Steve Bannon wasn’t angry, but he was very disappointed. “You know, I’m pretty low-key,” he said one recent evening. “And I think my instinctive reaction was ‘I really wish they had not done this to our town.’ Because I love our town, and we didn’t deserve it.” He was sipping hot chocolate outside a busy café in Great Barrington. “And I must tell you, with my name,” he added, “it seemed like a double whammy.”
Bannon, who frequently receives “very nasty” e-mails meant for the right-wing political operative, is a pharmacist and the chair of the select board in Great Barrington, a town of around seven thousand souls in the corner of the Berkshires where Massachusetts meets Connecticut and New York. A popular second-home spot for New York City residents, the town was until recently best known to city dwellers as the nearest place with a full-service pot dispensary. But that distinction was overshadowed in October, when more than three dozen epidemiologists, physicians, and statisticians, as well as a stray philosopher, published a report called the “Great Barrington Declaration.”
Sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank based in the town, the declaration argues against lockdowns and in favor of a strategy of herd immunity as a way to contain the coronavirus. Its chief signatories are professors at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, the last of whom asserted in May that covid was “on its way out” in the United Kingdom. The document immediately attracted international attention. Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical adviser, told a parliamentary committee that it was “scientifically weak, probably dangerously flawed, operationally impractical, and, I think personally, ethically a little difficult.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general, said that it was “scientifically and ethically problematic.” Anthony Fauci dismissed it as “ridiculous.” The White House embraced it.
For the people of Great Barrington, it was the declaration’s title that caused anguish. They saw it as a slur, in the way that Mike Pompeo’s insistence on calling SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus” vilified China. “The town of Great Barrington is 100% against herd immunity! Our town’s name has been hijacked!” a local posted on the town’s Facebook page. “The Declaration has absolutely nothing to do with GB. I wonder if it’s even legal to use GB’s name in a case like this,” another wrote, adding, “Why not issue something called the Great Barrington Nazi Party Declaration and put swastikas on it.” Mostly, residents were worried that tourists would stay away—or, worse, turn up without masks. Leigh Davis, a select-board member, drafted an angry letter to the A.I.E.R., protesting its “despoiling of our town’s good name.” The select board decided against publishing it, on the ground that it was too harsh.
Instead, town leaders fell back on a tried-and-true strategy: painting things. In May, they had tried to send a hopeful message by adding rainbow stripes to a number of Main Street crosswalks. In July, a local youth group painted a colorful Black Lives Matter mural in a prominent alleyway. After the declaration was published, the town stencilled sidewalks with reminders to social-distance and wear masks. “We have been very proactive,” Bannon said.
The select board also tried to dissociate itself from the declaration. “We’re not a town that does a lot of national press releases,” Bannon said. But, for this, “we put out two international press releases.” The first, published in October, made the point that “the town itself had no role in, or forewarning of, the declaration bearing the town’s name.” A second was addressed to the A.I.E.R.: “Your co-opting of our town’s name . . . is exploitative and unwelcome.” Mark Pruhenski, the town manager, wrote a letter to the Guardian, lamenting that the A.I.E.R. “has caused immeasurable distress to many in our community and confused many others about our town’s safety.”
The last time the town made the national news was in 2012, when Bill O’Reilly, then still at Fox News, called it “the town that hates Christmas,” claiming that it had banned festive lights on Main Street. O’Reilly had first picked on the town in 2007, when the select board imposed an ordinance mandating that Christmas lights be turned off at 10 p.m., to save energy. Great Barrington weathered those unwelcome moments in the limelight. Residents are hoping that this one, too, shall pass. Ed Abrahams, another select-board member, gave an interview to the Berkshire Edge, an online newspaper, in which he pointed out that “the Paris Accords were signed in Paris and I don’t think the people of Paris formally approved that document.” He added that Ralph Lauren had once marketed a line of bedding named for Great Barrington. “Though it’s possible,” the Edge noted, “those pillow shams and dust ruffles are named after the village of Great Barrington in Gloucestershire, England, from which the southern Berkshire County town derives its name.” ♦
