Mask Mandates - Here Come The Thought Police

Jackie Edwards had been one of the COVID Nazis.  She had been a member of her neighborhood Brown Shirts, Fascistas, enforcers, Stasi operatives of University Park.  She had identified, called out, and reported pandemic naysayers - j'accuse! was her mimetic viral-reveal howl.  She was the fury from hell, scorning the indifference and criminal ignorance of her neighborhood, bound and determined to spotlight the unwilling. 

 

She was proud of her calling.  Triple masked and shielded, gloved and frocked, she was a sentinel, a prowler of parks, a venting prophet.  She was the Madwoman of Chaillot come to Washington, untamed, unbridled in her fantastic crusade. 

And then it was over, all her energies for naught.  All the spraying, scrubbing, and purifying gone; masks discarded, and crowds back.  She continued her ISIS crusade long after COVID obsession had peaked and faded.  She was now the hysteric of Barkley Street, the woman who needed a good man, the progressive without a cause. 

She returned to life as normal, buttering her toast in the morning, taking her daily constitutional, and seeing to it that the aphids were off the roses.  All the clatter, her peculiar Sturm und Drang had been retired. 

She rejoined the more familiar progressive causes about - climate change, racism, social justice, and her favorite, transgenderism.  Her second cousin, gay as the day is long, finally came out with a vengeance. He became the queen of Dupont Circle, the swishiest gay man around, the go-to headliner for the clubs on 17th Street; until the life was not enough, faking it as a woman was so yesterday, serious reform had to be in the cards.  And so Bobby became Bobbie, chopped and channeled as his bear-bikers friends called it, and she became the poster girl of the Avenue, happy as a clam, feminine and pretty to her roots this time. 

Jackie became one of them, honorary trannie, the Pearl Mesta of the re-formed crowd, a Circle hostess as sought after as Penny Rademacher and her Georgetown soirees. 

Yet that too faded after the heady times of COVID.  There was purpose and principle involved of course, but none of the insurrectionist spirit of the pandemic.  Hers had been a 15-round bare-knuckled event.  Fighting the ignoramuses had been exhilarating, volcanic.  By comparison, hanging out with a gay crowd and drinking sweet drinks with little parasols was bunny stuff. 

She dabbled in climate change, but that was too academic for her taste.  Carbon this, emissions that, ozone layer babble - it all was too refined.  Yes, geothermal Armageddon was on its way, but not for a while when the next variation of COVID could wipe out the planet quicker than the Black Plague. 

A brief sojourn in the MeToo camp, and she decided to hang it up until the Big One was on the horizon.

She didn't have to wait long, for a new, highly contagious, and potentially dangerous variant was detected in California and had been responsible for a significant rise in hospitalizations and deaths.  This was what she had been waiting for!  Although the data were preliminary, they were cautionary.  It was none too soon to reimpose 2020 measures of protection and control. 

Of course the Biden Administration, eager to consolidate its earlier attempts at centralization of government authority and again use the fear of disease to subsume all America within the federal tent, sent out promising signals.  It may be time to reconsider mask mandates, said he President.  We cannot let down our guard. 

But the people were having none of it.  They had buttoned up, masked, sprayed, purified, and self-isolated and they still had all gotten COVID at least once and survived quite nicely, thank you.  They would be goddamned if they would go through it all again. 

So now the fight would be even more engaging and competitive.  There would be more naysayers and cultural miscreants about.  Simple vigilance and reporting would not be enough.  She would have to up her vigilantism, resort to the tactics of environmental terrorism.  Those who were seen on the streets of University Park without masks would see pink flamingo lawn furniture replaced by the ghoulish reminders of death.  Black Lives Matter signs would be repurposed.  'The Devil Lives Here' or some such thing would be necessary to expose the moral truancy of Park residents. 

Just as she began to collect and train her soldiers, so did those who opposed any kind of new government mandates and regulation.  These COVID Bad Boys were far cries from the complaisant, respectful protests of early COVID.  They promised revolutionary justice for all in Washington who defied popular opinion; and so the virus wars resurfaced, but this time with the antipathy, anger, and hostility of the abortion wars.  There could be no give between the two.  Disease brooked no compromise.  Either you did or you didn't.  

These hard-bitten protests fell, however, on her deaf ears, and she girded herself for the new, perhaps legendary battle against COVID.  This time, however, she was seen as a nutcase, a round-the-bend, off-her-rocker old maid who had nothing better to do.  No matter how many wild-eyed, streetcorner prophesies she spoke, and no matter how insistent her ferocity and threat, she was simply supernumerary, irrelevant, and dismissed. 

The new mask mandates were the death knell of the Biden Administration.  Just as they had underestimated the depth of feeling against his progressive agenda - shoving buggery and drag queens down the throats of good, ordinary American people - they misjudged the never lost, always percolating sense of individualism and personal independence of the citizenry.  They had had enough and saw through the transparent attempts at government authoritarianism.  

So Jackie went home, a tired, beaten woman, consigned to Barcalounger and chaise lounge.  She had given it her all, a Cassandra in aprons and mules.  No one had listened.  And so it was with Joe Biden and his progressive claques.  They had listened all right - to themselves - but when the electorate wised up, they were left summarily on the curb