Every
normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag,
and begin slitting throats. ---H. L. Mencken
Notes from the big box:
1)
In my store,
all the water fountains, in both the public and the employee areas, have signs
on them:
ATTENTION
THE
WATER FOUNTAIN IS OUT OF ORDER
DO
NOT USE
They
are not out of order, of course. They
work fine. Someone decided the fountains
could be a source of infection so they slapped the signs on them, which
everyone obeys. I haven’t seen anybody
even touch one of the drinking fountains for two weeks.
Since
no one uses them, I do.
2)
We had
a dust-up the other night near the frozen fish.
One shopper (no mask), got too close to another shopper (with a mask),
and when the masked shopper objected, the other one coughed on her and said, “I
got the virus, bitch. Now you gonna get
it.” Bad language followed, then
fists. The police, who are often around
in the evening, brought an end to the festivities.
The
store is usually busy, and the aisles are only four feet wide, so it’s
impractical to be always six feet away from everyone. There’s a polite dance that occurs when you
need to get past someone, a dance that says, “I care, I really care, and I’m
not exactly trying to infect you, but I’m going to come within six feet of you
now because it would be way too much trouble to avoid you entirely.” I do this dance dozens of times each
day. It is the new manners.
3)
John
started working at the store about a week ago, and we quickly identified each
other as members of the resistance. If
we see each other during the day, we remove our gloves, if we are wearing them,
and shake hands. We haven’t had a
conversation since the first time we met in the break room, but we always shake
hands.
Shaking
hands is now an act of civil disobedience.
4)
Each of
us now gets at paper mask at the beginning of each shift. The first time it happened, I asked if I was
required to wear it. “No,” was the
answer, though I was told by a different person, also a superior, that though
it was not “required required,” it was “recommended.”
*
On
April 7, Dr. Birx stated during the daily Corona briefing that, in the U.S.,
all deaths of persons who have the coronavirus are listed as corona deaths. On Thursday, Dr. Fauci appeared on the Today
Show, and described any concern that deaths might be mistakenly attributed
to corona as a “conspiracy theory.”
(What’s he doing on the Today Show, by the way?)
This is
the same man who testified to Congress on March 11 that the fatality rate from
corona was ten times the fatality rate of seasonal flu. He could not possibly have known this because
no one knows, even now, what the fatality rate might be. Whether or not it was his purpose, this
statement had the effect of ratchetting up the panic level to new heights.
Dr.
Fauci is a bureaucrat, with an agenda.
Asked a legitimate question about how deaths are categorized, he
suggests the people asking such a question wear tin-foil hats. A month before, he made a wildly irresponsible
statement to Congress based on evidence he knew was totally unreliable.
This is
not a person who should have any power over the lives of the American people.
*
Don’t
believe the approval polls. Trump is in
trouble.
Russia
collusion, Stormy Daniels, Ukrainian phone calls, the 25th
Amendment, emoluments (my personal favorite)---none of these imagined scandals
could bring him down, but this time, his own character deficits are coming
together to undermine his support with his political base. And you get the impression he never even saw
it coming.
Trump
is an executive, and his fondest vision of himself is that of the
uber-businessman, like Herbert Hoover, who can fix anything. For him, coronavirus is the Wollman Skating
Rink all over again. This was the
project in NYC that launched him as the kind of can-do guy the city needed and
wanted, the kind of guy who could fix something (in record time and under
budget), that everyone else had spent years and millions of dollars on, without
success.
So when
his bureaucrats came to him with coronavirus, he took up the cause with a
vengeance. HE would get everyone
tested! HE would flatten the curve! HE would shut down the economy and then HE
would revive it with trillions in freshly-printed money and brand-new
totalitarian powers!
And he
ran headlong into the bureaucracy, of course, like the faceless minions at the
CDC whose corona test didn’t work and who wouldn’t permit any pharma company to
produce one that did. (And who would not
permit the manufacture of face masks unless they conformed to fifty pages of
regulations.) Or the implacable Dr.
Fauci, for whom the convenience of healthcare providers appears to be the only
concern.
But the
intransigence of the bureaucrats is something every president has to deal with
(and Trump is actually better at it than others). The real problem, again, is rooted in Trump’s
character. He will not do his
homework. He will not read a book. He will not study the data. He will not ask Fauci, ”Hey, Doc, why are we
trying to flatten this damn curve anyway?
You never told me that part.”
Instead, he will turn over policy-making and thinking to the
“scientists” and just be the executive who does their bidding.
And
that’s the problem for Trump with his base.
They don’t understand why twenty million people had to be thrown out of
work and tens of thousands of small businesses destroyed. They don’t understand why people will have to
lose their homes and their savings and their marriages and, for some, their
lives. They don’t understand why the
federal government is taking over the role of capital markets. What does that
have to do with a virus?
Sometimes,
I look at Trump during the corona briefings and I wonder whether he’s starting
to figure out that he has been played, that his own character flaws are being
used against him. But the problem is
that even though he can see the economic shutdown is a mistake, he doesn’t know
how to pull it all back from the abyss. He
is responsible for urging authoritarian leftist governors to shut down their
states and now they won’t reverse course even if he wants them to.
Trump owns
the coronavirus. He wanted to own it and
now he does. His decision to turn over
his policy-making authority to bureaucrats and “experts” may well be his
downfall in November.
*
I am a
conservative, so I am used to having minority opinions on matters of public
policy. It’s why I am such a supporter
of the First Amendment, especially now that the left is so open and
enthusiastic about silencing those who disagree with them.
Still,
I like to think I’m not a whack-job. I
don’t believe there are mole people (or Nazis) living underground in the Antarctic,
and I’m pretty sure men walked on the moon in 1969. So I was surprised to find I am part of a
tiny minority of people who think it’s foolish to shut down the U.S. in order
to “flatten the curve,” or reduce the corona deaths, or whatever the latest
stated purpose is. The poll I saw had
79% of Americans who think this is the right thing to do and only 9% who don’t.
Nine
percent. It’s a low number. In fact, it’s about the lowest number you get
in polls because no matter what you ask people you can always find 8% or 9% who
believe the goofiest thing imaginable.
Nine percent of Americans believe Elvis is alive, and OJ was innocent,
and Tupac is living with a Navaho tribe in New Mexico. I mean, they are different 9 percents, but
you can find 9% of people who believe all those things.
And
now, because I believe shutting down the country is causing, and will cause, far more pain and deaths and misery than a
less authoritarian approach would, I’m one of them.
Copyright2020MichaelKubacki
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