Ignoring the wisdom of Sophocles’ Chorus in Oedipus Rex to avoid “the double weight of past woes,” pondering 2020 has become my recent obsession. I am presently writing a novel and cannot, unfortunately, avoid revisiting the momentousness of that absurd year, and in this pursuit, as Oedipus did, I “suffer twice over” (so you won’t have to), trapped in a retrospective into a kind of madness. Many thoughtful readers no doubt plumb that awful annum’s depths from time to time, whether they like to or not. I pray it has not been with the ugly addiction that has held me in thrall for the better part of ten quarters. Like the proverbial trainwreck, it’s hard to look away.
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Reflection has led me to conclude that 2020 should be remembered as “The Year of the Lie.” It has many brothers, of course, including especially its younger siblings, but has only one father. In retrospect,Old Scratch probably could have been Time’s “Person of the Year.” It would have been more fitting, though, had Anthony Fauci, former director of NIAID, won the honors. It is no surprise to anyone who has objectively studied that year and lived through its aftermath that he recently “pled the 5th” more than 100 times (111, to be precise, according to Grok) before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
We need to be honest, though: Fauci had a lot of competition to be the Patron Saint of 2020. It was, after all, an election year. And, oh, what a tangled web they wove, indeed. It was a year when: (a) halting travel from China was nothing more than xenophobic and racist; (b) the virus was not airborne… and then it was; (c) masks wouldn’t work… but then N95s would, but needed to be rationed for hospital use only… until any mask might do, even cloth ones could work… and should even be recommended… er… become mandatory; (d) gathering at churches and gyms was dangerous, but protest-cum-rioting in the streets was as safe as it was peaceful; (e) liquor stores were essential, but shutter the schoolhouse doors! (Feel free, dear reader, to add your (f) through (z), here.)
Unsurprisingly, it was also the year of: (a) ballot drop boxes; (b) vote harvesting; (c) mail-in voting; (d) simultaneous-but-purely-innocent-and-coincidental decisions in multiple swing states to pause counting votes; (e) massive reversals of vote totals for the candidates when the counting resumed (all in favor of one candidate); and (f) declarations by officials across the country (even some in the incumbent’s administration) that there was not a shred of evidence — at least according to their exhaustive, 36-hour, deep-dive investigations — that any electoral fraud had occurred. In fact, they assured us, the 2020 election “was the safest and most secure in history.”
No Mere Outlier, Alas.
Adding injury to insult, if 2020 was “The Year of the Lie”, I would nominate 2021 as “The Year of the Whopper.” They called a several-hours-long protest an “insurrection.” So carried away was the chattering class that its members labeled the unarmed, utterly uncoordinated goings-on (except perhaps those things orchestrated by a combination of FBI assets, opposition political operatives, and local law enforcement) the greatest threat in history to “our democracy.” It surpassed September 11, Pearl Harbor, and even the Civil War in its nearly-lethal blow, they screamed breathlessly and repeatedly. To believe them meant to understand January 6 as “an existential threat” to America itself.
While I never suspected that any of the talking heads on television actually believed for a minute the utter absurdities they willfully spewed, it seems that a huge percentage of their dimwit viewers accepted the accusations as sacrosanct. The more disturbing aspect of it was that some poseurs on the right, with wet fingers aloft, willingly parroted the noxious slander.
A second impeachment of President Trump — even, if possible, more laughable than the first — put an exclamation mark on the implied threat to anyone who failed to stick to the “insurrection” script. Social media platforms suppressed or terminated accounts that varied from the approved narrative, just as they had in the aforesaid laptop campaign.
Simultaneously, the restrictions on reports and opinions one might publish in social media regarding all-things-COVID grew more draconian. YouTubers were demonetized or deplatformed for calling either the election or the efficacy of the newly released “vaccine” into question. Ditto anyone in the then-Twitterverse who dared to doubt “the science,” whether political or medical.
Typing words like “hydroxychloroquine” and “Ivermectin” would trigger moderators — those hypervigilant sentinels of the various platforms — to tackle posts with the ferocity of Roquan Smith (my fellow “boomers” might refer to Dick Butkus or Jack Lambert for comparison). Many of us, without even trying, suddenly became instigators or perpetrators of “right wing” or “fringe” conspiracies, whether we wrote or spoke of our skepticism about just about anything we were officially told. Words mattered. And they were parsed.
In those years, just using the colloquial “jab” raised at least an eyebrow, and perhaps a posse, if one were addressing the experimental gene therapy euphemistically known as “the COVID vaccine.” Calling it “the clot shot” could forevermore exclude one from polite company. (It’s still a nearly-forbidden guilty pleasure. As I just typed the words on my keyboard, they autocorrected to “cloth’s hot,” whatever that might mean.) My fear is that in many western countries — particularly the English-speaking ones, alas — those two words, typed consecutively, may have resulted in visits from local authorities.
Let History Judge.
The importance of Fauci’s non-testimony this week cannot be overestimated. By revealing nothing, he revealed everything. That’s not because he pled the 5th. It’s not because we saw so clearly why he needed the pardon from President Autopen. The questions, we learned, were really the answers. That’s why questions are so important. And it’s why the official paranoia of that period was the true attempted insurrection. Denying people the right to question their government and institutions, as well as denying scientists the right to question the prevailing science, placed our leaders in the unflattering robes they seem to have inherited from Spain’s Grand Inquisitors.
History always tells the tale because the present is so full of vested interests, with enormous wagers still on the tables — wagers of wealth and reputation and power. Ultimately, to see through a glass darkly is the best the present can offer. That vantage point, however, might mean only to see the dimmest version of oneself staring back — our personal interests, inclinations, insecurities, and intolerance. Questions are the light beyond the glass. It is only in an environment that permits honest inquiry that we can ever hope to see the world beyond the glass, to achieve perfect “2020 vision.” Truth, like madness, is always easier to see in retrospect.
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Image: Freerange Stock/Ian Livesey