Now Lanser stood up. “I told you I’m very tired, sir. I must have some sleep. Please co-operate with us for the good of all.” When Mayor Orden made no reply, “For the good of all,” Lanser repeated. “Will you?”
Orden said, “This is a little town. I don’t know. The people are confused and so am I.”
“But will you try to co-operate?”
Orden Shook his head. “I don’t know. When the town makes up its mind what it wants to do, I’ll probably do that.”
– Steinbeck, The Moon is Down
I’m just a guy eating chocolate chip cookies for breakfast.
I know there’s a list of counties in Washington who are now (graciously) permitted (with suprememe benevolence) to apply for the privilege of embarking on phase 2 of reopening their businesses. I am no revolutionary, but I am no idiot, and while neither am I a Constitutional scholar, I don’t think that’s the way it works. I’m pretty sure these people – The People – can hang their shingles and throw open the doors whenever they damn well please, without begging for permission from those elected officials who serve because we allow them to do so. Not the other way around.
Andy Havens 
“And it’ll go on (already has), far longer than it should. It’s the only way to manufacture enough unwarranted fear to make us feel important.”
At some point folks realize that it is all “enemy action.”
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Vander Leun expository guide:
He’s making reference to one of Churchill’s most trenchant observations
Once is happenstance; Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action
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Alternately, as the Rabbi Ben Kingsley put it in Lucky Number Slevin:
“The first time a man calls you a horse, you punch him on the nose. The second time, you call him a jerk. He calls you a horse a third time, perhaps you should go shopping for a saddle.”
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[…] But here we have the best possible hell – a global one! Nobody is left out. It is literally everyone’s 15 minutes. Except that as the coronavirus sputtered along, the perpetually mediocre and eternally aggrieved masses started to realize, with a rising sense of panic, that they weren’t going to get sick. And neither was anyone in their families. Obviously, some did, but the numbers turned out to be disappointingly low and so full of asterisks and predictable concentrations in nursing homes that this global nightmare was starting to look like a date with fame that was going to leave us sitting alone at a fancy table and repeating to the waiter through stifled sobs that “she’ll be here any minute.” The PVP Diaries #48 – Andy Havens […]
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