I have heard it said that Covid was God’s gift to the Left.  Even so, the Lord helps those that help themselves.  If the goal is to control the population by spreading panic and fear, a good marketing plan is essential, and product names and labels are integral to a good marketing plan.

We were almost out of the woods on the mask-wearing front, but the guiding lights at the CDC decided they weren’t quite done with us.  From a marketing standpoint, I think they did well to focus on the now dominant “Delta Variant”.  After Delta, the pickings among the letters of the Greek alphabet are thin.

Few Greek letters have the same punch, the same power to persuade through fear, as Delta.  Think of “Delta Force”.  Something to be reckoned with.  Chi Force?  The Epsilon Factor?  Not likely to create the desired reaction.

I heard a Lambda Variation mentioned a couple of weeks ago.  It was making the rounds in Brazil.  But Lambda is not a scary letter.

So it is with many other Greek letters.  Pi?  The puns write (or is it right?) themselves.  Rho?  Reminds me of Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary Tyler Moore’s spinoff wacky next-door neighbor.  (Younger readers may want to google both references.  Well worth the time and effort.)

I grant you that Omicron and Omega could be pressed into service in a pinch and Sigma might be worth a limited run, but after we get through The Delta Variant, the ability to scare the public through the use of Greek letters is going to be touch-and-go.

The solution offered by the CDC to this new variant is to recommend – or is it mandate? – mask wearing.  This is like using a chain-link fence to keep mosquitos out of your yard.  The virus travels on packets that are smaller than the mask’s mesh.  Masks are not an effective way to block objects measuring a few ten-thousandths of a millimeter.

So why require masks?  Consider this excerpt from the psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (who writes under the pen-name Theodore Dalrymple):

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

A face covered by a mask is the overt display of inner compliance.  A population that will put up with an order from its government to take a meaningless action against this disease is a population that can be controlled and manipulated for other purposes.

A few months ago, Anthony Fauci said that Americans, despite their traditions of individual liberty, have to “do what they’re told”.  By him.  I have never heard a government official make such a statement (putting aside police or fire officials responding to an emergency).  There was a time when a comment like that from a government official would have caused an uproar.  Dr. Fauci would have been out of a job within weeks.  His next appearance would have been on an infomercial hawking pain medication.  Yet he remains in power, a medical adviser to the President.  He has proclaimed that he is Science incarnate.  The Scientific Word has become flesh.

The answer to the Delta Variant is the same policy that the country should have adopted once it became clear in the Spring of 2020 that the “curve” had been “flattened” – that we were not facing the end of civilized life as we knew it.  The smart policy would have been to ask those most at risk – the old, the ill, those with co-morbidities, and those with compromised immune systems – to self-quarantine and to let the rest of the population get on with their lives without shutting down, and  without requiring masks or social distancing.

Inevitably, there would have been some young, healthy people who contracted the disease.  A small percentage would have had symptoms requiring medical treatment, a smaller number would have been hospitalized, and a tiny number would have died from their infection.  That is true of any disease, including influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, strep throat. In the face of risks from those conditions, government does not shut down the economy, deprive workers of their livelihood, or attempt to control personal medical decisions.

It appeared initially that Covid-19 was different.  That’s why everyone cooperated with emergency measures to flatten the curve.  When it turned out after a few weeks that Covid-19 was not Godzilla, emergency measures should have been replaced with a reasonable, measured, and tailored approach that took into account the low level of mortality from this disease for the vast majority of the population.  Instead, those hungry for power seized it.  The Delta Variant gives them an opportunity to keep the string going.

Ronald Reagan said, “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”  It is one of life’s ironies that this noble idea is being put to the test by an unelected fellow in a white lab coat and a mask.

— Gerry Bresslour

Have you ever watched “Iron Chef America”?  In each episode, a top chef is selected to compete against an “Iron Chef”, a culinary master who is drawn from the show’s stable of regulars.  The two chefs, ferrous and non, are given a secret ingredient – the last episode I saw featured seaweed – and one hour to prepare a set of dishes based on the theme ingredient.  A panel of judges tastes all the dishes and then evaluates the chefs on the taste, originality, and presentation of their products.

The winner is usually the Iron Chef of the day, but not always.  Whichever chef loses a particular contest, the result must be bitter.  The loser is among the premier masters of his or her craft, someone whose cuisine is revered by thousands.  Yet on this occasion, the master fell short.

It’s the same for anyone gifted in a particular field.  The 100^th best golfer in the world – whoever that is – was the best golfer in their town, their county, maybe their state.  Yet that 100^th best golfer is probably never going to win the Masters or the US Open.  He or she is going to fall short when it comes to the biggest stage.

Many fine musicians don’t get recording contracts.  Brilliant writers can’t get published.  Superb athletes at every level find that they fall short of what it takes to move to the next level.

The higher one’s goals, the greater the chance for failure. Those who strive for excellence and perfection must accept that disappointment is the most likely outcome.

That brings me to the ruckus over the US athlete who turned her back on the American flag as she stood on the medal stand at the US Olympic trials.  The athlete (I didn’t retain her name, sorry) had placed third in the hammer throw.

