A Stagecraft Theory of Pandemic Mismanagement
Public Health as Stage Drama
Imagine if you will, a stage theater auditorium. There is an audience, a stage, and a backstage. Audience members buy tickets, take their seats, and enjoy the show. Backstage, the players make their final preparations out of sight of the audience, and when their time to perform comes, enter stage left or stage right, speak their lines, carry out their actions, and/or even sing a tune before returning backstage.
The audience has zero conception of what is occurring backstage - is there interpersonal conflict between the performers, did one of the stars sprain an ankle? Props and backdrops are moved behind curtains via invisible stagehands, costumes change out of view, and stage managers keep everything going according to a well-rehearsed script. After the conclusion, the characters vanish into the abyss of the mind's eye, and the audience typically does not follow the actors after the performance to their homes.
Do people simply cease existing when they leave our perception?
Setting the Viral Scene
We knew very early in the COVID-19 pandemic that restaurant line cooks, the backstage hand of the dining experience, quickly became one of the deadliest professions. We also know that very early in 2020, billionaires went on a full-blown propaganda blitz against any sort of measures to protect the public's health - throwing anything against the wall, including accusations of those who refused COVID-19 infections as unscientific "anti-herders," and astroturfing an economist with zero medical expertise to mislead parents into believing a new deadly and disabling virus was harmless in children with fraudulent data.
We also know that in Manhattan, in Spring 2020, that some nurses and doctors were driven to suicide after struggling to save lives in the utter carnage that was unfolding.
These poor souls exited stage left, never to be seen or heard from again, kept alive only in memory and historical record. How many were great authors, musicians, or other artistic greats that never got an opportunity to have their talents recognized?
The pampered "laptop class" that has never worked a real job, or gotten their hands dirty and calloused, many of which used their academic credentials to misrepresent their fictional navel-gazing as grounded, scientific fact. Many instead abandoned the reality of science to engage in advertising for a deadly and disabling pathogen, only to be financially rewarded for it, completely unaware of their role as a pawn in a much more nefarious political agenda against civil society.
The Mandate to Perform
So much of the modern American consumerist economy, which produces an incredible amount of waste whilst letting many of its children starve, has trapped millions of humans into this thespian prison. Scholar Arlie Hochschild would coin the term "emotional labor" in 1983 to describe the humiliating demands of retail and service workers in America to "perform" for the luxury and comfort of their economic "superiors,” in a Randian delusion fantasizing about the “captains of industry” much like Europe was once dominated by sadistic and delusional leaders who insisted they carried the “divine right of kings.”
Much like modern crusaders against public health, these monarchs felt themselves uniquely entitled to the bodies of their supposed inferiors. The entitlement of wealthy and powerful men to women’s bodies is a mainstay throughout history to our present:
The late billionaire eugenicist Jeffrey Epstein would prey upon teenage girls his associate found working in massage parlors and sexually abuse them.
Neo-Confederate billionaire and funder of pro-viral propaganda, Jeffrey Tucker, believes that teenage girls should be pulled out of public school and given a pack of Virgina Slims alongside a Hooters uniform.
Stanford academic Jay Bhattacharya is hosting a former med student who was dismissed for publicly admitting to sexual misconduct (and has a BOLO sheet against him by his former university) on his platform, "The Illusion of Consensus,” an anti-scientific embarrassment to critical thinking.
Laptop class pundit Yascha Mounk, for pro-viral rag The Atlantic, would write an unscientific rant titled "Open Everything: The Time to End Pandemic Restrictions is Now," in... February 2022, is facing a serious rape allegation which drove The Atlantic to cut ties with him.
The propaganda crusade against public health is a crusade by the wealthy to demand not only financial domination, but also physical domination over the bodily autonomy of their fellow citizens, whose crime was simply being born into a less-wealthy family.
We knew from SARS-1 that mass infections with SARS-CoV-2 could cause serious long-term health complications across the population - this fact was simply ignored in service of mass-infection strategies chasing “herd immunity” - including repeatedly in unvaccinated children. The numbers and research filing in now, four years after COVID-19 came ashore in the United States, are disastrously embarrassing for so many public pro-viral figures who refuse to admit they were wrong.
Surviving “The Fantasy of Normal”
For countless American children, it's already too late. They're trapped backstage in Long COVID disability, or worse, buried under the pestilence amphitheater that the ownership class constructed with fraudulent and refunded PPP loans. This wealthy ownership class then lobbied the government to mandate working Americans don costume and take center stage in an experimental, interactive theater experience unlike never before. The conversion of 3.797 million square miles into a mixed-use stage, with mandatory participation enforced by threats of poverty, starvation, and police brutality, became center stage in a new play: "The Fantasy of Normal."
Yes, you and your children will be constantly sick all the time. You might wind up bedridden with post-acute chronic symptoms, unable to work, and driven to poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair - luckily, we lobbied the government to divert COVID-19 relief funds to further militarize the police so they can knock you around a bit more. Those who understand the damage that COVID-19 can leave on the body and are protecting themselves and others from infection must be mocked, ridiculed, and abused by the laptop class cranks we've tipped a few extra Benjamins to write unscientific social media screeds on a non-stop basis.
America will lose many athletes, artisans, healthcare workers, and other pillars of civilized society in the process of chasing the delusional goose-egg of "herd immunity," "natural immunity," "hybrid immunity," or paying off "immunity debt" via mass, repeated infection, achieving nothing but further replication and evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The cumulative damage of repeated infections on a societal level is quite frankly, unsustainable.
Closing The Curtain
Our reaction to the pandemic, dictated by unscientific propaganda funded by sadistic ghouls, has become a slow-release cyanide pill rammed down society's throat.
Countless women and men developing Long COVID only for their partner to abandon them, lose the ability to work, and fall into the shadows of the backstage. Parents discovering that their child has developed cognitive and neurological impairment after their latest "mild" infection, realizing his or her future is going to all the more difficult. Family ties being shredded as one chooses to gamble with the health of a loved one. The fabric of civil society has been frayed to an outrageous extreme.
All this suffering, hidden in the backstage, as our remaining players are rapidly shuffled out to perform for the audience's entertainment, feeling their physical forms continue to decline in a slow burning wildfire blaze of rampant pestilence.
As the curtains close upon the end of Act II, we will have a brief intermission with wine and snacks available in the lobby. In our dramatic third act of pestilence theatre, we await the thrilling conclusion of class struggle and existential dread across a backdrop of pestilence slowly drowning us all.
If you find yourself staring into the mirror in the restroom, perhaps consider if you’re truly satisfied with your placement in the Dramatis personae.
