RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/5/the-scab-the-wound-beneath

EXCERPTS:

An overriding theme of the historian Thucydides’ monumental history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) is the fragility of civilization. In extremis, when both the elites and masses lose their thin veneer of culture, society can turn feral quickly. During a horrific war, plague, or revolution, even a wealthy and sophisticated civilization such as that of the classical Greek city-states regresses in a second to its innate state. And what follows from these natural and man-made disasters is not pretty. Still, these calamities can be tragically instructional. Hypocrisies arise. Pretexts vanish. Fundamental but forgotten truths, easily masked in times of calm, reemerge. From Thucydides’ warnings, we can glean that even suburban elites in Range Rovers can in a day be reduced to tugging over toilet paper rolls at Whole Foods.

Of course, in historical terms, covid-19may prove a rookie virus in comparison to the still mysterious infection—typhus, smallpox, or typhoid?—that wiped out one quarter of the Athenian population along with its iconic sexagenarian leader Pericles. He was the architect of the very wartime strategy of forced withdrawal inside the walls of Athens that birthed the plague in the first place and took his life.

Thucydides’ accounts of the plague, the savage factionalism at Corcyra, the mass executions at Mytilene and Melos, and the disaster at Syracuse all remind us that what is considered normal in calm can be rendered absurd instantly in the cauldron of panic and death. Last month I saw what seemed to be a stylishly dressed woman in a Lexus buying toilet paper from her car window in the parking lot of a local Walmart from someone who appeared homeless, a social interaction rare in healthier times.

The pernicious coronavirus tore off an American scab and revealed suppurating wounds beneath. Take the central actor of this plague, China. For much of the twenty-first century, the American establishment’s foreign policy toward China, to the degree it was even formalized, was ethically and logically bankrupt. Yet the status quo remained unquestioned, given it rested on a rare alignment of both progressive and commercial self-interests.

Of course, Americans in general have had a long romance with China. They were never colonialists in China, at least in the manner of the Europeans. Over fifteen million Chinese, our erstwhile allies, were killed in World War II, many brutally slaughtered by our enemies, the Japanese.

More recently, Mao Zedong, arguably the most lethal mass murderer of the twentieth century—perhaps a greater killer than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined—held an attraction for the New Left of the 1960s. His cherubic smile, worker’s cap, peasant dress, cool aphorisms, and hatred of running-dog capitalists once captivated student protestors. Even Barack Obama’s acting White House communications director, Anita Dunn, in 2009 still swooned that Mao was one of her two favorite political “philosophers”:

And then the third lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge.

https://www.city-journal.org/snapshots-from-shadow-of-covid-19

The pandemically correct line out of Trader Joe’s—everyone in the masked queue standing six feet apart—stretches down Spring Street from the food-market entrance and turns the corner on Sixth Avenue. I brake to a stop and tell Diane that the store is too crowded. We should just go home.

“We need a few things,” she says, and gets out.

I take my pick of a dozen parking spaces. The weather’s nice, but I do not put the window down, distancing myself from the air of my own hometown. Judging by that line, Diane will need at least an hour to buy essentials, and here I am sheltering in place in the Honda. I glance at my reflection in the rearview mirror. Have I turned into the legendary mafia guy, who, fearful of his friends, sends his wife out to start his car?

This is my first time outside in four days, and I’m surprised to find myself struggling against a crushing sense of bereavement that somehow alternates between anxiety and rage. Nearby, a woman sits on a bench, her mask lowered, her face raised to the antiseptic sun. A well-dressed but unmasked young man walks by and speaks to her, pointing toward the strange spectacle of a traffic-free avenue. Apparently, he’s standing too close, because the woman raises her mask and walks away. The young man wanders back and forth aimlessly, either stoned or in shock, or both. I recognize the look. I just saw it in the mirror.

Deep breaths. Coronavirus is not the Black Death. It’s not the epidemic that took down Marcus Aurelius or the cruel plague that devastated seventeenth-century London. It may turn out to be less dangerous than the Asian flu pandemic of 1957, which killed 116,000 Americans. That remains to be seen. The disease’s core public symptom is panic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZaOQVbHsmw&feature=youtu.be

Dr. Roth is author of an excellent book which rebuts venal media libels about his stability and fitness to serve.

http://www.renewamerica.com/

I am reminded of my own youth in England and of a particular incident when I was but seventeen years of age which both changed my life and my political outlook.

