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While words have the startling ability to wound, epigrams can be positively fatal. The former, though responsible for the leaving of scars upon their exit, have a tendency, mercifully, to heal. The latter, on the other hand, almost always take with their departure a corpse.

Karl Krauss, the Austrian satirist and wit—a man in whose eloquent quiver a remorseless handful of such sharp arrows and apothegms restively stood—was epigrammatically deadly. In particular, he shot off one epigram by which a life, albeit one rather of an idea than of a person, was cut permanently short. Writers, such as he, are always the most efficient of killers; their casualties are legion, their sentimentalities, barren and ink, unlike a dagger, always leaves a mark.

So frequently recited, Krauss—in commenting on the practice of psychoanalysis, the voguish breakthrough in the science of the mind of which he was, at his most withering moments, quite pungently critical—declared the field of study founded by his countryman, the brilliant Sigmund Freud, to be the very disease of which it purported to be the cure. It was, in the idiosyncratic wit of his opinion, the “mental disease for which it regards itself as therapy”. Save a few grasping acolytes and academic followers of this extraordinary school of thought, Krauss’s remark has become, for all intents and purposes, the definitive subtitle by which the story of psychoanalysis is remembered today.

An epigram’s utility, so far as it is at all useful, must exceed the context of its original use. It mustn’t be constrained to the peculiarities of the circumstance out of which it emerged. Indeed, for it to be counted as truly “epigrammatic” in any real and lasting way, it must do exactly that. Should it fail to do so, it would be considered nothing better than an ephemeral and an unremarkable remark—one to which, given the breadth of our literary options and the latitude of our vocalized realm, we’d be extraordinarily wasteful and careless to return.

Yet I think, indeed I’m quite certain, that Krauss’s insight is as applicable to the work of Freud as it is to the current global situation by which we’ve all been collectively roiled, and very nearly—in not only an economic, but a biological sense—destroyed. In this case, the Chinese Communist Party, that authoritarian regime under whose Maoist methodology a nation of over one billion people knowingly toil, and unknowingly suffer, is the disease of which it peremptorily asserts itself the remedy. It is, in every way, the ineradicable blight by which the international body politic is ailed, the ugly infection by which it’s pervasively ravaged, the malign influence by which its marrow, once ruddy and strong, has been enfeebled and bled almost completely dry.

The Chinese communist government—not the Trump administration, nor that of Great Britain’s Boris Johnson, nor the family of Rothschild, nor the brothers Koch, Karamazov, or Grimm, nor, if any such entity was overlooked, any other convenient and powerful scapegoat upon whom, in our desperate search of guilt and for answers, we ordinarily fall back—is responsible for what has happened across the globe. This responsibility is much more narrowly localized and, despite its ambiguity of needed detail, much clearer than our conspiratorial minds desperately want it to be. There is no quantity of state-media machinations by which this sober reality can be altered. There is no number of shadowy propagandistic clouds by which this terrible truth can be obscured. While far from a vaccine (for whose arrival, impatiently, we’ll await the passage of at least a full year), the light of the truth of this entire situation will be the most salutary disinfectant for which we can hope. We mustn’t further injure ourselves by refusing the radiance of its dose.

The truth, despite its unpalatability for the refined stomachs of the bien pensant, is that this disease is of a distinctly Chinese origin. Irrespective of the Sinophilic impulses by which your worldview might be excited, regardless of the broad-minded sympathy by whose extension you feel yourself an inhabitant of each and every land, and, therefore, a critic of none, you must acknowledge the guilt of the Chinese government in the midst, nay, the peak of this pandemic. This is a government, flagitious to its core and communistic in its creed, by which the entire world has been seriously imperiled. This is a government responsible for, at the somber time of this writing, over one-hundred-and-eighty thousand deaths. The world and its inhabitants were put in so acute a state of danger because of the Chinese government’s commitment not to sincerity and the truth—to which, when given the choice, it never opts to deign—but to its mendacity, obfuscation, concealment, and deceit.

Perhaps as far back as early December 2019, doctors working in the city of Wuhan—and, because there is no speck of information to which the Party’s eyes aren’t equally privy, the Chinese government—were aware of the presence of a novel virus about which, at the time, disconcertingly little was known. It seemed, by their hesitant expertise, to be very much akin to a viral pneumonia of which the millennium’s early SARS outbreak was reminiscent. They weren’t far off in thinking as much. As it turns out, part of this new disease’s novelty was its rampant and eager transmissibility—the facility with which it jumped from one man to the next. Evidence of its transmissibility seems to have been obvious from the start, when cases began exponentially to grow in the city and, in due time, the entirety of the province.

Yet, despite an internal acknowledgment of the alacrity with which it moved from one human to the next, the Chinese government maintained that no such mode of transmission, certainly not one of such speed, was possible. Multiple doctors, most notably the late Li Wenliang, circulated information to the contrary. Dr. Li Wenliang, since departed, was a member of a group of physicians among whom the ominous findings were initially spread—upon whose ears they ultimately fell dead.

He, in turn, was deemed himself contrary—that is, contrary to the smiling mask of progress, technological acumen, modern achievement, vitality, and sanitation behind which the Chinese government still hopes to shield itself. Dr. Li Wenliang—if not an outright whistleblower by whose clarion call the West might’ve been saved, then at least a martyr for his own cause—was summoned before the Wuhan Public Security Bureau and accused of “spreading rumors”. In a scene of coerced admission, the type of which a Lenin, Stalin, Pot, or Mao would’ve been proud, the good doctor Wenliang “confessed” to his interrogators his “misdemeanor”, promising no longer to commit such odiously “unlawful acts”.

Apparently, he was forgiven. What seemed a victory (he was neither stripped of his professional license nor, despite its moribundity, of his life—small are the “victories” in socialist China) became tragedy, became defeat. The reward for his confession was an opportunity to silence his evidence and return dutifully to his work. The upshot was that he’d keep his head, but he’d be made to keep it down. Sure, he’d keep his tongue, but never again would it be given the liberty to be cut from his government superior’s censorious leash. And so, he carried on, dutifully and fatally. While treating patients between whom, in the mute confidence of his suppressed opinion, there were obvious signs of inter-personal transmission, he was infected. The length of time spent in his struggle with the disease was mercifully brief. Like so many others, it was a disease to which he quickly succumbed, violently, but with haste.

