Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
Title of the Podcast unclear – I took 7 Aspirin and now don’t feel well.
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Kidding aside, the irrational hysteria is real! I went to go pick up items from Costco Friday night as part of my normally scheduled shopping trip, and they were entirely out of toilet paper, Clorox wipes, ground beef, bread, raw chicken, flour, rice, pasta, and several canned food items. The ironic thing is that I picked up my normal 15 gallons of milk (I was thankful nobody drinks whole milk anymore, so there was plenty of it left), and I felt like everyone was giving me the stink eye. I wanted to explain, “I’m not hoarding, I have 7 kids” – but decided better of it. I went to the local grocery supermarket on Saturday, and while they had a few more items left than Costco (I bought the last bag of flour, some of the last few boxes of spaghetti) they were extremely busy and already out of many items including the absurd high-priority item of toilet paper. I really don’t get the toilet paper thing – I mean, I like it as much as the next guy, but in an extreme crisis (which this is not), I’m pretty sure I could figure out ways to compensate for a lack of toilet paper (isn’t that what the New York Times is for, after all?). Archaeologists a thousand years hence will be trying to figure this out – “So if a Hurricane was coming everyone went out and bought toilet paper? And if there was a pandemic, everyone went out and bought up all the toilet paper? And if there was going to be a blizzard, everyone went out and bought toilet paper? Either these people had some serious digestive problems, or they worshiped some strange, scatological god – which, from the looks of their public entertainment, was the more likely case.”
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I say all this while knowing that my wife is very much in one of the very high risk categories for various medical reasons. So we’re trying to be cautious and wash hands and curb social interactions and such, but there seems to me to be a pretty easily discernible line between prudence and hysteria.
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Also – Jesus Christ Superstar? Really? What the heck!?!