Did You Hear the One About the Pandemic?
Don’t expect me to challenge a narrative. One doesn’t watch a comedy for the sake of the plot. For the sake of this rant, I assume that the virus exists, that it is potentially lethal and — here’s where the comedy comes in—that we are failing it big time.
I take the virus, its narrative function, as a point of departure, a launching point for the manifold manifestations of madness it reveals — not only the politics of fear from “believers” and “deniers” and the role of the market, but mainly what matters and what does not (if anything), what we fear and hope for (and how it’s often the same spectre haunting us in a different sheet), what we cannot conceive and what we must deny, how we blindfold ourselves and why we then bump into walls and complain about the unfairness of it all.
Let us read the virus, the fear and the panic, as a metaphor for the sickness we call normalcy. For the virus is a mirror, laughing at us while we stubbornly go on living. Idiots of the global village, we babble about “excess mortality”, as if it were an option to survive life and bring the mortality rate down from 100%, if only we haggle for bonus miles insistently enough: Would you rather die from the virus, or would death by cancer or car accident be more agreeable? You are a free agent, you know. Take your pick.
Man — thus goes the narrative — is a social creature, relying on each other for spiritual health as much as for survival. Forced into a social distance that allows us to see more clearly, we are revolted by what we see in the mirror: Morons we can’t reason with, monsters mocking our values. Outrage! How could they grow that large?
We live too long, and do not die fast enough. We’ve lost sight of the fact that humanity’s ills are ultimately due to the loss of death in our day-to-day lives. It is because we have lost death that we live life as a meaningless exercise in the trivial, the pointless and the superfluous, addicted to identities (Death, what is thy pronoun?) and drama. We are looking at a species which prides itself on being emotional, a species which irrationally claims that irrationality is “what makes us human”, which it considers to be swell.
Proudly and happily, we have always infected each other, with genitals, swords and pens. We never left the arena of death, and as we improved the arena’s plumbing, covering our eyes and going “la la la”, we have grown weak and bland and soft-bellied, on a diet of blood. We never learned to stop at the end of the lane, but stride on, and on, and on, until the end of the world. Now what? Will we get our act together when the global triage looms? Will our children grow up unmasked, unmolested, healthy and pert?
The rustling sound you hear is the cockroaches cheering and rubbing their legs in anticipation of the closing act.
