To the Person Who Gave Me the Virus:
I have no idea who you are, but our paths almost surely crossed last month in Las Vegas.
Even now I wouldn’t change a thing about that trip, by the way, which was a blast. The existence of the virus, it’s true, made my life a fraction of one percent more dangerous than it was before. But since I don’t have any mental disorders, I hadn’t calibrated my risk tolerance so precisely that such a tiny change would make me radically alter my life.
Naturally if you knew you were sick, you should have stayed home. Of all the advice they’ve given — mask wearing, social distancing, and all the rest — staying home when you’re sick would do by far the most good, yet we hear it urged upon us the least.
At the same time, The Hill reports that you can easily confuse the symptoms of the virus for allergies, so it’s entirely possible not to be aware that you’re contagious. I see no reason to assume bad will on your part.
Every time I leave my house I am taking a risk. We all are. I don’t blame you for the constraints imposed by reality.
If the chance of being struck by lightning increased tenfold tomorrow, this would not affect my behavior in any way. Not being neurotic, I don’t live my life as if the present rate of lightning strikes is precisely as high as I can tolerate.It has become almost impossible to have a rational conversation about any of this. For one thing, most people are shockingly misinformed. Ask the average person what the likelihood is of someone in his age cohort needing to be hospitalized for COVID, and his answer will be off by a factor of 10, if not 100. Guaranteed.
For that matter, I cannot believe how many people think masks are accomplishing anything. The laughable “studies” on masks generally assume what they set out to prove, and/or confine themselves to strangely arbitrary timeframes, before explosions in COVID spread.
Dozens of countries have seen their COVID charts go almost vertical after (not necessarily immediately after, but after) introducing large-scale masking, which is what the charts would look like if masks accomplished absolutely nothing. These places are ignored, because nobody is told about them.
Meanwhile, there have been essentially zero COVID deaths in Sweden over the past month, and the rest of Scandinavia is also doing very well despite very little masking or other restrictions.
The world acts as if these countries do not exist. As usual with the “you’re to blame for the virus” people, success stories like these are of no interest, because there’s nobody they can demonize — and demonizing people is their favorite pastime.
The case of Nepal is interesting, too. After a lockdown that ended in July 2020, they decided essentially to proceed as normal. They’re a poor country, and they chose the radical, unheard-of approach of overturning a policy that would have had them starving to death.
And guess what?
They’re doing fine.
“Public health officials” were stumped, but at this point who can be surprised by that? What we laughingly call our “public health” establishment has made fools of themselves during this entire fiasco.
Nepal is at 340 deaths per million. Compare that to locked-down countries like the UK (1909), Spain (1756), Belgium (2170), or Peru (5883).
Back in the United States, the Sun Belt spike of 2020 came down with zero behavioral changes of any kind. The “COVID is your fault” people are too determined to blame someone to show any curiosity about this, even though it absolutely should evoke curiosity.
COVID comes and goes seasonally and regionally, and blows its way past our silly masks and six-foot floor stickers.
With my friend Tim Scott, I created a website where people can test their ability to determine which alleged mitigation measures accomplished what. If they work, it should be easy and obvious to choose which line on a graph represents a state or country that implemented it and which line represents one that did not.
So go ahead. Try your hand at it. If any of the insanity accomplished anything, it’ll be a breeze: CovidChartsQuiz.com. …
Now it’s true: I was definitely laid up in bed for a while. But not a single kid should have missed a single basketball practice to keep me from getting sick. Imagine the selfishness involved in that kind of demand.
Screw that.
And nor should you, mysterious Las Vegas person, feel sorry for me. I don’t want you staying in your house! I don’t want you refusing to live! I’m glad you were out living your life, enjoying things that make life worth living. Merely preserving your biological existence is unworthy of a human being.
This is especially so when we’ve been given no indication of precisely what would constitute an all-clear. It’s all arbitrariness piled upon more anti-scientific arbitrariness.
We should all be inspired by the words of Lord Sumption in the UK:“What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends. Life is a crowded football match or a live concert. Life is a family celebration with children and grandchildren. Life is companionship, an arm around one’s back, laughter or tears shared at less than two meters. These things are not just optional extras. They are life itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as social beings. Of course death is permanent, whereas joy may be temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is.”
Thank you, Las Vegas person, for refusing to be inhuman, for refusing to be an automaton, and for saying yes to those things that bring us joy and make our lives meaningful.
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Today, this would be the sort of thing to embellish a band’s image, not to mention provide material for an entire segment of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” Not so in 1959, when four members of The Platters were arrested on drug and prostitution charges following a concert in Cincinnati when they were discovered with four women (three of them white) in what was reported as “various stages of undress.” Despite the fact that none of the Platters were convicted of anything, the Platters (who were all black) were removed from several radio stations’ playlists.
Speaking of odd music anniversaries: Today in 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the entire Beatles music library for more than $45 million.
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There’s a consoling thought as we descend deeper into the socially disintegrating, culturally self-loathing, economically stalling dystopia of contemporary America: We’ve been here before.
The hegemony of today’s left-wing radicals, pursuing their ambitions to repudiate America’s historical values and remake the country in the image of some purified version of a big government, equity-enforcing, social-democratic paradise, recalls the 1970s. That decade culminated in the unique combination of economic ruin and international humiliation that defined a one-term Democratic presidency—and we know what happened next. Wait a while, the optimists say. The next Reagan Revolution is at hand.
History doesn’t repeat itself, despite what Marx said, but there is a pattern in the ebb and flow of historical tides. Extreme lurches in one direction tend to be self-correcting, especially when they push a nation as successful as America close to the abyss.
