The deadly bundle of sins, betrayals, cover-ups, and human-concocted harms I call the Covid/Vax Disaster has provoked a number—alas, a shamefully small number—of protest songs. At PostModernConservative we’ve discussed several of these from Five Times August and Van Morrison, and in one of these posts I linked to four or five songs by other artists. You could also consult the two little collections of such songs gathered by Mark Crispin Miller.
But what about what the aftermath songs? The ones which are mainly seeking to describe what our society has become in the “wake” of the Disaster?
The best of these, so far, are Morrison’s “Pretending,” and this new one from Weyes Blood.
“Worst Is Done,” however, is not coming from the stance of a stunned anti-lockdown protestor like Morrison, but seems one more tuned to the wavelength, and to the accumulating wounds, of the Westcoast and Northeast progressivists, i.e., of the people who most embraced the lockdowns, the masks, the fear-hype, the vaxxes, and alas, in a majority of cases, the traitorous-to-democracy-and-basic-decency mandates too. Although that means they did not suffer the discrimination in employment, in college education, and at public-events, with respect to most other aspects of this season of semi-despotism, they suffered more compared to most citizens of the red states, as we will see below when we bring Naomi Wolf’s recent essay into the dicussion. Nor did they gain any of the compensating spiritual-health benefits imparted by the dignity of principled resistance. Just the opposite.
In any case, these are open wounds and unconfessed sins, which many are unsure that they can even speak about, if they are to remain progressivists in good standing.
I believe the song seeks to speak for them especially, if nonetheless for all of us also. Natalie Mering, Weyes Blood’s singer and songwriter, feels one way we can to begin to reunite is by acknowledging the damage we have all suffered. A repeated couplet is:
I hear it from, everyone:
we’re all so cracked, after that.
Here’s most of the first verse:
It's been a long, strange year.
Everyone's sad, they lost what they thought they had.
They lost our voices.
Can't keep with all the changes:
it's a different world and I am a different…
I am a different girl.
From the start we can see that the societal is going to be mixed with the personal.
I do like the move where the expected “we lost our voices,” turns out to be “they lost our voices,” which suggests that the despotism-mainstreaming moves of the social media giants, particularly in shadow-banning and account-suspending, have not escaped Mering’s notice. She makes a similar move by tweaking the expected “can’t keep up with all the changes” by removing the “up.” Thus, any blame here is shifted to the changes themselves, as opposed to the person who has failed to keep up with them.
But let’s go to the chorus, which is sung in a let’s-try-to-be-encouraging tone:
But they say the worst is done,
and it's time to go out--
pick up where we left off from.
They say the worst is done,
and it's time to find out what we've all become.
It's obvious what this refers to, and that many people these days are saying precisely this. Not that the idea Mering adds, that this return to social life should involve an effort of reflective self-analysis, is a common one.
But Mering’s deeper disagreement with the “they say” talk can be seen in the fact that while it pretends we can “pick up where we left off from,” she had already indicated, in the first verse, that our whole “world” has become a “different” one. And her shading of the determined sunniness becomes even plainer when the chorus is altered in its second appearance:
But they say the worst is done,
and it's time to go out
and see everyone.
They say the worst is done,
but I think it's only just begun.
If you don’t understand how it could be that the worst news about the Covid/Vax Disaster, and the worst shocks from it to our society have yet to be felt, you obviously have not been reading what I have been writing about it. Nor what Chris Bray has, Margaret Anna-Alice, Eugyppius, the Brownstone Institute, etc..
The shocks are of such magnitude that they have and will pose challenges to mental health. Mering is right to say we are all somewhat “cracked, after that,” although I would hasten to add that some of us are much more than others. Worse, not a few of us have encased our souls in a shell of denial so thick that total meltdown is possible if and when a major dose of the actual 2020s reality breaks through our defenses.
