One Small Step Towards Restoring Sanity

 

We are almost a quarter of a century into the third millennium Anno Domini.  In that period the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY - gang has grown accustomed to getting whatever it demands, no matter how ludicrous, absurd, or even downright insane, the demand happens to be.   This is true in general across the civilization formerly known as Christendom but nowhere more so than here in the Dominion of Canada.   It has been especially true here for the last nine years since Captain Airhead became the creepiest little low-life sleazebag ever to disgrace the office of the first minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.   Captain Airhead has aggressively promoted the craziest, most fringe, and least defensible elements of the alphabet soup agenda as if they were commonsensical, had the weight of universally recognized moral truth behind them, and could be opposed only by knuckle-dragging moral reprobates.  If knuckle-dragging moral reprobation is what is required to oppose such things then Captain Airhead ought to be leading the opposition.   He was never able to add two and two together and come up with four, however.   Just look at his budgets.  

 

One consequence of Captain Airhead’s alphabet soup policies has been a sharp decline in average intelligence in the country.   We might call this the Trudeau Effect.   It is the opposite of the Flynn Effect, the psychometric phenomenon named after James Flynn by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994) that was the reason standardized IQ tests needed to be revised, updated, and recalibrated periodically to prevent the average from running significantly over 100.   The Trudeau Effect is when, due to constant government-backed gas-lighting and bullying, intelligence so declines that people no longer understand the difference between what is true in reality and what someone mistakenly thinks or imagines to be true.   Before Captain Airhead we could say in response to those pushing the trans part of the alphabet soup agenda that we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is a chicken actually is a chicken, we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte actually is who he thinks he is, and neither should we accept that the boy who thinks he is a girl is a girl or that the girl who thinks she is a boy is a boy.   Today, not only do fewer and fewer people understand this, the aggressive promotion of the trans agenda has brought us to the point where there is now a demand that we regard people who think they are something other than people as being what they think or say they are.

 

This is why it has been rather encouraging over the last year or so to see a growing push back against this insanity.    Most recently, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, announced a new set of policies and upcoming legislation for her province that would restrict the genital and breast mutilation sickeningly called by such deranged euphemisms as gender-reassignment surgery or gender-affirming care to those who have reached the age of majority, ban puberty-blockers for those under the age of 16, require that parents be notified and give their consent when pervert teachers try to brainwash their kids into thinking they are the opposite sex/gender, require parental consent for sex education and that all sex ed curricula be approved by the minister of education, and prevent the sort of situation that Ray Stevens has hilariously lampooned in his new song “Since Bubba Changed His Name to Charlene”.   In other words, policies and legislation that anyone who isn’t a total idiot, insane, under the influence of an evil spirit or a substance that turns one’s mind to goo or both, evil on a megalomaniacal scale, or some combination of these, could and would support.   Needless to say, both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the supervillain who somehow broke out of the cartoon universe and into our own and having been denied entry to India due to his connections to the extremists who want to break that country up opted to become the leader of the socialist party here, have been having conniptions over this.

 

Most news media commentators have joined the whacko politicians like Airhead and Dhaliwal in howling in outrage over what could be best described as the very, bare bones, minimum of a sensible provincial policy towards alphabet soup gender politics.   This will not come as a shock to many, I suspect.    Canadian newspapers have acted as if their role was to propagate the ideas of and bolster support for the Liberal Party since at least the time when John Wesley Defoe edited the Winnipeg Free Press.   Arguably it goes back even further to when George Brown edited the Toronto Globe, the predecessor of today’s Globe and Mail.   That the new technological means of mass communication seemed designed to project a distorted view of reality that served the interests of some ideological vision of progress rather than of truth was a critique made by such varied observers as the American Richard M. Weaver, the French Jacques Ellul, and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan.  It was radio, television, and the motion picture industry that these men had in mind.   The second revolution in mass communications technology that gave us the internet, smartphones, social media, and streaming services has since eclipsed the first.    It has not rectified the problem those astute social critics and technosceptics saw in the earlier mass communications media any more than Captain Airhead’s bailout of the struggling Canadian newspapers solved the problem of their heavy bias towards the Liberal Party but rather, in both instances, the problem was exponentially magnified.

