The Age of The Virus may be a distant memory now, one we’ve all done our best to forget collectively, but it revealed a great deal about the compliance of Westerners to technocratic authoritarianism in their respective nations. Yes, there were pockets of ornery resistance—thank God I live in South Carolina!—but the full might of the weaponized media, elite toadies, and cat moms came out to scold us all for wanting to breathe free and enjoy public gatherings (the latter protected, albeit seemingly only on paper, in the First Amendment).
It’s little wonder that we try to suppress the memory of that benighted time, but like all such attempts to forget the past, it only serves as an unhealthy way to deal with deep trauma. By pushing all of those bad memories down, we avoid thinking about the unpleasant consequences that our society-wide foolishness wrought.
Of course, part of that response is that everyone got super bored talking about The Virus because, after awhile, it did get boring. Like all diseases, it reached its critical mass and then ebbed away, each new wave being less virulent, less lethal, and less widespread. The Left seemed eager to memory-hole the entire thing, and the Right was just glad we didn’t have to read another boring article with a lot medical lingo that we all pretended to understand. The Age of The Virus really did reveal how shallow and gutless we all are.
One realm in which the trauma has endured is film. Whether intentionally or otherwise, it’s hard to suppress those memories in works of art; after all, art is, at least in part, an expression of our innermost feelings and struggles. In vino veritas, yes, but also In arte veritas est.
The Age of The Virus crystallized a number of unpleasant Truths: the cowardice of our populous; the brazen indifference and hypocrisy of our elites; and the paradoxical grasping to stay alive at all costs while viewing millions of other, “lesser” lives as expendable. No film more aptly captures these wretched qualities of the twenty-first century developed world better than 2024’s Humane.
The Portly Politico 