The causes of this horrible reality of course extend back, and do not simply have to do with the Covid/Vax Disaster. There has been an even bigger, yet-harder-to-discern, societal disaster which was well underway in the teens, and Weyes Blood were one of few groups that grappled with it, as seen in their 2019 release Titanic Rising. That bigger disaster, as I discussed in my analysis of one of the songs from that album, “Wild Time,” has more to do with our personal and psychic state, and its relation to toxic patterns of isolation and internet-use.1 This is hinted at in the remaining two verses of this song:
I should've stayed with my family;
I shouldn't have stayed in my little place
in the world's loneliest city.
We're not meant to be our own angels all the time.2
No one coming by to see if you're alive.
Got kinda old--
happened to me quickly.
Burned down the house waiting for someone to save me,
from this hall of mirrors.
We slept-walked through the years--
didn't think we'd all lean into hyper-isolation.
Like Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, Mering regularly prophesies against the bad kind of individualism, the kind which in Tocqueville’s terms is a confinement of the heart, and of social activity, to a small set of friends and close family, as well as an avoidance of most community participation. Obviously, the ease with which so many accepted the lockdowns was aided by a previous flirtation with more extreme forms of such individualism, ones newly technologically feasible.3
As for the personal story here, we see that some unhealthy process of over-focus on the self (likely internet-fostered—consider “hall of mirrors”) and soul-wrenching loneliness unfolded in our narrator’s four walls. To Mering’s credit, she does not downplay the deep impact that the lockdowns alone had on many persons.
Overall, “Worst Is Done” is a pretty clear portrait of the wounded aftermath we are now having to deal with. The overall sense conveyed is something like the one in a recent Naomi Wolf essay, “Thanksgiving in A Victim World: Resuming our National Holidays After a Mass Violation,” especially the part where Wolf says
There is a palpable blanket of shame and fear now over New York, over Massachusetts, because we all have been through a life-changing traumatic experience, and not just for a day or for a month but for two years.
We were all violated in front of one another.
We were all made helpless to save one another or ourselves.
…So we try to pick up again, here in the Northeast, our rituals, with a sense of awkwardness and shame — shame that they were so easily stripped from us; shame that we were so duped; shame that we so publicly could not protect ourselves or our loved ones.
Men were unmanned. Women were un-womaned.
The Thanksgiving tables may even look different than they did pre-2020. Some families are broken right through. Some relationships will never heal.
All of us, outside of Florida, and Texas, and maybe South Dakota, the few non-”lockdown,” non-“mandate” states, are now victims.
We never won’t be.
For Thanksgiving I want America back. But to make all of America, not just a few blessed states, free and confident, safe and relaxed once again, will take a generation.
It is some essay. And however much typical critics speak of an “apocalyptic” element in Mering’s song-writing, she does not go as far as Wolf is about the actual state of things now, and she avoids looking directly at the issue of shame.
Wolf even claims to observe/detect that the overall social environment she recently encountered in Florida is fundamentally different from that she knows in New York, different even down to the way infants in public engage (or do not engage) with the adults around them. I guess we will eventually have the developmental data on whether her motherly/people-observer hunch about the babies raised in Lockdown World is (gulp) quantifiably true.
But back to Mering. She has not been on the front-lines of the “anti-lockdown” or “medical freedom” movement, and her political leanings have been leftward. For all I know, she is one of those who insist to this day that the novel mRNA vaxxes are basically “safe.” I doubt it—notice all the dead bodies she dances amid in this unsettling video for another song from the new album--but what I in any case appreciate is the way she stresses how fundamental the Disaster—even if it is thought of as mainly one of lockdowns--has been.
After 9/11, the phrase “everything has changed” was on many person’s lips, but in fact, as David Bowie pointed out, there was something quite false about those words. And in retrospect, it is easy to see that very little did change--certain already-underway trends, such as the over-empowerment of the intelligence agencies, ramped-up, and yes, there were a couple of medium-sized wars, but none of this was so different. But with our present Disaster, Mering declares that it has brought us into a new world. We ought to realize, she suggests, that we were “sleepwalking” for decades, since the world we all thought we knew, in which there were things now clearly “lost” which we at that time mistakenly “thought we had,” turned out to be quite fragile, and, fundamentally corrupt.