From this point on, from then till today, the Chinese government’s conduct only grew worse. When it ought to have been obliged to tell the World Health Organization of the true etiology, the probable virulence, and the transmissibility of the disease, it thought better of so unnaturally candid an act. Instead, it withheld from the WHO for at least three weeks the fact that it could be transferred through droplets, and possibly the air, between humans. In a term more innocuous than that which is here required, this is what’s known to the scientific community as an act of omission—when a fact, usually an instructive and a valuable one, is deliberately left out of a work. Attempting further to omit, if not fully to annihilate from its archives the facts surrounding this disease, the Chinese government ordered the destruction of all the viral genomic sequences into which it had come into possession, and by which, with further sobering analysis, the unprecedented cruelty of the virus might’ve been more fully appreciated.

The Chinese communist government had only just begun. This was but its introduction to a long and terrible agenda, a circuitous story of spin, perfidy, and death. Sensing the loss of its grip on the dissemination of the information by which this fledgling virus was surrounded, the Chinese government decided forcefully to strengthen its hold. It ordered the inquisitive researchers and virologists to whom this novel disease was an exciting and harrowing attraction to refrain from publishing anything they might learn about it. Any scientist worth his salt, regardless of the country whence he arrives, knows the difficulty of adhering to so suppressive a decree. He is, after all, one of the few professionals on earth to whose inveterate quest for truth, the state’s interference is nothing short of a detestable menace. In this case, however, the law of nature and of a higher professional calling succumbed to the fiat of apparatchiks and man. Their lofty morals availed them not, as the gag order became for them their newest universal law—not unlike a heavy gravity to which they had no choice but to submit.

So too were the options limited to the labs in which the virus was studied, a network of otherwise distinguished places through whose sterile flasks and glass-laden observation units the viral particles carefully floated. Of these samples, precious few remain. The labs once in possession of these samples were given something of a Hobson’s choice: they could choose either to transfer their specimens to a designated, centralized unit (over which, unsurprisingly, the Chinese government had full control), or they could destroy them, leaving behind no trace. It’s no wonder, then, that the quality and the quantity of the samples by which we might’ve been enlightened and better prepared for the impending outbreak is so frustratingly small. The Chinese government guaranteed a paucity of knowledge, and it swiftly effectuated this end.

These are most, though doubtless not all, of the internal edicts and measures of which the Chinese government, with the strength of its totalitarian might, availed itself. Considering the measures that the Chinese government pursued domestically, one can only hope to satisfy his righteous curiosity with a superficial and blurry view. The image, on the other hand, to whose clearer detail and nuance he’d be perceptive would be that of China’s external interactions—those by which it conducted itself with the rest of the world. Surely, the Earth’s eye would have to be of a sharper acuity if, in fact, it were to the detect the nimble movements of China’s deceit.

Sadly, it was not—especially if the World Health Organization is taken to be the representative of the world. The Chinese government, unencumbered by those strings of veracity by which our own liberal governments are so maddeningly entangled, hoodwinked the WHO into believing its lies. Availed of its dauntless abilities of persuasion, the Chinese government led the WHO to believe that the virus was not transmissible between humans—a fact of which, by this point in time, the Chinese government had been knowledgeable for at least an entire month, though probably longer.

Echoing the statements of which it was the faithful, if not servile recipient, the WHO stated, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan, China”. It went on heartily to applaud the efforts of the Chinese government, to whom the organization has since proven itself nauseatingly obsequious. “Preliminary identification of a novel virus in so short a period of time”, it exclaimed with unmitigated approbation, “is a notable achievement and demonstrates China’s increased capacity to manage new outbreaks”. This, at around the time Wuhan city authorities were encouraging the massive celebrations by which their nation’s Lunar New Year is frequently accompanied, a time at which some forty-thousand residents gathered in close proximity to share hugs, meals, and—by extension—the virus.

The Chinese government, now donning a carapace impenetrable to the truth, continued to lie to the world. At this point, it was committed, like an open grenade, to the explosiveness of its brazen deceit. After all, as Lenin once said in his unpublished yet obviously influential notes, “speaking the truth is a petty-bourgeois prejudice. A lie, on the other hand, is often justified by the end”.  The first of those two sentences is purely a product of Lenin. The latter, on the other hand, is better affixed to the name of Machiavelli.

What then, is the end toward which the Chinese government is striving? To what outcome, ignoring the infection of millions, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and the loss, in terms of the economic data, of tens of trillions, does it ultimately aspire? It wants, in many ways, to be seen as the cure of the disease for which it is, at least in its own mind, so obviously not responsible. It wants its massive country and the brutal system upon which it’s based to be seen as the peculiar force by which an outbreak of this magnitude, should ever it happen again, is best controlled. It wants to demonstrate to the world the supremacy of a centralized response, the broad-chested and tight-lipped power of a government executed by one. It wants to be seen as having given—at a time of insuperable danger and want—international aid and succor to all those in need. It wants to be seen as the benevolent parent, the noble guardian by whose expansive reach, empathic concern, and boundless magnanimity the nations of the world, playing the role of its ailing children, were miraculously restored and brought back to good health.

It has, out of the kindness of its benign and bleeding heart, already dispensed to the nations of Europe and Asia multitudinous testing kits and personal protective equipment—of which it certainly could’ve made ready use for itself. Except, knowingly, it assuredly couldn’t; the materials of which the Chinese government unburdened itself were sent to Spain, Turkey, Australia, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic and, once put into use, were found to be faulty. Indeed, despite the effort, they were of very little use. I don’t think it too ungrateful to say, in a circumstance such as this, that it’s not the thought, but rather the efficacy that counts. And China has been completely inefficacious, and completely nefarious.

A further fear of mine, misbegotten and callous though it may be, is that the Chinese government will be the first to develop a vaccine for this disease, a remedy for whose eventual creation we’re all huddled indoors and blindly hoping. Consider the fact that its research scientists, from whom there’s to be tolerated very little rest, much less dissent, have been working on novel coronaviruses for months, if not years (SARS, which in 2003 leaked out of an especially pervious facility in Beijing, was such a virus). As outlined above, they’ve had quite the “head-start” on their genomic knowledge of this particular virus—from which, with any luck, a vaccine will ultimately be developed. Given that this is a virus they concealed for months from the world, they’ve had that much more time to attend to its cure. Such a cure, I think, will be an epochal boon for which all of humanity can and will be enduringly grateful, but will we, in the midst of our salubrious celebrations, neglect to hold accountable the Chinese government, this rogue state actor by whose ineptitude and mendacity this event was precipitated, by whose repeated failures said vaccine was made necessary at all?

