When I first began my career as a medical journalist, I thought it would be a cinch: I would cover crucial issues in healthcare development as it intersected with race, religion, and sexual identity. My father was the second-most popular urologist in Southeastern Ohio, and my mother semi-annually wrote reviews of multi-vitamin gummies (one of them so damning as to trigger a product recall in the early 2000s), so “medical writing” seemed like a natural field to plant those influential seeds of childhood; to sink the proverbial plow.
After a decade-long stint of SEO-writing for pharmaceutical companies (who, naturally, yearned for Their Drugs to appear ahead of Other People’s Drugs in response to such online queries as “why does it burn when I pee”), I was hired by a notable newspaper to strike the man on the street and see how he rang; to hear and record the typical American’s feeling for these late and awesome medical interventions; these masks and vaccines and mandates of unpeopled space, recommended from sea to shining sea.
Cleaning out my Honda Civic for the cross-country trip, I tried to feel romantic. I was to be a physician, analyzing the American soul as it lay, wracked by plague. In truth, I felt more like a pastor leaving seven years of Oxford theology to minister to the churchgoing souls of Kirsqukee, Alabama—where the females are suspicious of any Christian unwilling to handle a poisonous snake, and the males are distracted by an ongoing blood feud. The newspaper wanted to query the Average American. I was nervous, because a suspicion had already begun to ferment within me: that the Average American is, on average, insane; that “the man on the street” is only superficially there; physically walking to the grocery store, sure, but spiritually trudging some tortuous pilgrim path, limping through the back alleys of the Holy Land, or creeping into a shaded grove to attend a ritual castration. I met with my editor to discuss all this.
“I’m worried,” I told him, “that the answers will be strange.”
“Welp. Strange times. Pandemic and all that.”
“But really strange.”
“Welp, people love strange. Get one of those anti-vaxxers on.”
My editor was a big, beery man. I was prepared for his response.
“Do you remember,” I pressed on, “that business at the anti-abortion march in Washington a few years ago? The boy filmed smirking at a native American man?”
“Yes, well, it wasn’t that in the end, was it? He was caught up in, ah, some sort of protest.”
“Yes—”
“But we covered that too. First the accusation of racism, then the backpedaling of the journalists when they found out he wasn’t racist. People loved both.”
“Yes, but—”
“The boy’s suing the Post now. I don’t see the problem.”
“Did you look into the nature of the protest the boy was, as you say, caught up in?”
“Something about black nationalism.”
“Something about Black Hebrew nationalists accusing native Americans of idol worship and forsaking their duties as a lost tribe of Israel.”
“As—”
“The tribe of Gad, to be specific.”
“Huh.”
“So to clarify, what was initially reported as a white person being racist to native person turned out to be black Hebrews disappointed in the unwillingness of native Americans, whom they presumed to be the ancient Semitic tribe of Gad, to join them (presumably Asher), in avenging Holy Israel on their devilish oppressors, at a largely Catholic protest in which teenagers from all over the country chant the guitar part of ‘Seven Nation Army’ in order to protest what they believe to be federally-sponsored child sacrifice.”
My editor glanced at his phone. “Look, Marc, I admit that the world is an odd place. I really do. It shouldn’t bother a journalist. We’re here to uncover the facts. Now get your ass on the road and don’t come back until you’ve got an editorial on the American mind.”
I got my ass on the road, past purple mountains and soybean expanses, to a little church called St. Maria Goretti in a drive-by town one hour outside of the Windy City. I set up a ten by ten pop-up tent and a folding table in an open parking spot, and held a sign that read “tell me what you think of the vaccine” in a benevolent font. Some bells rang. A Mass let out. A horde of sweating children spilled down the church steps, the males of which began hitting each other with sticks shaken from a magnolia tree in a recent thunderstorm. A redheaded one of them, screaming what sounded like “for Narnia,” hit me in the face.
“Sorry!” A creature I took to be his mother wrenched the stick from his hand and snapped it over her knee, hissing “go back inside and pray nine memorares at the side-altar or no donuts for two weeks” before directing a beautiful smile at my tent. She was tall and oddly muscular, as if restraining some secret suffering or militia training.
“The little rat,” she said, adjusting a veil on her head. “I bet he did it on purpose. Ha, ha! Oh, you’re bleeding.”
She reached into a tiny purse, tore off the clean half of a used-tissue and pressed it to my cheekbone with her middle finger, a gesture which gave me the odd sense of being held in place by a witch. “I’m Esther. Vaccines?” she said, looking at my sign.
“I’m a journalist,” I said, wondering how long she intended to apply pressure.
