Rod Dreher's Blog, page 169

News Of The Woke

I have been paying so much attention to the coronavirus and the Pink Bernie news this week that I have shamefully neglected to serve up some Dreherbait hot dish. Hey, I can fix that!

Item: wealthy school for the children of New York liberal elite blows itself up with psychotic wokeness. Miranda Devine has the story:

For some parents, concerns were crystallized when Fieldston students became aware that a YouTube video, “Secrets of the Living Dolls,” featured a new member of the faculty, a self-described “large black man” with a fetish for dressing up as a “sexy white woman” in a lifelike latex mask and breasts.

Looky-looky:

Can’t imagine why folks would not want a freak like that teaching their kids. More:

“I’ve fought for LGBT issues,” says one Fieldston parent, “but this is indicative of the weird things happening around the school which are rooted around intersectionality and an obsession about identity politics and race.”

A school insider says the video “bothers a particular group of parents, but in the hierarchy of problems at the school, I don’t consider this to be a particularly big one.”

Oh, do they ever have other issues. More:

One of the most contentious issues at Fieldston has been the introduction of affinity groups, separating children by race.

The groups “are rooted in a ­sociological model of whiteness that completely disregards the lived Jewish experience and, for a community with an above-average population of second- and third- and even first-generation Jews, that was deeply problematic,” said one insider.

“There are relationships with the school that will never be repaired. It really represented a turning point in the trajectory of the school and uncovered a degree of anti-Semitism that Fieldston [previously] has been immune from.”

A mother says the groups were a “pretext … They take kids of color and make them angry … It is the start of the blame culture. White people are to blame. The poison is far-reaching.”

Fieldston is paralyzed by “wokeness,” the mother says.

You have to read the whole thing to find out how the school reacted when Donald Trump was elected president. Oh, and guess what I learned from the school’s website:

2019–2020 tuition for all grades, Pre-K–12: $52,993

Learning to hate yourself and other people in a politically progressive way, and to be taught by pervs, does not come cheap.

This item is not actually funny in any way — it’s just sick. The Hollywood Reporter writes about a new film that is causing controversy. Excerpts:

Landing under the auspices of the Berlinale’s newly introduced Encounters strand aimed at fostering “aesthetically and structurally daring works,” The Trouble With Being Born, having its world premiere Thursday, could well end up being the most daring — not to mention divisive — film in a festival not known for holding back on provocation.

The second feature from Austrian director Sandra Wollner, the drama — which was already named one of the Berlinale 2020’s weirdest films based on the synopsis alone — begins gently enough, with a young girl lazing by a pool under the summer sun, discussing memories of her mother with her loving father. But as the scenes unravel it becomes clear that all is not as innocent as it first seemed.

Despite a remarkably lifelike appearance, the child — Elli — is actually an android, her memories programmed. And it doesn’t take long to realize that there’s something else to her relationship with this very human, very middle-aged man she calls “Daddy.”

Much of the nocturnal activity is only implied (perhaps leading many to question the depths of their own imagination), but there are moments where there’s absolutely no doubt as to the rather envelope-pushing direction the film is taking.

Read it all. This film is normalizing sex with children.

Speaking of, here’s the third and final item. Take a look at this TikTok video, taken at a “drag brunch” in Toronto earlier this month. The drag queen is Tynomi Banks, the nom de drag of Sheldon McIntosh:

That poor kid. What the hell is wrong with those adults standing around watching this? What kind of men are those, just sitting there? Disgusting, the lot, sexualizing children like this.

The post News Of The Woke appeared first on The American Conservative.

Coronavirus Haver: Chill!

This is reassuring. A man who caught coronavirus on the Diamond Princess says that for him: it ain’t so bad. Excerpt:

During the first few days, the hospital staff hooked me up to an IV, mostly as a precaution, and used it to administer magnesium and potassium, just to make sure I had plenty of vitamins. Other than that, my treatment has consisted of what felt like gallons and gallons of Gatorade — and, when my fever rose just above 100 degrees, some ibuprofen. The nurses came to the room every four hours or so, to check my vitals, ask if I needed anything and to draw my blood. I got very good at unhooking all the monitors checking my oxygen level, blood pressure and heart rate so I could go to the bathroom or just pace around the room a little, to get my blood flowing. I never quite got the hang of hooking them back up without making a tangled mess. After 10 days, I moved out of biocontainment and into the same facility as Jeri. Now we can videochat from our separate quarantines, in neighboring rooms.

As of my most recent test, on Thursday, I am still testing positive for the virus. But by now, I don’t require much medical care. The nurses check my temperature twice a day and draw my blood, because I’ve agreed to participate in a clinical study to try to find a treatment for coronavirus. If I test negative three days in a row, then I get to leave.

The time has passed more quickly than I would’ve expected. With my laptop, I get as much work done as I can, remotely. I catch up with friends. I take walks around my room, trying to take a thousand more steps each day. I also watch the news. It’s surreal to see everyone panic — news conferences, the stock market falling, school closures — about a disease I have. It does seem likely that coronavirus will spread in the U.S., but it won’t help anybody if we all panic. Based on my experience, I’d recommend that everyone get a good digital thermometer, just as a comfort tool, so they can reassure themselves if their noses start running. I have been relatively fortunate: At least six Diamond Princess passengers have died from the virus, of the around 705 passengers who caught it. But coronavirus doesn’t have to be a horrible calamity.

Read the whole thing.

The thing I worry about more than getting sick is the economic effects of this thing. We’ve just had a week in which $6 trillion of wealth was erased from the world. I cancelled a plan visit to a conference in Europe for late March, out of caution (I didn’t want to buy a plane ticket then have to cancel later if it seemed too risky). That kind of thing happening a lot, though, with tour groups, is going to have a massive impact. A friend of mine and his wife have a long-planned trip to Italy scheduled for next month. I doubt it’s going to happen now. The effects of this sort of thing rippling through the economy are going to be devastating.

Our local business magazine ran a piece about how a local furniture store has been unable to get its merchandise out of China all year, because of coronavirus. They don’t know when it will be here. Think about the lost sales to that one business. We use a maid service once weekly. Our cleaning lady told us today that at their office, they were talking this morning about how susceptible their staff is to coronavirus if it goes wide, because they go into so many people’s houses. If any one of us in our house gets sick, we’ll cancel the service until we’re all clear, because we’re not going to want to expose the cleaning lady. But if enough people do that, their business is going to crater, and she will be out of work.

You begin to see how this thing could send the world into an economic depression. A lot of people are blaming Trump for the stock market selloff this week. That’s not fair. We live in a global economy, and this is a global pandemic. This stock market decline was bound to happen because of China. I mean, even if the virus had been contained in China, the fact that the Chinese economy has been mostly frozen all year was bound to show up in stock prices at some point, given China’s role in the world economy. And now the virus is spreading globally. If we had not a single case in America, the market would be in trouble. How could it not be?