 

John Ibbitson wrote a piece that argued that Smith’s policies were endangering all teenagers in Alberta.   Naturally, the Globe and Mail had the poor taste to publish it.   The obvious reality is that no teenagers – or anybody else for that matter – are endangered by Smith’s policies.    Max Fawcett, the lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, attempted to argue that Smith, who has long been identified with the libertarian wing of Canadian conservatism, has betrayed her ideology.   As Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservative Party, pointed out, however, when he – finally – took a stand in favour what Smith was doing, prohibiting people from making irreversible, life-altering, decisions while they are children means protecting their right to make adult choices as adults.  That is hardly something that could be described as irreconcilably out of sync with libertarian ideals  As an indicator of just how cuckoo most of the media reporting on this has been, Ibbitson’s and Fawcett’s are among the saner of the anti-Smith pieces that have appeared.

 

Poilievre also predicted that Captain Airhead will eventually have to back down on this issue.   I certainly hope that he is right about that and that soon we will have the pleasure of watching Captain Airhead eat his own words.   In the meantime, it is good to see that a rational, sane, pushback against the alphabet soup madness has finally begun.   Let us hope and pray that it continues and spreads.

Songs of the Times

In this essay I shall be discussing the bands Echosmith and High Valley.  Joining the two together as a single topic will probably seem rather peculiar to anyone familiar with both groups.  The former band hails from the city of Chino, thirty miles east of Los Angeles in the state of California’s San Bernardino County in the American republic.   It specializes in the kind of music that is called “indie pop” or “alt pop.”   The latter band is from the province of Alberta here in the Dominion of Canada.   Their home community is Blumenort, which like the Blumenorts in Manitoba and Saskatchewan is a small, unincorporated, farming community founded by Mennonites.   It is located in Mackenzie County in the north of the province, near the hamlet of La Crete which is also a Mennonite community.   To provide a more familiar landmark, this is about thirty miles north of Edmonton.   High Valley performs country and western music of various styles and varieties.  One might be tempted to say that in the universe of music, these bands come from completely different worlds.

 

The reason I have decided to write about the two bands together is that they have both released new songs this year.   In the case of Echosmith they released an entire album, their second studio album “Lonely Generation.”   High Valley has not released a full studio album this year yet, but they have released an EP with six tracks, including the single that shares its title “Grew Up On That” which has received a lot of playtime on country radio.    It is this single and the title song from the Echosmith album which I will be focusing on specifically.  Both songs strike me as saying something which, due to the times in which we live, is very important and relevant.   I do not mean that they are saying the same thing.  Indeed, the contrast between what the two songs are saying is possibly greater than the one drawn in the previous paragraph between the two bands. 

 

Before examining them at greater length, however, it might be interesting to note a few curious similarities between the two groups.

 

Both groups consist of siblings.   High Valley, the older of the two groups, is composed of the Rempel brothers, Brad and Curtis.   Echosmith is composed of the Sierota siblings, the brothers Noah and Graham as well as a sister Sydney who is the lead vocalist of the group.   Another similarity is that both groups saw the departure of a brother and founding member in the last few years.     In the case of High Valley it was Bryan Rempel about six years ago and in the case of Echosmith it was Jamie Sierota about two years ago.   

 

The most successful songs so far of both bands were released in 2013-2014.    Echosmith’s debut studio album came out in 2013.   The band had been formed about four years previously and they had originally performed covers of songs by other artists but this album, “Talking Dreams”, featured original songs written by the band members with their father Jeffrey David who is also their producer.   The best known song from the album was “Cool Kids”, which reached the thirteenth spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.   High Valley, which as mentioned is the older of the two groups having been formed in the late 1990s, released their fourth studio album the following year, entitled “Country Line”.   It contained ten tracks, six of which charted in the top ten for Canadian country as radio singles.   One of these, “Make You Mine”, in which they were joined by Ricky Skaggs, made the top five.  Both songs grew in popularity in the years after they were originally released, and both were certified Platinum – triple Platinum in the case of “Cool Kids”.

