Full Facial Nudity is Banned in Kansas

Starting Friday, full facial nudity will no longer be allowed in Kansas, at least for the duration of the coronavirus problem. Gov. Laura Kelly has ordered that as of Friday all Kansans must wear face masks when in public, and it will be interesting to see how that turns out.

The measure is in response to a worrisome increase in the state’s coronavirus infections, especially here in mostly urban Sedgwick County and the suburban Kansas City counties to the northeast, but it’s also happening in the rural counties, which are sparsely populated and as always socially-distanced but have an average age over 65 and scant medical care, so any outbreak would be disastrous. Despite such compelling public health arguments, however, we expect that Kelly will face some harsh criticism.

Kansans tend to have an instinctive sense of civic duty, and come together in a crisis and fill sandbags in times of flooding and refrain from tossing cigarettes out of a car window during times of drought and tak\e up arms in time of war, but otherwise they tend to follow Walt Whitman’s advice to “resist much, obey little,” and don’t care for being told what to do. Which Kansas instinct prevails remains to be seen, but it surely won’t be a unanimous decision around here.

Here, as everywhere else in America, people tend to disregard the arguments and choose sides based on their previous political affiliations. Our liberal Democratic friends all agree that wearing a face mask is the least you can do for your fellow citizens, and far less onerous than what previous generations of civic-minded Kansans have one, but when our President Donald Trump-loving conservative Republican friends complain that wearing a mask in public very much sucks they also make an undeniably damned good point.

To fully confess to any revolutionary cadres out there, we’ve rarely worn a mask when buying beer and other essential groceries over the past many interminable months. We wore one to a small town Church of Christ funeral, where about a third of the mourners wore masks, but only on a couple of other occasions. In our beer and grocery shopping and other occasional appearances in public at an outdoor coffee shop and a beer joint with a small client tell and spacious patio seating, we’ve noticed that only about a third of our fellow citizens have been wearing face masks. We expect that percentage will go up when it becomes mandatory, but don’t anticipate full compliance. It might turn out to be the most widely broken law around here since Prohibition or the 55 mile per hour speed limit.

There’s also a chance it will redound to those liberals’ benefit. This coronavirus problem is undeniably serious, even so serious that the Trump-loving Republican governors of Florida and Texas are bringing back economic restrictions in response to recent worrisome spikes, and the Vice President and Republican Senate majority are urging Americans to wear face masks in public. Even in this traditionally Republican state our Democratic governor won handily against and a very-very-Trump-loving Republican just two years ago and won’t have to run again for another two years, by which time she might look both courageous and smart, and Trump might be long gone. Trump moved the Republican convention from Asheville, N.C, because to Jacksonville, Fla., because of Asheville’s coronavirus regulations, Jacksonville is adopting stricter coronavirus restrictions, and that’s embarrassing.

At this point there’s really no telling how Kelly’s executive order will be enforced, and what legal authority counties have the rights to countermand it, and what the cops can do about it, although she promises explanations about that by Thursday. If the inevitable court battles result in the counties getting their way, the Sedgwick County Commission, mostly comprised of the Wichita metropolitan area, which is currently seeing a worrisome rise in coronavirus cases, would probably vote to damn the face masks and full go speed ahead. The lone hold-out against and pro-business consensus for ignoring the coronavirus is a tattooed folk-singing single mom who represents our inordinately homosexual and lesbian and atypically liberal district of the county.

Once again we’re sitting on the political sidelines with no rooting interest in any of the players. We recognize the dangers of the coronavirus, but damn how we hate wearing those damn masks, and instinctively hate bossy government, and miss enjoying full facial nudity. We don’t regret that we voted for that Democratic governor or that hippy-dippy County Commissioner, and starting Friday we’ll comply with the face mask rule, and hating every moment of it and wondering whom to blame, and keep hoping that curve i flattened and eventually the center will hold and something like normalcy will eventually be restored.

— Bud Norman

You Say You Want a Revolution

We have resigned ourselves to the fact that winter will never end. The first week of May has brought snow, sub-freezing temperatures, yet another global warming speech by Al Gore, and a glum realization that the cold and gray will persist for the rest of our days.