“Oh, you should talk to my husband.”
“He’s a journalist?”
“No, but he does hate them, ha, ha.”
“Vaccines?”
“No, journalists—John Paul, it’s a journalist. Tell him what you told Margaret about vaccines.”
The young man sported a thin, horrific beard. He squeezed a stack of prayer books in his armpit. He was wearing one of those tweedy, Irish caps in what he appeared to think was a roguish manner.
“When, at the baptism?” John Paul asked, approaching with a pace that quickened when he saw his wife’s finger on my face. “What’s this?”
I blushed. “I—, that is, your son—”
“My what?”
“The boy who, um—”
“Oh, he’s not ours,” his wife tittered, adjusting her finger. “That’s Helena’s kid, Constantine. We call him Constant, because, well, he’s like, all the time, you know? Anyways, we all punish each other’s kids here. Like whosit said, the Church Father: ‘We’re Christians, we share everything but our wives.’ Ha, ha! Honey, Constant hit him in the face with a stick.”
The man relaxed. “Helena’s kid. I was about to say! I don’t have a son. Well, I might have. She’s pregnant.” He pointed at his wife’s abdomen. It seemed a little vulgar, but Esther smiled enthusiastically.
“I am.”
“Congratulations.”
“We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” she smiled.
“Too early to tell?”
“No,” John Paul said, interrupting her. “Well, yes, technically, it is too early to tell. But we’re not finding out, regardless. The whole Baconian project of modern science is really just a desperate attempt to control nature, the free creation of God, which always surprises and surpasses us as always already coming forth from the hand of another. Knowledge of sex prior to birth is just another instance of the overall project of modernity.”
“Which is?”
“To let some little knowledge of a thing delude us into imagining that it proceeds from us.”
“Well, you might want to know how to paint the nursery,” I said, in what I thought was a cheerful and dismissive tone.
“Spy on my child just to get a head-start on painting? Ha, ha!” laughed Esther—still, I must add, with her finger attached to my forehead. “Tell him what you told Margaret about the vaccines.”
“At the baptism? Hey, Margaret!” The man gestured to a sea of children foaming on the other side of the parking lot, out of which, like Venus, another woman rose. “What did I tell you about the vaccine?”
“When? At the—”
“At the baptism, yeah.”
“Oh, gosh, I dunno. Ed!” A man who had been waving a piece of paper and his arms under the nose of the parish priest jerked his head around, like a bird startled out of its mating dance.
“Sorry, Father. What?”
“What did John-Paul say—wait, I remember. You said it wasn’t the vaccine per se, it was the mandate. You cited Aquinas.”
“Is that a doctor?” I asked, wishing that I could find an acceptable way to move the woman’s finger and begin taking notes.
“The Angelic Doctor,” said Margaret, who joined us. She wore a blue dress covered in yellow flowers. Her nearness confirmed and ratified her distant appearance as the goddess, Venus. As a matter of habit, I scanned her hand for a wedding ring. It had one. I figured The Angelic Doctor was a medical show, something like Dr. Oz, but geared towards Christians. I resolved to look at it later, as it could save me some time distilling the American Christian attitude towards vaccination.
“He says human law is fundamentally dispensable,” she finished, to begin whispering to Esther, presumably about my face.
“Right, right, right,” muttered John-Paul into his creeping neck-beard, quietly flicking at a smartphone. “He says that when the law fails in its application to persons or circumstances, a just ruler may ‘allow the precept of the law not to be observed.’ Do you want the Latin?”
“No.”
“Well, even the English makes sense. There have to be exemptions. You can’t rule people like you rule a herd of cows. Law without the possibility of dispensation is given as if it were divine law, which Aquinas says ‘none can dispense but God.’”
I was beginning to wonder about this TV doctor. Mercifully, Esther removed her finger from my head, and began to inspect my wound. I scrabbled in my back pocket for a notepad.
“And the fundamental dispensability of all human law does not derive from the authority of the ruler,” the beard was saying. “No, human law can always be waived because it is always only ever an instantiation of the divine law into the particularities of history, which is always only ever changing and diversifying through the free and creative acts of the human person.”
I wrote down “always only ever” and then crossed it out.
“Yes, which is why Aquinas says all law can be rightly changed on account of the changed condition of man, to whom different things are expedient according to the difference of his condition. Hi, I’m Ed, by the way.” He had neck tattoos. The priest was not far behind.
“So—”
“Sorry about the scratch,” Margaret said.
“What happened?” asked Ed.
