Big Bird gets their COVID vaccination
As political theorist Bonnie Honig reminds us, public things aren’t just useful, providing services or meeting practical needs. They are also affectively significant, providing nodes of meaning through which people can create community and engage in shared public dialogue. In 2012, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney promised to cut funding to PBS, the US public broadcaster. Although, he said, ‘I like PBS. I love Big Bird’... referring to the character on the children’s television show, Sesame Street. ... ‘I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for’”(quoted in Honig 2013, 63). As Honig describes it, in the debate that followed more hard-nosed critics on both the political right and the left represented love of Big Bird as a childish fixation, preferring instead to focus on how much (or how little) money could be saved by cutting PBS. On Honig’s view, however, trivializing shared affection for Big Bird just shows how limited the language for talking about public things has become. Drawing on the midcentury British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of child development, she argues that Big Bird is an example of a public thing that provides an opportunity for affective constellation—an object that unites us in shared feeling—and a “holding environment”—a shared space that allows individual development because of a background of safety and containment (63-65).
Big Bird has been in the news again recently, when they spoke up in support of COVID vaccination. Following the approval in the US early November of the Pfizer vaccine for children aged between five and eleven, Big Bird, who is perpetually six-and-a-half, (aptly) tweeted: “I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy” (@BigBird, Nov 6). Republican Senator Ted Cruz was quick to reply: “Government propaganda... for your five year old!” (@tedcruz, Nov 6). Apparently Cruz’ comment triggered an outpouring of critical response from Big Bird lovers, just as Romney’s had in 2012. According to Martin Pengelly in The Guardian, right-wingers went on the offensive, stating that Big Bird’s tweet was not only propaganda, but also “brainwashing,” “evil,” and “twisted” alongside their claims that the vaccines are experimental and children are not at risk from COVID. Just as Romney was surprised by the expression of public support for Big Bird in 2012, so Cruz et al seemed gleefully shocked by the online coverage given to his criticism of Sesame Street. (To give you the vibe, news website The Right Scoop ran with the headline “Libs are really triggered by Big Bird’ – Ted Cruz TRIPLE trends as FROTHING libs have MELTDOWNS.”)
Here we have a public thing (Big Bird) defending another public thing (COVID vaccines). In fact, Sesame Street has a long tradition of role-modelling public health measures. As far back as 1972, Big Bird joined a line-up of kids waiting for measles vaccination, and his November 6 tweet ends, “I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!” COVID vaccination has been a flashpoint issue in the US, with political leaders on the right using the rebelliousness of vaccine refusal, libertarian rhetoric about vaccine mandates, and rallying cries around bodily autonomy, freedom of the person, government overreach, and frightening conspiracies as powerful affective muster-points. Defenders of vaccination have been left with less emotionally compelling, dryer academic arguments about evidence bases, clinical trial integrity, population health, statistical likelihoods, and other less emotive and less personal (and harder to understand) information about public health. The shared feelings for Big Bird Honig describes might thus mobilize an especially powerful intervention: maligned and feared “foreign” vaccines are transmuted into public things that bring us together through the operation of a loved and trusted puppet—a benign public thing, a transitional object for our fractured but inevitably shared world.