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On Masks, Again

Patients wearing face masks and personal protective equipment wait on line for COVID-19 testing outside Elmhurst Hospital Center, Friday, March 27, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

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The Basic Limiting Principle: “There are certain limiting principles which we unhesitatingly take for granted as the framework within which all our practical activities and our scientific theories are confined. Some of these seem to be self-evident. Others are so overwhelmingly supported by all the empirical facts which fall within the range of ordinary experience and the scientific elaborations of it (including under this heading orthodox psychology) that it hardly enters our heads to question them. Let us call these Basic Limiting Principles.” *C.D. Broad in his scholarly piece, “The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy”, 1949, in the journal Philosophy.

C.D. Broad

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While listening to a recent National Review podcast of “The Editors”, the discussion among the editors turned to the issue of masks, as a prophylactic in government guidance or commands regarding the epidemic. I recall that the general consensus of the 3 editors was supportive. The more their view settled in my head, the more disturbed I became. Broad’s limiting principle came to mind, as did the possibility of severe social and psychological disfigurement from this “new normal”. My conclusion: this has to end sooner rather than later.

One editor, Charles C.W. Cooke, true to his libertarian bias, equated the mask to the right to bear arms. The comparison is foolish, but I get it. The Second Amendment is integral to our understanding of ourselves as a self-governing people in a citizen republic. How does mask-wearing fit into that constitutional construct? It doesn’t, unless disguising one’s appearance in public is the “new normal”. Conceal-carry doesn’t undermine fundamental social interaction like conducting public life from behind a mask.

Charles C.W. Cooke

For the podcast participants, a great emphasis was placed on its usefulness in an epidemic, citing Asians in 1 million+ urban centers who are accustomed to wearing them in their pollution-addled air. Granted, but the excuse of an epidemic had better be carefully defined with much more than boundaries of geography and longevity. However, the treatment of this contagion is morphing into a never-ending crusade. We are about to confront the limits adumbrated by sociologist Robert K. Merton in his law of unintended consequences as we continue to treat the issue as the 14th-century’s Black Death. A simple plank (masks) in the program to fight the disease may result in something more than “flattening the curve”. It will flatten our psyche and our social connectivity. The emotional, social, and economic negative spinoffs will be profound.

The practice of hiding much of our face in public, and a good portion of everything else, is indicative of near-totalitarian social and political regimes. Does Sharia and the burka remind you of anything? Do the Guidance Squads of the Islamic Republic of Iran remind you of anything? No need to worry about the niqab’s impracticality for ID photos. Women are not supposed to drive … and vote, be educated, be business leaders, or stray too much outside the home in many of these places. The rule applies to only women, but it conveys an alarming assumption about the person. Hiding the face – or a good portion of it – is incompatible in a free society of free individuals.

How do we freely interact if the person is a stranger and if the contact isn’t carefully staged beforehand? Identification from the bridge of the nose up is nearly impossible; the voice is muffled as in the electronic distortion to protect a Mafioso turncoat; the initial attraction of people to each other is marred by the absence of two-thirds of the face. Identifying criminal suspects becomes impossible since the photo on the ID is difficult to match with the hidden face, unless the thing is removed thereby defeating its purpose. Plus, how do you distinguish the bank robbers from the crowd of seeming bank robbers on the street? The whole thing is ludicrous for finding a mate and protecting people’s savings accounts.

It’s beyond ludicrous. It’s creepy. Have you noticed the mangling of the social space under a regime of masks and social distancing? Yes, I’ll add social distancing since it is the policy cousin to the masks; its purpose being the same: reducing the risk of picking up and transmitting the bug. A restaurant resembles Madam Tussauds wax museum with mannequins seated at tables to give the patrons a phony sense of bustle in an atmosphere of lockdown. I’m reminded of the makeshift suburbia in nuclear tests. Others have invented ghoulish alterations to eat and drink through the things. Does the “new normal” look like this? Huxley or Orwell couldn’t have surpassed what we are proposing to do to ourselves.

