Monday, September 27, 2021

A Message on Masking from Your Friend Satan

MEMORANDUM

TO:  Liberals and Moderates

FROM: The Right Honorable Lucius Hasatan, Esq.

RE:  A Message on Masking from Your Friend Satan

Ah, my sweet liberals and moderates.  It's Satan, your oldest and dearest friend, here to offer you my help in your time of need.  

You've been so good, so righteous, such diligent citizens, which did vex me for a while there.  When I set the pandemic among all of you to make you stronger by culling the weak and the stupid, you did precisely what was strong and smart.  You quarantined.  You masked.  You waited patiently for the scientists to produce a vaccine, because you trust the science.  When the vaccines finally arrived, you waited patiently again.  Well, truth be told, impatiently, as you obsessively attempted to schedule an appointment for yourself online.  I prefer the impatience, naturally.  It stirs frustration and resentment and all manner of other helpful energizing sentiments.  

Still, you opposed my work at every turn, which was not nice of you.  I forgive you, because I know how much you need me now.  I have heard your cry.  You have been hurt, and as the angel who ensures that Justice is done to the guilty, I have so much to offer you.  I have something you should consider.

For a little while there, you were feeling elated, imagining hopefully that COVID might be finally beaten.  The masks came off.  You were free.  But it didn't last.  It could have, of course.  You were so very close.  Except, well, for THEM.  To beat a disease, a community all has to work together, and, well.  That didn't happen, because of THEM.

I and the One Who Serves Me have managed to convince enough people that any action required to prevent the spread of disease is an affront to their personal freedom.  That it's a hoax.  That it's not real.  That it's Big Government or Big Pharma just trying to control your lives.  

On the far left, they've refused vaccines, treating themselves instead with Indigenous locally sourced organic patchouli suppositories.  On the right, they're even worse.  They won't wear masks or vaccinate or quarantine.  No change of lifestyle, outside of getting even louder and more obnoxious.  They bellow and tantrum and roar around in their big stupid trucks with their big stupid flags. They're loud and horrible, tacky and brutish, all of them utterly devoid of any redeeming virtues at all.

Now the virus has mutated, as all of you knew it would if it was given enough time and opportunity.  The vaccines are less and less capable of preventing the spread of the new, fiercer strain.  It is as bad as it ever was, as the real second wave has broken like a tsunami over the land.

Who is responsible for this?  The antivaxxers and the antimaskers.  This is materially, provably their fault.  

How does that make you feel?  Angry? Overwhelmingly, fiercely, ragingly angry?  It should. You have every right to feel angry.  I feel your pain.  They have made you suffer.  They have mocked you.  The right wingers in particular have bullied you, storming into meetings, shouting and yelling and threatening you with guns.  They are monsters.  They are barely human at all.  It is so important that you not think of them as human, because they really aren't any more.  

But there's something important to remember.

With a fierce and lethal new version of virus burning anew through the population, they are also unmasked and unvaccinated.  Your deplorable, inhuman enemies, who you hate, are...of their own choice...unprotected.  Defenseless.  You see where I'm going with this?  Oh yes.  Oh yes you do.

They are, all of them, now vulnerable in a way that you are not.  Because you are vaccinated.  If you get COVID, you might get a little sick.  A tiny cough.  *cof*  A little sneeze.  Achoo!  A loss of taste, which actually might help you lose a few of those quarantine pounds.

But they?  Oh, they will suffer.  And die.  Horribly.  They should. They should pay for what they've done to you.

So just take off the mask.  Go among them.  Take off your mask, and spread the virus.  It's a weapon, a gift from me, one that will destroy your enemies.  

They have said all along that they think nature should take its course, so why not give them exactly what they want?  They deserve it.  Let it cull them, all of those bacon-fat Easy Rider wannabes, all of those shrieking-to-see-the-manager Karens, all of those Seal Team 6 cosplay Walrus Boys, let it ravage their lungs and burn through their nervous systems.  Let them die by the hundreds and thousands, which is what happens to any creatures too stupid to adapt.  This is only fair. Because it's about Justice!  This is a Justice Issue, one that must be prosecuted.  It would be perfectly just for them to suffer for what they have done, because they are to blame.  Those who falter and those who fall must pay the price.  

