To help him "think through" this crisis, Le'vy carries with him, Ã"degreestienne de La Boe'tie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. (This, the reader absorbs as a deliberate put down of the hoi polloi in the Land of the Free.) Conjuring up Jacques Lacan, BHL posits two possible explanations for the global capitulation, the prostration before the spiky feet of "King Corona." BHL thinks, like Lacan, that "humanity can choose between denial and delirium, neurosis and psychosis." And this is where his gain-of-gumption anxiety becomes more riveting, as performance:
Examples of the denial and neurosis are Donald Trump's boneheaded, unspeakably irresponsible attempts to deny the pandemic, his subsequent call to "Liberate Michigan," and the striking tweets in which the lunatic U.S. commander-in-chief promotes conspiracy theories about the birth and propagation of the virus.
That's right, our president has a birther complex, first Obama, now Corona (both linked by ACA coverage).
The second Lacunian choice, which BHL seems to prefer, if the title is any indication, is the proposition that we've all gone quite mad. (This is all the more believable, for reasons we'll get to later.) He projects to the nosebleeds in the balcony,
[T]he second choice-psychotic delirium-is the spectacle of leaders so terrified by the threat of a Corona Nuremberg that they deemed it more prudent to put the world on hold, caring little for the outbreaks of hunger, violence against the poor, and authoritarian takeovers that were sure to follow.
Out of nowhere, BHL is writing this book as a "midpoint review" to catalogue and to un-haruspicate, to stuff the guts back into the omen bird, and to tell of "the blows dealt to our innermost metaphysics during this strange crisis." Hmph.
The five chapter event is full of delightful, often enlightening surprises, especially if you play your reader-response cards right. In the first chapter Le'vy trotskys out the aforementioned Foucault for a macro-micro archeological dig at power. He reminds us of the ruminations in M and C of the rise of the medical model and its close proximity to the prison model, both requiring constant surveillance and "care" meted out by our jailers and nurses. He writes, "Discipline and Punish, yes, but first The Birth of the Clinic and its archaeology of a 'medical gaze' that would go on to become the 'power/knowledge' of the present day." Le'vy sees our astonishingly quick taking-to the pandemic protocols, such as they were, under Trump, with happy-seeming memic "lockdowns" and expressive decorative masks, and Zoom sessions where we shared our isolation stories, a Brady Bunch sleepover where we gleed for hours, high on each other's heroism. America was united again.
At least that's the way Le'vy wants to see it, if I was reading it properly, mon lecteur. He goes,
Never had one seen, on every screen on the planet, the image of commentators yielding the spotlight to hospital spokespersons, newcomers to the forum, sometimes knowledgeable, sometimes less so, but always enveloped in a continuously expanding aura, like Tintin's mysterious star-or a video game in which Dr. Fauci's steely eyes slay the fearsome coronavirus dragon.
What could be the meaning of this? Ship of Fools syndrome? Or maybe a mania pushed by the media to further hate on the science-illiterate Trump. In other words, a deft political maneuver to shape thinking before the election. Or maybe we've all gone quite mad, and have taken over the asylum and not known it. WTFK. But there's no sign of the discipline. A lot of mouths moving at the same time, though.
But, lo, what rock through yon window breaks: there's a new king in town -- no, wait, that's the old king's jester, "Middle Class Joe," with his vampy Veep Kamala, who has a look in her eyes, a madwoman shaking a dead water lily, as Eliot would have said if he'd seen her. Time to wake up and smell the power coffee.
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Le'vy, already possessed with jitterbugging, has one more cup of coffee for the road, before going back down to the valley below, and concedes of the medical class:
All doctors have at least this in common: they all take the side of rationalism against the imbecilic obscurantism of those who prefer superstition and magical thinking to reason and thinking.
But what Le'vy sees in play is magical thinking, blame-gaming, nostra culpa, punishment by illness and pestilence for our sins, and he ain't having any of this backsliding in a postmod world in which we went through so much trouble killing God -- we don't need to aggravate the pandemical situation with some old new testament fantasy about globalization and the terrible swift sword.
f*ck, howsa bout we do something about it instead, he seems to say, if I read him right, mon lecteur. Imbecilic. Like we becoming an Idiocracy under Trump, eating lead paint, and chasing it with the Kool Aid of fast-talking heads saying, "This was the most perfect election in history," as if, again, mocking what Trump would have said, had he won. Crazy sh*t. And Le'vy wants to get at the heart of it:
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