Essays in Idleness

Those who live in our big cities become, invariably, a little disturbed. (Take me, for example.) But some go shrieking mad, and with the prolongation of Batflu Orders, the number is increasing.

As I was just reporting to a priest, I’ve learnt to wear a mask for up to nine minutes, continuously: long enough for a quick dash into a grocery store, or a solemn Pater Noster. The public hygiene regs will allow me to go maskless, if I think that I have an excuse; but in that case, I must expect some disordered person at least to “comment,” and possibly to dose me with her Pepper Spray. For “Karens” at their best provide due process imperfectly.

Time and again my right ear is filled with lamentations, about the number being harmed by the Batflu, without coming into contact with the thing itself. I gather, from the usual suspects, that there are appalling losses by family violence, suicide, small businesses destroyed — before adding the number who have died untreated from coronaries, cancer, and various other ills.

By careful, and wisely suspicious attention to the meejah, one may learn that the death count from the actual virus continues to drop. By this, I don’t just mean that fewer are dying, but that the official, cumulative, death tolls are shrinking. They are lowered, retrospectively; with zero publicity, of course. This is because, in their eagerness for funding, the officials were counting “creatively.”

Having achieved their purpose, they quietly trim former deceits. In England, for instance, the health authority has quietly subtracted more than 5,000, who had died “after testing positive,” but also after fully recovering. Very large numbers, everywhere, were merely assumed to be Batflu deaths, in old folks’ homes and places of that sort. Governor Cuomo of New York may well have murdered a few thousand less than were observed to die, after he forced the sick and contagious into these homes. He just needed to pad the numbers for his federal subsidies. That’s what politicians do.

It is very hard for the modern, progressive mind, to understand that old people just die. This has been happening for some millenmia now, and we used to understand “natural causes,” but that was before we all became modern, progressive, and woke. “Science” tells us there must always be a cause; and if “science” can’t find it, something must be blamed. That is where politics comes in. Its task is to change a “something” into a “someone.”

The greatest damage is done not directly to the slandered, but to the human psyche at large. For there can be no estimate for the effect of lies. Yet there can be no civilization, when trust becomes impossible, and the trusting are invariably set up and used.