I can only hope that we do not. Above all, in thinking about how this situation might unfold before us (a situation, one might add, of which there’s still no end in sight), I can’t help but call to mind the famous words of Krauss: China, in this case rather psychotic than psychoanalytic, is the disease of which it purports to be the cure. It is the illness, ideological, cruel, and swaggeringly proud, for which it affects itself to be the therapy. It is the virus of which it declares itself the vaccine, the blight of which it claims itself wholly ameliorative. Luckily for us, ours isn’t a nation contented with nostrums. We’re not easily taken by quacks. We’re not a people with whom persuasive mountebanks will have their play, certainly not one over which they’ll gain the upper hand.

No. We’ll be clear of eye and sober-minded. We’ll be forgiving, perhaps, but not forgetful. We’ll look to the East and see the autocrat’s hand in flagrante delicto, in a mess of its own making, and covered, as always, in red.

The characters to whom, as readers, we’re the most unendingly attracted, are those into whose depths we have the longest way to plunge. Superficiality, in the opinion of so penetrating a reader, will never suffice—especially when his grasp is capable of exceeding the stunted limits of his reach. Nor should it, so long as depth remains to him an option, and beckons to him as a goal. It’s for this reason that God—whose bottom, much like his beginning, is completely untouchable and unknown—is the force in the midst of whose magnetism we’re all inextricably drawn. Probe though we might, his is a floor with whose profundity and immeasurable span we’ll never come into full contact. Yet we seek for it still.

Pharaoh, as presented in the Exodus narrative, isn’t nearly so deep. That said, no one else, in defense of the putative grandeur of the literary merit of which he thinks himself possessed, can make the claim that he is. Yet, where so many other biblical figures fail, Pharaoh does succeed in demanding and keeping our attention—at least throughout the first two-thirds of this fantastic and addictively vertiginous book. He entices us with a certain depth of character, an ambiguity of motivations, a paucity of words, an incongruity of actions, and a complexity of thought over which, though we be partisans on the side of Moses and God and the thousands of Judaic wretches of whom they were the tireless liberators, we’d be remiss to look.

Pharaoh, a man whose stature was commensurable with that of a god (in not only his own inflated opinion, but in that of his entire country and, what’s more, the ancient tradition to which they were all devoted as well), speaks in this narrative but a few times. More strikingly, he does so with but a few words—of which many are repeated at the heels of one plague, to the start of the next. He’s responsible for nothing poetic, scarcely anything original. This, I think, is a point worthy of further consideration, as a synonym for Exodus might very aptly be loquacious. It is, if you will, a comparatively discursive and talkative text.

It is, at least when it’s contrasted to its noble predecessor, the book of Genesis, a slightly more taciturn text. Genesis, in the awesome chronicle of its events, employs both an economy of words and an abundance of action. It’s more muscle than it is mind, more mythos than logos. Most thinking, and therefore speaking, is retrospective. Action is the primary and unavoidable force. There is no superfluity of speech, no long-winded pronouncements by which the world’s ear, having just been assembled, was unnecessarily bent. The breath that might’ve been used for so garrulous an approach was instead directed to the vivification of man. It breathed him into life, and this life went about his past-times, his temptations, and his ways.

Exodus lacks this sense of disproportionality of action and speech by which the creation story is made to feel so acutely forceful and new. Its dialogue, as opposed to that of Genesis, is nearly equivalent to its many and various acts. Moses, though allegedly heavy of tongue and ineloquent of speech, is heard to be in perpetual conversation not only with his fellow man, but with his “jealous” (his words, not mine!) God. As plenipotentiary here on earth, he who was once “pulled from the reeds” speaks within the halls at the Egyptian court, out of which he’s repeatedly kicked; as religious sage, he preaches to the Jewish people by whose inveterate obstinacy he’s continually annoyed; and as prophet to God, he converses surprisingly freely and often about the tenuous fate of the latter’s chosen nation—to whom, in the age of Abram, endless fecundity and the hopes of Canaan were, at least until this point, rather unsatisfactorily promised.

God, for his part, is no passive recipient of the back-and-forth of this Mosaic chatter. Deipnosophist and deity, they’re both volubly engaged. Indeed, God’s the one by which the conversation is initiated, as he introduced himself to the frightened prophet in the outline of a burning bush. Some conditions (the doffing of his shoes) doubtless were required, but Moses had rather liberal access to the capacious ear of God. And God, in exchange, displayed no feeling of reticence in the return to Moses of a familiar or foreboding word. Eventually, the two spoke as if friends—a relationship to whose level of intimacy many religious zealots have since (if the conviction their inspired professions are to be believed) acceded.

Athwart these two scheming interlocutors stands Pharaoh, a king around whom a devout and sycophantic group of North African courtiers revolves. When he speaks, there’s but little in the way of subtlety. His pronouncements are only affirmations or denials; there is nothing else. His edicts are binary—vocalizations, though never variations, of a simple yes or no. I suppose this is in keeping with the questions by which he was daily accosted (whether or not the Hebraic people, a “minority” over whom, despite their illimitable growth, he exercised an absolute dictatorship, might leave). One wonders, however, precisely how Pharaoh might explain his decision-making process—by whose inconstancy and disagreeableness a single bothersome plague multiplied into a devastating ten.

We know, of course, that Pharaoh was repeatedly dispossessed of that trait by which we’re all made to feel uniquely human: personal agency. When he ought to have been at the strongest point in the career of his reign, when he should’ve been consolidating all of his magisterial power and might, he was stripped of the ability to pursue his individual choice. This African monarch, possibly the most powerful in the world, became yet another plaything of the Jewish God, a rather militant and capricious deity to whom, as it was, an entire bonded nation was already tethered. This was a god—a coequal, you might even say, so far as it concerned Pharaoh’s assessment and gaze—of whom the Egyptian king was understandably dismissive, if not outright contemptuous. He cared little for the imperious demands of a religion that was not his own. He cared everything for his own divine right.

Perhaps, at this point, more sinned against than sinning, Pharaoh was thrust, quite unwittingly, into the most troublesome part of his life. He’d provoked the wrath of a foreign deity in whom neither he nor his native countrymen held anything close to a belief. Yet Yahweh cared for the nuances of these differing religious perspectives not. He was to exact upon Pharaoh his fury, and clemency was in rather short supply. Intolerant to the impudence of Pharaoh’s incompatible creed, and always keen on making an awful and memorable display, Yahweh decided to punish the royal fiend in every imaginable way. And yes, the ten plagues of which he was the author required no shortage of imagination. He wanted, perhaps more than anything else, to make of Pharaoh a lesson, one of which all mankind—should ever its swelling ego outpace its low position—could take heed. He wanted, at Pharaoh’s expense, to make an instructive display, a force majeure by which any other, pseudo-divine monarch—for whom outright deification was considered a natural “next step” along the ladder of life—might be stifled in the pursuit of his heavenly aim.

