Of Tyranny and Idiocy

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death is the name of an album made by the Dead Kennedys, a rock group which may or may not be properly described as a punk rock group, with a penchant for offensive names and witty, if gritty, songs like California Uber Alles and Holiday in Cambodia.  They lampooned a great deal, including American consumerism.  The title of this album comes to mind irresistibly in connection with "anti-maskers" and so much else associated with these dismal times.

I like to think of myself as fairly imaginative.  But I must admit it's difficult for me to even imagine that anyone would associate the requirement (and even the request it seems) that people wear masks during this pandemic with tyranny.  That there clearly are people who do, like the unfortunate(s) who made and held the sign pictured above, inspires a kind of awe regarding the vastness of our capacity for idiocy.

"Tyranny" is a word used to describe a form of government in ancient Greece, and also used to refer to a cruel, unreasonable or arbitrary exercise of control.   Assuming those who use the word in connection with wearing a mask in these times are aware of the fact that they don't live in ancient Greece, one can assume they mean to refer to the kind of exercise of control that may properly be termed "tyrannical."

If so, the bar on tyranny is being set very low.  Wearing a mask can, just barely, be deemed an inconvenience.  Can there be such a thing as a tyranny of inconvenience?  Are there really people who believe that refusing to wear a little mask is heroic?  What a sad spectacle we must make.

Considering it to be tyranny is to liken it to the tyranny complained of by Patrick Henry, which is to indulge in an absurd comparison, as if not more absurd than the consumerism decried by the Dead Kennedys in their album mimicking his bold statement about tyranny of the British government.

There are those who claim that they may hurt only themselves by refusing to wear a mask, and that therefore to do so is their decision to make.  This claim, of course, is contrary to what most experts maintain--that wearing a mask protects others, not the wearer.  But our Republic has degenerated to the extent that the deluded live in a kind of alternate reality; one in which those with the knowledge needed to pronounce on the need, on the facts, are to be disregarded and even reviled.  Even if they do not live in Never-Never Mask Land, it seems that they feel that their preference in rejecting the titanic effort required to wear a mask, trumps, as it were, the health and well being of others.  How else explain their insistence on the so-called right not to wear a mask even when requested to do so by business owners rightly concerned about their customers and employees, and the possibility that their businesses may be shut down if they are tested positive for Covid 19?

This kind of self-righteous stupidity highlights the fact that the concept of rights has been perverted to the extent that people actually believe that they may do, and think, anything they want, and that this enormously selfish conceit is one they may delight in by virtue of being American.  Thus the belief in a "right" not to wear a small mask that serves to prevent the spread of a pandemic (though of course, for some, the pandemic is a hoax).  The right, in other words, not be be inconvenienced.

It's a notion that would have appalled the Founding Fathers, who strove so hard to create a government which would restrain the opinion of those unsophisticated and uneducated folk they believed made up the great majority of American citizens, and protect the knowledgeable.  For good or ill, the Founders were fearful of the majority.  I suspect that they would be amazed by our current state of affairs.

Perhaps there's more than one pandemic.  One impacts the body, the other impacts the mind.  The one affecting the body may be cured or mitigated.  All reliable evidence indicates wearing a mask will limit its spread, with very little effort.  But the one that affects the mind is such that it convinces those afflicted that wearing a mask is a limitation of their rights.  And nothing can be done with those who are convinced they have a right of some kind, to do or not do something, regardless of whether their exercise of that right is at another's expense--indeed, perhaps, especially because it is at another's expense.