The red flag of extreme peril is out for the Minnesota State Fair. As all the COVID numbers once again head off in the wrong direction thanks to this latest surge — The Fools’ Surge / The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated — both The Lovely Mrs and Bouncing Baby Boy #1 have declared they will not be rubbing sweaty jowls with the masses at this year’s Great Minnesota Get Together.

Might as well board up The Food Building and The Beer Gardens.

Little by little businesses are coming around to the only effective conclusion. Namely, that they’re open only for clients and staff intelligent and morally responsible enough to have gotten themselves vaccinated. The rest — those clinging to their “personal beliefs” — can stay home, or like CNN, be fired.

Given the month it takes to acquire full efficacy from the three vaccines, we’ve already blown by the window for the Fair and the 1.3 million or whatever who show up to sweat and breathe all over each other. Fair authorities say they are “keeping all options on the table”. But as of this moment they are only seriously considering mandating masks for indoor exhibits and venues … which is ludicrous on the face of it.

Is some hapless employee really going to stand in front of O’Gara’s, The Food Building, the Grandstand or (my personal favorite) the Northern Tool shed and deny entrance to the “mask hesitant”? Give me a break. Mask mandates are unenforceable. Far better just to deny entrance to the grounds to anyone who can’t prove they’ve been vaccinated.

Our Great Cholesterol Get Together is hardly National Priority #1. IMHO getting schools back to normal operation gets top billing. But government leaders — the people we elect to make sometimes (very) unpopular decisions — are reluctant to take a walk out on the legal/political plank and make vaccines mandatory for every school with a link to public funding.

You don’t have to watch a couple hours of Christopher Hitchens/Sam Harris YouTube debates like I did the other night to get into a steaming seethe over all the unintended consequences of America’s anachronistic enshrinement of “religious and personal beliefs”.

With a vast majority of states genuflecting at the notion that what someone prefers to believe is every bit as valid and real as … well, reality … we find ourselves in a moment like this. Locked up and incapable (i.e. unwilling) to say, “No. Sorry. I’m happy for whatever you want to believe. But this disease is not a Sunday school fantasy. It is real. And deadly. And spread by people like you. Meanwhile, the vaccines are safe, widely available, free and effective. If you want to go on believing that the Great Bearded White Man in the Sky and/or His Son, the Beardless White Guy Who Looks Like the Drummer for Foghat, will protect you no matter what. You go right ahead. But until you get with the reality of science you’re not allowed in, and your kids can stay home another year.”

I don’t if anyone famous ever actually said, “Sometimes you’ve just got to take the heat.” But the line has been running through my head as I listen to people from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to U of M officials to White House spokesfolks to State Fair authorities wring their hands over vaccine mandates.

Frey was recently quoted saying he’d prefer not ordering another mask mandate given the impact that kind of thing has on restaurants and small businesses just now getting back on their feet after the first three surges of COVID. That said, he still didn’t want to demand public employees get vaccinated or stay away from work.

Public officials at nearly every level are conceding to this Fools’ Surge rather than biting the bullet and doing the only thing that will truly, once and for all stop the disease and the dying, which is to issue vaccine mandates.

No doubt all of them assume that given the country’s Federalist Society-polluted judiciary, any mandate will be hit with an injunction by some Trumpist-Libertarian judge within seconds of it being issued. Many on the basis of a violation of the basic Constitutional right to “religious or personal beliefs.” It goes without saying that at this point, with 640,000 already dead and more dying not to mention the recovery in danger of relapsing, I personally could not care less about some nitwit’s “religious beliefs.”

Generally speaking, public officials are of course required to care more about Constitutional nuances than me. But again, consider the context. We’re not talking about school prayer, or Critical Race Theory or some storefront preacher’s tax-exempt status. We’re talk the stark reality — reality, not fantasies — of serious illness and death wholly because of the ignorance, obstinancy and selfishness of a minority of the population.

Issue the vaccine mandates. Let it go to the courts. Play hardball with Trumpist judges. Slow walk the legal fight — a la Trump — for the two, three, four months it’d take to force the fools to get the vaccine. Achieve herd immunity. (Before the 30% idiot petri dish stirs up another variant that blows past the vaccines). And apologize for reckless, unconstitutional behavior later.

The Big Upside? The Lamberts afoot at the Fair, streams of grease and beer rolling off their chins.