Après le Déluge

After coronavirus — chaos and Zoom meetings?

There’s a type of writing you’ve probably read a dozen times in recent months: a newspaper op-ed, a magazine essay of the kind that reporters used to call a thumbsucker. A think-piece, written in a deep and pensive prose. Reflective, contemplative, and wise.

Goo, in other words. But goo of a particular sort, about how all the world has been forever changed, altered to its core, by the coronavirus — and yet, somehow, those changes are easily explained by small events in the writers’ lives. “The comfort of being in the presence of others,” writes a linguistics professor about the isolation she’s felt since the lockdown, will have to be “replaced by a greater comfort with absence.” The empty shelves of a local supermarket have empowered one sociologist to opine (not that sociologists typically need much empowering for their opinions) that the coronavirus pandemic has forever ended market society and individualism. Subscribers, click here to read the full magazine! Not a subscriber? Click here to become a Patriot member today and receive access to The American Spectator in print and online! Meanwhile, sex has been permanently transformed by the nude selfies sent during quarantine, according to reporters at both Vox and the New York Times, who drew that conclusion when they received nude pictures from people with whom they were not having sex. After getting his art fix from online sources for several weeks — basically analogous to gulping methadone to feed a heroin addiction — an art critic has confidently assured readers that, from now until the twelfth of never, art will exist only as online streaming. Geopolitics is a favorite for those who peer into the crystal ball of the coronavirus. The People’s Republic of China is on an inevitable rise to rule the world — or maybe it’s that China will soon collapse, broken into pieces like smashed dinner plates. This is the End of the West, you see. Or a demonstration of the West’s great strength. Hard to say.

But at lea...