Who is That Masked Man?

As I write this, the World Health Organization has several pages of its website devoted  to instructing non-health professionals how to wear a face mask, which it says you don’t need, but which you should wear whenever you leave the house, but won’t protect you in any way, but is essential.  This organization should change their name from W.H.O. to W.H.A.T.?  (World Health Alarmist Twits)

I’m not a health professional, but my wife is and The Doc made me a mask, so I am using it whenever I leave the house, even though I cannot stop humming the William Tell Overture. My mask may not help, but it won’t hurt.  After all, if all you have is a placebo, the correct prescription is to double the dose.

This blog post has nothing to do with whether you should wear a mask, or how to wear a mask, or anything of the sort.  (Though in all fairness, I’d probably be more accurate than the folks from W.H.E.N.—Whiny Hordes Enabling Nothing).

Despite being completely ignorant when it comes to things medical….I have noticed a few “peculiar” things about the way people are wearing their masks.  My mailman wears gloves, but while we were talking at the mailbox (at the approved social distance, of course), he used them to scratch his face twice.  And when I took The Doc’s cat to the vet today (where they wisely have you sit in the car while your pet is taken inside), I spotted masked patrons almost constantly scratching their faces and adjusting their apparently uncomfortable masks. 

If you google for “photos of people wearing their masks wrong”, the result is astounding.  People have cut eating holes through their masks, have worn them over their eyes, and (my personal favorite), one prominent senator had his mask positioned below his nose at a press conference about wearing masks.

That’s when it hit me—people aren’t wearing their masks for medical reasons, they are wearing them as magical gris-gris. 

If you aren’t up to date on your Voodoo, a gris-gris is a magical amulet usually consisting of a small bag on a string that is worn around the neck and used to bring good luck or to ward off evil spirits.  In Western Africa, where the custom originated, the bag usually contained verses from the Koran written on small strips of paper.  In Africa, the gris-gris was frequently used as a form of birth control among people who were called ‘parents’.

The custom came to the New World with slavery where it slowly changed over time becoming part of both VooDoo or, in some areas, the Church of Santería.  Slaves occasionally wore them to bring bad luck to their masters, and likenesses of the amulets can be found on a few slaves’ tombstones. In parts of Louisiana, a gris-gris is associated with dark magic, while in Haiti, a gris-gris is a good luck charm.   (And back in Senegal, a gris-gris is still one of the more popular forms of birth control, used by more mothers than the pill.)

Note.  I spent a couple of hours online reading about various folk remedies for birth control, wondering why people kept using a system that obviously failed.  Eventually, it dawned on me that magical birth control works exactly like socialism—when it inevitably fails, the reason is because it “just wasn’t done right” 

In popular parlance, a gris-gris is anything the wearer believes will keep away evil or will attract good luck.  Magical charms for protection seem to be universal, especially those that offer protection from bullets.

In Thailand, the Buddhists believe in Lek Lai, a metal amulet that protects the wearer from knives and bullets.  Magicians regularly demonstrate the effectiveness, and just as regularly—but not quite as often—get killed in the process when someone forgets to palm the actual cartridge for the specially prepared wax substitute.

During the Philippine Resistance, the U.S. Army ran up against the native Filipino troops, who lacking modern guns, confidently launched attacks armed with machetes, believing they were protected by the magic anting-anting charms they wore.  Though the Filipinos still lost—spectacularly—their fanaticism did help convince the Army to stop using a puny .38 revolver and adopt the powerful .45 automatic.

In Nigeria, magical charms known as odeshi are so regularly sold by shamans to ward off bullets that both the local police and the army tie small pieces of red cloth around the barrels of their firearms, which is the only known antidote to the odeshi charm.  Nor are the shamans indulging in fraud—they truly believe in their charms as testified to by the numerous online videos of shamans being slaughtered while demonstrating their wares.

Currently, there is a particularly gruesome video of a shaman who was profoundly bewildered after he shot his own jaw off.  The video doesn’t show it, but there was evidently a tiny piece of red cloth tied to the barrel of his revolver.

Closer to home, a number of Native American tribes believed that the right charm would protect them against bullets.  Tecumseh, the chief of the Shawnee, supposedly swallowed a small black lodestone (mąz-ni’ąp in Shawnee) that made him so impervious to bullets, that during battle he had to loosen his belt to discard the accumulated lead balls trapped between his skin and his shirt.  According to his tribe’s tradition, shortly before his death, the chief managed to cough up the stone and presented it to his son.  Somehow, the tribe’s tradition do not jive with the historical facts—Tecumseh died after being shot in the chest. 

A similar fate was met by the Lakota, who placed their belief—and lives—in the Ghost Shirts used in the latter part of the 19th century.  The Lakota believed that the shirts made the wearers impervious to bullets, and the U.S. Army, terrified that a newly confident Lakota might resume their war, promptly attacked first.  At Wounded Knee, at least 200 believers were killed or wounded despite their shirts.

I suppose that the most important aspect of any magical charm is that if the wearer believes in it, it probably works...At least until it doesn’t.  So, I’m going to keep wearing my mask.  Maybe it is magic.