Harry Potter and the Chickenhawks of COVID: A Measured Rant
“It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, no.”
-Credence Clearwater Revival, “Fortunate Son”
As you go about socially distancing, doing your civic duty like a good American, don’t forget that the politicians who have been forcing you to social distance are laughing at you.
You might have heard about Professor Neil Ferguson, the architect of the coronavirus lockdown in the United Kingdom, breaking quarantine for a romp with his mistress. Ferguson, in case you’ve forgotten, authored a now-infamous Imperial College London paper which concluded that millions will die unless society maintains extreme social distancing measures intermittently for however long it takes for a vaccine to be developed, most likely 18 months or more. Only problem was, he couldn’t be bothered to do it himself.
Don’t doubt for a second that he isn’t the only one. CNN, of all outlets, published an article about how members of the D.C. set, including a “media executive,” a “movie producer,” and a “Democrat political operative,” are going to great lengths to host secret dinner parties. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans, such as Dallas salon owner Shelley Luther, are being slapped with fines and thrown in jail for trying to keep their businesses open.
Social distancing, it seems, is only for the commoners.
Anti-war activists on the left and the libertarian right have long pointed to the “chickenhawk” phenomenon: the political class which advocates war is often reluctant to send its own sons to the front lines. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is George W. Bush, who got a cushy stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War while less fortunate Americans boys were dying in the jungle. Donald Trump evaded the draft by claiming bone spurs, although at least he hasn’t been a warmonger on the scale of Bush.
I don’t blame them for not wanting to die in a pointless war. If I were a young man during the Vietnam era, I probably would have tried to dodge the draft too. It’s the blatant double standard that matters: sacrifice for thee but not for me.
If we are not going to get angry at the chickenhawks of social distancing, then we have no right to get angry at anything, ever again.
The left, supposedly the voice of the common man (and woman), has done nothing to speak for the Shelley Luthers of the world. On the contrary, liberals today are content to pour their popcorn on the heads of anti-lockdown protesters. This is, perhaps, to be expected in an era when the great youth movements of the day involve clean-cut teenagers fighting for socially appropriate causes with the permission and encouragement of their parents and teachers. A lot can be said against the radicals of the 1960s, but at least they were true rebels against the system. Young people of that generation would have joined a movement to open the beach, not sneered at it. Today’s left-wingers are hall monitors.
This is where we have to start talking about Harry Potter.
There’s been a lot of bad political analysis that has come out of the Harry Potter books. For half a decade now, we’ve been hearing endless rhetoric from Potter fans — and occasionally J.K. Rowling herself — about how Trump is Voldemort and the “Resistance” is the Order of the Phoenix. The books themselves are simplistic good-versus-evil stories that are utterly lacking in moral complexity: Voldemort is an uninteresting villain with no sympathetic qualities whatsoever, while Harry and his friends fight under a suffocating cloud of moral righteousness.
But the biggest problem with Harry Potter is not its one-dimensionality. The real problem, which was touched on by Ross Douthat, is the question of Muggles. Most people who read Harry Potter imagine that they’re wizards. Kids secretly wait for owls on their eleventh birthdays; they decide which Hogwarts house they’d be in; they speculate about what their Patronuses and wand cores would be. Except you’re not a wizard. In the Harry Potter universe, only a tiny minority of the population are born with magical abilities. The rest are just Muggles, and that probably includes you. If you were standing on one side of a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and the Potterverse was on the other side, your chances of being a wizard would still be minuscule. Even if Hogwarts existed, you’d never know.
The same goes for Game of Thrones, by the way. You’re not a Stark, or a Lannister, or a Targaryen. You’re a peasant, or perhaps a craftsman if you’re lucky, just like well over 90% of Westeros (and the medieval reality on which it was based). You’re spear fodder for the Starks and the Lannisters of the world to use in their wars. There is a game of thrones in our world, but you’re not in it.
This does not conflict in any way with support for capitalism. The appropriate divide here is not between rich and poor, but between government and not-government. There is nothing wrong with having a dinner party now, only with having one while having others arrested for doing the same. Wealthy people are only to be scorned insofar as they use the levers of government — the monopoly on the legitimized use of force — to further their own aims. And it is legitimized force which is bearing down all around us right now.
Shelley Luther is a capitalist. The DC set are not. Capitalists build things both small and great. They are full of life and creative energy. They understand, like Donald Trump does, that society cannot just be shut down. The decadent political elite have, for the most part, never created anything of value, merely lifted themselves up the ladders of power. Academics, journalists, entertainers and the like inhabit a world of ideas and abstractions. Like the wizards in Harry Potter, who cast spells by waving a wand and spouting some funny Latin words, their power is a verbal one. Such people are so divorced from their basic human nature that they can believe that an 18-month lockdown is actually feasible. It is easy for them to forget that humans are physically embodied creatures, not machines that you can switch off and back on again when the pandemic is over.
One is tempted to quote Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator: “Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts!”
Why do you need to go to a restaurant, after all? Why not just sit at home and eat nutraloaf alone? Perhaps because dining is about more than ingesting the calories necessary for bodily sustenance. Why go to the theater when you can binge Netflix? Why go to the beach when you can fill your bathtub with sand? Restaurants, salons, beaches, parks, bars, sports arenas, concerts, theaters, churches, cafes — all of the little trivialities that make Muggle life worth living, these cannot be dismissed lightly.
Proponents of continuing the lockdown argue that the other side sees opening the economy as a cynical cost-benefit analysis. In fact, precisely the opposite is true. It is the lockdown proponents who have reduced the question to a count of lives saved, and opponents who see beyond the easily quantifiable. Fun, laughter, love, beauty, and joy all matter, and our elites know it deep down, or they wouldn’t break their own rules to host dinner parties even in the absence of any direct economic need. Long-term lockdown of the sort proposed by Dr. Ferguson is as much a psychological impossibility as an economic one.
You may be a Muggle, and chances are you will be forgotten to history after you die, but in the meantime, you have a life, and your life was meant to be lived. Our politicians have moved the goalposts on opening the country again and again. It is time for them to admit that they know no more about it than we do, and they are in no better position to make decisions for us than we ourselves are. Right now, they have asked us to preserve life at the cost of most of what makes life worth living. That is an equation that only makes sense to someone who has nothing to live for.