I was thinking today that if Hillary Clinton were the president, we would all be scapegoating her over this too. We Americans have this weird attitude — maybe a result of our litigious culture — that anything bad that happens is an aberration, and that it’s always somebody’s fault. Did you ever see the Atom Egoyan film version of the Russell Banks novel, The Sweet Hereafter? It’s a hell of a movie. It’s a drama about what happens to a small town when a school bus carrying many of the town’s children slides off the road in the winter, onto a frozen pond, and sinks, killing all the children. Ian Holm plays a lawyer who comes to town looking to sign up clients to sue somebody for the tragedy. Meanwhile, he is dealing with his own private tragedy: his grown daughter is addicted to drugs, and he’s trying to figure out how to save her, but can’t. The thing is, it appears that the bus tragedy was a true accident, with no one to plausibly blame for negligence. But, the film suggests, we have become a people who can’t bear the fact that life is tragic. Our litigious culture encourages us to gin up fault-finding, even when doing so is unjust, and undermines our resilience.

I suspect we’ll see a lot of that happening here. To be sure, there no doubt is, and will be, some genuine fault to be found. If we have to blame anybody, blame the Chinese Communist Party for its initial response to the outbreak. Once the crisis has passed, it will be time to assess the US response — what we did right, what we ought to have done better — and to lay credit and blame. But it seems to me that either left or right trying to score political points off of this crisis is exactly the wrong thing to do here at the outset, when we need to be pulling together to help each other. Trump named the vice president to head up the coronavirus task force. You would have thought that putting the No. 2 official in the executive branch in charge would have indicated to people how serious the White House is taking this. But no, it brought a bunch of pinhead bitching from the left, much of it having to do with Pence’s religious beliefs.

I don’t want to be naive here. When the authorities are not doing what they should be doing, then yes, it makes sense to call them out. But it’s damned dispiriting to watch liberals and conservatives doing their customary pointless backbiting and griping while this thing spreads. I’m going to watch myself on this point too.

I know some of you were really put off by the fact that I posted alarming accounts from Wyoming Doc over the past two weeks. I took what he had to say seriously, and prepared as he recommended — and as others are now recommending. When I see stories of bare store shelves now, I am grateful that Wyoming Doc said the things he said, alarming as they were, because they broke through my own wait-and-see lethargy. None of the preparations we did (e.g., laying in supplies, medical and otherwise) will protect us from the virus. But it will help us to make it through a long quarantine, if it comes to that. Having spent the past few days preparing, we are not feeling anxious tonight. Except over our retirement portfolio, but we can’t do anything about that.

UPDATE: Speaking of the economy, this is definitely not chill news:

UPDATE.2: Tiger Ye, a Wuhan resident, did not have such a mild experience with the virus. He writes:

On 25 January I had a checkup. I had begun to cough. It was a very dry cough with a little yellow phlegm. The results showed that my situation was worsening, with the infection spreading to my entire lungs. The doctor gave me an IV drip, while the oral medicine remained the same. At the time the doctor told me I was suspected of having the virus, but that only an expert committee could decide who would be able to use the testing kit.

By 26 January getting up had become extremely difficult and I was shivering with cold. I felt I was having a high fever, and I was: 39C. Reports later said that the situation could develop extremely fast in the middle stage, but before I knew it, by that evening the fever was gone. It felt like having been to hell and back. That period from 21 January to the 26th was the worst time. I coughed so bad my stomach was hurting and my back ached. Those were some of the worst days in my life.

The post Coronavirus Haver: Chill! appeared first on The American Conservative.

America’s Sanderista Future?

Devout Trumpophobe Andrew Sullivan worries that Bernie is going to be a Yankee Doodle Corbyn. He talks about how Bernie has strengths that Corbyn never did, but that there is still reason to worry, as with Corbyn, about Sanders’s weaknesses as a national leader. Excerpts:

The Tories and their press hammered Corbyn on extremist moments in his past: inviting members of the IRA into the Commons, placing a wreath at a ceremony where Black September terrorists were honored, calling Hamas leaders his friends, and several incidents which revealed either Corbyn’s anti-Semitism or his staggering indifference to it in his own ranks.

You can see an identical strategy by the GOP. Sanders’s kind words for left-wing despots, his defense of the Sandinistas, his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in the Cold War, his affiliation with the Socialist Workers Party while it was supporting the Iranian revolution, his admiration for some of the policies of totalitarian Cuba, his refusal to speak at AIPAC: All this and more will be playing on a loop by the summer. The Corbyn precedent — though Corbyn was comparatively more extreme and anti-Western in his rhetoric and foreign policy — suggests it could be fatal.

More:

Watching Sanders in the South Carolina debate, he became aggressive, shouty, and angry. His visceral hatred of actual billionaires like Mike Bloomberg — and not just the system that creates billionaires — was striking to me. He’s all but incapable of nuance. I remember my own interaction with him on the Bill Maher show, where I begged him to consider at least that there might be a middle ground between clobbering the pharmaceutical companies’ profits and encouraging research and development in the private sector. He wouldn’t. The profit motive in health care was evil, even if it had saved and extended countless lives.

And:

Corbyn was also crippled by cultural issues. Labour supported — or refused to oppose — the same mass immigration policies that had been rejected in the Brexit referendum. Upscale, pro-E.U. liberal urbanites therefore came more fully into Labour’s orbit, and gave the party a distinctly globalist appearance, even as socially conservative and nationalist members of the working class fled to the right. Corbyn tried to stop this realignment, or arrest it a little, but couldn’t. He had once been a classic old-school, left-wing immigration skeptic, just like Sanders. Yet he ran for office on a platform of relitigating the Brexit issue, toying with a second referendum, and demonizing hostility to mass immigration as a function of racism. For many white working-class voters, this was disqualifying.

And this is uncannily similar to Bernie’s trajectory. Sanders was, until quite recently, against open borders — “a Koch brothers’ proposal” — and an advocate of controlling immigration to strengthen wages for domestic workers. But check out his platform now: more liberal than any of the other Democratic candidates. He’s in favor of decriminalizing border crossing, a moratorium on all deportations, no more spending on the border wall, the abolition of ICE, federal health benefits for illegal immigrants, and no mandatory E-Verify. It’s a Koch brothers’ agenda — just woker — and all but an invitation for a new surge in illegal newcomers.

Read it all. I keep hearing from Bernie supporters that he cares more about class issues than about woke stuff. As I said yesterday, you vote for Bernie, you get all the woke stuff. He doesn’t care about class instead of wokeness; for him, it’s a matter of emphasis. And as Sully points out, he flip-flopped on immigration, abandoning the stance that would have strengthened the working class’s position in the country he wants to lead, in favor of the proposal that pleases the woke, including woke capitalists.

I also keep hearing that nobody cares about the Cold War anymore, and Bernie’s crackpot lefty activism back then doesn’t matter. Read this 2016 piece by Michael Moynihan to know just how far out Bernie was. If you dwell in a campus bubble, or are under the age of 40, you may not see why this stuff rattles us older folks. You need to think about this. Excerpt:

In the 1980s, any Bernie Sanders event or interview inevitably wended toward a denunciation of Washington’s Central America policy, typically punctuated with a full-throated defense of the dictatorship in Nicaragua. As one sympathetic biographer wrote in 1991, Sanders “probably has done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support the Sandinistas and their revolution.” Reflecting on a Potemkin tour of revolutionary Nicaragua he took in 1985, Sanders marveled that he was, “believe it or not, the highest ranking American official” to attend a parade celebrating the Sandinista seizure of power.

