01-25-2022, 01:06 PM
(02-03-2021, 08:48 PM)Mickey123 Wrote:(02-03-2021, 04:02 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We have a war against the worst enemy that America has ever faced, and we have extermination of that enemy as an objective. COVID-19 has no chance, as did the German or Japanese governments during the last Crisis or the Confederacy had during the previous Crisis to surrender to stop the killing. Donald Trump has not been effective in promoting the sort of regimentation necessary for defeating COVID-19; if anything the people most likely to defy him (or at least act independently of him) have been most effective in fighting the Great Menace.
The Spanish Flu was far more deadly than covid-19, and it killed young people, while covid-19 primarily kills old people who were at the end of their life anyway.
Covid-19 will not be remembered as the focus of this crisis. Whatever is to come in the next decade will be much worse.
I did write this after the Capitol Putsch. A million American deaths from a respiratory infection that we recently thought just did not happen in the advanced industrial world will reshape perceptions of the very nature of life. There will be cultural effects. The best music that I can imagine to fit this Crisis would be a requiem mass with a decided;y macabre edge. No, not the defiant resistance to death in Mozart's requiem, the reassurance in that of Faure, or the sheer terror in Verdi's Requiem.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.