 

Now let us come back to the present year and take a look at the songs the bands have just released.   We will start with Echosmith.

 

As mentioned Echosmith’s “Lonely Generation” album was released earlier this year.   The title song was the first track on the album.   Like the songs on their first album, and the rest of the songs on this one for that matter, it was written by the siblings with their father and producer Jeffrey David.  

 

Here is the song’s chorus:

We’re the lonely generation
A pixelated version of ourselves
Empty conversations
I’ve disconnected, now I’m by myself

 

What jumps out about these words is how they well they describe what so many people have been experiencing since March of this year – the loneliness and isolation forced upon us all by the bat flu lockdowns.   Upon hearing those words for the first time, one could easily come to the conclusion that Mr. David and his children wrote the song during lockdown to express how they feeling about the whole thing.

 

The conclusion would be wrong, however.   Unlike “The Quarantine Song”, written by C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr. and performed by legendary country and western funny man Ray Stevens, containing the excellent lines “two more weeks of quarantine/will be the death of me” this song was not written about the lockdown or even in the lockdown.   The album was released in early January.  

 

The song was actually written as a commentary on social media, computers, smartphones, etc. and the culture, if it can be called that, surrounding them.   This is the band’s own explanation of the song.  Sidney Sierota said “It came out of a really interesting conversation about social media and how addicted we are to our phones” and “Conceptually, it felt really important. We always have a message in our music. For how connected we are, we end up feeling lonelier. Our generation needs to acknowledge it’s a problem and be more intentional in daily life”.

 

What I find very interesting about the lyrics and the explanation of them is the contrast with which the same phenomenon was been portrayed since the beginning of the bat flu lockdown.  The freedom-hating Communist swine who have placed us all under house arrest and lied to us about how it is all for our own good to keep us “safe” have presented social media to us as a lifeline, a savior to keep us from the loneliness and isolation that they have forced upon us with these unjust and wicked measures.   “Stay connected” we have been told, not meaning any kind of normal human connection since all of those have been banned, but plugging ourselves into what is essentially the Matrix and becoming, in the band’s words “pixelated versions of ourselves.”   Echosmith’s depiction of social media and its effects is by far the more honest and truthful of the two.  

 

Lockdowns produce loneliness, disconnect, and isolation.   Social media produces loneliness, disconnect, and isolation.   Does this not tell us that suggesting that we alleviate the isolation caused by lockdowns with social media is the equivalent of suggesting that we try to douse a fire with gasoline?   Of course, the reality is that it is the lockdown that is adding fuel to the fire of loneliness, disconnect, and isolation which, as the song, coming out when it did, demonstrates, was already present prior to the lockdown.

 

What we find in the Echosmith song, therefore, is commentary on one of the important social problems of the day which has been made doubly relevant by events that transpired shortly after the song was released.

 

High Valley’s “Grew Up On That” provides us with something extremely different.   It does not discuss the social problems of the present day but rather the good life of yesteryear.   Anyone who was raised on a farm in a small rural community in the prairie provinces of Canada, or, for that matter, the states of the American Midwest, will likely find something in this song’s nostalgic lyrics that he can relate to, especially if he had any sort of Christian upbringing.  

 

The lengthy chorus depicts the rural way of life in many of its aspects, from the sacred to the mundane and from the hard work to the equally hard play.    It goes:

 

Them Main Streets, them tractor seats
We put some country miles on
Them Friday nights, wide-open skies
Back Forty, gettin' wild on
Sweet by-and-by, I saw the light
In a little white church way in the back
Grew up, grew up, grew up on that

Ricky Skaggs on the vinyl
King James on the Bible
Feet on the dash with ourselves in the back
We grew up on that

 

 

(I call all of the above the chorus because that is how it is so designated in every copy of the lyrics that I have been able to find.   Just from listening to the song I would have taken the lines prior to the mention of Ricky Skaggs to be a bridge and everything that follows to be the actual chorus.)

