Insanity Unmasked

Government interventions overall are naturally rife with logical absurdities, ambiguities, and hypocrisy, without which the legal profession would perish not to mention civilization. Masking is all the rage nowadays, and many are those who are enraged by masking mandates or disobedience thereto. Why, hardly a day goes by without some outrageous incident over masking, the most visible aspect justifying the existence government in its frustrated dictators, sometimes with misdemeanors converted into felonies.

"To the vulnerable, every mask-less person is a potential loaded weapon," indicted Florida legislator Michael Grieco, a former prosecutor, Miami Beach commissioner and disc jockey, on the 3rd of August 2020, in public response to a Miami Herald article about a shopper who coughed on a cancer patient who was filming the shopper arguing with an employee in a store. The cougher was arrested on an assault charge after the victim waited a few days to file a complaint.

One would expect Mr. Grieco to defend the accused woman. He is normally a criminal defense lawyer, and a successful one at that. He is, to boot, a popular politician, in the classic sense of doing something for everybody, rich and poor, who support him one way or the other. He lost his bid to become mayor of the city of Miami Beach to Dan Gelber, himself a former prosecutor and state legislator. The mayor, celebrated for his Talmudic piety, used his connections to have Grieco prosecuted for receiving campaign funds from a foreigner, a practice so common in South Florida that he neglected to launder it first, and then lying about it, which is customary in politics not to mention among sophists taught to make the worst cases seem like the better ones. As a consequence, his sins were the best things he had done so far to perpetuate his career. He managed to clear his record with good behavior, then win a seat on the state legislature due to his enormous popularity in the district. The political gang that runs the county, however, with the continuous applause of their press organ, the Miami Herald, are still endeavoring to have him disbarred.

As for Grieco’s perspective on masks, that everyone without a mask is a potential loaded weapon, I believe that is so actually true of the most dangerous of all animals that death is not such a bad thing if we die fighting against our evils. Is not to wage war for peace the most noble thing men can do? Of course the ancient Greeks knew that the personality is a mask worn by actors, that is, by hypocrites. Who knows who is lurking behind bare faces whether or not those masks are themselves masked?   

But to return to the particular subject of Grieco’s statement about vulnerability: doctors have long advised vulnerable people to protect themselves from circulating germs, that is, infectious variance and bacteria, with face masks, plastic face shields, hand-washing, distancing, or isolation at home. Why should the healthy population be inconvenienced? Let vulnerable people protect themselves. Ordinary flu and pneumonia can be deadly to unhealthy person at times, not to mention an extraordinarily vulnerable person. Shall we wear masks and hide at home during every flu season because tens of thousands die of it every year?

Now it appears that Grieco’s example involves assault and battery, upon which he has made an impetuous statement according to his partisan Democratic faith in masks, particularly the black funeral masks by worn Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during their debut. Mr. Biden would, first of all, force everyone in the United States to wear a mask, and then, at least according to a source I have not verified, would shut the United States down to fight the killer virus.

I myself believe that the public should be left to take voluntary precautions according to the recommendations of the experts they trust. The absurdities in the interventions mandated in Grieco’s district, where people are supposed to wear masks or else be fined and perhaps go to jail to catch the virus, no matter if anyone is endangered or not, are causing many people to lose faith in "their" particular governments as officials make tyrannical fools of themselves and their unwitting F-Type followers with absurd interventions in the war against the unseen and unknown enemy. Wherefore many citizens, realizing that the crisis has exposed the truth about the competency of their elected officials, contemplate the overthrow of same if they are not already humiliated enough to step down when the time comes.

Mr. Grieco has otherwise presented himself as a valiant Masketeer. Asserting self-defense, he defended an old man who had pushed another old man whom he had known for twenty or so years and who had unwittingly tried to board the elevator at a luxury high-rise without a mask, causing that old man to fall back out of the elevator and hit his head on something. The charges were dropped.

In yet another masking episode, he represented the owner of a small South Beach Hotel who was struck in the face by an Amazon delivery man whom he confronted for not wearing a mask on the premises. The victim, when asked if he had said something to the Amazon man, said the video of the incident didn't lie, leaving us with the wisdom that words can lead to sticks and stones that break bones. The delivery man has been arrested.

This is all insanity, that is, unwholesome, so everyone is free to have their own opinion, and that is fortunate, for we do not like totalitarian governments. Yet the country has become so divided into twain that we may see cities burning, masked outlaws running the streets, officials hanging from lamp posts, and civil war this very winter. On the other hand, we may have a good vaccine at a dollar or two a shot, and companies crying to hire more people as we scramble to forget the reality of life, that it might end right now if not in a few days.