Bat Scares Egghead Couple: Trump Blamed

by Matt Taibbi | Aug 5, 2024

The New York Times ran a guest editorial by Belle Boggs, a North Carolina author who had a bat fly in her house. It didn’t bite her, but she needed a sheriff’s deputy, a county health nurse, state animal control, the CDC, and an E.R. doctor to tell her what to do about that. Naturally, the episode led her to think of Donald Trump:

After our visit from the bat, our sheriff’s department, public health department and university hospital all functioned exactly as designed. The C.D.C., a huge federal agency that works to protect every one of us from infectious disease, food-borne illness and emerging threats like bird flu, pulled through. The C.D.C. is part of what Mr. Trump’s allies would call the administrative state and is in the cross hairs of Project 2025, which proposes breaking up the agency… I want to believe Kamala Harris is right when she says “we are not going back” to a time when every calamity leaves us on our own.

Leaving aside the problem of the ubiquitous personality who answers “Donald Trump” to every stain on the Rorschach test of life, the Boggs essay made me wonder about America’s prognosis. Early citizens packed kids in wagons and rode into forests teeming with human and animal predators. Now people reach middle age needing the federal government to tell them what to do if a bat flies past. It won’t hold:

The real-life decision tree is simpler. If you know you’re too much of a compulsive thinker to get through days of wondering if a rabid bat bit you in your sleep, you don’t need the CDC to tell you you need to pay the $600, get the shots, and buy peace of mind. If you’re confident in your senses and sanity and realize a) the bat didn’t bite you and b) see a, go back to sleep. If you need a government expert to walk you through the math of the second decision, you really already made the first decision. In fact, you probably made it back when you married whatever husband decided to go along with this caper (although he may be working on a different decision tree).

Either way, it’s not hard. If you leave the house unsure if you left the iron on, the question isn’t Did I leave the iron on?, but Am I crazy enough to need to go back to make sure I didn’t leave the iron on? Yes or no, the only wrong answer is thinking about it all the way to the airport. Or, now, giving up without aid of a Federal Department of Leaving Irons On.

About that: a billion years ago, when hadrosaurs roamed New Jersey and I was beginning a progressive education, American liberals believed paternalistic government was urgently needed in Harlem, but welcome to turn around when it got to the Hamptons. I somehow didn’t see the contradiction until I worked on The Divide and I Can’t Breathe. Both books featured social services inspectors who counted toothbrushes and sifted in underwear drawers in the homes of welfare moms, sniffing panties in search of illegal cohabitants. This went on at the same time as national campaigns demanding government stay out of our bedrooms (I agreed with those).

I’d just about reconciled with the fact that I’d been raised to believe basically racist notions about the inability of the Less Fortunate to cope without the charity and direction of the affluent and enlightened when members of my class threw a curveball, coming out themselves as hapless cucks begging for orders from Mistress Government. This psychosexual plot twist roared upon Covid’s arrival and hasn’t abated, leaving a world in which upscale educateds fetishize contempt for uncultured populists through self-mortifying obedience rituals, wearing diapers on their faces and writing proud memoirs about about needing federal help with flying mice.

However you want to characterize the original American colonists, as heroes or slave-holding land pirates or both, the problem they set out to solve was constructing a government that externally stopped invaders and internally stopped despots. Assuming citizens who both had and wanted self-sufficiency, they built a state that protected us from others, not ourselves. And so, lacking imagination, the founders never addressed the problem of reality flying through the windows of rich neurotics, failing also to guarantee companionship through “every calamity.” Did they get it wrong? Are we really that pathetic now?

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