Face Masks Are Our COVID

Nov 09, 2023

Ordinary artifacts at the center of foreign policy.

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Some Americans still wear face masks—to do what exactly? To prevent the spread of COVID-19? To signal their continuing vigilance amid growing public unconcern? As a now permanent part of their hygienic habitus?

Some Americans still wear face masks—to do what exactly? To prevent the spread of COVID-19? To signal their continuing vigilance amid growing public unconcern? As a now permanent part of their hygienic habitus?

Over the last three years, I have tried to avoid thinking about the particular motivations and reasonings that lead people around me to their various positions on masks, vaccines, and other health measures. Not least because those people were often so eager to explain themselves and attack others. People like my conservative family, who feared the vaccines as others feared COVID-19, and my academic colleagues, who imagined such people to be deluded, dangerous, and condemnable, each enjoyed speculating about the psychology of what quickly became the opposing team.

Both had some points. Those suspicious of and resistant to public health protocols noted the strange pleasure that those who followed them, mostly on the left, seemed to take in ostentatious displays of virtue at the intersection of biology and politics—remember how people changed their social media profile photos to masked versions of themselves? This was more than simple rule-following in an emergency; it was an opportunity to showcase one’s personal goodness. It was, of course, strange to see conservatives denounce such people as conformists happily trading their liberties for the promise of safety—hadn’t Republicans beaten us about the ears for decades with patriotic blather and bullied us into joining the dramaturgy of the global war on terrorism? They’d made Barack Obama wear the flag pin; they could at least wear masks.

If the left saw the hypocrisy of the right, it seemed unable to detect its own. Although the government lied to the public in the first months of the COVID-19 crisis—first downplaying the usefulness of masks, then insisting on them, to prevent a run on what was initially a scarce resource—few progressives seemed to hear the echoes of the Bush administration’s mendacity about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or successive presidents’ deceptions about the Vietnam War. In all these cases, the state suspended civil liberties (in the case of the COVID-19 crisis, freedom of assembly) for the sake of a crisis about which its spokespeople deceived us. Shouldn’t we expect—indeed, be encouraged to find—people protesting being lied to, being imposed on by those who think they’re too stupid for the truth?

People wear masks in Times Square in New York City on May 21, 2020.Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

If masks became immediately and intensely political in the spring of 2020, it was only in the barest sense of politics as partisanship. They became team symbols. But, like the flags and flag pins that appeared across the country after the 9/11 attacks or the safety pins that progressives briefly wore to protest Donald Trump’s election as president, they were simple, even insubstantial, means of demarcating “us” and “them.” They did not, like World War II Victory Gardens or campaigns to collect scrap metal, encourage citizens to work together to common ends or provide—even if their practical contribution to the war effort was minimal—experiences of solidarity from which a postwar world better than the disaster of the present could be imagined.

Indeed, the response to COVID-19 had in common with the Iraq and Vietnam wars the strange character of demanding sacrifices on the basis of falsehoods and of foreclosing, in the very manner of making that demand, the possibility that a mass mobilization could become the basis for new forms of civic inclusion, as had been seen during the world wars. We experienced, rather, a mass immobilization, a demand to stay at home, isolate, cover ourselves. We retreated either into an obedient, atomized self-concealment or, for those who protested, a confused, aimless howl of refusal, wishing the nation would go back to the “normal” preceding 2020—that is, a normal of falling life expectancies, obscenely routine bankruptcies for health care costs, and collective immiseration expressed as screeching, seemingly insuperable pseudo-political conflict.

Most of us, in our stoic resolution or stupid indifference, are carried through crises, our lives and sense of integrity returned to us ultimately undisturbed. But every crisis also leaves behind not only the dead but those who persist in their horror and grief over what has happened. Years ago, after a family reunion, my mother told me about a cousin of hers who, after coming home from his tour of duty in Vietnam, bought a house in the woods, sealed the property off with barbed wire, and withdrew from the world. He never spoke to our family again. Only in a physical sense had he “made it back.”

A health care worker kisses a woman’s forehead after she received a COVID-19 vaccine in Sibaté, Colombia, on Feb. 24, 2021RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP via Getty Images

On any drive through Chicago, my hometown, I pass several government buildings flying the black-and-white POW/MIA flag. Originally a symbol of protest against the U.S. abandonment of American soldiers taken prisoner or missing in action during the Vietnam War, the flag, over the past half-century, has become a strangely enduring and bipartisan symbol of…something.

Legislation passed in 2019 (sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren) mandates it to be flown over public buildings. It cannot be that a majority in Congress, or even a sizable minority of those flying the flag, think, in a kind of political mythology out of Rambo: First Blood Part II, that there are still American soldiers in Vietnamese prison camps, held decades after the war for inscrutable diplomatic (or sadistic communist) motives. Disconnected from its original urgency, from any particular aim, the flag appears as a vague injunction to remember the Vietnam War, ranged alongside similar fading appeals on billboards across the nation to “never forget” 9/11.

There is no public memorial for those lost to COVID-19. We have had no “mission accomplished” moment (perhaps because the last one proved so ironic and ill-fated). We were never told that our compliances, or even the mass deaths, were made for the sake of a better future; no one dares suggest there can be one. The last maskers, whether there is any medical basis or only a kind of bitter clinging (as Obama once said in another context) to their choice, are living emblems of our most recent lost war.

This article appears in the Spring 2023 print issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Subscribe now to support our journalism.

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Blake Smith is a Fulbright scholar in North Macedonia.

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