Rod Dreher's Blog, page 155

Pandemic Diaries 23

I’m at odds and ends, like most everybody else. Tonight I asked Matt if he wanted to split a Birra Nursia with me tonight. He said yes. And that was the second highlight of my day. The first highlight was doing a Skype conference with some fun Catholics in Zagreb, along with the great Marco Sermarini. I hope I was sane. This mono is making me so foggy-headed in spells. I’m really fed up with this thing we’re having to live through. We did evening prayer tonight with our priest, and some of our fellow parishioners, over Zoom. I was grateful for it, and I’m trying hard to stay grateful. Our priest said over Zoom that we will do Palm Sunday prayers (though we can’t do the liturgy) over Zoom, and that it will be “a Palm Sunday like we’ve never had, and hopefully we won’t have again.” Indeed.

Birra Nursia is such a gift at the end of a hard day. You can have it yourself, my fellow Americans, if you order from the monks’ online store in California. I wish I could explain why it’s so comforting. The beer itself is delicious, but that’s not the main thing, its deliciousness. It’s a feeling of connection with those good monks living on the side of a mountain, staying faithful.

Over to you, people.

From Fairfax, Virginia:

Things seem pretty quiet here in Fairfax, Va., a solid blue suburb of DC.  We took to the warnings fairly quickly, and folks are very accommodating and amiable, and respectful of everybody’s distance and personal space.   What were once busy thoroughfares are pretty empty.  The weather’s been beautiful, so some people are out for strolls or walking their dogs.  As for driving, it’s mostly just folks making the occasional trip to the grocery store.  Here’s a pic of a line waiting to get into Trader Joe’s (where they only allow 20-25 shoppers in at one time, they disinfect the shopping cart you want right in front of you, and provide gloves for you).  As you can see, folks are six feet apart in line, with TJ employees helping to enforce it.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/SNfVvo3X227GEeuZ6

I’m immuno-compromised myself, so I’ve been pretty darn careful.  I had to make a trip to a different grocery store, and I noticed that they made all the aisles “one way”, with 6 foot marker tapes:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/jSuDyNbDgqLoHdPM8

So, in Fairfax it’s as if the war is hundreds of miles away, and we’re just waiting for the front to move closer.  I’m only aware of one person in our neighborhood who caught the virus: luckily, as he had come back from school, his parents insisted on quarantining him in the house for 14 days.  Good thing, too — as the teenager never showed any symptoms at all, and yet tested positive.

In my broader circle, however, things aren’t great.  I know a number of folks in NYC who caught it, but, as they were all in their 20’s, came out OK.  On the other hand, however, we heard some awful news.  My daughter (who went to college in Manhattan) lived in a girls dorm that was actually an apartment building, and there was a couple in their 50’s who were sort of the RA’s.  They were affectionately called the “Dorm Parents”.  They were never blessed with children, and so they referred to the college students as their kids.

Yesterday, my daughter’s “dorm dad” passed away after struggling with the virus.  Oh, his poor widow!  As I write this, my daughter is attending the funeral, via Zoom.  Afterwards the widow will go back to her apartment — and mourn alone.  And “celebrate” Passover tonight.  Alone.

Tonight begins our celebration of Pesach / Passover.  As for me and my family, it means “unplugging” for three full days (the first two days of Pesach, and then our Sabbath).  I, frankly, welcome the respite from all the terrible news going on around us.  Obviously, our seder tonight will be different from all others (“why is this seder different from all other seders?”).  For starters, I’m in my 60’s and it will be the smallest seder I’ve attended in my life.  But on a spiritual level, it will resonate like never before.  During the seder, we read the words, originally in the Talmud, that it is incumbent upon us to consider it as if we, personally, left Egypt.  (In Hebrew, Egypt is “Mitzrayim”, which also means “constricting places” — the idea is to leave our “constricting place”, whether that be slaves to peer pressure, to societal pressure, and so forth).  While in prior years this involved a stretch of the imagination, not so this year.  We are quarantined in our houses, just like the Children of Israel was on the night before our Exodus.  We’ll be thinking of, among other things, the doctors, nurses, and other medical providers who risked their lives to save others, just as the midwives did when saving Jewish babies.  And, most importantly, tonight we will be look the Angel of Death in the eye and tell him to get lost, to “pass over” our houses, because we choose life over death, hope over despair, and faith over fear.  May we be redeemed, speedily and in our days.

From Maryland:

I am a relatively new reader, but have been enjoying reading the your pandemic diaries series very much. Thank you for sharing them and for taking time to wade through them all.

I’ve been trying to finish my entry for 3 weeks, but circumstances keep changing and my focus keeps shifting.

I am wife of 4 years to one of the vulnerable, my husband having had a nasty run-in with a respiratory virus when he was only 39. I have been reading that some men don’t seem to have good biological defenses against viruses generally and I would hazard a guess he’s one.  Husband underwent open-heart surgery and was left, we found out a couple years later, with scarring in his heart, either from the surgery or from the infection, not sure which.

Since it appears that the m.o. of this new coronavirus is to work its way from the respiratory tract to the cardio-pulmonary system, we don’t think he’d come out of an encounter with it well, or at all.  In addition, we live in close contact with my husband’s elderly parents who might not fare well either. (My own family is on the West Coast.)

The past 6 weeks, have been a slow torture of decisions.

End of Feb/beginning of March: Would my husband agree to let me do all the shopping/out in public trips? He balked; it seemed like overreacting. When there are cases in the adjacent county?, I asked. Yes, that would be ok.

Mid-March: Do we take our planned long weekend trip for our anniversary? Can I safely do my apocalypse shopping in the next town over?

Late March: Should I cancel upcoming doctors’ appointments?  What about his cousin’s wedding in May? My sister’s planned visit in April? What about the dog’s rabies vaccine?

Etc, etc, until we arrived at the point where we are now, in which we are not going out in public, although my husband’s very small business was deemed “essential,” and we are trying to figure out when to close/if there’s any safe way to stay open.

We’re both Catholic from birth, trying to be devout. There’s been a growing outcry from some friends and acquaintances in my social media that Masses shouldn’t be suspended/this pandemic is not as dangerous as the experts would have us believe.

It’s distressing and I need to start looking away, as engagement with that kind of thinking involves making protests along the lines that I do love Jesus and the Church and the sacraments, but this is a serious situation that is actually dangerous to my husband and many others, whose physical lives are worth something.

In actual fact, I don’t love Jesus enough, sinner that I am.  I can’t stop my husband from catching the virus and I don’t actually know what would happen if he did. I don’t want to be watching Masses from my living room. I can’t believe that this is Holy Week with no public liturgies.  There aren’t words for what Easter Sunday will be like. I wish the situation were different, but the local bishop’s decision came as a mercy to me – one awful difficult decision taken off my plate. I am scandalized at the apparent callousness of prolife Catholics, even though I suppose they don’t see the gravity of the situation and their motivations are good.

I have appreciated your inclusion of positives in your own writing and the diaries you share, so I should also say that so far our area seems to be coping and we ourselves are very fortunate. We live in a semi-rural part of MD close to where the Potomac River empties into the Chesapeake Bay. It is an exceptionally beautiful place to be quarantined. We got high-speed internet a couple years ago by mistake (!) – the company was supposed to be laying cable for someone else and didn’t realize until it was in the ground- so we can keep in touch with friends and family easily. We have one hospital in our county whose population has grown tremendously over recent years, but so far our case count seems to be low and the hospital stable. My husband opines that people are out more than they ought to be, but I have noticed less traffic on our road anyway. Maryland seems to be at a tipping point, and I hope we can avoid the fate of poor New York City.

Thank you again for your writing. For me it is a necessary alternative (antidote?) to news or social media.

From Evansville, Indiana:

We had our first COVID-19 death in Vanderburgh County yesterday.  They published his name, the names of his family and who was infected.  I was very surprised.

For the most part people seem to be abiding by the self-isolation rules, but I haven’t ventured out to the grocery store since last week so I don’t know.

Fun fact, Evansville had the honor of being the fattest city in the country a couple of years ago.  You wouldn’t know it now with so many people out and about walking their dogs and taking a stroll.  I don’t recognize most of them walking around in our neighborhood.

My husband works in a psychiatric hospital so he is still marching into work.  I’m telling myself that he has antibodies against it because when we returned from Italy late fall he developed a mysterious cough and fever, which he has never had in our 24 years together.  I worry most for our respective mothers, one in the suburbs of Chicago and the other outside of Boston.  We moved to this area that none of our city friends had ever heard of precisely for reasons like this.  We didn’t want to be in a big city when the you-know-what hit the fan.  But alas our mothers wouldn’t hear of following us.  It’s like ground hog day speaking with my mother in the nursing home: “Mom, the whole world is on lock-down, no one can visit you.” She laughs thinking I’m exaggerating.  “No seriously Mom, the whole world is on lock-down!”.  Same conversation, every day.  My niece who works in another nursing home outside of Boston got sent home with a fever.  In order to return to work she had to be tested in one of those drive-through’s.  She said it hurt very much.  Thankfully her results came back negative in three days.  But now one of her residents is positive, so what will this mean for her?  What will it mean if one of our mothers gets sick?  Why don’t they allow at least one family member to be suited-up like the nurses and be with their loved ones so they don’t have to die alone?

But I’m thankful though for all that we have.  I don’t even want to think of the day we don’t have electricity or running water or no food on the shelves because the supply chain has been disrupted.  Pascha will be very strange indeed.  Will my husband be one of the “lucky five” to be able to participate in the Paschal service or will the directive change before then?  Oh, and then we had an F-2 tornado rip through a neighborhood two miles away a week and a half ago!  Lots of damage, but no injuries. What is God telling us?  I’m trying to pray more and control my passions, like trying not to despair.   A local plastics company laid off 600 people and a major car manufacturer temporarily shut down production.  There will be so many people who won’t know where their next meal is coming from and I pray that this will end soon.  But what will the fallout be?  Will it be business as usual or will the world as we know it be changed forever?  I suppose these are the questions on everyone’s minds.

Thank you all for your missives. Please keep sending them — I’m at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. As ever, don’t forget to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and say where you’re from. I’m especially interested to hear how you are faring as Easter arrives, and, for Jewish readers, through Passover. We Orthodox Christians are a week behind Western Christians this year, on Easter. Next week will be our Holy Week.

 

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Fanatical Pastor Doesn’t Care If Flock Dies

I have beyond had it with the Rev. Tony Spell, the showboating Pentecostal pastor in Baton Rouge, who is making a name for himself by defying the governor’s order for large groups not to meet. Before I tell you what he’s done now, let me point out something I didn’t know, but which will be meaningful to theologically engaged Christians among this blog’s readers: the guy and his congregation are straight-up heretics. They deny the doctrine of the Trinity. From the church’s website:

 

Well. Tony Spell gave an interview to TMZ. Watch this 2:30 clip:

In it, Spell says that if people die by coming to services at his church, that’s fine. For truly religious people, he says,”Death looks to them like a welcome friend.”

Spell goes on:

“True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear, cowardice of their convictions. … People that can prefer disgrace to danger are headed for a master and deserve one. People that prefer tyranny over freedom do not deserve freedom.”

Said people have been locked in their homes for 23 days now, like prisoners. “the only vent they have to their emotion is coming to the house of God and worshiping, like free people.”

Why can’t they do it on Zoom? asks the interviewer. If God is everywhere, doesn’t that work?

“It does not work,” says Spell. “If it worked, then why did America spend billions and billions of dollars on churches.”

If one of his parishioners dies of coronavirus, asks the interviewer, what would the Rev. Spell have to say to the surviving family members?

“I have to say they died like free people, fighting for their convictions,” says Spell, who goes on to say that people in his church die from all kinds of things.

But this is preventable, objects the interviewer.

Spell: “Who knows what is preventable?”

Interviewer: “Scientists do.”

Spell: “And scientists need to know that God gave us a strong immune system, and the only way we’re gonna destroy this virus is for — they say everybody’s gonna get it, well if everybody’s gonna get it, then let’s get on with life.”

Look, I am sure the sheriff and the governor don’t want to make a martyr of this nut by arresting him and shutting down his church — he’s boasting that he’s planning to have Easter services — but I wish they would. He’s taunting people who don’t go to church in this pandemic, calling them servile cowards. He is willing to lead his congregation to dying a horrible death, like fools — and not fools for Christ.

I want you to understand exactly what he is doing here. This church has a “bus ministry” in which they bus in needy children for the Sunday service. From the website:

An average of almost 700 children every week! From this photo from the church’s website, these kids are almost all black children:

Perhaps you have heard that black Americans have disproportionately high deaths from this disease. Imagine how quickly the disease would pass through those kids. Imagine those kids taking the disease back to their homes, especially to the older people in their homes. This Pentecostal Pied Piper is potentially making those children vectors of infection. And for what? What is he trying to prove?

This is cult leader behavior.

Today the CDC highlighted a paper showing that 16 coronavirus cases, including three deaths, are linked to two Chicago family gatherings. Tony Spell told TMZ that death would be a “welcome friend” to the faithful, and that risking death by a viral plague by coming to church is what “free people” do. Do you see why I say he doesn’t care if his flock dies? Obviously I don’t think Spell wants people to die, but I do think he’s really excited about all the attention he’s getting.

As a Christian, I hope the sheriff will arrest this man and padlock his church for the duration of the pandemic. He does not have the moral right to do this to the rest of this community. Today was the biggest day of deaths here in Louisiana, but the number of covid hospitalizations is down, which indicates that the lockdown and social distancing are working. We need them to be effective, so we can get past this danger and get back to work, and to church.

But don’t ever forget what these selfish Pentecostals did during the crisis: risked the lives of others in their community and mocked Christians who stayed home in obedience to the legitimate order of the magistrate, to crush a deadly pandemic.

You non-Christians who read, please know: what Spell and his flock are doing is not true Christianity in a theological sense, or any other sense. Being willing to give your life for Christ, or to lay down your life for another person, is a holy deed. Being willing to make others die — including possibly little children, who have no choice about whether or not to be in that church — so you can live out your religious convictions is wicked.

UPDATE: I should point out that I call this guy a “Pentecostal,” because that is his worship tradition (speaking in tongues, baptism of the Holy Spirit, etc.), but let me caution readers not to think that all Pentecostals are like this man and his congregation. I looked on the church’s website to see which larger Pentecostal denomination with which they are affiliated, and couldn’t find one. If I’m missing something, please, one of you let me know. It seems like this is a total freelance family business. Spell’s grandfather started the church, handed it down to his father, and now the grandson is the pastor.