Even those most modestly educated—for whom, despite the pious exhortations of their Sunday school teachers, the bible is but a peripheral document about which little beyond a few proverbs need be known—recognize in an instant the story of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. It is an enduring and incredible tale by which, admittedly, I’m both puzzled and infatuated. Being that it’s so vital a part of the exodus from Egypt of the now enslaved, now wandering Jews, it’s not a tale of which any mind, especially one endeavoring toward cultivation, should be ignorant.

It is, on its surface, an inscrutable event, and a theme around which scholars of both religion and philosophy have the greatest difficulty wrapping their busy heads. Indeed, throughout the course of what can be a frustratingly esoteric text, this idea of the “hardening” of Pharaoh’s heart is perhaps its most perplexing. In the process of inflicting His “ten plagues” on the land of Egypt—by whose disbursement the country’s livestock, main water supply, cropland, atmosphere, and people were absolutely ravaged—the Lord repeatedly intrudes into Pharaoh’s mind. He penetrates it with a swiftness and an ease of which a toiling psychologist would be envious. As he does so, time and again, he proceeds to dictate the dictator’s thoughts, to commandeer the autocrat’s mind.

By so doing, Yahweh prevents Pharaoh from acting not only in the best interest of himself and his family, but of his country as well. Even the most absolute of monarchs, the most plenary of kings, must be attentive—if not genuinely sensitive—to the needs of the populace over which he’s in control. Pharaoh, though already proven to be rather unfeeling toward the inviolate sanctity of life (he’s the same man, after all, who ordered the infanticide of all the new-born Jewish boys), surely recognized the link between his continued prosperity and that of his people. He must’ve felt, should both survive, the mutual reinforcement they’d enjoy. He could expect from them taxes and adulation, worship and gold. He could give to them protection and pomp. To be seen as responsible for their famine, suffering, injury, and death would be impossible for him to countenance, as much as it’d be impossible for them to bear. Surely, in the final analysis, a king, even that of Egypt, is no one if not for the populace over which he reigns; he simply doesn’t exist without them, as God exists not without us.

God, so often subtle, is disconcertingly open about his intentions as they pertain to Pharaoh. Before unleashing upon Egypt the plague of locusts, from whose insatiable appetite no crop in the field would be rendered safe, he says, “Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and of your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them—in order that you may know that I am the Lord”.

What candor. What pith. The earnestness with which God discloses his motivations to Moses is as striking as it is succinct. Never is he so egoistical and honest, so omnipotent and blunt. God wants not only to defeat, but viciously to mock those by whom, albeit by a diminishing fault of their own, he’s been opposed in this weeks-long battle. It all seems a bit gratuitous to me. Surely, this is not the same, gentle God to whom all our mild supplications are directed. This can’t be the same being in whose loving-kindness and in whose caring image we were all originally created. I ask, in response, if so gloatingly cruel a God is really worth the knowing? Reading through his life, I suppose, we haven’t really a choice; we know him intimately, almost involuntarily, through the course of our study of his book. Claims to ineffability, in passages such as this, fall somewhat flat, as we feel that we know not too little, but too much of his mind—a mind that feels familiarly vindictive and anthropomorphic. All that being said, our acceptance, as opposed to our knowledge of him, is a movement over which we have a bit more control. While we can’t avoid knowing, we can withhold our belief.

Apologists for God, as though he requires for his actions a defense, have argued—and not without great erudition but scant persuasion—that God was not hardening Pharaoh’s heart in the sense of making it frigid to the clamorous appeals of suffering men. Rather, their contention is that Pharaoh’s heart was being hardened in the sense of it being “steeled”—as if it were being readied for some trying experience for which intrepidity and resilience would be needed above all else. The argument, at this point, somewhat tenuously carried forth, is that Pharaoh maintained the ability to act freely all throughout this series of events, but simply chose the wrong path. Personal agency, then, would be a trait of which he was always actually retentive, and never fully dispossessed. His heart was simply hardened and made strong, chiseled and steeled, in such a way that it freely could choose and commit itself to his unwaveringly Anti-Semitic agenda—by whose implementation, countless of his countrymen died.

While this attribution of autonomy to Pharaoh’s decision-making process strikes the modern reader as an enticing proposition (especially for those of us for whom the concept of “free will” is held to be vitally important), it isn’t convincingly sustained. The text, in this situation, is altogether clear—indeed, dispiritingly so. God’s intention, unabashedly, was to humiliate the land of Egypt, to add insult, if you will, to an already devastating injury for which the Egyptian people could find neither succor nor reprieve. Shorn of his agency, his free will, and—absent those two things—his ability to attend to his people and let, as Moses demanded, the Jewish population go, Pharaoh isn’t an entirely blamable figure. Far from guiltless, he must be considered in a more sympathetic view. There is to him greater depth, should we only be willing to look.

Throughout the course of its long, mostly salutary, yet often sanguinary existence, the laws of nature—as well as those of man—have frequently been suspended for the benefit of the church. This, I think, is a strange phenomenon of which we’ve simply grown to be accepting. It’s a part of an exalted story, an incredible myth to which, in the fullness of our devotion, we’re happily accustomed and at whose details we’d rather not cast a penetrating and suspicious eye. That said, it remains one by which, with an annual occurrence, I’m both amused and bewildered, entertained and completely struck. This feeling is especially acute and overwhelming as the two most supernatural of the Christian holidays, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, come and go without the vocalization of a rational man’s appeal.

So many dictates of the natural world by which the rest of us, as humble mortals, all join in being encumbered, so many unremitting impositions to which we, as simple organisms, are all bound to be submissive, haven’t a like influence within the walls and behind the sacristies of that high and mighty church. The laws of nature simply gain no admittance to the wine-drenched veins and the pulsating pulpits of its heart. Unadorned with popish vestments and shorn of inscrutable creeds, we, rather than it, are the playthings of the forces of life. The church, on the other hand, seems to be immune from their peremptory sway.

Like monkeys do we dance beneath the strings of gravity, biology, and the volatility and the thrust of chemical change. Tighter or looser, our fortunes are tied unbendingly to the temper of their pull. All the while, the church, in the lofty station of its high repose, manipulates in its own hand this trinity of a force to which it alone is superior. These laws of nature, it seems, have been barred from entry into its peculiar house of God, that house whose founder was but a precocious, if not notorious Jew. This humble Nazarene, this curious carpenter of middling, if not unremarkable occupational skill, was often the person—not quite yet the deity—to whom all of these acts of suspension are originally attributed.

