By Victor Davis Hanson
Joe Biden has redefined mask wearing. It is now the thinking man’s patriotism, what every “scientific” and “refined” mind naturally does.
Biden, the media, and the progressive party all blame the now ill Trump for becoming infected. They accuse the president of becoming sick because he was selfish. You see, he was not always wearing a mask, or not always isolating in social-distancing fashion, or not always staying inside except for essential expeditionary trips.
Upon reading these condemnations, one could be forgiven for thinking Trump was the mayor of Fresno, not the president of the most powerful and necessary nation in history.
The subtext is that Trump is no Biden. Joe follows “science.” He “gets it.” He “listens” to “experts.” Like Trump his rival septuagenarian has health issues, but very much unlike Trump, Biden, until lately, seldom was seen or heard. For Biden, the way to run a presidency is the way he wishes to conduct the second debate—by Zoom.
Who Is the Real “Patriot”?
This Trump/Biden good-bad dichotomy is crazy. It reveals that Biden has no real idea of who is keeping this country in general, and his own household in particular, alive—much less how hard that task is at a time of plague and quarantine.
Class differences, considerations, and interests are the real themes of this election. They are on the side of the president who took the same calculated risks that millions do to meet the requirements of their jobs that simply cannot be done from basements and safe zones or over computers and smartphones.
Recently, Joe Biden, in his usual clumsy racialist fashion, at last confessed that his own half-year sequestration kept him safe only because, “some black woman was able to stack the grocery shelf.”
Aside from the reality that Biden usually stereotypes black people as either stock people, or clueless (“you ain’t black”), or defenseless (“put ‘y’all back in chains” ) or addicted to drugs ( “you taking cocaine or not? What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”), he accidently stumbled upon a truth here.
Biden really doesn’t take risks, because he assumes that others less privileged will take them on his behalf. And in doing so, hundreds of thousands of Americans, with masks, with hand sanitizer on their palms, and with careful distancing whenever possible, have been infected, some severely and others mortally so.
So COVID, the quarantine, and the president’s illness alike have now become class issues. On the one hand, are the elite and entitled “Karens.” They scream and rant when they see a slipped mask. They worship Lord Zoom and His Highness Skype. They brag about their near-perfect quarantine, and become insufferable when talking of “the science” and “Dr. Fauci.” In truth, the telecommunicating, distance-working and remote profiting classes are all part of the pyramidal capstone of American society, the tiny tip that does not totter or blow off because it rests on a vast, indomitable base below that has no such options.
Who exactly makes or brings House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ’s (D-Calif.) designer ice cream to her palazzo? Who cooks the food delivered via DoorDash to the right zip codes? Who slaughters, cleans and packages the steak cooked by the quarantined class, or meets the sick at the ER door? Those of perfect weight, with correct vitamin D levels, who eat the proper vegetables, and keep their blood sugar and cholesterol low, and the fat off with a daily hour at the gym? Not always.
Yes, they should and they do wear protective gear. But they are also busy, often exhausted, short of breath by their eighth hour on their feet, and so human rather than Karen-perfect. A mask is not a matter of an hour’s walk break from quarantine, or a trip to the grocery store, but of impairing breathing for 9-10 hours, day after day, to keep a grocery store open or cut the tree limbs back from sidewalks.
Not long ago during the quarantine, four of our old appliances, like clockwork, failed. I ordered replacements from Home Depot. They were delivered by sweaty movers, who did 10-15 such deliveries a day. Most usually fit the weight, age, and ethnic categories of those at risk. As two scooted the refrigerator into the kitchen narrows, one had taken off his mask. He apologized with, “Sorry, but I can’t get enough air after about the 10th delivery.”
I told him “We beggars can’t be choosers—and without you I would have no food.” It was not as if he slung his mask off to board his private jet, or roamed around the Hamptons while actively infected, as a prelude to lecture the nation on the sacred and deified mask.
We Don’t Deserve or Choose to Get COVID
It is past time to remember that a hundred million Americans are out on the front lines doing their best to keep the country alive; and its whiny, sequestered elite fed, powered, supplied and safe—and thus ever more hyper-critical and hypocritical.
If our supermarkets ran on the logic of Yale, or our hospitals on the hours of Stanford, or our assembly plants worked on the rationale of the grad seminar, then most of us would starve, die, or revert to a pre-civilizational existence.
The track record of our elite policymakers, like many of our epidemiologists, and our modelers and our media, is not nearly as good as those who deliver refrigerators or slaughter steers.
There is a now mini-internet industry of exposing our hectoring political and media grandees—take Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), or CNN’s Chris Cuomo—shouting about the need to wear masks, while themselves stealthily not wearing them. And they do so often in the context of sneaking into upscale salons for beauty treatments, or scurrying around a private jet port, or inspecting an “East Hampton property under construction.” Their message is unambiguous: “I do exemptions so I can ensure you don’t.”
Most Americans who don’t work from home try to wear masks. They use hand cleansers. They distance when they go out each day. But most also under no circumstance say anything to correct anyone pouring cement, changing tires, cooking food, or fighting fires if their protocols seem like they don’t meet Joe Biden’s standards. Not only do these people help to keep us alive another day, but we know those who set such standards for others have often failed them—and predictably in a landscape of privileged hypocrisy.
In this context, Trump is not the reckless one. He no more deserved to get the virus than did the 210,000 who have died—died with and without masks, distancing and not so much, and meticulously clean and sometimes not.
Trump is president. He’s not a professor, not a journalist, not a stockbroker, not an actor. The Left has it upside-down. It is narcissistic for a president to hibernate on the theory that he can’t be replaced, even as he does the nation psychological damage. It is leadership to go out and, with proper caution, to brave the contagion, on the theory Trump is indeed replaceable while cowering is inexcusable.
His job description is to be one with the people, and to take measured risks, when necessary. That’s what leaders must do. General George Patton certainly did not have to fly above his 3rd Army in a fragile Piper-Cub in foul weather and near enemy skies. But he did it to hone his knowledge of the battlespace, and to remind his men that like them, he was as expendable.
Churchill had no business making 25 trips outside wartime Britain. Yet he had all the business in the world to do so if he was going to encourage men that not all was lost, and that the Wehrmacht was not so powerful. Teddy Roosevelt was not “reckless” when he finished a speech after being shot, with the bullet lodged near his heart. Rather he determined that his Stoicism reminded his audience that he was one with them, and stronger unarmed than the assassin armed.
Right now Biden has a runny nose and cough.
He got caught taking down his mask to cough IN PUBLIC!
Then he got caught without a mask at a gym!
(We normal folk are asked to not go to anyplace if we don’t feel well., ie., have a runny nose & cough.)
What?
Are there places where the virus can’t get you?
Let us in on the secret.
Trump has a job to do. A very difficult and complex job, made more difficult by Democrats seeking to do nothing but make it MORE difficult. Trump doesn’t have a choice; he HAS to do the job. Look at the political hay the left made with the rumor that Trump retreated to the White House bunker, even for a half hour. Imagine what they would make of him hunkering down in the White House, as Biden has been doing.
Biden has but one job; the campaign. And he doesn’t even have to do that, the left wing media is doing it for him, and much more competently than Biden could ever do. As President, though, Biden couldn’t afford to bunker up and hide.