Bard's Bar: Or, What We Didn’t Do During Our Coronavirus Vacation

Well, we couldn’t go to Bard’s bar and hear Bard and others hold forth on all manner of subjects, but mostly romance, politic and sports, most of which have been temporarily suspended during the ongoing Coronavirus infestation. Two of these subjects, romance and politics, are intimately related, Bard hotly insisted, a relationship not so much strained as inappropriate. The worst politicians are the romantics, idiots who want to make the world over and insist vehemently that what is not broken must be fixed – NOW!

Bard permitted only cigar smoking in a room set aside for “rebellious serfs,” as he called them.

Here is Bard, just before his business was shut down by “His Excellency Ned Lamont.” That is how Connecticut's governor signs off on his too frequent executive orders, a title carried over, Bard said, from colonial times, when men mostly – women had other less disruptive means of socialization --  gathered in bars to drown their sorrows, philosophize, and plot against His Excellency’s colonial orders which, like his modern counterparts, usually involved taxation and storm-troopers.

Bard on Lamont’s executive orders: The orders from His Excellency -- to keep bars and other enterprises shut down until mid-May -- are mostly unnecessary, I mean with respect to the Corona-plague. When you were sick with a cold, your mom told you to cover your mouth when you coughed, stay in the house until the plague passed by, maintain a safe distance from other members of the family, and exercise due caution. “Think, before you do anything stupid,” was the way she put it, though there were more colorful variations of the maxim. And if you pleaded vigorously, you got off from school. So, penning an edict that people should behave this way is a little bit like insisting everyone in Connecticut should drive on the right side of the road. But this is what politicians do. The cleverer of them figure out what most people are disposed to do – and then write a law taking credit for common human behavior. That way, people will think our politicians excellent and won’t laugh up their sleeve at them.

After his business had been shut down, Bard became fiercer but no less a barkeep philosopher. His political patron saint was Samuel Adams, known even during his own day as “the father of the American Revolution. Lamont, he said, was making decisions better made by thoughtful philosophers like him.

Bard on Sam Adams: Sam’s the man. His cousin John Adams was a bit more subdued, the rags of colonialism still hung loosely on him. But Sam had cast off these beggar rags very early on. He was the best of the American pamphleteers, an early form of rage journalism, the only tolerable kind. Here, listen and see if you can hear the liberty bell ringing in these words: “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; may your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

Bard on China: The typical politician’s view of China is the typical businessman’s view of China: We made it what it is, and China should be grateful to us for having pulled their country out of the Qing dynasty. But China of course is still a communist-fascist oligarchy and, now that McDonalds has pumped up its economy, Chinese communists have reverted to commi-fascism. It is a mistake to think that the CEOs of mega businesses here in the United States are altogether uncomfortable with fascism, because in every CEO independista of a global network, there is a little Mussolini stretching his limbs and begging to rule. It was Mussolini – a literate journalist, by the way – who gave us the best definition of fascism: Everything in the state; nothing above the state; nothing outside the state. There has never been a dictatorship of the proletariat that did not have as its endpoint the enslavement of the proletariat by a handful of slave-masters.

We should feel the chains that lie so heavily upon us digging into our flesh – and resist them.  Half of good government is resistance to insufferable autocrats who are there “to help.”

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Note: the names have been changed in this piece to protect the guilty. Only the facts cited above are factual.