A few years ago, when the progressive commentariat was
going on and on about the evils of “homophobia”, before that became old hat and
they turned to the new bugbear of “transphobia”, there was a man who happened
to catch the end of one of their sermonettes warning about homophobes. Now this fellow was a little hard of hearing
and he mistook the word for “homophones”.
Consequently, he began avoiding the dance hall like the plague. He didn’t want to run in to the Boogie Man.
Now that you are all groaning over that exceedingly
dreadful double-pun, allow me to say a few words about the Bogeyman.
The Bogeyman is a figure who has appeared, under one
name or another, in pretty much all of the world’s folklore, in all places and
all times. He can be regarded, in a sense, as the
standard to which all other legendary spooky monsters are to be compared. The details about his nature and appearance vary
considerably, except in that they are usually quite vague, much more so than is
the case with most other legendary beings.
It is the purpose he serves that is consistent. He serves as a warning to children against bad
behaviour. Behave yourselves or the
Bogeyman will get you. In the cultural
traditions in which Saint Nicholas or whoever else has been assigned the role
of bringing gifts to the good children around Christmas time is accompanied by
someone whose job it is to deal with the other kids, that someone – Black Pete,
the Krampus, Knecht Ruprecht, whoever – is essentially a Bogeyman, certainly in
function, often in description as well.
While frightening children into good behaviour is the
primary and universal purpose of the Bogeyman, a notable secondary purpose for his
legend can be found in the song “The Booger Man” which is
the second track on the 1989 studio album, I
Never Made a Record I Didn’t Like, by the “Clown Prince of Country Music”,
Ray Stevens. The song, co-written by
Stevens and his longtime friend and song-writing collaborator, C. W. “Buddy”
Kalb, the alternate spelling in the title of which reflects a Southern regional
variation rather than the reference to mucus that would probably be the first
thing it brings to mind for most others, involves a narrator boasting about how
he is not afraid of a long list of monsters, movie and otherwise, all of whom
he dismisses as nothing in comparison to the Booger Man, who “don’t need no other
makeup/no fancy Hollywood name/his mangled bloody victims/are his only claim to
fame.” Towards the end of the song, it
is revealed that the narrator is a young man, parked with his date in Lovers’
Lane. “Listen, did I hear some
scratchin’, outside your side of the car?”
There are those these days who object on moral grounds
to telling children scary stories to frighten them out of misbehaving. I am not going to pass judgment on this one
way or another, and bring it up merely to note the irony that these are often
the same people who buy completely into stories that are clearly designed to
frighten the entire populace, adult and child alike, into obeying some set of,
usually ridiculous, new rules.
That there is nothing sadder than an adult terrified
of the Bogeyman was well illustrated by The
Simpsons in an early
episode. The tenth episode of the
fifth season was entitled “$pringfield (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love Legalized Gambling), in which Mr. Burns builds a casino and Marge becomes
addicted to the slot machines. Since
Marge is now spending all of her time in the casino, Homer is the only one home
one night, when Lisa, woken by a nightmare, wakes him up and tells him “I know
its absurd, but I dreamed the Bogeyman was after me” at which she is
interrupted by a screaming Homer “Aaarggh.
Bogeyman! You nail the windows
shut, I’ll get the gun.” Homer then
wakes Bart, saying “Bart, I don’t want to alarm you, but there may be a
Bogeyman or Bogeymen in the house.”
When Marge finally returns home, a gun shot blows a hole in the door of
the house, which, when she opens, she finds it barricaded with Homer, hiding
behind a mattress with the kids, aiming his shotgun at her. “What happened here?” she asks, to be told “Oh
nothing Marge, just a little incident involving the Bogeyman. Of course, none of this would have happened
if you had been here to keep me from acting stupid.”