It’s quite easy to believe, actually, when one wonders what elected American official would knowingly join a group of largely unelected officials of various “fraternal” Soviet dictatorships while, just a few feet away, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega bellows into a microphone that the United States is governed by a criminal band of terrorists.

None of this bothered Sanders, though, because he largely shared Ortega’s worldview. While opposition to Reagan’s policy in Central America—including indefensible decisions like the mining of Managua harbor—was common amongst mainstream Democrats, it was rare to find outright support for the Soviet-funded, Cuban-trained Sandinistas. Indeed, Congress’s vote to cut off administration funding of the anti-Sandinista Contra guerrillas precipitated the Iran-Contra scandal.

But despite its aversion to elections, brutal suppression of dissent, hideous mistreatment of indigenous Nicaraguans, and rejection of basic democratic norms, Sanders thought Managua’s Marxist-Leninist clique had much to teach Burlington: “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”

The lesson Sanders saw in Nicaragua could have been plagiarized from an editorial in Barricada, the oafish Sandinista propaganda organ. “Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of the corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.”

But Sanders was mistaking aspirational Sandinista propaganda for quantifiable Sandinista achievement. None of it was true, but it overlaid nicely on top of his own political views. Sanders’s almost evangelical belief in “the revolution” led him from extreme credulity to occasional fits of extreme paranoia.

I love Moynihan’s questions:

If CNN can ambush Sanders by reaching back to 1974 and his not-entirely-unreasonable criticism of the CIA, perhaps another enterprising television journalist will ask the candidate-of-consistency one of the following questions:

— Do you think that American foreign policy gives people cancer?

— Do you think a state of war—be it against the Vietnamese communists, Nicaraguan anti-communists, or al Qaeda’s Islamists—justifies the curtailment of press freedoms?

— Do you stand by your qualified-but-fulsome praise of the totalitarian regime in Cuba? Do you stand by your unqualified-and-fulsome praise of the totalitarian Sandinista regime in Nicaragua?

— Do you believe that bread lines are a sign of economic health?

— Do you think the Reagan administration was engaged in the funding and commissioning of terrorism?

A weird palette of questions, sure, but when Sanders was mayor of Burlington, he answered “yes” to all of them.

Read it all. There is a lot more. The main reason this matters today is that Bernie has not repented of any of this today. When he’s asked about it, he waffles unconvincingly (as Moynihan noted in 2016), and changes the subject. I honestly don’t think he could withstand being grilled on it by a journalist who pressed him. He just gets ranty. There is a reason that Trump wants to run against Sanders, and Sanders’s solid record of left-wing extremism is at the core of it. The Democrats may not want to run on a replay of the Cold War, but that’s what the Republicans are going to make them do if Sanders is the nominee. I have seen nothing so far from Sanders to make me think that he knows how to handle effectively these questions about his past — and what the answers say about America’s future under a Sanderista government.

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The Benedict Option In Europe

In Rome recently, I did an interview with Solène Tadié of National Catholic Register. It has appeared on their website now. Excerpts:

Is there any specific European country or group that can be a leading force for the West?

As someone who grew up at the time of John Paul II, I always thought of Poland as a fortress of faith. When I went there last year for the first time, I was shocked to hear from young Catholics that still go to Mass. They feel that Poland is maybe 10 or 20 years away from becoming Ireland. They fear that Catholicism has become mostly cultural. I don’t know if it is true, but this concern is very real there.

I have not found in my travels a lot of reasons to hope very broadly for the Church because we are all in crisis. But when I meet these small communities of young Catholics who really see through the fog to the reality of our situation and want to find ways to live by the truths they were taught by the Church, their families and traditions, it is a beautiful thing.

I cannot say that one country has it better than the other, but I have seen in Eastern countries of Europe like Poland or Slovakia a very strong sense of what we are losing, especially because they do have a memory of what it was like under communism and what the communists tried to take from them.

One thing I find, too, is the sense that we have to form networks across national boundaries. It has been a great pleasure of mine since I’ve been starting the “Benedict Option” project to connect with Christians in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Eastern Europe so they can know each other. We need to know each other because we don’t know how important it will be in the future to know where your friends are. One thing I’ve learned from talking to the Christians who suffered from communism is how bad it can get very quickly. I keep talking about soft-totalitarianism, but the people I speak to, who grew up under communism, tell me, “Stop saying ‘soft’; what is happening is getting very hard.” So, maybe I am not alarmist enough, but we’ll see.

We must reject strongly the attacks that we are receiving, but one important thing is that we can’t say what we are against without saying what we are for. The first time I went to Subiaco, I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of what the Lord did for St. Benedict; and one reason why I am a Christian today is because of what happened in that cave in the sixth century. It is part of the essence of Roman and European civilization. If we don’t love it and defend it, it is like betraying your own father.

You left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy years ago, and yet your highest model for rebuilding our civilization is St. Benedict of Norcia and his new Catholic disciples of today. How do you explain that?

I am an Orthodox Christian. And St. Benedict is an Orthodox saint, also. All these saints were part of the Church before the [Great] Schism. But even if I were a Protestant, I would look the same to Benedict, because he is a spiritual father of all of us who believe in Jesus Christ. Even Protestants could look to what he did and why he did it as a source of hope and inspiration. As someone who loves the Catholic Church, and I am grateful to what it gave to me, and who especially loves Joseph Ratzinger, I want to try to build bridges among the Churches. I believe that today we need to build solidarity in the face of the coming oppression. I don’t believe in false ecumenism: I want Catholics to be Catholics, Orthodox to be Orthodox; but I also realize that we have a common interest in the brotherhood that creates bonds between these — bonds of love, fidelity and duty. We have to speak up for each other. If persecutors come for the Catholics or the Protestants or the Orthodox, we must stand up for them, because, ultimately, these persecutors will come for us.

What prevents you from coming back to the Catholic Church?

I don’t believe anymore in the claims of Catholicism and its authority. But I have to say that to look at what happened in the Catholic Church under Pope Francis is very concerning for me: the Amazon synod, for example, and the presence of pachamama. I saw this and I thought it was a sign of such a profound spiritual disorder. I have a lot of very good Catholic friends, and I pray for them so that they can resist that sort of thing within the Church. When I became a Catholic in 1993, the Church looked very different. It was under Pope John Paul II; and when I left in 2006, Pope Benedict was in charge, and it still looked like a solid rock. It is not the case anymore.

I didn’t go the Orthodox Church because I thought it has no scandals. We have these problems in every church. But the mistake I made as a Catholic was to make an idol of the institutional Church itself. I was so intellectually arrogant; and that is not the Catholic Church’s fault — it is mine. That left myself quite vulnerable. I started reporting on the sexual scandals when I was a columnist at the New York Post in 2001. I thought I had prepared myself for this by having the right arguments in my head. However, this wasn’t about arguments, but about facing real evil. If I had prepared myself spiritually more, through prayer, more devotion, I might have had the strength to resist it. I tell every Christian that if they think that just because they have the arguments straight in their head, they’ll understand anything, they’re wrong. They need to pray more in their body.

