Accelerating the Inevitable

Atlanta, GA

August 7, 2020

After almost ten days beside Lake Michigan, enjoying some normalcy and ignoring the news, we returned this week to the ongoing inanity. 

Like the bunny who sat near me each morning nibbling on his blade of grass, something the last several months has been gnawing at me. But as with a persistent itch in the middle of my back, I’ve not been able to lay my finger on it.

Not that I’m oblivious to the carnage inflicted on us by our ruling apparatchiks. Like a nuclear bomb on a way of life, their response to a nasty virus and some out-of-control cops has caused immediate, catastrophic, and perhaps irreparable damage. That much is obvious. But my concern is the fallout from the blast…the lingering effects.

When David and I were in South Haven last week, we saw a T-shirt hanging in a tourist shop. On it was a one-star review of this abominable year, over the words “very bad, would not recommend.” 

We chuckled, because it was funny. And, like most humor, it was funny because it was true. What’s also true, but not as funny, is that there are few reasons not to think next year won’t warrant a similar shirt. 

But it won’t be made. Acclimation, accommodation, and acquiescence will have washed away any latent humor. We will have become accustomed to the surrealism to which we are being consigned.

I don’t know why we’d expect our multifaceted lunacy to subside. If anything, it’s accelerating. 

Around the country, plazas, streets, and structures are being stripped of names, images, or emblems reflecting ideas or ancestors out of sync with our enlightened age. Violence and vandalism are becoming commonplace in major cities, where flames and gunfire light up the night. Pleas to stop the burning, looting, beating, and killing are taken by the instigators as another “systemic” symptom of why it continues.

We feel like Count Rostov in A Gentleman in Moscow, looking at the unlabeled, anonymous bottle of wine, and realizing that the Bolsheviks were “intent upon recasting the future from a mold of their own making, and would not rest until every last vestige of the past had been uprooted, shattered, or erased.” But these days, few seem to care. And those that speak out are often supportive of the purge.

Then, of course…and of a piece…there is “the virus.”

I’m old enough to remember when the rationale for house arrest and economic carnage was to “flatten the curve”. But when it did, the goal posts subtly shifted.

We were initially told to isolate for a couple weeks, then to stay home several months. Now, in some places, restrictions may last a few years! Like the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter, this is starting to seem like it’s never going to end. The return to normal is being replaced by an insidious “new normal” straight out of A Clockwork Orange.

We are not allowed to assess our own risks, or manage our own lives. Our betters have decided for us that our primary goal in living is not to get sick. Regardless the implications, and no matter the cost, our rulers decree that all of us will have a pulse…even if none of us has a soul.

When hospitals weren’t overwhelmed as the soothsayers predicted, we were nonetheless told to continue postponing life “until there is a vaccine” (which may never happen), or even till there are “no deaths” (which certainly won’t). Never-mind that the average age of those dying with COVID is two years higher than the life expectancy among the general population.

As morbidity rates fall, our harping hall monitors are now obsessively tracking “cases”, which everyone should have expected to rise with resumption of life. Yet the hysterical commentariat treats it like snowfall in the Sahara.

But an increase in “cases” is fine, particularly as deaths continue to decline. That is how herd immunity develops, and viruses are managed. And, hysteria aside, the vast majority of “cases” are harmless, at least to those under 75 without co-morbidities, or who haven’t eaten raw bats. 

Yet, like a late-night infomercial, the madness continues. As during a rolling series of twenty minute flight delays, people are being anesthetized into a resigned acceptance, and assured things will soon get moving.

But experienced passengers know this plane is never leaving. And, if it does, it won’t land where they thought they were going. While others huddle at the gate or seek a place to sleep on the floor, those in the know grab their luggage, rent a car, and get out of Dodge. 

Compulsory separation, boarded shops, and mask mandates restrict how we are allowed to act. Post-modernist identity politics and racially prescribed perspectives govern what we are permitted to think. And, like strangers on East German street corners, our neighbors have been co-opted into enforcing the new rules.

We were already a society of snitches and snoops (“see something, say something”). But now shame and violence are conscripted to compel recalcitrant individualists into acceptable behavior and approved thought.

Walking on eggshells, looking over our shoulders, and watching our words are becoming ways of life. Meanwhile, a somber pall descends on pleasant social engagement, civil human interaction, and simple rational discourse.

Riots, seclusion, separation, and shut-downs have been excused or encouraged, and are eating away at civilization’s seams. What our anointed elites have done, and are doing, to the great cities of the world is unforgivable.

These “leaders” are so sanctimonious that they have no compulsion issuing mandates without regard for predictably deleterious consequences. And when those effects inevitably arrive…like a grenade strapped to a boomerang…those who hurled them reflexively attribute fault to others.

And borders do not bind the barbarity. Melbourne, Australia incarcerated its people with ordinances so restrictive that I originally thought them a spoof. But they’re real, and nothing short of sadistic. As Tacitus said of Roman emperors, “where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

My parents were in Melbourne six months ago. They described it as one of the greatest cities they’ve seen…and they’ve seen most of them. I’m glad they saw it when they did, and regret I never had a chance to. I don’t know what will remain on the other side of this self-inflicted savagery.

