By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Monday, February 14, 2022
So that was it, wasn’t it?
The Super Bowl was our unofficial return
to normality for the United States. A relatively normal game, with a halftime
show geared toward people in their 40s. But the “normal” part was the crowd. It
was the general atmosphere. The Chinese Olympics that nobody is watching
feature athletes getting served by people in hazmat suits. Meanwhile, SoFi stadium gathered over 70,000 fans for the big game,
and the cameras panning the vast crowd showed the spectators to be almost
entirely maskless.
This was the end of the pandemic in the
United States — or at least the primary signal that, as a culture, we are ready
for the end.
Hearing this may be enraging, of course. A
significant number of Americans lost loved ones in the last two years and have
felt that the country never took Covid seriously enough. Fine. It also might
enrage you perhaps because your children are still going to schools a few miles
away from the stadium wearing masks, or are subject to other forms of health
theater, with general mask mandates in L.A. County having applied to everyone two and
older. I understand those feelings. I’m just
like the rest of you in the blue states, pleading with the local school
board for relief.
That a football game could “end” a
pandemic may seem absurd — what does it have to do with the spread, with the
facts of the disease and the latest variants, or with the rate of vaccine
uptake? But cultures never make sense as pure calculations about inputs and
outputs. Ultimately, we make a collective cultural decision about whether we
are in a state of emergency or not. A big, raucous crowd of unmasked fans at a
football game in America is normal. Broadcasting that game — and studiously
refusing to reference or mention the pandemic — is a giant flashing sign. You
probably have moved on or are about to move on. We’re moving on, too.
In an age where the Internet has destroyed
and divided up most of America’s former mass-broadcast culture, the Super Bowl
is one of the only events that we seem to experience collectively.
And it is fitting that things should go
this way, because American sports cued the beginning of the pandemic era when
the Utah Jazz’s star player Rudy Gobert contracted Covid, and suddenly the
whole world seemed to shut down. Gobert had treated Covid as a joke just the
day prior, touching all the microphones in a press conference to show he wasn’t
afraid of it. Hours after testing positive, the NBA suspended the season. Those
were the moments when everything first seemed to be abnormal.
Gobert recovered. By the time he tested
positive again this January, it was hardly even news at all. One bets that a
humorous guy like Gobert might be treating Covid a little like a joke again.
Too soon?
In either case, the sight of 70,000 people
maskless in California is going to further enflame and enrage anti-maskers in
California, who want an off-ramp for the pandemic. It will add more weight to
arguments that children in New York or Illinois are already at less risk of a
severe outcome from Covid than a vaccinated adult — than any of the 70,000
adults at the Super Bowl — and yet they are being singled out for the special
extension of indoor mask and distancing mandates. Their parents can’t come into
school for Valentine’s Day parties.
These absurdities will not stand more than
a few weeks.
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