Anonymity and Modern Illness

Itzhak Perlman teaches music appreciation
to a notoriously grouchy audience

Itzhak Perlman, the Israeli-American classical violinist, was a regular guest on Sesame Street in my childhood; a quick Google search reveals he still is. The show invited him aboard to help teach child audiences classical music appreciation. His frequent character arc included an encounter with somebody, often Oscar the Grouch, who vocally disliked classical music. However, after a few bars of Paganini or whoever, the designated Muppet inevitably came around.

Perlman visibly wasn’t able to walk unaided, though. This quality sometimes went unremarked. For the Muppets of Sesame Street, Perlman’s disability mattered little; his demonstrable violin skill held their attention. However, I remember one occasion where Big Bird questioned Perlman’s crutches and leg braces. Perlman set his violin aside that day and explained the lingering scars left by his childhood battle with polio, a battle that left his legs depleted.

Then as now, violin soloists traditionally performed standing up; seated was for ensemble players. Perlman’s inability to carry his instrument onstage with the panache of Andre Rieu or Jascha Haifetz, his necessity to sit while playing, like just another contract player, made him visibly different. Sure, his violin is virtuosic, and perhaps because of my childhood exposure, Perlman remains my yardstick for violin playing. But he also just looked different.

I couldn’t help remembering that during a recent discussion about COVID-19. Like polio before it, COVID’s social and economic effects have become the dominant factor of our era. Just as parents weigh the odds of children contracting and spreading COVID today versus the long-term social development costs of keeping them isolated from peers, parents performed such cost-benefit analyses in 1952. Culturally, the difference between the diseases is vanishingly small.

One important difference, however, grabs my attention. Like Perlman on PBS in my childhood, or wards full of iron lung patients, a sight still distressingly common in my lifetime, COVID patients haven’t been particularly visible. We don’t have widely circulated images of patients on respirators, immobilized by the weight of technology keeping them alive. And we don’t have celebrities teaching children the consequences of diseases that seem like ancient history.

A pediatric iron lung ward—an image my parents' generation
would've been intimately familiar with (click to enlarge)

Because if Perlman appeared on Sesame Street recently enough to lodge in my long-term memory, it must’ve happened after America’s last case of wild-caught polio, in 1979. It took 24 years from Jonas Salk’s invention of the polio vaccine, to the disease’s eradication in the United States, and polio’s long-term effects were something my generation needed to understand. Also, unlike smallpox, wild polio still exists on Earth, and could resurge.

Equally important, Perlman’s visibility as disabled, and his willingness to discuss his disability, influenced how my generation perceived disability. I remember some third-grade bully trying to instigate taunts against a girl with cerebral palsy and, in a rare show of childhood solidarity, several of us closed ranks around her and drove the bully away. I can’t speak for others, but my response originated partly because her crutches resembled Perlman’s.

Simply put, the visibility of people with significant scars and disabilities influenced how my generation perceived health concerns. Veterans of World War II and Vietnam in wheelchairs still steer how I perceive war, and war-making policy. Itzhak Perlman’s public persona as an entertainer and children’s TV personality, probably influenced why I don’t recall any organized anti-vaxxer culture before the middle 2000s. Representation, the slogan reminds us, matters.

But we live in different times. Modern medicine has made disfiguring illnesses rare, so we seldom see people with smallpox scars, diphtheria lung, or other pathogen damage anymore. Media consolidation has marginalized people with disabilities from public view, particularly those caused by severe, visible injury. We just don’t see people suffering long-term health effects of serious disease like my generation saw on Sesame Street.

Itzhak Perlman more recently

It’s impossible to prove without long-term longitudinal studies, which it’s too early to have yet, but perhaps the popularity of anti-vax conspiracy theories and anti-mask sentiment stems from this tunnel vision. Without the visibility of people who survived past terrible outbreaks, and patients currently hoping to survive COVID, it becomes easier to rationalize risks away. People want to believe the world they see perpetuated through glossy media images is reliable.

Americans perhaps don’t respect COVID risks, and other illnesses, because we don’t see those risks portrayed widely. We don’t experience illness as real, imminent risk, as our ancestors did with polio or smallpox. What we cannot see, becomes easy to dismiss. We need ways to foreground real, living people with real consequences from illness, to remind people the risks of complacency.