"Herd immunity": Media complicity in political brainwashing
Stephen H. Provost
Herd immunity.
Donald Trump once called it “herd mentality,” confusing it with the mindset of his most ardent followers.
But it really means something else: killing innocent people by encouraging them to become infected with a highly infections virus. And leaving others to deal with the aftereffects if they’re lucky enough to recover.
It’s tempting to compare the concept to “collateral damage,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “death or injury inflicted on something other than an intended target, specifically: civilian casualties of a military operation.”
If we accept this parallel, we should ask what the objectives of this particular “operation” is. One is to sustain the party in power by falsely portraying a colossal health-care failure as a spectacular success. Another is to sustain corporate profits by forcing people to expose themselves to a virus for the sake of “productivity.”
The term “collateral damage” dehumanizes the civilians killed in a military operation as the price of “victory” — a price the victims never agreed to pay.
To date, some 220,000 Americans have died and more than 8.2 million have been infected by the virus. But it’s easy to dismiss even such staggering figures as “just numbers.” So it’s helpful to rehumanize some of those victims who have been part of our lives but are no longer with us: baseball Hall-of-Famer Tom Seaver, singer-songwriter John Prine, former presidential candidate Herman Cain, actor Nick Cordero, Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy, football placekicker Tom Dempsey, jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, country star Joe Diffie...
These people might be called collateral damage of the Trumpublican approach to COVID-19 — if “collateral damage” were an apt analogy to “herd immunity.”
But it’s not.
Herd immunity is far more insidious. Collateral damage occurs when you drop a bomb on a military target, and kill some innocent bystanders in the process. Herd immunity is more like dropping a bomb on innocent bystanders and telling them, “Hey, don’t move. We’re going to drop a bomb on you. It might hurt now, but it will be a good thing in the long run. Maybe not for you, but for others.”
Herd immunity amounts to asking civilians to take part in a kamikaze attack. Or sending them out to fight a dangerous, well-armed enemy with zero military training and no one covering their back.
Politicians are notorious for employing euphemisms to hide what they’re really saying. White racism is watered down as the “alt right.” Assisted suicide is euphemized as “death with dignity. Assassinations are “targeted killings,” and torture is an “enhanced interrogation technique.” An undeclared war is sanitized as “regime change,” and people imprisoned without a trial are “taken into protective custody.” Armed mobs are “militias” (at least if they’re predominantly white).
Media complicity
What’s perhaps most interesting about these euphemisms isn’t their use by proponents of the acts they describe. It’s their adoption by mainstream media outlets.
That’s what should be raising eyebrows.
Why on earth are the media accepting the term “herd immunity” as a substitute for, say, “mass infection” or “deliberate exposure”? In doing so, they’re substituting a hoped-for outcome (there’s no guarantee that it’ll happen) for what they’re actually doing. It would be like labeling genocide as “peace” or a policy of deporting poor people as “the end of poverty.”
The media have become so used to deferring to various groups’ right to self-identify, that they’ve failed to understand there’s a huge difference between that and spreading disinformation. It’s one thing to use terms such as transgender or Black as opposed to pejorative terms. It’s quite another to use euphemisms that mask the real nature of a word for the sake of perpetuating propaganda.
It’s not just propaganda. It’s patently false.
And the media are complicit for reinforcing this falsehood.
It’s not “herd immunity,” it’s mass infection and deliberate exposure. But perhaps the term herd immunity can be instructive in one sense: A herd is a group of stupid, docile, domesticated animals. Like cattle. They’re herded into an area by those who control them and, ultimately, exploited for their milk and butchered for their meat.
That’s what the Trumpublicans want to do. They want to use America as their own personal herd, to be exploited and butchered at their pleasure.
Vote Nov. 3, or sooner, and tell them in no uncertain terms that this herd is ready for one hell of a stampede.
Featured photo: Downtown Dallas stampede by Leia Scofield, Creative Commons 2.0