Rack Squats and War Butter

And what vaccine passports are like in Europe

I just got back from the gym. It was leg day, about which I’ve come to feel the same way that office workers feel about Mondays.

Don’t get me wrong. Lower body workouts are great, and I’m thrilled about the routine my trainer made for me, and particularly thrilled about the results from it thus far. But it’s all work, and really hard work, and especially the kind of work we don’t normally do for “fun.” We might sometimes grab something overhead and hang from it because it feels good, or pick up something and throw it with our friends, but we don’t usually do anything approximating a rack squat or weighted lunges to amuse ourselves.

I’ve made reference to how emotional lower-body weight training can be, and that continues to be the case now six weeks into this new program. It’s settled a bit, though. It’s not that hip-opening lunges, dead lifts, and sets on an abductor machine actually make you emotional, it’s that they release emotions you generally avoid.

This can be said about exercise in general, especially if you didn’t spend much of your earlier life active. The first few months after joining a gym, I felt angry a lot, and I was mostly just doing cardio. Turns out that I already had lots of reasons to be angry (I was in a physically and emotionally abuse relationship at that time) but had been bottling it all up rather than expressing it.

It’s as if the body stores feelings the same way it stores fat. You can eat 5,000 calories a day and not gain any fat, assuming you’re extremely active. In such a case, the body doesn’t treat that food as “excess,” so it doesn’t try to store it. You can also eat half that amount and gain fat weight if you’re not doing anything besides sitting all day. The body treats that as excess and holds onto it.

I’m pretty sure it’s like that with emotions, too. There are times you are conserving your emotional energy, not letting yourself feel the full range of feelings that are sweeping across you. So the body stores those so you can feel them later. Times of stress, depression, crisis, and abuse are all moments you have to go into emotional subsistence mode.

All that comes out when you work out, especially when it involves parts of the body you generally ignore and don’t use. But then, just like fat, eventually there is less and less “excess,” and you learn better what needs to be stored up and what doesn’t.

So leg days, or more precisely lower-body days, are still very emotional for me, but less and less overwhelmingly so. That being said, I had a jarring experience when I arrived at the gym which I’m still trying to process.

If you’re American and living in the United States you might not have experienced this yet. Don’t worry: it’s coming, and you will. Here in Europe it’s been happening for awhile now, and it’s getting more intense.

What’s happening is the implementation of the digital vaccine passports for Covid and increased government tracking of people, as well as a tiered system of rights and access according to your vaccine status.

Today when I arrived at the gym, I noticed my membership pass didn’t work. We have to check in when we arrive, putting a bracelet with a passive microchip against a sensor. That’s also how we open and lock our lockers, a convenient system that is nevertheless still a little too creepy for me.

It didn’t work today, and there was a sign on the door stating that we were now subject to 2G. The G stands for ge-, the prefix on German verbs which makes the verb past tense instead of present, and the number before it tells you how many acceptable options you have for proving your worthiness to be in a place. There are currently several terrorist threat access levels associated with the system in descending order of restriction. 2G is the middle, and means that you can only enter a place if you have either been vaccinated or have proof of Covid anti-bodies. In 3G, you can use a negative test instead of those other options, and that was the default for much of Europe until recently.

There are more restrictive levels. 2G+ means you must have proof of vaccination or recover and also present a negative test. 1G is the most restrictive, meaning that you can only enter a place or participate in an activity with proof of vaccination, which is what Austria implemented.

Anyway, so my gym is now required to comply with 2G laws, as are many others. Another restriction that was just passed is that events at home which involve ten or more people must be masked and two meter distance must be kept at all times, unless you implement a 3G policy (meaning you must check grandma’s vaccine QR code, health document, or test result at the door).

What it looked like for me at the gym today was that, after noting my membership pass had been turned off and after seeing the sign, I had to find one of the trainers working there who could turn it back on. He could only do that by using an app on his phone to verify my vaccine status, and then he had to enter in my date of vaccination into their computers. ¹

Because I was vaccinated, and because I had the QR code that presents proof of this (linked to a European-wide government database with vaccine records), he was then able to turn back on my pass, meaning I was allowed to actually lift weights today.

It wasn’t just the rack squats and dead lifts that made me emotional today, but rather all this. Yeah, yeah, I’m ‘okay.’ I was able to become one of the worthy people in the world who merit doing nice things because they let someone inject something into them. I got a vaccine, so therefore I get to do meaningful things to me, and I need to tell you something:

This feels so absurd, gross, and a complete violation of everything I believe regarding imposed restrictions on movement, access, and participation in society.

Capitalism and governments already put relentless restrictions on human movement and access. Wealth is the most obvious: you need money to join a gym (though the largest gym chain here only costs 20 euro/month). You need money to eat, to have a roof over your head, to start a business, or really to do most else except breathe. Add to all this the government restrictions like citizenship and borders, and then laws about property access and trespassing and curfews, and of course you start to see things like Rousseau saw them (“man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”).

Covid regulations create yet another kind of restriction, but unlike these others they are related directly to what you choose to do with your body. Capitalists don’t care what you put inside of yourself, as long as you keep buying it from them. Governments are just as happy if you smoke or you don’t: on the one hand you pay extra taxes into their coffers, on the other hand you save them money on health care.

