Stephen Roney's Blog, page 247

A Journal of the Plague Year

I was not an early supporter of Trump; he was almost the last guy I would have picked for the presidency within the 2016 Republican field. I would have supported him against Clinton, but not against just about any other Democratic nominee.

But America seems to have some special Providence that keeps throwing up the right man at the critical time. I thought Reagan was a mad choice too, at the time; yet he won the Cold War. Lincoln came from nowhere. Washington was an improbable hero, a lousy tactician who almost got himself killed in his first battle. U.S. Grant was an obscure shop clerk and a drunk.

I now realize Trump is the ideal man for these times. Tough, optimistic, flexible, able to bargain and make deals.

Watching him, my admiration for businessmen of the entrepreneurial class increases.

A Hasidic doctor in the New York suburbs reports almost 100% support with seven hundred patients using hydroxychliriquine, azythromycin, and zinc on the onset of symptoms. No deaths, no intubations.

This feels right on the premise that this is all from God: salvation comes from the Jews.
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Missing Mass

My portlisting pal Xerxes is mocking the Catholic Church for cancelling masses.

“My Catholic friends were told they had to attend mass every week. Even during epidemics. Because the wafer and wine, as the symbolic body and blood of the sinless Christ, could not transmit germs.”

This is a grave misunderstanding of Catholic teaching, and so perhaps must be addressed.

The wafer and wine are not, as he says, the “symbolic” body and blood of Christ. They are the actual body and blood of Christ.

Nor did Catholic doctrine ever hold that this means they cannot transmit germs. That would be like saying they cannot get dirty if dropped on the floor. Great pains are traditionally taken to prevent just this.

If a virus can adhere to ordinary bread, it can adhere to the consecrated host. All the “accidents” of bread and wine remain. That means that they still weigh what they did, look as they did, and act as they did. If you drink enough communion wine, you will indeed get drunk.

Does Xerxes want to argue that God would never allow anyone to die as a result of taking communion? That makes no sense; God allows us all to die, good people as well as bad, and no matter how many times you have taken communion.

As to Xerxes’s point, that masses were not cancelled during previous plagues: this is because medical science did not know about germs until about the middle of the 19th century. Before then, the dominant assumption was that infectious diseases were spread by bad smells: the miasma theory.

On this understanding, a church full of incense should be about the safest place to be. Now we know better.

I have no sympathy with those who complain that the Church has abandoned them by shutting the doors. You could as justly complain that the church abandoned us all years ago by closing its doors when masses were not scheduled, preventing us from going in to pray at will. It was, and is, a practical necessity. This falls under the principle that “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.” Going to church and assuming it is God’s duty to protect you from the usual laws of nature is necromancy. It is claiming authority over God.

And, of course, God is everywhere. He is with the hermit in his cell. He is with the imprisoned martyr. He was with the persecuted church in Korea that had no priests for thirty years. We have our choice of online masses on the Internet every day.


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The Death of Comic Books

Left to right: Snowflake, Safespace, Screentime, Trailblazer, and B-Negative.
Marvel Comics has released a series supposed to be hep and with-it for the youngsters of Generation Z, “The New Warriors,” showcasing heroes named “Screentime,” “Safespace,” and “Snowflake.” The brainchild of a writer named Daniel Kibblesmith.

This looks like the end of Marvel Comics; perhaps of comics generally. If not the world.

I was, in my younger days, a fierce devotee of Marvel Comics, back in the Silver Age. Like everyone else, I’ve also enjoyed the recent movies, for the most part, with my own kids.

I do not love the movies so much as I did the comics, and I have not followed the comics for some time.

This is because I discovered mythology; I discovered the stories in their original versions.

The secret to the success of 1960s Marvel was that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and their gang knew the stories. Probably because they were all Jewish kids growing up reading the Torah. They were retelling the essential stories in modern Spandex.

The “super-hero” is simply the legendary hero, as he always has been. Heroes have superpowers. Perseus could fly; Herakles had superhuman strength.

