CSotD: Lockdown Easter
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An Easter to remember, and Signe Wilkinson sets the stage.
The people, I would note, appear to be getting a bit grumpy.
We were all willing to pull together for a couple of days, even a couple of weeks, but that sense of national purpose seems to wearing a bit thin, as we’ve reached the point where it’s starting to require more than sitting around watching TV.
Now we have to wear those damned masks.
I went to BJs yesterday and I’d say more than three-quarters of the people there had no masks, including a couple in which she was so pregnant that her protruding belly button was visible under her shirt.
It reminded me of when we were expecting our first.
I was a senior, my wife was working at a publishing house on campus, and when a student came down with meningitis — nobody I knew — I stopped drinking coffee at the snack shop in the morning and quarantined myself before class in a little-used section of the library.
These folks wouldn’t even wear masks to go shopping.
But then we never filled a baby bottle with Coca-Cola, either, and it’s an observation, not an accusation, when I observe that about two-thirds of the patrons in “regular” retail grocery stores around here are wearing masks.
It’s also only an observation that you have to know what to buy at BJs or Sam’s or Costco; you don’t save money on everything, and doing all your shopping there is, at best, a wash, not a savings.
Some people go there for the bargains and others will do all their shopping there, on the mistaken belief that they are saving money, and you can bet they aren’t limiting their purchases to things they’d have put on a list ahead of time.
As I’ve said before, there are entire businesses built on the fact that people make bad choices.
Today’s Edison Lee, for example, is a reflection on the hucksterism of daytime television commercials, and it’s not too far from the predatory companies that seek to separate people from the structured settlements that were set up to keep them from blowing it all.
As long as we’re all sheltering, I’d love to be locked in a room for a week with Elizabeth Warren or Katie Porter watching daytime television, just to watch them bounce off the walls in rage at the ambulance chasers, snake oil salesmen and other grifters who populate that daypart.
But if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be happening.
So here’s a
Juxtaposition of National Approach
Ariail decries foolish behaviors, including gathering for religious services and the opening of beaches.
Meanwhile, Morland is one of several British cartoonists decrying strict enforcement of rules keeping people out of open spaces. (And the one who came up with the funniest gag about it.)
Now, I don’t care about people hoarding toilet paper. The stuff is still in short supply, but it’s around and gags about it are starting to seem lame.
On the other hand, as an American, I’ve got enough of an inbred libertarian streak that I don’t feel people should have to be ordered not to pack into churches on Easter Sunday or gather in social groups on beaches.
Evidently, however, they do, and the British are apparently more frank in assessing the situation and a bit more paternalistic in trying to save the lives of people too foolish to protect themselves.
While on this side of the Atlantic, we’re not simply reluctant to make demands of our people, but, along with allowing scam artists to sell them wooden nickels clad in .001 troy ounces of real silver, we have built an entire political party based on exploiting their gullibility, which leads us to another
Juxtaposition of the Day
Rather than be inspiring and encouraging in this difficult time, Dear Leader continues to press upon the public desire to have it all be over.
Which is consistent with history.
After all, when Britain was in her hour of need, Princess Elizabeth put on a uniform and drove a First Aid truck, and then, in another hour of admittedly lesser need, as Queen, sent her son off to the Falklands to fly missions. And her grandson put in his time in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and asked us to turn down our thermostats, so we kicked his ass out of the White House.
We are separated by far more than a common language.
Here’s another thing: The whole “reenactor” industry began with the centenary of our Civil War, and it has always been easier to scare up Confederates than Union soldiers, right from the start.
While there is an element of white supremacy in that, it’s far more a case of fundamental libertarianism, of our inclination to celebrate the people who rose up against the central government and refused to be told what to do.
A hundred years from now, when we’re re-enacting the Second Civil War, we’ll be divided into Masks and Skins, and it will be harder to recruit Masks to fill the ranks for the faux-battles.
Even though the rebels who, today, reject calls for sensible preventive action will infect not just themselves but a lot of innocent people who tried to do the right thing.
Popular culture will no more judge them for that than it judges the rebels of the First Civil War for holding slaves.
Any more than we judge the jolly Deltas of Animal House for being racist, misogynistic, entitled slackers.
Even though Idiocracy’s fundamental flaw is its assumption that idiots are an exclusive product of the underclass.
Bluto is in the Oval Office today, and his ignorant, cocksure enthusiasm is no longer as funny as it seemed when he was a wealthy, lazy college bum.
Never mind.
Happy Easter.
Bob Moran sets what should be the mood, if only for a day:
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
— Winston Churchill
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