Mannequins in The Inn at Little Washington, a Michelin three-star restaurant, reopening shortly in Washington, Va., May 20, 2020
A “typical American family” of mannequins who were subject to an atomic bomb test at “Doom Town” in Yucca Flat, Nevada. (Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images)

And then there’s the plastic experience of simulating a touch, handshake, or hug through a broadband image on a monitor. Now we are one step closer to the digitized world of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” (acted by Tom Cruise in the movie). Masks, mannequins, and Thanksgiving dinners limited to the immediate household and TV images of grandma and grandpa promises to be our “new normal” if some of our overlords get their way. What happens to a society with much less personal contact? We become a people awfully resembling solipsistic automatons, a shadow of our former selves.

The “new normal” verbiage, and what it advocates, with its masks and ersatz social life, should be dispensed with immediately, except in targeted locations with flare-ups and serious rates of infection. Charles C.W. Cooke, this isn’t the same as a coal mine. Masks are limited to miners, not as a public ethos for everyone. Apples and oranges, buddy.

Once breached, the standard of masks imposition comes easier the next time. If it was good for the coronavirus, why wouldn’t they be good every flu season … or permanently? After all, human beings are walking founts of pathogens, at all times. Forget about that passionate French kiss. Forget about foreplay. Expect an intensification of the birth dearth. I wonder what romance looks like behind masks and a restaurant of mannequins. My guess: it’ll be as rare as the births.

Too bad the Wampanoags in the 17th century didn’t have their own blue-state governors. They wouldn’t need the warrior face paint to appear fearsome since they’d be frightening enough in a N95 mask. They’d also be around today in greater numbers given their complete lack of herd immunity to the Europeans’ influenza, smallpox, measles, and typhus. But then again, knowing the probable negative effect of masks on romance, they’d still experience empty maternity wards. They’d still end up with the same declining numbers.

Herd immunity (the possession of the antibody in enough people to dampen a contagion’s spread) is the key. Here’s how it worked in Harris County, Tx., regarding a measles outbreak.

Being as isolated as they were – and as we are trying to be with sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and masks – the Wampanoags were virologically innocent children waiting for death. Since Wampanoag medicine didn’t include vaccines, they either faced death or salvation from a European retreat from the continent. Given the acquisitive nature of human beings, the latter didn’t happen. For us, we can simulate herd immunity with vaccines, but the things are partially successful and difficult to create. Holding out for one in the meantime could result in some of us ending up like many of the Wampanoags or experiencing a Kafkaesque mangling of life and society, or both.

Depiction of 17th-century Native American smallpox victims.

My choice is to aggressively clamp down in hotspots at the onset to limit the devastation, then loosen ASAP. We must be mindful that after a while the social and economic costs come to be insurmountable. Lockdowns should be narrowly construed and then dropped like a hot potato. 2 months is too long in the absence of flare-ups, and even then only applied locally.

Herd immunity or no, vaccine or no, we must recognize that the risk of contagion is always present. Paraphrasing Matthew 26:11: you will always have pathogens among you. It’s a truism that should restrain us from doing the same thing again. No nation can endure the constant and ugly prospect of an on/off life overhanging us every fall and winter. The lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, shelter-in-place, and masks came with no real sunset provisions. If you live in the disease’s epicenter in the Northeast, you might look upon the smothering and mauling of social and economy life differently. Anywhere else, it’s grotesque in the extreme.

Down with masks and the rest of it. As per C.D. Broad, we have to acknowledge the explicit and inherent limits.

RogerG

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The Pandemic and Our Window

Lately I’ve been trying to catch up on my backlog of National Review issues, like the ones of April 6 and April 20. There’s much for me to agree with in the magazine … and some points of disagreement. I’ve noticed something else, however, during this pandemic. The magazine is headquartered in New York City. Its contributors may be scattered all over the country – with many residing in the City or its environs – but they come to focus on the city, which requires many trips to reacquaint and remind them of the City’s circumstances. I can’t help but think that they have an East Coast or Northeast orientation. Does the pandemic experience in the City overwhelm their perspective on everything relating to COVID-19?

