Product Warning: None Of What You See/ Half Of What You Hear

The National Football League has announced that it will be adding another song to the pregame ceremonies before its games this season. Before or after or instead of The Star Spangled Banner it will play “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” recognized as the “Black National Anthem”.

The song, written over 120 years ago by James Weldon Johnson, is part of a $250 million “outreach” from the league to placate radicals among its workforce and Critical Race Theorists in corporate America. If by outreach you mean protection money.

With critical outreach labelling the SSB a divisive song, it seems only logical that the NFL also start offering separate seating for blacks, separate washrooms and separate entrances.  So, the result of 60 years of fighting segregation, apartheid  and Jim  Crow is now the only safe place for blacks is in a parallel but equal world, a self-segregation for black people.

The massive effort to achieve MLK’s colour-blind society has somehow resulted in segregated university commencements, segregated dorms at those schools, segregated classes. Corporations are setting up separate facilities for blacks only. And a spike in blacks murdering other blacks. Listen to film maker Spike Lee and he’ll tell you he doesn’t like white people gentrifying black neighbourhoods.

S0 score one for Colin Kaepernick. The painful, bloody triumph of Nelson Mandela over apartheid, a triumph of inclusion, is now a mocking vision of self exclusion. 

But that might not be the most head-scratching moment of last week. At a CNN Town Hall president Joe Biden gave the latest demonstration that he is in the throes of pre-cognitive dementia. In the rambling word salads fed to him by his handlers from the Obama administration, Biden became lost in parenthetical thickets of policy when questioned by host Don Lemon.

One psychiatrist watching was alarmed. Dr. Tanveer Ahmed said that while Biden was coherent at times, “You get the feeling he’s almost just hanging on — which can be a feature of dementia”. continued “You know, it is probably steadily getting worse in the last sort of 12, 18 months, and that is a feature of dementia where you’re kind of seeing a steady, gradual decline … I don’t think it’s unreasonable to raise these questions.”

Most viewers likely felt the same. One person not asking questions about Biden’s obvious distress was Lemon (who’s had his own on-air cognitive issues). With the most powerful leader in the West floundering to speak in sentences Lemon seemed to think it was not worth remarking upon that the man before him was doing The Madness of King George. Nor did any of his CNN colleagues.

You’d think that with a Jamaican/ Indian/ Canadian in the wings just itching to be POTUS the race-baiting Lemon might jump at the chance to usher a doddering white man into the shadows. But not until after the 2022 midterm elections. Till then there’s the swath of middle-class white women who gave Biden the presidency who must be reassured that Genial Joe is still the Boss. 

This neglect of duty might be understandable had the progressive radicals of cable news not leapt upon every verbal gaffe or fluff as signs that Donald Trump was mentally incompetent. Time after time Lemon and friends enlisted psychiatrists and constitutional scholars to justify using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Employing Trump's nonsense word “cofeve” became a cottage industry.

But even those dislocative moments paled in comparison to the latest flip/ flop from the U.S. Center For Disease Control (CDC). Just months after its director triumphantly told Americans that, in light of dropping Covid-19 numbers, it was okay to not wear masks everywhere it now says that people must resume wearing masks again in light of the Delta variant (and declining face time for its director on friendly media).

(What CDC failed to mention is that the data the CDC used for the renewed mask mandate is from a single study from India that was rejected in peer review. But CDC used it anyway.) 

That means kids wearing masks in schools again. Same for people who’ve had both their vaccine shots more than 14 days ago. “In areas with substantial and high transmission, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people wear masks in public, indoor settings to help prevent the spread of the delta variant, and protect others. This includes schools,” Rochelle Walensky said. (Walensky added that children’s deaths from Covid far outstrip deaths from flu, another whopper unsupported by her own data.)

Let’s run that by you once more. After a furious campaign to get the reluctant to submit to a jab the CDC is telling you that— oh, by the way— the vaccine is not what we promised. (Actually it’s not worth a fig.) And while you’re at it, queue for the Third Miracle Dose. 

The directive seems to be a bridge between the draconian spring mask directives and mask mania in an anticipated fall flu season. Allowing the Heath® experts to keep the whip hand on the issue and not allow the plebes too much mask freedom. 

Walensky acknowledges that this is a recommendation and that states and other jurisdictions can judge for themselves. In other words, Florida, Texas and other reluctant states will stay the no-mask/ no lockdown course. Hyper-vigilant blue states will likely enforce the recommendations with threats of pestilence and depredation for their non-compliant citizens.

But where does that leave the hundreds of millions who were led to believe that vaccines were the end goal, the secret sauce to end the pandemic? And how in good conscience can they continue the barrage attack on those who decline the vaccines so far? 

In a week of imponderables this might be the most perplexing. How does a society do this to itself? And who has authority to speak for the public? 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx