We need to rethink nursing homes

There is a reason they became early focal points of the coronavirus outbreak in this country

Life Care Center.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

Let's talk about the devil. He has been on my mind lately, and I somehow doubt that I am the only person of whom this is true. It is remarkable how little we actually know about the evil spirit who "tempts us because he hates goodness, and does not wish us to enjoy the happiness which he himself has lost." This is probably a good thing. But that has not stopped people from writing or telling stories about him. (For me the most chilling, and almost certainly the subtlest, is "An Encounter," from Joyce's Dubliners.)

If Old Scratch were going to appear in human form today, what sort of guise would he assume? Pace Sir Michael Jagger, I do not believe he would be a dapper, well-spoken gentleman. But I also think that even Satan would recognize that horns and hooves and a forked tail is overdoing it ("the devil is wiser than we are; for, being an Angel, he is more intelligent, and he did not lose his intelligence by falling into sin"). I would be afraid of encountering him not at a lonely crossroads at dusk but in the suburbs of a medium-sized American city, standing in the lobby of a McMansion complex with a name like "Shady Acres" or "Harvest Lane" or (insert algorithmically generated combination of vaguely pastoral adjective and noun here). It would be totally unsurprising to me to find that Satan is the owner of a for-profit nursing home.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.