What do they see when they tune in their devices or look outside the window? New York City and neighboring New Jersey are the epicenter of disease in the US. Accordingly, the overall tenor of the magazine in the April issues is dark, one of doom. My perception of the publication’s treatment – yes, I admit to being overly subjective – centers on the dire condition of death and crippling illness in the region where they live, work, and may have been raised. Understandable.

Heaven knows, the virus is highly contagious and deadly to certain groups, regardless of national geography. Yet, a quarter of deaths to the virus comes from one state: New York, and the overwhelmingly majority of those concentrate in New York City. The Overton Window (the range of “acceptable” discourse and views) for the magazine’s staff and all media centered in the city must have been influenced by the experience.

A body wrapped in plastic that was unloaded from a refrigerated truck is handled by medical workers wearing personal protective equipment due to COVID-19 concerns, Tuesday, March 31, 2020, at Brooklyn Hospital Center in Brooklyn borough of New York. The body was moved to a hearse to be removed to a mortuary. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

You might say that my Overton Window is similarly constricted by my residence in sparsely populated northwest Montana. There’s no registered cases or deaths of COVID-19 in Sanders County (a county without a traffic light), with Montana being lightly touched by the disease. Geographical bias is a problem. One advantage, though, of living outside the urban infection and death centers is to better appreciate the bad consequences of instilling an induced coma to the social and economic parts of an entire nation.

Similarly, a mother will refuse to see her lovely little darling as a juvenile delinquent in spite of the evidence. Our experiences and emotional attachments color our view of the matters before our eyes. Welcome to National Review headquarters, most of big media, and Sanders County, Mt.

Some of the magazine’s editors and contributors are strong supporters of federalism, to their credit. Some writers have taken a slightly different tack in supporting the shutdown, or are at least defensive of it. Some states never fully shut down; others went all in, and continue to do so. Federalism at work … to a point – to the applause of many of the magazine’s contributors.

Overhanging it all is an overlay of federal policies – also generally supported by the magazine’s staff – that induced that national coma. As in a coma, many bodily systems atrophy after prolonged hibernation. Are we truly prepared for Great Depression, Part II? Is there a full appreciation of what it will entail? I doubt it, especially after much personal exposure to MSNBC (much in New York City), the networks (much in New York City), and even CNN which is headquartered in Atlanta. Most of CNN’s programming emanates from New York City and Washington, DC. The publishing industry also crowds into the city. What happens in New York City seldom stays in New York City.

And a dangerous virus crowds into the city as well. The crowding of people presents an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of dangerous microbes, always has. Public sanitation campaigns and systems can only take you so far. People are still piled on top of one another and spend much time cheek-by-jowl in subways and hives of the hospitality industry. Add to this the fact that the range of personal hygiene in any population extends from obsessive/compulsive to bachelor/couch potato. As the virus parties through a densely packed population, a lockdown seems appropriate to the denizens of the City – many of them in the media – but maybe not so in places where an existence in “flats” is much less a fact of life.

New York City subway pre-corona.

Charles Murray writing for the American Enterprise Institute makes a similar point. The gravity of the disease has a population density dimension. The observation makes an excellent case for the salutary effects of sprawl, and the therapeutic benefits of many and expansive suburban parks, tennis courts, golf courses, and bike paths that exist in exurbia. A spread-out population might be a healthier one.

American urban sprawl, or just a healthier low-horizon city?

The thought will be heartily condemned by your run-of-the-mill central-planning greenie trying to replicate Hong Kong everywhere in the country. To them, sprawl is of the devil. If their design leaves the country open to pandemics, well, so what?! As per AOC and her Squad fan club, they’d love a planet with far fewer people anyway. AOC has already announced her support for infertility. Speaking metaphorically, it’s no skin off her back … or ovaries.