 

 

There are also two short four-line verses.   The first which opens the song is a recital of parental injunctions that the Rempels undoubtedly heard repeatedly while growing up, about such things as showing reverence at meal time, treating their dates with respect, fiscal responsibility and social respectability.  The second verse references various staples of rural living such as “barbed wire” and “bonfires” and “one red light blinking.”

 

 

Obviously this song is not intended to be social commentary in the same way as the Echosmith song.   It is a very personal collection of reminiscences, autobiographical in nature and sentimental in tone.   The second verse, however, ends with a line that in expressing the nostalgic spirit of the song, does convey a message of sorts.  That line is:

 

 

Had it so good, didn’t know how good we had it, oh.

 

 

These words, removed from their context, can be understood in two rather different ways.   They can be taken in the eulogistic sense of “we didn’t realize what we had until it is gone” or they can be taken in the thankful sense of “in the wisdom that comes with age we have grown to appreciate all that was given us.”    Taken in context, of course, they can only have the latter sense.   The song is one of fond reminiscence not eulogy and gratitude is clearly the song writers’ intent here.    Now, with the Echosmith song, we saw how the events that followed almost immediately after the song’s release added to the meaning the writers had originally intended.    I think that is the case here too, but as with the words themselves there are two different ways to understand the additional meaning.

 

 

One way is to see the events of this year as having switched the sense from gratitude to eulogy.

 

 

This is the year in which C. S. Lewis’ insightful remark about how “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” has been confirmed.   With a few small, local, exceptions, tyranny of this very sort has been imposed all around the world.   The public health dictators have taken everything away from us – our basic freedoms and constitutional civil rights, the entire fabric of communities and institutions intermediate to the individual and the state that we call society, for many people their jobs and businesses, and basically our entire way of life.   While far too many people seem to be okay with sacrificing all of this, not only for themselves but for all other people as well, in the name of keeping people safe from the bat flu, it is difficult to imagine that there are many left who could not empathize with the sentiment “didn’t’ know how good we had it” even looking back only so far as January and February.

 

 

While all of this is true for people whether they are rural or urban, the particular way of life portrayed in the Rempels’ song is under especially severe attack by the public health dictatorship.   It is not exactly a secret that this way of life has been disappearing for decades.   That process has been accelerated by the public health dictatorship.   Think about it.   While the costly sanitation requirements, limited capacity restrictions, and lockdowns have made things difficult for all businesses, benefiting only internet based corporations like Amazon, they have been particularly hard on small local businesses, especially restaurants.   These are the businesses that have been driven into insolvency, or very close to it, by these measures.   In small towns, small local businesses are usually the only kind to be found.     In small, rural communities the churches have remained a much larger part of the life of the community than they have in large cities.   This year they have been ordered to close for most of the year, a move that has had no precedent in what was formerly Christendom except in the parts of it that succumbed to regimes with totalitarian ideologies like Communism.   While churches in small towns are probably more likely to be able to get away with disregarding public health orders to close than urban churches, they are also far less likely to be able to survive being shut down for a lengthy period.   Their loss due to the lockdown, whether temporary or permanent, will be a much bigger blow to the rural communities.   

 

Having said all of that, I don’t think that a switch from gratitude to eulogy is the best way of understanding what the song is saying to us in the context of the unfolding events of the year.     I think that the sense of thankful appreciation for having grown up in the kind of community where Edmund Burke’s “unbought grace of life” could still be found  should be understood as having been amplified by the sharp contrast with the opposite of all that which now surrounds us. 

 

Understood that way, its message in the context of the bat flu complements that of Echosmith’s “Lonely Generation.”    The latter by shining a light on the isolation caused by the “plugged in” culture of communications technology exposes the lie of the public health dictatorship that has been holding that very culture out to us as a lifeline to keep us from drowning in the loneliness that their mad experiment in universal quarantine has produced.   High Valley’s “Grew Up On That”, however, offers the real lifeline of a connection to the sanity which preceded the madness of these dark times in the grateful, appreciative, memory of good times and good places and the faith in God which made those times and places good.

