Great essay on Covid panic here from Freddie de Boer. Mostly nails what’s going on as a form of inter-elite cultural competition. He’s also noticed something else I observed as well.
Bogostโs piece is an absolute classic, maybe the classic, in a particularly strange form of worry porn that progressives have become addicted to in the past half-decade. Itโs this thing where they insist that they donโt want something to happen, but they describe it so lustily, imagine it so vividly, fixate on it so relentlessly, that itโs abundantly clear that a deep part of them wants it to happen.
Indeed, it’s pretty clear that many of them have a deep yearning both for the apocalypse (in the Greek sense) and what they will be able to take away from people because of it. Glad I’m not the only one to have noticed it. It is, though, hard to miss these days.
I’m glad de Boer also mentions the “quiet, throbbing need” that many people seem to have for these calamitous events to occur. He is deliberately hinting at the sexual dimension of this catastrophism, and he’s not mistaken to do so. I’ve noticed it as well. It’s perverse in a way that most of the rather tame sexual practices a lot of the PMC thinks are perverse are not.
Good piece. I think de Boer gets at a lot of what is going on with the PMC and the pandemic. As a side note, if the people squawking on Twitter and in PMC places actually gave a damn they’d be doing more to make sure schools stayed open and low-wage frontline workers were better taken care of. See any of that? Hell no. That’s how you know what all their inane noisemaking is really about.