The Masque of the Blue Death

An incident last Sunday marks the second time since COVID that I’ve witnessed an ugly confrontation in a retail location over a customer’s unwillingness to comply with facial mask directives. The first time, soon after the coronavirus onset, wasn’t so bad. A man stormed angrily out of a popular Westside liquor store, frustrated and sputtering loudly after a clerk reminded him of the mask requirement.

This last Sunday, in a big box hardware store, was much worse. A man removed his mask while leaving the store, but then stopped short of the exit to look at a display of garden topsoil arrayed under the windows near the entrance. When a female salesperson approached and reminded him that he needed to keep the mask on until he had fully exited the building, the guy went apoplectic, shouting profanities at the top of his lungs. The manager rushed up and quietly addressed him, causing the man to yell in response, “Go ahead, call the f&%king police.”

After several more rage-filled expletives, the man left. Twenty or so people waiting on line—including several young children—stood shell-shocked. I noticed several of them scanning the parking lot. Needless to say, in a country that has experienced scores of mass shootings in the last several weeks, these home improvement shoppers can be forgiven for wondering if perhaps their mass-shooting number had come up.

Shift to the big picture: COVID death and serious illness continues its march on the old and on those with underlying conditions, while red states move purposely to fully open and blue states incrementally begin relinquishing strictures that came with the infectious agent. Anthony Fauci’s face makes an appearance again, his directives having mutated as much as the virus he became spokesperson for. A Soviet-style Minster of Not who suggests that for all the gallonages of vaccine being injected once, twice into the populace, that masks, zombified public places, and distance paranoia are the New World Order.

The lost schoolchildren of COVID, acclimated now to Zoom’s barren intellectualism, wait, while the ranks in the teacher’s unions step up for early vaccines and drift haltingly back into classrooms. For the unattached and isolated, a pandemic of loneliness lifts while mental health emergencies run rampant with insurrectionists in the streets. Depression, suicide, economic paralysis. Societies across the globe coming out from under a shut-down Gestalt. Truth will be at the mercy of those who write the history books.

A Black Lives Matter co-founder buys up real estate in white neighborhoods, while the violent insurrectionists fomenting civil chaos under the BLM banner wreak havoc in communities where people of color actually live. The stench of hypocrisy rises like swamp gas, but never quite high enough to eclipse the smell of socio-political moribundity. Woke corporatists turn household names like Coca Cola into catchphrases denoting white guilt. As replacement theory gains traction, Marxist extremists sow racial dissension and gear up for what they believe is a long overdue reckoning. The rest of the “racist” citizenry battens down the hatches.

Dedicated law enforcement personnel in blue precincts across the country reexamine their chosen profession in light of clear signals that city hall and the statehouses don’t have their backs. Many will migrate and reaffirm their commitment to public safety in more appreciative jurisdictions. Some, like Gary Cooper’s lawman in High Noon, throw their badges into the dust.

America had a leader, former President Donald Trump, who, despite some controversial methodology and personality traits that are deal-breakers to many voters, undeniably cares deeply about this country, her traditions, her culture, and the philosophical values which inform her founding.

Now, in a nation left with a president for whom any characterization smacks of elder abuse, a cackling, fourth-string, Commie-crat VP, and a Deep State whose actions proclaim Don’t ever try this again, there is a terrible sense of unravelling. A trepidation that any potential 2022 reckoning may not come fast enough to staunch the outflow of civic and constitutional lifeblood.

We had a president who got us out of s%#t-shows like the Paris Climate Accords, NAFTA, and the Iran Nuclear Deal. A commander in chief who dealt effectively with the capital “C” crisis of mass illegal immigration. Trump shook the world by returning the stars and stripes to energy independence, brokering groundbreaking Mid-East peace initiatives, and revitalizing the U.S. military. He reclaimed from Communist China a $500 billion+ annual trade deficit, and mounted a historic response to the treacherous mass-casualty monster all the world recognizes as the China Virus.

Writer’s block can set in, or, more accurately, be succumbed to, when everything seems bad. It stinks to have to keep writing about terrible things, like corporate wokeness, technological censorship, the cooptation of women’s sports, and the politicization of professional sports. About the ongoing, calculated (and at the same time patently stupid) dismantling of everything President Trump did that was good.

But conservative media must continue to hammer home the implications, the potentials, and the reality of what is happening.

National power is predominantly in the hands of the Left, their corporate, media, Big-Tech, entertainment, and Deep State accomplices. There is a sense of unraveling. Besetting traditionalist America is an emotion comparable to that which overcame the man who dared remove his face mask in the hardware store.

A growing anger at unchecked socialist transformation and the constrictive clutch of the bureaucratic fist.