Right now, riots and General Flynn are competing with the epidemic for headline news space. All of them can only be reasonably processed by taking a breath and waiting for pertinent facts to arise and a cooling-off period to assess the situation in an adult fashion. Understanding the George Floyd case will take more serious and steady minds than those possessed by Democrat firebrands and a crowd of urbanites-turned-street-thugs. We’re quickly coming to realize for the umpteenth time that it doesn’t take much for chaotic home lives to become chaotic streets.
On the Flynn front, the suave Obama may turn out to be what he was all along: a smooth-talking community organizer who made the upper echelons of the federal government an arm of his Democratic Party. Bad news for General Flynn and the 2016 victor over Obama’s anointed successor. It’s only beginning to tumble out. Frequently, first impressions are wrong in love and headlines.
It’s no less true about the virus shipped to us from China. The reaction of our “better” people was lackadaisical at first and then immediately went to Nigel Tufnel’s (Spinal Tap) “11”. I have long suspected that big decisions were made on very little evidence, and much of that false.
A good deal of the reaction depends on where you sit, as I’ve said before. Our media central nervous system centers in New York City and runs up and down the Bos-Wash spinal cord, the most densely packed region in the country. .2% of New York’s population was killed by the bug. The inhibitions to a surrender of the mind to raw emotions was dramatically lowered by simply looking out the window (or, more properly, the “window” of our many connected devices). Can you really say that the view wouldn’t overwhelm a person’s rational calculus?
Sure, the same can be said of someone living in a lightly affected region, like my Montana. Both perspectives are probably wrong, but can we ignore the reality that more facts have emerged and more alternative voices have had a chance to weigh in? The virus is contagious and not nearly as lethal as Oxford’s crystal ball gazing that gave us 2.2 million deaths. The disease has trended downward from the Black Death apocalypse to something just above flu season.
I can’t help but wonder that the huge numbers of infected are at least partially a result of the massive total war approach for dealing with this particular candidate for mayhem. We know more about the reach of this virus than probably any of the more recent varietals of flu, including the strange strains of fall 2019. We have always been swimming around in a sea of pathogens. That won’t change when this culprit fades. By concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, we exaggerate its relative magnitude. Great and highly focused efforts inherently distort perspective.
The 100,000 deaths figure demands reexamination. Not that the number is wrong (even though it can be contested from a number of angles) but we have no reliable comparison with other infectious diseases because they were never accorded this level of rectal examination.
The trigger for this piece was the discovery on the CDC website of a “case fatality rate” (CFR) of 0.26% for corona (thanks Robert Verbruggen). That contrasts with the run-of-the-mill CFR ranging from 0.5 to 1.0. What’s up with that? Another example of the downward progression of the disease’s lethality.
Are we about to experience another round of disappointment for those panting for the next “Moral Equivalent of War” so as to stampede us into the Green New Deal or a woke utopia? Ignoring the ski slope fall in the actuality of a cataclysm, some still act as if the mirage of the March state-of-play has magically become as true today as it was false back then. They are as stuck in the past as Bernie Sanders and AOC are wallowing in their long-dead Scandinavian socialism. AOC’s “Scandinavia” has the same totemic value for her as the use of “selfish” and “reckless” by today’s wannabe authoritarians.
Was it all worth it? You now, the shutdowns, shelter-in-place, masks, social distancing; the loss of 10-25% of small businesses; the movement of millions of workers from the workplace to unemployment; the rise in depression, suicides, domestic violence, and substance abuse; the release of “nonviolent” inmates to “nonviolently” prey on their neighbors; and the damage to the health care of anyone not suffering from a fever and pneumonia. And let’s not forget the destruction of social life by the loss of grandma’s hugs, big-family dinners, the social bonding of the handshake, antiseptic romance through a mask, and human interaction reduced to a digital image on a screen. We may as well go all-in for sex-bots and any motorized version of a person in grey hair.
More of the same is likely to come. These geniuses have yet to distinguish this contagion from any prior, contemporaneous, or future one. If the strangulation of society is justified for this rapidly declining threat, buckle up for the next fall/winter. As some addicts have said, taking the first hit of coke makes it easier to snort the next line, and the next, and the next, and ….
I am not sure if we are careening toward Orwell’s Oceania or Huxley’s World State. Either way, I’d hate to see the books moved from fiction to nonfiction on the Amazon website.
RogerG