Vaccine Hesitancy and the Herman Cain Award Reddit

The pandemic has challenged all of us, and especially your truly, in the department of maintaining equanimity, magnanimity, and loving-kindness for my fellow humans. Recently, I’ve been wrestling with anger toward the “vaccine-hesitant” and thought I’d write about it.

Recently, I discovered a Reddit community called /r/HermanCainAward. A “Herman Cain Award” is named after the Trump-supporting businessman Herman Cain who, shortly after attending a Trump rally in 2020, contracted COVID-19, and then died of it.

The founders of the community reported to Vice that the goal of the community was to demonstrate and educate that these bad ideas about vaccinations were causing lots of real, avoidable death.¹ And the community has provided plenty of articles that informed and shocked, like this “Ask Me Anything” from an enbalmer:

But I soon started to notice, in me, a burgeoning interest in another type of post. One that collates a person’s objections, misinformation, Fauci-hatred, bravado and then sudden death. A common arc emerged after reading dozens of posts that I’ll summarize here:

• Boomer
  • Usually (White) men (but not exclusively) with
    • Goatee
    • Knock-off Oakleys
      • On a neck string
    • Usually in southern states
  • Who have a penchant for posting memes with domination-based masculinity dripping from them e.g.:
    • “Pelosi is the Wuhan bat” memes
    • “President Biden is weak / gay”
    • “Wearing a mask is the same thing as being Jewish under the Nazis” 🙄
    • Trump will be “restored” to office in August 2021 September 2021 When Q thinks the time is right
  • And who deny the efficacy of “liberal elites’” solutions in preference to:
    • “My immune system”
    • “The blood of Christ”
    • Some veterinary drug
  • While appealing to…
    • Rights to be an asshole
    • Rights to be someone you don’t like
    • Rights to follow God instead of medical science
    • Rights to “identify” as vaccinated because — hahaha, transphobia is funny
  • Who then are stricken with COVID and
    • Are placed on a ventilator
    • Are given days to live
  • And who then ask
    • For someone to smuggle some nonsense remedy into them
    • For prayers, lots of prayers; and “prayer warriors”
    • (Very seldom) that people learn from their example and get a vaccination
  • And then die
  • And whose widows, daughters, sons go on to open a GoFundMe page so that what remains of the family can pay beg for:
    • The funeral, as they had no life insurance
    • 😢 The left-behind children’s future (Eloi eloi, what have you done?) who have been left without (usually) their primary breadwinner 😢

On reflection, initially lapping up these posts exercised my “good kid” anger. It was like watching the school bully get clocked by another, bigger bully. No matter how bad you know you should feel, in some way, you felt justified: “These are the super-spreaders, the impolite to clerks when asked for masks, the delusional protesters yelling at medical staff as they face another miserable shift under hellish conditions.” After four years under Trump, where misinformation was part of his bullshit cavalcade disinformation strategy and where facts were routinely eschewed, these stories were a glorious hit parade in validating the anti-Trump and anti-Trumpism warning. It was a demonstrable object lesson in “we told you so.” It was the mordantly wicked sentiment of the 1987 black comedy Heathers: “[the two murdered football players] had nothing to offer except date rapes and AIDS jokes.”

But hold the hell up, this wasn’t some asshole doing donuts in the parking lot getting a taste of instant karma by shearing a rear bumper off on a shopping cart; this is real, household-destroying death. It is one thing to rubber-neck at an accident, but it’s downright ghoulish to set up a camera to film the dangerous stretch of highway and catch up on the month’s most gruesome crashes as a compilation to watch while you eat lunch.

I recoiled at the sentiment I was harboring and stopped watching the group. It was bad for me in a way that required further processing.

Just what was so seductive about the group? In my thinking about masculinity, where men’s only safe emotion is anger, I’ve learned to ask “What emotion is my anger really, underneath its socially-acceptable-for-men mantle?” Around the present stage of the pandemic, the real emotions I’m facing are fear, loneliness, and fatigue.

I’m afraid for my loved ones. I’m fatigued by the whole experience; which I’m ready to have end. I’m angry that the ill-informed have built a whole culture of provably false beliefs that create a society that ensures my fear and my fatigue will not be ebbed soon. I’m sad that I haven’t seen my family in years. Identifying what was really inside helped me turn off anger, which yearns for “just deserts” and which was a happy, ghoulish spectator of the message board.

To try to atone for my ghoulishness, I’ve tried to put an equal amount of empathetic consideration about these dead to balance my karmic error. Two things have become obvious:

1. They’re getting (and propagating) bad information
2. Many of them seem to be part of a misinformationist death cult — the same afflicted population whose anger and hopelessness was weaponized by that departed ghoul-in-chief, Donald Trump and whose tolerance for misrepresentation was raised by the same

The first problem is the living hellhole that is social media. Acting without any responsibility except to profit, these companies have abnegated controls and have become a perfect contagion vector for misinformation. And while I’m not pro-censorship or governmental control, Facebook, for one, has played government like a two-bit fiddle. They simultaneously contend “we’re just a platform, not editors!” while making editorial decisions to drive their revenue model (which would leave them legally vulnerable). Whatever they are, they’re not merely a platform.

The second problem is more pervasive. (Dominantly White) men, accustomed to all the privilege in the world, are not taking their cohort’s regression to the mean well. From their zooming suicide rates, to their opioid addiction, to their misinformation in-tribe signaling around Trumpism or Q-Anon, they’re not well. And, thanks to dominance-based masculinity, they don’t have the emotional security or vocabulary to articulate:

I’m scared for the future and I’d rather die than face a world that confirms that I’m not special. And if I can get a suicide exit that’s dressed as an Alamo last-stand, that praises my in-group, and that means I’ll never recognize my cohort’s loss of privilege, I’ll take it.

I heard from park rangers in the Presidio that many of the people jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge realize their error during the fall. The panicked animal brain breaks free of their suicidal fog and screams for survival as they try to twist and turn to avoid the onrushing fatal impact, but it’s too late. These “Cain award recipients” are like those suicides, lost in a delusional perspective, awash in an undiagnosed grief, and cavalierly tap-dancing on the chilled, slippery guardrails of the bridge while wearing a MAGA hat and “owning all the libs.” They’re positively daring gravity to interrupt their antics.

Choosing to do such a performative stunt is deranged; gravity calling such a bet, horribly sad; indulging in reviews of the footage, beneath my better nature.

Footnotes

1. Slate also did a solid report

• Covid
• Covid_vaccine
• Trumpism
• Anti_science
• Dominance_based_masculinity

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