Essays in Idleness

You can get a cat into a bag twice, as someone said (I think it was me); but the second time it has to be dead. This would be the reasoning behind my prediction that a second general lockdown will not even be attempted; but it must be qualified. For many of the people who imposed the first one were demonstrably insane, and they haven’t yet been removed from public office.

The same could be said about our impending “summer of love,” or hot season of race riots, already endured a half-century ago. That cat has been put into that bag before. This time is bound to be a different story.

It is fairly strictly a party question, now. The “theory” behind the lockdowns — to avoid overloading the hospitals in Manhattan — proved a crock, but there is a more cogent alternative theory. The Democrats in Natted States Merica guessed that destroying the “Trump economy,” and encouraging “peaceful” riots in the cities, was the only way they could defeat Trump, having tried other methods to remove him. And for a party of convinced abortionists, defeating Trump takes priority over mere human lives. We’ll see in November whether their Caracas strategy is the final winner.

To be fair, as they say at Instapundit, the Repubs have historically played along with this, and agreed to take responsibility and blame for almost purely Democrat measures. A good example is race, where the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenic birth control to reduce the black population, and Jim Crow laws, presents itself to captive media as the champion of the black man against “systemic racism”; while the party of Lincoln apologizes for itself. That the devil is at large in American politics is, to my mind, an irresistible hypothesis.

The refusal of this Trump fellow to play this game, as his predecessors did, drives Democrats berserk. He actually fights back, to their consternation. It didn’t help that they were so proximate to berserk already.

But I would not wish to miss a kick at the “Republicants” in their old country clubs, either. For generations they were the models of complacency, to their own cost. They weren’t even interested in the black man’s plight, and forfeited the “negro” vote (I used the same term as Martin Luther King), while the Democrats absconded with it. This they did by means of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” whose nanny-state provisions were instrumental in wrecking black families, as well as the families of “white trash,” in Ozarkia and elsewhere. The poor were locked into Pringle-eating, drug abusing, fatherless despair. Systemic “entitlements” (i.e. pogey) preserve this status quo.

On the other hand, I have heard earnest discussions of what “systemic” might mean, among the Republicant factions. With a hat tip to perhaps half of the civil rights legislation (which was supported by a much higher proportion of “Reds” than “Blues” in the legislatures of the time), the Americans have heroically dismantled the genuinely “systemic” racism of the southern Democrat tradition, through the generations since the last World War; so that now it survives only in the leftist imagination.

That individual acts of bigotry continue, even by the occasional rogue cop, cannot be denied. That all tribes are “racist” against all other tribes in the state of nature, is an observation available to the sane. A few anthropological footnotes to Hobbes could confirm this nicely. But in the Western Civ which “multiculti” radicals seek to overthrow, tribal propensities used to be resisted.

In the big fat book that I have never been tempted to write, for fear of terminal boredom, every statement above could be vindicated. For the moment I am only trying to provide some forgotten context. We came to our unpretty pass by a route much different from what the slogans of left demagogues suggest.