I’ve been writing this column now for nearly twelve years, and during that time the Human Condition has worsened while becoming more hilarious at one and the same time.
I would argue in all seriousness that failure to burst out laughing every twenty minutes (at least) since 2009 is a worrying sign of complicit mental illness.
Much of Shakespeare is dubbed ‘tragicomic’, but whoever that man was (and that too remains conspiratorially amusing) would not have found it at all difficult to write plays as a commentary upon this, our 21st century epoch.
Can you imagine a chap who knew about genuinely deadly Plagues – and who died three days prior to his 53rd birthday – becoming in any way worried by SarsCovid2 at the age of 73?
I mean, does it seem to you likely that Old Bill would’ve seen Matthew Hancock as anyone other than Tom Snout, the third-rate ham in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The man who sows false seeds of terror…
“By’r lakin, a parlous fear….Will not the ladies be afear’d of the lion? In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall;
And such a wall, as I would have you think,
That had in it a crannied hole or chink”
This tends to suggest to me that, 430 years on, the biggest single thing we have “learned” is fear: fear of holes in the wall of longevity that might deliver us unto an eternity of nothingness. That we have, in truth, no defence to call upon other than that wall. That wall of what? Why, the wall of science’s vaccines of course.
There are two elements in play in this our era of mass media obfuscation. The first is the presentation of insouciant meddling apprentices in the process of things they barely understand as – in some way – an expansion of careful scientific discovery.
The second is the ridiculous idea of the best way forward for any species being a terror of enemies with nothing more than the dubious ability to cull homoaeopathic numbers of its least useful members.
And where is the laughter in this, you ask?
We wonder….which would be worse?
Where exactly are the management rules to be found for this?
During the AIDS “crisis”, I was once in a meeting with his Lordship where the term ‘oral sex’ had to be explained to him.
I’m sorry, but New Normals, 20/20 hindsight, lying toe-rags, mountains from molehills and pompous ignorance are all things that make me laugh.
Sleep well.
The Slog 