In his time, among the events to which the predictable patterns of nature offered but little answer, the lame walked, the blind saw, the hungry ate, and the infirm were healed. Demons were expelled, devils out-smarted, evils averted, and the dead—intolerant of the idea of an eternity from which there was to be no foreseeable escape—were raised from the shallow confines of their graves. Corpses were exhumed, angels called and shouted, and the restored gaiety of the spirits set upon themselves to dance. The bones of the deceased, stiffened by their years, rattled anew and stretched beyond their reach; they sought, as in a time prior to this, the happy company of the living among whom they once proudly numbered their own. Revisiting the earth beneath which they were now so quietly buried, they looked for the society of that species by whom they might, as in their memory, be made to feel the rush of life.

Fish, now exiguous, were made in an instant to be abundant, while the surface density of the water from which they were retrieved was so strengthened, that it bore without difficulty the ambling tread of a man. Yet this man wasn’t just any man, a mere face in the crowd, a regular Tom, Dick, or Harry by whom, without even the slightest acknowledgement of his stale and boring presence, we might casually pass. No ebbing ocean, despite the latticed-strength of its dense salinity (upon which, in some distant and allegedly “dead” sea, a restful bather can leisurely float), could ever hope to support so heavy a load as was he. The waves would simply give way under the influence of his mass. If not his corpulent physical makeup (to whose unprecedented increase, our modern eating habits are dangerously conducive), the bulk of his ego will undoubtedly cut the surface in two. His stomach, abdominous, his self-image, ponderous, he’d just as quickly plunge to the ocean’s floor, never to re-surface and gasp the living air again.

He, on the contrary, was altogether different. Jesus of Nazareth, that single man of whom all men partook, with whom all men walked, by whom all were saved, was a feather-light essence in the midst of the indelicate mass.

His was a figure above which, in a direction pointed toward the endless and unknowable heavens, an ethereal string from the throne of God was suspended, by whose taut inspiration he was driven to move. His person, therefore, was one beneath whose gentle and confident gait, the molecular bonds of two hydrogen, one oxygen, and countless aqueous particles weren’t likely to break. The habitation of neither water, nor land, nor sky was, for this reason, inaccessible to him. The ocean of the air above him, that of the sea below, he spent what might be called his most important years in the firmament of the earth. Every environment, even those most uncongenial to the limited resources and nature of man, were potential residencies of which he alone could be the occupant. He was, after all, the preordained son of man, the epitome of man, the weightiest of men, the mysteriously begotten boy wonder of Mary and God who might exist everywhere, in everything, and at any time.

The former, a semi-divinity in her own right, was the helpful vessel in which the latter’s spirit grew. Mary’s was the body—unblemished by the impotent, perhaps absent touch of the ageing and avuncular Joseph to whom, doubtless without the physical delights of the glory of wedlock, she was dutifully married—out of which an infant god was to fall. Hers would be the numinous uterus, as I like to call it, from which this being would emerge and about which, in later and Scholastic times, so much would be written and said. While it’s agreed with universal consent that her virginity never suffered, Mary was, nevertheless, the immaculate and fertile surrogate of whom Yahweh, an impressively virile father, made remarkable good use. A creator, a warrior, and finally a fertility god—demonstrating, all the while, his puissant aptitude in every field—Yahweh was so philoprogenitive, that he birthed three monotheisms out of one.

Yet what are we to make of those nettlesome laws of nature, particularly as they apply (or don’t apply, as is the case) to the son of God and man as he suffered on the cross? On Good Friday, between the hours of twelve and three, the land was shrouded, or so it’s claimed, by what exegetes call the “Crucifixion Darkness”. It is, admittedly, an ominous phrase. Jesus, for all his manly endurance, hadn’t yet succumbed to the exposure, to the asphyxiation, nor to the fatigue of which the crucifix was so menacingly productive, but his expiry was distressingly near. He’d been nailed to the crucifix about three hours prior and, three hours hence, he’d be as good as dead. At around the time of noon, at what you might call the halftime of his marathon of torture, the radiance of the sun was blotted out. The land was obscured in a preternatural darkness and the hills of Roman Palestine were covered in shade. An eclipse, as we might conceive it, persisted in this province until the hour of his death.

And yet, this was an event—unconcealed, one must assume, from the inquisitive eyes of, if not the rest of the inhabited earth, then certainly the regions by which it was immediately neighbored—of which neither sage, savant, philosopher nor poet of the Greek or Roman world had a thing to say. These ostensible men of learning and science, for whose supine inattention to this miracle of the passion, there really is no conceivable defense, must’ve been sleeping that day. Should we, then, revoke from them the honorifics to which, as a consequence of their eloquent works, they’ve been entitled? How are we to measure their sizable neglect, into whose gaps we stumble and fall? Would not this miracle, if encountered in their wakeful state, have been evident not only to them, but to every man—be he crude of eye or of keen perception? How might we explain, in the presence of so extraordinary a phenomenon, their unswerving commitments to their day jobs and their lesson plans toward which their days were so habitually directed? Were they so inattentive to the external world of sense, and so immured in that of their own person and reason, that they couldn’t, if only for three hours, extricate themselves from this inner realm, and look to that awful sight in the land of the Jews?

In an age not only of history, but of science, a time during which the great Seneca and Pliny both wrote and lived, this crucifixion darkness, this preternatural cloud through which not a single ray of light peaked, excited little curiosity in the Greco-Roman mind. Indeed, it was hardly noticed, save for those later scribblers who, perhaps retroactively, wished it to be part of a dogma to which they hoped to attach their names. This event, international in its scope, if not completely hemispheric, wouldn’t have been one to which our astute and stoic Seneca, and our punctilious and elder Pliny, would’ve been insensitive. They would’ve known about it, they would’ve thought about it, they would’ve talked about it, as they did nearly all other things. Immediately would they have felt its effects, as they were the recipients of the best intelligence that then circulated around Rome. Yet they said not a word about it, despite their voluminous works on all phenomena by which nature makes herself known. These, mind you, were men to whom such matters as earthquakes (also alleged to have occurred at the time of Jesus’ death), meteors, floods, comets, and—yes—eclipses were intimately familiar. These were topics about which, especially in the case of Pliny, they wrote at length.

The church, it’s clear, is nothing if not the great beneficiary of their silence on these matters. It appears that, through the passage of centuries, mythos has surpassed logos, and—having overcome it—is teaching the latter to speak. It is an astonishing reversal of the roles. But we, as moderns, are far less reticent in the movement of our tongues, and we’re far less susceptible to ancient and improbable tales. We know, and will express aloud, that the suspension of the laws of nature requires of us the suspension of our disbelief. And what, after all, is faith, but such a suspension? Happy Good Friday, Happy Good Easter, and may you be unburdened by the natural law.

