The center-liberal
view of resistance to vaccines in the pandemic has rested on what it thinks is
a rational view of history: the government is basically looking out for the people
and rarely ever lies or misleads in its larger policies. I found a perfect
expression of this in, where else, the NYT, in the “ethicist” column. In that
column, some clueless type asks a question and the ethicist answers it. The
question this time is one of inheritance – which perks up the ears of the
country club set that runs the nyt – with the questioner thinking of disinheriting
his daughters who have become rightwing anti-vaxxers. In response, the ethicist
fabulates a response beginning like this:
“Back in the late 1960s, when the “generation gap” gained
currency, many families were divided over political questions, involving the
Vietnam War, women’s rights, racial justice. Facts were relevant to these
disputes, but at the heart of the matter were moral questions — e.g., When is a
war just? Should social roles be assigned to people on the basis of sex?”
This is as fictious
a view of the 1960s as anything woven out of thin air by the maddest Trumpite. By
“elevating” the notion of “moral questions” over the “relevance” of fact
questions, we just wipe away a whole dirty record of lies that actually
happened in the sixties, lies told by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations,
lies that led to what, at that point in time, was known as the “credibility gap”
– a gingerly country club name for lying, which is the shall not be named of
the U.S. establishment press – beginning with the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident,
including the secret war in Laos and in Cambodia, fed by multitudinous lies
about the conduct and prospects of the war that were standard issue of what
reporters then called the “five o’clock follies”, and of course ending, domestically
(in a domestic scene where the FBI was engaging in a death squadish project
called COINTELPRO while the CIA was engaging in systematic illegal activities
called, among other things, Operation Chaos) with Watergate.
It is a fact that
rightwing politicians are trying to rewrite or forget the racist history of the
U.S. by attacking critical race theory in schools – and it is also a fact that
centrist-liberals are engaged in rewriting a history of the U.S. government
that assigns doubts about the veracity of the government, the press, or the
establishment in general to the precincts of the conspiracy theory set. In
other words, both sides work very hard to distort U.S. history. The facts, for
instance, about CIA links to narco-rich warlords in Laos are wished aside in
the nice pink picture the ethicist has of the sixties. The fact that the
government, at many levels, poisoned and drugged black men – for instance, in
the MKUltra experiments with LSD supervised by Harris Isabel in Lexington,
Kentucky – just isn’t in the picture. Nor are the literally hundreds of
thousands of cancers caused by fallout from atom bomb tests that were performed
by the government in the 1950s and sixties, the effect of which was strenuously
denied by the relevant government agency, the AEC, while secretly AEC
scientists were sounding the alarm about the effects of the fallout. Etc. While
the NYT has cheerfully forgotten this history, popular culture has not. Just
watch, say, Stranger Things, a popular show among teens, and you will have a
more accurate view of the US government’s view of what one AEC document called
the “low use” population than you will get from the collected ten year’s worth
of the ethicist.
The struggle
between fantasy histories of the U.S. is where we are at. You don’t have to
chose one or the other.
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