For those of us in the empire of sprawl, our incidences of infection and death are much below de Blasio’s mecca. Thus, why the national shutdown, or more accurately, the broad imposition of the creepy-mask look, the shuttered businesses, and enforced unemployment due to China’s city-loving incubus? The empty streets of Missoula, Mt., weren’t much different from the thoroughfares of New York City.

North Higgins Ave. in Missoula was mostly empty on the morning of April 3, 2020. (photo: WILLIAM MARCUS / MONTANA PUBLIC RADIO)

Again, why? Don’t answer by saying that it could be the same in the Helena. “Could” is a nasty word for the rational governance of one’s life. We “could” be invaded by a superpower like the Grand Duchy of Fenwick as in the “The Mouse That Roared” (It’s a hoot so take a look.).

The “science” – the thing that lefties ubiquitously proclaim but seldom understand – of the virus is mostly well known, not so with cures or therapies, or the accuracy of the stats to brutalize the population into cultural and economic suicide. A country as vast and diverse as ours should not be cowed into broadly shutting down or coming close to it by ending much of our social and economic life.

Target, target, target is the sensible response. Target with quarantines the ravaged areas. Target public and private moneys on cures and therapies. For the rest of us, leave us alone. A hurt economy is far better than a wrecked one.

The principle of holes is very relevant to our current situation. A v-shaped recovery is impossible if our hole has become a miles-deep shaft. The bounce will come up short if the lighted hole of the surface is a small dot as we look up. The window that dominates our media empires might makes us less cognizant of this reality. NYC-centrism may unnecessarily end up crippling us for quite some time.

RogerG

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Never Again

Hugh Hewitt, normally one of the sane people in the media storm in the age of Trump, has joined the ranks of militant busybodies that were unleashed by the current sickness hysteria. A couple of days ago he was agreeing with a caller (a medical doctor, so someone with medical street cred) on the need to continue the mitigations: social distancing, masks, business closures, etc. The day after, he was ranting from his WaPo op-ed about running into groups of joggers and bicyclists on paths who were not practicing his meddlesome measures. He crafted his complaint as one of selfishness and foolishness of the non-compliant. I was incensed … not at the bicyclists but at him.

He would say, and has said, that the numbers and science are on his side. What drivel. Yes, policy making during a pandemic demands the use of statistics and science. But these are some of the ingredients in the recipe for making good policy, not the only ones. Think about it: science has produced many ways to safely abort a baby, but is abortion even acceptable? On such matters, science and numbers can only take you so far in the determination of what ought to be done.

The limitations on science and numbers go beyond the moral issues. They extend to all decision making, and especially to ones that have great impact on the country. It should begin with a presumption on the boundaries for action. In other words, what is acceptable? In combating terrorism in Baghdad, is it appropriate to nuke the city? (Oh, by the way, don’t think that it didn’t come up in many a ribald beerhall conversation around the time of The Surge.) For me, the thought was beyond the pale. The same consideration should be at work in response to a communicable disease. Options like the mass execution of the infected are too horrible to contemplate … and so should the euthanization of the social and economic life of a continental country of 330 million people. Going back to Dirty Harry: “Man must know his limits.”

Who would have thought it was possible? LA freeway without traffic jams during the current California lockdown.

And that’s what we have done with the American lockdown. We’ve decided to nuke Baghdad, so to speak.

There are so many holes in Hewitt’s logic – and others like him – that if it was a ship, it’d sink. Forcing a population of 330 million to take on the appearance of bank robbers is foolishness in the extreme. An argument in support of the nonsense relies on the highly contagious nature of the virus. Wait a minute. All viruses, as well as bacteria, are contagious and dangerous to certain classes of persons. Yes, Hugh, no surprise, the things are small enough to swim in aerosols (suspended fine droplets of moisture). Always have.

