ROGER KIMBALL: Lockdown Theater Brings Hoopla and Amateur Epidemiologists.
An acquaintance of mine made what I think is an astute observation when he wrote that “Politicians and bureaucracies tend to respond to crises with theater. After 9/11 it was airport security theater. Following Corona it was lockdown theater. There’s some utility to it, but only some, there is much more hoopla.”
I agree, except for the “there’s some utility to it” bit. In my view, the TSA is 100 percent “airport security theater.” If we really wanted to be secure airline travel, we’d allow passengers to carry concealed weapons. A baddie pops up with a box cutter, pow, Mr. Smith in 11D puts his Beretta M9 to good use. No more baddie and the nice lady next to him gets to keep the box cutter as a souvenir.
How about lockdown theater? What good has it done? The main current of opinion favors the process if not necessarily the theater. In a particularly nauseating piece, even for The New York Times, our former paper of record notes today that the situation on the ground seems to be improving, but asserts that “The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country.”
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Since part of Lockdown Theater is that everyone has to play being an expert epidemiologist and talk knowingly about William Farr, R0, “patient zero,” and the like. It’s a bit like playing Ben Casey, if you remember him, or Dr. House if you’re a young ’un. You just bone up on a bit of the jargon, then mobilize it to heap contempt on anyone with whom you disagree politically. The best part is that not only do you get to sound like you know something about epidemiology, but also you get to imply that the object of your contempt is both wrong and a bad person for disagreeing with you.
Related! Queen’s Brian May says the coronavirus pandemic is meat eaters’ fault.
As Tom Wolfe once wrote, “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”
Hopefully, Drs. Fauci and Birx will return the favor, plug into a couple of Marshall stacks, and play a wailing lead guitar battle at tomorrow’s briefing.