Society

Nothing duller for those of us not in therapy than listening to people who are in therapy talking about it, something they seem to like to do incessantly, at every opportunity. For this reason, my heart sank during the Oprah interview — which I’d been looking forward to tremendously — when early into his appearance, Prince Harry made an unsmiling reference to the ‘many years’ he had spent ‘doing the work — and doing my own learning’. Here we go, I thought. Sure enough, not long later he was telling the ludicrously softball interviewer of his family, his father, particularly: ‘they only know what they know. I’ve tried to educate them, through the process that I’ve been educated.’ Difficult to imagine how much the Windsors must have enjoyed that.

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.

To echo my friend Michael Warren Davis, I’m a big old centrist when it comes to masks. There are limits to my acquiescence, of course: the guy who yelled at me last week for not wearing one while jogging can go gargle with road salt. But generally speaking, if fogging up my glasses in public makes it a little less likely that even one person will contract the coronavirus, then I’m willing to do my part. The question is: is that good enough for the great Dr Fauci? These days, it can be hard to tell. Last week, our Hippocratic high priest got into a heated tiff with Sen. Rand Paul, a fellow doctor who was puzzled that Fauci was wearing a mask at their congressional hearing. Paul pointed out that Fauci had been fully vaccinated. ‘You want to get rid of vaccine hesitancy?

What follows the global pandemic? The global vaccine freakout. European politicians have their knickers in a twist about the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot. The source of the panic was reports from Denmark and Norway that some people who received the British-made vaccine developed blood clots — though there is no evidence yet that the shot is at fault. Over a dozen European nations, including France, Germany, Ireland and Spain have temporarily suspended their use of Oxford-AstraZeneca, in what seems to be a team effort to mistake correlation for causation. Sometimes the world cries out for American global leadership. The US is currently sitting on a stockpile of around 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. AstraZeneca has yet to apply for FDA approval for their shot.

How sacred is a New York Times reporter? Is one required to kowtow in their presence, or merely bow? If one eats a Times reporter, does one become ritually impure? These critical questions are being settled right now in the clash over Times technology reporter and factually-challenged busybody Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz spent the bulk of lockdown season stalking the nascent Silicon Valley chat app Clubhouse. In July, she vowed to quit the app forever for not caring enough about ‘user safety’, i.e. protecting Lorenz from all criticism. But of course, like most addicts who pledge to quit, Lorenz’s promise was a farce, and she was soon back on the app.

There are two women leaning against a railing overlooking the medieval armor exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on a Sunday afternoon. Both have shoulder-length, proudly gray hair, are resplendent in wooden jewelry and draped in clashing layers of flowing tapestry ranging from clay to marigold to topaz, some with vaguely ethnic-inspired patterning. The two women are in conversation, six feet apart down to the inch and laughing. They’re having a good time. The tableau is a sort of variation on a theme, an aesthetic we might call Santa Fe Art Mom and they are exactly the sort of person you’d expect, as they are, to be wearing two face masks, each.

It is a testament to Elon Musk’s genius that it transcends how fantastically immature he is. Musk is knocking on the door of 50 but released a song called 'RIP Harambe' that included the lyrics, 'RIP Harambe/Sippin’ on that Bombay/We thinkin’ about you/Amen, amen.' At this point, Harambe, and the Harambe meme, had been dead for almost three years. Maybe that was the point. When Musk’s contribution to the rescue of Thai schoolkids from waterlogged caves was insulted by British diver Vernon Unsworth, Musk summoned up all the wisdom of his five decades on Earth and called him 'pedo guy'. He appears to love nothing more than uploading memes involving anime characters to Twitter.

We’re coming up to the one-year anniversary of shutting down and masking up. Since then, America’s governors have found themselves cast as one of two stereotypes. There’s the overbearing, schoolmarmish blue-state governor who loves to mandate masks and the freedom-lovin’, grandma-killin’ red-state governor who doesn’t. (Of course, most people ignored the fact that Gov. Andrew Cuomo was as ruthlessly effective at culling the elderly as he was at shuttering businesses in New York). These archetypes resurfaced this week after Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his Texas’s mask mandate, declaring his state ‘100 percent open’. California governor and passionate foodie Gavin Newsom branded the move ‘reckless’.

In an article in The Spectator on February 25 Damian Thompson, with his characteristic vigor, raised objections to a book written by Fr Thomas Crean O.P. and myself and recently published by Editiones Scholasticae entitled Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy. His central objection is that the work is antiquated in its ideals and presentation and that it harms the cause of religion by burdening it with objectives which are unattainable, repellent to non-Catholics (and many Catholics) and anyway undesirable. Why, dear reader, am I troubling you with this arcane intramural dispute among Papists? Indulge me and I will explain. The word ‘integralism’ is a term of art to describe the opposite of liberalism.

