Today, we look at how school districts are fighting anti-mask governors, discuss gaming, Twitch, and the left, and highlight a Polish film that’s a meditation on the misery and alienation of the rich.

In Florida and Texas, school leaders and state governors are locked in a heated battle over how to send kids back to school in a pandemic.

The logic for in-school protections is simple: Kids under the age of 12 are still ineligible for the COVID vaccine, but the Delta variant is more transmissible and is sending more kids to the hospital. After a tumultuous year of virtual learning, children should be back in the classroom, experts suggest – but with necessary protections enforced like student and staff masking, improved ventilation, vaccinations for adults and regular COVID testing.

But starting in April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began issuing executive orders to prevent local governments, school districts and even private businesses from enforcing these things. Abbott also banned mandatory masking in schools in May, while DeSantis banned it late last month.

There have already been consequences. Recently, the CDC announced that cases from Texas and Florida made up a third of the all new COVID cases reported within that week. Last week, Florida admitted more young people to the hospital for COVID than any other state. 

So districts have decided to fight back. 

School districts in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston announced this week that they’re defying the ban and mandating masks in schools, while county officials in Dallas and San Antonio sued the governor for the right to mandate masks in schools and government buildings. Districts in Miami-Dade, Gainesville, Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale have also said they’ll be requiring masks in schools.

In response, Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said they’re taking the fight to court, and DeSantis has threatened to withhold pay to superintendents and school board members of districts that require masks. Three of the districts are now under investigation for “non-compliance.” It’s an ironic, sad reality to take in: as child hospitalization rates rise, these “pro-small government” politicians are much more concerned with quashing local rebellion than they are with halting the spread of a deadly virus.

— Samantha Grasso (@samjgrasso)

🎮 Twitch, gaming and the Left

For many years, the concept of Twitch-streaming baffled me. Why would I want to watch someone else play video games on the internet?

The value-add of gaming is interactivity; if I have no control over the action, why not watch something with a good story, with better acting and fewer repetitive fight scenes – say, a movie or a TV-show? What’s more, if I wanted to get a sense of a particular game, there were plenty of edited and curated playthroughs on YouTube, with none of the awkward dead air, loading screens and distractions (ever-scrolling chat; glazed, blue-lit faces) of the Twitch experience.

But at some point last year, I saw the light. In early April 2020, my friend Pat Blanchfield, a journalist and academic, embarked on what seemed an absurd undertaking, one in keeping with the gonzo creativity of early quarantine: He set out to play through every entry in the immensely popular Call of Duty franchise, explaining in real-time on Twitch their distortions of actual events in the history of warfare. His goal, he told me, was to untangle the nefarious means by which the games metabolize the violent American past and manufacture consent, if not enthusiasm, for the U.S. war machine. This sounded like my kind of stream. And like many people in that period of petrified stasis – when the passage of time was compressed and elongated, vivid with motion and static, like an HD film of a bullet traveling underwater – passivity felt like the only bearable posture. In other words, I wasn‘t doing much. So I tuned in.

Pat’s project was not entirely novel. Game critics have increasingly sought to incorporate analysis of the ideological effects of gaming, as well as the (often dire) material conditions of the video game industry, into their work. (I wrote recently for Dissent magazine about these efforts.) Twitch itself has attracted, in recent years, a small but influential community of left-wing streamers. In fact, the most popular Twitch account is held by Hasan Piker, nephew of “The Young Turks” co-founder Cenk Uygur and now a left media powerhouse in his own right. Piker is brawny and handsome – BuzzFeed once deemed him a “woke bae” – with the look and affect of a jock who prefers the company of nerds. His streams often feature gaming, but also hours upon hours of idle chatter, banal stretches in which Piker eats lunch or responds to comments in the chat. He has an impish charm and lack of sanctimony that make his unwavering left-wing politics more attractive to his audience of irony-poisoned gamers. He understands his medium intuitively. “I am pretty much an AM radio host,” he said in an interview with New York Times reporters Kevin Roose and Charlie Warzel last year, “like a conservative talk show host. Rush Limbaugh, but a leftist. And for Gen Z and millennials.”

When last fall Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced on Twitter she was looking to play Among Us – a 2018 multiplayer that spiked in popularity during the pandemic – Piker and his team pounced; in coordination with her office, they hosted a stream during which AOC, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Piker and other popular streamers played the game, talked about the stakes of the 2020 election and reached millions of viewers. AOC, a veritable Instagram star in her own right, shares Piker’s ease with online performance – which is to say, the performance of nonperformance. After the stream, game recognized game. As Piker put it, the stream was successful, in large part, because “she’s a natural.”

