A Godsend for the Godless
All around the planet, petty tyrants used the pandemic to bully others into submission.
The title refers to the Covid virus. The first people to benefit from its release on the world were Xi Jinping and his fellow Communist comrades in China.
Whichever way the man-made virus made its getaway from the Wuhan lab, China’s leaders quickly realized that so long as they kept it a secret for at least a couple of months, they could watch it spread among the other nations, decimating competing economies.
Soon thereafter, all around the planet, petty tyrants used the pandemic to bully others into submission. In Australia, a previously democratic society, the officials turned the western half of the nation into a police state.
Here in the U.S., even as various governors and mayors displayed their hubris by going mask-less to restaurants and hair salons and turning a blind eye on the hooligans who ignored all the mandatory rules regarding masks and social-distancing while trashing our cities, looting stores and burning down police precincts, we turned America into the world’s biggest sheep ranch. We stood idly by while the likes of Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzker, Phil Murphy, Lori Lightfoot and Kate Brown denied us our constitutional rights to attend church and peacefully assemble.
Today, Joe Biden is threatening to deny us police, fire and emergency protection by firing any of those first responders who refuse to comply with his illegal orders.
All of that would be bad enough if Biden were an honorable man who was simply misguided by medical experts like the repugnant Anthony Fauci, but there is nothing in Biden’s half century in public office to suggest he has ever been anything other than a chiseler who has spent 50 years lining his pockets and the pockets of his relatives.
For most of his political life, he was the grateful recipient of campaign financing provided by the credit card companies. It was partly through his efforts that Visa, Mastercard and others got away with charging usurious interest rates that rivaled those offered by the Mafia.
But once he became Barack Obama’s vice president, he went after bigger game. After 2008, he started collecting his bribes on the international stage, using his son Hunter as his bag man once the money came flooding in from places like Ukraine and China.
But even that doesn’t truly capture the evil nature of the man. Many years ago, when his first wife and child were killed in a traffic accident, he insisted the driver of a truck was responsible even though the police claimed it was Mrs. Biden who caused the collision. Biden ruined the man’s life.
When the Ukrainian state prosecutor began his investigation of Burisma, the energy company that was paying his son Hunter a million dollars a year, Biden threatened to withhold money Congress had allotted to Ukraine unless the prosecutor was fired. He later bragged about having done so at a gathering of the vile Council on Foreign Relations and received an ovation from the Deep Staters.
Biden even strikes out as a father. He has been an enabler of his middle-aged son’s addiction to crack cocaine and underage hookers and referred to him as “the smartest man” he knows.
Referring to Joe Biden as “good old Joe” has the same false ring as referring to Joseph Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” as America’s dumber-than-dirt Communists did for several decades.
I recently watched “The Celluloid Closet,” a documentary about the depiction of homosexuals and lesbians in the movies over the years.
In the silent days, they were usually depicted as sissies, prancing around for comic relief.
In the 30s and 40s, they were still employed in comedies, but by that time, they had stopped prancing and generally made their presence felt by portraying overly fastidious valets (Eric Blore), addleheaded sidekicks (Edward Everett Horton) and prissy suitors and supercilious officials (Billy De Wolfe, Grady Sutton, Franklin Pangborn).
In the years since, they generally show up as villains, as in “Silence of the Lambs,” or as funny, warm-hearted neighbors (Nathan Lane, James Coco).
The history of censorship in Hollywood has always intrigued me. That’s because under pressure of the Catholic Church, which could threaten nation-wide boycotts, the studio bosses who were usually Jewish decided they better get a handle on the often-libertine movies of the early sound era. So they hired Warren G. Harding’s postmaster general, Will Hays of Indiana.
The Hays Office, as it was known, came up with a list of specific no-noes that included open-mouthed kissing, lustful embraces, sex perversion, seduction, rape, abortion, prostitution, white slavery, nudity, obscenity and profanity.
There was some leeway, of course, or they might as well have shut down the industry. The compromise was that if the characters engaged in any of these activities, they had to pay the price, which was often death in the final reel.
What I find interesting is that most of my all-time favorite movies were made during that era. I suppose it’s because the writers and directors had to come up with original ways to convey all the things they weren’t allowed to depict visually.
I have always opposed Affirmative Action, not just because quota systems that favor one or two groups invariably put other groups at a disadvantage, but because it places a shadow on the accomplishments of those who were provided a leg up.
That is why I am proud of one of my longtime subscribers, a former cop, who, because she was born with a Mexican surname, was twice offered and twice refused the advantage.
As Tina Hurley writes: “Someone decided I needed the extra points to pass two different exams, one entry and the other promotional. It was an insult, and I blew them off. How dare they!
"They thought I couldn’t compete with the white women competing for the job? No thanks! There were 300 applicants, vying for just six slots. I aced the damn tests, and I was only one of three women among the 300 without a college degree.”
Her story reminded me of Vijay Jojo Chokal Ingam, an Asian-American who posed as a black student to see if he could get into the St. Louis University medical school 20 years ago, and then wrote a book, “Almost Black,” about it.
He was also accepted at two other prestigious medical schools even though he only had a 3.1 GPA when white students wouldn’t even have a shot unless they had 3.7 GPAs. He flunked out, as he fully expected to happen, as do a great many black and brown students who are allowed to leapfrog over superior white and Asian students at places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
Not because he’s looking to enter college under false colors, but because he’s a wiseacre, my friend Howard Last reports: “On the various forms from the government busybodies, I check off Native American. I was born here, so doesn’t that mean I am a Native American? The one race that has me scratching my bald head is Indigenous People. The only thing I picture when I hear that term is seeing them sprouting out of the ground. I wonder if all that head scratching caused my hair to fall out.”
Before I had the cataract surgery performed on my left eye last week, I thought they said I would look better. Turns out they meant I’d see better. Bummer!
You can email Burt directly at [email protected].
