We watched the NFL playoffs last weekend. As everyone has already commented, the football was unusually thrilling, with all four games decided on the final play.
Exciting also was the glimpse
that the TV provided into the future, when COVID will be just a bad memory. On
the field, in the studio, and during the commercials, the pandemic had
disappeared. So there was no need to wear masks.
For hours I watched carefully for any sign of a mask. Naturally the players didn’t wear masks. Neither did the coaches, although just a few weeks ago, NFL coaches were all wearing masks. Since December 16, masks have only been required at indoors training facilities.
In July, the NFL mandated
masks for all fans in stadiums. All sideline coaches had to wear masks, and three coaches were fined for not being properly masked during Week 2 games. Those
rules are gone. I saw no masks on the sidelines this weekend and few in the
stands. The two commentators during the game and the five guys in the Verizon
Halftime Report also had no masks. NFL football is a mask-free environment.
NFL world is hardly real
life. But the never-ending commercial breaks might be expected to portray more
familiar environments: hanging out with friends, mealtimes, shopping. I watched
carefully for hours and saw barely any masks.
The “Star Trek” movie
concerns another place and time, so masks were probably inappropriate. The
silly DirecTV ad where Serena plays tennis against a horde of Matrix-inspired
avatars is also other-worldly. The Agatha Christie drama “Death on the Nile”
could pretend that COVID is in the distant future. The three medical
professionals in an ad for the hospital drama “Good Sam” were wearing surgical
masks. But in all the imagined advertising scenes of normal life, masks were
absent: the motorcycle guys in a GEICO ad; Progressive Insurance ads helping
you avoid becoming your parents, even in a grocery store; the growing list of
FBI programs; all the fleeting images from the lineup of CBS shows, from Queen
Latifah to Stephen Colbert.
Pfizer paid for an ad
congratulating itself on how their vaccine allows people to lead a more normal
life, with a scene of people crowding into a restaurant without masks. State
Farm showed Patrick Mahomes and “Jake” in a shoe store without masks. Indeed’s
ad for job recruiting included a brief shot of a commercial setting without
masks. Other ads in hospital settings showed no masks. AT&T displayed one
of its stores filled with customers without masks.
There were a few masks. I saw
one mask briefly in a Verizon ad. An actor with a mask appeared in the
background of an ad for “NCIS Hawai’i”.
TV ads have changed over the
past two years. Scenes of casual dining have been replaced by ads for safer food delivery. Indoor scenes were replaced by outdoor
shots. Every scene I saw with unmasked actors could presumably be defended as
conforming to CDC guidelines. But life on TV does not follow any pandemic
guideline except lust for profit and fear of loss. Showing people in masks is a
loser. None of us look good, or even friendly in a mask. Living behind a mask
is unnatural, anathema to those who live by images.
We took a long break from TV
to eat dinner. The fellow who delivered our dinner wore a mask. My wife said
that he stayed as far away from her as possible. Both sets of my grandchildren
are at home in different states these weeks, because daycare is dangerous.
Many, maybe most people I see when I walk in my Boston neighborhood every day
wear masks outdoors. On the bus or subway, in the whole MBTA system of vehicles
and stations, only the rarest person is not masked.
That’s real life. I don’t
expect real life from my TV – everything is highly produced, whether it is
supposed to be real or not. But displaying life as maskless, presenting masks
as unusual, unnecessary, even aberrant, normalizes the anti-maskers and
anti-vaxxers.
The murder victims on the
crime shows I like are killed by individuals who nearly always get caught. The
2000 people who now die every day, mostly unvaccinated, mostly unmasked, are
being killed off by their political leaders and professional polemicists, who
commit their crimes against public health in public without accountability.
They are supported by the “apolitical” media displaying a fictional world
without COVID, a world I could only wish for.
Steve Hochstadt
Boston, MA
January 31, 2022