UPDATE.2: Dr. William Tighe, the church historian, writes to say that Spell is a “Oneness Pentecostal. More:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneness_Pentecostalism

You can easily find lots more (although most mostly polemical) by googling up “oneness Pentecostalism.”

The fact is, anti-Trinitarian Pentecostalism goes right back to the beginnings of Pentecostalism ca.1906, although — since I would say that most of the early Pentecostalist preachers and revivalists were enthusiasts ignorant of Biblical languages and ignorant of all Church History — it wasn’t until about 1912 or 13 that some of them began to attack Trinitarianism as “unScriptural” and as a “corruption of Biblical Christianity,” and, almost simultaneously, to reject baptism “in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” in favor of “in the Name of Jesus,” and (most of them) to rebaptize those who had been “wrongly” baptized.

Thanks, Dr. Tighe. I’m learning something here.

UPDATE.3: A reader writes to say that Pastor Spell’s denomination is United Pentecostal. The reader is a member of the denomination, but asks me to summarize his letter, not to quote him directly. This is important.

The reader says that the United Pentecostal Church is not hierarchical. There is an enormous amount of autonomy in the local congregation. The reader says that a strong majority of Louisiana’s UPC pastors are opposed to what Pastor Spell is doing, but won’t say anything because they don’t want to have a denominational fight in the media, and they feel that Spell is going to do whatever he wants to do, no matter what they say. There are no good options, as they see it, other than to pray that Spell comes to his senses.

I appreciate the background, especially because I don’t know that world at all. It helps me understand how non-Catholics must have seen the Catholic sex abuse scandal from the outside, wondering why priests didn’t speak out about the situation, criticizing other priests. From inside the Catholic Church (as I was for the first four years of the scandal), it frustrated me, but I understood why priests stayed quiet, even if they hated what was happening. But I’m sure that to people outside, it looked like pure cowardice, or something like it. It’s interesting now to hear a UPC layman explain how and why other pastors in the denomination are keeping silent. I’m not saying that it’s right, mind you, but it’s interesting to hear from the inside why things are happening like they are.

Those pastors should know, though, that their silence means that outsiders will think that they agree with Pastor Spell. It might not be as bad as I think. I didn’t know that Spell was part of the United Pentecostal Church until this reader wrote to explain this. But my guess is that outsiders might make unwarranted negative assumptions about all Pentecostals, or even all Christians, based on the behavior of this out-of-control Baton Rouge pastor. It’s not fair, but it’s likely to happen.

UPDATE.4: To respond to a couple of readers’ comments, I agree that I probably shouldn’t have brought up the anti-Trinitarian heresy of this pastor and congregation. What they’re doing with the coronavirus has nothing to do with their views on the Trinity. It would be no better if they were completely orthodox on Trinitarian theology.

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A Wise Ruling In Texas Abortion Case

A three-judge panel of the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld yesterday the Texas ban on elective abortions during the coronavirus state of emergency. Here’s a link to the text of the decision, which was written by Justice Kyle Duncan. I encourage you to read it. It’s carefully reasoned.

The argument goes like this. The State of Texas banned all non-elective medical procedures (that is, non-necessary) for the duration of this emergency, to free up medical personnel and material to care for COVID patients. Texas says that order entails elective abortions, meaning that non-elective abortions — abortion procedures not necessary to save the life of the mother — are banned temporarily, until the emergency passes. The plaintiffs suing Texas claimed that this is an infringement on the constitutional right to an abortion.

A 2-1 majority on the panel disagreed. It said that under the 1905 Jacobson decision, which had to do with smallpox vaccination, the Supreme Court ruled that the state has the power to override, under certain conditions, an individual’s rights to do with his body what he wants to do. That is, if the community’s right to protect itself in an extraordinary situation. Judge Duncan, writing for the majority, notes that in important abortion rights rulings — Roe, Casey, and Carhart — SCOTUS has cited Jacobson to point out that abortion rights are not absolute, and that the state can, under extreme circumstances, suspend certain liberties. From this week’s ruling:

“[U]nder the pressure of great dangers,” constitutional rights may be reasonably restricted “as the safety of the general public may demand.” Jacobson. That settled rule allows the state to restrict, for example, one’s right to peaceably assemble, to publicly worship, to travel, and even to leave one’s home. The right to abortion is no exception. See Roe v. Wade (1973) (citing Jacobson); Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) (same); Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) (same). {Jacobson governs a state’s emergency restriction of any individual right, not only the right to abortion. The same analysis would apply, for example, to an emergency restriction on gathering in large groups for public worship during an epidemic. See Prince v. Massachusetts (1944) (“The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community … to communicable disease.”).} … [And] “[i]t is no part of the function of a court” to decide which measures are “likely to be the most effective for the protection of the public against disease.” Jacobson, 197 U.S. at 30….

To be sure, individual rights secured by the Constitution do not disappear during a public health crisis, but the Court plainly stated that rights could be reasonably restricted during those times. Importantly, the Court narrowly described the scope of judicial authority to review rights-claims under these circumstances: review is “only” available

“if a statute purporting to have been enacted to protect the public health, the public morals, or the public safety, has no real or substantial relation to those objects, or is, beyond all question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights secured by the fundamental law.”

Elsewhere, the Court similarly described this review as asking whether power had been exercised in an “arbitrary, unreasonable manner,” or through “arbitrary and oppressive” regulations.

Jacobson did emphasize, however, that even an emergency mandate must include a medical exception for “[e]xtreme cases.” Thus, the vaccination mandate could not have applied to an adult where vaccination would exacerbate a “particular condition of his health or body.” In such a case, the judiciary would be “competent to interfere and protect the health and life of the individual concerned.” At the same time, Jacobson disclaimed any judicial power to second-guess the state’s policy choices in crafting emergency public health measures: “Smallpox being prevalent and increasing at Cambridge, the court would usurp the functions of another branch of government if it adjudged, as matter of law, that the mode adopted under the sanction of the state, to protect the people at large was arbitrary, and not justified by the necessities of the case.” … “It is no part of the function of a court or a jury to determine which one of two modes was likely to be the most effective for the protection of the public against disease. That was for the legislative department to determine in the light of all the information it had or could obtain.” ….

Jacobson remains good law. See, e.g., Kansas v. Hendricks (1997) (recognizing Fourteenth Amendment liberties may be restrained even in civil contexts, relying on Jacobson); Hickox v. Christie (D.N.J. 2016) (rejecting, based on Jacobson, a § 1983 lawsuit concerning 80-hour quarantine of nurse returning from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone). And, most importantly for the present case, nothing in the Supreme Court’s abortion cases suggests that abortion rights are somehow exempt from the Jacobson framework. Quite the contrary, the Court has consistently cited Jacobson in its abortion decisions….

The ruling goes on to say that the temporary abortion ban is reasonable. Not that it is the correct policy choice, but that it is a reasonable one for the state to make under these circumstances. To be clear: the court is saying, implicitly, that the state may have erred here, but if so, its error is within the proper bounds of the state government to make. To be wrong is not the same thing as to be irrational. As Justice Antonin Scalia said in his 2003 Lawrence dissent, on sodomy laws, he does not believe the Supreme Court has the right to forbid states to abolish sodomy laws, or to compel states to abolish them. That is a power reserved to the states (said Scalia). Similarly, if I’m reading this decision correctly, the three-judge panel said that the plaintiffs asking them to overturn the Texas order did not demonstrate that the harm from the order would be great enough to overcome the Jacobson test. It is not the court’s responsibility to second-guess the state’s call in response to this emergency.

This seems to me like the wisest outcome. I say that not because I’m pro-life (though I am), but because it makes sense. Elective abortion is a medical procedure, neither a life-saving operation nor a sacrament. I do want to point out, though, that under the Jacobson ruling, Christians who claim to possess an absolute First Amendment right to gather for worship during this pandemic, in violation of a state order, would almost certainly lose if taken to court. This also seems reasonable to me.

Interestingly, the two judges who votes in the majority are Republican appointees (Trump’s, in the case of Duncan, and G.W. Bush’s, in the case of Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod); the dissenting judge is a Clinton appointee. Elections matter.

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Class, Race, Coronavirus, And Cuisine

As someone who listens to a fair amount of NPR in the car, I can tell you that if there’s a race, sex, gender, or immigration angle to any story, NPR is going to find it and run with it. I haven’t been listening to any NPR since the lockdown began, because with nowhere to go, I’m never in my car. I wasn’t surprised, though, when a reader sent me a link to the interview NPR’s David Greene did with Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican, on the subject of why a wildly disproportionate number of black Louisianans dead of Covid-19. Blacks make up 32 percent of the state’s population, but a whopping 70 percent of coronavirus deaths. Why?

Sen. Cassidy, who is a physician with extensive experience working in the state’s public hospital system, tried to explain to Greene. Excerpt:

GREENE: Can you tell me what is being done to help the black community in your state right now, which, you know, it clearly is being disproportionately hit by this disease?

CASSIDY: Well, I think it’s, first – clearly, there’s been a surge of ventilators, of medical equipment to all folks, particularly in southeast Louisiana because that’s where we had the peak first. I worked in the Charity Hospital system for 25 years as a physician, and 80% of my patients were African American. That was just the demographic makeup. And so some things in your report, I’m not quite sure people of whatever race are less likely – at least of African American race are less likely to go to the hospital. Again, that was my practice, and I did not see that.

But if you’re going to look at the fundamental reason, African Americans are 60% more likely to have diabetes. The virus likes to hit what is called an ACE receptor. Now, if you have diabetes, obesity, hypertension, then African Americans are going to have more of those receptors inherent in their having the diabetes, the hypertension, the obesity.

So there’s a physiologic reason which is explaining this. Now, as a physician, I would say we need to address the obesity epidemic, which disproportionately affects African Americans. That would lower the prevalence of diabetes, of hypertension. And that’s what would bring benefit.

GREENE: Well, I mean, as we heard in that report, I mean, some underlying health conditions and disparities are part of the issue here. But I mean, we heard Congressman Cedric Richmond say, as well, that this is rooted in years of systemic racism. Aren’t there other forces at work here?

CASSIDY: Well, you know, that’s rhetoric, and it may be. But as a physician, I’m looking at science. And the science…

GREENE: You’re saying that’s just rhetoric? I mean, there are more uninsured African Americans compared to other populations in your state. Doesn’t that play a role in people…

CASSIDY: You know, they said minorities. African – we’ve done the Medicaid expansion. Now, intuitively, it might be. But again – I don’t want to seem insensitive at all. Again, I’m a physician. This was my practice. But as a physician, I approach it more – OK, what is the physiology? And the physiology is that if you have an ACE inhibitor – excuse me, an ACE receptor, that’s where the virus hits.

Read or listen to the whole thing. Cassidy tries to tell him the scientific reasons why this is happening, but Greene keeps trying to pin it on racism. It’s infuriating. This is exactly the kind of interview or segment that would make me turn off the radio, or listen to a podcast.

Let’s do a deeper dive on these numbers. From the New Orleans Advocate:

Of the coronavirus deaths recorded in Louisiana thus far, more than half have occurred in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, both of which have large African-American populations: New Orleans is 59% black; Jefferson, 23%. Other parishes that have been early hotbeds of COVID-19 are heavily African-American, including St. John the Baptist Parish, which has the highest per-capita death rate of any U.S. county and is 58% black.

We now know that coronavirus was circulating among the big crowds at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, on February 25. Those three parishes where the worst of the virus deaths have been — Orleans, Jefferson and St. John the Baptist — are all Greater New Orleans. If you live in one of those parishes, you are more likely to have been exposed first, before anybody was social-distancing, and more likely to have died. Those parishes are all majority black. Furthermore, Louisiana’s three largest cities — New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport — are all majority black cities. It stands to reason that coronavirus spread would have moved first, and fastest, in the cities, which are more densely packed.

Second, look at this graphic from the Advocate about Louisiana’s comorbidity factors with coronavirus:

Hypertension is high blood pressure. According to the statistics, Louisianans are more likely to be subject to high blood pressure than other Americans, and black Louisianans slightly more likely to have it than whites. But the hypertension stats in the Bayou State are massive for people who have less than a high school education — that is, the poor. Over half the adults in Louisiana without a high school degree suffer from hypertension.

Let’s look at obesity in Louisiana. Here are the stats. My state is a fat state. Among whites here, 33 percent of adults are obese (I think I would be counted in that number, alas). But 46.2 percent of black adults are obese — a big difference.

How about diabetes? Black adults in the Bayou State have about 50 percent higher rates of diabetes than do whites.

So, why are blacks dying in disproportionate numbers from COVID in Louisiana? The virus hits hard people who have diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Hypertension levels between blacks and whites are about the same, but blacks have far more obesity and diabetes than whites. That’s a big reason.

The other big reason is that because of Mardi Gras, the virus took hold first in New Orleans, and spread quickly in the crowds. Two of the three parishes that make up Greater New Orleans are majority black, including Orleans Parish, the heart of the city. Mardi Gras was February 25. The state closed all public schools on March 16. On March 22, Gov. Edwards sent down his Stay At Home order, which closed non-essential businesses. So people who had caught the virus at Mardi Gras had a month to pass it around before serious social distancing started.

I haven’t seen any reporting on whether social distancing practices have been more followed among whites than blacks, and if that might account for the disparity.

The point is, if you want to make this a story about racism, you really have to go out of your way. But trust NPR to find the progressive talking point on just about any story.

Now, having said that, it is the case that all over America, not just in Louisiana, black folks are more likely to die of Covid than whites. 

Why? The linked story (from the Washington Post) makes the familiar point that black Americans have greater comorbidities:

Elected officials and public-health experts have pointed to generations of discrimination and distrust between black communities and the health-care system. African Americans are also more likely to be uninsured and live in communities with inadequate health-care facilities.

As a result, African Americans have historically been disproportionately diagnosed with chronic diseases such as asthma, hypertension and diabetes — underlying conditions that experts say make covid-19 more lethal.

Critics of the public-health response have cited confusing messaging about how the virus is transmitted, such as an early emphasis on overseas travel, and have noted that some public officials were slow to issue stay-at-home directives to encourage social distancing.

Even then, some activists argued, black people might have been more exposed because many held low-wage or essential jobs, such as food service, public transit and health care, that required them to continue to interact with the public.