The Bogeyman

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?

(1)   In case this sort of thing interests anyone, Donald Pleasence is the one-person connection between Michael Myers the character and Mike Myers the actor.   Long before taking on the role of Dr. Samuel Loomis, which he would continue to portray in the Halloween franchise through several sequels, he was one of the actors to portray James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who, prior to this Christopher Walz’s performance in SPECTRE and the upcoming No Time To Die, had never been portrayed by the same actor twice), and the first to portray him as anything other than a shadow, seen only from behind, stroking a cat.   Pleasence’s version of the character, from 1967’s You Only Live Twice, is the direct basis of the look of Mike Myer’s character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers trilogy.

The Matrix was not Supposed to be a Blueprint for a New World

I believe that I have mentioned a number of times in the past that I was not particularly impressed by the trilogy of films written and directed by the Wochowski Brothers as they were known at the time – they have since become the Wochowski Sisters – produced by Joel Silver, and starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss that began with The Matrix in 1999. It is not that I have anything against them, per se. I just did not find them at all interesting. In fact, having allowed friends to talk me into going with them to see all three instalments, there was not a single one in which I was able to make it to the end credits without dozing off in the theatre.

Having said that, I did manage to pick up on one detail of the motion picture franchise’s storyline that I am increasingly becoming convinced that many other people somehow missed. At the beginning of the story, the main character Neo portrayed by Reeves, is, like most other human characters in these movies, living out his life within the computer-generated virtual reality to which the title of the series refers, completely unaware that it is a simulation – until the events of the first film unfold. Now, the detail to which I refer is simply this – the simulated reality, the Matrix, is not a good thing. The choice represented by the “blue pill” – to remain in the Matrix blissfully unaware that it is not reality – is the wrong choice. The choice represented by the “red pill” – awaking from the Matrix and discovering reality – is the right choice. The filmmakers were not throwing this idea of people spending their lives trapped in a virtual reality out as a suggestion of something we might want to try and make happen.

I am being somewhat facetious and sarcastic, or course, in saying that other people missed this point. However, consider some of the trends of the past couple of decades that as recently as last winter a sizeable number of people decried but which have been accelerated over the last four months.

When I was growing up, parents would scold their children for watching too much television instead of going outside and playing, doing their homework, or reading a book, and would often actually lay the law down, shut the television off, and send the kids outside. Furthermore, they would try to prevent their daughters from spending hours talking to their friends on the telephone, which in those days was something stationary inside the house rather than something that you carried around with you everywhere. In those days, parents were far more likely to have the latter problem with their daughters than with their sons, and nobody was afraid to mention this even though feminism was already entering into its third wave, way worse than the first and second. I won’t belabor the point that nowadays people are scared to death of talking about behavioural differences between the sexes because that belongs to an entirely different set of unwholesome trends than the one being discussed here, but I will note that if the transition to cellular phone technology has eliminated this distinction between the sexes it was not in the positive direction of girls wasting less time on the phone but in the negative direction of boys spending way more time on it. Since phones now double as television sets – with instant access to far more content than was available on the broadcast stations of three to four decades ago – anyone today seeking to emulate the examples of good parenting just described, would have a much, much, harder time of it.

I wonder what anyone would have said back then if you were to have told them that within a few short decades everyone would have their own portable phone which they would all bring to family meals, with which they would feel free to engage in electronic text conversations with distant friends, and sometimes even the person across the table from them?

I don’t know if they would have believed you or not, but I suspect they would have had a few words to say about the utter rudeness of such behaviour.

