Uncomfortable Residents of Meat Thing

don't ask me, i just live in here

The Wall Street Journal, describing people who died in Buffalo during the recent blizzard:

On Friday afternoon, Abdul Sharifu left his house in Buffalo, N.Y., to go to the market to buy milk for his two young children. He hadn’t gotten far when his car got stuck in one of the deadliest blizzards in the history of the city. 

Mr. Sharifu, a 26-year-old refugee from Congo, sat in his Toyota RAV4 with a dwindling supply of gas in his tank and called a friend to explain his plight, said Erieckson Kiza, a leader in the Congolese community. Mr. Sharifu, clad only in a thin tracksuit, told the friend he feared he would freeze when his gas ran out and the heat cut off. Waiting at home for his return was his wife who was nine months pregnant….

Anndel Nicole Taylor, 22, was driving home from her job as an assistant at a nursing home Friday afternoon when her 2004 Nissan Altima got stuck in the snow, said her mother, Wanda Brown Steele.

Ms. Taylor called emergency services, but her mother said help never came. She was wearing light blue scrubs and Crocs and didn’t have warm clothes with her.

People who live in Buffalo were caught by surprise because it got cold and snowed. They froze to death in “a thin tracksuit” and “light blue scrubs,” going out into a blizzard without a coat and then using their phones to tell people they felt cold.

One of the great recurring themes of the moment is that people are sort of at war with their bodies and sort of lost inside their bodies, living through screens and constantly hearing messages about the strangeness of the clumsy thing we have the misfortune to occupy. Many people are born with genitals that don’t match their gender identity, so you sometimes have to cut and drug your stupid body until it matches you, and you have to stay six feet away from other bodies, which can poison you with their respiratory exhaust, and you’re in danger if you see a face, which should be obscured behind a face covering for safety. And remember, the physical condition of your body has nothing to do with you, but is determined by dynamics of race and class. Exercise is white supremacy, after all, so it’s important to avoid it.

We’re at war — or encouraged to be at war — with our physical selves, the apparent realities of which are socially constructed, and properly managed by government agencies rather than by the consciousness that dwells inside the meat thing. And so people go outside in a blizzard, dressed for summer, and call for help when the shock of feeling cold overtakes them.

The other remarkable detail in that Wall Street Journal story is about people trapped outdoors in a deadly blizzard knocking on doors for shelter and being refused. That’s a bright red emergency beacon flashing on our culture, because turning someone away into a blizzard is a potentially deadly act. Offering help to strangers in an emergency is the most normal behavior in the world — see, for example, small town Newfoundland on 9-11 — and there are some examples of people in Buffalo doing just that.

But there are also quite a few examples of people refusing to offer any form of shelter or help to other people in a life and death crisis, turning strangers away from their homes, and it’s really an accomplishment to sow that much distrust and social alienation in a culture as quickly as we’ve managed it. Other human bodies are a grave danger to you, the unvaxxed should be denied medical care and thrown into prison, faces should always be covered, and remember to always help a stranger in need.

A decline of bodily autonomy and physical self-reliance plus a sustained attack at the roots of social trust give us…well, late 2022. Welcome! We hope you enjoy your stay.

Related, see this recent end-of-the-trail cultural dispatch from the New Yorker:

The story describes a team of rebel epidemiologists and medical activists, “The People’s CDC,” bold outliers who stand bravely to challenge the institutions of power. They’re also funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, natch, because The Resistance has a pretty good gig, these days. You’ll be shocked to hear it, but the courageous team of science-focused activists primarily reject individual approaches to health questions, and instead offer collectivist solutions.

And then there are masks. The People’s C.D.C. strongly supports mask mandates, and they have called on federal, state, and local governments to put them back in place, arguing that “the vaccine-only strategy promoted by the CDC is insufficient.” The group has noted that resistance to masks is most common among white people: Lucky Tran, who organizes the coalition’s media team, recently tweeted a YouGov survey supporting this, and wrote that “a lot of anti-mask sentiment is deeply embedded in white supremacy.”

There are no bodies in any of this. Discussing the ways a virus infects a human meat-thing, a team of science experts lament capitalism and white supremacy and imperialism, offering collectivism as a solution. Take that, SARS-CoV-2!

The New Yorker correspondent manages to work herself up into mentioning to a member of “The People’s CDC,” Rob Wallace, that they sound a lot like Marxists, at which point the interviewee accuses her of “red-baiting,” and that’s the end of that line of inquiry. So see also this friendly interview with the same Rob Wallace, which describes Covid-19 as “a capitalist virus” inflicted on the world by “the bourgeoisie.” It’s a wobbler — I can’t issue a ruling on this one, but maaaaaaaybe there’s a little Marxism in there.

What there isn’t, however, is any epidemiology, any consideration of the way a physical virus enters and infects the tangible bodies of human beings. There’s a theory-virus that injects imperialism into theory-bodies, dirtying them with profit motive and a nasty cough. The solution is to challenge white supremacy with masks, which will do….something?

The cultural and political effacement of the body, the physical thing, is imposing obvious costs on us. We’re paying those costs with our bodies.