This week, instead of one, longer story, I’ll begin with two shorter ones.
Some parents feel they’ve failed their children if they don’t take them to Disneyworld. But the Magic Kingdom doesn’t always yield bliss. It’s hot and the lines are long. Sometimes the costumed characters are too much in kids’ faces. Plus, children load up on sugary snacks and beverages and crash emotionally after consuming these. And the rides at local or regional amusement parks are much better.
A couple I know brought their five-year-old son, an only child, there. Things didn’t go well. Late in the afternoon, the boy had a breakdown. As they reached the exit, he howled, through tears, “Don’t ever take me here again!”
When my wife, Ellen, and I heard this story, we laughed because this kid was kind of temperamental and though we hadn’t been to Disney, we suspected it was overrated. Many get swept up in the hype about “the magic.” The contrast between the idyllic Disney ads and the visual/audio image of this kid’s real-world meltdown struck us as funny.
Regardless, when Ellen and I go somewhere that disappoints us—as after a downright painful couples $20 “Accupressure” massage in a cramped upstairs “studio” in New York City’s Chinatown or a bad restaurant meal or day trip—one or the other of us will say, kiddingly but seriously, “Don’t ever take me here again!”
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Over the years, we’ve all had embittering experiences, and known others who have. We’ve known and been crime victims, been cheated in commercial dealings, had hearts broken in relationships, etc. Typically, there’s no way to fix what happened. The criminals aren’t caught. The scammers worth suing. And it turns out that “let’s just be friends” is just something people say to soften the blow of a breakup. As Taylor Swift sang, “We are never, ever, ever getting back together.”
Lacking a way to change the past, humans console themselves by saying that the bad experience taught them about life or about themselves. They assert, “We’ll know better next time.”
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Similarly, to make themselves feel better about the Scamdemic, many now say, “We know better now” and/or “Never again!”
Last week, I mentioned a 2021 book about the Vietnam War. That book’s author, a War veteran named Jeff Danziger, praises another author, Neil Sheehan, for writing a “majestic” book, A Bright and Shining Lie (1988), about that war, upon which Sheehan reported for years from Indochina.
I read Sheehan’s book when it was published. It deserved such praise. Those who say that “Covid’s over” and that therefore, people like me should stop mentioning it, deserve to be reminded that Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book was released thirteen years after that War ended.
Danziger writes that A Bright and Shining Lie “told in hellish detail of endless American waste and failure. It told of intelligence ignored and wisdom cast aside.”
Sounds like Coronamania.
Danziger summarizes his in-person 1988 book tour interview of Sheehan. He describes Sheehan as courteous but dour and drained, both physically and emotionally, from the many years spent witnessing and thinking about that War. Danziger says he ended the interview by asking Sheehan what the War had meant.
Looking at the floor, Sheehan wearily replied, “They’ll never be able to do that again.”
Danziger says that he respectfully disagreed with Sheehan at that time. Then, in 2021, having seen the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Danziger writes that “whoever he (Sheehan) meant by ‘they’ could certainly do it again. And again. They learned that failure could be ignored.”
Danziger says that American history between 1975-2021 had shown that “we seem doomed to a Vietnam-like quagmire every few decades.”
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While it’s hard to envision it now, and I hope we’re not doomed to witness a repeat of the “Pandemic response,” I wouldn’t rule it out. Many Americans naively, even enthusiastically, supported “two weeks to stop the spread.” Others said that it took them “only” a month to detect the Scam.
This realization came too late. By then, the Covid crazy train had left the station. Funded by trillions of federal government subsidies, Coronamania had already gained unstoppable momentum. With such backing, states and cities closed public places, including schools, and kept them closed. Thereafter, “Public Health” entities, “Pandemic Mitigation” industries, Pharma, teachers and PPP recipients collectively dipped their buckets into the deep river of printed CARES Act dollars. With that much money in reach, there was no going back.
Despite the endless fearmongering and “expert” worship, there was no need for onerous, costly interventions to manage this “Pandemic,” nor any other imagined crises, such as those suspiciously predicted months or years in advance by the biosecurity goons or the vaxx-manic WHO and the creepy Gates, Gottlieb, Hotez and Bourla. They had a solution in search of a problem. No modern era respiratory disease outbreak has widely killed healthy people. Nonetheless, a false Covid narrative will be used to justify hundreds of billions of public misspending on “Pandemic Preparedness” to prevent “The Next Big One.”
Those Americans who see the past five years as a Scam will reject attempts at Viral Mania 2.0.
But just as the US became entangled in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars despite Sheehan’s “never again” Vietnam takeaway lesson, a Scamdemic sequel still seems possible. The Biosecurity/Pharmaceutical Complex is the contemporary counterpart of the Military/Industrial Complex that drove post-Vietnam military misadventures. It seeks and creates opportunities to intervene in order to derive profits from and control easily manipulated Americans. As during post-Vietnam military interventions, the Biosecurity/Pharmaceutical Complex can buy off government officials and the media and can repackage the Covid narrative to make some other microbe sound sufficiently “novel” to build enough fear and close things down. Naive, fearful individuals with short memories will panic and comply.
Most Americans still falsely insist that lockdowns, masks, tests and shots worked. Their egos prevent them from admitting to others and to themselves that they were conned. Others liked being able to hide from others, skipping their commutes and getting free money. Others readily forget the past. Added together, these groups constitute a coalition majority that would submit to a future, “curve flattening” round of closures, restrictions and new shots. If the Scamdemic camel gets its nose under the tent again, extended authoritarianism will again ensue.
While I’d bet against this scenario, I don’t always predict well. I opposed the lockdowns from the jump. But I thought that most people would get bored and resentful and reject these within a month. My anti-NPI rooting interest caused me to project upon others my low fear of viruses and my desire for human interaction and to predict too optimistically. I succumbed to wishful thinking in order to stave off despair.
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