Charlie Baker’s mask-querade is over

It looked like a hostage video Monday morning when Gov. Charlie Baker glumly announced the impending end of his beloved mask mandate.

He gulped, he mumbled, his voice cracked, like a feckless substitute teacher in middle school trying to rein in a rowdy classroom.

“We’ve said since day one,” he gurgled, “we’d get through this together.”

Yes, we’re all in this together. He gives the orders, you follow them. He and his hacks never missed a paycheck and thousands of them basically took 14 months off with full pay, while you were fired-furloughed-laid off and your business is gone.

Oh yeah, we’ve all been in this together.

And then, suddenly, the Panic was over. And the man Dementia Joe Biden calls “Charlie Parker” was standing in front of his amen chorus that is the Boston media, chagrined.

Shouldn’t he have been happy? The war is over. Yet he was subdued, a lot less animated than he’s been on those occasions when he’s been sternly canceling Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Super Bowl parties and St. Patrick’s Day (twice!).

Now those were fun press conferences! Ordering other people around, arbitrarily, for no good reason — those were the days, my friend. Charlie thought they’d never end.

“It’s been a really, really, really long year for the people of Massachusetts.”

And it seemed even longer listening to your droning daily doses of panic porn.

Telling us, again and again, to respect the virus. About the protocols, the sectors and the folks. The intimate settings. Follow the science. The new normal. Out of an abundance of caution. Plexiglas. One-way aisles. Phase IV, part 2. Regimens. I’m a basketball player. I miss hugging my dad. …

What does Charlie do now? Maybe he’ll stop bragging about the state’s allegedly high vaccination rates — although oddly he has never once mentioned any of the other statistics, including the fact that Maskachusetts still has the third-highest death rate in the U.S., not to mention had the highest unemployment rate in the nation for months on end last year.

Yet Charlie remains a legend in his own mind. He’s proud of the calamities he’s authored. He feels good about what’s done … to everybody else.

As Aldous Huxley once wrote:

“To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

But what goes around comes around. Last Thursday, as he was preparing to make a pilgrimage to his spiritual home — D.C. — the word came down from on high.

The scam is over. Mission accomplished.

Just as Charlie had to crush thousands of small businesses in order to shift the blame from his hacks at the Holyoke Soldiers Home, the Registry, Mass State Police, etc., Charlie’s hero Joe Biden last week urgently needed to do something to divert attention from his own fiascoes — gas lines, inflation, war in Gaza, the chaos on the Southern border.

Ending the mask-querade would change the subject. And so Charlie’s beloved lockdown was history, collateral damage.

On Monday, like a modern Baghdad Bob, Charlie kept randomly shouting out his preposterous orders — “If you’re not vaccinated, get vaccinated!”

But his voice somehow lacked that stern squeak that he used to such dismal effect among Ch. 5 viewers and Globe readers these past 14 months.

Of course Parker couldn’t bring himself to put an immediate end to the hoax, unlike his fellow gubernatorial scammers. But they had their own selfish reasons — Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing a recall election, Gov. Andrew Cuomo had to change the subject from his $5.1 million blood money book advance and Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee wants to run for a full term next year.

Charlie’s a COVID dead-ender, but he’s still not as deranged as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, his classmate at Needham High and Harvard College.

Murphy stamped his little foot and vowed to hang on — damn them all, masks forever and ever, amen.

“This is a matter,” Murphy babbled incoherently, “of a couple of more weeks on the clock.”

Can someone say, 15 days to flatten the curve?

After 14 months of nonstop hellfire-and-brimstone preaching that the end of the world is nigh, what does Brother Charlie do now that Doomsday has come and gone and the sun has risen again in the East?

The answer is, the preacher never folds his tent. He just recalculates the date of the Apocalypse.

Last month, Charlie’s campaign raised a mere $9,429.60. I figured he was all done. But now I’m not so sure.

What if Charlie Parker decides to tap into a new donor base — say, with help with the Republican Governors Association — and undertakes his fourth run for governor?

There’s so much work left undone. Bacon has demolished the state’s economy, but he still needs to ram through the “millionaires’” tax and raise the gasoline tax from 24 to 62 cents a gallon. You know, to save the planet.

Why not soldier on? As H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Vote for Baker in ’22. You’ll get it good and hard — again.