FLYING PIGS, ECLIPSES, EARTHQUAKES AND CORONAMANIA

Winston Churchill said, “A dog looks up to you. A cat looks down upon you. But a pig looks at you as his equal.”

Researchers say that swine are very smart, and their countenance so suggests. I’ve worked around pigs. Seconds after slurping full-on mudwater like it’s a milkshake, they’ll approach you, put their front legs on a fence and stare directly into your eyes as if to say, as did Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, “Are you talking to me?”

I can’t blame pigs for having chips on their shoulders. They might have a premonition about their near-term future.

If you’ve driven up the New Jersey Turnpike, you’ve seen a slice of North Jersey’s heavy industry. There are, or at least were, oil refineries, chemical, metal and plastics mills, power plants, paint makers, printers, big bakeries, and much more within a twenty-mile radius. My father worked 37 years in an auto assembly plant there.

From the 1920s-60s, Secaucus, in the belly of that industrial beast, had many pig farms. Sometimes there were simultaneously 70,000 pigs in town. While these farms provided pork to the surrounding metropolitan area, they made Secaucus reek.

For seven years, I lived in that industrial region in an old, densely packed city named Kearny. Around midnight on January 7, 1983, there was a tremendous blast within earshot of my tiny, fourth-floor early 1900s apartment there. Or so I was told. I slept through it. I wish I could still sleep that soundly.

The next morning, my roommate, who had been awake at midnight, hanging out with two other guys in the kitchen, told me the loudness of the blast shocked them. He said it made the loose, wood-framed windows in our apartment rattle for thirty seconds. They thought that the Soviets had dropped an atomic bomb. Many who lived 75 miles away heard the mega-blast.

It turned out that a three-million-gallon gasoline storage tank at a refinery alongside the Turnpike in Newark, four miles from where I lived, had been accidentally ignited.

KA-BOOM!

—-

This past Friday morning at 10:20, I was minding my bidness, reading a book on my sofa. Suddenly, I heard a heavy rumbling sound. The ground vibrated. At first, it seemed weird; then, as the shaking and noise intensified, weirder. This went on for about ten seconds.

Initially, I thought there may have been an industrial explosion, as in Newark, 1983. Alternatively, I wondered if an airliner or a helicopter had crashed in my neighborhood. We live beneath the flight paths to Newark Airport and a nearby trauma center hospital with a rooftop helipad.

It took me at least five seconds to consider that an earthquake might be occurring. New Jersey quakes are extremely rare. In six-plus New Jersey decades, I hadn’t experienced one. If earthquakes happened here with any frequency, I might have more promptly recognized what Friday’s event was. But given my frame of reference, there was no reason to have expected a quake.

—

In my current neighborhood, the houses are ten feet apart. Though we live in close proximity to each other, it’s not a close-knit community. Several of the houses are rented. As tenants—typically college students—are short-timers, they make no effort to get to know their neighbors. There are also various underlying demographic divides. (I almost wrote “fault lines”). For example, the Orthodox Jews show little interest in their neighbors, including non-observant Jews. Additionally, those neighbors with whom I had been friendly four years ago now hate me for disparaging the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots, both during direct interaction and with art/signs I’ve displayed on my front porch or car. The antipathy is mutual.

Nonetheless, thirty seconds after the shaking stopped, most neighbors opened their front doors to survey any damage and seek affirmation that they weren’t imagining things. People called across and down the street to no one in particular:

“Is everybody OK?”

“Was that an earthquake?”

Given that my neighbors seldom interact, and that no one was highly motivated to continue the conversation or knew what else to say to people whom they either didn’t know or disliked, one young renter across the street ended the brief exchange by wisecracking, loudly, “Well, it was nice to see everybody.”

Then, everybody went back inside and carried on as usual.

Seeing most of the neighbors home on a Friday morning was a sign of the times. Four-plus years ago, most people would have been at work. Now, most people on my block, and many other blocks, “work from home.” Overall, this is a profoundly negative Scamdemic legacy. At work, pre-Scamdemic, I had many friends. Without the workplace as a core element of social life, most people are worse off; even those who, for now, are enjoying the respite from their commute. As time passes, they’ll see the lost value of workplace relationships.

—

In New Jersey, earthquakes are like flying pigs; practically speaking, they don’t exist. Please don’t say you think that pigs can fly because, as with the videos of those Chinese guys writhing on the sidewalk or of refrigerator trucks outside hospitals during early Coronamania, you saw the photo of the winged pig that precedes this post.

The photo is fake. The camera does lie. Pigs don’t fly. Even if they’re “novel pigs.”

And although Friday’s earthquake was, at least at its epicenter, 25 miles away, a 4.8 on the logarithmic Richter Scale— i.e., a 4.8 quake is ten times stronger than a 3.8—it did no visible damage on my block. Nor was there damage anywhere else in the Metro Area.