I wonder to what extent social class and geography has to do with this. I grew up in the rural South, and let me tell you, the diet of country people — black and white — is not what you would call healthy. What people call “soul food” is delicious, but heavy on pork fat and salt. The thing is, in the South, country white people and country black people eat the same kind of food. I’ve told a story in this space before about reheating a mess of turnip greens in the kitchen at work in Dallas once, and having a co-worker — a black woman from Indiana — walk in with an astonished look on her face. She could smell the greens from her desk, and wondered who was cooking them. She told me flat-out that she had no idea white people ate greens. I told her this was normal for me, that I grew up in a greens-cornbread-and-pork-chops culture.

It was an interesting cross-cultural moment. My co-worker had been born and raised up north, but also raised on the food of her poor rural Southern ancestors who migrated. She assumed that she was eating “black” food — which, in her context, she was — but it was really rural Southern cuisine. Up North, where many Southern blacks migrated, they took that food culture, and it was perceived, and received, up there as “black.” I wonder to what extent the disproportionate deaths of black folks up North are related to the food they eat — and their ancestral roots in the rural South.

There’s a really funny book that came out in the 1980s — White Trash Cooking — that’s probably too un-PC to be published now. It’s the food of poor Southern white people, compiled by a man, the late Ernie Mickler, who was raised that way. It’s an amusing book, but Mickler writes not to make fun of his people from the outside, but to say, “This is how we are, ain’t it a hoot?” Somebody gave me a copy of the book when it came out, and I still have it. I was looking through it this morning, and all that food — man, if you want to create a people that’s more susceptible to diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, feed them that stuff.

Again, this is how generations of country white people grew up. If you look at the blurbs page, you’ll find comments like this:

“The is the most delicious cookbook I have encountered — and it seems my diet in childhood was all White Trash! So may beloved old recipes have turned up. Bless you!”

Know who said that? Helen Hayes, a native of Washington DC, which was in her childhood culturally a Southern town. Harper Lee raves about it as “a sociological document of such beauty.” There’s also a blurb from Sen. Fulbright of Arkansas, praising the cuisine. “White trash” is the joke, but the cooking is the peasant cuisine of Southern whites. In the introduction, Mickler writes:

But the first thing you’ve got to understand is that there’s white trash and there’s White Trash. Manners and pride separate the two. Common white trash has very little in the way of pride, and no manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anybody or anything. But where I come from in North Florida you never failed to say “yes ma’m” and “no sir,” never sat on a made-up bed (or put your ht on it), never opened someone else’s icebox, never left food on your plate, never left the table without permission, and never forgot to say “thank you” for the teeniest favor. That’s the way the ones before us were raised and that’s the way they raised us in the South.

The point is, Mickler appropriates the term “White Trash” the way gay people (and he was gay, by the way) would later appropriate the term “queer”: in a celebratory fashion that took the sting out of the insult. If you read the recipe book as a sociological document, as Harper Lee did, you will learn how country people of the American South traditionally ate.

For me, it’s fascinating, because it captures my own young culinary life as a transitional generation, as America grew richer and more cosmopolitan. My parents were born in 1934 (dad) and 1943 (mom), into rural Southern poverty. I was born in 1967, into the lower-middle class (Daddy was the first one in his family to go to college, which he did on the GI Bill). The kind of food in this cookbook was, I guess, about 60 percent of what we ate. Unlike my parents in their childhood, I had television, and like everybody else we knew, our family ate a lot of processed stuff sold on TV.

Now, if any of my beloved yuppie children saw that cookbook, they would feel like they were reading a cookbook from some foreign people. It wasn’t their mother’s cuisine — she grew up in the Dallas suburbs. The only one in our house who eats greens and fatback is … me. Philip and Barbara Bess once invited me to meet them for lunch at the Old Country Store in Lorman, Miss., where Arthur “Mr. D.” Davis serves soul food. It’s heaven on earth for such as me — it’s the traditional food of the Deep South. Here is Mr. D.:

If you want to get food like all the old people in the South ate, you almost always have to go to a restaurant where black people are in the kitchen. They are the main ones keeping the heritage going.

Why do I bring all this up? Because I am wondering to what extent black folks all over the country still eat the traditional soul food diet, with lots of grease, salt, pork, sugar, and carbs. It is delicious, but it is not healthy, and it would contribute to the comorbidities.

Maybe that’s beside the point, or at least not quite the point. Obesity is exploding, and it is concentrated among both low-income whites and blacks.  Obesity is tied to diabetes and hypertension. I don’t know that poor whites eat soul food anymore, but it is an established sociological fact that people on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale eat much less healthy food. You can say that it’s a matter of not being able to afford better, and you’d be right. But if you were honest, you’d have to recognize that people who have become accustomed to a diet high in fat, sugar, and simple carbs do not like healthier food. To them, it doesn’t taste good. A lot of these commentators assume that poor people eat bad diets only because they have no choice; they don’t give them agency, which is a mistake.

Here in Louisiana, you run into people all the time who are solidly middle class, or even upper middle class, who have the money to eat healthier, but who won’t do it because they were raised on high-fat, high-carb food, and that’s what tastes good to them. In the past, I’ve cooked for my folks vegetable dishes that would be considered delicious by people at my Dallas or Philadelphia dinner table, but which they thought were flavorless. This is not because they are bad people, but because to them, vegetables required more fat and salt to have an appropriate flavor. Unsurprisingly, in Louisiana, obesity is not as strictly confined to the lower income levels as it might be elsewhere in the country. You can’t blame poverty for non-poor people choosing to eat food that makes them unhealthy. I am a yuppie type who has a much healthier diet than many people, but if I have to choose between going to Sonic for a double cheeseburger, and going somewhere else for a salad, that sure enough requires an exercise of willpower. And if I’m forced to choose between a salad and pork chops, cornbread, and greens — forget about it, I’m going with the soul food. I have the money to eat as healthy as I like, but that’s just the way the cornbread crumbles. Guess who is about 40 pounds overweight? Me! I think I technically qualify as obese. If I get coronavirus, I will suffer more because I am overweight, and I am overweight because of my diet and my lack of physical activity. Society didn’t force me to be this way. I’m lazy, and I like to eat things that are not good for me. It happens.

What I want to know is this: do we have socioeconomic class data on Covid victims? 

I know the liberal media always and everywhere want to blame white supremacy for all the social ills that beset the African-American community, but there might be more to it in the case of Covid deaths. This could be a lot more tied into socioeconomic class than race. And we should factor in Maybe not, but shouldn’t journalists at least consider this before hopping on top of their hobbyhorses and galloping toward their preferred conclusions?

One last thing that these liberal journalists may not be considering. I have a kinsman who lives up in the country. He is obese and has a lot of health problems, including diabetes. He won’t stick to his prescribed diet. Despite him having a target on his back, he is not taking this Covid thing seriously. He thinks it’s all overblown. I love him, and am really, really worried about him, but he’s a grown man with a strong will, and he’s going to do whatever he wants to do. I hope and pray that the virus passes him by, but if he gets it, it will be because he has not done social distancing like he was supposed to, and if, God forbid, he dies, it will be because he has all the comorbidities.

He is a working-class white man, not poor. And he’s damn sure not stupid. What he is, is deeply set in his ways. He’s going to live the way he wants to live, and to hell with the rest of you. You can call that pride, or you can call it grit — he really doesn’t care. That’s the kind of stubbornness that is a virtue in some circumstances, a vice in others — but it is what it is. He has just as much agency in all this as his black working-class neighbors.

If my kinsman becomes a statistic, the fact that his behavior made him more susceptible to the virus, and his comorbidities made him more likely to die of it if he gets it, will be part of the story. Nobody on NPR is going to care, because he’s a white working-class man, and his death would not fit a simplistic liberal narrative. No NPR host is going to confront Sen. Bill Cassidy about what he isn’t doing to help working-class white people who are dying of Covid. Whatever one might say about class in this country, the fact is that my kinsman has chosen, for whatever reasons, not to change his diet to lose weight, to make his hypertension and diabetes less onerous. And for whatever reason or reasons, he is choosing not to observe strict social distancing. So I pray for him, and hope for the best, but if this virus takes him, it’s not going to be the fault of Bill Cassidy, or anybody else. And like I said, it’s not going to occur to the liberal media to blame Republican politicians, because my kinsman — a white, working-class, Southern male — doesn’t fit into a preferred victim demographic.

UPDATE: Reader Lee Podles, who lives in Baltimore:

Our well-thumbed White Trash Cooking I and II have provided occasional delights when my wife throws dietary caution to the winds and makes a batch of Russian Tea Cakes, which have nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with the South and its love of all things sweet. (These particular temptations seem to be a relative of Mexican Wedding Cookies.) Baltimore is not the deep South, but those cookies were a favorite of my childhood.

Blacks and poor whites (and some not so poor whites) preserve the eating habits of 19th century America, as documented in that necessary book, The Great Cornflake Crusade. Mr. Kellogg tried to cure America of its dyspepsia and obesity by his sanitoria and a cornflake diet. Some of us learned; but most didn’t, and America is fat.

I am especially amused by the implication that a racist conspiracy is keeping brussel sprouts and kale from black neighborhoods. If people wanted fresh vegetables and salads and tofu, stores would provide them; but it takes self-discipline to change eating habits, and blacks (and poor whites) are constantly told that nothing they do is Their Fault; it is Society’s fault, or Racism, or whatever. The poor are Victims; and they have no agency. They are acted upon, and do not act.

In Baltimore poor blacks are not practicing social distancing. Community leaders have tried to convince them, but the populace have decided that they are immune to coronavirus; it is a White Man’s disease. The open air drug markets of my acquaintance are still flourishing, although I notice some dealers are wearing masks and gloves as they peddle fentanyl-laced heroin. The Baltimore police are under a consent decree that they will not break up groups of black men who are not obviously breaking the law by shooting at each other (The police wisely turn a blind eye to the drug dealing; interrupting it may cause a riot.) As the governor’s order for social distancing may not have the force of law, all the police can do is pull up to the drug markets and broadcast a warning to keep 6 feet way and not form a group. The police are ignored, and drive away to find a church that has more than 10 people in attendance.

The population of Baltimore is falling; but the white and Asian population is increasing. Simple math leads to an interesting conclusion about the effects on the black population of generations of liberal Democratic governance of the city.

Reader Hannahbet:

I live in a minority-majority neighborhood. Everyone hosts parties in their front yards, and for some this happens every weekend. It’s something I usually love about where I live—because the high number of recent immigrants from Mexico means the intergenerational social fabric is on display all the time. But no one seems to be on lockdown here. Pickup basketball across the street hasn’t abated since the lockdown. I’ve been bracing for headlines that COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting minorities—knowing that racism is going to be the label the media gives it here locally, but also that my neighborhood hasn’t ever truly locked down.

I also received an e-mail from a white reader in Texas who talked about how none of his black friends are taking the crisis seriously, and none are changing their behavior to protect themselves.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

I grew up, as I’ve probably mentioned too many times, in rural Western Pennsylvania, not the home of Soul Food.  When I was first out of college in 1999 I was hired by Adelphia Cable to work in their call center, an awful job in many ways, wonderful in others.  I worked the 3 p.m. – 11 p.m. shift and most of my coworkers were black Americans from the little city of Blairsville, PA.  Some were from other communities that stretched toward Pittsburgh.

One day we were talking food, as I love to eat, and I brought in “side meat” and soon we were swapping recipes and food lore.  Most of them had grandparents or great-grandparents who were part of the Great Migrations north, others had been, like me long-term western Pennsylvanians, but the one thing we quickly discovered was a shared culture of eating.  The rural people of this country until at least my childhood preserved much of the cooking of the late 18th and early 19th century.  American working and lower middle class.  Tempered by local ingredients and tastes and immigrant groups.

The food of my ancestors was a mix of Palatinate German filtered through York and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania before it crossed the mountain, the food of London and Northern Ireland and the Native American dishes the first settlers adapted mixed together, and like you, my childhood eating was leavened with unhealthy doses of American Processed Boxed and Canned Garbage.

My wife and I still eat like farmers from 19th century Armstrong County, PA, even if we don’t work like they did, and we mix it up with modern cooking and her families mix of Slovak, Bohemian, and Lebanese dishes.

When we moved to Montana we decried the loss of liver pudding and scrapple, and behold, those Moravians and Germans and Scotch-Irish who came to North Carolina in the mid-18th century brought them with them and we enjoy them here.  Although Southerners ruin their sausage by adding the unnecessary hot pepper.

My wife posted a picture to face book a few nights ago of our supper cooking, lovely cakes of fried mush sizzling in butter, soon all our new Southern friends were discussing not having eaten them since their Grandmother passed in 1960 or 1980.  We make them the way my Pennsylvania Dutch and Irish grandmother did, and in my 20’s I discovered my Dad’s mother’s family tradition of eating a certain type of noodle on potatoes goes back to 18th Century Germany, and my Mother’s mothers potatoes were just Irish champ passed down from Ulster.  So it goes, and good on you for celebrating.  We will eat foodie and gourmet and international with the best of them, but I’ll never despise or turn my back on the peasant food of my ancestors.

Throughout my moves around American and traveling about working in pipe organ construction on thing I’ve found more constant than most others is the deep rural strain that binds much of the country together.   Many things we assume are unique to our region and our “people” are just part of the fussy, antsy, restless rural world of our covered wagon driving rural ancestors.  Many things turn out not to be a North Carolina thing or a Montana thing or a Pennsylvania thing but a rural American thing – and of course there are those things that are unique, but Russian Tea Cakes, ate’em by the ton as a kid, and they were a favorite of my Great-Grandfather, born 1870 died 1861 his family had been in our county since the 1780’s.

Food can bind us together in healthy and unhealthy ways.

Thanks for reminding us of the good that links us all, of all races, and regions, and at least in the past classes, and screw NPR’s wokeness.

The post Class, Race, Coronavirus, And Cuisine appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pandemic Diaries 22

Another day where nothing much happened. Slept till 11:30 am. Mono. What a drag. No further news to report. I’d rather hear from y’all.