But there’s a fallback position for the would-be authoritarians. Wait for it: they proclaim that this one is particularly deadly. Well, to be honest, it’s lethal only to vulnerable groups, but these people are vulnerable to any malevolent bug, and there are many, many of those without the coronavirus in the mix. Hewitt’s stance is actually a demand that many of us will come to know only a third of a person’s face from here on out. Apparently, for him, it’s the new normal.

I guess that the discovery of masks on a couple of dimwits who just held up the local Wells Fargo can no longer satisfy the new post-pandemic standard for “probable cause” when so many of us have a few in the glove box, thanks to Hewitt, others like him, and that band of “experts” straying way outside their lane.

Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist at a bank in Odessa, Tx., January 2020.
Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist in a bank in Lower Gwynedd, Penn., September 2019.

Furthermore, why bother putting anyone in a police lineup with half the face gone? Criminal investigations will be farcical in Hewitt’s brave new world. The only parallel that comes to mind is the demand by some Muslims for their women to be photographed in the burqa for government-issued ID’s. A crowded DMV under the current protocols would logically require a photo of everyone in a full burka or at a minimum in Jesse James mode. Of course, what good are the pics with two-thirds of the face veiled?

Voter ID laws are similarly made useless since the picture is undecipherable. The electorate instantly becomes whoever happens to be breathing – or not breathing in the case of Chicago – on US soil at the time of the election, a fervently sought end state of the Pelosi Democratic Party. It’s an interesting way to repeal protections of the ballot from fraud.

Exceptions? Come on, what Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and every other power-hungry politico in high office isn’t salivating at the opportunity to embrace full burka getups and the N95 bank-robber look in state-issued id’s and driver’s licenses if need be? But how will cops identify a pulled-over driver with everyone disguised in their mask? It certainly will be easier for under-aged teens to buy beer as they approach the counter with the same mask that appears on their older brother’s driver’s license. Clerks will have to learn the science of forensic facial recognition absent two-thirds of the face … or, more likely, the booze age limits will become passé.

See, the scheme is so unworkable in the long term. It’s a short-term response that some meatheads want to make the “new normal”. Amazing!

There is no limiting principle in the logic of the shutdowns, every-man-is-an-island mode of social interaction, ending gatherings and the First Amendment’s right of association, the mask-wearing nonsense, and government squashing the livelihoods of millions as businesses are forcibly shuttered. You simply can’t take a meat axe to the social and economic parts of life and still have anything resembling a life.

Some have proposed that the epidemic should be treated as a war, like Trump and ironically his “progressive” foes who are constantly on the lookout for the next “moral equivalent of war”. What they’re after, more accurately, is total war. Total war is the complete involvement of the community from kids collecting scrap metal in the neighborhood, to bond drives, the militarization of the work force, to all kinds of conservation and rationing schemes. But here’s the kicker: all war plans presume the existence of an economy. No economy, no war material, and no war. They want total war without the “total”.

The advocates of William James’s “moral equivalent of war” in response to the virus have killed off much of the economy. And given their rationale, they would inflict the prescription on us anytime the same, mutated, or cousin of the bug makes an encore. Can you imagine our economy and social life sitting on pins and needles every flu season? Stress on the people goes through the roof, uncertainty for all investment is the “new normal”, business and commerce becomes unsteady as they constantly look over their shoulders at the latest moves by some commissar, and workers and everybody else can’t plan ahead. Get used to that word “depression”. That will be our new normal.

We can’t do this, this shutting down of life. We can’t continue with social distancing, universal sheltering-in-place, the masks, and an end to work life – or its constriction. And what’s with this planned obsolescence of the neighborhood school, with its lifetime memories of friendships, teachers, band, cheerleaders, games? We can’t do this, and never should have done it. Instead, we need to do something more sensible: limit restrictions to the infected and vulnerable, pump private and public moneys into therapies and cures, and leave the rest of us to conduct our lives in accordance with our conscience and our God.

