By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
And thus have the kings of the earth stood up, and the
Rulers have taken counsel together, against the Lord, and against his Anointed,
as it is written. Therefore now the Lord that sitteth in heaven . . . poureth
contempt upon Princes, by casting down and destroying of them, even by men that
have been and are base and contemptible in their eyes. And thus the Lord is
vexing of them, and will vex them in his sore displeasure, until he have
destroyed them from off the earth: because they have vexed, persecuted, and
shed the blood of his Saints, therefore he will give them blood to drink: for
they are worthy.
— Henry
Haggar, No King But Jesus, 1652
People think of Texas as the land of “wide open spaces,” but being home to four
metropolitan areas with populations each exceeding 2 million, it is one of the
most urban states, with five of the 15 largest cities in the country. The
politics and social character of Houston and San Antonio have much more in
common with Chicago and Los Angeles than they do with Alpine, Texas, which is
even more remote from Houston than the 571 miles on the map would indicate.
Alpine is the seat of Brewster County, the gateway to the
backcountry wilderness of West Texas. It is under an emergency COVID-19 order.
But as of Tuesday afternoon, the latest New York Times data showed that
Brewster County was home to not one of Texas’s 20,286 coronavirus cases. That
is not surprising. A big part of the county is in Big Bend National Park, where
you can spend days wandering around without seeing another living soul. With
population density at 1.5 human beings per square mile, social distancing is
the traditional way of life.
The South Bronx it isn’t.
New Yorkers are burning up the police hotlines to inform
on their neighbors for violating social-distancing protocols — more than 14,000
calls already have been made to the NYPD, who have found it necessary to take
no action in the majority of these cases. But it isn’t just New York. In
Dallas, the police are dutifully trolling through old urban neighborhoods with
on-street parking, putting “abandoned vehicle” tickets on the windshields of
cars that are parked in front of their owners’ houses but haven’t been moved
for a couple of weeks — there’s not much reason to drive.
Why? Because somebody complained.
The coronavirus epidemic has brought out the best in many
Americans and the worst in others. It also has intensified one of the tribal
fissures that run through practically every state and a great many counties in
this country: Ratfink America vs. You’re Not the Boss of Me! America.
Ratfink America mostly lives in the urban metros, mostly
has a progressive-secular cultural orientation, and mostly votes Democratic.
Did you see that Harvard Magazine essay about Elizabeth Bartholet of
Harvard Law, who argued that we should prohibit
homeschooling because it makes it harder for authorities to keep an eye on the
domestic lives of unruly proles? That’s pure Ratfink America.
Michael Bloomberg shoving his vain little snout into your soda? Ratfink
America. The people who call CPS on mothers who smoke in front of their
children? Ratfink Americans, one and all.
And the people who leave eleven-month-old babies locked
up in the Nissan all night while they’re gambling in a New
Jersey casino?
They’re the other kind.
You’re Not the Boss of Me! America is, in its raw and
concentrated form, The
Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. It’s Ammon Bundy and David
Koresh. But it’s also Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, Civil
Disobedience, and the Declaration of Independence. In the coronavirus
context, it is Pentecostals in Florida and Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn defying
social-distancing mandates.
You might think the blue-nosed busybodies who are always
up in everybody else’s business would be found in the churches, but that is not
the case in America Anno Domini 2020. Traditional religious believers of
many different faiths are at the center of the collective soul of You’re Not
the Boss of Me! America. These are our modern Levellers, determined to have “No
King But Jesus.”
You’re Not the Boss of Me! America is forever hearing
footsteps in the night, expecting the jackboot on the front door at any minute.
That mentality used to be a more natural fit for the Left, which in the days of
the Sixties counterculture understood itself to be the target of the
homogenizing and disciplining forces of institutions from church to state to
college to corporation. They may have been listening to the Who, but they were
the Whom.
After the Left’s Long March through the institutions, the
tables have turned. Progressives enjoy power in the bureaucracies, in the
universities, in the corporations,
etc. There is a slight complication at the moment owing to the fact that the
cultural mascot of You’re Not the Boss of Me! America happens to be president,
and believes that he is indeed the boss of us all. (He is not.) As Charles C.
W. Cooke has noted, the Left has criticized Trump for acting like a dictator
and then complained that in the response to the epidemic he has not acted in a sufficiently
dictatorial fashion.
You can be confident that the partisans and theorists of
Ratfink America will give up “Resistance!” just as soon as the next Democrat is
elected president, and then we’ll go back to having media Democrats explain to
us that opposing the president is sedition and demanding we put Rush Limbaugh
on trial. Or that we arrest people with naughty
views on climate change.
The divide in our culture is Left and Right. But it is
also town and country, farm and pharma, institutionalist and dissident, who and
whom, Prius and F-150, kale and Mountain Dew. It is Ratfink America and You’re
Not the Boss of Me! America.
Like professional wrestling, it is the same fight over
and over again in a hundred different arenas — and no less hokey and fake.
No comments:
Post a Comment