When I was a teenager/young adult, young men and women who were unattached and wished to change that had a number of options. These were somewhat more limited for those who had a traditional moral upbringing which they still honoured and obeyed, but they all involved going someplace and meeting someone in person. It could be Church-sponsored events and groups for those of stricter morals, bars and clubs for the less strict, get-togethers with mutual friends trying to set you up for either group, or any number of such possibilities. Today, online dating is where it is at, with plenty of dating sites and cellphone apps to choose from. The closest thing to this back then was the “personals” in the advertisement section of the newspaper.

Granted, for those who preferred to by-pass relationships of this sort altogether and substitute the vicarious sexual experience of others, pornography was available back then as it always has been, but obtaining it involved going to some shady theatre, or the back room of a video or magazine store, rather than simply downloading it on your computer or phone. This, however, opens up yet another line of complaint about our cultural downward spiral that is extraneous to the present discussion.

I grew up on a farm in rural Manitoba, and a concern that was somewhat regularly voiced in the local newspaper, had to do with locals driving into the city – where I lived this would have meant Brandon more often than Winnipeg – to do shopping that could have been done locally. Stated positively, of course, this was the idea that we should support our local communities, and the businesses within them. The positive formulation of this remains more or less the same. The negative concerns have grown however. With the advent of the internet, it is no longer merely the competition of larger businesses in the big city that smaller, local, rural businesses have to worry about, or, even the competition of the multinational chains that threaten local businesses rural and urban, but the competition of online megabusinesses.

There have been on-air religious programs for as long as the media of radio and television have been around, but these were regarded as parachurch ministries that were supplemental to going to Church not substitutes for it. Many of these were explicitly aimed at evangelizing the unchurched. A television or radio preacher who actually encouraged his audience to think of themselves and him in the traditional pastor-flock relationship would have been regarded as bordering on the cultic, if not crossing the line. In the eighties this sort of ministry was coming into a bit of disrepute due to excessive fundraising tactics and scandals on the part of some prominent televangelists – when I was eleven country and western comic artist Ray Stevens released his recording of the song “Would Jesus Wear a Rolex (On His Television Show)” written by Margaret Archer with legendary guitarist Chet Atkins and it just missed the country Top 40.

What all of these trends have in common is that they all involve moving things – playing outside with other kids, conversing with friends and family, becoming romantically involved with someone, making purchases, hearing hymns and a sermon – from the circle of real social interaction into that of the artificial space generated by electronic technology. There are plenty of other such examples, and all of these trends have been accelerating since the governments of the world decided to follow the World Health Organization’s lockdown model for dealing with the Chinese bat flu.

In mandating social distancing and severe limits on group sizes, our governments essentially ordered us to move all social interaction onto the internet. Companies that operate online have swallowed up a much larger share of the market than they ever had before. Amazon has made out like a bandit, to give one obvious example. Churches were all forced to become the internet age equivalent of televangelists and the governments have left them closed longer than practically anything else.

I found all of these trends appalling long before the lockdown, and this dangerous social experiment has done nothing to change my mind. They are moving us quickly in the direction of a virtual reality experience, different, of course, than the one depicted in The Matrix, but arguably just as bad.

Apart from the story of the Ring of Gyges, the best known narrative in Plato’s dialogue Politeia, is his Allegory of the Cave. It is the story of men, who all their lives have been chained in a fixed position to a bench in a cave, watching shadows on the wall in front of them, cast by people walking before the fire behind them, one of whom, having been set free, realizes for the first time what the images he has been seeing are. Ironically, the reality into which Neo awakes in The Matrix, is what the shadows represent in Plato’s allegory, for the point he was trying to illustrate is that the universal ideas contained in things – for example, the idea of dog which makes a dog a dog despite the fact that specific dogs differ from each other – being permanent and unchanging, unlike their material representatives, are the real reality. Or, perhaps it is not so ironic after all. By Plato’s reasoning, the simulated world of The Matrix could only fit into his Allegory of the Cave as something even less real than the shadows on the wall – perhaps their dim reflection in a mirror.

This is the direction in which we have been moving. The dim reflection of shadows in a mirror.

I’m sure you are as thrilled about that as I am.