From Michigan:

I live in W. Michigan – the other side of the mitten from Detroit. The hospitals here have largely refused to accept patients from the other side with the exception of Spectrum Health, our largest area medical system. While the DeVos family chairs the board of this hospital system, and I largely disagree with Betsy DeVos’ education philosophy, I will give full credit to Spectrum for doing the right thing. People are incensed online that they’re accepting transfer patients from the East side of the state, but it’s the right thing to do. We have cases here, but nothing like what has hit the SE side of Michigan. Spectrum has engineered emptying the Renucci House (for families of patients in hospital) into the local Ronald McDonald House so that hospice patients can be housed at Renucci and are able to have family with them in their final days/weeks. I am a Spectrum hospice volunteer, and I can tell you their hospice organization is amazing. And the fact that these non-Covid folks won’t have to die alone despite Covid19 is a real accomplishment IMO. We are unable to visit our hospice patients right now (which makes total sense) and the worst side of this IMO is having people dying alone. So whatever they can do to alleviate that situation gets my highest approval. The DeVos family takes a ton of heat in the press (and frankly, I’m no fan) but the hospital system here is top notch and they deserve credit for what they’ve done to create and maintain it.

From British Columbia:

Thank you so much for posting the wonderful and fascinating accounts of how people from all over are experiencing/enduring this misery. Both my husband and I read them with interest, some of them so sorrowful, all so human.

We live in British Columbia, and feel very blessed indeed to be in a small town which has yet to see a confirmed case. It’s been wonderful to see how responsible people are being, careful of one another’s well being and their own. Social distancing like champions. So far, so good. We pray a Rosary every night for this to end, for all those who have been afflicted, and especially for the safety of all the health care workers who continue to be so selfless. In this town, there are hearts in many windows and on lawns and doors, saying thank you to them all. Our son in Vancouver has said that every night at 7 pm, whole neighbourhoods turn out onto balconies to bang pots and pans in gratitude. A joyful cacophony.

I wanted to send you an article from the Times of Israel about violence towards health care workers who entered an Ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood to test for the virus, and call your attention to a comment mentioning “pikuach nefesh” – a new term to me, and one that I think could apply to those foolishly stubborn Christians who continue to insist on gathering in large groups to worship. According to Wikipedia, “Pikuach nefesh describes the principle in Jewish law that the preservation of human life overrides virtually any other religious rule. When the life of a specific person is in danger, almost any mitzvah lo ta’aseh of the Torah becomes inapplicable.”

From Toronto:

It looks like Toronto has escaped the disasters we see down in New York. Most people I know are patiently waiting at home, although I have heard of plenty of younger people gathering out at the parks. The mayor, John Tory, has cancelled all public events, including the Pride Parade, until July, meaning that our first day out en masse might be Canada Day. I’m sure we will celebrate, as much as is possible, given the lost months of employment. No summer festivals, no revenue for the tourism industry. Pride tends to be pretty noxious (check out the open drug use, nudity, anarchic politics) but it, and many other festivals, brought in millions. That’s gone this year. We’re all going to hurt. But more of us will be alive to help with the recovery than if we continued to crowd the subway.

Ontario’s premier and former alleged drug dealer Doug Ford (older brother of the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, he of the “I’ve got more than enough to eat at home” fame), has surprised almost everybody, including his closest supporters, by his handling of this pandemic. Unlike the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who likes to think of himself as polished and professional, Ford has been angry, scared, flustered—and totally authentic. He made public the province’s projections that warn us that upwards of 15,000 people could die over the next two years, assuming that we keep up social distancing. It’s shocking. A hard truth we needed to hear. Meanwhile, Trudeau used the crisis to try to give his minority government unfettered access to spending powers until the end of 2021. Parliament said no, thankfully. It goes to show what people want in a crisis: reality and honesty. A slob who reads badly off a teleprompter but shows genuine concern goes farther in a pandemic than a guy who probably formed a committee to decide whether a beard might help his brand.

Nothing happens much these days. Conversations with friends repeat themselves. When are your groceries arriving? What’re you making for dinner? Life in my little apartment is surprisingly sweet. Our baby demands all our time, but we love to give it to him. We cried watching the Queen’s message. We stay home to protect others, like our parents. It’s our civic duty, as the Queen reminded us. It’s boring and the financial effects hurt, but it’s not like we’re being bombed.

I watch the news more than ever. I am shocked at the appallingly poor quality of reporting I see across the spectrum. So partisan, so breathless, so hard to ignore.

I dream about the day when we can leave our house. I want to attend Easter celebrations. I fear losing the church. I worry about my country (and yours) and how we might become comfortable with suspension of rights. Yes, we need to accept short-term limitations to protect the vulnerable. But we should remain wary about how malign actors will use this mess to assert agendas. God knows they will–and are. Protecting ourselves will entail untangling the global supply chain from the most malign actor on the world stage right now (next to Daesh, of course).

If the pandemic strengthens home, then good will have come out of it.

From Salem, North Carolina:

This Easter, the sunrise service at Home Moravian church in Winston-Salem, NC will not be open to the public.  This year would have been the 248th year for the gathering of Christians across Winston-Salem and even other parts of NC.  Winston-Salem was home to RJ Reynolds Tobacco and the birthplace of two famous cigarette names:  Winston, and Salem.  But long before that Salem was the settlement of German-speaking Moravians.  Near the church is the community cemetery called God’s Acre, an old name for Christian cemeteries.  Salem was the southern headquarters for the Moravian church, the northern headquarters being Bethlehem, PA.  Down here Salem is called Easter Town due to sunrise service done in the Moravian fashion.  Usually there will be families who come to God’s Acre to clean headstones and put out fresh flowers.  It’s an inspiring visual to the hope we have in Christ.  Saturday night the brass bands will fan out across the town to play music to awaken others for the sunrise service.  But not this year.

Sunday would usually see several thousand (depending on weather) who would mass early in the morning at the doors of Home Moravian church.  But not this year.

This year due to the virus, the church will celebrate Easter without the public participating.  The service can draw thousands for the event.  It starts at the doors of the church with a loud proclamation of “The Lord is Risen!” followed by those attending responding “The Lord is Risen indeed!”  After the first section of the service, those attending then walk to the cemetery while the brass bands play traditional Moravian hymns.  The rest of the service is in God’s Acre where we would stand in rows between the headstones to await the sunrise.

I was introduced to this tradition back in the 80’s when I lived there.  Many Christians from different denominations would go to the sunrise service in “Old Salem” and then go to their own church for church again.  I am sure many people will also miss the best hot cross buns in the USA produced at Winkler’s bakery and still made by hand.  We will make our own at home, but they are not the same.

It is hard to believe that the pandemic has shut down this tradition, but it has not shut down the hope we have in the risen Lord.  We plan to watch via the church website and follow the liturgy, before watching our own church service.  What a world.

From Papua New Guinea:

I write from the ‘end of the world’, Papua New Guinea, to be exact.  With one imported case of COVID 2019 discovered in March, we have been on two-week national lockdown, which ends on Thursday. Given another case discovered yesterday, the Government’s earlier decision to extend an overall State of Emergency until June seems wise. At the University where I teach and live, we have been on enforced break, just staying at home (on campus) or individually working from the office. There is discussion of teaching online if we go back to classes on 27 April as presently planned, but that is still to be logistically worked out.

Ironically, it is a good time to be physically at the ‘end of the world’. Yet, I find myself thinking of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 movie, “On the Beach”, which posits a world after a nuclear war between the US and the USSR, with Australia [and New Zealand] temporarily spared from the atomic fallout (for six months).People know it (and their end) is coming, and react in varied fallen human ways. While I began the lockdown on campus in a reasonable mood, I find the passing days more difficult to bear, with only two friends coming to see me regularly (albeit briefly). I don’t feel free to attend the local Anglican Church due to lockdown, and I worry more and more about friends and colleagues in Europe (particularly in Italy and Romania) and my family at home in the USA (as the general situation seems to be worsening there with each passing day). While the emotional part of me would want to be with them, I intellectually realize I am better off here, with few cases of COVID (at present) – and a Government that takes it seriously even so – as well as a salaried job and house. But I feel adrift and stressed even so, only getting some joy by looking at Instragram pictures of Truman and Buddy Buttigieg being happy dogs in South Bend and playing too much retro-cocktail stereophonic music from a more idealistic era.

As I had mentioned before, I am an international academic who has built his post-1989 career on the post-Cold War ‘New World Order’, depending upon the networks and connecting infrastructures (cheap, reliable air transport) and (for me) reasonably open borders that allows me to have ongoing working relations in Europe and Papua New Guinea (in June, I normally would be attending conferences and PhD examinations in Europe and beyond, but that is not likely now). Nearing retirement, I had been expecting to build a sustainable bridge between these places and roles. All the current global uncertainty now causes me to wonder if it all will be (or not).

Thank you for the opportunity to share these thoughts. God Bless you and your family, and the Birra Nursias look fabulous!

Papua New Guinea! Boy oh boy, we have readers everywhere. Thanks to all who have written, and who continue to write. Keep ’em coming to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and don’t forget to say from where you write, and to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line.

By the way, a sad note to report. Back on March 26, in Pandemic Diaries 11, a reader from Oklahoma mentioned this in her diary:

My in-laws are old-time Pentecostals of the “claim the blood of Jesus and go about your business” tribe. They did so, in spite of our respectful then increasingly insistent warnings. Between bad theology and Fox News, both are now in the hospital.

The reader wrote this afternoon to say:

Just wanted to let you and readers know that, grief upon grief, both my in-laws have died — may Perpetual Light shine upon them. My MIL passed on March 27 and my father-in-law joined her in eternal rest this morning, April 7. We are undone, but we do not grieve as those who have no hope.

It takes my breath away that there are still people who do not believe this is real.

Lord, have mercy.

The post Pandemic Diaries 22 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Eschatology In The Pandemic

Hey readers, how about some good old-fashioned End Times speculation? A Catholic reader writes:

I am reading Benedict XVI’s second volume of Jesus of Nazareth during this Holy Week. This morning I read and was haunted by its second chapter which details Jesus’ eschatological discourse concerning the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world. I have put all the excerpts below that I think suggest the following points:

1. In my understanding, Jesus’ prophesy about the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem have a double meaning: they first pertain to events in the immediate future and, in an analogous way, to the events of the end of the world.

2. The emptying-out of the Temple seems to me to be an eerie, distant echo to the current emptying out of the churches due to the pandemic, especially if one considers the cause of the first emptying-out is the faithlessness of Israel. Has not your point since 2001/2002 – and then more and for different reasons over the years – been the apostasy of the Catholic Church, not to mention other Christian groups? To me, that the churches are empty for hygienic reasons is neither here nor there when considering its spiritual meaning.

3. Before the destruction of Jerusalem, Josephus mentions the fleeing of Christians from the city. You made this analogy in the epilogue of The Benedict Option with the Monks of Norcia explicitly, and, in fact, the whole of the Benedict Option is laden with this theme.

Make of it what you will, but here are the [Benedict XVI] passages that stuck out to me.

In Saint Matthew’s Gospel, after the “woes” with which Jesus denounced the scribes and Pharisees-that is to say, in the context of the discourses given after his entrance into Jerusalem-there is a mysterious saying of Jesus that Luke also quotes (albeit at an earlier point, during the journey toward the Holy City): “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate …. ” (Mt 23:37-38; Lk 13:34-35). This passage clearly reveals Jesus’ profound love for Jerusalem and his impassioned efforts to elicit from the Holy City a positive response to the message he must proclaim, the message with which he takes his place in the long line of God’s messengers from earlier salvation history.

…

The misfortune to which this refusal leads is described by Jesus mysteriously yet unmistakably in a saying couched in the language of ancient prophecy. Jeremiah records the words spoken by God concerning the abuses in the Temple: “I have forsaken my house; I have abandoned my heritage” (12:7). Jesus says exactly the same thing: “Your house is forsaken” (Mt 23:38). God is withdrawing. The Temple is no longer the place where he sets down his name. It will be left empty; henceforth it is merely “your house”.

There is a remarkable parallel to this saying of Jesus in the writings of Flavius Josephus, the historian of the Jewish War. Tacitus likewise took up the same idea in his own historical writing (cf. Hist. s, 13). Flavius Josephus reports strange happenings in the final years before the outbreak of the Jewish War, all of which, in different and unsettling ways, heralded the end of the Temple. The historian tells of seven such signs altogether. Here I shall limit my comments to the one that bears a strange resemblance to the somber words of Jesus quoted above.

The event took place at Pentecost [Shavuot] in A.O. 66 “At the Feast of Pentecost, when the priests had gone into the inner court of the Temple at night to perform the usual ceremonies, they declared that they were aware, first of a violent movement and a loud crash, then of a concerted cry: ‘Let us go hence'” (The Jewish War, p. 361). Whatever exactly may have happened, one thing is clear: in the final years before the dramatic events of the year 70, the Temple was enveloped in a mysterious premonition that its end was approaching. “Your house will be deserted.” Using the first person plural that is characteristic of divine utterances in the Bible (cf. Gen 1:26, for example), God himself is announcing (“Let us go hence!”) that he is to depart from the Temple, to leave it “empty”. A historic change of incalculable significance was in the air.

After this saying about the deserted house — which proph­esies, not yet directly the destruction of the Temple, but rather its inner demise, the loss of its meaning as a place of encounter between God and man — Matthew’s text con­tinues with Jesus’ great eschatological discourse, which takes as its central themes the destruction of the Temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, the Last Judgment, and the end of the world. This discourse, found in all three Syn­optic Gospels with certain variations, could perhaps be described as the most difficult text in the whole of the Gospels.

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Before returning to the words of Jesus, we must cast a glance at the historical events of the year 70. The Jewish War had begun in the year 66, with the expulsion of the procurator Gessius Florus and the successful resistance to the Roman counterattack. This was not merely a war of Jews against Romans: in broader terms, it was a civil war between rival Jewish factions and their ringleaders. This was what accounted for the full horror of the fight for Jerusalem.

Eusebius of Caesarea (d. ca. 339) and — from a different perspective — Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403) tell us that even before the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem, the Christians had fled to the city of Pella beyond the Jordan. According to Eusebius, they decided to flee after a com­mand to do so had been communicated to “those who were worthy” by a revelation (Hist. Eccl. 111/5). Epipha­nius, on the other hand, writes: “Christ had told them to abandon Jerusalem and go elsewhere, because it would be besieged” (Haer. 29, 8). In fact we find an instruction to flee in Jesus’ eschatological discourse: “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be …. then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains … ” (Mk 13: 14).

