Toxic Individualism

We clearly don’t need courts to interpret statutes, regulations or the Constitution. We can cut way back on having police officers protect or control crowds. And doctors, university research facilities, government agencies aimed at protecting health, safety, and consumer rights are a total waste of money.  US intelligence agencies, federal policing authorities (ATF, FBI, etc.) are wasting taxpayer money every day investigating foreign interference in our elections or the non-existent threat of “domestic terrorism.” They know the immigrants of color are mostly criminals and deadbeats, so best to close our borders completely.

There are so many individuals, without any real authority, training or medical knowledge and experience out there who are somehow able to tell you without hesitation that they absolutely know that a government mandate to wear masks or close down a business during a pandemic violates the US Constitution. Their 2nd Amendment rights will allow them to control crowds. That the novel coronavirus is not much more than a bad flu, that we are almost over it and that China intentionally exported that virus to the rest of the world. They know that Russia did not mount a major campaign to spread disinformation during our election cycles. 

Each one of those positions is wrong, but a huge part of this nation continues under the belief that they are right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. Civilians with no legal education telling judges and specialized lawyers, people without a scintilla of medical qualifications, individuals with no access to the relevant underlying research contradicting experts based only on what they think should be. What’s worse, they act as they have the legal power to overrule the experts and act without any regard for the lives of others. Unilateral, private and unsubstantiated actions. Some have guns if you want to confront their ignorance. 

If you ask, they will tell you that they have an exceptionally reliable set of sources – from tabloid newspapers to so many stories online to information given to them by friends or generated by “opinion” television. To maintain the purity of their vision, they also filter out any nasty contradictory information as unreliable or biased beyond the pale of their credibility. These sources let them make life altering medical diagnoses on their own and issue and act on their own legal opinions without asking a court. And should you challenge their “opinions masquerading as facts,” they simply laugh at your idiocy and cite the greatest affirmation of their position possible: the President of the United States of America. QED.

Carolina Miranda, writing for the November 1st Los Angeles Times, addresses this seemingly uniquely American vision of Me, My Rights and My Individual Power that allows individuals to make major life and death decisions on behalf of others based solely on their unsupportable opinions, which she calls the “American myth” resulting in “toxic individualism.” Or what she describes as “The focus on individual rights over the greater good is one for which we are paying with our health and our lives.” The American collective, the notion of that United States where we are all in this together, appears to be unraveling.

“The summer has seen a cinematic array of meltdowns in supermarkets and restaurants across the country, all inspired by the simple request to wear a mask. A customer inside a North Hollywood Trader Joe’s threw down her basket and blasted frontline staff with obscenities. A woman at a New York City bagel shop stalked up on another customer and deliberately coughed in her face.

“And it has only escalated from there. In May, a guard at a Family Dollar in Flint, Mich., was shot and killed after telling a customer that her child needed to wear a mask in the store. During that same period, gangs of armed paramilitaries (calling them “militias” is too romantic) showed up at the Michigan State Capitol to protest stay-at-home orders and mask mandates — at one point, brandishing semiautomatic weapons inside government chambers.

“Much of it is fueled by the belief that these measures represent an undue restriction on individual freedom. Former San Francisco Giants slugger Aubrey Huff, responding to ‘soy-boy professors and the blue check mark crazy cat ladies’ ‘guilt shaming’ him for declaring mask enforcement ‘unconstitutional,’ said in a Twitter video: Just because others may be susceptible to the disease ‘doesn’t mean the whole world has to shut down.’ He added that he would ‘rather die from coronavirus’ than wear ‘a damn mask.’

“Never mind that if he does die, he’ll likely take others with him, since communicable diseases don’t just strike individuals. ‘The point is that masks do not just protect the wearer, they protect others,’ stated a Scientific American dispatch from May… We live in a culture of rugged individualism run amok. Call it toxic individualism. Because in the case of this pandemic, it is literally toxic.

“Example-in-chief: the Trump White House, where masks for long stretches of the pandemic have been a rarity and which may have been the source of at least one super spreader event in October (Rose Garden virus-gate), after which the president himself was hospitalized with COVID-19. When he returned to the White House, he proceeded to rip off his mask, action-movie style.

“Less than a week before the election, Vice President Mike Pence’s team is taking its turn at the virus wheel as the infection blooms among his staff… According to the continuously updated figures published by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, as of Wednesday, the United States is among the top 14 countries in the world when it comes to case fatalities from the novel coronavirus, and we are among the top five nations in the world when it comes to per capita deaths…

“[Where does this self-importance come from?] A good piece of it is tied to the cultural legacy of manifest destiny and the settlement of the West: the myth of the up-by-the-bootstraps pioneer who helped tame the uninhabited West in the name of the United States.

“Never mind that the land was already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. And never mind, as historian Greg Grandin points out in his book ‘The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,’ that the nation building was not the work of rugged individuals working alone but a lot of people working in tandem, with the regular support of the U.S. military and the U.S. Treasury — for what was, to put it mildly, a government handout on an epic scale. (‘What we think of as the West, since its inception, has been the domain of large-scale power, of highly capitalized speculators, businesses, railroads, agricultural, and mining,’ he writes.)

Even so, the mythos of individualism has infused both our culture and our politics… Herbert Hoover hammered the idea into the popular consciousness by popularizing (possibly coining) the phrase ‘rugged individualism’ in a 1928 campaign speech — in which he described a choice between ‘rugged individualism and a European philosophy of ... paternalism and state socialism.’ It was an idea that continued to be echoed decades later by presidents such as Ronald Reagan, who once quipped at a 1986 news conference that ‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ’

In culture, rugged individualism frequently materializes in the form of the solo cowboy: ‘The Lone Ranger’ popularized by ’30s-era radio, the westerns of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and the strapping Marlboro Man of cigarette advertising campaigns — a figure that the Economist once described as epitomizing ‘resilience, self-sufficiency, independence and free enterprise.’

Rugged individualism manifests as the solitary, sharp-tongued justice seekers of the 20th century — the early noir detectives, such as Carroll John Daly’s tough guy, Race Williams, and the self-absorbed Batman of comics and film. They are archetypes that, as literary scholar Susanna Lee, author of ‘Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History,’ noted in a recent essay, may make for great entertainment, but don’t offer great role models in a pandemic, when ‘a fully rounded human and worker among workers — able to tolerate discomfort and put others first’ is what we need… Instead, we have the opposite. Trump has shown zero empathy for the more than 226,000 Americans who have succumbed to the disease. At his rallies recently, he complains that all CNN does is talk about ‘COVID, COVID, COVID.’” Miranda.

Instead, the President appears rather nonchalantly to embrace obvious mythology and effectively infect and even kill his most ardent supporters. “A rigorous attempt to gauge the after-effects of 18 of the president’s reelection rallies, all held in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggests they have led to more than 30,000 additional cases and at least 700 additional deaths.

“Those casualties would not have occurred if the campaign events had not taken place, according to a team of Stanford researchers. Media coverage of the rallies made clear there was little effort to follow guidelines about social distancing, and mask use was optional for attendees, who typically numbered in the thousands. (Indeed, face coverings were disparaged by the president on several occasions.)” LA Times, October 31st.

While the 20th century Marlboro man pictured above was mostly killing himself, the 21st century mask-fighting equivalent isn’t content to die without taking a few others with him. The former notion of a selfless and bold rugged individual has collapsed into a widespread pile of unrepentant Trump-inspired narcissism. PS The COVID-19 virus thanks them all for the best feeding imaginable.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I continue to seek a good example where unbridled hubris has ever served any individual or nation well.