Politics can show through the face mask
Polls: Most follow experts’ advice
John Harper believes climate warming is a farce and that aside from a few bizarre tweets, Donald Trump has done a splendid job running the country both before and during the COVID-19 crisis.
A great-grandfather and retired engineer, now 79, Harper lives with his wife in Pleasanton in Atascosa County. Often, he spends a normal week seeing doctors in San Antonio — after three bouts with cancer — having dinner with friends and, of late, railing on Facebook about the tyranny of masks.
“My immune system may be compromised, but the government will not tell me I have to wear a mask,” Harper said in a recent interview. “These people who do are just misinformed. They’re sheep. And they want to shame me into wearing a mask. … It’s like we’ve all been told (by the government) to get on this boxcar. ‘We’re taking you to Poland.’”
National surveys show Harper to be in the minority, as most Americans continue to follow the instructions of epidemiologists and public health experts, with or without government rules, to wear facial coverings and stay at
least 6 feet away from those not living under the same roof.
But as the coronavirus pandemic’s economic damage deepens and the pressure to normalize has mounted, the humble face mask has led many Texans, consciously or not, to choose a side, maybe even an identity. For some, it’s just an awareness of health guidelines and local laws, but the wearing of a mask can also be a way to show solidarity with science over suspicion, with reason over convenience and populism.
“It’s virtue signaling every moment of the day,” observed law professor Robert Kahn of the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, who has studied such things as Holocaust denial and hate speech against Muslims. “The mask says, ‘I’m such a blue person (politically). I don’t want to infect anyone, and I want to be sure you know that I’m saying that.”
Just as certain, a significant number of Texans skewing pro-Trump or libertarian believe that government directives to wear masks, whether or not enforced, are more fascistic than altruistic. On April 18, a small but vocal group of mask deniers and anti-vaccination activists gathered at the Capitol in Austin to protest stay-at-home orders and mock scientists.
It was organized by Austin-based InfoWars, a group of websites that peddle conspiracy theories and bogus virus cures such as colloidal-silver toothpaste. Similar protests have been held across the country, though national surveys have shown steady support for stay-at-home orders.
“It’s a shame that science has become political,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said last week. “Not wearing a mask is not a sign of rebellion. … That’s just silly. We are collectively better than that. This is a simple thing to do to protect the health and lives of our neighbors.”
On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott, after having moved more quickly than most health experts wanted in authorizing the reopening of restaurants, bars and other indoor spaces, urged people “to unite as one Texas to contain COVID-19 and … if you go out in public, stay 6 feet apart from others, wear a face covering and wash your hands regularly. Be a good neighbor. Be a Texan.”
The same day, the Bexar County Republican Party chair, Cynthia Brehm, exhorted listeners at a rally to drop the mask-wearing — unnecessary, she said, because the pandemic is a hoax invented as a way to bring down Trump.
Mask compliance has become almost as easy to predict as a voting precinct in a presidential election. In April, a Washington Post national survey reported that 73 percent of self-identified Democrats were wearing masks to combat the virus, compared with 59 percent of Republicans. Ethnicity matters, too. Masks or scarfs were being used by 82 percent of AsianAmericans, 71 percent of Latinos and 74 percent of African-Americans, compared with 66 percent of whites.
In San Antonio’s modestly hip Beacon Hill neighborhood, which has voted mostly Democratic for decades, many shaded front lawns have, since March, sprouted motivational signs urging neighbors, “Don’t Give Up / No Te Rindas” and “We’re All In This Together.” Young Anglo couples with tikes on trikes stop to chat with third- and fourth-generation Latino neighbors, usually wearing masks that seem as comfortable to them as a green recycling bin.
For Harper, the Pleasanton man who calls himself “about as conservative as you can find,” that urban neighborhood scene is not just fingernails across the chalkboard culturally and politically. He finds it frightening and morally suspect.
“Everyone (in a mask) looks like a Muslim terrorist,” he said, adding that Facebook had censored some of his posts with that incendiary term. “That bothers me that I can’t see whether they’re smiling or plotting.”
