I'm getting vaccinated today!

I'm getting vaccinated today, but I don't want to. My company now requires it, and I can't visit my daughter studying abroad in Italy without it (unless we only meet in the Tuscan countryside.) So what choice do I have? I could quit the job and cancel the trip, or I can just get the shot and write this blog post.

I'd prefer to acquire natural immunity. For someone of my age and health condition, I think that's better for my long term health and for the health of those around me. But that choice is being made difficult. Sure, the vaccine has been proven to be reasonably safe in the short term, but the virus has also proven to be not very deadly for people like me. I've been shamed and blamed for 17 months for not caring about the immunocompromised enough, for not trusting the CDC fully, for not respecting Newsom's stay-at-home order, for not believing my mask protects fellow shoppers at the grocery store. The media relentlessly advocates for the vaccine, promoting the story of every white conservative virus-denying male who recanted on his covid deathbed (with underlying conditions noted below). I'm not smart enough to know exactly what cultural change is going on, but I know my skin has thickened.

For all this, I'm barely suffering. I still have a job. No one I know personally has died from covid, for which I'm grateful. And the vaccine will almost certainly do no harm. It also won't do me much good. My status as a possible asymptomatic spreader does not change. My chances of dying from covid don't change much. And my long term concerns aren't significant because I don't have much long term left.

But I can't say the same for my children. Their opportunities for school and work have been severely impacted. They have little upside to getting the vaccine, and no assemblage of the world's greatest scientists can assure them that there is no long term downside to this new medical technology. And they are inheriting a world that cannot easily let go of this massive fear of infection and distrust of germ-spreading neighbors.

That said, America is still the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. So I freely offer my arm and hope to bravely wait for what comes next.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a few miles from where my mother grew up in Osakis. After being educated on the East Coast at Oberlin and Yale, he moved to Washington D.C. and wrote this best seller in 1920 about life in rural Minnesota. I was motivated to read the book while contemplating my own move back to Minnesota and how I should set my expectations.

The protagonist, Carol Milford, is a sophisticated, beautiful Minneapolis girl who marries a medical doctor, Will Kennicott, and moves to Gopher Prairie, a fictional Sauk Centre, with ambitions of transforming its architecture and culture. She hits barrier after barrier, never making progress on her grand project. She attempts entertaining, theater, social clubs, even designing a house with her husband, but none of her efforts ever take hold. No one else shares her values.

Carol meets Guy Pollock, who is well read, agnostic, but is also admittedly given over to the "village virus" (ch 13), which is his term for a life of resignation in the simplicity of a small town. Carol is attracted to him, even considering if having an affair with Guy would be possible, but she resolves on being faithful to Will because she is still fond of her husband. But signs of weakness in their marriage are clear.

She finds some solace in having a son, Hugh (ch 20), but refuses to resign herself to the simple quiet life of a country wife and mother.

She meets Percy Bresnahan (ch 23), the local boy who made it big manufacturing cars out east. In comparison to his sparkling conversation and sharp dressing, Will is boring and shabby. But Percy leaves and Carol keeps trying to be a good wife.

She finds friendship with a simple Swedish handyman Miles Bjornstam who marries her maid Bea, starts a farm, and has a baby. But his wife and child die with a sickness for which he is to blame, and so he ends up leaving the town in disgrace. Carol finds no lasting happiness in friendship.

But everything comes to a head when Carol meets Erik Volberg, a country boy who is an avid reader with grand ambitions as a big city fashion designer, but lacks any experience or serious education. She takes walks with him and enjoys conversation, dabbling with romantic interest. In Chapter 31, Erik aggressively declares his desire for her, alone in her bedroom, but she rejects him. He wants a lover, she wants an aspirational friend, so they part ways. The chapter ends with an ominous, "The next day, the storm crashed." 

