"All Meant to Drive You Crazy"

Just got home from our safari into northern Virginia. Along with Diploson1 and Diploson2, we visited Diploson3, his wife, and the new Diplograndson. We all vowed to stay away from DC, and we kept that vow.

The Diplograndson, already three months old, has decided to use "male" as his gender designation, and will employ he/him/his as his personal pronouns. Between sips of Maker's Mark, and puffs on a Romeo y Julieta, he expressed great concern over the hysteria generated by the global warming hoax; rejected as fake the Russia collusion story; tagged the Ukraine impeachment story as another fraud; and argued that since black lives matter, he opposes federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the biggest destroyer of black lives in America. I might have over interpreted his comments . . . maybe . . ..

Diploson3 and wife fled DC a couple of weeks ago for the relative safety and comfort of Fairfax county in Virginia. We noticed that the area around Vienna, Merrifield, Fairfax City, and Dunn Loring apparently has undergone another of its every-so-often but titanic demographic shifts. Occupying the area's million-dollar-plus condos and townhouses are youngish white couples. They have, it seems, fled the big city and returned to the suburbs. When we bought a home in the area some thirty years (fortunately, we still have it), we saw the tide running the other way, with suburban neighborhoods full of recent immigrants from Vietnam and the Middle East.

This time, furthermore, we saw these youngish white couples with a surprising number of small children, almost more than dogs--also a change from thirty years ago. The politics? Ah, well, they remain the classic vacuous progressive politics of semi-wealthy young suburbanites. We saw several cars and businesses displaying "Black Lives Matter" signs, thereby, it seems, some of these white suburbanites attribute greater value to the lives of others than to their own. Examples of generosity and self-sacrifice? Empty-headed virtue signaling? Fear and the paying of Dane-geld? I report, you decide.

Northern Virginia remains very much in the grip of the Chicom virus fear. The partially reopened stores and restaurants require you to wear a mask. It all looks like a bad dystopian future scifi flick. The restaurants we tried had an austere clinical feel; hard to enjoy a meal while breathing in bleach fumes, tables damp from disinfectant "wipe downs," and attended by wait staff who look like lab techs with masks and rubber gloves. I kept expecting them to ask me for a stool sample -- all the while surrounded by written and broadcast messages telling us: "We are all in this together!" "Maintain your social distance!" "No mask, no entry!"

Much of the reaction to the ChiCom virus forms part of what I wrote about some seven years ago: the left's war on joy and fun. While that post dealt mostly with the assault on Christmas, it contained some observations of a more general nature that apply to the current situation:

The old irascible, politically incorrect, and acerbic sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, once famously defined Puritanism as, "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Mencken today likely would want to revise his definition; Puritans and their ethos have long departed the American political and cultural scene. Today's warriors against happiness, those haunted by the "fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" are the leftist ideologues in charge of most of our social, political, educational, and cultural institutions. Yes, of course, they have an insatiable drive for power; yes, of course, they want control over all aspects of our lives. I, however, have come to the conclusion that what really fuels them, or put it another way, the hidden turbocharge in their engine, is their hatred of joy, of happiness, and most notably of the special joy and happiness that comes with an individual expressing and exercising independence. <...> 

The left cannot stand the thought of individuals doing things that bring them joy and happiness. Automobiles. Yes, automobiles form a major target of this assault. Driving an automobile can bring joy, excitement, and independence into a person's life. Driving an "impractical" automobile such as a Porsche, a Corvette, a Nissan GTR, a Cadillac CTS-V, a Ferrari, or a 700Hp modified Shelby GT-500 is fun and brings joy. The leftists would have us all in grey buses, trains, and, at best, in subsidized pokey Priuses and Volts, stifling our joy and happiness in the name of protecting Gaia against a fake warming threat. They will use taxes, and EPA and safety regulations, and absurd speed limits to ruin our joy. The same with gun ownership. Guns are fun; they bring joy to the owner, and assert an individual's right to independence and self-defense. Gun ownership, of course, also limits the power of the state, and the ability of the leftists running the state to dictate the arc of our lives. We see the same in the assault on drinking, smoking, eating meat, homeschooling, and on individual choice in medical care. The state will decide which schools our children can attend, what they will learn; the state will decide our medical choices. They wage war on small businesses, which bring joy to the owners and, again assert independence, because after all, "you didn't build that."

Diploson3 had, perhaps, a more accurate, and infinitely more pithy observation. He noted that the edicts coming out from the left are "all meant to drive you crazy." So many of the "rules" we have had imposed on us in reaction to the ChiCom virus have no rhyme or reason, no logic, no science. It's hard, therefore, to dispute Diploson3's observation.

Don't let the left succeed.

Do not get crazy, get angry.