Journal of the Plague Year 2020-2021, Part 2

The Country Mouse

October 28, 2020

To the country mouse,

We’ll be kissing our cousins from afar this year.

Secularists have already stripped Christmas of Christ. Now come the politicians, pleading Coronavirus, to strip the seasons of relatives. Scrooge made the celebration of Christmas difficult, but not impossible like everyone’s daddy and mommy, Governor Ned Lamont.

It is not enough that enlightened, “science based” politics has driven our relations out of state. The Coronavirus Governor of Connecticut now threatens to prevent their return during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted by King Ned. Bradley Field airport, voted one of the best airports in the country, is now a wasteland.

Here is Ned throwing ashes on the joy of Thanksgiving and Christmas:

“With Thanksgiving a month away, Lamont said he’s concerned college students returning home for the holiday might bring COVID-19 with them.

“’I am really worried about thousands of kids coming back from universities all over the country, places like Wisconsin and Nevada and Utah, where they have a 30% infection rate,’ Lamont said in Bridgeport.

“The governor said he’d work with governors in other states on ‘really strict guidance,’ perhaps asking students to quarantine for two weeks before returning to Connecticut, then get tested for COVID-19 when they arrive.

“Lamont said the Department of Public Health would soon issue guidelines for returning students.

“’I don’t want people just getting on that plane, going home, potentially putting their family at risk and their friends at risk,’ Lamont said.”

Really, with a daddy and mommy like Lamont, who needs daddies and mommies?

Thanksgiving, now that we are all toxic, will be less thankful. Halloween has flitted by like a ghost; no children were on the streets; the candy dishes are still full. Even All Saints Day is muted, because church attendance has been diminished owing to Lamont’s solicitude towards attendees in Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques .

Facing a tsunami of atheist tinged secularism G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” On this score, not much has changed over the centuries.

The four cardinal virtues listed by Aristotle are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, all of them sadly missing in our politics, which gives us more than enough reason to fortify ourselves with them. A prudent, just and temperate policy on Coronavirus would allow and even facilitate the joys of Christmas, Thanksgiving and All Saints Day, now secularized and bastardized as Halloween.

Columbus Day has passed with Columbus statues beheaded by vandals without medical facemasks. Restaurants, those lucky few that have not yet gone out of business, are less than half full because they are only three quarters open on orders of the governor. Tomorrow, on a gubernatorial whim, they may be shuttered once again. The arts in Connecticut, all of them, are dead. Our cities are ghost towns. And though legislators, sequestered far from the state Capitol, have plenty of time on hand, not one of them appears to have had time to read Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Precautions were taken by Lord Prospero to keep at bay the Red Death ravaging the countryside outside the walls of his castle: “With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.”

Ha!!!

A Puritan stink bomb has exploded here in the northeast and left behind the wreckage of joy. Handshakes are out; hugs are out; kisses are fatal; even our daring former Vice President Joe Biden has lately refrained from smelling women’s hair and pawing uncomfortable strange children. The Puritan divines of pre-Revolutionary Boston must be clapping, not dancing, in their graves. Richard Mather and John Cotton would rather sink into Hell than dance in their graves.

My cousin, the city mouse, does have a way of putting things. I once asked her why she insisted on capitalizing the word “hell” in her handwritten letters to me. Lazier than a bug bed, I send my spell-checked notes to her via email. She writes back in an artful cursive, imposed on her by dozens of ruler-wilding nuns, “Because Hell is a real place-name, like 210 Capitol Ave, Hartford, CT 06106.” That is the address of our gold-topped state capitol, now dead and lifeless as Main Street.

Real Coronavirus science has yet to clear its throat. There can be no “science” of Coronavirus this early, because the virus is a novel one, and it mutates, as do all viruses. Instead of science, we have a crowd of politicians crowing from the rooftops and using the best guesses of scientists to close down entire states.

I wonder if the city mouse does not have a point about the modern world.  “The old Italians,” she wrote me long ago, “grandfather Carlo for instance, were superstitious rather than religious. You remember how Carlo, spotting a cluster of nuns walking down Center Street in Windsor Locks towards his house, would take refuge inside. Perhaps he felt nuns could see into his sin-cluttered soul. The second generation was both religious and superstitious. Thoughts were left unsaid because the devil who hides in dark corners, anxious to do mischief, would seize upon them and wreck all lovely things, including friendships and marriages. What the tongue says the ear cannot unhear. But today, as young people have bid farewell to religion – rather than consider it seriously, they have outgrown it, so they think – the young nation is merely superstitious. And this phenomenon explains a good deal of our politics.”

I should draw her out on that one.

... to be continued