The December 7 issue of the New Yorker features a withering send-up of quarantine neuroses and psychoses, depicting a smiling woman with hair, makeup and jewelry done, pulling off a convincing facsimile of sanity for her Zoom date while her apartment is strewn with trash and discarded PPE just outside the camera range.
Titled ‘Love Life,’ the image manages to pack in an impressive amount of Covid-19 memes, from Zooming in one’s slippers (the woman is at least wearing shorts, unlike some) to the piled up Amazon boxes, takeout containers and empty wine bottles everywhere, and even a few pill bottles strewn on her desk.
It’s not exactly news that nearly a year of fear-fraught isolation can push people off the deep end psychologically – indeed, everyone from the World Economic Forum to US President Donald Trump warned about such a possibility early on. But the New Yorker, like the rest of the media establishment, has been terrifying its readers by hyping up the destructive potential of the coronavirus while throwing shade on anyone trying to live a normal life.
From telling readers to embrace their inner panic-shopper and gushing over a remote-dating reality show, to romanticizing isolation-induced psychosis, the magazine has done more than its share to convince its ‘intellectual’ audience that the world will never go back to normal, so neither should they. Sprinkle in some worship at the altar of Corona Saint Anthony Fauci and you get a cocktail much more poisonous than whatever is in the cover girl’s glass.
Why would the New Yorker lampoon their faithful readers? Lockdown fetishists may have lost their sense of humor long ago, but they haven’t seen their perception of reality in a while either. If they are neither offended nor amused by the situation on the cover, the Covid-19 “new normal” has been, well, normalized.
Successful propaganda campaigns frequently embed such ‘tests’ to gauge their effectiveness among the target population – Russiagate, for example, convinced a sizable cross-section of liberals to embrace their mortal enemies the CIA and FBI, agencies that have since their inception been devoted to crushing the domestic Left, as ‘proof’ the narrative had been internalized.
The cover has also served as something of a Rorschach blot for communities outside the New Yorker’s typical audience, with many holding it up as the logical endpoint of the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ – a disturbing reorganization of human civilization into a cashless society in which private property is abolished, planet-blanketing real-time surveillance (including internal bio-surveillance) is constantly operating, and humanity has merged with technology.
Certainly, the pod-like size of the apartment and the total isolation of its inhabitant speak to that looming dystopia (though there are, alas, no edible bugs visible).
The ‘Manosphere,’ an online community of unabashed male chauvinists, instead saw the cover’s protagonist as the culmination of feminism – the slovenly, unshaven cat lady who has no need for a man because she’s married to the state, having attained the Nirvana state of living judgment- and accountability-free.
However, horrifically alienating Zoom dates require two participants – somewhere on the other end of that call is another equally desperate and lonely human being – and the image equally evokes the pre-feminist horror of women living a dependent existence “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.”
She might not be pregnant, but she’s not leaving that apartment anytime soon – not when there’s a killer virus with a 99.9 percent survival rate for her age group is on the loose!
Plenty of people recognized themselves in the cartoon, some to an uncomfortable extent. Will they take a walk outside, hug a friend, eat a picnic in the park? Or just wash down another handful of anti-depressants with the last sip of that martini? Unfortunately, all signs point to the latter.
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