I would again refer readers to the motto at the top of Eugyppius’s substack, and remind you that in my “Seven Deadly Sins” piece linked up top, I indicated that three-fourths or more of our institutions’ elites have been hopelesssly tainted by the Covid/Vax Disaster, either through action or inaction, such that we can never trust them again, and must realize that they were never worthy of the positions of influence they gained, and which they now cling so desperately to. Their present refusal to whistle-blow, to investigate, or to repent shows us who they are.
They were/are corrupt. Cowards prepared to see us die in large batches rather than buck the Narrative and the Careerist Code.
We didn’t know what were living in. We didn’t know what our own vices, including our addiction to the conveniences offered us by the big organizations, were enabling, even if more of us should have seen how insane the whole society was getting.
I’m reminded of in this poignant line from “Wild Time”:
I'm wonderin’ how we ever got here
With no fear, we'd fall.
Indeed. Mering was right about the fraught character of our situation in 2019, and with respect to the overt disaster that did happen in 2020-22, whatever differences someone like myself and her might have on the details or the politics of it, she’s largely right about the big personal lessons we ought to be drawing from it, and entirely correct that it has enacted a fundamental break from our past society, whether or not people are yet brave enough to see this.
And significantly, the other bohemian-hipster songsters now have her example of honesty, of refusing to glide silently by the extent of the Disaster, before them.
Addendum: on a happier note, a link back to what we now know were healthier times, and a bit of evidence of Weyes Blood’s overall excellence:
As a social conservative, I would also highlight a turn from basically-orthodox Christianity and Judaism, and a filling in of the religious gap with historicist and/or Woke-ist ideological insanity, as two key ingredients of that bigger disaster. As an academic, I would also say it was the fruit of a quarter-century of refusing to at all heed the warnings about liberal education issued by Allan Bloom and others, and indeed, an open and structural discrimination depolyed against genuine Great-Books-attuned liberal educators like myself.
Hmm…“angels?” A recent story indicates that Mering lives in Altadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, and one thus under the authority of LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, one of America’s worst Covid despots, who even this week is threatening to re-impose indoor mask-mandates. I won’t report here the extent of LA County’s various lockdowns over 2020-22, as Be-Evil Google appears to be making it difficult to research that. But while these lockdowns were not as egregious in strictness and length as the infamous ones of Melborne, they were among the worst in the US—and with people like Ferrer still in power there, there’s not even a guarantee they’re over! So perhaps, one-time DSA advocate Mering might bring herself to notice that there is a politics behind what makes or keeps a city the world’s “loneliest” one, and it sure ain’t any kind of conservative politics! And insofar as the adjective “democratic” means anything in the term “democratic-socialist,” it isn’t any kind of genuinely democratic-socialist politics either. (BTW, if any reader keeps up with the likes of Jacobin, I would be happy to learn if there were any socialist leaders or DSA chapters that spoke-up against the lockdowns and mandates.)
See the 2014 song by Drinks, “Hermits on Holiday,” and my brief comment on its prophetic character in 2020.
Muse has a new album that is TOTALLY a protest album about our current “troubles.” I’ve always loved Muse and most of their songs, even on earlier (pre-COV) releases, are protests -- some overt & some thinly veiled -- about our collective cultural dysfunctions. This newest album is a HUGE departure from other work because they take other bands’ songs (most in a wildly different rock genre than Muse’s typical creations) and put their own new lyrics to it.
I learned of the Van Morrison song because you mentioned it in a comment on one of my posts. Thank you.
Great article and analysis. I like the idea of aftermath songs, but I’m not sure the aftermath is completely unfolded yet.
“Men were unmanned. Women were unwomaned,” <- This has been going on for quite awhile now and many had already succumbed prior to these troubles.
For a while, I was ambivalent about Naomi Wolf, but she has more than proven her heroic character now. Her most recent interviews with Eric Metaxas are well worth the time to watch: https://rumble.com/v29k66o-naomi-wolf-of-dailyclout.io-on-the-greed-driven-alliance-behind-the-pandemi.html
This one is half as long but also great: https://rumble.com/v26afo2-naomi-wolf-on-her-yale-speech-and-mandatory-covid-vaccinations.html