Nobody Is Protected From President Trump
The
simple accessory of a mask tells the story of a presidency and a pandemic.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 12, 2020
I’ve
heard of Muslim women in America being taunted for wearing hijabs, I’ve heard
of Jewish men being mocked for wearing yarmulkes and now I’ve heard it all: A
friend of mine was cursed by a passing stranger the other day for wearing a
protective mask.
There
is, of course, a rather nasty virus going around, and one way to lessen the chance
of its spread, especially from you to someone else, is to cover your nose and
mouth. Call it civic responsibility. Call it science.
But
science is no match for tribalism in this dysfunctional country. Truth is
whatever validates your prejudices, feeds your sense of grievance and fuels
your antipathy toward the people you’ve decided are on some other side.
And
protective masks, God help us, are tribal totems. With soul-crushing
inevitably, these common-sense precautions morphed into controversial declarations
of identity. What’s next? Band-Aids?
“Wearing
a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans.” That was
the headline on a recent article in
Politico by Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman that noted that “in a deeply
polarized America, almost anything can be politicized.”
I
quibble only with “almost.” And I submit that the entire story of our
scattered, schizoid response to the coronavirus pandemic can be distilled into
the glares, tussles, tweets, deference and defiance surrounding this simple
accessory.
On
Monday the White House belatedly introduced a policy of mask-wearing in the West
Wing — but it exempted President Trump. See what I mean about mask as metaphor?
Trump demands protection from everybody around him, but nobody is protected
from Trump. Story of America.
My
friend was standing on a street corner in the center of a small town in New
York. The state has decreed that people wear face coverings if they’re in
public settings where they can’t be sure to stay six feet or more away from
others. So my friend was following the rules, as were her two companions. All
three of them were masked.
And a man driving by shouted a
profanity at them.
Just
two words. Just two syllables. You can probably guess which.
How
did she know their masks were the trigger? She said that nothing else about the
three of them could possibly have drawn any particular notice and judgment and
that she’d encountered other evidence of objection to lockdowns, social
distancing and masks in this relatively rural and relatively conservative area.
One
man, she said, has been standing outside the local post office, yelling about
government oppression and handing out fliers. She showed me one. It had an
image of a face mask crossed out and said: “ATTN GOVERNMENT AGENTS. Please
provide lawful and necessary consideration to aid the bearer in the unimpeded
exercise of constitutionally protected rights.”
It’s
not just her town. “Mask haters causing problems at retail establishments,”
read a recent headline in
the Illinois political newsletter Capitol Fax, which presented a compendium of
reports from merchants around the state, including one in Dekalb who said that
a customer wearing what looked like a hunting knife refused to follow Illinois
directives and wear a mask. Priorities.
When
the president visited Phoenix a week ago, some residents who’d turned out to
see him harangued journalists in masks, “saying how we’re only wearing masks to
instill fear,” BrieAnna Frank, a reporter with The Arizona Republic, told Tom Jones
of Poynter. Frank posted a Twitter thread with
videos in which journalists were loudly accused of being “on the wrong side of
patriotism” and “like communists.”
Outside
the State Capitol in Sacramento two days later, a woman held a sign that
said: “Do you know who Dr. Judy Mikovits is? Then don’t tell me I need a silly
mask.”
Mikovits
is a discredited scientist whose wild assertions and
scaremongering regarding vaccines have made her a hero to conspiracy theorists
and a social media and YouTube star. Naturally, masks factor into her repertoire.
She has claimed that “wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.”
So
masks are props in our polluted ecosystem of information. They’re also symbols
of American complacency. When the pandemic hit, there weren’t nearly enough of
them, not even for medical workers, a shortage that more-prepared countries
didn’t experience.
And
masks are emblems, maybe the best ones, of the Trump administration’s disregard
for, and degradation of, experts and expertise. Last month, when Trump
announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was recommending
the use of masks, he went out of his way to make clear that he wouldn’t be wearing one and that no one else
was obliged.
Is
it any wonder that weeks later, Mike Pence went maskless to the Mayo Clinic? No. He had a boss to
please. He had a statement to make. And the statement was that masks were for
wimpy worrywarts keen to do whatever the eggheads and elites told them.
.
Those
of us with masks on our faces or masks in our pockets, at the ready, are
definitely doing what’s right, but we’re also making our own statements. I know
this because I’ve hurriedly slipped my own mask on in uncrowded outdoor
situations where it almost certainly wasn’t necessary but where others were
masked. I wanted to signal them. I wanted them to know: I take my own tiny role
in vanquishing this pandemic seriously.
Rugged
individualism ends where dying on this breathtaking scale begins. There’s liberty
and then there’s death.
I’ve
often heard that this once-in-a-generation crisis will bring us together,
making us realize how much we need one another.
But
it may well be driving us farther apart. Income inequality hasn’t been writ
this large and gruesomely in decades. Red state vs. blue state and rural vs.
urban tensions steer politicians’ and the public’s actions and words.
And a potentially lifesaving
accommodation is a badge of so much — of too much — more. Masks have unmasked
immeasurable distrust in America. Who’s working on the vaccine for that?
