The Diana virus is infecting the world. The symptoms of the resulting pandemic include mass hysteria, grossly sentimental effluvia, acute self-righteousness, moral torpor, aesthetic paralysis and highly contagious loss of taste.
And by George, the disease is lethal. As in George Floyd, hailed as a hero and martyr in the US and beyond. This strikes me as incongruous.
After all, heroes and martyrs are role models for all to venerate and follow. Yet I’m not sure that a drug-addled career criminal is suited for that role.
In fact I’m sure he isn’t, especially considering that Floyd’s crimes included such distinctly unsaintly acts as aggravated assault and armed robbery. Not to mention that the fatal incident resulted from Floyd, flying high on meth, being caught red-handed by a green-handed sales clerk (whose fingers turned green from contact with a $20 note George had counterfeited somewhat clumsily).
There exists a semantic distinction between a hero and a victim, which seems to be lost on the mob. Floyd was as far from a hero as it’s possible to get this side of Jack the Ripper, but a victim of a crime he undoubtedly was. So by all means demand maximum prison terms for the criminals, and I hope they get them, but please, please, spare us the emetic displays.
But they won’t, will they? Once the Diana virus gets out of hand, it’s unstoppable.
Unlike other popular viruses, however, it produces a curious side effect. The carriers demand that the unaffected individuals, especially those in the public eye, submit to the infection willingly and with a broad smile on their faces or, better still, tears filling their eyes.
Disgruntled Gen Mattis, ex-Defense Secretary unceremoniously fired by Trump, vented his rancour by attacking the president for being infection-free. Writing in The Atlantic, a magazine not generally known for Republican sympathies, the good general got his own back:
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people… Instead, he tries to divide us… Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens…”
Allow me to propose a factually correct ending to the last sentence: “… to burn cities down, throw Molotov cocktails at police cars, loot shops, attack policemen and force an imposition of curfews in major cities.”
Actually, the last time I looked none of these rights was mentioned in the US Constitution. Peaceful protest, however, is indeed protected by the First Amendment to that document. So does the general think that Trump called for the National Guard and troops to be deployed in response to the people exercising their right “peaceably to assemble”? If he does, he justifies the mad part of his ‘Mad Dog’ nickname.
As to Trump being divisive, that is the common leitmotif in the liberal press, which is to say the press. Chaps working for the New York Times, The Washington Post, most TV networks and, for that matter, The Atlantic brainwash the gullible populace, successfully, with messages of Trump’s divisiveness.
What supposedly makes Trump have that deplorable effect is his open contempt for the Beltway establishment and also his tendency not only to sound conservative (in the American sense), but even to implement some conservative policies.
The liberals know that the voting public won’t be repelled by Trump’s real failings, those I find repellant, such as his narcissism, illiteracy, bumptiousness, vulgarity, dubious dealings with Putin. Hence they have to repeat ad nauseum that Trump divides the nation, meaning doesn’t let it sink into the morass of ‘liberal’ uniformity.
How, according to Mattis and other victims of dianafication, is Trump supposed to heal the wounds of the nation? By being photographed hugging a black woman, like Terrence Monahan, NYPD Department Chief? Why, he’d be accused of sexual harassment faster than you can say Harvey Weinstein.
Anyway, if a soppy speech, a strategically placed hug and a tear or two can unite a nation torn asunder, how disunited was it in the first place? Not very, I’d suggest.
Do people really expect Trump to turn touchy-feely in his advanced age? If so, they are in for a let-down. At least he never pretended to be an old softie when they voted him into the White House. Or is Trump expected to tell those arsonists and looters that he feels their pain, shares it and – by George! – he’d be tossing Molotov cocktails too if only he weren’t president?
Would that unify the nation Trump has so egregiously divided? I don’t know how many Americans would wish to be united with the crazed mob, but I suspect not many.
When Trump talked tough, he was threatening not peaceful demonstrators but looters. And force is the only way to deal with a rampaging, marauding mob. When looting talks, conciliation walks.
If some people have a craving for nauseating spectacles, they don’t need the president to provide them. The sight of policemen ‘taking the knee’ in abject surrender to the horde in American cities and even in London (!) should satisfy that appetite – especially if accompanied by cops marching with the multitudes and even giving the Black Power salute.
The only reason for policemen to go down on one knee is to create a more solid platform for firing a rifle – unless of course they are being knighted. If they wish to express solidarity with the protesters, they should do so off-duty, not when trying to stop an onslaught with riot shields.
Does it ever occur to the guardians of the peace that the very fact they have to wield riot shields suggests that the demonstrations aren’t entirely peaceful? And hence kowtowing to the mob represents a gross dereliction of duty? No, obviously not.
The world is in the grip of the Diana virus, ultimately more toxic than Covid-19. The latter can only kill the individual body and lighten the wallet. The former is killing the collective soul.
The anti-Trump narrative is set in stone by the media world wide, and opportunistic and callow politicians everywhere. The bandwagon is a very warm place. Even here in Oz the usual suspects are out in force, protesting an incident 12,000 miles away in a country of 350 million. The absurd irony being that we cannot attend sporting events or restaurants in numbers on penalty of a hefty fine, yet the police commissioner has given carte blanche to the thousands of grievance mongers on the streets. Many who are aboriginal and more susceptible to the virus. We are being led by idiots.
“Many who are aboriginal and more susceptible to the virus”
Exactly. They are more susceptible, will get the virus, die, then blame the authorities for not doing enough for them. We are doomed.
One of the influential speakers to “The Mob” is Barack Obama. He tweeted recently that black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’” and that bigotry “infects our institutions”. His false narrative of systemic police bias only inflames the situation, and it certainly does not reflect facts. African-Americans made up 53% of homicide offenders in the US and commit 60% of robberies, yet they are 13% of the USA population. Is this the maddening ‘normal’?
Surely crime, not race, determine most police actions. For example last weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is. Obama should retire and keep his revisionist history to himself.
Obama is hardly one to talk to the average street black. O grew up in relative luxury the like of wish I as a white man would never happen ever expected.
Who can speak to them? I fear no one is listening anymore.
What garbage taking a knee. Those police probably in violation of policy making a political statement. Those troops doing so indeed in violation of military law. Making a political statement.
And don’t think any of that garbage is doing to do one bit of good. The mob now knows what it can do and get away with and how to do it. They will only press for more and more and I fear get it.
How very sad and dangerous also that when a small segment of society with so many dysfunctions orders the rest of society to behave and everyone just takes a knee.
Every dog must know his master. Enjoy the dog food. We are doomed.
What’s more Bert, forcing police to ‘take the knee’ is forcing them to re-enact the crime that started the current protests. All that is missing is a neck. That must be upsetting many neck owners.
Look at the folks in that image yelling and screaming with their big mouths. No reasoning with any of them. What is it? The intelligence of a mob falls to the lowest possible denominator.
Mattis too is just a dumb ass. Of course the military can be used to restore order. Any military anywhere has both an internal and external security function. Mattis should be more concerned about the “rights” of those persons who had their businesses destroyed by a mob. Or those elderly pulled from wheelchairs or women beaten with clubs. And this man was a general officer. He vents just out of rage over slights from Don he perceives?
Cops are overwhelmed now. Refusing some duties. A bad situation even ominous.