We should be admonished to proclaim “never again”. “Never again” applies to genocides, and it could also refer to the horror wreaked on our social, religious, and work lives. Never again. Please, never again.

RogerG

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A Debate We Need to Have

New York mayor Bill De Blasio at one of his press conference.

Hugh Hewitt on his morning radio news show recently recounted from his Washington Post column his anger at bicyclists on a bike path in unapproved groups not wearing masks. He reacted as if they were morally irresponsible. I was floored by his over-the-top reaction, disturbingly aware that many others probably share his troubling opinion. I most emphatically don’t.

Family biking on Long Island, NY, April 28, 2020.

Our responses to this virus should ignite a debate about what is permissible for government to do. Events frequently expose deeper issues at stake. Here, during this epidemic, are we to have a government that can end the very and most basic act of living, suspending the behaviors that make up a life, any life? Do we realize that we have quietly condoned a Leviathan suffering from an obesity of power? The lockdown, both national and by the states, raises these overarching questions.

While in Costco last week, the store mandated masks to be worn and passed them out at the entrance. I overheard a conversation among two customers in the store with one person extolling the virtues of the mask. The other was in general agreement and not disposed to push back. They answered the question in one way. But the view cries out for pushback. Have sovereign citizens all of a sudden become field hands under the control of political overseers, no one being allowed to dispute their overseers’ dictats?

The masks are a signifier of this deeper problem. There is official and peer pressure to wear them. We are told that they prevent us from spreading the virus to other people. Do they? Maybe in some instances but not in others. The virus like other viruses will spread from touching products on the shelves in the same Costco that requires us to wear masks. Masks reduce the flight of the bug but it will still land on something touched by someone reaching under the thing to scratch or remove bodily fluid, and from there to the hands, eyes, and every place under the mask of another patron.

Plus, can you imagine a cardio-vascular exercise routine as we partially reintroduce carbon dioxide back into our lungs while sweat pours underneath the things? The experience makes for one more excuse for a couch potato to not shed the spare tire. Gyms – corporate or personal – might go the way of Sears or JC Penneys.

And how long must we put up with it? Hewitt says through the summer. But that’s the problem: these measures are so open-ended. There’s a never-ending array of reasons to continue to corset our noses and mouths with the things: a second surge (or a third, fourth, ….), the bug is still lurking somewhere, etc. And, let’s not forget, that greatest of all fear trump cards: kids will die if we don’t get them used to noticing people from the eyes up.

To make the encumbrances more attractive, businesses have even popped up to sell us more stylish versions, like a Riyadh bizarre selling burkas with bling. Pardon me, the thought is appalling.

In the end, should all facets of a person’s existence be surrendered to the fear of catching a virus? At a certain point we must accept the risks of a traffic accident as we drive to work, getting salmonella from our dinner salad, a slip and fall as we shuffle between our work desk and the boss’s office, carpal tunnel syndrome from pounding on our computer keyboard, and catching a germ from a friend in a prayer circle. Risks must be accepted to live the life that God gave us.

Mandates for masks, sheltering-in-place, social distancing, massive business closures, and an end to all gatherings in “large” groups is more than an expression of prudent health measures. It’s an expression of totalitarian control. Freedom carries with it dangers, always has. And so does ensconcing near-omnipotent power in the hands of a select group of “experts”.

Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist, of Imperial College in London, and the author of the projection of 2.2 million deaths in the U.S from the coronavirus.

Lenin was surrounded by “experts” in revolution. If experience is an indicator, they were good at it … bringing about revolution, that is. They just weren’t much good at anything else, as the assorted misery, shortages, and bloodshed in the ensuing decades would attest. I’m not wiling to turn over my life to the dictates of narrow-minded “experts”.

“Experts”, as I’ve said before, are specialists. By definition, they only know one thing well. The decisions of a community will always require much more than that, such as impacts on livelihoods, our religious life, and that thing called the Constitution. A broad-reaching decision should never be the sole province of a compressed group of “experts”.

