a burning readiness to die
In Mississippi, and throughout the country, people are taking horse medicine. Various media personalities on the right have touted the drug ivermectin as effective against Covid; Laura Ingraham promoted it back in February, alongside hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and vitamin D. Ivermectin, which is used to treat livestock as well as some parasites in humans, has not been shown to be effective against Covid. Mississippi State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said in a Zoom meeting that “you wouldn't get your chemotherapy at a feed store. I mean, you wouldn't want to treat your pneumonia with your animal's medication.” The FDA recently clarified that the medicine is meant for “large animals like horses and cows, which can weigh a lot more than we do.”
In Mississippi, a man veers his white Ford F-150 off the road and runs over to an NBC crew reporting on the aftermath of a hurricane. He shouts “You’re gonna report this accurately, right?” and gets in the reporter’s face, as if to grab away the mic. The video is of that now-familiar genre: bizarre actions that, filmed and shared, begin to seem like parables of fear and decay.
In Florida, two conservative radio hosts who had vocally refused vaccination die of Covid-19 within a month of each other: Dick Farrel, a shock talk host who railed agains “power trip lib loons,” and Marc Bernier, who in March said of Fauci’s statements: “How dare this guy tell us that we have to get the vaccine? What if we don’t want to get the vaccine? What if we don’t want to wear the mask?”
Bernier’s now-deleted Twitter page is a strange record of the past year, each radio show accompanied by a corresponding tweet that looks like a deranged poem. From February 16, for instance: “Woman shoots herself at traffic stop/e-bikes on the beach?/Moskowitz resigns from emergency management/young moving to Florida/lower deaths from Covid-19.” Some are entirely incoherent: “Trump wows ‘em at CPAC/Plane head to Daytona crashes killing.”
Bernier’s final tweet compares government vaccination efforts to Nazism, a talking point that’s become common on the right. Marjorie Taylor-Greene tweeted in July that people “don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.” Tucker Carlson recently declared that “Governments should never require people to submit to any medical procedure, whether that procedure is sterilization, or frontal lobotomies or Covid vaccine.”
Over the weekend, sitting at a dismal airport bar in Washington, D.C., I finished Diary of a Man in Despair, a secret diary kept by Friedrich Reck during the Nazis’ rise and fall. Reck, an old reactionary monarchist who would be much less likable if he weren’t so good at insulting Nazis, finds himself bewildered by the era he lives in. His journal is a jeremiad against industrialists, warmongers, Prussians, propagandists, mechanization, and what he repeatedly calls “mass-man.” On August 16, 1944, he writes:
We breathe the air of death. We do not need to be told so, as the Woman’s Organisation leader in Obing, a harmless farm village, told us recently, when she extolled this ‘Führer’ of ours because ‘in his goodness, he has prepared a gentle and easy death by gas for the German people in case the war ends badly.’ […]
And what reaction was there? Did these Bavarian farmers, offspring of independent-minded fathers prepared at any time to revolt—did they at least dip the lady, all on fire as she was with a burning readiness to die, into Lake Obing?
The thought never entered their minds. They trailed off towards home, shaking their heads bewilderedly, muttering to each other that unfortunately there was nothing to be done.
In Mississippi, 37% of the population is vaccinated. “In Mississippi,” said Reeves last month, “we believe in freedom.”
ben tapeworm