As we know, the vast majority of young people have always been – and certainly are today – filled with idealistic notions. That is good and is part of growing up. I certainly was idealistic and, not surprisingly, had automatically wished to assert my own ideas in opposition to those of my father. I loved him greatly but he was a staunch member of the British Conservative party and so I foolishly chose – to his dismay – to join the left-wing and radically Socialist opposition Labour Party.

Now my father’s relatives being mostly working class folks were all automatically wedded to Britain’s Labour Party that claimed to be for the workers. In fact Communist ideas were front and center among so many Brits. The old Socialist song, We’ll keep the Red flag flying here was often sung along with the parading of the slogan; Workers of the World Unite.

When I was still only in my pre-teen years I remember how Dad would drive our family in his black Morris 12, to visit my uncles, aunts and cousins once a month in their relatively poor part of London. Inevitably, after a game of cards, politics would take over among the adults and Dad would inevitably be in the political minority. This was the customary turn of events and neither one of his brothers and sisters would give way during what often became heated arguments.

So back now to that incident when I was about seventeen. I was getting off a double decker bus in my home town. An elderly man was boarding the bus at the same time and he saw a lapel badge I was wearing. He asked what was written on it and I proudly and naively said, “Oh, it shows I’m a member of the Young Socialists.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/25/stanford_university_dr_scott_atlas_virus_panic_induced_by_overestimation_of_fatality_rate_of_infected.html

Former Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center Dr. Scott Atlas appeared on FOX News’ ‘The Story’ with Martha MacCallum to discuss his popular column on the coronavirus titled, ‘The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation.’

Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center from 1998 until 2012.

MARTHA MACCALLUM, FOX NEWS: So, my next guest is a senior fellow at Stanford University, and he wrote a column that has gotten a lot of attention tonight. It is titled, The Data Is In, Stop the Panic and End the Total Isolation.

So, here now to explain the title of that piece is Dr. Scott Atlas, former Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center. Doctor, thank you very much for being here. So, why should we stop the panic and end the total isolation, in your opinion?

DR. SCOTT ATLAS, HOOVER INSTITUTION SENIOR FELLOW: Well, I mean, I think we’re in a different position now than we were a month ago, and that position is, we have a lot of evidence. We don’t need to just simply emphasize hypothetical projections. We can combine that empirical data instead of ignoring it, we can combine that with our knowledge of fundamental biology decades we’ve known a lot about viruses, a lot about infections, and for decades even about this family of viruses. And then we can thoughtfully combine that evidence with the way to restore the country in a safe way.

MACCALLUM: So, you say that that most people in this country are not in danger of dying from COVID-19. Explain.

ATLAS: Well, sure. I mean, these are some of the key facts that we’ve learned. Point number one is that the overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying. This is showing all over the world. And in fact, what induced the panic was this overestimation of what’s called the fatality rate of the infection by the World Health Organization. But in reality, that’s a fraction. So, if you take the number of people who are going to die and you divide it by the people who are infected, they got three to five percent of people, which is very high.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/25/post-hoc-vs-propter-hoc/

Curves are flattening worldwide thanks to stringent lockdown efforts.” That bulletin from one of my favorite magazines made me sit up. “Really?” I thought, “Is it because of the stringent lockdown that the ‘curves’ are flattening?”

For that is what “thanks to” means here, right? Because, “propter” in Latin.

No one needs to ask what sort of curves we are talking about here. There is only one subject that is being discussed now towards the end of April 2020: coronavirus, the insidious cold bug brought to the world by the Chinese Communist Party.

After several weeks of rising numbers of cases and deaths, the bell curves have crested and are beginning to decline almost everywhere. Hurrah! Let’s pat the American people on their collective back. It takes a lot of hard work to destroy the entire economy of a complex first-world nation like the United States in just a few weeks.

But we may have done just that. We forced most businesses to close. We forced people to stay at home. We imperiled countless hospitals by making them treat only one thing: patients sick from the coronavirus. We put more than 26 million people out of work. We shaved trillions of dollars of wealth off the market. Whew! I think of the Caledonian Calgacus who (according to Tacitus) observed that the Romans solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant: “they make a wasteland and call it peace.” 

Unless you are a public health official, for whom even one case of illness from coronavirus is unacceptable, most people feel that our work here is done, or nearly. You can tell that because everywhere people are talking about, and embarking upon, an effort to restart the engines of everyday life.

Well, not only public health officials. They are joined by many Democratic politicians who, like the Marxists of yore, believe that “the worse, the better,” that is, the worse things get, they better they are for “the revolution.” The more people suffer, they think, the more likely they are to turn the bad orange man out of office come November.

Nothing Like a Little Human Sacrifice to Save Lives