Please watch this 54-minute session of the Hillsdale College symposium, “The Coronavirus and the Constitution”.

RogerG

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Waco and What We’ve Become

“Waco”, the miniseries currently airing on Netflix.

I was surprised and disappointed that Clint Eastwood’s “Jewell” didn’t do better at the box office. The poor showing wasn’t due to a lack of cinematic craftsmanship. It was well-made and acted with a riveting script. I have only speculation, but it sure seems like today’s public is squeamish about such offerings. Could it be a byproduct of a broad revulsion of our incendiary politics? Escapism might be more appealing because the quality of our public discourse is so appalling. That’s my guess. I hope that Netflix’s “Waco” doesn’t experience the same fate. It cries out to be seen.

Eastwood’s story is riveting, as is “Waco”. Richard Jewell was tarnished by nothing more than a FBI profile (of the “lone bomber” and the “hero syndrome” psyche hypotheses) – profiling being an investigative technique to narrow the range of suspects, not to ignore evidence and hound a person. An institutional psychosis grips and propels agents toward a particular suspect or set of actions to the exclusion of any other possibilities. All of it is based on nothing more than an abstraction that straitjackets the minds of government agents.

The potential for tunnel vision, fueled by this institutional psychosis, intensifies as the responsible agency is administratively removed from local circumstances. The FBI in 1996 was obsessed with Richard Jewell in Atlanta, and the ATF/FBI in 1993 was consumed with Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, outside Waco, Texas, as the US Marshals Service and FBI were with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Caricatures were formed and plans made from afar, and then imposed on a locality. The fallout included Jewell’s unjustifiably tarred reputation, 79 dead in the inferno at Waco, and the killing of Weaver’s wife, Vicky, and son, Sammy (age 14), at Ruby Ridge. We might as well include the yang of the Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168, to the yin of Waco. Innocents all; lives cut short. It’s not a matter of saints and sinners. It’s a matter of a grotesque abuse of power that is broadly ignored as such. Easy to do when decision making is centralized and distant.

Randy Weaver and family. Federal authorities would kill his wife, Vicky (next to Randy) and son, Sammy (seated at his mother’s feet).
Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, southwest of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.

By the way, what was with the 1990’s? Now that’s a question awaiting serious consideration.

Far more troubling for us today is the public’s apparent assent to this state of affairs. Are we becoming the type of people who are increasingly willing to turn over our right to govern ourselves to a narrow class of specialized “experts” employed in government service? Are we becoming sheep? One has to wonder.

Interestingly, the character of Janet Reno had a brief appearance in Netflix’s “Waco”. She approved the final assault on the Branch Dividian compound when informed of unproven accusations of child abuse at the Mt. Carmel estate. Janet Reno cut her teeth on successfully prosecuting child abuse cases in the 1980’s as chief prosecutor of Dade County, Florida, and rode her success to fame and the office of Attorney General of the United States under Bill Clinton.

Janet Reno takes the oath as attorney general during a ceremony at the White House on March 12, 1993, while President Bill Clinton watches. (photo: Barry Thumma/AP)

Oh, one important fact about Janet Reno: she devised a prosecutorial recipe – the infamous “Miami method” – for carrying out a mammoth miscarriage of justice by railroading many innocent people into long prison terms and setting off a daycare child-abuse hysteria that gripped the country in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Almost all of the convictions have been overturned and ample payouts awarded for false prosecution by states and localities who followed the Pied Piper of Dade County. The story is vividly portrayed in PBS’s “The Child Terror” and in the work of journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz in publications like the Wall Street Journal. From her perch in Washington, DC, Reno was inflicted on the Branch Davidians.

A page from the PBS website for “The Child Terror”.

