Participants:
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI200479B
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00:01 Welcome back to the Liberty Insider.
00:02 Before the break, I was sharing something 00:04 that I'd written in Liberty, 00:06 the onset of the COVID emergency 00:10 and our changed lifestyle. 00:11 And in the few minutes left, 00:13 I want to start off 00:14 by sharing something that I just wrote 00:16 not yet published, actually, for the... 00:20 I guess it's the July issue. 00:25 Another editorial 00:26 and the first one I'd called Contagion, 00:29 which is the working title of this program, 00:31 but this one I called the Masque. 00:33 And I have to explain this 00:35 as I did to my children who asked me about it. 00:38 We're all wearing masks now, 00:41 by government edict and by practical consideration, 00:44 in spite of the fact that early on in the pandemic, 00:46 we were told they made no difference, 00:48 which I wondered at the time. 00:51 But now we pretty much have to wear them 00:53 and I do it gladly. 00:54 It's practical consideration. 00:56 That's spelled mask. 00:58 But the word that I titled this is the Masque, 01:01 M-A-S-Q-U-E. 01:03 A masque was a... 01:06 Well, I'll explain it in little in the editorial 01:08 but it was an event where people wore masks, 01:10 but it was a party and a social convention 01:15 where you are going sort of semi anonymously, 01:17 and you could maybe get away with things 01:20 that you wouldn't normally and so the masque, 01:23 the deception in other words. 01:25 I wrote this, "Last time I was in Venice 01:28 the water stains in St. Mark's Square 01:30 were still visible, 01:32 though months after the last flooding tide. 01:36 Some of the steps onto the canals 01:38 looked suspiciously slimy, 01:41 but by and large it was easy to forget 01:43 the predicted Atlantean future. 01:48 The most unavoidable reminder 01:49 was one grand and ancient building 01:51 held up by a complicated piling system 01:54 and cocooned 01:56 by an outer frame of scaffolding, 01:57 designed not to give building access 02:00 but to hold things up and together. 02:03 And in the narrow streets, 02:05 people jostled and moved in a crowded procession 02:09 scarcely imaginable 02:11 now in these days of COVID-19 social distancing. 02:16 Many of them wore masks, 02:18 it seemed and was a festival time, 02:21 and the stores were brimming with the artisanal 02:23 and often expensive masks for the masques: 02:29 and those masques reminders of medieval entertainments 02:32 and vehicle for often profane and politically dangerous talk 02:36 behind the painted grotesqueries. 02:40 I cannot shake the feeling of a surreal parallel 02:44 to the Days of COVID Abnormality. 02:48 On the face of it, this situation is big, 02:52 but bigness aside, a necessary mass quarantine, 02:56 it seems to minimize infection. 02:58 Intended or not, 03:00 the whole experience seems to have thrust us 03:02 into the theater of the absurd 03:05 and dangers way beyond the flulike depredations. 03:09 It should be obvious 03:11 even to the most amateur psychologist 03:14 that social distancing and the mandatory masks, 03:17 now that they have belatedly appeared 03:19 even on supermarket shelves, as has toilet paper, 03:22 these masks have changed our social psyche. 03:26 It might not be so obvious, 03:28 except to those who muse on other places 03:30 and other times, 03:32 that this was ever a necessary condition 03:34 for crowd control and state dominance 03:37 of the individual. 03:38 It is the ultimate antidote to democracy and freedom. 03:42 Some, in spite of the stupefying magic 03:44 of these moments of disorientation, 03:46 have spoken aloud about the ease 03:48 with which individual rights no longer matter so much, 03:52 how religion, 03:53 once dismissed as the opiate of the masses 03:56 by a hated ideologue, hint Karl Marx, 04:00 now takes a weirdly confirming sleepy back seat 04:04 to a simplistic 04:05 either or scenario of public safety. 04:08 Yes, it is true 04:09 that any religion or other personal habit 04:12 that places others at risk of life 04:14 and limb needs to be held back. 04:16 But whether broad or any, in most cases testing, 04:20 the restriction of religion, 04:22 even of the drive-by kind 04:23 favored by elites and Pharisees, 04:26 makes no sense to me. 04:28 Essential services have at times 04:31 seemed an oxymoron. 04:34 We must, 04:35 yes, well, why not, 04:37 spare a little charity 04:38 for the position of community leaders 04:40 faced with an unknown horror and rapid contagion. 04:44 But did they panic, 04:46 or just react in a way conditioned by a worldview? 04:50 Three trillion, and counting, 04:53 Weimar dollars have been given away so far. 04:56 A small fraction of that could have paid for masks 04:59 and rapid testing for all. 05:01 Then pockets of infection could have been known 05:04 and those infected 05:05 or directly in contact quarantined, 05:08 saving the greater freedoms from their possible demise 05:12 in the new Darwinian Big Brother Solution. 05:15 But that is what might have been. 05:17 Well, actually, there are a few countries 05:19 in the world 05:20 that have taken negative advantage 05:22 to further restrict civil and religious liberties 05:24 as part of their ongoing COVID agenda. 05:27 We have not quite gone that way here in the West 05:30 and in the USA specifically yet. 05:33 As I write these lines, 05:34 several weeks 05:36 before the cover date of the magazine, 05:38 and speak them to you here in this program, 05:40 there is rioting, 05:42 demonstrations in cities all across the nation. 