The storm of chapter 32 is the disgrace and banishment of her friend Fern Mullins. When the high school teacher Fern is accused of getting drunk and possibly fooling around with her student Cy Bogart, the vicious, self-righteous, condemning nature of Gopher Prairie is exposed. Will and others realize Cy is hardly innocent, but they feel no compulsion to save Fern. Cy's mother is blind to her son's mischievous nature, but Carol believes strongly that society is at fault. She says, "The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!" And this fault is ultimately theological. She tells Fern, "My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be - Main's Street's god. But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him...though he slay us."

In chapter 33, Carol meets up with Erik for a long walk, only to be discovered by Will. He seems calm at first, but in private Will is outraged. But his outrage is not that she that she loves another man, but that Carol will be exposed to the wrath of the town. He says, "You better cut it out now. I'm not going to do the outraged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did." His concern is social, not personal. Then they argue about Will's actual medical accomplishments compared to Erik's potential cultural accomplishments. Will handily wins the logical argument and Carol is shut down. But they still care for each other, so they decide to go away on a 3 month California vacation, leaving their son Hugh with Aunt Bessie. This seems to be a good thing, but they return to a sleet storm, lonely streets, and no one being terribly interested in their adventures. Happiness will not be found in travel.

The final blow in chapter 35 is the arrival of Mr. James. Blausser, a land speculator, leads a campaign to promote Gopher Prairie as the best city in the world. He wants to draw more business to the town, thereby increasing his property values. It's a classic "fake it till you make it" scheme, and no one seems to be bothered by it. Carol has been sincerely trying to make Gopher Prairie a bit more like Minneapolis or Paris, but Mr. Blausser swoops in and declares that it already is! Carol is disgusted.

Carol is now devastated and wants to leave Gopher Prairie. She gets Will's permission to move to the east coast indefinitely, under the pretense of joining the war effort. She finds office work in D.C. for two years. Will comes out and tries to woo her. In chapter 38 he makes one of the more touching speeches in the book. "Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love me. I'm not. And I'm not going to ask you to come back to Gopher Prairie!...I just want you to know how I wait for you. Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I'm kind of scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming back." He communicates genuine care and humility. 

But then he comes to his most serious matter saying, "'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always been absolutely, uh absolutely, proper." And then he begins to confess his affair with a neighbor woman, Maud Dyer. This is the point of repentance, where real reconciliation and healing is possible. But Carol cuts him off and says, "It's all right. Let's forget it." We can be sympathetic to Carol's hurt, but here was her best chance at finding love. But her lack of anger or even feeling over her husband's unfaithfulness is proportional to her lack of care over her husband. Sadly, Carol does not believe her happiness will be found in marriage.

The book quickly draws to an end with Carol finding a muted happiness in the social and political aspirations of her son and newborn daughter (ch 39). She says, "Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars." She has given up on herself, her friendships, her personal ambitions, and her marriage, but has not given up on her ideals. Her final word in the book is, "But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." Her hope is being part of some transcendent cause to which she has been faithful. She doesn't have to see much of any result in her life and in her town, as long as she's a part of some ideal of Progress.

After giving this final thought, her husband responds with a total lack of understanding and sympathy. He doesn't have a clue about what she just said, and he doesn't care. And she seems to not care either.

I enjoyed the book because Lewis is a talented writer, the characters are engaging, the descriptions of humanity's messed up condition are vivid, and the Minnesota setting is special to me. But Sinclair Lewis's worldview is empty. He tries to find significance in societal struggle and cultural accomplishments, but misses the primacy of love. Carol could have gone to small town Minnesota and learned to love people - her husband, her simple and sinful neighbors, her work, and her place. She had many opportunities to pursue love instead of accomplishments. But both she and it seems Lewis himself don't see the centrality of love. Jesus taught us that our greatest obligation and our greatest joy is to love God with all our heart, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And he taught us what love is, to lay down our lives for our friends. This may seem like stodgy tradition and old fashioned religion, but I think the book, as excellent as it was, only showed how right our Lord was.

