Essays in Idleness

In my last Thing column of the year (here) I review the year 2020, in my pessimistic way. Yes, it has been fairly bad; but next year could be much worse; and a time may come when we look back on “the first year of the Batflu” with nostalgia; as a time of candy and roses.

Perhaps I should mention why I call it “the Batflu.” At least one correspondent thinks it is because I am racist, and “have a problem” with bats. But he fails to discriminate between bats and viruses, between the Chinese generally, and the Communist devils who rule them. He thinks I mean one, if he thinks at all — when I mean the other. Not being any sort of bigot, to my knowledge, and not even wanting to be one, my practice is to ignore people like him, except when they can be used as illustrations.

Our “speech codes,” which are unambiguously vicious, are designed to trip up anyone not parroting a progressive party line. The natural iteration of a communist ideology is that one is guilty, from the moment one is accused — no matter how obviously the accusation is ridiculous. This is not a new thing, however. It is a method that has been used, throughout recorded history, by those in whom the moral stench is overwhelming; who demand heresy trials, even for unbelievers. It is the casual and humourless use of epithets such as “racist” that marks a person as something worse, and beyond the reach of any civilized disputation. He is what Glenn Reynolds calls “a garbage person,” or what Pope Benedict characterized as “filth.”

In my use of the word, “Batflu,” I mean something beyond the current, wildly overstated, viral outbreaks. My reference is to the whole syndrome (fine Greek word) in which it is one component. Yes, people may die from the virus, and many more get sick. Many, many more test positive and show no serious symptoms, or no symptoms at all. And many, many, many were effectively immune, from the outset. But no one is immune to the political machinations, in which fear of a disease is cultivated to delete our freedoms.

Like the counting machines used to advance fraud in elections, it is a phenomenon that ultimately crosses party lines. Anyone might use that technology, once they see that it works. And those who are evil will not hesitate to use it, for as the Devil ever whispers: “The end justifies the means.”

Unfortunately, at this time, our society is so broken by the spread of falsities, that it is hard for any simple, honest man to espy the rhetorical tricks, cast everywhere to ensnare him. While he is on his guard against one set of lies, he succumbs to another. He lets things pass, because there are too many to stop. And if he is a coward, he accommodates the lies, in his longing for a quiet life.

For much more than any virus from a batcave, or Wuhan, he fears what will happen if he does not wear the mask; how he will be fingered and ostracized. As we have seen from the rank hypocrisy of well-known politicians, partying in defiance of their own illicit commands, even they do not believe the horseshit they are preaching; they only calculate what they can get away with. (Sometimes, happily, they calculate wrong.)

My point is that the real “pandemic” is the by-product of a war, seemingly perpetual, between Truth and the Lie. The side of Truth is currently losing badly, and a temptation to surrender is always there. But in my view, we are in need of escalation.

Speak the Truth. There is no price too high.