Emmanuel Macron’s entire security detail – his personal praetorian guard, if you will – quit en masse rather than submit to his requirement that they all pass his new ‘sanitary certificate’, that is, receive the new experimental gene-therapy vaccine. I admire their principled stance, heading out to the unemployment lines to sell their services to Eric Clapton and van Morrison. Macron’s draconian approach has lit a fire of revolution in France, as thousands resist the measures; things are, shall we say, mal tournant. How many police and military do these nouveaux-emperors need to protect their vulnerability? Perhaps they will see the light, only once they realize their own nakedness.
Ah, the chaos in trying to govern everything. Two Americans were fined $20,000 – that’s most people’s life savings – for trying to cross into Canada with fake vaccine passports, lying about their tests and not staying the ‘quarantine hotels’. So much for tourism. Trudeau can try to keep Canada pristine of Covid, but viruses do what viruses do, and they’re small, sneaky, insidious little critters, not much bigger than a DNA molecule. They tend to get around regardless of what measures we take. Then there’s the southern American border, which at this point is almost completely porous: Estimates are that a million undocumented – what is the word? What does one call ‘immigrants’ who do not go through the legal process of immigration? – have entered the U.S. since Biden took power, or whoever is the ventriloquist moving him around and telling what to say. And they’re not all just from Mexico, for apparently the ‘world’ has discovered you can just fly to Tijuana and on walk on in; or to Ciudad Juárez, and with a few front crawls across the Rio Grande, presto Americano! They are all bused to various centres, given amnesty, and released into the general population. Do you think they’re all getting tested and showing vaxx-passes? As a few Mexican bandits shouted to Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre: ‘We don’ need no stinkin’ badges!’ No, we don’t indeed.
A final historical note: A hundred years ago today, July 29th, a young Austrian took control of the nascent National Socialist Workers’ Party in Germany. The members acceded to all his demands, including changing the title of the leader to Führer, difficult to translate precisely into English – a leader/father figure, of sorts. Contemporary reports describe the 32 year old veteran as charismatic, and quite an animated speaker. He also had a nifty little moustache, and side-swept hair, that may well become the rage. Hmm. You don’t say.
Hubris, dear reader, hubris. We are drowning in it, and not just in our secular society. But God has His time, and knows what He is about, if we but trust, hope, pray and be led not into anxiety.
Pax vobiscum, omnes!