Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I know from epidemics.

I grew up without a grandfather because, thanks to that political worm-casting Woodrow Wilson, he died during the 1918 Spanish Influenza outbreak at an Army camp in Waco, Texas. I would like to have had a grandfather. He was a cowboy, got into bar-fights, and twice disarmed badguys who tried to hold up his mother’s business. My poor parents sweated out summers in the 1950s when swimming pools were emptied and movie theaters shut down because nobody knew what caused crippling poliomyelitis or how it was transmitted (when was the last time you heard the horrible phrase “iron lung”?). I had one kind of flu after another in my adult years until I started refusing flu shots.

Yesterday I became so thoroughly disgusted with the wall-to-wall, run-for-the-hills, hide-under-the-bed coverage of the Corona Virus on FOX News that I finally changed the channel and watched Ancient Aliens all day. The occasional, possibly accidental occurrence of the truth was vastly greater. Being a science fiction writer, and a firm believer in historical conspiracies, I have entertained the notion that this buglet was deliberately fabricated by the Chinese government as a bio-weapon to inflict on Western Civilization, but that, with typical communist incompetence, they let it escape to backfire on them (lost in all the drama is the fact that Chinese mortuary workers are complaining—as they did in Nazi Germany—that the crematory furnaces are burning out from being overworked) but that it has generally been a bust wherever else it has spread. Where was John Galt when they really needed him?

“A bust?” I pretend I hear you ask incredulously. Consider these facts: the United States’ population in 1918 was 104,550,000, less than one third of what it is now. The Spanish influenza killed 675,000 people (45,000 of them recent military inductees like my grandfather). That’s the statistical equivalent of more than two million deaths in 2020. Two million Spanish Influenza deaths. Today, different strains of the flu kill 80,000 Americans every year.

If you remember nothing else of what I’ve written here, remember this: every year 4500 Americans die of the common cold. 4500 Americans. I’ll repeat that so you’ll recall it the next time the boobs on the tube start shouting at you that the current malaise has killed eleven people somewhere in Upper Lowerovia County. Every year 4500 Americans die of the common cold. The vast majority of them are very old, with health complications like bad kidneys, coronary disease, or diabetes. One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

Corona virus, Covid-19, The Chinese Sneeze, the Wu-wu Flu, whatever you want to call it, is the Y2K of public health crises. Remember Y2K? The real disease is the excuse, the golden opportunity, that the manufactured panic over it has created to establish police state controls over the population that won’t go away once the virus eventually does.

Think I’m exaggerating? Charles Ellis Schumer (he wants you to call him “Chuck”), Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler, Rob Reiner, Barbra Streisand, Michael Moore, Alyssa Milano, Joy Behar, and other such anal extrusions routinely lie about Donald Trump’s health and mental capabilities while rallying passionately around an ancient communist retread and a demented, senile old fart. Some of them, believing their own propaganda, have started a PAC to somehow infect the President. (As humorist Roger Price once put it, all the folks who believe the Earth is round gathering up all those who don’t and shoving them off the edge.)

Right now they’re hyping this pathetic microthing in the hope that they can put a stop to the huge rallies that are the basis of Trump’s ascendancy and that they hate, loathe, and despise. It would be an historically tragic mistake to let them. If they could claim the phony-baloney illness is spread by his tweeting—his direct, unfiltered communication with his constituency—which they detest even more (elsewhere, they’re using it, unbelievably, as an excuse to pile on more victim disarmament legislation), somehow they would.

To paraphrase Monty Python, I unclog my nostrils in their general direction.