The Idle Terror Mounts

by Fergus Downie

A spectre is haunting the public sector though I’d venture no one will be banging pots and pans for its victims. Working from home by all indications is deeply traumatic and to anyone doubting the heroism of us all, my council’s wellbeing app ( complete with meditation soundtrack) is the proof of it. The anticipation of deadly sacrifice is immense though at times not so much as the horror that we really haven’t been missed (not me, I recently slaved away preparing an equalities and diversity impact assessment on it). A lot of it about.

Freed from physical labour the educated classes might now more than ever have dared to think, but the silence of left wing intellectuals on the collective hysteria is deafening even as their determination to root out the enemy within is unflinching. Right wing tabloids used to draw fire for sensationalising the seamy underbelly of the working class, now it’s the bloodsport of the progressive intelligentsia and it’s combined with all the curtain twitching malice of provincials. There isn’t, truth be told, much of an underbelly about and the police are far from busy unless someone has binged on groceries or taken a walk. That doctors aren’t either is a blasphemy no one dares mention. After Brexit a much touted generational war was supposed to have broken out, with elderly xenophobes stealing a golden millennial future. Many like the nauseating former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg called for a second referendum on the calculation that the swing geriatrics would be dead by then but in this call to solitary confinement they’ve more than played their part. Accident and Emergency wards are actually eerily quiet (yes, I said it) because there’s a startling absence of cardiac arrests.

To judge by the figures Coronavirus evidently has hidden therapeutic benefits, unless one draws the more plausible conclusion the elderly poor are making their final sacrifice and dying at home. All this has little cut through amidst the psychic masturbation of the moment and the tone of the Guardian is positively putrid in its determination to run covid 19 as a moral metaphor for Brexit.

As in Camus’ novel the plague has ripped asunder all the common social decencies and you’d need more than orchestrated applause to put it back. Even the humour has gone alas. I asked for a bat at my local butchers after getting through the mournful queue and a pompous prat eyed me with witless intent calling me a racist. I have never harboured any prejudice against them unless they defecate from above and I deny myself even the respectable middle class prejudice of antisemtism. As for the clapping cretins I could summon a heart of darkness.