The Divine Comedy by Dante

A "review" of a monumental classic like Dante's Divine Comedy may be an exercise in hubris that lands me in a "bolgia" of the Inferno. After finishing all three volumes, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise), I feel compelled to respond in writing to complete my enjoyment, but realize I have nothing profound to say. Here are some observations, humbly offered.

The Divine Comedy is epic because it offers a complete worldview, capturing the totality of heaven and earth from the Medieval perspective in a personal story. Dante integrates the Biblical and classical worlds by including Abraham and Aristotle, the Blessed Virgin and the gifted Virgil in their proper places. The virtuous pagans are consigned to limbo, yet their philosophy and mythology and proto-science reach up to heavenly realms. It is a fusion of two streams of civilization, the Greek and the Christian, with unambiguous priority given to the latter. Contemporary Christians do the same as we explain and integrate Freudian psychology, Marxist theory, secular science and rock music by a Biblical standard. We expend immense effort trying to preserve the good and reject the bad. History will judge if we fare better.

The Divine Comedy is moral because it provides Dante a vehicle to critique his society and contemplate a righteous life. The rebuke of popes and emperors is scathing. Those who suffer in the Inferno are punished by being given over to the evil they pursued in life. We should tremble at final justice. Dante subscribes to the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, but Protestants can understood it as a metaphor for sanctification in this life, a hopeful battle against sin by joyfully accepting its temporary consequences because, unlike the Inferno, God works it for our good. This optimistic moral vision extends beyond the personal, foreseeing revival in the Church and the rise of good government. Evil fails and good succeeds, both in our personal lives and in society.

The Divine Comedy is transcendent because it captures the human desire for complete happiness and full understanding. It ends with Dante seeing the turning of planets driven by the love of God, an ultimate satisfaction made possible in the presence of God, and a wondrous gaze into the Triune essence of God. We are created for such things and should not settle for the small and the selfish. If it awakens an inner whisper "What if this could be true?" then Dante has successfully reached across the ages. But if we dismiss this as Medieval superstition and religious ignorance, then we are left with our convenient but barren world, where our technology allows us to click on the latest Netflix Original but won't bring us the satisfaction and insight that Dante believes is possible.

Never Trump

Although a political conservative and consistent Republican voter, I have not voted for Trump and, after watching the first Presidential Debate of 2020, have decided to not vote for Trump. Add my name to the "Never Trump" column, not as an ideological commitment, but simply as a fact. I will have never voted for him. This is why.

First, abortion. The Culture War will be won with character not politics. Overturning Roe does not end the bloodshed. Its repeal allows South Dakota and Mississippi to outlaw abortion, but allows, even encourages, California and New York to continue. The actual number of abortions may not decrease and the cost of victory would be endorsing a man who exemplifies the Sexual Revolution's degradation of women and marriage. Who can calculate the unintended consequences? And it's not obvious that these originalist, textualist justices will actually overturn Roe, with its decades of stare decisis. The true precedent for overturning abortion is the Early Church ending infanticide and the exposure of infants in the Roman Empire through its own moral lives and theological convictions. Ending abortion and repealing the Sexual Revolution requires a change of heart, which is not compatible with an ends-justify-the-means rationale.

Second, the Constitution. Trump shows a lack of conviction about his oath to "protect and defend the Constitution". Like Obama, stretching back to Woodrow Wilson, Trump shares the imperial view of the Presidency. He feels entitled to "get things done" by executive order if Congress doesn't "act". It's true that he hasn't done that much, for which I'm grateful, but he would if he could. And that paves the way for a future President who actually has ability. We need a President who humbly serves the country by executing his or her office as laid out in the Constitution.

Third, Black Lives Matter. All Americans should care about the hopelessness and violence in our inner cities. The progressives are fanning Marxist flames and peddling the false hope of revolution. They are not helping. But Trump's partial, sometimes indirect, endorsements of white nationalist groups is too frequent to be accidental. You can't be the law and order candidate and play with verbal matches next to that gasoline. We need a President who believes in liberty and justice for all, who champions equality under the law, and who "takes Care that Laws be faithfully executed" in our land.