“Constantine.” I said, keeping up. Everyone nodded sagaciously. “So vaccine mandates are—”
“They’re bad,” said Margaret. Several children had approached, clinging onto the various fabrics hanging around their parents’ legs. The priest started blessing their foreheads without looking at them. At first, I thought he was fixing their hair.
“I mean, just think of it,” Margaret continued. “We know that having had the disease provides as much, if not better, immunity from it. So why don’t the vaccine mandates come with an exemption for the previously afflicted?”
“Well-” I began to answer, thinking about the need to create a positive culture of vaccination, and, generally speaking, doubting Venus’ confidence regarding natural immunity.
“I’ll tell you why,” said Ed. “Our regime is tyrannical.”
“Yep,” said Esther.
“It attempts to operate on a scale at which the knowledge and love prerequisite for justice are, frankly, impossible.”
“Yep.”
“If it is the case that all human law is fundamentally dispensable, then there can be no human law that is unwilling to attain the knowledge of which particular people ought to be dispensed; which particular circumstances merit a dispensation; when a change occurs in a person or a people which allows for a change in law. To dispense with dispensation is, strictly speaking, inhuman. Tyranny, simply. Rule without love, if you want an epithet. Idolatry, if you want a Thomistic category of vice.”
“A what?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Esther, kindly. A child with a squished face and an amber necklace asked, “Mommy, what’s a dispensation?” to which Margaret, Venus and Mommy, answered: “It’s when you don’t have to collect the eggs because it’s your Feast Day.”
“I like dispensations!”
The conversation was getting long-winded, so I turned on a recorder. I wondered why so many of Ed’s neck tattoos had been crossed out. The priest had finished his blessings. “Honestly, it’s probably why Aquinas uses the image of a father to describe the one who most properly dispenses law: the father is the one who most properly knows when a command is not good for the particular individual, namely, his children. The man of loving discernment is the paragon for all human rule. Only pagans think otherwise.”
“Who?”
“Pagans. Heathens. You, probably, ha, ha.”
I felt hot. The priest wandered away, having apparently made his sole contribution to the controversy.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Ed, who did not know what I was thinking. “Can’t whoever is making the vaccine mandates love the people to whom they mandate vaccinations as a whole? The answer is, yeah, obviously, it’s theoretically possible, but if our regime is acting out of love, where is their effort to find out when the mandate should be dispensed of, done away with, deemed harmful rather than good? I mean they’re not that good, are they?”
“The regime?”
“The vaccines. They’re not so inarguably brilliant at their job to negate even the need to look for the exceptional case. In this county, one-fifth of last month’s new infections occurred in the fully vaccinated.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Some journalist.”
“Hey!” said Esther, flexing her forearm at Ed. Even if it was flexed in jest, it had enough meat on it to look like a real threat.
“Sorry, I just get worked up. Saw a Facebook post about it.”
“You should delete your Facebook, Ed.”
“Yeah, whatever, John-Paul. My question is: If a mandate is an act of governmental love for the whole society, where is the concern for the particular people who make up that self-same society? If corporations are loving their employees into better health by mandating vaccines, where is their investigation of the particular person and circumstance which would make their efforts human, rather than usurpations of God’s prerogatives, and so the typical idolatry of the powerful over the powerless? Can there be a love which is not fundamentally open to the particularity, diversity, and temporality of the object of love? No, of course not. One may as well love one’s wife as an abstract ‘wife’ rather than as a particular person.”
Here Ed gave Margaret a saccharine look I thought to be in very poor taste. Still, she blushed. I began to wonder about the power relations inherent in American Catholicism. That is, how such ugly men managed to get such beautiful wives. To be frank, this question absorbed me so that I missed most of Ed’s tirade, which I print in full, having later listened to the recording:
“Our regime is tyrannical, not because Biden is particularly mean, but as a matter of scale. In attempting to control the behavior of such large masses of people, the effort to inquire into particular circumstances becomes, frankly, inefficient.
A father knows his children, and a leader within a community knows his own, but after a certain number, this effort to know the particular exception wars against the ability to effectively disseminate the law, in this case, the necessity of vaccination.
You might be able to tell five people “get the shot, unless you’ve had the disease, don’t fear death and can reasonably prevent spread, or can give a good reason which I will subsequently evaluate.” But once you try and give those same instructions to a crowd of a thousand, you may as well say “get the shot or don’t, who cares,” for the overall impression is that the thing is not necessary; that there are enough reasons to do otherwise; that if one doesn’t get the shot, no one would know or care why. One is already forgotten in a thousand-person crowd, never mind being sunk into a nation of three hundred million.