But conservatives should defer the optimism. There are surely similarities between today’s conditions and that benighted decade of 50 years ago, and you don’t have to have a wild imagination to see the Joe Biden-Jimmy Carter parallels. But there are important differences that should temper any confident predictions of an imminent new era of conservative ascendancy.
The 1970s were probably the last decade when existential doubts about the American project were as pronounced and debilitating as they are now. The advances of the 1960s in civil rights and economic prosperity collapsed into a tumult of social unrest and, to coin a phrase, national malaise. The racial strife that closed the previous decade continued to define much of the next one. There are echoes of today’s woke revolutionaries in the 1968 Summer Olympics, when black athletes demonstrated their antipathy to the flag and what it stood for in their own Black Power salute from the medal podium.
The surge in homicides in the past year is a flashback to the decade when American cities were hellscapes—as is the flight of many Americans from those cities to suburbs and beyond. Back then Democratic politicians blamed it on systemic injustice and racist policing and seemed to favor criminals over their victims. Sound familiar?
Then as now there was an existential sense of peril and failure. In the 1970s the nation was haunted by a widespread fear that America was losing the great ideological struggle of the time to the communist superpower. The U.S. retreat from Vietnam, the tightening Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, and Marxist advances in Latin America had at least American progressive elites convinced of ultimate decline and fall. More than 40 years later, American elites are convinced another communist power is eclipsing the U.S. and the civilization it has led.
The 1970s gave us stagflation—immortalized in the popularization of the “misery index”—the sum of the unemployment and inflation rates. While today’s number remains well shy of the peak it reached in 1980, it has doubled in the past two years—a feat last performed in the mid-1970s. Other echoes resonate across the half century: unaccustomed military misadventures, in Vietnam then and Iraq and Afghanistan now; presidential infamy in Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.
For all the similarities, though, there’s at least one big political difference—rooted in an economic one—that suggests reason for pessimism.
Today, unlike then, almost the entire American establishment lines up on one side. The progressive revolution is much more deeply embedded in the nation’s institutions than it ever was in the 1970s. It was still possible then to find conservatives on campuses—it was the intellectual revolution of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school that presaged Ronald Reagan’s political version. Friedman would probably be canceled today. The permanent government wasn’t steeped as it is now in the social and political orthodoxy that thwarts efforts to undo it.
But the biggest difference of all is the investment by America’s corporate leadership in the dominant progressive ideology.
By the late 1970s U.S. financial markets had been in a decade-long bear market. In 1979 the Dow Jones Industrial Average was where it had been in 1965. Since then, and thanks in great part to the global economic liberalization unleashed by the Reagan-Thatcher years, today’s American corporations have enjoyed a bull run like no other.
Which leaves us with one of the strangest alliances in history: a dominant political class that argues America is a fundamentally flawed society in need of complete transformation, in coalition with a dominant capitalist class that reaps unprecedented riches from investors’ convictions that things have never been better.
Barring an epic financial collapse or some improbable early cultural counterrevolution, the coalition that helped elect Ronald Reagan isn’t coming back. Any reversal of the tide of progressive hegemony will have to be achieved from the bottom up.
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Today should be a national holiday. That is because this group first entered the music charts today in 1969, getting three or four chart spots lower than its title:
That was the same day the number one single predicted life 556 years in the future:
Today in 1975, the Bee Gees hit number one, even though they were just just just …
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Two anniversaries today demonstrate the fickle nature of the pop charts. This is the number one song today in 1960:
Three years later, the Kingsmen released “Louie Louie.” Some radio stations refused to play it because they claimed it was obscene. Which is ridiculous, because the lyrics were not obscene, merely incomprehensible:
Today in 1969, while the Beatles were wrapping up work on “Abbey Road,” they shot the album cover:
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Some might argue that this program today in 1955 started the rock and roll era:
I have a hard time believing the Beatles needed any help getting to number one, including today in 1965:
That was in Britain. On this side of the Atlantic, today’s number one pop song:
Released today in 1967:
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Today in 1965, the Beatles sought “Help” in purchasing an album:
Two years later, Beatles manager Brian Epstein tried to help quell the worldwide furor over John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment:
“The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist has been quoted and misrepresented entirely out of context of the article, which was in fact highly complimentary to Lennon as a person. … Lennon didn’t mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles’ effect appeared to be a more immediate one upon, certainly, the younger generation. John is deeply concerned and regrets that people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended.”
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First, a non-rock anniversary: Today is the 95th anniversary of the first broadcasted baseball game, on KDKA in Pittsburgh: Harold Arlen described Pittsburgh’s 8–0 win over Philadelphia.
Speaking of Philadelphia … today in 1957, ABC-TV picked up WFIL-TV’s “American Bandstand” …
… though ABC interrupted it in the middle for “The Mickey Mouse Club.”
Today in 1966, the Beatles recorded “Yellow Submarine” …
… and “Eleanor Rigby” …
… which were part of their “Revolver” album, released one year to the day later.
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Today in 1957, the Everly Brothers performed on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew …
… performing a song about a couple who falls asleep on a date, making others assume that they spent the night together when they didn’t. The song was banned in some markets.
Today in 1958, Billboard magazine combined its five charts measuring record sales, jukebox plays and radio airplay to the Hot 100. And the first Hot 100 number one was …
Today in 1967, a 16-year-old girl stowed away on the Monkees’ flight from Minneapolis to St. Louis. The girl’s father accused the Monkees of transporting a minor across state lines, presumably for immoral purposes.
Today in 1970, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson married his second wife.
Possibly connected: Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for public drunkenness after being found passed out on the front steps of a house.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 