plague journal

Two weeks without a television.
That is to say without access to neighbours' televisions.
The same without internet.
A healthy spirtual retreat.
A great mystic clarity has dawned for me.
The great mystic clarity says: "I'm a celebrity get me out of here."
Wandered into the post office this afternoon.
No Darth Vader jokes to the girl in the  face mask.
She doesn't like them.
This virus obviously hits people hardest in their sense of humour.
The other staff members haven't bothered with face masks.
She's the only nice girl in the place.
And obviously she wants to live.
The irony is that the other staff members could probably do with a few face masks.
It wouldn't hurt.
Stopped at a couple of police checkpoints.
"What is the purpose of your journey?"
No jokeypoos about ogling women.
Irish police don't like them.
They don't like my jokes I mean. They're comparatively well disposed towards women.
Listening to the car radio I hear a supposed hospital employee called Ahmed being interviewed by former politician Ivan Yates on a radio station styled Newstalk, owned by white collar criminal Denis O'Brien.
Ahmed is giving Ivan Yates a lecture on how we all must support the government and the police during this time no matter what craziness they perpetrate in the name of fighting the virus.
Ahmed is accusing Ivan Yates and our notoriously supine government financed bankrupt media groups of poking fun at government efforts to contain the outbreak.
In effect Ahmed is accusing Ivan Yates of being me.
Hilarious, no.
Ivan Yates, a former parliamentarian from the liberal left wing, atheistic, abortionist Fine Gael party, normally quite assertive in his manner, seemed suddenly unsure of himself.
I wonder why.
If it had been me, the first question I would have asked Ahmed is what country he orginally came from. Then I would have asked how do the government and police treat the people there.
Then I would have given him a lecture to wit that the Irish did away with thug dictatorship generations ago and we're not going to allow such monstrousness to weasle its way back into our culture again using the Corona Virus as a Trojan horse,
I would have noted that there are always forces in any society tending towards dictatorship and that in recent times the Irish police force had become famously corrupt, the shame of  Europe in fact, under the leadership of Commissioner Martin Callanan and after him under the leadership of Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan who had both been party to the framing of hero cop Maurice McCabe on trumped up charges of child abuse in order to prevent Maurice McCabe revealing the depths of the endemic police corruption which had so flourished and metastasized under the debased leadership of Callanan and O'Sullivan.
I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.
The price of preventing recurrences of police thuggery a la Callanan/O'Sullivan is eternal vigilance.
Ivan Yates listened respectfully as Ahmed trashed his show, his insight and his analysis.
It is as I've said.
You can justify an awful lot of dictatorship in the name of health care.
Or in the name of being polite to immigrants.
People who are afraid to debate with immigrants because they're called Ahmed are in fact deeply disrespecting those immigrants.
On the avenue I met a nurse with whom I had not so long ago disputed the nature of the flu outbreak.
"I was wrong about the Corona virus and you were right," I said.
"Is this an apology."
"This is me saying I was wrong and you were right."
"What changed?"
"Someone I knew got it."