Like many these days, I’ve been watching a lot of videos. One that I keep going back to is a two and a half minute scene from the old biopic Paracelsus, directed by the great G.W. Pabst.

It depicts an outbreak of a mysterious epidemic that allegedly tore through Western Europe at the time — the Dancing Plague, which is said to have caused large groups of people to mindlessly dance for hours. What caused it, or how dangerous it was remains unclear. There are accounts of people dancing until they dropped dead from exhaustion, but that’s never been verified.

The moment in the film depicts an outbreak in a tavern. A single man begins to mindlessly, gracelessly dance to strange music. Slowly the dance spreads through the room until every individual is reduced to a face in a crowd, a mass of empty-eyed, staring people all following identical, senseless steps.

The movie was made in 1943. It’s hard for a 21st century viewer to avoid drawing a parallel between this scene and the rise of Nazism.

But here’s the kicker — It’s a Nazi film, made under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels.

Pabst, who was no Nazi, had tried to escape, but got trapped in Paris by the Nazi invasion and had to return to Germany. This was one of two films he made — or was forced to make. It’s not hard to imagine this moment in the film as a subversive dig at the Nazis by a man who had no doubt seen the “contagion” of Hitler’s Nazism spread even among people he considered friends.

And yet, it had to have been viewed by Goebbels, and Goebbels had to have approved of it. Otherwise the movie would never have been released.

As satisfying as it might be to imagine Goebbels as too dense to notice this scene’s comment on conformity and irrationality, he was a hateful, subtle and brilliant man. Goebbels knew committed Nazis would not see this scene as an attack on them, but an attack on those others, the Socialists, the Communists, the non-Aryans who, the Nazis insisted, could “infect” helpless people with their ideology and lead them into madness. He knew that Nazi audiences would not imagine themselves as the dancers.

Today in the United States, we are seeing not just an epidemic of a virus, but of mindlessness. Science is rejected in favor of whatever the president says is true. The same people who contemptuously thrust aside the advice of experts are calling those who don’t blindly follow Trump “sheep” and seeing themselves as courageous non-conformists — just as many Nazis saw themselves as clear-thinking rebels ushering in a new, scientific century.

I think Americans are naïve about how just how entrenched irrationality can be once it spreads. One of the tropes I’ve seen frequently in American fiction (A Face in the Crowd comes to mind) has been the authoritarian leader exposed by someone recording what he truly thinks of his followers and broadcasting it to them. This is sometimes depicted as an almost miraculous cure that opens the followers’ eyes and turns them against that leader.

If only that were so.

This scene from Paracelsus should remind us that willful blindness includes a refusal to see one’s reflection even when a mirror is held up inches from one’s nose. I could be wrong, of course, but I imagine Pabst filming this scene, pouring into it his anguish, his anger, his contempt for the “infection” that had spread through both Germany and Austria. I imagine him sitting next to Goebbels in the screening room afterwards, feeling anxious and silently defiant.

And then I imagine Goebbels’ vulpine grin at Pabst as he nods his approval and declares it a good, Nazi film.

Without comment Michael handed me his phone last night to show me the announcement that Specialties has closed permanently. Specialties was a chain restaurant that catered mainly to office workers, offering both take-out and eat-in with excellent sandwiches and legendary cookies. One had been located quite close by the library for well over a decade, first as a small stand, then as a restaurant space in the downstairs plaza. I only had to go around the corner to pick up a paper-bag lunch with a Caprese and a pack of chips to eat at my desk. Very shiny place, scrubbed clean, but a came-of-age-in-the-80s umber rather than 50s-diner-white. It had the usual bland bought-by-the-yard framed pictures on its walls, and a dining area of brown leather booths that looked barely used even during the lunch rush. But the lines for takeout were always long, and the shelf of pick-up lunches always crowded with paper bags . Another familiar place and flavor gone.

Its more downmarket counterpart in San Francisco is — or was — Lee’s, a mainly serve-yourself takeout-joint. A typical Lee’s is — or was — a plain storefront with a small entrance that led into a dark, undecorated, surprisingly large space crowded with hot tables of chow mein, fried rice, chow fun, glass noodles egg-rolls, dim sum, kung pao chicken, pot stickers, fried chicken, stir-fried beef, spicy tofu and cold tables of salad fixings, fruit, hand-rolls, and nigiri. At least one wall would be dedicated to a long counter with a sneeze-guard and behind it workers in aprons waiting to serve up hot soup or sandwiches. Takeout from the tables was charged by the weight. You’d load up a stiff paper container, bring it to the check out counter near the front, and the Asian women — I don’t remember seeing any white person or any male working there — would weigh it on a scale before ringing it up. If white, shiny Specialties has gone under, can Lee’s survive?

I spoke to my mother on the phone this morning. She sounded good, though it was raining and she had to stay inside. Her shut-down project these days is transforming her back deck into a garden and bird sanctuary, with plants, feeders, perches, etc. She’s always loved birds. Lately a cow bird has been hanging around on the back of a chair near the sliding glass doors, apparently in love with its reflection. “He puffs up his feathers and makes noises and paces like he’s flirting. Every now and then he flies over to the feeder to eat but he always comes back. I just know it’s a male. A female bird wouldn’t have the time. Narcissus was a man. There’s a reason for that.”

Lee’s is also gone now.