Read the whole thing. I really enjoyed talking to Solène, who is a great interviewer.

I wish I had been more precise in my ecumenical remarks. In truth, I desire that all Christians would be united in the Orthodox Church. I don’t expect that to happen, though, and in any case don’t consider it my calling to make that happen. I wanted to express that I see my calling not as proselytizing for Orthodoxy, but rather to build bridges among all small-o orthodox Christians. Please don’t read my words as indifference to one’s Christian confession. That’s not what I mean.

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Church In The Time Of Coronavirus

A reader sends along these instructions that an Orthodox parish in Michigan is sharing with its people:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

It is rather clear now that the novel Corona Virus, which seems to have first infected humans in China last month, will spread throughout the world. That includes us sinners here.

First: the absolutely worst thing we can do us panic. We are Orthodox Christians. We understand that some day we will die. This virus is unlikely to be the cause of that. We must pray for those who are suffering. We must pray for our civil leaders. We must pray that the Lord grant us peace even in unpeaceful times. The Lord will not leave us in such a situation. In fact He will be closer to us than ever.

Second: We urge our parishioners to follow the advice of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and to ignore uneducated conspiracy theories on the internet, which abound now. There are some good things on the internet of course, but also lots of junk. The key web site at the CDC for this information is here:

CDC Coronavirus Site

Remember – panic is the greatest enemy. Is it a pandemic? To be quite honest it does not matter whether it is called a pandemic, an epidemic, an outbreak, or something else. Calling it a pandemic does not make the virus stronger. The news media, for whatever reason, seems hellbent on causing widespread panic in the population about this. Do not fall to to this temptation. It is a virus. The same virus family that causes the common cold, SARS, and MERS. Those at greatest danger are the very young, the very old, and those with compromised immune systems – exactly the same group that is at greatest risk for the annual flu.

Wash your hands, cover your cough, seek medical help if you are sick and stay away from others if you are sick.

Third: A quarantine seems not unlikely. There was a quarantine in Italy when the virus emerged there and their health care system is similar to ours. This is not a cause for panic, but rather a cause for preparation. It would be prudent to have adequate food and medicines on hand for 30 days (the quarantine for this virus has generally been 14 days) just in case. Stock up on non-perishable food items and medicines that you need, including over the counter medications. Try to get a 90 day supply of crucial prescriptions like blood pressure medications if you need those. Now is the time to prepare for a potential quarantine. Perhaps it will not happen. In that case you have a little extra food and medicine. Perhaps it will. In that case you are prepared.

Will we cancel services? We might — if the CDC recommends this. But that would only happen if a quarantine is declared in our area. It could happen — but it probably won’t.

Should you wear a mask to services? That is up to you. We would not mandate that unless the CDC recommends we do that.

Will there be other things that effect how we worship in public during this time? There might be, but we will follow the advice of the experts and get the bishop’s blessing before we do anything.

DO NOT PANIC! Do not be pulled in by the apoplectic media screaming heads. Pray. Ask the Lord to give us all what is best for our salvation. Such things do not happen without the opportunity for spiritual growth and we should take that opportunity! It seems unlikely that the arrival of the virus and the beginning of Great Lent are completely spiritually unrelated. Let us redouble our efforts to draw nearer to the Lord at this time of year as we prepare ourselves for the feast of feasts and the day of days: the Pascha of the Lord!

If you need ANYTHING and you can’t get someone to help you call one of us. Clergy have always served the people zealously during such outbreaks — God willing we will do the same.

The Orthodox Church in South Korea, where things are worse, is handling things like this:

Apart from the special prayer, which we have already started offering in our everyday Church Services, and by which we ask the Lord for the victims of the Coronavirus, for their loved ones, and for the protection of all people from this great danger, we have also decided to take certain safety measures, in accordance with the instructions of the Ministry of Health of our country.

For this reason, we urge all believers to follow the following instructions until the problem ends:

1. During the Divine Liturgy all believers will wear masks.

2. Before entering the Church, they will disinfect their hands with a disinfectant present at the entrance of the Church.

3. They will not shake hands with anyone.

4. They will not kiss the hand of the Clergy.

5. They will not kiss the Icons, but they will bow before them.

6. They will not use the liturgical books at the time of prayer.

7. They will not receive the Antidoron from the Clergy, but on their own as they leave the church.

8. The Agape Meal will not be served following the Sunday Liturgy.

9. The various group meetings of the Faithful as well as the Catechumens will not take place.

Hoping soon to overcome this crisis in our country and at a global level, let us pray in a humble spirit and repentant heart to our Philanthropic Lord to show His mercy and free us from this grave problem.

What is your church doing, and saying? Some of us in our parish are working to put together a fund so those who have greater resources can help parishioners who are more cash-strapped buy medications and supplies.

Let’s make this a thread where we share good ideas!

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Pink Bernie’s Radical Chic

You see this? You should see this:

“…we need a powerful socialist movement to end all capitalist oppression and exploitation.”

– Radical Socialist & #BernieSanders surrogate, Kshama Sawant#BernieBruh #yikes

Doctor: ‘It Has Begun’

This morning’s letter from the Doctor:

Rod — I wanted to give you an update this AM — so much has happened in the past 2 days.

It has begun. On so many different fronts.

My wife and I were watching her Mandarin TV station news this AM. This was the feed from Beijing — their vision of the Today Show. The leading story was a five-minute discussion of the fact that the world is now looking at the USA and its response to the virus — and it is clearly being bungled. After weeks of snickering at China, he world is now having a belly laugh at the way the USA is handling the situation. The Chinese people have sacrificed greatly for the whole world to have a month or two to prepare – and this is the way the USA has decided to use their time — and by the way, they have not even tested 500 people. It is very clear to us that they are lying about their numbers.

You will have to forgive me — they are meaning this to be propaganda — but I cannot find a lot that is untrue in these statements.

The concern, worry, and anxiety being expressed by my patients is becoming stronger by the day. Unsolicited, the patients are starting off every visit with “What do you think?” or “What should I do?”.

The feast of consequences we have created with our profoundly dysfunctional health care system is about to be served.

First off, this could not have happened at a worse time of the year for most patients with our now ubiquitous high deductible plans. Until the first $10,000 are met, everything is done out of pocket. So instead of going to the ER and the URGENT CARE centers across America where they will likely have to pay at least $1000 for a visit, patients with very concerning symptoms are going to either stay at home and continue to work, or flood their primary care doctor’s office because it is much less expensive. The ER and URGENT CARE are much more likely to be equipped to handle this situation, with negative pressure rooms and appropriate gear. Local doctors’ offices are not and never will be able to handle this kind of load with this kind of danger. Not a thing is being done about this at any level in our “preparations”.

