rest of the world is slaving away in catch-up mode, relying on human and material resources much inferior to ours. In terms of propagating science theory and strategies, the American media is nimble and can more easily inform the public than the media in most other countries.
Parochial Perspectives
It turns out, all the while that I've been criticizing American parochialism, I've often been guilty of parochialism myself along the way. As I've described in previous entries, early in the pandemic I was faced with Fauci/CDC recommendations to wear gloves but not worry about wearing masks during air travel. I knew South Korea and other countries with recent pandemic experience were recommending masking as essential. Idiotically, I prioritized the CDC advice. I was wrong and could have paid the price while flying in February 2020.
Why did I have such a parochial perspective, giving American institutional advice heavier weight than it deserved? I think that the answer lies in my growing up during the glory days of the race to the moon. I trusted American science and the ability of American institutions to work with science to get things right. Ultimately, growing up while the United States was at its scientific peak vis-a-vis the rest of the world made me think that somehow the U.S. scientific community that handled the moon landing was the same U.S. scientific community tackling the pandemic. I could not have been more wrong.
I spent long months in 2020 and 2021 criticizing the Americans lack of Covid testing, lack of state-to-state coordination, and the lack of reporting of demographic data as the pandemic unfolded. What was most surprising and galling was American media's inability or unwillingness to compare U.S. institutional responses to the responses of other countries.
Parochial Pundits
One of the great manipulations of the pandemic has been American institutions and American corporate media relying almost exclusively on American pundits to provide a very skewed, limited, and parochial perspective on the pandemic.
Rather than using its media organizations to scour the globe for international opinions, differences in strategies, and reports on results as they fluidly transpired, the United States trotted out its own experts, placed only those experts in front of audiences, and never promoted the kinds of comparisons that would put particular narrow approaches at risk of being undercut or disbelieved. Other countries used a wide range of Covid strategies. Other countries had more and recent experience with pandemics, but American institutions stayed in-house as much as possible both for expertise and who was put in front of the public.
From the beginning, I had expected multiple eyes on the demographics and results pouring in from other nations. I had expected real time summaries and comparisons. The more different the treatments, the more I expected thorough analyses by American institutions and public data. Nothing of the sort happened.
Under Trump, we were fed baldly manipulative and wildly inaccurate predictions. The Trump administration kept touting ridiculous numbers and glee club optimism. Under Biden, I expected data to be made public, comprehensive comparisons with other countries, and a more multi-national assessment of treatments. We received nothing of the kind.
Michael Osterholm, as I reported from the beginning, was a straight shooter and accurate Covid handicapper. That's probably why he wasn't on the Trump task force. The task force turned out to be a less-than-well-meaning clusterfuck, as I described June 27, 2020 in "Task Force Review." Under Biden, things have actually gotten informationally worse, which I thought was well-nigh impossible.
Back in February and March 2020, some punditry from the South Korea Infectious Disease Institute would have been quite helpful. As months passed, comparisons of U.S. results with results from other countries should have been featured every night on major news networks.
Our American pundits during these two years have studiously adhered to the favored narratives of the day, which have embarrassingly changed on a regular basis, a la the sloganeering in Orwell's 1984. Without televised debate, without American pundits being challenged by adversarial interviewers, the U.S. citizenry was never put in a position to meaningfully compare and contrast the Covid priorities and results from around the world. When was the last time a major network's science talking heads were actually challenged on air by experts from other countries that have had different, often better, results? The classic case is CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Leana Wen, who get to do monologue snippets on air rather than field actual adversarial questions.
Parochial Propaganda
During a historic pandemic, a reasonable person might have expected American media to interview those experts from countries that have more experience with pandemics than the United States. Similarly, one might have expected that as the pandemic unfolded (with the U.S. not doing well by any particular metric) that American media would hold U.S. institutions' feet to the fire to make U.S. experts explain why the U.S. was lacking. These kinds of questions, however, were rarely broached by American media and certainly not featured on an ongoing basis.
The lack of featuring this information, the lack of holding U.S. Covid response up to an international mirror, is its own kind of propaganda. As I have emphasized repeatedly in these "Propaganda Files," what's NOT said is usually the most salient tipoff to propaganda.
Ivermectin has been one of the crucial debate points during the pandemic. One would reasonably expect a healthy adversarial dialogue between Ivermectin advocates and naysayers. That hasn't happened. It's not that the Ivermectin advocates don't have the credentials. It's not like Ivermectin hasn't been widely used in other countries. One would expect William Campbell and Satoshi Omura, who received the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine for inventing Ivermectin, to be featured guests on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and 60 Minutes on a regular basis, not necessarily to advocate, but to discuss. I'm not aware of any major corporate American news show that has interviewed either. How can that be?
This is one of those occasions when the American penchant for thinking the U.S. is the center of the universe has provided cover for propaganda. We're so respectful of American scientific wizardry and bottomless material resources that we Americans blithely assume we've cornered the market not just on science, but on reality itself. Our reflexive narcissistic assumptions make us particularly vulnerable to parochialism that blinds us to the limits of both what we see and what we are being told. And these limits have consequences, rarely of the good kind. Our narrow American perspective is easily manipulated by those who prefer to keep us unaware of how parochial we are.
Conclusions
Pick your cliche. Pick your stereotype. Americans think they're the smartest guys in the room, and they fail to notice that there are no windows in the room and the doors have been locked. A kind of incestuous retardation of thinking results, but because we stay inside the room, we're barely aware of our disabilities.
Bob Dietz
April 16, 2022