It cannot be determined which event or reality it was that the Christians identified as the sign of the “abomina­tion that makes desolate”, precipitating their departure, but there was no shortage of possible candidates-inci­dents in the course of the Jewish War that could be inter­preted as this sign foretold by Jesus. The expression itself is taken from the Book of Daniel (9:27, 11:31, 12:11), where it referred to the Hellenistic desecration of the Temple. This symbolic description, drawn from Israel’s history, is open to a variety of interpretations as a prophecy of things to come. So Eusebius’ text is thoroughly plausible, in the sense that certain highly regarded members of the early Christian community could have recognized in some particular event, “by a revelation”, the sign that had been foretold, and they could have interpreted it as an instruc­tion to begin their flight.

Thus ends the reader’s letter.

This talk about the “abomination of desolation” sends me back to this October 17, 2019, essay by the prominent Catholic theologian Douglas Farrow. He published it in First Things during the controversial Amazon Synod in Rome. In it, Farrow spoke of the Synod as a “sign of the times,” and:

The real problem here is not, as some suggest, the expensive German plumbers [that is, liberal German bishops] who, after all, are doing the flushing for free. The real problem is the Great Apostasy, now several centuries in the making, which has at last produced a global union of such plumbers—a union now so powerful that it can elect popes and conduct its dirty business in the name of the Church itself.

Hmm. When I saw the Pope bless the Pachamama idol in the Vatican gardens last fall, I was suspicious. When I saw the Catholics carrying it into St. Peter’s Basilica (see above image), held high in honor, my first thought was, “Abomination of desolation.” Before all of this, some prominent conservative Catholic leaders, like the Dutch cardinal Willem Eijk, were talking about the sense they had that the world could be entering into the prophesied Last Days — in Eijk’s particular case, because of the prophesied apostasy inside the Church, that would precede the End.

And now, most of the churches in the world, Catholic and otherwise, are presumably empty because of the coronavirus. As my Catholic correspondent said, from a symbolic point of view, it doesn’t really matter why they are empty. The fact is, they are empty, and many, perhaps even most, of the world’s Christians will experience their first Easter in history without gathering together for commemoration.

If that isn’t an apocalyptic sign, what is?

One has to be very careful. We know well that there have for at least a thousand years been apocalyptic sects who believed that the world was on the verge of the Last Days. However, from a Christian point of view, one of these days, such people will be right.

The entire world is affected by this virus, or soon will be. Economies are collapsing. It is wishful thinking to believe that we will be back to normal by this autumn. The global economy might bounce back somewhat, but until there is a vaccine for this virus, we are going to be caught in the jaws of an economic cataclysm. 

A professor friend at a large private university told me the other day that the administration there is terrified in thinking about all the students who will not be returning this fall, because they can’t afford it. The administration has instructed professors to plan for austerity. That conversation prompted me to think about what we face here in my small corner of the world. Louisiana State University is the state’s flagship. It is funded by a state government that faces the economic abyss. Louisiana has never been rich, but now, with the two biggest industries, tourism and oil, either dead (the former) or in deep trouble (the latter)? How can the state collect tax revenues when there is almost no commerce — and not because of economic policy, but because of nature?

A lot of students won’t return to LSU this fall, because they won’t be able to afford it. And for those who can return, what kind of school will they return to? Or maybe colleges and universities won’t be able to open this autumn, because the second wave of the virus will have hit?

Once you start pulling at those threads, a hell of a lot can unravel. It is all too easy to see how quickly this and every nation might welcome strongly authoritarian regimes just to manage social order and to keep people fed until the crisis is over, and we can start trying to rebuild out of the ruins of our economies.

One thing we will surely see in the near future: the universal monitoring of people via smartphones, chips, or other forms, as they do in China now. We are going to see this so if there is a future outbreak, the state can quickly identify who has the virus, and lock them down. I expect that the trauma from this outbreak, and the economic devastation it will have caused, will be so enormous that most people will welcome this monitoring. In China right now, the state, through advanced surveillance technology, can know when its people go to places they aren’t supposed to go — like to church. This is coming here, and most Americans will welcome it, because they will be too afraid to repeat what we are now living through, and its aftermath.

I could go on. The point I want to make is that I track what my Catholic correspondent is saying. We could be living through the birth pangs right now. I wrote The Benedict Option not for the Apocalypse, but for the current and coming time of great trial in the post-Christian world. I didn’t have front to mind an End-of-Days persecution.

As I wrote my forthcoming book, Live Not By Lies, I didn’t foresee an End-of-Days persecution either. Rather, I wrote it for a time when the grip of anti-Christian belief and prejudice slowly tightened — that is, when the world was like it is now, only moreso. Well, the pandemic apocalypse changes that. I still wouldn’t dare to say “we are in the End,” because history has made countless fools of people who claim that. But I do believe that we are entering a time that is at least analogous to the Russian Revolution, when all things were overturned, and anything could happen.

Only God knows when the End will arrive. But it doesn’t take a religious prophet to read the signs of the times around us right now, and to know that something terrible — the end of the world as we knew it — is at hand. Prepare, while there is time.

 

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Against Coronavirus Free Riders

Last night, my 16-year-old son went to shoot hoops in a neighborhood park, alone. He came back earlier than expected. Why? He said a group of kids — friends of his — came out en masse to horse around. We had told our son that if that happens, he is to come home, and not risk contact with others. So he did.

It’s really discouraging to me that some parents are letting their kids run around like it’s a normal summertime. A friend in Alabama told me the same thing is happening in his neighborhood: adults social-distancing, but allowing their kids to carry on like they’re just on vacation. The cognitive dissonance is jaw-dropping. When I tweeted about this last night, someone asked what the big deal was. I responded with something like, “Say one of the kids in the scrum is carrying the virus, but is asymptomatic and doesn’t know he’s got it. He passes it on to my son, who comes home and passes it to me. I’m immunocompromised, and am at real risk.” My interlocutor answered:

You see? Ben Esler is correct; this is basic civic responsibility. But these other two, they’re not going to let anybody tell them what to do, even though we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that is killing tens of thousands worldwide, and is destroying economies. Because their “rights.”

Do you think that there is going to be any serious resentment over all this? My late father and his uncle hated each other. It started back in the 1940s, when the US was at war. My dad was a boy. The man who became his uncle was a gentleman farmer — a city boy whose wealthy father bought a hobby farm for him out in the country, to help him avoid the draft. In those days, farmers were allowed to stay home to keep feeding the nation. The future uncle, who married my dad’s sister, was a pampered kid from uptown New Orleans — a fake farmer, in other words.

One afternoon, my father’s aunt brought her beau by to meet the family. Daddy ran to hide under the house, so he wouldn’t have to greet the man. My grandmother called out to him to come out and say hello to Auntie’s suitor.

“I ain’t doin’ it!” Daddy called out from his hiding place. “He’s a damn draft dodger!”

Auntie married that man. He and my father hated each other all their lives. It turned out over the course of their lives that my father’s youthful assessment of the man’s character was right on target.

I wonder if something like that is going to happen here, over social distancing. I know that I, personally, feel very hard towards those Pentecostals in Baton Rouge who are continuing to meet, in defiance of the governor’s order and public health advice. We have not been able to have church for a month or so now, which has been a painful sacrifice, but we’ve done it because we know that saving lives depends on making that sacrifice. And saving lives depends on that sacrifice being shared. It’s in the nature of this virus threat — not just shared sacrifice for the sake of social psychology, but more important, for reasons of epidemiology. The more people we have who refuse to obey the guidelines, the harder it is going to be to flatten the curve, and the longer the rest of us who are making the socially responsible sacrifices are going to have to do so.

These church people, the neighborhood folks,  and people like the Twitter commenters above, are all free riders on the rest of us doing the right thing. If any of them get sick, and if there happens to be hospital beds for them, it will be in part because so many of us did what we were supposed to do, and stayed healthy. I really am wrestling with anger at those others. I hate being cooped up in this house, but what choice is there? First of all, I don’t want to catch this virus and risk death. Second, I don’t want to spread this virus to my wife and children. Third, I want to be part of sacrificing my own personal desires for the greater good.

I live near to a fire station — close enough so that I can hear their sirens every time they go out on a call. Some of these calls are not fires, but medical calls. Those men have to put their own health, and the health of their family members, to whom they return after the shifts, on the line to protect and serve the rest of us. They don’t have a choice. The least we can do for servants like them is to stay at home to help keep the virus from spreading, and to make it more likely that if any of them fall ill and require hospitalization, that there will be beds for them.

Or think about the men and women who are staffing grocery stores and pharmacies. They are now starting to die of the virus. Because they go out there every day to keep the shelves stocked, people like us can keep our pantries and our medicine cabinets full. When they fall ill, will there be hospital beds for them? Or will spaces that they deserve be taken by people who got sick because they wouldn’t do even the minimal work of social distancing?

When I think about people who sit at home bitching about “my rights being trampled” because they can’t live exactly as they please right now, or who go to church because they’re “covered in Jesus’ blood,” which they figure gives them immunity, I think about those firefighters, the medical personnel, and the grocery and pharmacy workers. If the “muh rights” people, and the defiant church people, the Brooklyn hasidim, and others,  were only putting their own lives at risk, that would be unfortunate, but that would be their choice. But it’s not only about them!

I have friends who are jobless, friends whose businesses have gone under already. These are people who desperately need this disease to pass so they can get back to work. The longer we drag this out, the longer it is going to be before they can start to look for work, or rebuild their livelihoods. Is it too much to ask the rest of us to stay at home to do our part to help out the plight of the jobless?

If we were at war, and the government said that we had to live under blackout at night so that enemy bombers wouldn’t be able to find their targets, how would you feel about people who kept their lights on, because they weren’t going to let the government trample on their rights, or because they claim to be covered in the blood of Jesus, and therefore their lights won’t be visible to enemy pilots? That’s what we are dealing with here. Asian countries have had more success than we have in suppressing the infection curve because they are culturally more willing to make personal sacrifices for the collective good. But we Americans?

Here’s news from Idaho today:

Inside an old factory building north of Boise, a few dozen people gathered last week to hear from Ammon Bundy, the man who once led an armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife refuge.

The meeting, which appeared to violate orders by Gov. Brad Little of Idaho to avoid group gatherings, was an assertion of what Mr. Bundy said was a constitutional right to peacefully assemble. But Mr. Bundy said he also hoped to create a network of people ready to come to the aid of those facing closure of their businesses or other interference from the government as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

“If it gets bad enough, and our rights are infringed upon enough, we can physically stand in defense in whatever way we need to,” Mr. Bundy told the meeting. “But we hope we don’t have to get there.”

In a state with pockets of deep wariness about both big government and mainstream medicine, the sweeping restrictions aimed at containing the spread of the virus have run into outright rebellion in some parts of Idaho, which is facing its own worrying spike in coronavirus cases.

The opposition is coming not only from people like Mr. Bundy, whose armed takeover of the Oregon refuge with dozens of other men and women in 2016 led to a 41-day standoff, but also from some state lawmakers and a county sheriff who are calling the governor’s statewide stay-at-home order an infringement on individual liberties.

Health care providers and others have been horrified at the public calls to countermand social-distancing requirements, warning that failing to take firm measures could overwhelm Idaho’s small hospitals and put large numbers of people at risk of dying.

“There are a lot of people that listen to those voices around here,” said Dr. Hans Hurt, an emergency doctor at Bonner General Health, a medical center in the town of Sandpoint, 45 miles north of Coeur d’Alene. “Even if it’s just a small group that wants to exercise their right to assemble, it puts the community at large at such a high risk.”

Many of the latest claims about the Constitution have come from Idaho’s northern panhandle, where vaccination rates for other diseases have always been low and where wariness of government is high.

State Representative Heather Scott, a Republican from Blanchard, northwest of Coeur d’Alene, is encouraging her constituents to push back on the statewide stay-at-home order, saying people have “a God-given constitutionally protected right to peacefully assemble.”

Read it all. It’s amazing. These ideologues are going to ensure that the nation’s suffering is prolonged. The coronavirus doesn’t care about the US Constitution. You might as well threaten an approaching tsunami with violence if it rolls across your property line and trespasses. Go ahead, Don’t Tread On Me Man, shoot the tidal wave with your AK-47. That’ll save you.

The virus doesn’t care about religious claims. God certainly can miraculously protect whoever He chooses from infection — but do not put the Lord your God to the test! (Luke 4:12) That South Korean Christian church that was initially responsible for the virus spreading in that country — did the blood of Jesus not cover them too? How does one know? Christian faith is not the same thing as magical thinking.

Seems to me that this viral pandemic is putting the American way of life, and of approaching life, to the test, and is revealing the extent of our decadent individualism. This is not a conservative or liberal thing. It’s an American thing. We are dealing with a crisis that requires us all to pull together and sacrifice together, and we are failing. Not all of us are failing, but we are surely being failed by some of our fellow Americans. I don’t see a lot of difference between progressives who believe the entire world has to rearrange itself, and to deny basic scientific fact, to accommodate their individual desires (for example, transgender activists) and right-wingers (church people, muh-rights people, et alia) who insist on the same thing, for their own reasons.

Ideology kills. The weird thing is that I am not used to describing Pentecostal churchgoers and ordinary Republican subdivision dwellers as selfish individualists. But this pandemic has been a real apocalypse, in ways I didn’t expect.

UPDATE: In the 11th Pandemic Diaries entry, which appeared on March 26, a reader in Oklahoma wrote:

My in-laws are old-time Pentecostals of the “claim the blood of Jesus and go about your business” tribe. They did so, in spite of our respectful then increasingly insistent warnings. Between bad theology and Fox News, both are now in the hospital.

The reader wrote this afternoon to say:

Just wanted to let you and readers know that, grief upon grief, both my in-laws have died — may Perpetual Light shine upon them. My MIL passed on March 27 and my father-in-law joined her in eternal rest this morning, April 7. We are undone, but we do not grieve as those who have no hope.

It takes my breath away that there are still people who do not believe this is real.

UPDATE.2: Reader Thomas comments:

I work at/own an essential business. If you want your city to still have running water, you want electricity, you want farmers to have water, want sewage to work, and so on we have to be open. We stock the stuff the cities, plumbers, and electricians need and manufacturing centers need. We are like Lowes/Home Depot but for the professionals and we do allow the public to come in. The problem is that the public is coming in not for essential stuff but even for the most minor things like their sprinkler system needs a new rotor head. It is highly infuriating. There are not enough real masks for the medical people so you know we can’t get any. People are hoarding up on hand sanitize and Clorox wipes that it is hard for us to get any. We are getting by for now with them thanks in part to you sounding the alarm and me stocking up in February and some timely supplies coming in. People will not stay 6 feet away but want you to talk on their phone for them and get close to you. Some think it is a hoax. We have implemented a lot of things to limit people contact but people still just keep coming in so much so that we had a huge month last month and this month is shaping up to be same. It is about the only time I have been angry at people while making a good profit off them.

