Opus 2020-223: Knavery and Collusion

In Texas we are generally free to go about our business as long as we play the game of Masks and Distance.  I find that I often do not go because I hate the game.  One place I have been avoiding is our library.  They closed down for a long time but are now open.  The problem for me is that the state mandate requires masks.  So I don’t go and it has been a benefit for me.  I have been reading the stuff that is on my shelves.  I have been downloading from Project Gutenberg.  I have a load of Baen novels on my Kindle.

In my reading I am seeing a lot of parallels from the past.  The one I came across today as I began a book called A Journal of the Plague Year had to do with government deception.  The year was 1665 and the last time that the Bubonic plague hit England.  As the book opens I came across this,

“And accordingly in the Weekly Bill for the next Week, the thing began to shew it self; there was indeed but 14 set down of the Plague, but this was all Knavery and Collusion, for St Giles’s Parish they buried 40 in all, whereof it was certain most of them died of the Plague, though they were set down of other Distempers;...”  page 6

In 1665 the authorities were lying by making the numbers low.  I guess the object was to reduce panic.  Today we have the government and media lying high for the opposite reason.  They want us to panic.  One advantage they had in those days was a lack of CNN.

“We had no such thing as printed News-Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things; and to improve them by the Invention of Men, as I have liv’d to see practis’d since.” page 1

But some things never change.  We think we doubt the government today but it is nothing new.

Defoe, Daniel.  A Journal of the Plague Year.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 1722, 1978.

homo unius libri