In an era of unfolding partisan tragedies, it helps to pause and celebrate the mordant comedies as well.
Readers, I’ll cut to the chase: Everybody else is having fun with this western Massachusetts lesbian bar story, so why can’t I? By now you may have acquainted yourself with the most wonderfully viral article of the season, written by the Boston Globe: about the hilariously woke travails of a small-town bar. (The piece is paywalled, but the Globe is currently offering readers a deal of $1 for the rest of the year, so huck ’em a buck and enjoy the article blow by spectacular blow.)
But to summarize: Back in 2020, the Last Ditch, a tiny lesbian activist bar (with the sort of clientele to match) in the western Massachusetts town of Greenfield, mandated that all patrons wear an N95 mask during the Covid lockdown era of early 2020. Six years later, on August 31, they announced they would be going mask-optional — for one night per week. (“It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional.”)
At this point the heavens cracked open, the skies began to rain bloody tears, and a plague of locusts emerged from the dark, barren fields of Amherst to devour the Last Ditch alive. The local “long Covid” community — which as it turns out is not solely confined to Taylor Lorenz, but is just as bored — was outraged about every possible aspect of this “mass disabling event”: “I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic]” said one emblematic out-of-towner response.
But, alas, this is western Massachusetts, and not Gulf Coast Florida. Which is to say: In this particular part of the country, the online hive-brain progressivism isn’t just “online,” it’s “everyday life.” So Greenfield’s ultraprogressive locals have been of no help whatsoever either in bailing out the Last Ditch, or even benignly ignoring it: Instead, they’ve been clotting it with struggle sessions, mediation, and endless activist grief from attention-seeking progressive sociopaths.
I can’t even hope to get to all the various delicious details and quotes of this delightfully well-reported story — Rich Lowry offered some, but there are oh so many more — so you must read it. But ask yourself: Why has this story gripped America’s chattering classes all week? It’s not just conservatives like us who are pointing and gawking with wonder, shouting “SEE?!?” at these self-sabotaging progressive freaks fresh from April 2021. It’s the quiet masses of the semi-sane left who are giving this tale wings as well. (Look at the venue where was first published for all the evidence you need of that.)
Because, in ways that you and I will thankfully forever be ignorant of (but not Bill Kristol!), they know. This story perfectly embodies and makes human a dynamic they’ve been living through for 20 years. Armand Domalewski, a YIMBY San Francisco progressive (which is to say, not leftist enough for many activists in the city) put it perfectly last night: “The reason this lesbian bar story went so viral is that basically every left wing person in America has personally experienced some version of this story in their life over the course of the last decade and is really goddam sick of it.”
If these bar owners are smart, they’ll manage to turn all of this new attention into a profit. (Rosa DeLauro, the famously blue-haired crone/representative from nearby Connecticut, proposed a solidarity trip over the state border on Twitter, which is honestly kind of touching.) But chances are they’re not all that smart, because — in a development no professional comedy writer in modern times would have been daring enough to script — at least one of them has already dropped out of the entire rotten, debt-ridden commitment . . . to instead attend clown school. Good writers would consider themselves too sophisticated to write on-the-nose, audience-pandering slop like that. Or the detail where one patron mused about how to save the Last Ditch, proposing a Lady Gaga–themed dance night: “Gaga is canceled,” she says. “Gaga is Zionist.” But the Boston Globe didn’t have to invent the comedic absurdities; they only had to report on them.
In an era of unfolding partisan tragedies, it helps to pause and celebrate the mordant comedies as well.