Masks Save Lives

And while today, in a time of pandemic, health officials are begging us to close our gates, plastering over our noses and mouths with masks hasn’t always been our response to contagion. Before the rise of the germ theory of disease—the notion that sickness stems from microbial infection rather than spirits, spells, or bad mojo—was first postulated about 700 years ago, the best known means to protect oneself was through prayer, penitence, talisman, or maybe a stiff drink. In eleventh-century Egypt, Quaranic scrolls and amulets were worn around the neck to fend off the plague. In Middle Ages Europe, PPE included onion necklaces, quaffing vinegar—a practice to which I subscribe—and bloodletting.

Finally, about 130 years ago, German bacteriologist Carl Flügge discovered that pathogens teem in the aerosolized mucus constantly wafting out of our mouths. He called the airborne nastiness Flügge droplets. At the end of the 19th century, French physician Paul Berger was the first surgeon to cover his damn mouth while leering over a split-open patient. “For several years,” Berger wrote, “I have been worried as to the part that drops of liquid projected from the mouth… may exercise on the outbreaks of infection.”

So we’ve known as much for over a century. And yet, even in the midst of a raging pandemic (a redundancy, I know) we have seen presidents, surgeons general, and a terrifyingly large portion of the population willing to ignore science and hark back to Bubonic-era ignorance—all while watching a deadly virus tear across our world.

Part of the problem—but far from a valid excuse—seems to be that wearing a mask sucks. Besides having to rebreathe our breakfast, there’s also maskne, going raw behind the ears, difficulty of eating on the run, and missing out on smiles and other forms of teeth-bearing expressions. And surgical masks, or their colorful cotton brethren, just aren’t as sexy or alluring as, say, Venetian masks or what you might wear to a ball. Nor do they captivate like the naked face. They’re just little sanitary patches on our faces, and even if Gucci, Hermes, Collina Strada, or Off-White enter into the business—they all have—masks are still ugly and awkward across the board.

The widespread use of face masks isn’t new. In Japan they were used first after the Spanish Flu—as they were briefly in other parts of the world as well—and remained common after an earthquake and volcanic eruption in the 1920s, and then a viral epidemic in the 1930s. Japanese citizens quickly, collectively picked up masks again in 2020, and the country, despite having some of the most densely populated cities, still has less than a thousand COVID deaths. In the United States, meanwhile, until the last few months, masks were still associated with bandits and sickness more than health and decency. Even after the gravity of the pandemic was grinding into our cities, as recently as February 29, the US Surgeon General wrote on Twitter, “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” As late as March 30, the World Health Organization, in a strong showing of unscientific jackassery, recommended healthy members of the general public not wear masks. (Both parties have since reversed course.)

What was highly recommended—at first—was that people stop touching their faces. That exhortation, however, is impossible to follow. Hands are drawn to the face like ants to a picnic, or like crowned viral agents to the human lung. Many of us have oral fixations—gnawing on straws, gum, fingernails, lips—all of us have facial fixations. Modern humans, like tactile Narcissuses, just can’t stop touching, caressing, swiping, picking, wiping, preening, or holding ourselves in the face.

But touching yourself or not touching yourself doesn’t matter as much as keeping our Flügge Droplets to ourselves, and the only real way to do that is by wearing a mask. Bad messaging—starting but not ending with the U.S. president—plus Americans penchant to flaunt their impudence have led to voracious contagion. And while Trump didn’t want to give the media “the pleasure” of seeing him in a mask (until in mid-July—one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-plus deaths later—he strode in blue-on-blue (avec mask) down a hallway of Walter Reed Medical Center flanked by men in medal-bedazzled chests and more dark face coverings, and supporters thought he looked “presidential,” rather than, say, like a G.I. Joe villain) and while various kooks continue to protest infringements on their facial liberty, others have appealed—limply, desperately—to our aesthetic sensibilities. Harvard Business Review wrote that in order to get Americans to mask up, face coverings should be “fun, cool, and fashionable”—which sounds like an evangelical’s prescription for Christian rap. By late April, GQ called Off-White’s $95 dollar face mask the “hottest product in the world.” Lady Gaga posted a selfie with a spiked and chained mask. Still, cases spiked, and then—and still—death upon death upon death… and many still with their mouth-gates agape, spewing forth their deadly Flügge droplets.

The logic behind the mask, as it’s been explained to us, is that a mask does more to stymie spread than to stop contraction. There is a revealing social lesson here: your own health depends more on the actions of others than on your own, and others’ health depends more on your actions than on their own. Of course, that’s always partially true, but what does it say about those who neglect or refuse to wear the mask? Is it any wonder that the land that so fervently celebrates the individual over the collective, personal liberty over social cohesion, is suffering the worst of the pandemic? “We don’t live in a communist country!” a Texan bar-owner who banned the wearing of masks in her bar, told the Guardian. “This is supposed to be America,” she said. Making masks “cool”—sorry Harvard—was never going to bridge the partisan divide in both social distancing and mask wearing. Trump solipsistically catalyzed such vile and deadly politicization, suggesting that the reason people were wearing masks wasn’t because it’s obviously the right fucking thing to do, but just to spite him.

Hoping to make up for the paucity in use, some have tried bettering and beautifying masks. Many a designer or DIYer have not only pinned or ironed smiles or symbols onto a mask, but also words and slogans, which, frankly, is a shame. What’s best about a face is its nakedness. And what’s good about being face-naked is the face’s infinite and beautiful modalities, its simultaneous hyper-expressivity and impenetrability. To paste over that, even part of that, with a slogan or semaphore would be as reductive as translating Madame Bovary into a series of emojis.

This is the other lesson to be had from these semi-masked months, which is about the face itself. Not only do the eyes want an open vista—the mouth and the nose need their horizons, too—but the face itself is a vista, and an occluded view of that panorama is as unsatisfactory to the viewer as it is to the viewed. PPE’d communication with passersby and clerks, or demi-faced palaver with neighbors or roomies, flows as fluidly as water down a clogged drain—and not just because voices are muffled, but because words don’t have their necessary facial accompaniment. Meaning still dribbles through, but it’s slow, unproductive, and chunked of debris—like a real-life Zoom connection.

But even while our own speech is muffled, the mask itself has a voice. Cultural theorist Ronald Grimes writes of masking—of a different kind—as a “culturally reflexive activity in which the collective unconscious—that is, the ambivalences and contradictions latent in a culture—are acted out.” While the mouth can spew falsity and fiction a dozen times a minute, eyes rarely lie. (Why do you think Trump was so wary of being seen in a mask?) That’s to say, there is often a contradiction in the face itself, and that is enunciated, not covered over, by the mask. We’re more honest the less loquacious we are—which says a lot about speech itself: truth and silence are intimately bound. The act—bandaging over our mouths and noses—seeming at first blush like self-protection is, today, a silent expression of love.

It’s a sign of deep social trouble that we have to have this debate at all. What is perhaps more unsettling is not that the governor of Georgia is threatening legal action against mayors for implementing mask mandates, but that we even need mask mandates. I’ll leave it at this: according to research from the University of Washington, more than 40,000 deaths could be avoided in the next three months if 95 percent of Americans wore face masks in public. Forty thousand lives lost or saved by a simple act.

John Washington writes about immigration and border politics, as well as prisons, foreign policy, beer, and hats for various publications. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and The Intercept. His first book, The Dispossessed_—a narrative take on asylum policy and ancient history—was published this year by Verso Books. Find him at @jbwashing._