I am in a primary care office. And this has already begun. We are already in the middle of a very nasty flu year. My office is full of people coughing and hacking. There were three patients of particular concern already this week; two have been shown to have the flu; the other one is very very concerning — and demonstrates the complete and total failure of our public health systems to be prepared.

It is a young twentysomething business professional. They have spent the past three weeks in one of the places outside of China that has been in the news lately. In fact — the very city. Their job requires multiple meetings, and people people people all day. The trip home went through two international airport hubs, and then two of our major hub airports.

About half way through the trip, the patient became febrile, and began having a cough. All during the way there were close quarters with other passengers in the plane and in the concourse, and multiple kiosk experiences getting boarding passes and luggage claim. A trip through security being forced to remove sweaty socks, coughing and hacking the whole time.

The flu test was negative. I then contacted our local public health office, and was told that I needed to contact the CDC. The first person on the phone had trouble spelling the state in which I was located, and could not get the information correctly in the computer. After several minutes of this, I was finally connected to a “specialist”. I was asked if the patient had been to Wuhan or if they had been in contact with anyone from Wuhan. I then told her the story, and my concern about this person being in the city that had been in the news the past week.

“Well, sir, they do not meet the criteria for testing, so we will not be able to do it.” I got a bit hostile. “Wuhan is last month’s news! This is a real problem — I have this young person’s life in my hands! You have got to be kidding me….”

“Sir, I will not be talked to like that. I will now end this call.” Click.

Our public health system — once the envy of the world — reduced to a customer service transaction. The consequences will soon be enormous.

The patient is about the same — still having fevers. I do not know what they have. But I told them it was their civic duty to go home and remain home. Self-imposed quarantine — and they are doing it. We have community help to make sure they are being looked after.

If you think it is just me, I would urge you to read the story coming out about our first patient with no known exposure risk. It is just stunning — from the UC Davis medical school.

(https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/sta...)

They basically had the same response from the CDC.

And please note also: this [California] patient does not have a head cold or a little flu — this patient is on a ventilator and fighting for their life. I wonder how many ventilators are in the city of Sacramento, and what will happen if more and more and more people start coming in this ill?

And I am hearing a lot about vaccines. Vaccines are not going to save us. They are years down the road — and any confidence I had in our HHS Secretary Mr. Azar (experience for the job: he’s a former big pharma lobbyist) is now completely gone – Please look at this tweet –

Azar refuses to promise a coronavirus vaccine will be affordable for anyone:

“We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price, because we need the private sector to invest.. Price controls won’t get us there.”

— Michael McAuliff (@mmcauliff) February 26, 2020

Here's the clip of Azar not assuring Rep. Schakowsky a covid-19 vaccine will be affordable to all. pic.twitter.com/Z8aNd4wLWj

— Michael McAuliff (@mmcauliff) February 26, 2020

;

“We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price, because we need the private sector to invest.. Price controls won’t get us there.”

So, the message is the vaccine will be priced at whatever they want, if only the 10% or up can afford it, too bad. We are not about public health — it is all profits, profits and more profits.

I would remind everyone that in a previous pandemic — that of polio — Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine. He could have been wealthy beyond the dreams of Mammon. But what did he do? He donated the vaccine to the world.

What is wrong with us? What has happened to this Republic?

Again: the feast of consequences is on the way.

I am certain the fire that is about to rain down will take us all by surprise.

We did once have leaders who stood in the breach with the people in some of the darkest days of this Republic. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and in the absolute darkest days of WWII – “Everything we have and everything we are is at stake – everything we have and everything we are shall be given.”

What do we have now? Stock market tips, and oh this is just a flu, it will blow over.

I pray to God every day for this country. May he have mercy upon us.

It is hard to imagine a better issue for a democratic socialist running for president than a Big Pharma executive Trump put in charge of the health ministry saying that he won’t guarantee that a vaccine for the pandemic about to hit America will be affordable to people, because the Free Market.

UPDATE: The idiocy of these people!

This NYT column is not only brainless, it's a menace. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize Trump for his handling of the crisis. But this is as stupid as anything Limbaugh has said. We should not be politicizing this pandemic! pic.twitter.com/O8x41TVtsE

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) February 27, 2020

UPDATE.2: Associated Press with an important piece of news:

Democratic presidential contenders are describing the federal infectious-disease bureaucracy as rudderless and ill-prepared for the coronavirus threat because of budget cuts and ham-handed leadership by President Donald Trump. That’s a distorted picture. For starters, Trump hasn’t succeeded in cutting the budget.

He’s proposed cuts but Congress ignored him and increased financing instead. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect.

The post Doctor: ‘It Has Begun’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Surprising Christian ‘Dominion’

I hate long drives, but the one redeeming aspect of them is that I get to do something I never do otherwise: listen to audiobooks. Driving to and from Dallas is a 16-hours-plus trip from Baton Rouge. I made it with my wife and kids this past weekend, for a wedding. On my son Matt’s recommendation, I listened to historian Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade The World.

Before I say anything about the book, I want to recommend a cool piece of technology. It’s illegal to drive with standard earbuds in, so Matt let me borrow his bone-conduction headphones, by Aftershokz. They work by sending the sound into your aural canal through your bones. You can hear the audio with perfect clarity, even though your aural canals are open, allowing you to hear traffic sounds, and sounds in the car. An amazing device. I wouldn’t buy a pair for myself, because I’m usually driving alone, and use the car’s sound system. But on this trip, when I wanted to listen to the audiobook while everybody else in the car had other plans, they were terrific.

Now, the book. It’s Holland’s account of how Christianity revolutionized Western culture, and the world. Back in 2016, Holland, whose work focuses on ancient Greece and Rome, wrote an op-ed for New Statesman talking about how he had changed his mind about Christianity. Excerpts:

By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity was founded on the dusting down of long-forgotten classical values. My childhood instinct to think of the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted puritans who had served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,” Swinburne wrote, echoing the apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. “The world has grown grey from thy breath.” Instinctively, I agreed.

More:

The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

“Every sensible man,” Voltaire wrote, “every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.” Rather than acknowledge that his ethical principles might owe anything to Christianity, he preferred to derive them from a range of other sources – not just classical literature, but Chinese philosophy and his own powers of reason. Yet Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and ­oppressed, was marked more enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit. His defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least, recognisably Christian.

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Read it all. Holland concludes by concluding that “in my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.”

Dominion is his book-length explanation of why.

I’ve never read a Tom Holland book, but now I’m eager to read them all. He is a fantastic storyteller. History is my favorite thing to read, but rarely does one find a historian who makes history as vivid as Holland does. And what a story he has to tell! Mind you, it’s a long audiobook, and after all that driving, I had only made it up to the late Middle Ages, so I can’t tell you anything about how he handles the last 800 years of Christianity. But Matthew Rose’s rave review in First Things is entirely consonant with my take on the book. Excerpts:

When did the world become modern? Holland gives an arresting answer. Modernity began with the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Today, we view human beings as individuals defined by their abilities to reason and to choose, capacities that endow them with moral equality. Holland tells us there was nothing natural or inevitable about this perspective; it is the result of a metaphysical earthquake, two millennia ago, that slowly altered our perception of human life. The idea that God died on an instrument of torture, that the Eternal could be revealed through humility and suffering, did not change human history overnight. But it suggested the possibility, dimly understood at first, that the world might be utterly different than it had seemed to be. Perhaps it is not the victors but the victims who are closest to the divine.