Fourth, conscience. If I vote third party, or write-in, or decline to vote, I am not implicitly voting for Biden. I reject the binary choice. I may never have the decisive vote on any matter, but a lifetime of voting my conscience makes a difference. There is a time for transactional thinking, picking the lesser of two evils, but this is not it. Our democracy will survive Trump or Biden. It survived Obama and would have survived Hillary. Our ideals are stronger than either major candidate in 2020, so it's best to follow my conscience and be Never Trump.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell is the classic allegory of the false hopes of Soviet Communism. The sympathetic story of the animals who hope for a ideal farm, run by animals and for animals, turns into a nightmare of oppression by the pigs who become their new masters. It was a prescient and insightful book which deserves to be cherished by freedom loving people.

The book shows the evil of propaganda, revisionist history and twisted laws. We feel for the hardworking, long-suffering Boxer who gives his life for the farm, and are repulsed by the selfish, heartless pigs who are ready to take advantage of him.

However, there are some glaring shortcomings of the book.

The Animal Farm run by the pigs is no better than the previous Manor Farm run by the human, Mr. Jones. But in the final chapter Orwell has the farm being still successful by those same human standards. Being written in 1945, Orwell does not anticipate the failure and internal collapse of Soviet Communism 40 years later. The farm actually becomes a model of productivity and efficiency to the human-led farms around them, albeit at the expense of the lower animals. The last paragraph, where Napoleon is caught cheating at cards, may be a hint of that future collapse, but it is only a hint.

Orwell also offers no counter philosophy that proves why the pigs are wrong. They are inherently smarter and more capable than the other animals. The reader feels a moral revulsion that they would use their abilities to take advantage of those less intelligent than them, but Orwell has nothing equivalent to the theologically-based statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The raven is the sole religious figure who talks of the glorious Sugarcandy Mountain, but he is a crackpot and simpleton who offers no real help to the suffering animals and gathers no following.

Finally, Orwell does not show any of the lesser animals actually standing up to their oppressors. There is no hope for another revolution to reject their new pig overlords. The reader comes away convinced that the first revolution was a failure, but does not see any way out of the current situation.

Out of an Abundance of Caution

In March 2020, COVID-19 panic hit the US with surprising speed. In weeks prior measures were already being taken, but then President Trump declared a national emergency followed quickly by Governor Newsom declaring daily-escalating shelter-in-place orders in California. We all stayed home, waiting for the viral wave to break over us. The rationale was that temporary drastic measures were necessary to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed like they had recently been in Italy.

At that time, the virus was an unknown danger. Six months later, it's safe to say we know quite a bit more about it, and what it has exposed in our culture.

A month after the lockdowns began, major news outlets reported on antibody studies performed by respected institutions like USC, Stanford, Northeastern University and others. They independently found that the virus had spread through the population 10, 20 or even 50 times greater than the "confirmed cases" on the John Hopkins dashboard website. When I heard this, I told my children that the panic would be over in a week because the virus was confirmed to be not nearly as deadly as initially feared. Instead of a 5% or even 2% mortality rate, it was 10, 20 or 50 times less. Worse than the flu, but not a deadly pestilence that demanded shutting down the economy.

I still remember the dejected feeling several days later reading follow-on news reports that interpreted those same results, not by concluding that the virus was not as deadly as we feared, but that the contagion was far worse than we knew.

In the initial weeks we were given conflicting advice regarding masks. The US Surgeon General tweeted that we should not buy masks because they are ineffective and because medical professionals needed them. The obviously duplicity can be forgiven because everyone was scrambling then, but months later the mask/no-mask debate has been fully integrated into our progressive/conservative culture war.

So, as a conservative, here are a few lessons I've learned.