She does not consider the United States worthy of her respect and turned her back to underscore her contempt.  The United States wants to be, tries to be, the best country in the world and to be thought of that way.  On this occasion, like the challenger to an Iron Chef, we came up short.

Despite the back-turning, there is a decent case to be made that the U.S is worthy of the respect of its citizens, even those who believe the country has let them down.

This was the first nation to be founded on the idea of human equality, that each person is the equal of every other person in their natural rights, the rights that are discoverable by unassisted reason, and that do not derive from the accidents of history or birth.  At its founding, the nation gave to all of humanity the free gift of the finest statement ever penned in support of that proposition.

But there was a flaw present at the moment when the document declaring those principles was published on July 4, 1776.  The gentleman who penned those words did not live up to the principles he announced.  It is a violation of natural law to govern another person without that person’s consent.  Yet, Mr. Jefferson and many of the signers of the Declaration took advantage of the provisions of enacted law to contravene natural law.

That posture was an unacceptable compromise with principle.  But surely a valid principle remains valid despite the inconsistencies and compromises of the person who frames it.  The country was founded on the enduring and unalterable truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights, among which, as Lincoln said, is the right to eat with one’s own hands the bread that those hands have earned.  Would it be unreasonable to give the country credit for declaring the principle, even though it did not live up to it?  After all, in 1776, no one else had ever declared equality as a political principle and no one else was even trying to.

Surely the country gets some small credit for taking the action in 1807 to banish the slave trade.  The only other country to do so was Great Britain, more or less simultaneously with the American action.

In 1820, the nation’s legislators, knowing that slavery was wrong but without a clear means to abolish it, reached a compromise to keep slavery out of the Louisiana Territory north of 36º30’ (apart from the newly admitted State of Missouri).  Perhaps that is worth some credit.

Still not good enough, I suppose.  Later, after taking territory in the southwest from Mexico, the country generated a new political party aimed at preventing the spread of slavery into any new areas.  In 1860, it elected a president determined to limit an institution that he described unequivocally as wrong.

On January 1, 1863 that president issued a proclamation ending slavery in areas then in rebellion against the United States.  Does the country get credit for that?

Still not good enough.  By December 1865, after a war that cost more American lives than any other in its history, the nation amended its constitution to abolish the institution of slavery forever.  We weren’t the first nation to do that, true, but it does demonstrate devotion to those basic principles of equality on which the country was founded.

After the Civil War, the nation further amended its constitution to ensure that formerly enslaved people would be citizens of the United States and that all persons subject to the jurisdiction of the nation would have rights of due process and equal protection of the laws.

That athletic back turned to the flag tells me that this was not good enough, either.

Now, it has to be admitted that after the passage of the post-Civil War Amendments in the late 1860s, the nation endured a long period of backsliding in the effort to actualize its mission statement of securing the equal natural rights of its citizens.  Thirty years after the abolition of slavery, the old South and a number of its neighbors adopted a system of state-imposed racial segregation, blessed by seven of the eight US Supreme Court justices who ruled on its constitutionality, that endured into the 1960s.

Might that athletic back be tempted to turn part way back toward the flag by the progress that the country made in the 1950s and 1960s, when a series of Supreme Court decisions combined with federal legislation securing civil rights and voting rights put the nation on the road back toward achieving the mission of equality?

As a young person when the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act became law, I was thrilled to witness the nation taking powerful and unmistakable steps to restore its promise and to live up to Mr. Jefferson’s words better than he did.  It was only a few years later than I was disappointed when the sterling principle of equality was replaced by racial and ethnic preferences.  And it was not only the federal government that abandoned individual equality in favor of group preferences.  State and local governments followed, as did private and public colleges and universities, and private employers.  Over the course of decades, I have been appalled to witness a system of  preferences evolve into one that overtly acknowledges the goal of distributing spoils on the basis of race.  The advocates of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are not subtle on this point (or on anything else) and have the benefit of considerable cultural, political, and institutional tailwinds.

In contrast, what appalls me should have thrilled the woman with the hammer.  I think we should get credit for devotion to the principle of equal natural rights, but we can’t get as much as a wink of approval for it from her.  If, as appears to me, the country’s elites have abandoned the belief in equal natural rights in favor of group rights and a racial spoils system, shouldn’t that get at least one thumb up from Ms. Hammer?

Neither is good enough.  Like the 100^th best golfer or a chef who comes in second on Iron Chef America, this may be a case where we have to accept that we have come up short, even though we have done about as well as we could be expected to do.

I doubt that I will watch much, if any, of this year’s Olympic Games.  The fake internationalist idealism in service to greed and corruption is irritating.  The saccharine personal profiles that dominate the TV coverage have little appeal.  However, if I learn that the back-turning hammer-throwing celebrity athlete makes it to the podium, I will be happy for her, although I accept that the sentiment will not be reciprocated.

What I would like to know is, if the United States isn’t good enough, if a person thinks that its flag is worthy of a gesture of contempt, who is the Iron Chef?  Which is the nation on whose flag Ms. Hammer would not turn her back, and for whose support she would feel gratitude, were she a citizen of that country?