Love is the experience, indeed the only experience, for whose arrival the heart will wait. Yet, patient though it is, and indefatigable as its constant beat, it discounts the peril to which it exposes itself during so long an allotment of time. Such innocence is to be expected, however, of an organ—of which muscle is the scaffolding and iron the fuel—tasked with so unrelenting and perpetual a function, a job from which, for at most nine decades, it’s given nary a moment of rest. The heart, at our urging and, more perhaps than that, at our imperious biologic need, must never be felt to alter, much less to stop, the regularity of its incessant pace. It’s a job of which, with quiet deference, the physical body is alone in being thankful, but one to which, in all its oversight, the unknowable brain, too busy with its fluttering thoughts, pays precious little mind.

And so, the heart pumps, and the heart waits. In so doing, it ignores the very real potential for a fracture, the propensity—by which love’s fickle presence is always dangerously attended—to a painful and irreparable break. These are the worries by which the head is encumbered—for which, we well know, each hill of anxiety conceals a mountain of distress. The heart, dauntless explorer that it is, cares for so portentous a landscape not. It embraces both summit and valley alike. It endeavors to go where the head refuses to take it. These are not, so far as it’s concerned, the places by whose frightening views its domain will be occupied. Instead, it sits in silent observation of that point, enchantingly distant yet ambiguously distinct, at which the sky and the sea converge. It looks to the place out of which the fascinating images by which we’re daily enlivened arise. There, it gazes at the horizon, an endless line whose sea-bathed sunset a variegated collection of blue, orange, and red brightens not only the sky, but our soul, from which it hopes to see the outline of the ship of love, long coming in its voyage, finally emerge and move swiftly to our shore.

For the attainment of some other, doubtless lesser good, the heart will not suffer so long a delay. It will not devote its time to an inferior acquisition, one easily procured by which, upon its capture, it’s neither exalted nor glorified, heightened nor gladdened, deified nor christened in the house of the gods. Love is the exception, and love is the rule. Its advent is that for which the soul, typically temperate though seldom obedient, quietly yearns. The soul, our soul, is clamorous in the presence of things too numerable to name, yet it knows the restraint with which it must address the variously diffident and dallying figure of love. So too, in ways more obvious to the eye, does love impart its effect upon the body, into whose proximity it comes, and from which it can’t then leave. Of course, it can and often does, but not of the skin’s own accord. The flesh, that long, complex, and sun-scarred integument—sometimes of a darker, sometimes of a lighter hue—by which the unravaged soul is safely enclosed, does all it can to keep love near. Yet love, evasively clever and frustratingly thin, hasn’t the least difficulty in planning, attempting, and executing its escape.

So it was in the time of Cholera, so it is in the time of Corona. Granted, the etiology of either disease—that about which the famed Colombian author, Gabriel Garcia Márquez so movingly wrote, and that by which we’re so gravely, presently afflicted—isn’t quite the same. The former, bacterial in nature with a distinctive inhabitance among the nooks and folds of the winding gastrointestinal tract, is a disease upon which simple medications have a powerful and, more importantly, a reproducible influence. It’s a disease—one by which any number of under-developed and impecunious nations have been, in the throes of their wretched squalor and slow maturation, burdened—for which simple anti-biotics now readily exist. One need only turn, for their acquisition, to the alcoves of modernity, through whose gilded pipes, sanitary and potable water freely springs and out of whose industries medical advancements flow.

The latter, to our great misery and misfortune, isn’t so amenable to the baths of scientific advancements and the baptisms of change. Neither, so it appears, is it attentive to our cleanliness. Virulent in nature, and by that, I mean viral, the Wuhan Coronavirus isn’t one upon which our ordinary medical techniques have proven themselves availing. It is respiratory in origin, though mischievously capable of infiltrating most every organ system to which, for one reason or an unknown other, it’s lured. Up till this point in time, our pharmaceutical companies (once condemned, now cheered) haven’t yet proposed interventions by which it’s to be persuaded; with contempt does it laugh at our desperate consumption of elixirs, potions, and pills. Our valiant public health officials, despite their blind and best efforts, haven’t yet, with any appreciable consensus, developed charts and measures by which its exponential growth is to be stunted. It eagerly foresees the heights to which, in the coming weeks, it’ll inevitably grow, and finds in its past progress no source of discouragement. It’s prospects, it thinks, are grand and improving. It’ll wax, very much larger, before it decides with pernicious humility finally to wane.

In the time of cholera, love was made to wait. And so, given no other alternative, it did just that. This is a reality by which the heart can abide. For over five interminable decades, an insufferable half-century during which the story’s charmingly blemished protagonist, Florentino, passed his time with the indulgence of his every sexual whim, the two youthful lovers, around whom this great story is built, lived apart, but never without a passing thought of the other.

Fermina, his beloved, the woman to whom all of his love’s spiritual splendor was directed, initially felt the same way; she requited all the grand feelings, the noble sentiments, the flammable passions by which he, and now she, was so exuberantly inspired. But this flame, having hardly made the leaping evolution from a spark, was just as rapidly quenched.

The calculated interference of her sober-thinking father, a man to whom the frivolities of immature love, if it so be called, meant absolutely nothing, made certain of that. With the peremptory and cold snap of his finger, their blossoming relationship was shorn of the soil into which its roots had tentatively hoped to settle. By his edict, an oppressive and paternal decree, Fermina was taken from the house of her youth, of which her devoted Florentino was so constant a visitor, and brought to a distant city to which, despite his best efforts, her Romeo was unable to travel.

Though removed from his inamorata, the girl, now the woman, to whom he’d dedicated his still fledgling life, Florentino fell not into a state of despair. Perhaps he fell into a state of lasciviousness and loose sexual restraints, but it was never a depth so deep that he couldn’t recover himself at once. His fidelity to Fermina or, at least, to his idea of Fermina, was left not only intact, but absolutely inviolable—even as he pursued the satisfaction of his, how shall we say, masculine bodily urges and needs. To him, she was sacrosanct, even if he were a sinner. He may have slipped, here and there, into the empty liaisons and blank assignations to which a life as a sailor on the water, so distant from the stability of the land, is susceptible, but his spiritual, if not his corporeal devotion to Fermina was never for an instant shaken.

For her part, Fermina succeeded in capturing the attention of a young and dashing physician—a man of science, progress, and unfeeling rationality by the name of Juvenal Urbino. Propitiously stationed in not only this, but in any world under whose archway he might’ve passed, Juvenal was, as his name makes clear, a young urbanite. He was a man of brilliance and means, an educated and refined doctor beneath whose capacious insole the rest of the living world sat in wait. He was the man from whom a shadow would proceed, as long as his fame, in whose welcome shade an over-heated, under-nourished country might be cooled and healed. This was a country into which he was making his ambitious debut and this, cholera, was a disease for whose eradication he’d be a wretched nation’s patron saint.

