Friday
I’ve been struck by how Trumpism, an authoritarian movement that attempted to overthrow the 2020 election and may well be planning to override the voters’ will in future contests, insists on personal freedom when it comes to vaccine mandates. As many have noted, Trumpists support freedom for themselves but not for others, as is clear by their voter suppression efforts and Texas’s abortion bounty laws. My father Scott Bates notes this seeming paradox in a fable he wrote back in the 1970s.
In “The Recalcitrant Piece of Mimeograph Paper,” a sheet of paper defiantly resists attempts to impose text upon it, using arguments reminiscent of many who refuse to get Covid vaccine shots. For all his advocacy of individual rights, however, the sheet has succumbed to cultish groupthink by the end of the poem. While my father was targeting leftwing groups when he wrote it, authoritarians are pretty much the same, whether right or left. Instead of spouting The Communist Manifesto, as the mimeograph sheet does, today’s anti-vaxxers quote QAnon, Fox News, and stuff circulated on Facebook.
A note on the vaccine mandates before I share the poem: all advanced nations require various public health measures to protect their populations. Without them, our society would be ravaged by numerous lethal diseases and other ills. Only because children are required to receive multiple vaccines are they able to attend school safely, with the few families who resist vaccines parasitically rely on everyone around them to protect them.
As far as the poem’s imagery is concerned, those of you who grew up in the photocopy and digital ages should feel lucky that you never had to grapple with mimeograph machines, which were messy and a real pain. To update the poem, imagine “the recalcitrant piece of mimeograph paper” as a sheet in your printer that refuses to respond to your “print” command.
The Recalcitrant Piece of Mimeograph Paper
By Scott Bates
A Sheet of Mimeograph Paper refused to go through the machine
No no it cried
Set me apart
Must I serve as fodder for a Mimeograph Moloch
Reduced
To the docile conformity and blank imbecility of my sheeplike compatriots
My purity sullied
My innocence destroyed
Will you track up my candor with your muddy feet
No no I protest
I refuse
Let me be crumpled into cabbage
Peeled into carrot strips
Abandoned with the used kleenices holey hermit sacks outcast chewing gum wrappers and all the other paper pariahs of your so-called civilization
Before you tattoo my backside with the decadent artifacts of a worn-out bureaucracy
They fed it through the machine
It came out blank
They fed it through again
Inexorably
At last it spoke
Dear Sirs it said
Pursuant to your request of long standing
And in full cognizance of the numerous difficulties involved
I am authorized to inform you at this time
You have nothing to lose but your chains
Further thought: Another way to read the poem is that the sheet has been driven to communist rebellion because of society’s failure to recognize personal characteristics that are integral to a sense of self. When my father wrote this poem, I remember some leftwing protestors carrying signs that said, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” a reference to computer cards and to an IBM society that they feared was destroying all individuality (“the man in the gray flannel suit”). In that case, the state would bear some of the blame for what happens to the sheet.
Does some vaccine resistance stem from a similar dynamic? Perhaps. But the stakes are too high to mess around in this case. Resisters put everyone around them at risk, not only themselves. Their vaunted individuality in this case begins to resemble narcissistic self-absorption, or a toddler saying no to a parent who knows better. Furthermore, many do not realize they are being shaped by rightwing talking points. True individuality involves critical thinking, not reactive stances. In short, whatever society’s sins, the sheet of mimeograph paper cannot be excused for going full-out authoritarian.