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Pandemic Diaries 21

Another day done. Here are my kids Nora and Matthew, out on the back patio with Roscoe, doing their Latin homework late this morning:

Around the same time, I received via delivery a case of Birra Nursia, the beer of the monks of Norcia, sent from their California importer. You, my fellow Americans, still have time to order some in time for Easter delivery. I cleaned the bottles with a sanitizing wipe:

Later, after I was reminded by a friend that in the Russian Orthodox tradition, beer in not forbidden in Lent, I greeted cocktail hour with two cold Birra Nursias — one blond, the other dark — which I enjoyed with Matt:

And Roscoe, who is a fat, lazy old dog, just like his master. Look at that belly! No kidding, we only give him a minimal amount of kibble daily, but he is so lazy that he remains a tub. I adore this velvet log:

What a world. The most exciting thing that happened all day is drinking Benedictine ale on the back patio and cradling a fat elderly mutt.

What happened with y’all? Let’s see.

From England:

I wanted to thank you for telling me to keep a diary. I’ve started doing it, when time allows, in the evening before bed. If anything, it helps to place a decisive end on days which are all blurring into one. But it’s also helpful for gathering my thoughts and reflecting on what God’s been saying and doing in the day.

I wanted to share as well that I’ve turned my reading of Augustine’s The City of God into a project, and I’m blogging my way through it here. My aim is to make it accessible to the low-church laypeople who I’ve grown up with and worship alongside, hopefully introducing them to the wisdom of the church’s old dead guys–it’s a wisdom we sorely need.

So much of what Augustine says is just leaping right off the page for our current crisis. I can’t remember if I read it on your blog or elsewhere, but I’m sure you’ve seen that Pornhub have been offering free premium access in various European lockdown countries–apparently as a “service”. It’s sickening stuff, and will surely hook waves of new people onto a destructive new habit (what a dark irony from this strange Lent!) John Gray, in a fantastic piece for the New Statesman last week, suggests this will be one of many reasons why the crisis is a turning point.

With that on my mind, I came to a section in Book I of City of God. Augustine is railing against gladiatorial games and how they corrupted the Roman moral character. He refers to a time when the Roman gods supposedly ordered games to be put on in their honour, to allay a serious plague. This gave the games a foothold in Roman life, and they began their corrupting influence on the great society. Augustine writes:

“the powers of evil foresaw, in their cleverness, that the plague would soon come to its natural end, and they craftily used this opportunity to bring upon you a far more serious pestilence, which gives them greater satisfaction. For this disease attacks not the body but the character” (Book I.32)

It’s the same powers of evil at work now. There’s already been tragic loss of life from COVID-19 and more to come. But it will run its natural course. People are optimistically speculating on the moral renewal this might bring about in some places–and I hope so too. But Augustine should show us that things may set in which lead to even greater corruption.

Thanks God Pascha is upon us.

From Las Vegas:

On Friday, I talked with a few acquaintances who are in complete fear.  Both are middle-aged men who have largely lost any faith in God that they had.  They are very worried about our local economy and that we will not recover and that the state, largely dependent on tourism dollars, may go bankrupt.  These are men, like me, who have had numerous setbacks from the various economic downturns, each of which has hit the Las Vegas area extremely hard.  They are sore afraid.

On the same morning, I was struck at how peaceful the world is.  Sin City is mostly sinless, these days.  The streets are empty and quiet.  People are friendly (but giving each other space).  More people seem to be spending good quality time with their families, taking walks.  Life is beautiful and amazing.

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and this last weekend was one of two general conferences for the year.   During these two weekends each year, we have 10 hours of sermons and music over two days, broadcast from Salt Lake City.  This year was a little different, as there was no crowd and recorded music and social distancing, but it was beautiful in any event.  It was full of wonderful messages and was spiritually uplifting.

I miss attending our weekly services and seeing my neighbors and friends.  Our prophet directed us to stop holding Sunday services a month ago.  However, we have been authorized to have communion at home.  In our church, all worthy men can hold the priesthood and officiate in the blessing and giving of the bread and water.  It has been a blessing to be able to it at home.  I have also been taking doing it for a elderly sister each week, and we try to allow everyone to receive communion.

I feel more peaceful myself than I have in years.  I have gone through plenty of trials and difficulties of extreme nature that I have yearned for peace.  With Covid-19, the world is at peace and I feel more at peace.

This is God’s world.  Perhaps the day rapidly approaches when he says the time has come for him to come again.  If so, we may look back at these days are wonderful times compared to what we will face before the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.  Perhaps these are the Seven Fat Years during which we need to fill our spiritual and physical granaries so that we survive the Seven Lean Years.  Perhaps the Hour is very nigh when we need our Lamps full prior to the arrival of the Bridegroom.

I will trust in the Lord either way.

From Washington DC, the reader sent in a blog post of his for inclusion here. It’s long, so I’m going to include this part:

As I sit by myself and look at all the funny memes and Tik-Tok videos of people at home, I think of the reactions of people who are forced to spend time with their family and never go out. There are legitimate needs out there, but there is also a great deal of iniquity.

We are impatient. We are restless. We do not want to rest. We do not want to sit with the Lord and contemplate what he has given us. We want to “get back to work.” We are restless, and our souls will remain restless until they find rest in God.

How does this apply to COVID19? Well, it must. Something this big happening all over the world cannot have happened without God’s divine influence. He does not ignore a sparrow that falls to the Earth. How could he ignore this? I’m quite sure that God has seen us all. He has seen what we have struggled with. He has seen our bickering, our exhaustion, and out bitterness. And our God who loves us – who let our bent-ness be our overseer for a small amount of time – has now said:

STOP. Lie down, and REST.

DO NOT SERVE OTHER “GODS” OR ANYTHING ELSE BUT ME. Do not serve all the things that you now see cannot save you. Look at all your plans just weeks before. Where are they now? Instead, see that it is I who provides. It is I who gives you life. It is I who inflicts death. And about that death you see: Do not worry, because only I call people home. They will come if I wish. They will stay if I command.

WORSHIP. Look what I have done to show my power. There is no toilet paper in the store and no work at your job because of my discipline and instruction. See: You still have toilet paper, don’t you? A check is in the mail, too, isn’t it? Isn’t my instruction gentle? Am I not good? Can’t you see that even now, there is food and medicine and delivery and light and heat and electricity and internet because of my great and wonderful compassion.

SERVE. There is still work to do. There are some who work harder now than before. Take strength, because I am mighty to save. I am mighty to save. I will work my power through doctors, nurses, garbage men, janitors, and unemployed souls desperately seeking work. I will work wonders in your midst, and people will be speechless because of what they will see. Honor the authorities I have placed over you. They have been placed in their positions for your good. And though they are often blind to me, take comfort, because they have no true power. They are my servants, whether they know it or not. I have already made them too busy to do or think about anything except for what I wish. Their goals for private gain are gone. They instead only argue about how to save life. They bicker because they do not know how to save life. Imagine what they can accomplish by me and for your good when I decide to show them?

PRAY. I will watch over you. Call to me. I have brought your plans to ruin to save you. I have let your restlessness be your overseer for long enough. I am bringing you and your family back to me. Notice how all of your friends, your distractions, your business are now gone. Come to me, because I love you. I have pursued you from the garden of Eden, over centuries and millennia until now. You are free by the work of Christ, but you are not truly free yet. I will let you escape from your burdens. You will not be free, because look where that put you. Instead, learn from my. My burden is light and my yoke is easy. Come to me. You will rest. I can save. Pray. I have done wonders in the past. Call on me again.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of sin and death. I qanna of you, and I will never rest in my pursuit of you.

Stay safe, everybody. Stay strong. Be filled by the Spirit, which will push you do to what you ought to do.

From Oregon:

Greetings from rural Oregon.  I live in one of the three least populated counties in Oregon.  Eastern Oregon folks have kind of prided themselves that we have no COVID19 cases like the metro areas do, what with all the cities crowded with people.  No more.  A local case was announced on social media yesterday, and the Facebook postings following that were amazing.  Several rude, foul-mouthed local people were posting on various sites “who is it” “where does this person work” “we have the right to know who it is”, while many others replied with comments citing HIPPA, patient privacy, it doesn’t matter just keep up your social distancing, etc.  Admins had to turn off comments.  I noticed that some of the public posts this morning did not allow for comments.  The school board posted that they were notified a staff member had been diagnosed, the Health Department memo stated the first case was a male.  The witch hunt is on, people are playing detective trying to figure out who it is.  Sigh.

From northeastern Ohio:

After reading some of the other diaries, I wanted to communicate how LITTLE impact all this is having on our family at the moment.  This is not to discount the struggles that people (and especially healthcare workers) are experiencing in other places, but just to give a view of what it looks like “on the ground”, right now, in a typical midwest county.  And maybe explain why it doesn’t yet feel like the end of the world, not just to us, but to many Americans.

My company makes medical equipment, so business is booming right now.  I can easily work from home, and in fact was doing so 2 days a week even before the lock-downs, so going full-time from home was an easy transition.  I prefer it anyway, to the noisy “open office” we have at work.

My wife is a stay-at home mother… our younger son was transitioning to home-school anyway just before the Governor closed the schools here in Ohio.  Our older son seems to do fine with on-line instruction.  He’s mostly happy school starts an hour later now.  Our boys are shy, and not into a lot of extra-curricular activities, so having them home most of the time is pretty normal.

Our semi-rural county has an abundance of parks and natural areas, so it’s easy for us to get outside the house once day, and enjoy the beginning Spring weather after a long winter, while obeying the 6-feet social distancing rules.  The dogs feels like she’s died and gone to Dog Heaven – daily walks after lunch!!

We’re in the middle of transitioning churches, and still feel rather “new” at the current place, so missing faces in worship each week is not so hard (in fact, it’s kind of a nice break for an introvert).

We will miss Easter Week services, and even more the gathering with our extended family, but that’s about the worst of it.  If this is what a “Pearl Harbor Moment” feels like, to be honest, it’s kind of a let-down.  I doubt I will be telling my grandchildren stories about it.

One more detail – I’ve been tracking the new coronavirus cases in Ohio as the numbers come in each day, and comparing them to the Forecasts from our state health department.  As of yesterday, we’re averaging about 1/3 of the new cases per day, (300 yesterday) compared to predictions.  Note that these are the Official Predictions which ASSUME the current social distancing rules.  Total deaths in Ohio related to corona are 120.  If things keep going this way, it’s looking like the outbreak will peek well before the predicted numbers of 10,000 new cases in late April.  I’m betting the numbers start to go down significantly before the end of this week.

Again – I know things are horrible in certain parts of the country, and my heart goes out to the people living there (and even more in Spain and Italy at the moment).  But this isn’t looking like a National Emergency from here – just particularly bad in certain localized regions of the country.

 The Economic Emergency, on the other hand, with trillions in new debt and the loss of millions of jobs, could well be another story….

From British Columbia, Canada:

The COVID virus has come to our part of the world, but it seems our political leaders (whom i did not vote for) are doing a credible job. no complaints. admiration. our chief health officer has given sound advice, the provincial authorities have responded in a timely fashion. Deeply grateful for public servants who do their work well.

my home congregation is hosting a blood donor clinic in our gym on Tuesday.

below is a an email forwarded from Kevin King, friend and ceo of Mennonite Disaster Service. Thought your readers might enjoy this bit of good news. Plain Christians pitching in and making a difference. Might inspire others.

May God’s grace go before you so you know the Way. And may we all meet upon that path. Christ have mercy.

Hi [name]:

Good to hear from you.

The ingenuity of the plain people here in Lancaster PA and eastern Ohio never ceases to amaze me.

Equipment is being moved out of Amish cabinet shops and making room for their wives cutting and sewing machine.  (cabinet shops ordered closed)

Harness shops too.  MDS is helping them acquire cloth for face masks and a pattern approved by local hospital authorities with 20,000 employees. They are cranking them out by the thousands per day.

Lancaster Prison – 2000.  EMT authorities – no problem – order filled.

Problem: can MDS design a mask for the interpreter for hearing impaired so deaf can read their lips through a mask. Yes, vinyl clear screen surrounded by a breathing apparatus so the lips can be seen.

Last November, a local apple warehouse was purchased nearby by the conservative group and turned it into a warehouse to distribute food for local ministries.  Little did they know how timely this would be. Truckloads of food and milk are being dumped because distribution patterns and labor are upset. So this Blessings of Hope group is now providing boxes of hope for a family of four for $7.  Local ministries come in and get pallets of these boxes and distribute to their vulnerable populations. Last week Walmart almost dumped 4 tractor trailers of fresh butchered whole chickens (chilled). They are now being put to use.

God at work.

Kevin King

Mennonite Disaster Services

Thanks y’all. Please keep the stories coming to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Be sure to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and don’t forget to say from where you write.

And please, if you have a dog’s belly near to hand, please scratch it. You will increase the amount of happiness in a world that sorely needs it.

The post Pandemic Diaries 21 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Cardinal Pell Is Free!

Fantastic news from Australia:

Cardinal George Pell will immediately be released from prison after the High Court ordered his child sexual abuse convictions to be quashed “and judgments of acquittal be entered in their place”.

The most senior Catholic in the world to be convicted of child sexual abuse today learnt his final appeal bid to the High Court had been a success.

The full bench of seven judges were unanimous in their decision, finding that the jury, acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a reasonable doubt as to Pell’s guilt.

Read it all. 

The news has just broken, so I don’t have anything else. This is such a relief — notice the unanimous nature of the decision — because it was so clear that the guilty verdict was a put-up job. The cardinal can now go free.

In all the bad news we have had to deal with, finally, some good news. On Holy Week, at that.

UPDATE: Two Australian commentators, both with good points:

The problem always with the Pell case was he represented a system that had hurt so many. To the extent that whether he did the aforementioned crimes seemed almost irrelevant, as he was standing in place for a guilty institution. But that’s not how this works

— The Phantom Menace (@AusPhantom) April 7, 2020

The truth is, the Australian Catholic Church was repulsive in how it treated abuse victims. But that does not make Cardinal Pell guilty of molestation. If you have followed the case against him at all, it was shockingly clear that he was being scapegoated for the failures of the entire institution.