The central character in Holland’s story is St. Paul, whose genius was to see that the God revealed in Christ turned the world upside down. Paul questioned what pagan antiquity had serenely assumed: that the strong are fated to exploit the weak, that we have no obligations to strangers, and that our identities are determined by our social status. His vision of a community of believers, drawn from all nations and lands, was disruptive. Paul discovered a ground of human identity, and a depth of motivation, that no pagan thinker could fathom. Human beings are individuals, equal before God, called to act out of love. Paul proclaimed an ethics of universal agape, Holland claims, though he failed to follow through its subversive logic. When confronted by entrenched ideas about gender, sex, and authority, he compromised, counseling wives to submit to their husbands and slaves to obey their masters.

None of this is news to me, exactly, but I was startled by how much of this I had forgotten, simply because the story is so familiar. It took a non-believer to reawaken me to how stupendously radical Christianity was in its advent. We tend to think that people in Greco-Roman times were pretty much as they are today, but with Doric columns, togas, and hippodromes. Holland details the cruelty — especially the sexual cruelty — of classical culture, and explains how it cannot be separated from the things we admire about that culture. Christianity was an anthropological revolution, one that toppled a view of the human person that hallowed the strong, and condemned the weak to exploitation, slavery, even — in the case of unwanted infants — death by exposure.

Again, none of this should be news to anybody with a more than slight familiarity with the Classical age, but Holland’s rich, evocative way of telling this story makes the moral drama come alive. You are standing there with St. Macrina, the sister of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa, when she takes in more castoff baby girls to raise. It doesn’t take long before you realize that yes, just about everything we find admirable in human behavior, regarding compassion to the weak, comes to us through Christianity, whether we believe in Jesus or not. To put it another way, if the world of the distant past had never believed in Jesus, the Jewish sage who was the Son of the Most High, the world today would be a far darker and meaner place.

Which brings us to a question: what will become of the world that has ceased to believe in Jesus? Holland has a pro-Christian secular liberal’s view of the matter, as Father Stephen De Young, an Eastern Orthodox priest who also likes the book, avers. Father De Young writes:

Nietzsche had a profound understanding of the nature of Christian teaching and the way in which it had completely upended the preceding worldview of the classical world.  He understood it and he hated it.  He further foresaw the consequences that would come when Western culture finally decided to divest itself of Christian moral teaching and the worldview whose underpinnings it had already rejected at an intellectual level.  These consequences were reaped in blood throughout the twentieth century and, should de-Christianization prove successful in the future, they can only continue and intensify.

The truth, however, as Holland shows, is that the de-Christianizers have not been that successful at all.  Atheists attack the Scriptures and Christian history as immoral when compared to the standards of Christian morality.  They do not do this to undermine the consistency of the Christian worldview from the outside but rather because they still share that morality which found its origins in Christian teaching.

Holland’s point is that Christianity has so transformed Western man that even atheists are Christian atheists, in that they want to keep the moral teachings of Christianity regarding compassion for the weak, without the metaphysics or the un-fun rules on sexual behavior. I haven’t yet finished the book, but Rose and other reviewers indicate that Holland affirms that one can be a Christian by living according to the Christian way of compassion, without professing Christ. It sounds like he’s a Social Gospel liberal. I don’t say that in a pejorative sense, but simply a descriptive one. He cherishes Christianity — he really does; no one writes a book like this without loving his subject — for what it did for society. But that’s as far as it goes.

Which brings us back to Nietzsche. I’m returning to Matthew Rose’s review here:

I wish that Holland could tell us when Christian self-criticism becomes self-destructive. For if he cannot, others will. Nietzsche looms in the background of Dominion. Holland comes close to saying that Nietzsche was right about Christianity’s influence on Europe, but wrong to reject that influence as dehumanizing. Nietzsche loathed Christianity for the same reasons Holland admires it. Christianity made us tender and empathetic and shifted the burden of proof against the aristocratic sentiment that tolerates cruelties and inequities. In doing so, it gave us bad consciences, wounding our self-love and pride. Nietzsche mocked Europeans for clinging to Christian values once they had drifted from Christian faith. Holland’s response is that Nietzsche was mistaken to distinguish them. To be a Christian is to keep faith with its vision of love and equality, which in the end requires shedding the dead husks of dogma and the Church’s exclusive claim to salvation.

Rose says that Holland “evades a difficult question.

He suggests that the influence of Christianity is so pervasive as to be no longer a matter of individual belief. Christianity has become a pattern of deeply ingrained social practices, the way we experience and belong to a social group. One can be a Christian without knowing it, even while insisting otherwise. But the problem is obvious: Almost none of the Christian heroes of his story believed this. In fact, his book suggests that the opposite is true. If these men and women are any indication, the moral influence of Christianity requires radical believers who seek first of all communion with Christ, not ethical-political outcomes.

It seems to me that Holland is celebrating the light and the warmth that comes from the embers of a dying bonfire.

Reading Rose’s and De Young’s reviews, I couldn’t help thinking about some of the late writings of Rene Girard, who said that Christianity so transformed the world (in the sense that Holland illuminates) that that transformed world is now turning on the source of its transformation.

Girard wrote that “we hear repeated in every way that we no longer have an absolute,” but in fact the concern for victims “is our absolute.” That is, it is the basis for our morality: “it is the concern for victims that determines what is most important.” This is the case because all other sources of absolute value have been lost. More:

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition. … We are living through a caricatural “ultra-Christianity” that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by “radicalizing” the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner. … The intellectuals and other cultural elites have promoted Christianity to the role of number one scapegoat.

Girard says we are at the advent of what he calls “the other totalitarianism,” saying that it is

the most cunning and malicious of the two, the one with the greatest future, by all evidence. At present it does not oppose Judeo-Christian aspirations but claims them as its own and questions the concern for victims on the part of Christians (not without a certain semblance of reason at the level of concrete action, given the deficiencies of historical Christianity). The other totalitarianism does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing.

This is the force of what in the Christian tradition is called Antichrist. You don’t have to believe in a literal Antichrist figure to grasp what Girard is saying here. Girard points out that in the symbolic language of the New Testament, Antichrist opposes Christ by imitating him and seeking to be better than him. More:

The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.

Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived s complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious. Since the Christian denominations have become only tardily aware of their failings in charity, their connivance with established political orders in the past and present world that are always “sacrificial,” they are particularly vulnerable to the ongoing blackmail of contemporary neo-paganism.

Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, who prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.

I would love for Tom Holland to essay on Rene Girard, and Nietzsche, in light of his thesis. I don’t know what he would say, but whatever a historian as gifted and imaginative as Holland writes is bound to be worth reading. I hope you will buy Dominion. Whether you are a devout Christian, a lapsed Christian, or a non-believer interested in cultural history, Tom Holland’s book is essential reading to understand who we in the West were, who we are, and who we might yet become.