A truly pathetic number of adults have been behaving
just like Homer this year. Just last
week, Donald the Orange, was asked by both his opponent in the televised
popularity contest by which our American friends and neighbours foolishly
choose their head of state rather than rely on the time-tested, God-honoured,
tradition of royal lineage, and by debate moderator Chris Wallace, to denounce
the Bogeyman. Granted, they called the
Bogeyman “white supremacism”, but actual white supremacists have not posed a
real threat to law, order, civilization, rights, and freedoms, anywhere in the
Western world for decades now. White
supremacism is now merely another name for the Bogeyman. Donald the Orange did not, contrary to the
lying left-wing newsmedia, refuse to make the worthless ritual
denunciation. He has, in fact, gone
through with this stupid ritual many times in the past, and agreed to do so
this time as well. He asked for specific
names, and all he was given was the Proud Boys, a multi-racial organization
this is not, and never has been, white supremacist. By contrast with the lies told by CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and even liberal newspapers and the Crown
broadcaster up here, it was Joe Biden who refused to make a denunciation. Except that in his case he was asked to
denounce a real, present day, menace, Antifa, the well-organized groups of
mask-wearing, far-left, thugs who have been going around beating people up,
shutting down events and speeches they disapprove of, and terrorizing university
administrators and hotel managers into giving in to their demands for years
now, and this year, have been aiding and abetting Black Lives Matter, in their
spree of looting, vandalism, violence, and destruction. Indeed, rather than denounce these bastards,
Biden denied their existence, saying that “Antifa is an idea not an
organization.” No, Mr. Biden, despite
what you and that wretched, vile and contemptible nincompoop Christopher Wray
have to say, the burning cities and toppled statues, all across the United
States and the larger Western world, demonstrate Antifa to be an extremely real
threat, unlike the Bogeyman of white supremacism you keep going on about.
Of course the biggest Bogeyman of this year has not
been white supremacism but SARS-CoV-2. This
coronavirus produces mild to no symptoms in over 80% of those who come in
contact with it. It can produce the
very painful and potentially fatal form of pneumonia dubbed SARS when the first
coronavirus to produce it made its appearance twenty years ago, but for people
who are under 65 and have no complicating chronic health problems, the survival
rate is well over 99 percent. Even for
those who are at a higher risk, their chances of surviving are still pretty
good, even more so now than in March and April when the virus was first making
the rounds of the world, after escaping the confines of Wuhan. Back in March, when the World Health
Organization pressed the panic button, and governments around the planet took
the unprecedented and insane step of shutting down their economies and ordering
their entire populations, healthy or sick, into quarantine, we were seeing a
rise both in the number of people testing positive for the presence of this
virus, and in the number of people experiencing symptoms ranging from cough and
shortness of breath to full-blown, death-dealing, SARS. We have again this fall, seen a rise in the
number of people testing positive, which, plotted on a graph, looks very
similar to the one we saw in late winter-early spring. We have not been seeing a similar rise in
the number of people hospitalized and dying.
Indeed, plotted on the same kind of graph, the hospitalization/death
numbers appear as a flat-to-declining line from the beginning of summer onward.
Sane, grown-up, people will recognize that if there
is no drastic rise in people getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying, then
the rise in the number of people testing positive is no cause for alarm. Viruses have been present with us since the
beginning of time and will be with us until the end of time. To lock ourselves away in our houses, refuse
all contact with other people, and worse, to demand that other people be forced
to do the same, is to behave out of irrational fear, to be frightened, as it
were, by the Bogeyman.
The media is intentionally trying to frighten us in
this way. Note how they are constantly
reporting about the “alarming” rise in the numbers of those who test
positive. As
Karen Selick pointed out in The
Western Standard about a week ago, this number is meaningless when it is
not presented as a percentage of tests given.
The number of tests given has been going up steadily and is much higher
now than it was back in March and April.
To emphasize only the number of
new “cases” – or, more precisely, new “positive results”, for the tests give
false positives all the time – without also emphasizing that they are out of a
much larger number of tests being given, and that the number of people getting
sick, requiring hospitalization, and dying of SARS has not been commensurately
rising, but, indeed, has been remaining steady and even declining, is to engage
in dishonest scare-mongering.