Last week, it emerged that the Chinese government has issued new rules for religious ministers in the country. Amid the regulations was a new official process for the appointment of Catholic bishops in the country, one which makes no reference to the Vatican or the deal the Catholic Church and China signed in 2018. The rules are the latest in a series of pointed humiliations inflicted on the Vatican since it handed over control of the country’s Catholics to the Communist party two years ago.

When John F. Kennedy was president, McDonald’s invented the Filet-O-Fish to cater for Catholics who wouldn’t touch hamburgers on Fridays and were harming their profits. Nearly 60 years later, the flaccid fish sandwich is still on the menu, but it’s unlikely that McDonald’s or anyone else will introduce products catering specially for Catholics during the administration of America’s second Catholic president. The tumbleweed in the ruined dioceses of the rust belt is rolling across the country. Countless parishes will die of the complications of COVID-19; many will be euthanized by their own bishops, who’ve found just the excuse they needed to close them.

Monday marked a solemn day for America, as the coronavirus death toll in the United States crossed the 500,000 mark. By this weekend, 100,000 will have died during Joe Biden’s short tenure as President. One hundred thousand. Think about that for just a second. Let that sink in. We could do what all the Trump-deranged pundit class did when the 45th president was in charge. That is, compare the COVID death count 'under this President's watch' to various unrelated historical atrocities. One hundred thousand deaths is the same death toll as the German Peasants’ War, a populist revolt in 1524 which lasted an entire year.

We’ve all had to learn more than enough about pathogens in recent months — how contagion spreads, how our immune systems work, what vaccines do and so on. All of us, that is — apart from President Joe Biden, it seems. On Sunday, in order to demonstrate that he ‘listens to scientists’— an important campaign promise — the Commander-in-Chief posted a video of himself being lectured by the Scientist-in-Chief, Dr Anthony Fauci, the man who used to tell us not to bother with masks but now says we’ll still be wearing them until, oh, maybe forever. 'This is the spike protein,’ explains Dr Fauci, patiently. ‘This is the protein of coronavirus.

Throughout the dark years of the Trump administration, brave, isolated voices in America’s richest, most liberal cities needed a means to communicate. They needed a kind of secret signal to show other liberals they were not alone, that the flame of liberalism was still burning. You may have seen the sign above and been confused: Now, thanks to Joe Biden’s triumphal arrival in the capital, these symbols can be deciphered. In each line, the glyphs carry a hidden, greater meaning: 'Black Lives Matter' translates to 'we should defund the police and increase the crime rate in predominately black areas.' 'Women’s rights are human rights' is coded language for 'biological males should win every women’s track meet.' And so on. What about 'Science is real?

The joy of life in America, in the 21st century, consists partly in the knowledge that whenever something bad happens, it’s ipso facto someone else’s fault. So let’s go get the so-and-so! Welcome to frozen-over Texas, where on Wednesday morning, February 17, 2.7 million households were without heat, owing to the uninvited and unwelcome presence of an Arctic cold front spreading suffering and inconvenience through every one of this energy-rich state’s 254 counties. The last time it got anything like this cold around here was 1949. I was here in ’49, albeit too young to appreciate the icicles.

Last week, the homepage of CNN announced that 'The story keeps getting worse for Andrew Cuomo on COVID-19.' The story, penned by Chris Cillizza, is gripping. A top aide confessed that the New York governor’s office had 'knowingly undercounted deaths among nursing home residents during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic’. This 'stunning admission’ is 'a very bad look — to say the least’ for an office currently dealing with separate scrutiny over having sent 9,000 patients recovering from coronavirus back to nursing homes. This figure was 40 percent higher than reported originally, indicating that deaths aren’t the only data Cuomo and his team are lying about. But what the CNN piece fails to mention is that the new, damning evidence about Gov.

Media Karen Culture didn’t take a break for Sunday’s Super Bowl. Once again Florida and its murderous dictator-governor Ron DeSantis found themselves the target of the media’s ire. The NFL set aside the football contest and offered viewers a detour through their favorite social causes. CNN reporter Randi Kaye was reporting from downtown Tampa Bay on the first occasion that the Super Bowl took place in the home stadium of one of the teams playing. She found herself on the phone to the cops looking to stop public gatherings. Kaye was double-masked  and alluded to CNN host Ana Cabrera that she felt her production team was in danger. ‘I spoke to the Tampa police and I asked them, “What are you doing about this?” A lot of people were very concerned.