Anthony Fauci is way out of his lane, once again, and the public is starting to catch on.
Anthony Fauci is way out of his lane, once again, and the public is starting to catch on.
P laying a role that historically has been reserved to figures such as the Grinch, Oliver Cromwell, and the Vozhd of the Soviet Union, Anthony Fauci announced yesterday that he has not yet decided whether Americans will be permitted to enjoy Christmas this year. Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Fauci was asked whether we can gather for Christmas, or it’s too soon to tell. “It is just too soon to tell,” he replied, without missing a beat. “We have to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we’re going to do at a particular time.”
Counterpoint: We don’t.
Today is October 4, and, pace Fauci, I am quite willing to “jump ahead by weeks or months” and say what I’m going to do “at a particular time”: In late December of this year, I’m going to gather for Christmas — and I’m going to do so, if I may borrow from the unsurpassable Jane Austen, in a “manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.” As ever, this is not Anthony Fauci’s call. Like the Whos down in Whoville, I like Christmas a lot, and I intend to celebrate it irrespective of the obsequiousness of the media and the intensity of the sour frown emanating from the top of Mount Public Health.
Most of the political issues that I spend my days debating tend not to puncture the public’s consciousness. But this one has. In fact, since Fauci made his little pronouncement, my cell phone has been besieged by friends who have happily mocked the idea that the observance of a tradition as ancient and as pre-legal as Christmas would be contingent upon the preferences of an octogenarian mandarin whose serves in the executive branch of our limited federal government. “He and whose army?” a buddy of mine asked today, acidly.
This is a good question — and one that illustrates neatly just how skewed a worldview some Americans have acquired of late. Megalomaniacal though he may be, Anthony Fauci was able to deliver his answer about whether or not we may gather for Christmas only because Anthony Fauci was asked a question about whether or not we may gather for Christmas. And Anthony Fauci was only asked a question about whether or not we may gather for Christmas because far too many people in the press corps have come to regard him as our national oracle. In making her peculiar inquiry, CBS’s Margaret Brennan was not attempting to catch Fauci out or to highlight the absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves; she was earnestly attempting to glean information that, for reasons that remain inexplicable to me, she genuinely believed he was in a position to give her.
Which, being an adviser rather than the emperor of North America, he was not.
Writing in 1775, Edmund Burke proposed that Americans tend instinctively to “augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” Nearly two years into this pandemic, it is high time that we lived up to that reputation. When, as is their ugly wont, our “public health” officials such as him begin to step outside of their boxes, the correct response from a free people is to shove them right back inside and to nail down the lid. “Can I gather for Christmas?” is a question asked by serfs, not citizens, and, if it must be asked, “it is just too soon to tell” is the sort of answer that should yield laughter, the furrowing of brows, and, if necessary, a mass Google search for where to buy tar and feathers. Anthony Fauci is a government adviser; he is not the suzerain of the American Calendar. He would do well to remember it.