More Social Distancing, Please

Defying all the skeptics who thought Joe Biden had actually forgotten to choose a running mate, he has brilliantly chosen the woman who stood on a primary debate stage and implied he was a racist old white man who tried to protect segregation. No surprise there, of course. Biden had to choose a black woman, because those are the rules today; and every black Democrat has to say that an old white man is a segregationist, because those are also the rules today.

What I find interesting, however, is that if you saunter on over to kamalaharris.com, which is now in fact a link to joebiden.com, you will see a wonderful series of video images pitching the new Biden-Harris presidential ticket. You know, that kind of campaign video in which ordinary people of all ages, races, and genders smile happily in slow motion while being filmed from knee-level, so we can look right up all their noses, interspersed with slow-motion video of the two stars themselves, laughing excitedly at each other like two idiots, performing various ethnically appropriate handshakes with people of all ages, races, and genders, and talking with alternating sobriety and joviality with ordinary folks from all walks of life. 

In itself, of course, there is nothing interesting about such a video. But what is interesting is that I did not see a single mask, elbow bump, or attempt at social distancing throughout the entire monotonous montage. It’s as if lockdown fever and asymptomatic panic do not apply at all to happy and forward-looking Democrats. What a throwback video that was! Remember those halcyon, pre-Fauci days when humans were not all living in mortal fear of one another? 

Then I remembered that all these unmasked, cheerful, ordinary people were smiling in support of global communism, the death of free speech, the obliteration of private property, and the division of all mankind into rival collectives based on age, race, and gender. And then I remembered, further, that these smiling jackasses for progressive totalitarianism were running against Donald J. Trump, during whose first term pretty much everything that could possibly go wrong with America and the world did go wrong, much of it due to Trump’s own ignorance, sociopathy, unprincipled vanity, and hero-worshipping of tyrants. 

Then I began to have second thoughts — as, admittedly, I do roughly thrice a week these days — about this whole social distancing thing. I mean if we really wanted to do this right, and prevent all possible infection of one another — including the infection of bad political philosophy, the infection of school-induced ignorance, the infection of personal vulgarity, the infection of crowds, the infection of stupid conversation, the infection of paternalism, and the infection of modernity — would we not do well to consider a far more radical form of social distancing than the paltry little mass unemployment and tyrannical isolationism that we are all being herded into today?

In my humble opinion, as long as government can still reach us, we are not nearly distanced enough. As long as we still feel surrounded and suffocated by the intrusive ignorance and gruff disrespect of others, we are in dangerous proximity. As long as we are forced to engage in any human contact that is not entirely voluntary, entirely within our command as to time, substance, and context, and entirely free of responsibilities and obligations we did not and would not assume by choice, then we can hardly claim to be practicing social distancing in the full and proper sense, it seems to me. 

It is time, I believe, to get serious about eradicating the pandemic of mindless materialism we call enlightenment today, the contagion of right-thinking moralism that is in truth the elimination of all genuine thought and morality, and the insidious ravages of our incurable politics of tribal nihilism or nihilistic tribalism.

It is time for all of us — all thirty of us — who believe in freedom as anything more than a rhetorical mask of tyranny, in knowledge as anything more than a cudgel of sophistries with which to beat our neighbors into submission, and in education as anything more than a means of subduing our inferiors before they start asking questions we cannot answer, to stand up and demand our rightful share of social distance. Every man his own island fortress, I say, with moats full of crocodiles, and retractable bridges with breakaway planks for imposters who dare to sneak onto our bridges without written permission — or for anyone who dares to do so as a representative of any government or political faction.

There is my campaign speech. Yes, I know, I lose. That does not worry me. I am not running to win. I am running to remind myself I am not dead, which is to say that I am not a party to this moment.