Harper said he doesn’t own a mask and will ask that one be provided for him when he goes to a doctor’s office or out to eat. He recently went to a restaurant near Marbach and Loop 410 — he would rather not identify it — and said the manager fashioned a mask for him out of a paper napkin, rather than ask him to leave.
“How stupid is that?” he said. “They should treat it like a construction site, where they hand you a hard hat. The mask would be a safety device.”
How does Harper reconcile his beliefs with the accepted science that masks and social distancing reduce the spread of the coronavirus? (An article by 19 scientists awaiting peer review before the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that 50 percent mask usage with 50 percent mask efficacy could reduce the reproduction rate for the coronavirus to that of seasonal influenza.)
“I don’t believe any of those numbers,” Harper said. “They are corrupt. The infection rate is hit or miss. We don’t know that we’ve had the exposure other cities have. We don’t have the testing numbers.”
But Harper doesn’t walk around town trying to provoke people, like some proponents of open carry gun laws or so-called First Amendment “auditors” who barge into government buildings with video cameras, courting arrest.
The mask issue has sparked at least one shooting death, that of a security guard at a Family Dollar in Flint, Mich., this month. In San Antonio, a man who stood in front of a VIA Metropolitan Transit bus two weeks ago at a stop on East Southcross told police he was trying to block it from leaving because the driver refused to let him board without a face covering, a bus company rule.
Jason Audie Jackson, 36, said he was calling a VIA supervisor to complain — and had done so before — when a passenger confronted and attacked him, according to a police report. Jackson had a license to carry a concealed handgun and shot the passenger, whose injuries were non-lifethreatening, the report said, and Jackson was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A VIA spokeswoman said Friday that the transit agency has no immediate plans to change its requirement.
Countless retail confrontations that have stopped short of violence have circulated on social media, such as one involving a coolheaded Costco employee in Arvada, Colo., informing a customer about the chain’s policy not to admit people without face coverings.
Intended or not, the mask as a political statement has a simplicity not often seen on the American cultural landscape.
Yellow ribbons became popular during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981 and later in the Gulf War, but their original message — bring the hostages home safely — evolved into a general show of support for American soldiers, and in some minds, the later invasion of Iraq in 2003, wrote folklorists Linda Pershing and Margaret R. Yocom, who observed an “intriguing battle … not in Iraq and Kuwait, but on the home front, a battle of symbols.”
This isn’t the first time masks in America have served as both a target and a seal of approval. San Francisco was hit harder by the 1918 influenza pandemic than other major U.S. cities, wrote Peter Lawrence Kane in the Guardian. A now-forgotten movement known as the Anti-Mask League “helped turn a manageable public health situation into a disaster” that brought 45,000 infections and 3,000 deaths to the city, he said.
The Anti-Mask League complained “that an obligation to cover one’s nose and mouth was an unconstitutional affront to the principles of a free society.”
Atascosa County Judge Robert Hurley has heard that argument before.
A moderate Republican familiar with John Harper’s provocative Facebook posts, he firmly believes the science underlying mask usage and has acquired about 9,000 of them for county employees, expecting no substantive control of the virus at least through the summer.
“I get the right-wing crap from Facebook forwarded to me all the time,” said Hurley, whose daughter is a nurse. “I think they want to believe it, and for a certain element it’s also a macho thing. They think it’s a sign of weakness, maybe even effeminate, to wear the mask.”
Hurley said he’s had great cooperation from large and small merchants in getting employees to wear masks, even when not required by law. A local Walmart manager simply asked him to put the request in a formal letter, and “overnight they were all in masks,” Hurley said. “I love them for it, too.”
Epidemics are tremendous drivers of fear, confusion and paralysis, said Trinity University anthropology professor Alfred Montoya, who has studied the intersection of science and society during such events.
“People may grasp at whatever information or action conforms to their pre-established notions, or provides even a semblance of agency that can dispel feelings of powerlessness,” Montoya said in an email. “I think this is likely what has happened regarding the symbolism of the mask for a segment of the population that is not super science literate, and who are less able to sort fact from belief or conjecture.”