A BLUE LAGOON: Have the gods of plague finally come for Us?

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2024

Flashing on Camus: In yesterday's offering, we reported a statement by Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe—a statement we regard as truly remarkable.

Boothe made the statement on Saturday evening's edition of The Big Weekend Show, a clown car-adjacent Fox News Channel production. This was the statement in question:

BOOTHE (11/30/24): Joe Biden took a stage at the end of July [2021], CNN Town Hall, telling Americans that if you got the vaccine, you wouldn't get the virus. So we were lied to the entire time, and Dr. Fauci is corrupt and evil and was the person spearheading a lot of those lies.

Dr. Fauci is evil! Given the cultural climate of the time, we regard that statement as deeply dangerous. In fairness, we'd have to say this:

In the past few years, we've watched a lot of these Fox News Channel TV shows.  On the basis of that experience, it seems to us that Boothe went beyond a line which is normally observed by that channel's army of scripted commentators, who appear on the channel's "discussion" programs to parrot the channel's corporate line.

In our own report, we focused on the physical danger involved in Boothe's remarkable claim that Dr. Fauci is "evil." In this subsequent post, Kevin Drum focused on the part of Boothe's statement in which she claimed that "we were lied to [about Covid] the entire time" by people like Dr. Fauci.

We strongly suggest that you read every word of Kevin's subsequent post. For ourselves, we flashed on a iconic literary text as we read his report. 

For the first time in several years, we flashed on Camus' La Peste (The Plague)—for example, on this passage from his famous allegory (Stuart Gilbert translation):

CAMUS (page 36): The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor’s uncertainty and surprise—since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that come crashing down on our heads from a blue sky. 

"There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet somehow plagues and wars take people equally by surprise," Camus writes as he continues.  In short, we humans find it hard to see what's happening when the gods of plague finally come for us. 

We tend to assume that plagues only happen to other people in other, distant locales. 

La Peste (The Plague) is an allegory.  Camus describes a literal, rat-borne plague infesting the city of Oran. He lets this literal plague represent the moral pestilence which swept through Europe in the years before World War II.

A bit later, still on page 36, Camus describes the way the people of Oran, Dr. Rieux included, initially failed to see that a plague had now come for them.  You see that passage below.

For our money, the judgments in this passage about "the humanists" are too harsh. That said, this is Gilbert's translation, and we think the passage captures one aspect of our current time:

CAMUS: In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his guard...

[O]ur townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. 

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

Indeed, even after Dr. Rieux had admitted in his friend's company that a handful of persons, scattered about the town, had without warning died of plague, the danger still remained fantastically unreal...

In certain ways, we think the judgments offered there are too harsh. Still:

In our nation's present circumstance, a certain type of plague may have come for us. Being human, we humanists in Blue America may have a hard time seeing some of the ways we ourselves have contributed to the onset of this plague.

In our view, what happens each day and night on the Fox News Channel is a type pf pestilence. That said, the onset of this plague has been enabled, again and again, by the behaviors of those of us in Blue America.

Being human, we tend to find it hard to see this part of the situation. For ourselves, we tend to regard that as a form of "true belief" or as a form of "denial." 

Gilbert's translation refers to "stupidity." We think that's not the right word.

When people like Boothe make statements like the statement in question, we're being invaded by a type of pestilence. When Blue America's major orgs avert their gaze from such non-stop behaviors, we humanists in Blue America are in fact playing an active role in this situation.

Here's a further bit of disclosure:

On one topic after another, the men and women of the Fox News Channel have actually been more right—have actually been more insightful—then their counterparts at MSNBC. 

Those of us in Blue America tend to have a hard time seeing that fact. But it remains an actual fact, however much we humanists may be inclined to deny or disregard it.

Early in Camus' famous novel, the men and women of Oran couldn't see what was happening right there before them. It's a bit like that with the blindness exhibited by our own Blue American tribe.

We live in a type of Blue Lagoon. Our own behaviors have contributed to the election of Candidate Trump, but such facts rarely invade our view of the world. 

In the next four days, then never again, we'll try to explain that state of affairs. In our view, the story starts in the 1960s. Also, there's the part of the story which comes to us, live and direct, from the imperfect behaviors of President Biden and other Blue players over the past four years.

We Blues have played a significant part in the onset of the current plague. On the one hand, we refuse to come to terms with the behaviors of people like Boothe. Also, we refuse to see the ways our own tribe's behaviors have helped bring us to this point.

This plague is advancing day and night. When we remain locked in our own Blue Lagoon, we remain a part of the problem.

Tomorrow: A tale of two lists