The “Wizard’s First Rule” in Terry Goodkind’s novel of
that title, the first in his Sword of
Truth series and the last in the same series worth reading, is “people are
stupid” and we have certainly been living down to that this year. Despite everything pointed out in the
previous paragraph, we have been putting up with our governments’ responding to
the rise in numbers by slapping more restrictions down on us, and even calling
upon them to do so. Here in the
Province of Manitoba, we are now in the second week of a four-week period of
heightened restrictions in Winnipeg and the surrounding region, that Dr. Brent
Roussin, the public health officer who has given every evidence of having gone
mad from the dictatorial-level powers given him during this scam of a health
emergency, slapped down on us a couple of Fridays ago, to start from last
Monday. Earlier in the week in which he
announced this, Roussin was publicly pressured to do this by Brian Bowman, the
clown of a mayor that this city elected, and re-elected, although about the
only thing that can be said in his favour is that he is a look-alike of
television actor Jon Cryer, and even then I would have preferred Charlie Sheen
any day. Among the new restrictions a
return to the limiting of gatherings to ten or under, and a new mandatory mask
policy for all public indoor places.
The mask policy is especially indicative of the
infantile, afraid of the Bogeyman, mentality that has infected the thinking of
our adult populace. The pores of cloth
masks are 200+ times larger than the virions of SARS-CoV-2. Anybody with an ounce of logic and who is
willing to actually use it, ought to be able to deduce from this that the virus
will have no difficulty passing through these masks. Youtube videos, showing that cloth masks can
lessen the spread of visible particles, hardly constitute proof to the
contrary, at least to anyone aware that viruses are too small to be visible to
the naked eye apart from very powerful magnifiers. Nor do scientific research studies
purporting to show that masks are effective at reducing COVID-19 transmission
constitute such proof. There is no
dearth of such studies demonstrating the exact opposite, and these are more consistent
with logic. While I reject the modern
consensus that logic and science trump tradition and divine revelation, I will
say that between the two former, logic trumps science, and that thinking
otherwise is the ultimate formula for allowing oneself to be duped.
The mandate to wear masks everywhere is essentially a
mandate to wear a talisman, a magic symbol to ward off the Bogeyman. It is very ironic, therefore, that in the
popular culture of recent years, the Bogeyman has been the mask wearer.
Think back to the film that launched the plethora of
serialized slasher-film franchises that glutted the cinema in the 1980s. In 1978, John Carpenter co-wrote, directed,
and composed the music for the film Halloween. At the beginning of this film, the six-year
old Michael Myers – the character’s name, not to be confused with the actor who
portrayed Wayne, Shrek, and Austin Powers – wearing a Halloween costume,
complete with mask, stabs his older sister to death. The film then jumps ahead fifteen years to
when Michael, who has spent the whole time in a mental hospital under the care
of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) (1), escapes and makes his way to his
hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, stealing a bleached Captain Kirk mask on the
way. From behind that mask, he stalks
teenage girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her debut role). He kills a number of her friends, one of
whom calls Laurie at the home where she is babysitting on Halloween night just
before Michael gets her. She, rather
foolishly, heads over there and comes face-to-mask with Michael. In the confrontation,
she manages to pull his mask off, but would undoubtedly have been killed then
and there, had Dr. Loomis not entered at that moment and emptied his revolver
into Michael, knocking him from the hall to the bedroom, out the picture
window, and over the balcony to the ground below. Laurie turns to the psychiatrist and asks “was
that the Bogeyman?” “As a matter of
fact, it was” he answers, finding confirmation when he steps out onto the
balcony, looks down, and finds that Michael has disappeared.
To John Carpenter, the Bogeyman was the one in the
mask. Does this tell us anything about
the multitude of dolts today, cowering away in fear behind their masks, hoping
that they will save them from the Bogeyman?
Spot on.
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