Superhero comics before Fantastic Four, however, were missing an essential element: heroes lead troubled lives. They have problems; they are outcasts. Robin Hood; the Heroes of the Water Margin; Samson and Delilah. The creators of Superman and Batman missed this.

Superheroes—heroes—come from the storehouse imagination. We are inclined to think that the imagination is random and limitless. To the contrary, to the imagination only some things are real—vivid to the mind’s eye—and they are a limited set. Every culture has dragons, and dragons have certain known features. There are no dragons in nature. Every culture has unicorns, and unicorns have certain identifiable features, although there are no unicorns in nature. Every culture has fairies, elves, ogres, and so on.

The bright colours and the solid line art are also part of the mix; it is no coincidence that the art in comic books resembles the art of the stained glass window. This is how things appear in the imagination: bright and distinct. Lines are solid; there are few shadows or gradients. Things simply are, or are not.

Kibblesmith seems to have no sense of any of this. He has read nothing. Hero legends, tapping the storehouse consciousness, speak of things eternal. Trying to be “trendy,” regardless of the trend, is anathema to the genre. It is like putting contemporary references in a cowboy movie.

One problem faced by the comic book author is that there are only a limited number of compelling superpowers. This is why there are so many near-duplicates in the DC and the Marvel universe. Iron Man, for example, the man made of metal with a fatal flaw, is Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica. The Thing is the Golem. The Flash, of course, is Hermes, Mercury. Everyone dreams of flying, like Superman. Everyone dreams of being invisible.

Kibblesmith does not get this, and tries to invent new powers. “Snowflake” throws projectiles shaped like snowflakes. There’s the stuff of legends. “Safespace” generates forcefields that arbitrarily protect others, but not himself. Not too useful in a bar fight. “Screentime,” thanks to the effects of “Internet gas,” is directly connected at all times to the Internet. Meaning, I guess, that he does not need to pull his iPhone out of his pocket like everybody else.

Snowflake and Safespace are plainly meant to reflect current ideas of fluid “gender identity”: the visibly male “Safespace” is pink, the visibly female “Snowflake” is baby blue, and supposedly “non-binary.” The message is the postmodern message that the imagination and its archetypes and associations are purely arbitrary and subject to conscious manipulation.

This is the opposite of the core message of comic books.

It is all mythically illiterate. Kibblesmith and the current Marvel are, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, playing with powers they do not comprehend. It will not go well for them.



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Tim Pool on Talk of Revolution in Italy

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

The Service Canada centres have been shut down, after civil servants walked out, fearing for their personal safety. This despite the fact that “social distancing” measures had been put in place at the centres.

I can sympathize with their fear, but this is hard to forgive.

Clerks and shelf stockers are soldiering on in the grocery stores; pharmacists are still dispensing; truckers are still hauling. Doctors and nurses are risking their health hour by hour. We need essential workers to stay on the job, or things can quickly get much worse.

Many people are being thrown out of work, and suddenly urgently needing government services.

And the government itself is abandoning its posts. It is deserting in the face of the enemy.

This is a grave stain on Canadian honour; a breach of the Canadian social contract.

Yes, in theory, services are accessible online. But just try navigating them online at the best of times. Now imagine a disabled senior doing it. Not everyone even has internet access; and the libraries and the community centres, with free access, have been shut down.

A responsible government would be ordering civil servants back to work. If they refuse, they lose their jobs. If necessary, military personnel are brought in to replace them.

This dereliction of duty by the government should not be forgotten when the fog of war clears.

In China, meantime, there are signs of unrest as a result of the virus; I see a YouTube video of a mob overturning a car to break through a quarantine roadblock in Wuhan.

Riots are not rare in China; it’s probably nothing.

Most intriguing is that there are uniformed police in the shot, and they are doing nothing to prevent it. They look as though they might even be participating.

When the organized and armed forces, the police or the military, are no longer prepared to execute orders, things can turn quickly. I think of Ceausescu in Romania, who lost control of the nation in the middle of a speech.