It is more effective, insofar as your goal is to rule a population, to cut all the “exception” talk entirely. It gives ‘clarity of message.’ It divides people into two classes, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, and this division can only be superficially described as a political plot to breed rancor and discontent. Rather, such binary divisions are, in the first place, for the sake of the ease of the bureaucratic enactment of law, for the sake of the forms to be filled out, for the sake of easily and identically repeating a mandate from the top all the way down to the bottom, for the sake of billboards and advertisements that simply say “Get Vaccinated” rather than “Get Vaccinated Unless.” Rule over a mass must annul the dispensability of human law, or fail to effectively rule the mass. It’s axiomatic.
But this simply means that, within a mass society, it is always more effective to act like a tyrant and less effective to act like a father—as a ruler knows and loves those over whom he rules. For, if a ruler commits to maintaining the theoretical dispensability of his every ordinance, he must also commit to shrinking the scale of his direct rule to a body, the size of which allows its members to be known and loved in their particular circumstances: This is what Moses did when he grew weary of hearing the cases of all the Israelites. He appointed judges over them, who judged the people by their own lights.
It is an act of creaturely humility that the Church calls subsidiarity, and it is distasteful for tyrants, for it demands that human rule be either distributive or idolatrous; that a ruling elite either gives up authority to those who do have the knowledge and care of a particular community—or they act like gods. Were a tyrant to obey the Church, he would cease to be a tyrant. His power would cease taking on the appearance of sovereignty. He would mediate the vaccine mandate through other leaders who have the genuine authority to declare this or that man’s case “exceptional,” acknowledging the limits of human rule.
In their unwillingness to retain the dispensability of human law in this manner, our regime shows its cards: they do not want to lose an ounce of power, and so they arbitrarily and unjustly ignore the particular case. They may want a healthy population, but not if it comes at the expense of godlike rule. The objective effect of this is idolatry: a regime attempting to instantiate mandates without exceptions can be objectively described as a group of people attempting to rule over others as only God can rule over others.
“But it’s not a top down thing. I mean, there are different states, different companies—there’s not some sort of universal vaccine mandate,” I said, tuning in.
Esther muttered something that sounded like: “Imagine if Fookoh heard that.”
I wanted to ask if Fookoh was a scientist, but Ed was ploughing ahead, caught up in some weird trance, delivering his monologue to the waving top of the magnolia tree.
“There is a type of rule which apes subsidiarity—bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is a technique of tyranny, a vain attempt to administrate a mandate to an entire people, not by giving over the authority of its dispensation to others, but by employing others to identically repeat and enforce the order into smaller and smaller communities. Thus, when face to face with a bureaucrat, one sees, not an independent person, but a person doing his utmost to look, sound, know, and care exactly as the regime looks, sounds, knows, and cares. Bureaucracy is the participation of the ruled in the power of the ruler by way of repetition rather than mediation. This is why most bureaucrats appear mean and cold, by the way: they are not given any authority of their own, they administer the authority of the State.”
“Oh!” John-Paul shouted, scaring me. “Now I remember what I said at the baptism! It’s simple, really. The lack of an exemption for the already afflicted is a sign that signifies the intent of our rulers, namely, to rule us as if we were the kind of beings that can be ruled without the knowledge or love necessary to offer particular dispensations—as animals. This sheds light on the alarmist association of the mandates with the number of the beast, an animal, after all, whose sign marks the heads and foreheads of those oppressed by the tyrant. The tyrant rules those he marks, not as some ominous portent, but by necessity: in his idolatrous imitation of the divine law, he simply cannot rule over the unique, particular people, whose number and constant diversification wearied even Moses’ efforts to keep up. Rather, the tyrant rules the repeatable sign, the artificial image which lays a man-made sameness over an actual diversity, treating people as numbers under Caesar’s census, as reproductions of kind, which is as close to treating man as one of the beasts that you can get.
Ultimately, this is the great weakness of the tyrant: the thing he rules is not the real person, but the person insofar as they are submitted to the regime, which is a ominous way of saying a very silly truth: that the tyrant only rules the ones who are afraid of him, and only insofar as they are afraid of him.”
By this point, the whole parish seemed to have congregated around my tent. “So,” I said, a little weakly. “It’s a no go on the vaccines, is it?”
“What? No,” said Ed. “Just the mandates. Weren’t you listening?”
In truth, I hadn’t been. I had been thinking of my editor, how infuriatingly wrong he was about this fever-dream of a country. I tried to redirect things away from the Angelic Doctor, but most of my other questions were lost in the laughing and screaming of the recently-blessed children.