UPDATE.2:

Just as France once charged an innocent man of treason on scant evidence amidst a poisonous culture of anti-semitic frenzy, so did Australia charge an innocent man amidst the poisonous culture of anti-Catholic frenzy.

Cardinal Pell is Australia’s Dreyfus Affair.

— C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) April 7, 2020

Australian columnist Miranda Devine takes the same line:

An innocent man persecuted as the reviled scapegoat for all the sins of the Catholic Church, is free of the most disgusting and implausible charges of child sexual assault.

This was Australia’s Dreyfus Affair, an egregious miscarriage of justice that has destroyed the reputation of this country’s justice system.

The case that he sexually assaulted two choir boys after Sunday mass in 1996 in a crowded St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne was patently implausible from the start.

More:

He was convicted and imprisoned over the most heinous of all crimes on the word of one anonymous complainant, whose testimony was unsupported by any other witnesses, or any forensic evidence. The same fate could befall any Victorian.

The media lynch mob and the entire Victorian legal system stand condemned. The unanimous decision of the High Court is a conclusive repudiation of everyone involved in the false imprisonment of Cardinal George Pell, every politician, every cop, every lawyer, every journalist, every coward who naively trusted the system and vilified as “paedophile protectors” those who maintained Cardinal Pell’s innocence.

Amen. Read the whole thing. To call the case against Pell tissue-thin would be an insult to tissues.

The post Cardinal Pell Is Free! appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Situation With Viktor Orban

I have hesitated to write about Viktor Orban’s recent moves in Hungary, though I have (understandably) been under pressure to do so, given my praise of him in the past. The reason for my hesitation has been wanting to learn  reliable details about what’s happening in Hungary, and being extremely reluctant to write without being confident that I have a reasonable hold on what is actually going on there. I have learned over the past couple of years that you really cannot trust the Western media to report consistently with fairness and accuracy on Hungarian politics, or, more broadly, the politics of the European populist right. In my experience, things are usually far more nuanced than the presentation we get in the West. There have been instances in which information I personally knew to be true, but which contradicted the Western liberal media spin (that all the right-wing populist parties of Europe are vanguards of fascism), was ignored by Western journalists. One is correct to be very cautious about what we hear, see, and read in the Western media about Hungary and the other Visegrad countries.

And yet, I still don’t feel that I know enough about what’s going on in Hungary to have a confident opinion. But here’s what it looks like to me right now. Tl;dr? I think the emergency law is defensible, and that Orban’s critics are flipping out unnecessarily — but I agree with the critics that the law’s open-ended nature (that is, lack of a definite end date, and requirement for parliamentary re-approval) is deeply concerning, for its obvious temptation to authoritarian abuse.

Now, the longer version. It’s very long, but remember, writing about things is how I think through them. I beg your indulgence.

You might have seen Damon Linker’s column last week calling out me and other American conservatives who have spoken well in the past of Orban. He writes:

Bestselling author Patrick Deneen has spoken of Orbán’s Hungary serving as a model for conservatives in the West and even sat down for a photo op in a book-lined office with the statesman himself. Prominent blogger Rod Dreher has written numerous posts plugging Orbán’s anti-liberal political project and passionately defended him against the supposedly malicious smears of Western critics. Author Christopher Caldwell has penned a highly literate essay explaining that Orbán should be considered the “future of Europe.” And in the most astonishing example of all, journalist Sohrab Ahmari allowed Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó to use the pages of the New York Post as a megaphone for spreading Fidesz Party propaganda directly to American readers.

I know and respect all of these authors. I count some of them as longstanding friends. I’m therefore eager to know what they think of the alarming (but also completely unsurprising) events of recent days — days during which the Hungarian legislature, which Orbán’s party controls with a strong majority, approved an open-ended extension of the previously declared COVID-19-related state of emergency, suspending parliament and elections, giving Orbán the power to rule by decree, and pronouncing that the spreading of “fake news” would be punished by up to five years in prison.

Linker says that we might be horrified, and realize we were duped all along. Or we might go on being Orban’s “useful idiots,” defending him even when he does the indefensible.

I don’t want to be too quick to answer, for the reason I mentioned above, but I also don’t want to stand by actions that I think are wrong. My personal experiences in Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary) have taught me that the Western version of liberal democracy is not a universal model. Writing in the (left-wing) New Statesman this week, the political theorist John Gray says:

In the view of the future to which progressive thinkers cling, the future is an embellished version of the recent past. No doubt this helps them preserve some semblance of sanity. It also undermines what is now our most vital attribute: the ability to adapt and fashion different ways of life. The task ahead is to build economies and societies that are more durable, and more humanly habitable, than those that were exposed to the anarchy of the global market. …

With all its talk of freedom and choice, liberalism was in practice the experiment of dissolving traditional sources of social cohesion and political legitimacy and replacing them with the promise of rising material living standards. This experiment has now run its course. Suppressing the virus necessitates an economic shutdown that can only be temporary, but when the economy restarts, it will be in a world where governments act to curb the global market.

He continues:

Few ideas are so scorned by higher minds than sovereignty.

Orban has been a tireless advocate of Hungarian national sovereignty. When I first visited Hungary, I found myself in conversation with a Hungarian who supports Orban. Her view — and I subsequently learned that this is widely shared in Hungary, among Orban’s supporters — is that after the fall of communism, Westerners came in and bought up what was left of Hungarian industry at fire sale prices. A big reason for Orban’s popularity is that he realized that as long as the country’s economy is controlled, or at least strongly dominated, by foreigners, Hungarians do not control their destiny. My Hungarian interlocutor told me that Orban clawed back those industries, and put them under Hungarian sovereignty. In her opinion, Orban can be fairly criticized for cronyism — redistributing controlling interests in those industries to his own supporters. But (she said), that is a lesser problem than foreign ownership — for those Hungarians who believe that Hungarians should determine Hungary’s future.

This accounts for Orban’s hatred of George Soros, by the way. This is something that Western liberals do not understand — or if they understand it, they don’t accept it. Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire, has poured a fortune into trying to turn Hungary and the other countries of the former Soviet bloc into Western-style liberal democracies. A small but telling example that I reported on in 2016: Soros teaming up with the Obama-era USAID to translate and publish Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the Macedonian language. The idea in part is to undermine traditional sources of moral authority in that country, to turn it, politically, into a Western-style liberal democracy. Soros, as many of you know, has been a strong advocate of open borders.

Orban knows that Soros is rich and powerful, and represents the dominant point of view among Western liberals. This kind of thing really stood out to me last autumn, when I made a reporting trip to Poland, and learned from talking to Poles how much they resented US and Europe-based corporations forcing gay pride and transgenderism on them in the workplace. Poles are morally conservative, in general, and heavily Catholic. I talked to some Poles who worked for Western companies, and felt hard-pressed to violate their consciences by participating in Pride Month celebrations in the workplace. They see it as a form of Western cultural imperialism — and of course they are right. In Hungary, this kind of thing is where the anti-Soros sentiment comes from: the idea that the West sees the people of the former communist countries are morally and culturally backward, and deploy “soft power” against them, to undermine their traditional beliefs and practices.

Orban came in for a vicious lashing from Western liberals in the 2015 migration crisis, when he closed Hungary’s borders and refused to take in refugees invited into Europe by Angela Merkel. Hungary is a country of 10 million. It was ruled for over a century by the Turks, and was always on the front line during the many centuries of hostility between Christian Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. These people, the Hungarians, have a history — and that history informs how and why they think the way they do about Islamic migration into Europe.

I tell you all this as background. Recall John Gray’s line: “liberalism was in practice the experiment of dissolving traditional sources of social cohesion and political legitimacy and replacing them with the promise of rising material living standards.” Orban, and Orbanism, is a reaction to this. He and his supporters believe that the cost of liberalism to the Hungarian people, and to what makes them distinct as a people and a nation, is too high. I believe he — and they — are correct. But then, I have long thought the European Union project was too costly to cultural particularity. Who are we to expect the Spaniards to live as the Danes, the Greeks to live as the Germans?

Now, none of this is a justification for what Orban and his parliamentary allies did with the new emergency law. I’m just offering it as context for readers who haven’t followed closely the politics here. A great book to read to understand the thinking behind the Orbanist right in those former Soviet countries is Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon In Democracy. Legutko is a small-d democrat, but his book discusses how the European Union bureaucrats, under the guise of promoting liberal democracy, have worked to delegitimize and dismiss national particularities that conflict with a secular progressive view of society.

When the news of Orban’s new powers under the emergency decree came down, my initial impulse was to think that this looks really bad. I don’t fault him, and wouldn’t fault any political leader, for assuming stronger powers during this emergency. The two things that jumped out at me as especially problematic about the new Hungary law were a) the fact that it has no time limit — that is, Orban could rule by decree indefinitely, and b) it seemed to give Orban the power to suppress criticism, under the guise of keeping rumor-mongering in check.

I wrote to several Hungarian friends to ask them what was happening, from their point of view. One of them wrote to explain that the debate over whether or not Orban’s move is a threat to Hungarian democracy is abstract to most Hungarians, who are much more worried about their economic future in the face of this destructive pandemic. She writes, “This tiny virus is already changing our lives a thousand time more brutally than Orbán would have ever been able to. And it will continue to do so.” She says that on balance, she has a favorable view of Orban’s governance.

We had subsequent correspondence, which she allows me to publish here.

Even though I feel less than capable I probably I need to give you a more coherent, constructive, practical and less rant-like answer that the previous one. I was already very frustrated that day; sorry about the tone. I am reluctantly writing this. Anyway, it won’t be all-encompassing either, but I want to give you a few more points:

1. Since 1990 Hungary has always been on the brink of a dictatorship — that is, if you relied on the reporting of Western media. I worked with foreign journalists for almost six years, and there was, if I remember correctly, only one case when the report was based on a premiss other than “Look everybody, Hungary is on the far-right (almost as a whole)”: when a toxic red sludge descended on a whole area.

But this was the case well before Orbán came into power, already in the early 1990s, at the time of the first Hungarian government — a conservative one, led by a real gentleman (József Antall), who was also very incompetent. There is a certain group of activists/journalists, accidentally almost all well-connected with the Soros empire, who run screaming to “alert” the international media whenever they get a chance. These journos/activists have good connections to international journalists — I happened to be present in some situations where this was evident. This is common knowledge — I am not saying this to brag.

You might as well say that there certainly has to be some truth to those claims — maybe, but here we are, thirty years later, and still no dictatorship. So, as a general rule, take these claims with a pinch of salt.

In this particular case, I think it is fair to say that the coronavirus situation warrants the measures that are being taken — the point of contention, even with the Hungarian opposition, is that this state of emergency (ruling by decrees etc.) does not have an end point. Given that the government has been handling the coronavirus situation quite well so far, and Hungarians are complying with the measures, my sense is that the general public trusts that the this is part of the government doing its job.

2. There is an intellectual debate to be had about democracy as the highest good. Maybe the French vs. Ahmari debate covers some of it, but as far asI can see, Americans as a whole are almost all fundamentally immersed in an enlightenment/liberal view of the common good (even conservatives). Does democracy in itself contribute to the common good? I do not have the tools or the capacity to outline the main skeleton of such a debate, but I sense a barrier between Anglo-Saxons and Continentals in this regard, most especially Eastern Europeans. Are people necessarily worse and worse off on the whole in a less democratic environment? Liberalism reigns supreme, whether they know it or not, even in the minds of most American conservatives in the sense that one’s individual freedom is considered to be the highest good. Also, I have a sense, which saddens me, that many liberals are vexed by what Orbán does or does not not out of care for Hungary and for the Hungarian people, but more as if the Goddess of Liberty has been dishonored (liberalism does seem to be a coming religion).

3. I do think the Orbán government is democratic in the sense that it enjoys the support of the majority of Hungarians (or the majority of voters). That is what I tried to convey, maybe not very successfully. Voters support Orbán for a variety of reasons. In a very general sense you can probably say they do because they think he represents Hungarians’ interest well. But we need to be careful here — Hitler enjoyed the support of the bigger part of Germans too, so in a sense, he was a democratically elected leader (Reichstag or not). So, again, democracy in itself is not a guarantee. For some reason this is difficult for liberals to grasp.

4. And now for the problematic part. It is not that Orbán will now crown himself king of the Huns, but what is happening already is that Fidesz will pass laws which it couldn’t get through Parliament in normal circumstances, not related to the actual state of emergency.

Point in case:  the City Park, an ambitious project of Fidesz. It’s the oldest park of the city, and has been in disarray for decades now. They want to rebuild it as a hub of cultural activities. This has been met with strong opposition from left-wingers. There are some arguments involved (they don’t want new buildings there, because it is a park), but mostly it is just out of political spite. So, the new liberal mayor of Budapest has had the works stopped. Now they will likely resume because now the government will pass new legislation.

Do I support the City Park plan? Yes, one hundred percent. It is the closest green area to where my family lives, and is truly in bad shape. Our quality of life, no kidding, would be definitely better if the park was a nice place for me to take the kids. Is this method sufficiently democratic though? I don’t think so.

I think the emergency situation, as per usual, is a mixture of needed leadership and an opportunity for the government to squeeze in some stuff they otherwise couldn’t have. What Orbán learned when he was a young politician in the early 1990s is that in this part of the world, you will get exactly nothing done (no good things!) if you play completely according to the democratic rules. There — it is what it is. Still, that’s not a dictatorship, if you ask me.

However, aren’t these sorts of abuses of power present in Western democracies to some degrees? Maybe to a lesser degree — I am not an expert on this, certainly. I have said it a million times, so it must be boring, but the transition period was maybe equally catastrophic for Hungary than was forty years of communism. Democracy and free market capitalism arrived in Hungary with quite the birth pangs — and not in the least because of the action of big corporations, the IMF, the World Bank, and forces within major Western economies which somehow favored keeping Hungary feeble. So, Hungarians, especially the older generation, are not so keen on any of these institutions.

5. Which leads me to my final point. I don’t feel like I am in a position to give you advice. As far as I can recall, you have written about Orbán on your blog in terms of his actions to help persecuted Christians. I don’t see anything wrong with that. And, again, even if it makes zero sense for Westerners he might be somewhat unsavory in terms of his political means AND AT THE SAME TIME a great hero for persecuted Christians. There is no black and white here. Which is why, if I had to say something resembling a piece of advice, I’d say probably it is best to stay clear of Orbán. You will never, ever win the argument with liberals in favor of him, and people hate him with so much passion that you will be in trouble forever for voicing support for even the least significant of his policies.

