THE BURDEN OF BAD SLOGANS

During winters, my urban church hosted homeless men to sleep on cots in its basement. Between 15-20 men did so on any given night.

Most of the men were amiable and respectful and chatted with me. One of them admitted, “There are people who would let me stay with them. But sometimes I drink too much and misbehave. So I wore out my welcome.”

Typically, the guys began trickling in at 6:00 PM. They talked, read or goofed around until lights-out at 9:30. Some of the guys had jobs and needed their sleep.

Some others didn’t have jobs and wanted to stay up later. One night, one man was urging the others to postpone their collective bedtime. A colloquy ensued. Thinking he was delivering the dispute-winning one-liner, the lights-on advocate called out for all to hear, in an urban cadence and tone:

“If your eyes are closed, the lights are off!”

Despite his confident delivery, the lights-on advocate’s cute assertion was plainly false. Eyelids are the thinnest skin on the human body; light easily passes through them. Even sleeping people can tell when the lights are switched on in a dark room. No one tries to fall asleep with the lights on.

__

Slogans often have superficial appeal. But just because a saying is snappy doesn’t mean it’s true; it often means it isn’t true. As one of many examples, if you let pseudo-pithy lines from pop songs inform your love life, you’re destined to suffer and fail. And then suffer some more as you cry in your beer. Night after night, as the songs say.

Nonetheless, as Madison Avenue, DC public-relations firms, totalitarian governments and federal bureaucrats—the line between the four is blurry—know, and Orwell knew, people readily fall for aphorisms. People recite these as if they’re gospel.

—

The Scamdemic was fueled by bromides that failed to withstand the slightest scrutiny. For example:

“If it, i.e., the Covid mitigation: lockdowns/masks/tests saves just one life, it’s worth it!”

Many simple-minded people invoked this one-liner with great conviction. But what did it mean to “save a life” from a virus? The vast majority of those who were said to have been killed by Covid were old and worn out or died from medical mistreatment. And the mitigation measures didn’t help; there was no significant difference in death rates between places that intervened aggressively and those that didn’t.

Most people never seriously considered the vast, deep damage to billions of the supermajority of vital people caused by inducing a social and economic coma. Nor did they make any effort to quantify the damage. Thus, how could they say this damage was “worth it?”

The various Covid interventions seemed like doing something. And to many, doing something felt better than not doing something. The “if it saves one life” fallacy should have been obvious to anyone who considered it for five seconds.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve!”

It was obvious that the two-week lockdown was a bait-and-switch/camel’s nose under the tent” stratagem that would last much longer than two weeks. Would a virus wither and die because some people hid from each other for two weeks? Or four, or six, or more?

“Stop the Spread!”

How does one stop the spread of a virus when tens of millions still had to go to work, buy food and live life? Essential workers who worked alongside multiple others had to go home and live with their families.

“Novel Coronavirus!”

Aren’t all viruses to some extent novel? Countless viruses inhabit human bodies at any one time. Was SARS-CoV-2 ever definitively linked to unspecific symptoms common to many respiratory viruses? When had societies ever quarantined healthy people as other viruses were going around?

“Follow The Science!”

Whose Science? Science is largely about discerning trends. Early 2020 data from Italy and Spain unmistakably revealed that the virus didn’t threaten healthy people under 75. No serious scientist would have disregarded this core, age-stratification trend. But many unserious, nominal “scientists” did, and imposed one-size-fits-all restrictions.

“No one is safe until everyone is safe!”

The notion that all were endangered by this virus was knowingly disconnected from reality. So was the idea that old, sick people are ever fully safe. Nor, for that matter, is anyone ever completely safe. Life has always required people to tolerate a wide array of risks, many of which are unevenly distributed.

“We’re all in this together!”

Clearly, everyone wasn’t in the same boat. Tens of millions of people could work from home while others couldn’t. Many hid out in vacation homes as checks rolled in for doing little or no work. Simultaneously, many who had businesses, lost them.

“Follow the protocols!”

Before March 2020, who thought or spoke of “following protocols?" Making people stay six feet from others, wear masks and walk in one direction in supermarkets, et al. was theater. But to many, labeling such nonsense “protocols” made bureaucrats seem sophisticated and worth obeying.

“The New Normal”

This slogan was designed to build resignation: don’t even think of objecting or asking questions about absurd rules.

“Children are Super Spreaders!”

This demagogic construct fostered the sci-fi notion of uncontrolled contagion, and villainized those who said kids should have been in school. “Spikes,” “surges,” “hot spots,” etc. were used to sell the myth of an aggressive, stealthy viral killer.

“Public health is economic health.”

Isolating people from each other did nothing to advance public health. But it did seriously harm the economy, upon which people depend for jobs, goods and services and thus, health.

“My mask protects you!”

I don’t fear the virus, so don’t worry about protecting me. If your mask blocks viruses, it should protect you no matter what I do. Your mask is a symbol, used to instill fear. But you do you.

“The shots are safe and effective!”

Immune systems had already shown themselves to be more effective than the shots were promised to be. Were the shots safe? Many people know multiple vaccinees who were injured, and many more injectees were dying from non-Covid causes than is normal. There were no long-term safety studies. Despite the guarantee that the shots would stop the spread, they failed to do so. Jabbers were more likely to become ill than were the unjabbed.

“Pandemic of the Unvaccinated!”

The notion that if you didn’t inject, you’d die was clearly false. It also connoted that “If you didn’t inject, we hope you die.” This was an odd notion coming from people who think of themselves as nice. It was also thoroughly false; plenty of injectees got sick and died, while plenty who didn’t inject were fine.

At every turn, there was another slogan. Each one was easily disproven.

—

In general, people resent being talked down, or lied, to. When bosses, teachers, coaches, advertisers or politicians rely on simplistic, nonsensical sayings, their employees, students, players, customers and constituents mock and then ignore them. Those who repeatedly invoke blather “lose the room.”

Yet, somehow, during Coronamania, most people didn’t perceive that, via their bogus slogans, their government and its complicit media were talking down, and lying, to them. The Covid slogans didn’t express truth or logic; to the contrary, slogans were used to promote lies. Instead of being widely accepted and recited, the Covid slogans’ silliness and widespread invocation should have tipped any thinking person to how phony all of the government-sponsored measures were.

The slogans were trite affirmations, designed to make people feel like part of a tribe and to keep them from thinking. In that way, the Covid slogans resembled such Presidential candidates’ slogans as “Bring Us All Together,” “Hope and Change,” “Make American Great Again” and “Build Back Better.” Neither the candidates who invoked these slogans nor the Covid interventions were intrinsically compelling; each had to be manipulatively packaged to gain favor, just as weak TV sitcoms use laugh tracks to subliminally prompt viewers to laugh at unfunny jokes.

A government and media that could lie, via vapid slogans, to the public as blatantly and continuously as it has over the past four years showed that it feels unaccountable for doing so. They government and media calculated that most of their subjects and consumers were suckers for cheesy propaganda.

They were right.