Part of the problem in our thinking is the nomenclature for the government headquartered in DC. You know, the one surrounding The Mall. We try to avoid calling it what it is: a “central” government. “Central” is unsettling to a nation who sees itself as geographically and culturally diverse with the accompanying and long-established regional loyalties, and a governmental structure to reflect it. If you doubt the belief’s persistence, attend a pro or college football game. Regionalism is rampant.

The word “federal” in reference to the one headquartered in DC is the odd duck in the field. “Federal” pertains to a system of state and national sovereignties, not just the central one. The word is an awkward fit when applied to those manning our national bureaucracies. More accurately, they are “national” or “central” government authorities.

The fuzzy wording hides the reality that the DC government has been centralizing since Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office in 1913 (or maybe it was TR in 1901). The zenith of concentration is a very high plateau of power for our DC authorities running from the New Deal of the 1930’s through the Great Society of the 1960’s to our current Great American Shutdown. The decentralizing efforts of the Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich triumvirate were just hiccups along the way.

Let’s count the ways of DC’s consolidation of power. How do we, the general public, view our national chief executive? George Will’s use of “caesaropapism” for the popular conception of the presidency is apt. DC has been a hot real estate market since FDR’s alphabet soup of “federal” agencies. The commerce clause of the Constitution has been exploited to impose a national floor on wages, the amount of allowable particulate matter in a locality, our car’s fuel economy, whether to cut down a tree, bans on guns that look mean, and nearly everything between … including light bulbs. Huge swaths of our population are dependent on a national bureaucracy’s paycheck or handout. The Supreme Court through its edicts has turned the states into handmaidens of DC. With its ATF, Marshals Service, and FBI, DC has extensive and expansive police forces with a very long reach. Many of them in personnel and behavior mirror the other armed branch of the central government, the military.

The DC government is primed and ready to be at war with its citizens. I have warmed to the complaint about the militarization of law enforcement. Long a talking point of the left, it nonetheless has resonance in light of the increasing recruitment of ex-military into law enforcement, the formation of law enforcement special forces in the form of SWAT teams, and tactics and equipment more appropriate for storming Baghdad. David Koresh looked out the window of his Mt. Carmel compound and saw something familiar to Wehrmacht and Russian officers as they viewed the soon-to-be battlefield of Kursk in 1943.

Tanks in the final assault on the Branch Davidian compound.

Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge might have thought that he was beset by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars like Lt. Colonel Hal Moore’s battalion in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 (captured in Randall Wallace’s and Mel Gibson’s film, “We Were Soldiers”). “Enemy” patrols and snipers surrounded his family cabin, but he didn’t have Moore’s advantage of airpower and artillery. More aptly, he was Custer at the Little Big Horn.

The thread of concentration runs right through the past and onward to the Great American Shutdown of 2020. The potentates in DC without reservation, in essence, commanded us to stop living. It was a nationwide cease-and-desist order to end the actions that define living. Many governors – mostly blue state ones – see themselves as mini-Woodrow Wilsons, or caesaropapists, and began arresting dads playing with their children in parks or surfers 30 yards offshore. When a local government stood in his way, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom steamrolled Newport Beach. Many of them announced the extended euthanization of their states well into June, maybe beyond. Do you doubt any of them, if they won the presidency, would hesitate in making the act of going to work a crime or using their immense law enforcement powers to assault any group not culturally and politically correct? The real viral threat is this massive abuse of power, not a bug from China.

SAN RAFAEL, CA – MARCH 22: McNears Beach County Park in San Rafael, Calif. was among the parks to close in Marin County on Sunday, March 22, 2020. (Sherry LaVars/Marin Independent Journal)

The stage is set for an edict to kill society at the start of every flu season. Is that even possible? Yes, it’s possible, but not sustainable. It’s no more sustainable than to allow more law enforcement power to accrue in the DC headquarters of the FBI, ATF, and other branches of centralized police forces.

We need to be constantly reminded of the dangers. See Netflix’s “Waco” for a refresher course.

RogerG