Sure, there might be some very minor collateral damage.  A child here or there.  They are unlikely to be your children, so, well, that's probably fine.  A few exhausted nurses and doctors quitting because they can't take it anymore, but they need to take that break, and they'll have no trouble finding work again when they're ready.  A grandparent or two.  That will be very sad, but it'll be the fault of the antimaskers who are responsible for all of this, which means you can hate them even more.   

What was that?  What did you just think?  Oh no.  I'm sure it won't mutate into something even worse.  That is so very unlikely.  You have my promise as an Angel of Light that you don't need to worry about that.

But you seem troubled, so let me sweeten the deal.  Think about this, instead: if there are fewer of them because they've all died of COVID, you'll win more elections, no matter how much they gerrymander and suppress voting and try to rig the system in their favor.   You'll finally be in charge, able to do whatever you want, with none of their meddling and obstruction.  You'll have power.

What I offer you is pure justice, and as a bonus, I'll throw in the possibility of power which you can use for good.  Think of the things you could do with that power.  Let power fill your imagination, and your dreams.

All I ask in return is, well.  You know what I want.  It's not such a big thing really, a "soul."  It's nothing at all.  A trifle, barely more real than a dream.  You don't even know if such a thing as a soul really exists.  I offer you something for basically nothing, which is always a sign of my great generosity and trustworthiness.

So take off your mask.  Let the chips fall where they may.  It's the just thing to do.  

Trust me.  

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

The Image of Freedom

I have watched, with horror and fascination, the events of the last several days.

In Louisiana, devastation, as Hurricane Ida blasted away so much of the infrastructure that maintains our familiar day to day life.  The lights are out.  The roads, impassable.  Communities lie in ruins, blasted by wind and rising sea.  The remains are the murky umbers of mud and clay, the drab sullen green muck of mold and wet and cloying, inescapable humidity. 

In Northern California, the color palette is different.  As fires cross the Sierra Nevada for the first time, and come sweeping down into cities and towns, the destruction is different.  It is a different color.  The lowering deep-orange-grey of towering clouds of choking smoke, the fiercer living yellow-orange of devouring flame, the charcoal of ashen ruin.

Yet in so many ways, the two events are the same.

There is the same look on the faces of the human beings.  The exhaustion.  The resignation. The sorrow and fear and uncertainty.

There are the same lines of cars.  Well, not cars.  Americans no longer buy cars.  We drive Sport Utility Vehicles, the great lumbering totems of cheap gas and American consumer freedom.  They are not, as the manufacturers pitch us, cruising effortlessly across empty highways, filled with smiling picture perfect families living abundantly.  They are not, as the marketers would have us believe, driving through the deep backwoods, on the way to a secluded campsite by a shimmering moonlit lake.

Those SUVs aren't moving at all.  They're sitting useless in long lines in Louisiana, waiting for gas, a gallon here, a gallon there, idling with the air conditioning on against the stifling, intolerable heat, consuming gas as they wait for gas, a hopeless ouroboros of consumption.

They are packed to the gills near Lake Tahoe, trapped in bottlenecked traffic for hours and hours, as the fires creep closer to the one road out, doors open, drivers standing on the doorframes, peering out at the backs of endless identical SUVs, emblems of our individuality, stalled motionless as far as the eye can see.

The same faces, and the same vehicles.  And there is also the same cause, our warming, more threatening world.  

It is a painful irony, seeing the flood and the flame, seeing human fear, and those helpless columns of huge, inefficient vehicles.  Because we know, we do, that these three things are all different parts of the same fearsome painting.  The fire and the storm...and our fear and helplessness in the face of a roused and angered world...are a result of the gases that spew from the exhausts of those very same Sport Utility Vehicles.  

Which we know, but somehow cannot change, as if our addiction to an illusory image of freedom has made us forget that we are free to choose another path.

Such strange, strange creatures, we humans are.