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Trumpworld Vs. Coronavirus

This is a thing that actually happened:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh seemed to bash a top official from the Centers for Disease Control by insinuating she’s among those who are trying to overhype fears of the coronavirus and bring down President Donald Trump.

After claiming that the virus was “weaponized” by the Chinese and that the media is “gleeful” that this will be a new problem for Trump, Limbaugh turned his attention on Tuesday to a recent announcement from Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Messonier warned that the coronavirus pandemic will inevitably spread to the United States, which prompted Limbaugh to focus on the fact that Messonnier is the sister of former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.

This is what he said. Quote:

So you’ve got here the CDC urging Americans to prepare for a coronavirus virus outbreak. ‘This might be bad, could be bad. Keep your kids at home. Don’t go anywhere. It might be bad. We’ve got 53 cases. It might be bad. It could be! The stock market’s plunging.’ Okay. This person running this agency, who does she donate to? Well, her brother is Rod Rosenstein.

He’s not only an idiot, he’s a public menace.

Meanwhile, I think Megan McArdle has some good advice for the president:

This is just an idea, but maybe our president could focus on getting the government ready for the emerging pandemic rather than trash talking news organizations he considers insufficiently obsequious? https://t.co/61nb6EQHqi

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) February 26, 2020

At the news conference Trump is having as I write this, he said “we’re very, very ready for this.” On that subject, I put about as much stock in his word as I do in Xi Jinping’s.

I saw today this January 31 piece by Laurie Garrett in Foreign Policy. She’s probably the foremost science journalist writing about pandemics. The piece is three weeks old, but it’s pretty shocking:

The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, “What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?”

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is.

More:

But much of the United States is less fortunate on the local level, struggling with underfunded agencies, understaffing, and no genuine epidemic experience. Large and small, America’s localities rely in times of public health crisis on the federal government.

Bureaucracy matters. Without it, there’s nothing to coherently manage an alphabet soup of agencies housed in departments ranging from Defense to Commerce, Homeland Security to Health and Human Services (HHS).

But that’s all gone now.

And:

In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.

Read it all.

I’m genuinely shocked. With the pandemic coming, now is not the time for the Democrats to turn on Trump. But when this is over, if it has been bad, and if all these allegations from Garrett prove to have been accurate, then Trump will deserve everything they throw at him.

Trumpworld cannot be so stupid as to stay on the “media conspiracy” story while all this is going on, can it?

Meanwhile, Sen. Josh Hawley is taking sensible action:

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) announced on Tuesday that he will introduce a bill that would diversify the U.S. medical supply chain in order to reduce reliance on Chinese products.

“If the Coronavirus crisis makes anything clear, it’s that we need to stop relying on China for our critical medical supply chains,” Hawley wrote on Twitter. “I will introduce legislation this week to jump start that effort.”

On Monday, Hawley sent a letter to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn asking how the agency plans to deal with a potential medical supply shortage caused by the onset of the coronavirus in China.

“The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus has threatened the domestic supply of some 150 prescription drugs, including antibiotics, generics, and branded drugs. Some of these drugs do not have alternatives on the market,” Hawley wrote in the letter. “The degree to which some of our own manufacturers rely on China to produce life-saving and life-sustaining medications is inexcusable.”

Ah, so the Trump presser is over. A reader texted me to say, correctly, that he sure hopes Trump is right to downplay the severity of this thing, “otherwise, he’s going to be Baghdad Bob in November.” It’s a difficult position to be in, to be POTUS at a time like this. You don’t want to panic people, or the markets. But you also want to be responsible. I wish Trump gave us reason to believe that he and his administration had this well in hand. If he were a different man, and had governed in a different way, I would praise this performance as cool and reassuring. I guess we’ll soon see.

UPDATE: You’re not going to believe the back story behind the first patient with “community-spread” coronavirus, whose existence was announced today. The patient is at the UC Davis hospital:

The UC Davis memo explains the delay in testing in testing by noting that neither Sacramento County nor the city of Davis’ public health agency performs the test. The hospital had to request the CDC do it. “Since the patient did not fit the existing diagnostic criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered,” the memo says. On Sunday the CDC did the test and UC Davis put the patient on more stringent airborne and contact infection control precautions. “Today the CDC confirmed the patient’s test was positive.”

The UC Davis memo also confirms that the hospital has treated other patients infected with Covid-19 and said that the precautions it had taken with the patient all along probably meant “minimal potential for exposure.” Nevertheless, “out of an abundance of caution, in order to assure the health and safety of our employees, we are asking a small number of employees to stay home and monitor their temperature.”

They asked CDC to test this guy, but because he hadn’t traveled to China, the CDC didn’t do it. For seven days, this infected person has been in the hospital, and they didn’t know he had coronavirus, because the CDC declined the initial testing request. This virus has been raging in China for weeks now, and this is how our government reacted!

I have a feeling that we’ll be talking about this at President Sanders’s inauguration.

 

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The Danger Of Christian False Nostalgia

Driving around Dallas this past weekend, I saw a couple of electronic billboards advertising this upcoming event. It must be like the time in 2017 that Dr. Jeffress, instead of preaching a sermon, interviewed Sean Hannity on stage during the church service.

Can you imagine this guy in Dallas whose wife has kicked him out because he won’t stop drinking, who’s deeply in debt, who decides that he’s hit bottom, and needs to know God. He turns up at one of the most famous churches in the city looking for the word of life, and gets … an interview with a Trumpworld celebrity.

It’s interesting that in the online bio the church prepared for her, there’s a lot in there about her political and professional accomplishments, but nothing in there about her beliefs or relationship with God.

Truly, I don’t get this — and wouldn’t get it if it were a liberal church inviting some liberal political figure to spend an hour being softballed on stage in lieu of a sermon.

Along these lines, here’s an op-ed by the liberal Episcopalian historian and journalist Jon Meacham, on why (as the headline has it): “why religion is the best hope against Trump.” Excerpts:

For many Americans, especially non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality is a useful guide to much of anything these days is risible, particularly since so many evangelicals have thrown in their lot with a relentlessly solipsistic American president who bullies, boasts and sneers. The political hero of the Christian right of 2020 has used the National Prayer Breakfast to mock the New Testament injunction to love one’s enemies, and it’s clear that leading conservative Christian voices are putting the Supreme Court ahead of the Sermon on the Mount.

And yet history suggests that religiously inspired activism may hold the best hope for those in resistance to the prevailing Trumpian order.

He goes on to talk about how Christianity inspired the Civil Rights movement, which is true. And then:

This was the vision that brought America to account in the mid-1960s — which was, historically speaking, the day before yesterday. It was a religious vision. One need not profess faith in traditional terms to share it, of course; no sect, no nation, has a monopoly on virtue. And as the fourth-century Roman writer Symmachus noted in arguing against Christians who wanted to remove an altar to the pagan deity Victory, “We cannot attain to so great a mystery by one way.”