On this side of the Pacific, tyrannical governors and mayors have turned American cities into wastelands and war zones. Seattle and Portland succumbed unapologetically to violent Marxist mobs. Murders and muggings are becoming a way of life in New York and Chicago.

Los Angeles announced it would shut water (!) to houses where people dared to congregate in numbers their masters deem too high for anything other than an ideologically-approved gathering. The dictatorial “science” on which such inhuman directives are based must assume water is not necessary for hygiene or health.

But this is about power and authority, not science or well-being. And it is about self-righteous power, for authoritarians who know best what is good for us. The “science” our “experts” spew recalls that of witch doctors, rain dances, and human sacrifice. The face mask is their lucky rabbit’s foot, the “case curve” their entrails, the capricious edict their magic wand.

Real science relies on actual data, which for COVID shows no correlation between draconian measures and declining deaths. Empirical results across states and countries are essentially random. If anything, they show a slight positive relationship between severity of response and spread of illness. Yet house arrest and mask mandates correlate extremely well with herding, corralling, and controlling a formerly free flock. It’s almost as if that’s the actual goal.

Detrimental effects of business closures and home isolation are obvious, no matter how much they are disregarded by arrogant advocates or papered over with counterfeit cash.

But as cities shut down businesses, they allowed rioters to destroy public property, even as they virtually imprisoned everyone else in their homes. Many prospective captives were fortunate to flee these urban gulags, decamping to Lake Tahoe, the Hamptons, or a rural bolthole. 

Some bewildered wardens are wondering when the escapees will return, or are baffled why they won’t. Not that they care about the well-being of their prey. They view them, as Doug Casey put it, like a flea views a dog. They need them alive for their own survival, but couldn’t care less about the hosts’ comfort or desires.

Perhaps this brings me closer to finding my elusive itch. Not the realization that political psychopaths are making our lives miserable. I’ve long been aware of that. That’s to be expected. It’s what fleas do.

What is most disconcerting is that many of the dogs don’t seem to care. Their sustenance is being drained, their lives are being sapped, but most aren’t even scratching. And as the kennel gate closes, they emit hardly a whimper.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most. Our overlords are taking our world, and have no apparent intention of giving it back. Yet a lot of the victims don’t seem to mind being robbed of the one life they have. For months, they hung on every word from their mayors and governors, waiting to learn if they could leave their home, and what they’d be”allowed” to do. And, like Stockholm Syndrome, most appear to cheer these arbitrary constraints, and chastise their fellow detainees for resisting.

We are being slowly acclimated to a creepy “new normal” of six-foot separation, plexiglass shields, zoom videos, face cloth, floor tape, periodic house arrest, synthetic “entertainment”, and having everything shipped to our home…like meals slipped under a cellblock door. Yet many are just fine with this sterile dystopia, and begrudge others for questioning it.

We have even been deprived the distractions, joys, and solace that would normally relieve such a depressing existence. No happy hours, no family gatherings, no festive events, no warm smiles, no exotic travel, no welcoming handshakes, no celebratory high fives, no consoling hugs, no parting hospital visits. And even if these erstwhile pleasures and humane activities were suddenly permitted, many people have now been conditioned to fear them.

Most sports, concerts, and shows were cancelled. Others sort of returned…diluted, with “bubbles”, no spectators, canned noise, cardboard “fans”, political messaging, “national” anthems for different races, and announcers broadcasting games as if we weren’t living in a giant insane asylum. 

Funerals and weddings are restricted, unless they are for members of the club that George Carlin described as big…but that we aren’t in. Even Mass was proscribed, with the craven complicity of spineless bishops who seem never to have heard of St Vincent de Paul. As always, separation of Church and State means less Church…and more State.

Schools are being closed, or converted into the pages of an Orwell novel. Those under twenty are virtually insusceptible to viral symptoms. Highly publicized anecdotes to the contrary are exceptions that prove the rule. But parents are panicked, and teachers are using kids as collective bargaining chips. They should be fired. If teachers are unwilling to do their job, they should find another one.

Jefferson said that not every difference in opinion was a difference in principle. I’m not sure that is still generally the case. Till recently, Americans desired similar ends, even if they disagreed on appropriate means. The United States of today do not share the same opinions, principles, or ends. But they share a common contagion.

Politics is the deadly virus afflicting modern America. It contaminates everything, and cannot be quarantined. It infects societies, and destroys relationships. It has been spreading for years, and is corroding the vital organs. And a crisis is its ideal carrier.

Crises tend to accelerate the inevitable. And the crises now being conjured and stoked are revolutionary. As we are seeing, revolutions may claim to correct wrongs, but they mostly strip rights.

They claim good intentions, which pave the road to a place Thomas Hobbes described as being where “truth is seen too late”. As we continue inevitably down that path, many in good health sit confined…secluded and scared…but “safe”. Staying alive, as life passes by.

As it does, we again sympathize with A Gentleman in Moscow, for whom “all the splendid modulations of the seasons and those colorful festivities that recur in the course of normal life have been replaced by a tyranny of indistinguishable days.” 

JD