The political climate is every bit as dispiriting, but even in this endless winter of our discontent we are not yet readying a musket for an armed revolution against the government. One always hopes things won’t come to that, of course, but one never knows. Revolutions have always become necessary at some point, and there are reasons to believe that many of our fellow citizens expect it to happen sooner rather than later.

One reason is a recent opinion poll conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University, which found 29 percent of registered voters agreeing that “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Only 47 percent of the respondents said they disagreed, hardly a reassuring show of confidence in the safety of our liberties, with 18 percent neither agreeing or disagreeing, 5 percent saying they were unsure, and 1 percent shrewdly refusing to give any answer at all. Those not registered to vote might be more or less inclined to foresee the necessity of an armed revolution to remain free men and women, but in any case there seems to be a very sizeable minority of Americans who share this concern.

The sentiment is so widespread that 18 percent of Democrats concede the possibility of an armed revolution becoming necessary, although it is hard to say what reasons they might have. Perhaps they are worried about the possibility of another Republican administration in the next few years, or they regard the soon-to-be-bankrupt entitlement programs as liberty, or are quietly hoping that a few years of revolutionary bomb-throwing will pay off with a prestigious professorship somewhere down the line just as it did for the likes of Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Kathy Boudin. Regardless of the rationale, 18 percent is a significant chunk of the party of Hope and Change and all things government, and an even larger 27 percent of independents also believe a revolution might soon be required.

Republicans are most inclined to think so, with a whopping 44 percent of them agreeing with the poll’s premise, but at least they have made their many reasons loud and clear. On countless issues ranging from health insurance mandates to expanding regulatory bureaucracies to a spread-the-wealth economic program to bans on everything from that rusty old musket to big ol’ cups of soda pop, many Republicans have consistently argued that the constant and rapid expansion of government’s size and power eventually encroaches upon personal liberties to an intolerable extent. This oft-stated theory also holds that when a long train of abuses and usurpations reduce a people to despotism, to paraphrase the Declaration of Impendence, it is the right, it is the duty of the people to throw off such a government, and a good many of the Republicans we know take this very seriously.

Such insurrectionist talk is clearly taken seriously by others. The Department of Homeland Security has famously warned that Barack Obama’s election as president would unleash a wave of white supremacist violence and warned the nation’s law enforcement officials to be on the lookout for disgruntled military veterans, Army training materials explain that Catholics and Evangelical Christians are every bit as dangerously extremist as al-Qaeda’s brand of Islam, and numerous Democratic politicians have publicly fretted that those crazy Tea Party people are going to don their tri-cornered hats and take up arms. Such nervousness about a right-wing uprising are so prevalent in government that we suspect the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who were so uninterested in the Boston Marathon bombers even after explicit warnings from the Russian government felt obliged by multi-cultural sensitivity to be snooping around some Free Republic poster instead. The view is also common to much of the media, who immediately suspect conservatism any time something blows up, and the more strident liberals of our acquaintance are downright doctrinaire about it.

Such worries, we think, are exaggerated at the moment. The Tea Party people that we know are all lawn-mowing, credit card-carrying, fastidiously law-abiding folk who are disinclined by a conservative temperament to quit their hard-earned jobs and wage an armed revolution against the government. They certainly don’t have the same romantic notions about it that Professors Ayers, Dohrn, and Boudin once had, or that the Occupy Wall Street hobos in their Che Guevara t-shirts still have. Instead they believe that prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and instransient reasons, to further paraphrase the Declaration, and they don’t believe we have yet reached the point that rebellion is necessary. Not yet, anyway, and the defeat of the recent gun control bills and the resistance of many state governments to federal over-reach and the prospect of a mid-term election next year all give hope that we can avoid that point through democratic means.

When something blows up and it turns out the work of an Islamist rather than a conservative, as is so often the case, the same people can be counted on to thoughtfully consider what they have done to provoke such an unpleasant act. They never seem to ponder why a full 29 percent of their countrymen, many of them lawn-mowing and cred card-carrying and fastidiously law-abiding folk, might think it possible that they’ll need an armed revolution in the next few years. Nor do they wonder why only 47 percent dismiss the possibility. Perhaps they should give it some thought.

— Bud Norman