05:46 Not yet food riots 05:48 from a 1929 Redux financial pandemic: 05:52 No! 05:53 The proximate cause today 05:54 is the shockingly public killing 05:56 in Minneapolis of George Floyd by a policeman 06:00 kneeling on his neck 06:02 and insensible to his cries of "I can't breathe." 06:06 But this is a play whose curtain goes up 06:09 with such regularity 06:10 that it has become 06:12 as characteristic of American law enforcement 06:14 as the usually unarmed London Bobby 06:17 is over there. 06:20 And as shocking as many find the president's guttural call 06:23 for military law and order, 06:25 it is of a piece with the reverse engineering 06:28 of social distancing. 06:31 This issue of Liberty has a special feature, 06:34 the one I'm writing about on Congressman John Lewis, 06:37 a surviving memorial of the civil rights movement. 06:41 I am moved when I read 06:43 his remembrance of the day in 1965 06:46 when he and Martin Luther King and assorted idealists, 06:50 who were not content with "who we were, " 06:53 linked arms and walked into the swinging billy club, 06:56 the whip, and the released attack dogs. 06:59 "We were ready to die" is his remembrance. 07:03 I wish we were not getting the magazine ready 07:07 and recording this program, 07:10 as the dogs again 07:11 are seen loosed on demonstrators and horses 07:13 wade into crowds and even children 07:16 and the elderly are struck by riot police. 07:19 I remember that time all too well, 07:22 as a teenager recently arrived in the US 07:24 from my birthplace of Australia. 07:26 The background hiss 07:28 was the noise of a seemingly endless war 07:30 in Vietnam. 07:32 I remember my draft number, 07:33 high enough that with my grades in school 07:36 it mattered little to me 07:37 whether my draft board records 07:39 had been burnt in riots or not. 07:41 But I remember the thousands of young men 07:44 fleeing to Canada. 07:45 I remember friends coming back from Vietnam 07:48 minus limbs 07:49 and with what post-Gulf War we now call PTSD. 07:53 I also remember friends in the white coats 07:56 telling of guinea-pigging 07:57 for who knows what chemical horrors. 08:00 Like now, it was a surreal time. 08:03 The year 1968 comes to mind most. 08:06 It was a presidential election year. 08:08 The Democratic Party held its convention in Chicago, 08:11 whose mayor 08:13 in the most nonpartisan way possible 08:15 determined to keep law and order 08:16 in spite of the provocateurs, 08:19 draft dodgers, and anarchists put them. 08:21 A nation then was shocked at how violently 08:25 the Chicago police dealt with them. 08:27 That was the year 08:29 presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was shot. 08:32 He was a tough understudy to his slain brother, 08:35 and he probably wasn't the liberal 08:36 that his followers thought, 08:38 but he was in a fine line of slain public figures 08:42 in a tough political neighborhood. 08:44 That was the year Martin Luther King was slain. 08:47 He was an activist 08:48 who had already transcended personhood: 08:51 which is why his death seemed to many 08:54 the end of a dream for a new and better world. 08:56 Cities all over the country 08:59 erupted in violence and destruction. 09:02 I still remember Washington, D.C., 09:04 the nation's capital burning 09:07 and tens of thousands of national guardsmen 09:09 and police vehicles with tape on the windows 09:11 to neutralize rocks from rioters. 09:14 And in the middle of it all, the Tet Offensive, 09:17 which showed that French folly 09:19 and half a million American college boys 09:21 lacked the resolve of an ever-strengthening enemy! 09:26 But that was then. 09:27 We and our democracy survived, somehow. 09:31 When I look back on it, 09:32 I think it was due to "high hopes," 09:36 and a rallying of people of good spiritual inclination, 09:39 and not immaterial to it 09:42 all was the Jesus movement 09:43 emerging from the mist of the flower power movement. 09:47 Or to put it in more analytical terms: 09:49 people renewed the social contract. 09:52 I hope that is the "again" 09:57 that this administration 09:58 and many in our day think of and hope for. 10:02 In 1968 social conflict had not yet come 10:05 to the full social distancing of 2020. 10:08 People were traumatized, 10:10 but not yet socially or morally asleep. 10:12 Bobby Kennedy campaign from the flatbed of a truck 10:14 in Indianapolis 10:16 rather than by Zoom, Facebook or Twitter. 10:18 It fell to him to tell the crowd 10:20 that Martin Luther King had just been murdered. 10:22 He quoted the ancient Greek tragedian 10:26 Aeschylus to them. 10:28 This is what Aeschylus wrote and Bobby Kennedy shared, 10:31 "Even in our sleep, 10:34 pain which cannot forget 10:36 falls drop by drop upon the heart, 10:39 until in our own despair, 10:42 against our will, 10:44 comes wisdom 10:45 through the awful grace of God. 10:49 There was no rioting in Minneapolis." 10:54 You might think that I'm using hyperbole, 10:56 but I think I'm using analogy. 10:59 In some ways we've been there before. 11:01 And in some ways 11:02 things are not nearly as bad now. 11:04 But the underlying dynamic is eerily familiar 11:08 with the added complication of COVID 11:11 on an international scale, 11:13 and I believe as never before, 11:16 and whether in the United States, 11:17 but particularly in the United States, 11:19 we need to protect freedom and religious freedom. |
Revised 2020-10-06