Lost in the Land of Frogs

 

Dr. Theresa Tam is calling for us all to get masked up once again, and take a new vaccine. Covid is back.

This might seem odd, given that studies now show that wearing a mask does nothing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and previous vaccines seem to have done more harm than good. So why would Tam give such apparently bad advice?

Some are inclined o believe there is a government conspiracy here to get us all accustomed to taking orders. 

I say, never ascribe to malice what can more easily be explained by a fairy tale.

The relevant fable here is Aesop’s, of the frogs who wanted a king.

The frogs were tired of governing themselves. So they sent a petition to Zeus asking for a king.

To keep them quiet and make them think they had a king he threw down a huge log, which fell into the water with a great splash. The frogs hid themselves among the reeds and grasses, thinking the new king to be some fearful giant. But in a short time the younger frogs were using him for a diving platform, while the older frogs made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly to Zeus about the government.

So Zeus now sent down a crane to be king of frogland. He gobbled up the poor frogs right and left. 

At last the frogs believed they had a real king, and were content.

The government knows a new strain of the virus is coming. A lot of people are likely to get sick. Some will die. And the people will raise a hue and cry, “Zeus, why didn’t the government do something?” So the government takes some random but plausible action, ideally something that sounds drastic. People will still sicken and die, but the government will not be blamed. Best too to propose something that requires general compliance. Then the government can scapegoat the public for not doing it, or at least not all doing it—for inevitably, not all will do it. 

The frogs fall for it every time.

For the same reason, you are never going to leave a doctor’s office without some prescription.

Another similar story also in the news: the Peel Regional School Board has been pulling all the books from school libraries that were published before 2008, and sending them off to landfill, n the premise that nothing written before that date is “inclusive.” 

This sounds like something out of 1984, an attempt to memory hole our past. 

But the more likely explanation is simpler. The provincial government issued a directive that school libraries cull any book that is not “inclusive,” with special attention to books published before 2008.

Now, what is a school librarian to do? What is and is not “inclusive” is subjective, and what counts as “inclusivity” seems to change hourly. A current example: Disney decided the politically safe move was to remove the dwarfs from their Snow White remake, because they were told by one dwarf this was an obnoxious stereotype. Now they are under the gun for excluding dwarf actors.

In any case, reading or researching every book in the library in order to make an informed judgment of this sort would require a lot of dog work and a lot of mental effort.

The safe and convenient move, is to scrap anything published before 2008. People can’t object to what isn’t there.

Unfortunately, it turns out that empty shelves also look bad.