If the earth quakes in the hood but no damage occurs, did the earth quake?

Analogously, if there’s a viral outbreak and reasonably healthy people don’t die, was it worth isolating reasonably healthy people?

Just as there was no reason to believe that pigs could fly, there was no reason to believe, even in mid-March 2020, that a viral outbreak would kill large numbers of non-old people. Such mass, indiscriminate, virally-induced death had never happened in any living person’s lifetime. Nor had population-wide viral deaths occurred in Italy or Spain in February/March 2020.

Covid fear mongers repeatedly, misleadingly referenced the 1918 Spanish Flu, which had a dubious death toll to begin with. Further, that epidemic occurred during a time of malnutrition and compromised sanitation, including World War I’s trench warfare. Those soldiers were—like pigs—ankle deep in mudwater and excrement. To increase the war’s Hellishness, the soldiers shared tight quarters with multitudes of hungry, aggressive, disease-vectoring rats. Plus, there were then no antibiotics to quell secondary bacterial infections. Moreover, as with Coronamania, much ostensible Spanish Flu death was iatrogenically induced by overmedication; in that instance, patients were given ten times the lethal dose of the new drug, aspirin.

Runaway, killer respiratory viruses are sci-fi movie constructs. Super lethal viruses are self-limiting because they kill their hosts. Endemic illnesses like malaria and diabetes afflict and kill many more people than do viral ailments.

—

People need to have mass culture topics about which they can talk to each other: the Super Bowl, Trump, Taylor Swift, movies like Oppenheimer and TV shows like The Bachelor and American Idol. From 2020-22 or 23, people talked incessantly about The Virus.

The latest two things to talk about are an earthquake and an eclipse. I suspect that most eclipse enthusiasts strongly supported the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots. They embrace that which fits in the box they deem “Science.” Doing so makes them feel smarter than others. And many just follow the crowd.

During Monday’s eclipse, it was cloudy where I live. Thus, instead of going outside, I flipped between TV channels and watched 45 minutes of eclipse reports. The newscasters’ and spectators’ elation/cheerleading about “totality(!)” and their amazement about “the enormity of the universe” and “the smallness of humankind,” etc. were laughable; they sounded like teens high for the first time. Their affected enthusiasm resembled their disingenuous grimness during Coronamania. In both instances, superlatives flowed from them as does water from a firehose. Though instead of gushing about “totality(!),” the Coronamanic spookily spoke of “spikes(!)”

Normally, other than wasting small amounts of the time by talking about the latest thing, discussing pop culture is harmless. Small talk about news stories can even be beneficial if it greases social skids.

“Did you see that guy in Ohio whose pet monkey does The Macarena…?”

Yet, problems arise when people take the news seriously. From 2020-23, talk about a supposed supervirus occupied grossly disproportionate social time and space and thus, badly misshaped public consciousness. If something is talked about enough, it becomes far more important to people than it actually is. If, during Coronamania, the government and media hadn’t relentlessly hyped “The Virus,” “Covid” and “The Pandemic,” and people hadn’t propagated the hype via their conversations with peers, people wouldn’t have feared, or even cared about, it.

A brief illness said to be linked to some respiratory virus shouldn’t have scared any reasonably healthy individual, especially because that illness presented the same constellation of symptoms caused by many other respiratory viruses. But people feared the Viral Boogie Man because the media terrorized them via overwrought coverage of a greatly over-hyped coronavirus. They and their friends and family members mutually reinforced fear through their conversation and conduct. This interaction created a stampeding herd of compliance with, and proselytizing about, “protocols.”

By so doing, the media and government gave chronically bored or anxious news watchers something to talk about. Thereafter, “The Virus” took on such a larger-than-life identity/lethality that many supported trashing a society and an economy over it. It was a painfully clear, highly consequential example of mass susceptibility to post-modern propaganda and of perception overwhelming reality.

When the majority very belatedly understood that the virus had been badly overhyped, the perpetually overrated, ostensibly “reasonable people in the middle” predictably moved on to the next thing: Ukraine, climate change, college basketball brackets or Billy Joel’s 100th Show at Madison Square Garden. It didn’t matter what the next thing was, as long as it gave people an outlet for their attention and emotion. Freud called this “cathexis.”

By changing the object of their obsession and fear, the Coronamanic are avoiding admitting or apologizing for their support of lockdowns, masks, tests and pseudo-vaccines. None of these measures ever made sense. Not even for two weeks. Nor even two days or two hours.

No New Jerseyan should fret about the next earthquake or make pilgrimages to Buffalo to see the next eclipse. Similarly, despite Public Health bureaucrats’ and Pharma execs’ opportunistic hype about preparedness for the “The Next Pandemic,” no one— anywhere—should fret about the next virus.