This Revolution

A student joined me in the elevator last Friday, and midway to the ground floor had the audacity to open his mouth. At least I presume he opened his mouth, since his lips were naturally hidden behind a mask.  They must have moved, because they formed words.  It requires some audacity to break the silence of an elevator under any conditions, and more was required of this young man last Friday. Under the Covid Regime, elevator etiquette requires every elevator rider to pretend that he is holding his pestilential breath.

This is what the student said.

“I hate this. I want to leave.”

I am now, of course, trained by the Covid Regime to see clouds of malignant miasma puffing from the edges of the mask of any man who ventures to speak, and so might well have recoiled from this brazen attempt at human contact.  But pity got the better of me and I asked the student to explain what he meant. His complaint was that everything he enjoyed about college was now forbidden, and everything he did not enjoy—namely attending classes—was now even less enjoyable than before.

You will recall what the poet Wordsworth said of the early days of the French Revolution

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!”

This student took the opposite view. In the early days of this Revolution, he would have written (if he had been Wordsworth),

“Woe is it in this day to be alive,
But to be young is very hades!”

At the risk of contaminating the young man with my miasmal breath, I puffed out some words of encouragement and trudged away to class.

Trudging thereto, I appreciated the woeful assessment of the young man in the elevator. I was, naturally, panting behind my mask, and I was on my way to the classroom half an hour early so I could activate the various components in its complex audio-visual apparatus. There was a time when a professor’s only worry was that he would turn to the blackboard and find the chalk tray empty, but he now must activate and adjust the lights, computer, projector, audio system and (under Covid) on-line video feed. The Covid Regime also requires him to sanitize the lectern, position the miasma deflection screen, and take phone calls from the miasma-phobic students who have chosen to monitor the class by Zoom.

When I entered the lecture hall, a man in what may have been a hazmat suit was fogging it with an industrial fumigant, and when the miasma-friendly students at last arrived, their posture and gait had all the eager jollity of a gang of prisoners going to work in a Siberian salt mine. They spaced themselves in the now color-coded seats and prepared to listen to a man who looked like a mummy, and indeed sounded as a mummy might sound if a mummy could talk.

* * * * *

The Covid Regime is but one theater in what I call this Revolution. We still know curiously little about the origins of the virus, and are no longer even discussing the cause of the outbreak, but it now seems clear that this pandemic has been, for certain people, both fortuitous and opportune. And in this respect it resembles another theater in this Revolution, the fortuitous and opportune death of George Floyd.

It now seems reasonably clear that George Floyd had the personal misfortune to die as he was being placed under arrest. It seems that he was not killed by the police, and that he certainly was not “murdered.” The coroner’s report indicates that he likely died of a heart attack occasioned by a drug overdose, and the leaked video from a policeman’s bodycam shows that Floyd “could not breathe” and was suffering acute distress before the police restrained him. Fear of prosecution and struggling with police officers no doubt heightened the poor man’s anxiety, but these were, at most, the proverbial straws that broke this camel’s back.

And yet I continue to read that George Floyd was “killed,” even “murdered,” and that extraordinary video in which he crawls, unassisted, through the back seat of the police car and out the opposite door, complaining the while that “I can’t breathe,” seems to have disappeared down the memory hole. The video was, I understand, first leaked to the British Daily Mail, which posted it at their website. When I finished watching it, I naively thought, that’s that.

How very wrong I was. Indeed, my cursory scan of U.S. media on that day suggested that, so far as U.S. media was concerned, that extraordinary video did not exist. And I can only suppose that this is because the actual death of the man called George Floyd does not matter to U.S. media. What matters is his martyrdom.

A martyr is not a person who dies in the service of a cause. Many people die in the service of causes and are not treated as martyrs. A martyr is a person whose death has been transformed by a cause into a symbol that energizes the cause with righteous anger. Poetic license is the most striking feature in this transformation, and the resemblance of the dead man to the martyr is always very slight. To hide this poetic license, a cause buries the original men and women in graves that are deep, dark and carefully guarded. This is called respecting their memory.

The alleged killing of George Floyd did not cause the protests, riots and destruction of monuments. If it were the cause, the protesters, rioters and destroyers of monuments would have stopped once it became clear the original George Floyd had died and was not killed. Some might even have felt chagrin and expressed regret.

They did not do this because the original man named George Floyd did not matter. What mattered was the cause that energized its minions when it made George Floyd into a martyr.

* * * * *

Like the death of George Floyd, the outbreak of the Covid virus was a fortuitous opportunity for the cause of this Revolution. George Floyd really died, but the martyrdom of George Floyd is a political fiction. The Covid virus really exists, and really kills people, but the Pandemic is also a political fiction that has been crafted to advance this Revolution.  

In other words, the Martyrdom of George Floyd and the Covid Pandemic are symbols in an ideology.

Ideology is an instrument of domination and it works in two ways. It first works to energize and embolden the dominant class and its minions, to fill them with a stimulating sense of their own righteousness. And an ideology also works to make the dominated class more submissive by filling their heads with the “false consciousness” that the dominant class and its minions are right. The phrase “false consciousness” comes from Marx, but one does not have to be a Marxist to see that ideology works in this way.

The symbol of the Pandemic is obviously being used to establish a new regime of bureaucratic and technological control. I have called this the Covid Regime, but have argued that the Covid outbreak was simply a pretext for this radical and now accomplished usurpation of power. Bureaucrats can now issue ukases that disrupt and regulate aspects of your life that were entirely private only six months ago. Technological titans can now compel you to use their products and submit to their surveillance and discipline when you do so.

Thus one of the larger changes in this Revolution is that a good deal of your private life has now passed into the hands of your managers.  You now knows that they can lock you down, and that any complains you make will be noted and possibly disciplined by their digital panopticon.  

The managers and their minions are energized by a feeling of righteousness as they do this. The managed truckle and submit with a vague sense that somehow the managers and their minions are right.

* * * * *

So now you see that the student in the elevator said more than he knew when he said,

“I hate this. I want to leave.”

And that we have good reason to lament our lack of a Wordsworth to write,

“Woe is it in this day to be alive,
But to be young is very hades!”