Large Fierce Mammal

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog), Caspar David Friedrich c. 1818

Our title today is a twist of a sentiment expressed in song by the character of Fagin in the musical Oliver!. In the wake of an existential threat from Bill Sikes, Fagin reflects on his own litany of bad life choices and how things might be different if he only tried some options on for size. End result of his mental gymnastics — he finds he can’t wrap his mind around any of them. He’s screwed.

Yesterday’s piece, Cui Bono?, spoke to how the philosophy of multicultural globalism (a small example of which can be found here) created the perfect storm for the situation we now share with all the other jolly sailors adrift with us aboard the Goode Ship Earth. Where mere weeks ago, open borders, sunny ways, and friend helping friend were the mantra of Western Liberalism, the ship is now a life boat, its passengers scrambling over each other to lock the watertight doors in hope that at least their compartment won’t sink with all the rest. An analogy made all the sweeter by the plethora of “cruise ships of the damned” that have spent weeks being shunned at every port as passengers and crew sickened and died.

If COVID-19 has done anything, it has raised the question of whether the adherents of Western Liberalism have abandoned multicultural globalism, or if it has abandoned them. One thing is certain — the bigger an organism is, the more dependence it has on stability of the environmental conditions in which it evolved. When those veer too far from ideal, megafauna become fossils with surprising speed.

Another grimly positive effect of what I will henceforth refer to as The Pestilence is that it has highlighted where lines need to be drawn through all levels of society, and suggests that going forward, he risks career suicide who leads a nation into codependency with any other to the point that the homegrown essentials of national self-sufficiency are lost.

We will need a clearly defined, decidedly unconvoluted, definition of “homegrown essentials of national self-sufficiency”, and if there was ever an understatement, that is it.

Stay tuned. As you can probably sense, I’m not done yet.