The seeds of COVID-19 fear were planted well before the virus came. For years, we've been helicopter parenting our children because of the low-percentage chance that a child molester may be stalking our city playground. We've sanitized commercial kitchens from the residual presence of peanuts because a small number of our people may have a deadly reaction. And we started offering gluten-free communion options to our congregants because - well, I still don't know the rationale for this one. I'm realizing that our ability to assess risk and responsibility has not kept pace with the explosion of news and opinion offered by the Internet. 

Our new moral reasoning that brought ethically-sourced seafood, fair-trade coffee, and reusable shopping bags is now been applied to a contagious disease. People are driving in their cars by themselves with masks on and no one is telling them that there's no point. Others are wearing gloves while pumping gas and no one is re-iterating the CDC's updated advice that the virus is unlikely to be transmitted on surfaces. Instead of reasonable measures which respect individual freedom and common sense, we have fear-mongering and moralizing in the name of science, regardless of actual effectiveness. I'm realizing that while science is a powerful tool which can bring wonderful benefits, it can be easily co-opted for political purposes when used as a moral cudgel.

Finally, the massive outlay of cash by the Federal Government has completely pummeled what remained of fiscal conservatism. We have no idea what the future cost will be as our national debt climbs ever higher, but we convince ourselves that there will be no cost or that the uber-rich will pay. The government showered unemployment benefits on low wage workers, and weeks later our streets explode with Marxist fervor. If the Progressives succeed in tearing down the free-market system that has been built over the past several centuries, the ruin and misery felt by all people, rich and poor, regardless of skin color or political affiliation, will be immense. I'm realizing how precious and fragile our system of liberal democratic capitalism is.

We continue to respond to the coronavirus out of an abundance of caution, thinking that the risks are obvious, the science is clear, and the costs are worth it. But it seems we all have a lot more learning to do.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Graham Greene's 1951 novel The End of the Affair tells the story of Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Mills. Bendrix is searching for love, but only finds an unresolved love/hate with Sarah, a married woman whom he can never have because she will not leave her husband Henry. Sarah is also searching for love, and finds her way back to Christianity and the Roman Catholic faith of her mother and her own childhood.

The book turns when Sarah is shocked back into belief by the miracle of answered prayer. Bendrix lies lifeless under the wreckage of an exploded German V1 bomb. In book III, chapter II, her diary records her prayer when she sees his body, "Dear God, I said - why dear, why dear? - make be believe. I can't believe. Make me. I said, I'm a bitch and a fake and I hate myself. I can't do anything of myself. Make me believe" and then "Let him be alive, and I will believe." Moments later Bendrix gets up and she knows that she must leave him and return to God.

Her faith is simple but fierce. She is vulnerable to superstition, but is also able to resist Bendrix's pursuit of her. Her death is hastened by exposing herself to the cold rain in a desperate attempt to pray in church.

In the last chapter, Richard Smythe, an outspoken atheist whom Sarah meets following her affair with Bendrix, experiences a type of conversion through the miraculous healing of his disfigured cheek. Sarah's belief was indirectly strengthened by listening to his arguments against God, and this foreshadows what is about to happen with Bendrix on the next page.

Bendrix realizes his hatred of Sarah reveals his hatred of God. He hates or rather fears the fact that anyone, even Sarah, can leap from immorality and unbelief directly to sainthood. In the final chapter he rants, "What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you - with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell - can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, then it's not so difficult to be a saint." Bendrix is rejecting grace: that God loves and saves sinners, that a Christian does not stand before God in his own righteous but only in the righteousness of Christ, purchased on the cross, received by faith alone and not by works.

Yet even his hatred of God reveals a nascent belief. He concludes his rant with, "I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed." And the book ends with utter loneliness: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever."

But like Richard Smythe, Bendrix indirectly argues for belief. One cannot finish the story, after being captivated by Greene's characters and plot, and side with Bendrix. He have to hope that we don't end up like him, which means we have to hope in God.