Intrepidly did he wage his fight, sometimes gaining, often losing ground to the ravages of the plague. But his love, no less pertinent to the world of his devoted Fermina, was a slightly more impotent expression of the acumen and the robust ability of this man. While his science was a pursuit of total conquest by which, having won his prize, he’d surely be universally renowned, his romance was a picture of complacency and want. He hadn’t the numinous, intransigent, desperate love by which the vanquished Florentino was so passionately possessed. The hard and callous science of which he was so staunch an advocate ended up being the force by which he was mortally overcome. Youthful, at this point, in no other attribute outside of his name, Juvenal decided to climb a ladder in pursuit of his pet parrot—to whom a nearby mango tree seemed the more hospitable option when compared with the steel confines of his cage.

Gravity, the force to which we’re all so frustratingly and imperceptibly bound, proved the devilish compulsion to which Dr. Juvenal Urbino was fatally to succumb. As a consequence of her husband’s unexpected, arboreal death, Fermina—now far displaced from the radiant beauty of her riper years—was once again romantically open, though understandably reluctant to proceed as such. Then a child, now a widow, Fermina—with the everlasting enticement and magic of a femininity and a womanly charm against which man, despite his better efforts, has no natural defense—rekindled the latent emotions of love on to which Florentino had so long held. A hesitant courtship led to the renewal of their love. One suspects, however, that even through the decades of their radically divergent lives, so deep an attachment and so insuperable a bond was never fully broken. The heart, you see, has a tendency to wait. Florentino’s, more even than Fermina’s, is encouraging proof of this.

And so shall it wait in our own time as well. Márquez wrote of love in the time of Cholera; we write of that in the time of Coronavirus. The heart, while vulnerable to the hostile takeover that is the insidious hallmark of this viral threat, will persist, at the very least, in awaiting the return or the renewal of a suspended love. While it might be a virus by which the heart is endangered, this isn’t a phenomenon from which, in fear of its own preservation, it will turn and run. Its resolve is too far determined, its patience too unyieldingly long. It’s demonstrably stronger than any disease by which it might be afflicted, of which the enduring resonance of its each and every beat is another bellow of proof. Neither months of social distancing, nor one hundred years of terrible solitude could shake the confidence of our still beating, still loving heart. Love in the time of Coronavirus, should we remain patient through its spread, will give us the life to love again. We are all Florentino, and our hearts, in the face of illness, must settle down and wait.

A sick man, believing himself in health, is unlikely ever to be cured; there is no remedy, after all, for obstinacy. It’s a blight, beneath the skin yet always festering, to which the proud man, though seldom the wise man, is inclined predictably to succumb. So too might it be said of an international health body, as opposed to a mere human body, atop whose stiff neck a hardened head rests. Of said bodies, I speak here with particular reference to that of the World Health Organization, or, as it’s widely known, the “WHO”. It is a body, indeed, the world’s largest and most eminent health body, in whom, for the desire of the preservation of our species’ well-being and the continuance of our kind, our collective trust has been placed.

Perhaps, however, we were unwise to have invested it where we did. The WHO, as evidenced by recent events, appears to be undeserving of the possession of so delicate a gift. The organization is, by every indication by which we’re embarrassed to have become aware, nothing better than a ponderous, mischievous, maladroit entity—to whom we Americans contribute a disproportionate fifteen-percent of its operating budget, and from whom we can expect little in the way of help. It’s proven itself, time and again, unequal to the exigencies of the moment by which we’re now being overcome. It seems incapable of reaching down to its fundamental charter and living up to its assumed raison d’etre: that of protecting the humanity of which, as we’ve been led to believe, it’s the intrepid benefactor, and of propagating the medical and scientific truth.

Demonstrably spineless and venal in form, the WHO, we’ve now learned, isn’t the type of governing structure to whose sturdy core every nation can affix the branches of its own arms. It’s not the ideal, unifying, burly anatomy upon whose broad shoulders the weight of our own hopes can securely rest. It’s nothing of the osseous substrate out of which we’d preferentially have our own “bodies” made. If they were, they’d be more likely to crumble. They’d just as quickly buckle at the brittle articulations of its knees, as the WHO’s legitimacy falls in a heap of dust.

We know this now. Having examined it as if under the X-ray vision of a full, discerning light, we see the WHO for what it is: a limp and supine body, Sinophilic and Science-phobic, from which we must, if we’re to retain our dignity and self-respect, divest our future trust. It’s a body at whose groveling and servile helm a bunch sick and proud men and women reside. The cloak of their good intentions and lofty pronouncements, behind which—for many years—they’ve draped themselves and stood, has been acknowledged and stripped away. We see them now in their naked garb and, with a consensus of our joined observation, pass our judgment that we’re unimpressed.

In the course of the past three months, a vertiginous and frightful quarter of a year defined by the outbreak of the novel Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic, these men and women—among whom, mind you, we number some of the world’s most eminent medical researchers, epidemiologists, and physicians—have proven themselves not only inadequate to the task on which their professional (and, by extension, our personal) lives are staked, but irremediable in every moral, political, and humanitarian sense. The WHO’s failures have been not only abundant, but painfully contrary to the “Health” for which that organization’s medial “H” supposedly stands.

Its shortcomings are legion. Parroting the doubtful message by which the Chinese communist government was attempting to salvage itself in the pandemic’s incipient phase, the WHO announced that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan”. This, however, came weeks after such an inter-human conduit of transmission was established, a fact of which the Taiwanese government and its independent researches were acutely knowledgeable. In fact, they were the first to awaken the WHO to this information by which, apparently, it was neither moved nor convinced. Pity, for had it been, a huge diminution in deaths might’ve been the consequence.  

Instead, the WHO agreed blindly to devour whatever garbage was served to it by the Chinese Communist regime. It accepted, quite without hesitation nor curiosity, the talking points by which its mouth was filled. There were, along with the Taiwanese, a few intrepid Chinese scientists for whom this possible route of transmissibility was, for lack of a better word, disquieting. But, as it turns out, these were the very people, indeed, the most important people, from whom—with the type of alacrity for which totalitarian states are known—the privilege of circulating this information was revoked. This information, had it not been suppressed, would’ve clearly indicated that the virus could indeed pass from man to man between the particles of his breath. The information, from the standpoint of said “Chinese authorities” wasn’t so much erroneous on the merit of its science, but injurious to the face of the regime. As for the WHO, it pressed the matter very little, incuriously accepting at face-value the tales to which their Chinese masters treated them.

