All of Gov. Charlie Baker’s world is divided into two parts.
People, and folks.
Folks are the salt of the earth. They man the governor’s snitch lines, they count up how many are congregating in the backyards and then write up the fines for anyone having too much fun.
They scream at you for not wearing a mask. They cut off the water and the power in gyms whose owners try to reopen.
Folks are on the public payroll. Some wear white lab coats and have Ph.D.s, which they think makes them doctors. Folks always tell Joe Biden’s BFF Charlie Parker what a wonderful job he’s doing, and they never mention that we have the third highest death rate in the nation, or the 5,658 deaths on his watch in his nursing homes.
Folks have never missed a paycheck these last five months.
Then there are the people. You know who they are — they’re angry, just because they’ve lost their jobs, their barrooms are shut down and their kids can’t go back to school. And perhaps most importantly, they’re fed up with being yelled at by “folks.”
The unemployment for people in Maskachusetts is 17.4%, the worst in the nation. For folks, it’s zero.
Here’s Charlie Parker at a spring press conference describing his favorite “folks” who are dealing with COVID, which would be health care folks and some folks in municipal government and state government, and then “folks who work with vulnerable populations.”
We used to call ‘em hacks. Now they’re folks.
Thank goodness Tall Deval has enough folks on the payroll to keep an eye on these people who are behaving like this is still a free country.
Remember the recent horror at the M Street Beach in South Boston? People were having fun, a fact the governor found “particularly oppressive.” Fortunately, his folks were there to put a halt to such frivolity.
“The crowding and the behavior that our folks saw out there last weekend simply can’t continue. If people can’t space out … then we’ll have to limit the number of people who can be there.”
Do you want to loot and riot? That’s fine with Charlie Parker, as he made clear after the mayhem in Boston. If you want to work out at a gym, or have a beer on the golf course, you’re people. Looting, though, is for folks.
“The vast majority of the folks who participated in those demonstrations were wearing masks.”
George Orwell wrote that some animals were more equal than others. In Charlie Parker’s Fourth Reich, folks are more equal than people.
Take Karyn Polito, the lieutenant governor. If she and her family were people, they’d have been in big trouble for that kegger they threw out at the compound on Lake Quinsigamond. But they’re folks, plus Pay to Play has meetings, as Tall Deval pointed out.
Being governor, Charlie has to make sure people do whatever the hell he tells them to, no matter how absurd. That’s where the folks come in.
“The response we’ve gotten from the folks we talk to is that people are abiding by the rules … the place where you get into the biggest trouble with respect to all of this is not abiding by the rules, not doing the things that we’ve been advised by many folks in the public health and health care and epidemiological communities are the things that we need to do to stay safe. People need to abide by the rules.”
Remember that: people must abide by the rules. And folks set the rules for the people.
“Folks,” the governor tells us, “are trying to do the right thing.”
People, on the other hand, are always throwing “these parties (that) are too big, too crowded, and people are simply not responsible about face coverings or any of the major metrics.”
How dare people not follow any of Tall Deval’s major metrics! Call 911 — call the folks.
“I was on a call this morning with a bunch of folks from the health care community … We work pretty hard with some folks to put together a pretty robust uh testing infrastructure for colleges and universities … If you just look at the data that’s on the weekly report that’s put out by um by the folks at the Command Center.”
People, if you’re not at the public trough, you can’t be folks, with one exception. The exception is, if you live in a “community,” meaning, where a lot of illegals live. Those are the communities getting free testing, in addition to everything else they get for free, just like always.
“I certainly want the folks um who are living in those communities and the folks who shop or whatever in those communities to know what they uh, what their circumstances (are) so that people will take appropriate precautions.”
Take appropriate precautions, folks, or the governor will treat you like he treats people — like dogs.
Bob Dylan once described the world as “one big prison yard. Some of us are prisoners, and some of us are guards.”
Nothing’s changed in Maskachusetts except the terminology. Nowadays, some of us are people, and the rest of us are folks.