Given the conservative reputation of the gaming community – 2014’s “Gamergate” fiasco is considered a precursor to the online alt-right; Steve Bannon was explicit about seeking to manipulate the gamer sensibility to generate online foot soldiers for Trumpism – the number of prominent left-wing streamers on Twitch is improbably large. In addition to Piker, there’s whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the hosts of the left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House, Ian Kochinski (aka Vaush), Harris Brewis (aka Hbomberguy) and many smaller streamers with passionate fan bases. Indeed, many left-wing streamers explicitly identify their project with a form of joyful counterprogramming – giving gamers a place to congregate, stew in and absorb progressive rather than reactionary ideas.

Such efforts are especially important, Pat reminded me, because the content of the most popular video game titles is so ideologically noxious. Many installments in the Call of Duty franchise, he says, “chart a series of nostalgic operations,” mining the Great War as a means of “metabolizing and reconciling us to the forever wars” of the present. Hundreds of millions of (mostly) young men will only encounter certain historical events – African wars of decolonization, Cold War proxy conflicts and even war crimes committed by U.S. troops (often symptomatically remixed with culpability reassigned to Russian or Iranian perpetrators) – through their depiction in Call of Duty.

The irony of Pat’s project, however, is that the task he’s setting for himself – playing the game while staying alive to its insidious moral and historical recalibrations – is deliberately foreclosed by the game’s design. The thin jingoistic gruel of Call of Duty, Pat told me, is “delivered to the player through this constant brain lavage of gunfire, where you actually can’t think as it’s happening.” Thus, many of Pat’s streams chart a gradual devolution of his capacity to deliver the carefully prepared historical and analytical remarks he has prepared, as the necessity of not getting shot overwhelms his ability to stay focused on the pedagogical task at hand. “I become increasingly desperate and angry,” he says, his mindset warped in precisely the manner intended by the game’s mechanisms for discipline and reward.

“It’s like Kafka’s hunger artist,” says Pat, ruefully. His onlookers, myself included, brace ourselves around his digital cage, not daring to move away.

— Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell)

📺 The misery of the rich

Reviewed: Never Gonna Snow Again, directed by Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert

The misery and alienation of the rich is a favorite narrative topic of ours. It flatters the wealthy, of course, who like to see their stories told and believe they have it much harder than us plebs would believe. 

For the rest of us, it can be both a powerful criticism of our system — capitalism makes even its most powerful beneficiaries miserable. Why are our families and households designed in such a repressive image? — as well as a reactionary salve for our resentment — see, aren't you glad you aren't rich? They're so confused and lonely. Be happy in your place!

The domestic spaces of the wealthy, and particularly those spaces' women, children and laborers, are most often where this unhappiness is portrayed. In the beautiful, quietly surreal Polish dark comedy Never Gonna Snow Again, we watch lonely Ukrainian immigrant Zenia move to an unnamed city and develop relationships with the housewives of a rich gated community, where he works as a masseuse and hypnotist.

Zenia, who comes from the Chernobyl area, has a preternatural and spooky ability for caring for his clients. The implication of a kind of psychic or mystical power counterpoints pleasingly with the vulgar and petty conflicts of his wealthy customers.

The film is beautifully shot, dreamy and sexy, and full of tension, melancholy and strange euphoria. It also touches on the environmental legacies of both the USSR and U.S.-exported suburban McMansion architecture, as well as the current authoritarian and racist political climate in Poland.

Its fantastical and nostalgic elements let it down a bit, but it's a fascinating and subtle film about heartbreak, desire and political legacies. 

Until we eat the rich, we will be dominated by their power and forced to work for their meager pleasures. How those struggles, exploitations and histories shape us will always make for interesting artistic exploration.

— Vicky Osterweil

Stacy-Marie Ishmael on quitting, burnout and sustainability in journalism. [Poynter]

The coronavirus could look like this in the future. [The New Yorker]

We really hope this isn’t necessary, but if you bought a sweater endorsing Cuomo, here’s what you can do. [Gawker]

Why poverty is a policy choice. [Vox]

“Once the people lose hope, there’s not much left to go on” – a personal reflection on Lebanon and corruption. [The Nation]

Baltimore would really like, A) for you to get the vaccine, and B) for you to know that salad is not a good alternative. [Twitter/@BMore_Healthy]

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