I agree. …

Is that not the most liberal Protestant thing ever? Christianity inspired the greatest moral victory in American history: the defeat of racist white people. But if folks want to pray to pagan gods at pagan altars, hey, that’s cool too. 

Jon Meacham spoke earlier this month at a conference I attended. I had given a speech the day before, on the Benedict Option. His speech was not clearly in opposition to the Benedict Option — he hadn’t heard my talk — though it seemed to me that he was familiar with the concept, and characterized it as people who have only read about it often do: as “head for the hills” cultural nostalgia. He said in his speech, “the Enlightenment was good” — as if affirming the goodness of the Enlightenment somehow magically dispelled all the problems it has bequeathed to late modernity. And he talked at length about the Civil Rights movement, saying that he believes in “the John Lewis Option.”

After Meacham’s talk, I met him privately, and we talked for about 20 minutes. He’s a nice guy, and a smart guy with a good heart, I thought. But also, it seemed to me, deeply, profoundly liberal, and preoccupied with Trump about as much as Robert Jeffress is from the Right.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of either Jeffress or Meacham, but their politicized Christianity strikes me as wholly inadequate to the moment. For Meacham, a Gen Xer, it’s Forever Selma; for Jeffress, a Boomer, it’s always Election Night, 1980.

Jeffress once characterized the Benedict Option as “standing around in a holy huddle and hoping that nobody does you harm.” I actually met him a couple of years ago in an airport, had lunch with him, and found him to be a pretty likable guy. He had not read my book, so I explained to him that it’s really about forming Christians to live in such a way that we will be able to withstand the cultural pressures of the post-Christian world. He said that that makes sense to him. I wish Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life had been out then. That movie — about the true-life anti-Nazi martyr Franz Jägerstätter — explains better than I have been able to do what the Benedict Option is for. Franz and his family lived high in a remote Austrian Alpine village — but Nazism found their village anyway. There’s no escaping the evil of the world. But Franz, because of the way he lived out his faith in normal times, was able to see clearly the true nature of Nazism — this, when it had seduced all his churchgoing neighbors — and to find within himself the strength and courage to resist, even till the end.

The Benedict Option is about living today so that, if we have to, we will all know how to be Franz Jägerstätters tomorrow, instead of conformists.

I have no idea how the Trumpy Christianity of Jeffress’s church, First Baptist Dallas, prepares the faithful to live under the conditions that are rapidly coming into being. Jeffress grew up in First Baptist Dallas under Dr. W.A. Criswell, who celebrated Reaganism in all its forms. I once watched a 1980s British television documentary on the Religious Right, focused on First Baptist Dallas, under Criswell’s leadership. I saw it on YouTube years ago, but can’t find it now. My wife grew up in that church back then, and loved Dr. Criswell … but she said the documentary was accurate in what it reported about the culture in and around the church. The point is not that Criswell was, or Jeffress is, insincere in their faith. The point is that they were so politicized, and so given over to thinking that conservative, nationalistic Republicanism is the same thing as living a Christian life, that the people living that way left themselves vulnerable. If Antichrist comes as a nationalistic conservative Republican, how will they know what they are looking at? The Catholics of that Austrian village, according to the film, saw Hitler as a nationalist who was Making Germany Great Again, and didn’t understand why their fellow Christian opposed him.

(No, for pity’s sake, Trump is not Hitler. I’m making a point about a particular kind of blindness that conservatives, including conservative Christians, tend to have.)

I read Meacham’s kind of Christianity as a more sophisticated, liberal version of the same worldly thing. Again, I emphasize: this is not a judgment on his conscience or the sincerity of his faith, but only on its claims, in the face of the mounting cultural crisis for Christians. Meacham understandably cherishes the faithful witness of the black church during the Civil Rights movement, but like many liberals, wants to take that historical experience and use it as a template through which to interpret the entire world. It’s like trying to understand the Vietnam War through the experience of World War II. In the liberal imagination, we must always be on a Grand March towards justice. Progress! Progress toward peace, justice, and equality! Toward diversity, inclusion, and equity!

Listening to Meacham’s talk in Nashville, I wondered what he would think about the fact that the Civil Rights movement wouldn’t be possible today, in this sense: it was a thoroughly Christianized movement, led by pastors and articulated publicly in Biblical language. It worked in part because America in the 1960s was still a country that understood that language. We no longer are.

Having read Meacham this morning, I have my answer: this doesn’t bother a liberal Christian, for whom the point is Progress, as defined by secular liberalism, no matter how we get there — even if we have to pray at a pagan altar to do it. This is how the spirit of Antichrist will win over liberals.

I think Jeffress and Meacham, and Christians like them, long for the days when the line between Good and Evil was clear and simple. If only we throw out the Bad People, we’ll solve our problems. But what if the Bad People include us, and our tribe? Actually, they do. The most famous words Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ever wrote were these, from The Gulag Archipelago:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I’m not a relativist. We live in a time of great confusion, and are trying to figure out how to walk through the fog without falling off the cliff. I don’t trust the counsel of those who talk like the way forward is with Fox News At Prayer, or The New York Times At Prayer. Both sides, it seems to me, are guilty of false nostalgia — conservative Christians for the 1980s, liberal Christians for the 1960s. The world in 2020 is a very different place, with very different challenges for the faithful.  A Christianity that doesn’t grapple with the world as it is, not as it once was, or that we wish it were, is not one that is going to produce Franz Jägerstätters.

Meacham writes today:

People of faith are called — again and again and again — to return to the foot of the cross. It’s a terrifying place to stand.

Yes, and the most terrifying thing about it is the realization that you yourself crucified Him. Not them — or not only them — but also you, with your crooked heart.

Believe me, I’m not standing on my soapbox lecturing. On the way to and from Dallas this past weekend, I listened to Tom Holland’s wonderful popular history of Christianity, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Made The World. I’m going to write more about it later. Holland is a bestselling British historian who has heretofore focused on the world of antiquity. Though he’s not a religious believer, he came to understand that nearly everything he believes is morally good about today came into the world through the Christian revolution. His book talks about the utter cruelty of the Greco-Roman world, and how Christianity overturned it. He’s a fantastic storyteller, and as I heard him talk of the early church, I kept thinking about myself, and how I live, and how I see, and treat, the poor. Holland is not a Christian, but to me, his words were a call to introspection, and conversion.

As I see it, the problem with the Jeffress and the Meacham views of the world, as Christians, is that they are fundamentally political. Jeffress doesn’t seem to understand that we are living in a post-Christian world, and that conservative Evangelicalism, as it is now constituted, is not being passed on to the next generation — and cannot be voted into existence. Meacham, who is an adherent to a dying religious tradition, liberal Protestantism, doesn’t really seem to care if the world is post-Christian or not, as long as we have Progress.

Neither of these two forms of faith is going to survive what’s coming.

UPDATE: I just thought about the incredible final scene in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Most of the movie has been about Mayan headhunters chasing Jaguar Paw, a fellow Mayan, through the jungle; they want to capture him to sacrifice him to their gods. If you haven’t seen the movie, and want to see it, don’t click the link. It made me think of conservative Christians, liberal Christians, and global plague as the black swan that renders their conflict meaningless.

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