Saturday, June 20, 2020

A Confession


I suppose that some of you dear readers who have been following this blog for a while have come to believe that I, normalvision, am the nicest, sweetest creature to have trod this planet’s turf since the days of Tyrannosaurus rex. But I have to confess that I have moments when I slip down the niceness slope, usually because the good angel sitting on my left shoulder is out-argued by the bad angel on my right. Today is one of those times.

Today is the day scheduled for Donald Trump’s latest lie-fest, to be held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. About 19,000 drinkers of the Kool-Aid will be in attendance. In all probability most of these shoulder-to-shoulder idiots will emulate their duce and not wear a face mask. Why listen to the scientists about the dangers of the coronavirus? 

Why not, instead, create a perfect storm for the pandemic to spread? Even Trump, who understands little, understood enough to have all attendees sign a waiver that neither Trump (Mr. "I am not responsible") nor his campaign will be held responsible for any corona illnesses that will undoubtedly arise from attendance at his love-in.

Now, my good angel is whispering in my ear that one should sympathize with anyone who falls ill (with any malady) and hope, humanely, for their sake that their affliction is mild and soon recovered from.

But my bad angel is spurring me to a feeling of schadenfreude (or, Schadenfreude).* After all, those who catch the virus at the rally will have brought it on themselves, by their own determined ignoring of social distancing and mask wearing. And, unfortunately, after they leave the premises of the arena, many of them will be bringing the virus to other—innocent—contacts. They, therefore, should not be viewed as victims, but as creators of their own (and others') misery, and we should, therefore, like Hamlet feel it’s “sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard.”

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* Pedantry Note: My personal stylesheet hasn’t yet decided whether to treat the word as an English loanword from German (thus, “schadenfreude”) or as a German word still (thus, “Schadenfreude,” and capitalized as are all German nouns—both common and proper).

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