Your Patriotism Will Not Protect You: Anti-Masking Movements and the “War on Terror”

• Published in: Literature and medicine 2021-01, Vol.39 (2), p.212-216
• Main Authors: Iwai, Yoshiko, Khan, Zahra, DasGupta, Sayantani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; American literature; Coronaviruses; Heroism & heroes; Humans; Imagery; Immunization; Literary devices; Logic; Masking; Medicine; Metaphor; Movement; Opacity; Pandemics; Racism; Slogans; Sontag, Susan (1933-2004); Terrorism; War; Websites
• ISSN: 0278-9671; 1080-6571; 1080-6571
• DOI: 10.1353/lm.2021.0019

Susan Sontag famously discussed the problems of this metaphorical language in Illness as Metaphor, and this framing has become even more dangerous in the COVID-19 pandemic.2 The authors of this essay previously discussed the dangers of the militaristic #healthcareheroes metaphor that emerged in the COVID-19 era.3 We examined how this metaphor became a call for self-sacrifice on the part of healthcare workers while they lacked essential personal protective equipment (PPE), and yet were celebrated with costly military flyovers. While military metaphors, and metaphors in medicine in general, can be used to arouse and heighten sensorial or emotional experiences, they are often at the expense of the nuance that is required to implement public health measures that function beyond the scope of political parties. Media coverage of quarantine protestors showed them wearing camouflage gear and bulletproof vests, armed with nooses, axes, and guns, protesting mask-wearing mandates.6 While former President Trump repeatedly pointed fingers at China, and COVID-related anti-Asian hate crimes rose in the U.S., these protesters carried to the fore of American consciousness racist imagery and slogans, including, “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves, I am a free human being” and the infamous Nazi phrase from Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” In “Of Ziplock Bags and Black Holes: The Aesthetics of Transparency in the War on Terror,” Rachel Hall argues that the aesthetics of transparency belongs to governments who “understand security in terms of visibility” and that it is motivated by “a desire to turn the world (the body) inside-out such that there would no longer be any secrets or interiors, human or geographical, in which our enemies (or the enemy within) might find refuge.”