The Garrison State Will See You Now

so get on the ground and heal

No 9/11, no pandemic lockdowns. I’ve probably made this point more cleanly than it should be made, but at least it’s a catchy sentence.

The habits of weaponized safetyism, the governmental instinct to issue orders to the whole population and to expect prompt obedience, reflect the assumptions of a national security state. Remember the places where we’ve previously seen the policing of the normal, as opposed to the practice of policing the pathological – generalized repression rather than the corralling of dangerous behavioral outliers.

In April of 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick issued a shelter-in-place order – go inside and don’t come out until we say so – for the residents of Boston and its suburbs. The commonwealth quickly turned cute about the whole thing, claiming that it had always been purely voluntary, but it wasn’t, and it wasn’t experienced that way: businesses and schools closed, buses and trains stopped running, the streets emptied. In a comment that now sounds awfully familiar, Time quoted Watertown resident Jenny Sartori: “We can’t go on living in lockdown indefinitely.” (Silly Jenny, it was voluntary!)

I wrote about the Boston lockdown in 2013, and even quoted Zygmunt Bauman on bureaucratic garden culture and “the human objects of bureaucratic task-performance.” The striking thing about the moment, I wrote eight years ago, is that the lockdowns were supposed to facilitate a police manhunt for the bombing suspects, but the end of the lockdowns is actually what did the trick; the police found nothing until a resident, released from his home imprisonment, noticed signs that one of the bombers was hiding in his back yard. The public, that nuisance, was the solution.

But the habit of mind among a technocratic managerial elite that views the embodied public as a form of disorder, and the presence of unmanaged people out doing stuff as a problem to be solved, sought cleanliness: purged streets, cleansed down to just the cops and the bad guys. They still yearn for that purge. They’re the Travis Bickle governing class: one day a rain is gonna come and cleanse the filth off the streets, but until that rain appears….

As a response to a terrorist attack by Islamists, the Boston Marathon lockdown was primed by more than a decade of societal construction; we correctly understood that Islamist terrorism was a serious danger, so we grew a mechanism to address it, so we were prepared for the mechanism to function. The fact that the functioning of the mechanism wasn’t necessarily effective or appropriate was another matter. There was a threat, and people did stuff. And man, they did it hard. To everybody.

There are some predecessor behaviors, Japanese-American internment most obvious among them, and you could probably make an essay out of a discussion of public health fetishism as medical Comstockery, but the habit of placing whole cities under house arrest to keep people safe is a 21st-century maneuver. We used to quarantine the sick, or the people we regarded as potentially sick. Today our technocrats are inclined to quarantine us all, which is a neat expression of what they regard as disease.