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The Zombie Apocalypse Is Real

I suddenly understand why zombies of the cinematic sort have now become such a popular theme in various forms of entertainment, in graphic novels and on screens large and small; why the simple plot line of a zombie apocalypse has become so compelling.

It is because we are all living through it.

The strange deep sense of satisfaction that the zombie stories produce is the serenity that comes from at last confronting some unspoken truth. It is catharsis, in Aristotle’s sense; it is like lancing a boil.

I am not referring to the coronavirus; even though, eerily, in most iterations of the zombie apocalypse, it is a virus that zombifies.

It seems more as though the Wuhan pandemic has thrown the other, more serious infection into stark relief: like a bolt of lightning lighting up the night sky. The “zombie apocalypse” that dates back to Night of the Living Dead in 1968, has been growing within our imaginations like a vivid premonition, a bit disjointed, as in dreams.

There’s been a virus going round since about then.

Many press voices, as the coronavirus hit North America, were most concerned that it not be called the “Chinese virus,” and with the “racism” of people who suddenly were not eating in the restaurants of Chinatown. Those were the lead stories.

Many journalists, commentators, tweeters and social media memes are blaming Trump for the virus and saying that he murdered everyone who has died from it. Others are blaming the virus on Christian evangelicals. Others blame it on the lack of tax-funded public health care in the US.

Objectively, of course, these are perfect non sequiturs; and show a dangerous lack of focus.

For more traces of some strange zombification, witness the mainstream Democrats who have locked down in line behind Joe Biden, continuing to insist that he is the one man America needs as president; despite obvious indications of a narcissistic personality, and now clear symptoms of dementia. Also a dangerous disconnect from either reality or ethics: objectively, aside from policies, electing such a man would be perilous for the republic. A recent editorial in the Atlantic headlined something like “Just Don’t Die, Joe Biden.” It looks like the selection by zombies of a zombie president. I’d say intentional, if zombies had intent.

Or witness the congresshumans and US senators who insist on imposing carbon emissions reductions on airlines getting relief aid in an emergency bill; or they will not support the bill. Let everyone die, then. Or demanding additional minority hiring quotas for businesses getting relief; or they would not support the bill.



These people seem to be operating without a functioning brain. Or rather, more properly, without a soul, without real awareness. The brain, as a mechanism, still functions, driving the legs forward one after the other. Zombies; the same sense is expressed by the currently popular gamer phrase, “NPCs.” “Non-player characters”: people who seem to be only simulating consciousness, like the algorithm-generated opponents in a computer game. Their reactions are mechanical, predictable, and over time reveal that there is no thought behind them.

The coronavirus, with such other uncanny events as Biden’s abrupt dementia, or the locust swarms in Africa, simply reveal to us where the zombies are. Hand of God, perhaps.

What is the real virus? Something that infects brains. That much our premonitions told us. “Postmodernism” and its intellectual littermates have stripped modern thought, beginning with the academics and spreading out through the professional elites, of its moorings, the essential guiding principles of the soul: the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Sat, Cit, Ananada. You can say “God,” to combine the principles, but even outside of monotheism, these three navigational goals remain the meaning of life.

Contemporary thought has turned away from all of them. This amounts to zombification at the mass level. To remove all spiritual moorings is to remove the soul. One simply lurches around responding to simple instincts, like hunger. Eat. Brains.

A real crisis, calling for a serious response, reveals the problem.

If this meaninglessness virus corresponds to postmodernism on the intellectual place, on the psychological plane it corresponds to narcissism. Narcissists have pulled out all their moorings. They seem to live to a limited script, unable to see what is really around them. Fliess described them as “ambulatory psychotics.”

Unfortunately, it is further the case that narcissists, postmodernists, zombies are programmed to destroy. It is Pope St. John Paul II called “the culture of death.” Like a virus, the prime directive is to spread, by eating the next brain.

