Peter Van Buren

When will our intellectual life return to normal, where facts come together into conclusions? Today, in service to ideologies like Critical Race Theory, conclusions are established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support them. You can't argue intellectually against something so profoundly nonintellectual but you can take note of it in hopes that someday we will untangle ourselves. That's why today we're paying a visit to the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side. When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016, it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th-century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments.

It's bad enough when someone actually thinks reposting an "I Stand With..." meme is an act of woke resistance. But when the problem is enlarged to a societal scale, it hurts us all. Nothing actually broken ever gets fixed, and a deep sense of cynicism is injected into once-believers when they realize they've been conned. We live inside a con job where the appearance of action is mistaken for action. So we are left to wonder about the point, other than setting the stage for more future cynicism, of the Google "doodle" this past Veteran's Day. The illustration showed various vets, all appropriately racially ratioed, drawn half in uniform and half in civilian garb. One's a painter, one's a baker, and the Marine is shown as trans.

Sometimes a thing can be two things at once, one good and one bad. That requires a choice. And in a free society, that choice is usually best made by the individual directly affected. If not, then by an open, democratic process. Yet that is not what's happening with Joe Biden's vaccine mandate and it's why the cure is worse than the disease. I am, by my choice, thrice vaccinated. I understand the COVID vaccine prevents me from getting sick, and it is only a day-by-day smaller population of unvaccinated people who are actually still at risk of dying. We each make a choice. Now the government wants to make that choice for us. Vax mandates are an unhealthy thing for our democracy and represent a willful effort by government to exert additional control over an already cowed population.

The word malaise, a general feeling of uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify, is creeping into discussions. It's a politically loaded word, following its use by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to describe the country he could not figure out to how lead. Carter's specific use of the term focused on the energy crisis, when OPEC monkeyed with America's oil supply. But Carter saw that something much deeper was wrong. There wasn't just an oil shortage to manage, but a recession of hope, a crisis of confidence that someone would have to lead America out of. He perceived that we were tired, worn down, unable to come together in common purpose and fix something. It would be interesting to hear what Carter thinks about 2021, when things once again don't work well.

Two weeks to flatten the curve became 18 months of mandates with no end in sight. Government seized new powers from the people to regulate their lives. Rules that make no sense dominate us, experiments in compliance not science. How do COVID restrictions end? They likely never will. I learned all that at the Department of Motor Vehicles . My reeducation started when I was told to prove as an American citizen in an American state that I am 'resident' here, not simply being an American in America. I'm a good sport and wanted to comply, just like I try to keep up with the latest rules and Purell my terrestrial hands 600 times a day against an airborne virus. Threats aren't inherently political, right? And you just can't be too careful.