This is a new kind of restriction, but with it comes a remarkably old kind of Protestant morality. You get to be part of the elect because you elected to get injected with something, which means you get to feel pretty good about yourself. Who cares that others don’t get to do what you get to do? They’re moral degenerates anyway, yeah?

But also, and this is something I’ve not yet seen brought up in any of the other really good discussions for it (I’ll mention two of those at the end of this dispatch), it’s a hell of a lot like war butter and victory gardens.

Just after 9/11, the implementation of the Patriot Act, and the invasion of Iraq, there was a peculiar criticism you’d see from liberals about the way that George W. Bush was handling things. If you’re young, then no, it’s not the criticism you’re probably guessing it was. It wasn’t an anti-war sentiment, or any sort of push back on these new government surveillance policies, but rather that Bush had told people to go shopping.

For liberals, the problem with this statement was that it didn’t actually give Americans the sense that they were at war, nor did it inculcate a sense of national unity. What was needed instead of a trip to the mall was, believe it or not, something akin to rationing.

This probably sounds absurd, but only if you don’t understand the purpose of rationing in the United States during the World Wars. See, there wasn’t actually a need for many of the things that were suddenly made artificially scarce. While some production of things like rubber and steel were affected by the war, more basic foods like butter and jam were not, yet they were heavily rationed.

Supposedly such things were being diverted to soldiers overseas, and to some degree they were. However, and this is a common trope in fiction about that time, there seemed to be a lot of missing butter in the trenches. That is, the soldiers weren’t getting the butter that Americans were giving up. In fact, no one really was, but that was never actually the point.

Instead, rationing food became a way of inculcating into the American mind (the same thing happened in Canada as well) that things were dire and they needed to make some sort of national sacrifice to support the war effort (as if sending their sons, brothers, and husbands to the slaughter wasn’t enough…). This was also the point of ‘victory gardens,’ a simple way for people to feel they were participating in war by doing something humans have already done (growing their own food).

That’s a bit what is happening now as well. Vaccine mandates are methods of control, but not just of movement. They are also the new victory garden and the new war butter, a way for everyday people to feel that they are doing something against an existential threat against which they are actually powerless.

Remember, I got the vaccine. This isn’t some screed against vaccines or even necessarily against restrictions. That all probably works to some degree, but we need to be honest about what is also happening. We’re “being moral,” becoming part of the elect, while those who don’t make the same decisions get punished, forbade, restricted, and blamed for the crisis, just as those who kept using butter or driving their car by themselves were smeared as helping Hitler win.

If you’re in America you might also not know this, but there have been some really massive protests here in Europe lately. If you’ve heard about them from the news, you probably think they’re far right protests. They’re not, though there are absolutely some hard right elements participating in them. There are also lots of leftist elements (particularly trade unions, which I know in America you don’t really have anymore). And then also just regular people pretty exhausted and worried and scared about the constant shiftiness of the government policies here.

What is happening here is a lot like what happened with the Gilets Jaunes, the “yellow vest” movement in France. That movement pulled in people from every group except the neoliberal center, which is what these protests movements are doing now.

Just like at an anti-globalisation protest two decades ago, if you ask people in these protests what they are there for they won’t give the same answer as the next person. That phenomenon was used by the US news media to prove that the protesters were just idiots, which is also what is happening now.

The changes wrought by the globalisation of capital back then were too numerous to condense into sound bites or succinct protest slogans. The changes occurring now are just as numerous, nearly impossible to track or even understand. This is all bigger than us, and no one can stop it.

Americans don’t know what this is like yet, but you will. In the meantime, I can at least tell you that it’s fucking really weird to scan a QR code to be allowed to enter a gym, or to eat pizza with your friends at a restaurant (which I did a few days ago), or to sip a coffee in a cafe (which I also did). It’s weird to realise you can only do these things because you consented to a medical procedure. And it’s really weird to think about how this gives you access to everyday things that people who don’t consent are not allowed any more.

I say “weird,” but I also mean terrifying, and sad, and a bit maddening. No one really knows how to understand this, nor what any of the larger implications of this technology really is, and even more so what we are losing by collectively accepting this way of doing things.

I say 'no one,’ but I do think one writer, Paul Kingsnorth, has some really good insight. His recent series at The Abbey of Misrule on these shifts is great, and though I cannot be certain he is more right than others, I feel a little better just reading his attempts to understand this. It means someone is still trying to think about these things.

If you don’t have access to his essays (they are paywalled, but they are absolutely worth paying for), you can at least watch this conversation he had recently about this. He isn’t a vaccine or Covid denier, nor is he a lockstep authoritarian, and anyways he doesn’t just have a victory garden but an entire homestead. What he is, however, is deeply interested in these larger changes that very few are talking about, and maybe you’ll feel a little better after listening to him like I did.

Meantime, I’m just going to keep resting and dealing with my emotions until the next leg day. And also, if you’re one of my kind paid supporters, I just posted a new druid journal video here.

1. If later the government begins demanding additional vaccine boosters or changing the length of validity of these vaccinations, then I will need to present a booster-shot verification on top of my original vaccine verification.