Collaborate and listen: Even more bedbugs analogies to make sense of the CAQ’s COVID response (Now with more curfew talk!)

If you read the first part of my essay (which you should because I’m hilarious and also, I fully intend to build on it), you know that I firmly believe in the “Stop, collaborate and listen” way of solving life’s problems. I already dug pretty deep into the “Stop” part of the aphorism. If you thought I brought up Vanilla Ice as a mere attention grabber, well, you are very very wrong, because we are about to dive in the muddy waters of the “collaborate and listen” analysis.

Collaborate!

As a master of linguistics with a 36000$ student debt, I like to shoehorn linguistics into anything as a way of maximizing the profitability of that poorly thought-out investment. So let’s talk about the word “collaborate”.

“Collaborate” is a polysemic vocable, meaning that the signifier “Collaborate” is attached to more than one meaning and that each meaning is conceptually linked to at least one of the others (unlike with homonyms, that share a signifier by a mere weird-ass coincidence, because their meanings could not possibly be more removed from one another.) In other words, if you look for “Collaborate” in the dictionary, you will see more than one definition.

[embed]Only 15 more years, student loans

Merriam-Webster has 3 definitions of “Collaborate”:

1: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor

2: to cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy of one’s country and especially an occupying force

3: to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected

Obviously, when it comes to fighting bedbugs, the first definition is the kind of collaboration we mean. But in the middle of an unpreceded public health crisis with the boy who won’t say ‘systemic racism’ at the helm of the boat, it may, at times feel like the second one. More on that later.

Hell is other people

As stated in part 1 on this essay, having bedbugs will cause your soul to vacate your body and leave you like the pale remains of crushed ice at the bottom of a fully drained slushie. It is thus very bad news that every single person of your apartment, and possibly of your entire apartment building, must observe the same maniacal diligence as you when sorting through their shit in order to beat the infestation. If you happen to be the only competent person in every group project you’ve ever been invested in (and everybody think they are), it may be slightly stress-inducing to know that regardless of the good work of your exterminator, your whole world could be tipped back to into Hell by the guy who leaves uneaten pizza pocket crescents in the bottom of your sink.

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In the early days of the pandemic, the people who understood the gravity of the situation were pitted against the nation’s sloppy roommates in a collaborative project that leaves about as much room to personal initiative as riding a tandem bike. To further complicate the political and emotional dynamics of the situation, an undertaking needing that extent of homogeneous collaboration necessitates a strong leadership, leaving us to follow the guy who thinks it’s in women’s nature to not mind being paid less, pretty much in the same way the fellowship of the ring was saddled with Gollum as tour guide of Mordor.

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If your read part 1 (and at this point, come on, just go read it and come back if you haven’t), you remember that at the very beginning of the pandemic, the CAQ response was pretty adequate if not deadass proactive. So, at about the same period as everyone was modeling a pandemic character for themselves that they were more or less going to embody for the whole duration of the public health crisis, following the government’s directives was akin to following science. Parallel to that, people who were not following the government’s directives were also coincidently breaking their social contract toward their peers in their community. As CAQ’s management of the crisis went from exemplary to exactly what you would expect from the people who pulled bill 21 out of their racist asses, the perception of the rule of law as good public health policy somehow remained, and the notion of collaboration became blurrier.

Machiavel or Inspector Gadget

It’s hard to attach a sophisticated Machiavellian scheming to a government who’s farthest reaching vision was to appeal to Québec’s lowest common denominator’s deep-seated xenophobia to gain power for the sake of power, so we kinda have to assume they accidentally stumbled upon the gold mine that is people’s willingness to turn on each other. The thing is that it’s achieving great results for their bottom line of deflection of responsibility.

If we come back to our bedbug scenario, imagine that you left an exterminator in your apartment to take care of your bedbug problem, and in-between sniffing your shoes and trying on your lip-glosses, they stumbled upon you berating your roommate about their bedbug nurturing ways. Now, whether your exterminator was already planning on half-assing their job or not, that could have been a lightbulb moment for them.

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Here’s the kicker though it: it is very possible that even with top-notch extermination services, your roommate could have been responsible for the return of the bedbugs. But responsibilities are not a zero-sum game, and the zero-sum approach is particularly suspect when the party most responsible piggybacks on the pre-existing annoyance toward the somewhat responsible party to shed its own responsibility. Your roommate failing to uphold their social contract with you and the exterminator failing to do the bare minimum they are being paid for are two entirely different issues.

At this point, the CAQ’s MO shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore and it’s capital that we do not let ourselves be fooled by it anymore. For example, with Christmas on the line, they made the statistically improbable promise of letting us celebrate, at the condition that we, the individuals, managed to get the infection rate down, while not announcing any new preventive measures to accomplish that, fully knowing that clusters of infections massively originated in warehouses and meat processing plants. That way, they can pretend that they tried to save Christmas, but that Christmas was stolen from us not by our failure of an administration, but by a nation of partying Grinches who only think about themselves.

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It is akin to promising your kid a trip to Disneyland if they manage to save 2000$ off their allowance within the next 6 months, when you know damn well you’re the one providing them with a 3,75$ weekly allowance. Like a discount magician, the CAQ waves personal responsibility in our face as a misdirection while shoving 3000 new daily infections up our asses.

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The great Gaslight

Of all their misdirection, the new curfew might be their most daring. For one thing, even when correctly used (that is, during an actual complete confinement), curfews can be a counter-productive measure, as they compress traffic in essential businesses (which is why the preceding set of measures included extended business hours to spread the patronage throughout the day). It is thus only logical to oppose the curfew and it was a natural breaking point for people who, up until that point, were willing to give the CAQ the benefit of the doubt. But this is where the curfew is either absolute Machiavellian brilliance or the goddam sheerest stroke of luck of happy-go-lucky idiots: they absolutely know how absolutely fucking ridiculous the curfew is as a prevention measure. They’re just turning people’s natural tendency to rip each other out into a bona fide art form and a mere misdirection into full-on gaslight.

Remember how I said that earlier that at the beginning of the confinement, people created characters for themselves that they would embody for the whole duration of the crisis?

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Well, the CAQ knew that despite jumping the legislative shark, there would still be some people left equating the CAQ’s drowning flailing with synchronized swimming. They knew that a large number of those people would be willing to call a conspiracy nut anyone who would oppose. Hell, their media relation director equated Québec Solidaire’s MP asking expected questions about the curfew with conspiracy theory peddling on Twitter and was retweeted by the Prime Minister himself.

They also knew that people who up until that point were supporting them would turn their back on them. They knew that community organizers would raise the flag about homeless people having no home to go back to during curfew. They knew that letting the police force “use their judgement” would lead to essential workers being harassed by cops. They knew homeless people would be fined. They knew we would have to choose our battles.

In short, they knew it would create chaos.

The sheer amount of bullshit happening right now is depleting our attention to a point where it’s hard to fully grasp the wide array of CAQ’s fuckery. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• Montreal’s hospitals are still running above 100% capacity, with Maisonneuve-Rosemont and Santa Cabrini fighting outbreaks among staff and non-COVID patients.

• A new study demonstrated the role the schools play in spreading COVID, just as the CAQ is throwing away 3 weeks of school-aged kids confinement.

• The province’s untested vaccine protocol got Pfizer to threaten to pull away from its distribution deal in Québec.

Listen!

Which leads me to the listen part of the essay. There isn’t a far reaching analysis of the “listen” part of the deal. It’s just generally good advice that can take many forms.

Just listen and pay attention. To the expert. To what’s happening. To what’s happening while what’s happening is happening.

And don’t forget to collaborate. With your community, not with the ennemy.