imaGe

 

Fauci, the Fifth

We lived through the bullshit era of this man and the people and agendas they represented. Why did Biden issue him a pardon again? What might he need a pardon for?

And - aside altogether the infinitely more serious revelations about his pubic versus private utterances regarding Covid, its origin and treatment, etc - a few quotes from the diaries regarding his inner life whilst he was doing everything he could to battle this dreadful pandemic and rescue humanity from its malevolent, even if unconscious, clutches: “The press is hot and heavy about me.” “Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving  me.” I am the most famous person in the world.”  “My national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable.” “I am the most famous person in the country and one of the most famous person in the world.” “Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt(sic) me since I am so busy …. seriously.”

Imagine being one of the most famous people in the world, but lacking the time to read everything written about you. Tragic. If only there were more hours in the day.

And here are the words of the great man in 2017:

“There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the area of infectious diseases . . . There will be a surprise outbreak.”

A surprise? If I’m definitely predicting to something to happen, it’s probably not going to be a surprise. But then Fauci of course is a great man of science, though perhaps a little deficient in his mastery of human language. And maybe that’s why he refused to answer any questions whatsoever above - he was afraid he might make a fool of himself with his clunky use of words. There were also many more scientific questions for Fauci at this hearing which can be easily seen, but, even here, very much on his own territory, so to speak, he chose the Fifth also. A heroic intellectual performance.

heaven, Dante

“You know what I was thinking about earlier?”

“I don’t know. The Galapagos Islands?”

“The Galapagos Islands? No, I wasn’t thinking about them. Good guess though, but no. I might have been thinking about them, but I wasn’t. What I was thinking about was … emm . . . Let’s call it Celebrity Heaven.”

“What’s that? Is it a tv show?”

“Not that I know of, though maybe there is some show called Celebrity Heaven - it’s hard to keep up with everything important that’s going on - but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the afterlife, and if it exists is there a separate heaven for celebrities, or at least a part of heaven set aside for celebrities, especially the bigger ones. It just doesn’t seem right to me that they should be in the same place as the rest of us. So what do you think? Does it make sense?”

“Celebrity Heaven?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure. But why not instead rather Celebrity Hell?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know like Dante’s Inferno with the nine circles of hell. And so with each circle having a different bunch of celebrities, whatever logic they’d employ to divide them up into their differing destinations.”

“You’re out of your mind!”

caTs

 

to change a

“How many woke popes does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know. It’s not a question I’ve ever asked myself. Well how many does it take?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know either. It just came to me to there for some reason - you know, like in a moment of illumination, but with the answer remaining in the darkness, so to speak. So whether there’s some depth to it or it’s just nonsense I have no idea.”

“It’s interesting though. Maybe it’s got something to do with the spiritual world needing to become more practical.”

“Maybe.”

The Collapse of Language

 

Dostoevsky, Liberal Love, the United States of Europe/European Union

One of the traits of ‘liberal, leftist, progressive’ is obviously enough to hate one’s own nation - the national is a painful insult to their sensitive and vulnerable psyche (I won’t say to their soul, that word might wound them also). With that in mind, I think this is interesting from Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky where, in a letter from 1867 to the writer Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky writes:

All those trashy little liberals and progressives find their greatest pleasure and satisfaction in criticizing Russia. They openly wish for its collapse, whilst adding that they ‘love Russia’. But meanwhile not only is everything at the slightest originality in Russia hateful to them, so that they deny it and immediately take enjoyment in turning it into a caricature, but that if one really were to present them finally with a fact that they could not overturn or ruin in a caricature, but which they definitely would have to be reconciled. I think they would be unhappy to the point of torture to the point of pain to the point of despair. 

One other detail from this period. Dostoevsky was living in Geneva at the time, and when there attended a congress under a group of progressive and radices called themselves the League of Peace and Freedom who had appointed the celebrated revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin to represent their native land. Bakunin made a stirring speech calling for the breakup of the Russian empire and expressing the hope that his armies would be defeated in the future. He also assailed the principle of nationality as a tool of reaction, and called destruction of all centralised states to make way for the formation of the United States of Europe.