Perhaps the current crisis is a godsend. Perhaps we can now rally and fight.

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Something Strange

... and I have no expertise to bring to bear.

But someone has crunched numbers from the US and concluded that deaths from flu-like illnesses and from all causes  are actually DOWN in the US this year. 

This seems to be so much counter to everything else we hear that I am nonplussed.

But if true, deliriously good news, surely.


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The Simple Law of Love

A Wall Street Journal article speculated on a Third Great Awakening as a result of this virus.

Yet if God sent this virus as a means to shake and wake, I fear He has more work to do.

It’s incredibly simple, really. The meaning of life is to seek the truth, the good, and the beautiful.

But most people avoid or deny the truth, have little sensitivity to beauty and deny there is such a thing as the good.

All that is arbitrary, “culturally conditioned.” Truth is just a matter of opinion. Evil just a matter of a “misunderstanding.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I have written here before of the simplicity of truth.

The good is even simpler.

It is love.

Jesus gave it as “Love God with your whole heart and your whole mind; and love your neighbour as yourself.” St. Augustine shortened it to “love, and do what you will.”

Love means you seek the best for the other. Just as you would for yourself.

It is simple enough to grasp that anyone who pretends not to get it must surely be lying.
They get it; they do not want to do it.

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Journal of the Plague Year

Today was my weekly grocery shopping. I went during the pre-opening hour reserved for the elderly and infirm.

There was no lineup this time, although the store was busy. Social distancing was impossible. There is no way you can anticipate the movements of others, and most if not all were paying it no heed.

There were few bare shelves; although powdered milk was still out. They even had toilet paper.

I wore gloves, and used a pencil to enter my pin code at checkout.

Each cashier was suddenly behind plexiglass. All were masked and gloved. There were strips on the floor to guide social distancing, although nobody was paying attention to them.

As I went through the cash, one guy came up to the next cash with four crates full of sanitary wipes. The store owner told him he had to put them back. He tried a second time, and was forced to return them again. Shouting. He left with one crate, told not to come back that day.

Boris Johnson now has coronavirus, as well as the UK Health Minister.

Another milestone: the number of confirmed cases in the US now surpasses the number in China. This despite the fact that the US has only a fraction of the population. And the numbers are still growing fast.

However, the important number is the total deaths compared to the total infected. On that, the US is doing far better than China. Either they are doing better on treating, or better on testing, or both.

Dr. John Campbell, one of the two YouTubers I most trust on this crisis, reports that hopes the virus will be slowed by warm weather look vain.

Reports from Madrid that doctors are not allowing patients over 65 on ventilators. They are just given sedation and left to die.'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Steampunk coronavirus selfie.
It feels like a corner was turned today.

Dr. Fauci, who was the pessimist at Trump’s press conferences on the pandemic, is now quoted as saying "I know we'll be successful in putting this down now, but we really need to be prepared for another cycle."

This looks like a backhanded admission that the hydrochloroquine treatment works. It also looks like he has reason to believe the virus is seasonal, and will naturally begin to abate, as flu viruses often do, as summer approaches. Perhaps the thesis that the virus needs a narrow band of temperature and humidity to spread was at least partly right.

Although abating for summer is only temporary relief, it does buy us a bit of time to be better prepared in the autumn.

The Oxford study, suggesting that the virus is significantly less deadly than we thought, is also getting widely circulated. It does not sound right to me, but perhaps I am missing something. Others who presumably understand better than I do are impressed.

Perhaps the reason Fauci and others in government have been downplaying hydrochloroquine is because they did not have enough of the drug. Since it was already available on prescription, people could pressure their doctors, producing a possible run on the drug. And they felt they needed the limited supply to protect health care workers. Just like with face masks.

India has now banned exports of the drug.

They would not do this if it were not effective.

Same for Nevada suddenly banning the drug’s use for COVID-19.

They are worried about protecting limited supplies.

Unfortunately, India is a major world source for generic drugs. We have to hope there are sufficient production facilities closer to home.


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