At first the conspiracy theories were almost charming. The idea that the reason we were all being asked to stay inside was so that government agents could freely change the batteries in the birds (which were actually super-advanced spying devices) only made the world a more interesting place, at least to me, and at least temporarily. What must the life of a mechanical bird minder be like, I wondered? Is there a whole secret world of bird minders, and do they have special cafes and bars where they gather? Is it (gasp!) like Harry Potter, where there is an entire other world existing within our own, in plain sight and yet totally hidden? And what if there were a steam punk version of this world, where instead of periodically changing the batteries in the birds they had to instead wind them up, and instead of being bird minders they were called winders? Quick, somebody write this book so we can all watch the movie.
But then the conspiracies turned a little more tinfoil hat and they began to lose their charm. Suddenly this wasn’t a virus at all, but rather cancer, and we were all getting it not from exposure to other infected individuals but actually from 5G towers and watching too much Netflix, and the only solution was to burn down these towers worldwide. Or maybe nobody was really getting sick at all and it was just a scheme to make Trump look bad in a futile, Deep State attempt to take down Q, and soon the flags and the guns came out and it was all just business as usual, except this time with mothers and their confused children protesting at shuttered playgrounds.
And then the complaints about mask-wearing began, and suddenly I felt like a child being served the same dinner for the third night in a row, and I couldn’t contain my whine of unhappy disbelief. “Are you serious? Toxic masculinity for dinner again?”
Because of course men make up the majority of the people who are refusing to mask. (According to a Gallup poll taken in mid May, 29% of men regularly wear masks, as opposed to 44% of women. More tellingly, 38% of men refuse to ever wear a mask, as opposed to 25% of women.) And of course, the main reason for this is the fear of looking “weak,” most commonly articulated as “I refuse to live in fear.” (I’m not even going to attempt to go down the rabbit hole that is the fear of showing fear , mostly because I’m pretty sure that if I stare at it cross-eyed long enough, like you do with one of those Magic Eye pictures, eventually it will just resolve itself into a big billboard saying “Toxic Masculinity,” and I already mentioned how tired I am of being served that dish yet again.)
In case you still had your doubts about this, look no further than the example of Trump at the Michigan Ford plant this past week, where he actually wore a mask in deference to the plant rules, but then took it off before (he believed) he could be photographed in it, because he didn’t want people to see him wearing it. (“I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”) This sentiment was still echoing days later when large groups gathered to celebrate the Memorial Day holiday. When a young beachgoer was asked why he wasn’t wearing a mask, he referenced Trump. “If he’s not wearing it, I’m not wearing it.”
Somewhere, as that young man was saying those words, America’s one hundred thousandth victim breathed their last, and their bed was made ready for the next victim.
Is it any wonder I find myself longing for the good old days of bird winding?