More Jot Notes from Deep Underground
Let us begin the day (well, my day anyway) with a quick survey of two absurdities from the surface, courtesy of Tommy Tuberville and Tom Hanks.
Apropos of my remarks about “loser” Jeff Sessions being defeated in the Alabama Republican run-off, a friend from that state, a retired Air Force officer, e-mailed about his voting decision:
For me the answer was simple: Back in early March I heard an interview with Tommy [Tuberville]. Referencing the ‘pandemic’ he said, “It may be nothing, but we have to do something.” Some consider that leadership. I consider it revolting. In the military we call that, Fire, Ready, Aim.
In Trump World, they call it, “What will get the best ratings for this time slot?” As I replied to my correspondent, “Fire, Ready, Aim” is exactly the mental mechanism of progressivism. The intellectual leaders of the movement know exactly what they are doing, but they count on the mindset of “do something” from unprincipled middle management to take care of the day to day “progress.”
Donald Trump, and apparently his anti-Sessions pet Tuberville, are classic progressive middle management. They do not know, but they insist on doing.
Speaking of Tommys who occupy middling positions but pretend to be leaders, America’s favorite Hollywood mediocrity, Tom Hanks, one of the most famous over-60 people to get a little sick from COVID-19 and then recover just fine, continues his self-aggrandizement tour as the world’s celebrity expert on this disease and what must be done about it.
The latest is the now-fully-worked-out version of his harrowing tale of feeling crummy, as delivered to Stephen Colbert:
“I said, ‘You know I’m feeling a little punky,'” Hanks told Colbert. “Rita had a headache, she was feeling bad. We were tested… and by the next morning, we were surrounded by people in PPE and we were in a hospital.”
The two had “very different” symptoms from each other, Hanks said, explaining Wilson “had horrible nausea,” a high-grade fever and had lost her sense of taste and smell, while he did not.
“I had bones that felt like they were made of soda crackers,” Hanks revealed. “Every time I moved I felt like something was cracking inside.”
The star told Colbert it took him and his wife about eight to nine days to heal from COVID-19.
He and his 63-year-old wife contracted a flu-like virus they had never had before. Being a little older, but in generally healthy condition, the couple got sick with flu-like symptoms for a few days, felt a bit weak for a few more days after that, and then, in barely over one week, they felt normal again — pardon me, they had “healed from COVID-19.”
I cannot even imagine the suffering they must have gone through. Obviously, I have never experienced anything like that, and neither have you — unless of course you are one of the infinite number of people who have “almost died” of this dread disease, the likes of which the world has never seen (not including every other year in recorded history).
Luckily, Hanks, a survivor, is here to hand down a warning from Mount Olympus, specifically a warning on how to be a compliant little servant if you don’t want to be subjected to moral condemnation:
“There’s really only three things we can do in order to get to tomorrow: Wear a mask, social distance, wash our hands,” Hanks said during a press conference [aka promotional gig] for Greyhound. “Those things are so simple, so easy, if anybody cannot find it in themselves to practice those three very basic things – I just think shame on you,” he added.
To “get to tomorrow,” you see, you must do these things that Hanks and his wife obviously were not doing before they contracted this virus, although they seem to have gotten to tomorrow just fine without doing them.
But I am most fond of his admonition to the little people about how these three things are “so simple, so easy” — especially if you are a gazillionaire who lives in his own private village with its own lake, restaurant, café, and spa, and who never has to work another day in his life in order to pay the bills.
And speaking from his seventh dining room, America’s beloved Everyman concludes by spitting on those who do have priorities other than making the world safe for Tom Hanks’ movie career: “if anyone cannot find it in themselves to practice those three very basic things — I just think shame on you.”
Shame on you for needing to go to work. Shame on you for being skeptical of the absolute certainty of the importance of wearing a mask, and the assurance that if everyone wore a mask, this coronavirus outbreak would be completely ended in three months, coming from the same experts who told you a month ago not to put much faith in masks. Shame on you for not consigning yourself and your friends and relatives to a year or more of social isolation, loneliness, and the lack of the normal, everyday human contact that allows millions of emotionally vulnerable people to feel alive, stable, and tangibly connected to their communities.
No. Shame on Tom Hanks and the rest of the insignificant privileged elite who dare to preach to the people who made them rich about how those people ought to live their lives. Shame on today’s knee-jerk shame merchants, bullying their neighbors with Maoist-style warnings to do the right thing or be outed. Shame on this virtual stoning culture the Marxist-progressive left has created. And shame on all of us who fall into their shameless totalitarian moral traps, even for one second.