In subsequent weeks, the WHO continued to downplay not only the gravity of the disease, but the potential lethality of it as well. It equated this enigmatic affliction, of which the early 2000’s SARS was so oddly reminiscent, with a type of “viral pneumonia” to which, on any given year, we’d all be ineluctably and innocently exposed. So much for that, yet it was the script given them by the Chinese government. Consequently, the WHO raised and sounded no early alarm of the potential transmissibility, the widespread fatality, the contagiousness and the virulence of this menacing and growing plague. The virus was, for this and other reasons, a perfect storm for which our blithe and distracted world was fully unprepared. This is an oversight for which we, as money-chasing laymen and pleasure-seeking lovers, can be largely excused; the WHO, whose job it is to find and report precisely these cases as they arise in their inchoate forms, can be less easily forgiven.

The WHO then turned its attention (of which it had already proven itself to possess rather little) to matters of political and—in the shadow of the malady by which we were increasingly being swallowed—trivial concern. It took time out of its busy schedule from licking the boots of Xi Jinping and his Communist Party apparatchiks, to turn its scorn westward and castigate President Trump. It did so for the latter’s attribution to “Wuhan” as the source and cause of the novel coronavirus, a city in whose name, at the time of this writing, fifteen-thousand American lives have been claimed.

This, in the haut opinion of the WHO, wasn’t to be tolerated; it was unbecoming, inaccurate, and offensively outré. Apparently, the use of accurate demonyms (among which, in the course of a pestiferous passage through our medical history, we might recall such titles as the Spanish Flu, the Hong Kong Flu, the Ebola Virus, the Zika Virus, the German Measles, the Lyme Disease, the French Disease, and the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) is not only to be discountenanced, but fully discontinued in the special case of Wuhan. The WHO, for its part, exhorted us promptly to break with this insensitive tradition and avoid attaching “locations or ethnicity to the disease”. It went on to assure us that the “official name of the disease was deliberately chosen to avoid stigmatization”. Or, alternatively, it was chosen to stroke and appease the Chinese government’s ego, and ensure its continued access to that populous realm.

Tireless in what’s become its open campaign against President Trump—of whom, perhaps with greater tact and forbearance, it’s not at all unreasonable to be critical—the WHO condemned his ban on Asiatic travel. At his urging, along with that of the Sino-skeptic advisors (such as his economic advisors, Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer) by whom he was undoubtedly influenced, President Trump placed a moratorium on non-essential travel between China and America. This, when first declared, was denounced by many, the WHO not excluded, as an ugly recrudescence of his earlier “Muslim Travel Ban”—for which he was roundly and rightly chastised at the outset of 2017. It was the WHO’s opinion that his decree, though less perfunctorily imposed than its predecessor, was not only ill-considered, but overtly xenophobic.

Now, seemingly, the entire planet has lined up to follow in the path of which President Trump was the unexpected trail-blazer—a strange circumstance for so whimsical a thinker, unstable an ambulator, and heterodox a man. Most nations, rightly prioritizing the health of their own citizens over the sensitivities of their commentariat (to whom any criticism of China has become, for some odd reason, tantamount to racism), have stopped receiving flights from Asia. Emphasizing the needed insularity of the situation, they’ve proceeded to do so from Europe and every other continent, be it contiguous or not, as well. We’ve thus witnessed, in not only the nineteenth-century but the twenty-first as well, an act of both Chinese and Worldwide exclusion. In so doing, the international community has made the WHO look near-sighted and petty and Trump, by comparison, prescient—an epithet to which, on only the very rarest of occasions, he has anything close to a claim.

The most glaring example, however, of the WHO’s ineptitude in its response to this pandemic, as well as its blatant sycophancy to the Communist Party of China, is also the most recent. But a few days ago, a journalist from Hong Kong, no friend, mind you, of the Xi Jinping regime, was engaged in conversation with a WHO official. Attentive to the social distancing precautions about which we’ve heard so much, the reporter and the Canadian epidemiologist to whom her questions were respectfully posed were discussing the pandemic over the platform of a tele-conference. The reporter raised the question of Taiwan’s membership in the WHO—a body, like most bodies, from which the tiny island nation has been pitilessly excluded. This, it seems, is Taiwan’s eternal punishment for being the nettlesome neighbor over which the mainland, despite its best effort, has failed to exercise its hegemonic control.

Evidently discomfited by the question for whose answer the reporter patiently waited, the WHO official pretended, for a total of ten cringe-inducing seconds, not to have heard it. One could sense behind the dumb expression by which his face was illumined the hastening of his heart’s beat, not to mention the obsequious fear of upsetting the Chinese officials to whom, as he made clear, he’s totally servile. Confirming that their connection had not spontaneously been breached, the reporter, undismayed by the “silent treatment” of which she was so awkwardly a recipient, pressed to her interlocutor the question once again. He recommended they proceed to another. She declined to relent. Having arrived at something of an impasse, and having the expedient and excuse of a failing internet connection by which, he might say, he was inopportunely poorly served, he decided to shut himself off. In a grand display of tact and intrepidity, the kind upon which our future tales of heroes and myths will surely be based, the WHO official promptly cut off the conversation and let it go to black. He dropped his weapon (in this case, his microphone) and, with the shamelessness of a coward, turned on his heel and fled.

Upon re-establishing their connection, and upon the reporter reiterating her question yet again, the WHO official—for whom, as evidenced by his manner, this entire back-and-forth romp was becoming an importunacy by which he’d rather not be bothered—concluded by saying that he’d already spoken enough, as it is, on the topic of China. No further would the subject be pursued. Yet the question, at this point thrice repeated, was on that of Taiwan. A learned man, one mustn’t suppose that this was a fact of which the obeisant epidemiologist, fatigued by a reporter yet faithful to China, was ignorant. It was a remark, deliberately crafted and sharply applied, by whose impact he’d wanted the idea of Taiwanese sovereignty and, more cruelly even than that, its dignity to be punctured. For what it’s worth, by every indication, that resilient little nation is far tougher than is he.

This man, one of the many by whom the World Health Organization is lead, is a very sick one, indeed. Yet he, like the rest of its leaders, believes himself in the soundest of good health. Until now, he’s never been led to believe he was not, having been safely coddled in the warm embrace of the Chinese government and the enticing perquisites of its strong and reaching grasp. And, as there is no remedy for the obstinacy by which he and his ilk are ailed, what recourse is to be taken on the world’s behalf? This organization, it seems, isn’t likely to be cured. Neither is the world, in its presence, ever to be made completely well. A new body, I think, might be more healthfully born.