I also don’t feel capable of passing a complete and final judgment on him and his policies. Only time will tell. I think friends and foes are fascinated by him for several reasons, one of which might be that he could serve as a model. But I do not think that will be the case – the world is too much in turmoil for that, and I fear that the usual course of Hungarian history will repeat itself: that it is only a series of calamities to be born. Usually there is very little time for building for us Hungarians, and with this next crisis upon us, I don’t see any other way.

6. Most of all, I still stand by my observation that liberal democracies are headed for a more-or-less totalitarian future. It is only an inkling of mine, maybe not a very original one. It may come about from ideological zeal (SJWs), or some other combination of factors, but I do think that this pandemic, whether we like it or not, will contribute to this. I am thinking about mass surveillance upgraded, and so on and so forth. That is why it feels a bit absurd, even if in some ways justified, that some people are having a hissy fit over Orbán in these circumstances.

One other thing about Orbán is that he is very astute, but also quite direct — he is clever but not cunning. I feel like much more sinister things are going on in the world, but they are cloaked by the darkness.

So that’s one view from Budapest.

Here’s another, from government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs, who says, in part:

Q: Does it give PM Orbán unlimited power?

No. The government can exercise these extraordinary powers only to prevent, treat, eradicate and remedy harmful effects of the human epidemic [2§ (2)]. And the government must still answer to Parliament (see below).

Furthermore, the Fundamental Law makes it clear that during a state of danger, the application of the Fundamental Law cannot be suspended, the operation of the Constitutional Court cannot be restricted, and the government cannot restrict the most fundamental rights.

Q: Does the law establish a state of emergency that can last without limit?

No. The parliament can lift the state of emergency – state of danger, as we call it – at any time. Furthermore, the state of danger applies specifically to the coronavirus epidemic. We all hope the epidemic will end soon, and with it so will the state of danger and these extraordinary measures.

“At any given moment, Parliament must be in a position to take back the right of decision from the government,” Prime Minister Orbán told the National Assembly during last Monday’s debate. “I don’t need a fixed deadline. You can take it back tomorrow morning if you consider it inadequate.”

Q: Does the law dissolve Parliament?

No. In fact, it requires the government to regularly inform Parliament about measures being taken to counter the emergency as long as said measures remain in force. If Parliament is not in session or lacks a quorum, the government must provide information to the House Speaker and the heads of the parliamentary political groups.

By the way, as Miklós Szánthó pointed out in his guest post, the governing parties have a two-thirds majority in the democratically elected parliament – a mandate given to them by the Hungarian voters.  So why would the government want to dissolve parliament?

Q: Does the law create prison terms for spreading fake news and rumors?

No. It introduces sanctions for acts far more specific and more dangerous than “spreading fake news and rumors.” The law makes it a criminal act to intentionally spread false information and distortions that could undermine or thwart efforts to protect the public against the spread of the virus. It’s in force only during the state of danger. It’s about intentionally reporting false information that endangers.

When it comes to restrictions on intentionally reporting false and dangerous information the legal precedents are many.

Q: What does the Hungarian public say about the state of danger and the extraordinary measures?

Some 90 percent of Hungarians, according to recent polls, say that the state of danger that introduced the extraordinary legal measures should be extended. On the question of how long, nearly 60 percent say that the state of danger and the extraordinary measures should be extended until the end of the pandemic.

The liberal media and its noisy Twittersphere have been posting furiously about this legislation, but most of the reporting is based on poor information or simply unadulterated bias.

That’s what the government spokesman has to say. Here is a summary explanation of the law by a liberal Budapest media outlet. It concludes:

The bottom line is that according to the bill, Parliament can terminate the extraordinary decrees, but cannot force the government to revoke the state of emergency, but there are enough opposition MPs to initiate the constitutional review of the government’s actions. So in the end, it all comes down to these two institutions – and whether or not one trusts that Fidesz’s third supermajority in Parliament will revoke the government’s authorisation when needed and that the judges they elected to the Constitutional Court will uphold legality during the state of emergency.

Now, to remind you where I am, generally. I count myself an admirer of many of the things Viktor Orban has done, especially his moves to protect Hungarian sovereignty, the particularity of its culture, and to resist migration being forced upon Hungary. This does not mean I support everything he does — I honestly don’t follow Orban closely enough to have an informed opinion — but I think on balance, he has been good for Hungary, and for Europe. I would have a lot more confidence for the future were I living country governed by Viktor Orban than by Angela Merkel. For that matter, I would be far more confident living in a country governed by the Fidesz party than by the Socialists now running Spain. Nevertheless, I don’t want to be a “useful idiot” either for Orban, or for the Western liberal media. What I am trying to figure out here is whether or not Orban’s emergency law move is in line with what other national leaders are doing in this unprecedented crisis, or if it exceeds that, and constitutes an authoritarian attempt to consolidate power — if coronavirus has been, as Damon Linker pungently put it, Orban’s Reichstag fire.

Last week I decided that I would consult my friend John O’Sullivan, the British conservative journalist, who actually lives in Budapest, and is watching this play out as a local story. I figured if anybody could tell me straight what was happening, it’s John. As I was starting to write my e-mail to him, John published a terrific piece in National Review commenting on the Orban story. Excerpts:

I don’t justify the emergency law as it stands.

As an old classical liberal of a conservative disposition, I accept there will be occasions when a crisis is so severe that a government needs emergency powers to deal with it outside the regular law. The coronavirus threat is plainly such a challenge. If a law granting emergency powers to the government to deal with it is proposed, however, I would submit it to certain tests before supporting it.

The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

John explains why — and in this, he’s 100 percent right — and then goes on to criticize as hysterical and wrong a tweet Anne Applebaum sent out, which read:

And there it is: The European Union’s first dictatorship. None of these powers is needed to fight the virus. But they will help distract and deter opposition, especially when it becomes clear that the government has no better plan.

(Incidentally, I had not realized that Applebaum jumped on Your Working Boy over Orban until I read about it in John’s essay.)

In his response to this, John O’Sullivan says, in part:

I magnanimously concede that the Orban government will rule by decree in this time because a “state of emergency” is the term of art for a government ruling by decree. Macron is already ruling by decree, and both Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel are doing the same in effect, through primary and secondary legislation.

I’m also perplexed when Ms. Applebaum writes that “none of these powers is needed to fight the virus” and that they’re in the legislation to confuse the opposition because the Hungarian government has “no better plan.” Is that true? After all, it has more or less the same plan as most European governments — social distancing, lockdown, quarantine, extreme hygienic care when meeting people, and so on — and these regulations are a direct attempt to halt the spread of the virus. The most draconian loss of freedom under the emergency — requiring people to stay at home except for exercise and shopping — is the same in those countries. If that strategy were to “fail,” i.e., be abandoned because its costs proved too high economically and humanely, Hungary would then doubtless be in trouble, but so would most every other country.

Then follows a really interesting analysis in which O’Sullivan points out that the emergency measures that are already in place in France, Germany, and Britain are barely distinct from what the Hungarians are doing. So why the freakout? The point (as I read O’Sullivan) is not that small-l, small-d liberal democrats should not be worried about what Orban is doing, but that they should be concerned about what all governments do with the extraordinary powers the pandemic response grants to them — powers that are justly claimed and deployed for the sake of defeating this virus. Why are people like Applebaum holding Orban to standards that they don’t hold other European nations?

O’Sullivan repeats his belief that the Hungarian parliament should put an unambiguous sunset provision into the law. And note well his statement early in the piece that the legislation’s ban on rumor-mongering is legitimate in an extreme crisis (in wartime, these laws are common), and it may be here. But it could easily be abused to stifle proper political criticism, though there is no evidence yet that it has been.

Please read the whole thing. 

It’s a superb piece, one I wish I had written, but one I couldn’t have written because John O’Sullivan is right on the scene. It confirms my initial intuition — that the law was basically fine, but needs a sunset provision, and should be more sensitively written to protect legitimate criticism. But here too, remember what the government spokesman said:

The law makes it a criminal act to intentionally spread false information and distortions that could undermine or thwart efforts to protect the public against the spread of the virus. It’s in force only during the state of danger. It’s about intentionally reporting false information that endangers.

Hungary has a significant Roma (Gypsy) population. They are not the most popular people in Hungary, to put it mildly. What if one of the far-right websites in Hungary — and believe me, there are activists there who think Orban is a liberal — started a rumor that the Roma were responsible for spreading coronavirus. That could very quickly result in pogroms. In that case, wouldn’t we want the Hungarian government to have special powers to suppress and punish that kind of thing? These powers could certainly be abused by the state, and if so, the state should be criticized harshly. But so far, they have not been, as far as I am aware.

If you’ve gotten this far, then you’ll want my answer, and it’s the same as John O’Sullivan’s: I don’t support the law as it stands now, but I am far less concerned about it than Western liberals, who leap at any opportunity to trash Viktor Orban. I probably would have been better off just waiting to see what John O’Sullivan said. But I’m glad I didn’t, because I learned something through corresponding with Hungarian friends. Specifically, I was reminded of why Orban became popular in the first place, and remains popular in Hungary, and how little we in the West understand this.

You might have noticed that the Budapest correspondent whose e-mail I quoted at length apologized for her first e-mail, which I didn’t quote. It was an angry response, and it came from someone who is sick and tired of what she believes is a double standard that Western liberals apply to Hungary. She conceded in that first e-mail that “Hungary will never be Switzerland,” by which she meant, I think, that the things that the Hungarian people believe, and their ways of living, do not fully conform to a neat, clean Western model of democracy — and this is not something for which they should have to apologize. More deeply, though — and this is something that she and I have discussed at some length, in person, in my visits to her country — she says that Western liberals conceal from themselves the authoritarianism and intolerance for popular sovereignty within their own beliefs and actions. Look, for example, how long it took for Brexit, based on a free democratic vote of a popular majority, to be implemented over the objections of liberal, globalist British elites.

It makes my Budapest friend angry because these liberals hold the high ground in European institutions, especially in the media, and assume that their views are neutral and normative, when they are anything but. On migration, for example, George Soros and other socialist, left-liberal, and right-liberal elites have been for open borders, even though it means the de facto dissolution of sovereignty, and the dissolution of European peoples. Politicians of the so-called “far right” — Orban’s Fidesz Party, Germany’s AfD, Poland’s Law and Justice party, Spain’s Vox, and others — have stood up to this, and have been smeared consistently in the media as proto-fascists. This is why a lot of Europeans take liberal criticism of Orban with a grain of salt: because they see the coerciveness of liberalism, and its consequences. We Western media consumers are rarely if ever shown this side of things.

None of which is to say that Hungary’s emergency law is 100 percent solid — I have said where I dissent from it, and I strongly believe that we have to be vigilant that emergency laws and decrees in all democracies aren’t used by those in power to extend illicit control over us, and to take away our liberties. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But don’t for a minute believe that that vigilance should only be exercised against Hungarians. Contra Anne Applebaum, this is not “whataboutism”; it’s the plain truth.

Forgive me for the length and the meandering nature of this post. I honestly have been struggling to figure out what is happening in Hungary. I’ve tried to lay out for you as best I can what my thinking has been.

UPDATE: Just received this e-mail from a political scientist:

It must be said that the people sounding the alarm about this are the usual suspects. It drives me a bit batty that people can cite Anne Applebaum as a responsible journalist, when she’s the wife of former Polish foreign minister, architect of Poland’s pro-EU strategy who was thrown out of office by Law and Justice, Radosław Sikorski (https://www.ft.com/content/9939e514-2b90-11e9-88a4-c32129756dd8). I don’t begrudge her her point of view, but she’s not exactly a neutral party.

It annoys me the extent to which none of these people have been seriously studying democratic backsliding. There is a copious academic literature. I recommend Ivan Krastev’s latest work for a serious and rigorous version of the standard liberal interpretation (it is remarkably how much it has in common with The Demon in Democracy). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/24/western-liberalism-failed-post-communist-eastern-europe The motivations of Hungarians are not that distinct from other post-Communist states. A disappointment about how things turned out with the West, a recognition that part of the EU/WTO bargain is substantial limitations on freedom, and the feeling (more than justified) that the West was more interested in privatization than economic investment and democratization, and the result was probably the biggest transfer of wealth in world history, from the people’s of Eastern Europe to well-connected investors (often former Communist affiliates) both foreign and domestic.

But the critical theory of this emergency law makes no sense. As I’ve mentioned before, I can’t find a single case where pandemic powers led to a serious erosion of democratic norms, unlike terrorism, war, or other kinds of emergencies. Moreover, in this case, Fidesz already has a super-majority. What does Orban need a dictatorship for? Besides, the academic literature is clear that dictatorship of this kind (emergency powers etc) is becoming much rarer. Why? Well if you are expert at controlling political competition, and you have a genuinely popular agenda, dictatorship is all downside. You would get held responsible for everything, you would be an international pariah (sanctioned quickly), and you would have no more real power than you could obtain at the ballot box, where you would already have an advantage due to manipulation of electoral rules, media ownership, etc. So the trend everywhere is to maintain meaningful elections as a tool of less-than-democratic rule, even as other aspects of democracy decline.

In this case my prediction is that Orban will yet again make a fool of his critics. He won’t abuse his powers, though may make an example of some quarantine violators etc to appear tough and in charge. He’ll give emergency powers back and end the state of emergency…and then use hysterical reporting from both domestic and Western critics in campaign ads about the double standard Hungary is held to, how deranged his critics are, etc.

UPDATE: James C. comments:

[Quoting an earlier comment:] Macron is already ruling by decree

Yes he is. And in his country a couple of days ago, something lovely happened yet again. Something the poor Hungarians never get the privilege of experiencing thanks to that evil Viktor Orban.

In a small town southeast of Lyon, French people were waiting their turn outside the butcher and the baker on Saturday morning. A Sudanese ‘refugee’, housed and cared-for at French taxpayers’ expense and welcomed by Macron, suddenly started butchering them right on the street, screaming Allahu Akbar.

The ‘refugee’ asked one of his victims if he was North African. He responded, “I’m French.” And thus the “refugee” ran his knife through him. When police arrived, the “refugee” was found kneeling on the sidewalk, praying in Arabic.

So far at least two have died. Others are in critical condition. I’m sure, as they fight for life in hospital, they are thanking Emmanuel Macron for not being such a fascist about immigration like that awful Viktor Orban.

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