Black Knights, Mockdowns and Gold Standards
The NSW Government’s slow moving (non) response to the most recent COVID-19 outbreak reminds me of the famous “Black Knight” scene from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (I appreciate that the situation is a bit more complex than that but here goes anyway..)
In the movie, during the King’s travels in search of the Grail, he comes across the Black Knight. While not looking for an altercation, the Black Knight steadfastly refuses to allow the King to continue his journey, threatening the King with both a very large sword and the words “None shall pass!”
Despite a height and size disadvantage, the King triumphs over the Black Knight, slowly dismembering him a limb at a time. And yet, at the loss of each limb, the Black Knight maintains an obstinate belief in his destiny to win – losing an arm is “just a flesh wound”- to the point that when he is finally unable to fight further, and sits, (h)armless, on bleeding stumps, he reconsiders his somewhat reduced situation and suggests “All right, we’ll call it draw!”
Similarly, the NSW Government’s claim that “[COVID] shall not pass” due to the mistaken belief in the power of the government’s ‘gold standard’ COVID response teams and contact tracers evinces a similar level of obstinacy. So does suggestions that NSW has to start ‘living with COVID’.
And day after day, King COVID slowly but surely dismembered each NSW strategy, until we are left with the current situation. As a resident of the Australian Capital Territory’s ‘porous’ border with NSW, I can only sit and watch (as I now can’t travel interstate and my daughter cannot return to her college in Melbourne)…
Perhaps if the same level of obstinacy had been applied to a lockdown two weeks ago then things may have been different. Instead NSW went for ‘lockdown-light’, or my favourite new word, ‘mockdown’, in order to ‘protect the economy’ and not unduly annoy voters. Compare that to the situation now - a prolonged ‘mockdown’ of sorts and nationwide border closures (also creating economic hardship and annoyed voters)..
In an earlier post in December 2020, I noted, particularly in relation to COVID, how ‘leaders need to tell us the truth, even if it is unbearable’. It is worth returning to the quote from Keith Grint in that article:
...In [Henrik Ibsen’s play] An Enemy of the People, the bad news is that the new public baths have been poisoned by the local tannery, just as the tourist season is starting (this, of course, is the frame for the 1975 Spielberg movie ‘Jaws’). In the play, the hero, Dr Stockmann fails to persuade his brother, the mayor, to close the baths and is then shouted down at a town meeting for trying to persuade the people that they have an unpopular but necessary duty to perform; they call him ‘the enemy of the people.’ This is the opposite of telling people lies that keep followers happy. And it might be no coincidence that one of the heroes of the UK’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is Larry Vaughn, the Mayor of Amity in Jaws, who wants to keep the beaches open, despite the evidence that a shark is devouring the swimmers one by one (Heritage, 2020)..
It is the NSW Government’s failure to grasp the hard reality that the choices available are neither easy nor popular that goes to the heart of the current dilemma facing NSW Government (and the Black Knight). The government has not only has failed to make the hard decision to ‘close the beaches’ but continues to blame the community for going for a swim and getting eaten..