Civil Commotion

Detroit has a worrisome and stubborn coronavirus infection rate, and this video is why.

An astonishing number of people simply refuse to take this pandemic seriously. Churches continue to assemble; college students continue to party; the aisles at local stores, and the lobby of carry-out restaurants, remain crowded … on and on. I even received an e-mail from a local used bookstore last evening; they’re going to be open for browsing 3-days per week, and will be buying and shelving germy used books. This is nuts.

Granted, it’s anecdotal, but I complained just yesterday that there didn’t seem to be much of a lockdown in effect around here. What do you know? The New York Times confirms that southerners seem to think the coronavirus is interesting but not something that should interfere with getting around.

Stay-at-home orders have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, according to an analysis of cellphone location data by The New York Times.

The divide in travel patterns, based on anonymous cellphone data from 15 million people, suggests that Americans in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home. Disease experts who reviewed the results say those reductions in travel — to less than a mile a day, on average, from about five miles — may be enough to sharply curb the spread of the coronavirus in those regions, at least for now.

Dawn is in her 3rd-week of working at home, and neither of us has gone anywhere but for unavoidable errands. We’re definitely in the minority, though.

You may have thought something like this to yourself over the past couple of weeks: “Maybe there’s a bright side. Maybe this coronavirus stuff is like a slap in the face to the Evangelical Right nutjobs and, with something real to worry about, they won’t be such godawful nuisances.”

No. They’re still crazy, still nuisances.

• Roy Moore, who lost a special Senatorial election in Alabama, is now defending a pastor who won’t suspend church services just because of that pesky coronavirus ‘hoax.’

  Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice and two-time U.S. Senate candidate, will serve as an adviser for a Central pastor, and his church, during expected litigation over the religious leader’s defiance of state orders limiting public gatherings to control the spread of the novel coronavirus.

  Moore and the Rev. Tony Spell said Moore would represent Spell and the church, though it isn’t clear yet in what capacity. Moore is a licensed lawyer in Alabama but isn’t licensed to practice law in Louisiana.

• It’s confusing to me and hard to follow, but it seems that if a coronavirus vaccine is developed it will actually be used to let Satan know who is willing to accept the Mark of the Beast.

  Right-wing pastor Curt Landry posted a video on YouTube on Tuesday in which he told viewers never to accept any vaccine that is created to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus because the vaccine will be a precursor to the biblical Mark of the Beast.

  “Do not pray, do not hope, do not think, ‘Oh, praise God they are going to have a vaccine,’” Landry said. “That vaccine is from the pit of Hell. Do not pray for those vaccines, and do not take the vaccine. These vaccines are going to be coming, they are not going to be good. They’re not good for you physically, and spiritually, they’re a set-up for what shall come later.”

  My own inclination is to avoid respiratory failure now and take my chances with the Beast later, but maybe I’d feel differently about that if I weren’t so wicked.

• Apparently, Godly pastors in Europe are idiots, just like here, and raking in the bucks while simultaneously endangering their congregations.

  A pastor whose church service has been blamed for sparking a huge wave of Covid-19 infections in France apologised today as countries across Europe continued to struggle to slow the rising death toll from the disease.

  Thiebault Geyer said he wanted to say “sorry to God for my selfishness” after officials confirmed that around 2,500 of his parishioners have contracted coronavirus.

  At least 17 of those have died after a mass outbreak of the virus among the thousands who attended a week-long gathering at the pastor’s Christian Open Door church in the eastern city of Mulhouse in February.

  I admit that stories like this puzzle me. Wouldn’t you think that Our Invisible Friend would throw a sort of protective blanket over church gatherings, exploiting the opportunity to demonstrate to skeptics that He looks after the faithful?

  But … nope. He lets ’em get mowed down, with the result that coronavirus’ lethality is experienced by proportionally more of the Pious than the wicked. Truly, His Ways are Mysterious.

  Amen.

So: Dawn and I consolidated a prescription pickup and grocery pickup into a single trip out this evening, with both delivered to our car by store employees. It was the first time out of the house for either of us in several days, and neither of us got out of the car after we left the garage.

We’re good, conscientious citizens, right?

Sure … but so what? We watched people stream in and out the store’s front doors almost like any regular evening. You sure wouldn’t watch the front door and ask yourself, Where’d everybody go? Has something happened? Quick! Turn on the news!

This pandemic is going to be with us for a long time, because an awful lot of us aren’t going to take this seriously till the Grim Reaper is standing at the front door.

While Mrs. Reagan darted angry looks about the hall (displeased at the press?), the star of Death Valley Days was staring intently at the speaker on the platform. Thus an actor rpepares, I thought, and I suspected even then that Reagan would some day find himself up there on the platform: as the age of television progresses, the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception.

Gore Vidal
New York Review of Books; September 12, 1968

That was 52-years ago, and Vidal certainly got it right. After all, America is today governed by a reality-television star — meaning, wholly divorced from reality — and his weaselly, ass-kissing sycophants.

But notice this: In the judgment that the Reagans were political forerunners, there is a dark implicit judgment — that Americans were growing decadent, trivial-minded, empty-headed, that cheap theater would overtake competence. Right again.