The Juntoo

Countless are the sacred cows—the institutions, the sentiments, the racial stereotypes, the gender pronouns and preferences, and the totality of the day’s politically sterilized ideas—into whose cherished hides we can no longer thrust. These placid political beasts and their skins, pachydermatous and grazing without so much as a hint of fear, have simply become too thick. Contrariwise, our ability to scratch them has become too weak. We thus have a competition of physics that favors the former: an immovable force against an impotent subject. And this, this feeble subject, has shown itself incapable of carrying its own weight.

Perhaps the fault is ours; we’ve no longer the strength, certainly not the inclination, to break through these cows and their now sacrosanct skin. We’ve lost the energy for the pursuit, the taste for the fun, and evidently the motivation to puncture what’ve turned into bodies of bovine inviolability and censorious gloom.

Are we at all to be surprised? What’s to be expected of a previously funny society shorn of its once-famous claws? We’ve become nothing but fluff, treading daintily with paws upon reticent feet. Our vivacity has been blunted as our intelligence has dulled. Our resilience has wilted as our quickness has slowed. Our wit, once the envy of all others and the surprise even to ourselves, has pivoted on a heel and hastened its retreat. It has no home in this environment of repressed opinions, shutting down, and “canceling” out. No longer a sword, combative to the point of wonderfully gratuitous, humorous excess, our wit has become a broken persona non-grata in search of new identity and new life. Its flaccid memory now hangs unimpressively sharp as it thinks of trenchant days of old. If heated, I daresay it couldn’t even navigate its way through a plump stick of butter.

In a word, we’ve become limp in body, languid in mind, humorless in soul. We’ve squandered our piercing dialogue, neutralized and made politically “correct” our caustic jokes, and—in so doing—tossed overboard our greatest treasures and assets—no matter how corrosive they might’ve been. We’ve jettisoned from this ponderous ship of state our once celebrated acuity of thought, our clever risibility of speech, and that which made us comically unique. Now hopelessly adrift, we look in vain for the shores of true comedy, for a beach onto which we can stumble and once again breathe.

In the meantime, what’s left? Sadly, little remains. With whom can we laugh and about what? Again, the answer is exiguous and it’s discouraging—those who deliver to us our laughs will be few, even fewer the topics on which they can speak. It appears that that by which we’re now to be amused is a humorless, vacuous, intellectually-ailing cortege of comedians. This is a group to whom the most recently and poorly conceived morals are more important than the deep and ancient roots from which our fun and humor sprout. This, it turns out, is a group better-equipped to sing dirges than to bust guts, to silence heretics than hilariously to riff. It’s a group comfortably accustomed to the quiet solemnity of the void, and this is a void through whose gated-entrance we’ll all be led, pulled and yoked not unlike cattle. Instead of laughing, however, we’ll be lowing as we think about what once was.

This is the void, the world in which we live. It’s a world and an age of political Puritanism and ostentatious “woke-ness”. It’s a world of endless affectation and show behind which precious little thought lives. You might say ours is a world in the embrace of something like a third great awakening—fundamentally akin to its anterior two—saturnine, hulking, and proud of the mirthless, joyless state it’s built.

But there is one messiah—one fallen and guiding light from whose treasury of meretricious humor we might find for ourselves a brief and temporal reprieve. With a meteoric descent upon our television and computer screens, he arrives as a comedic genius, a naughty Nazarene, a man to whose insight, provocation, subtlety, and brilliance we annually lend an ear. Like acolytes we await his message and like converts we preach. Comedic and salvific, we welcome into our homes and the last bastions of our fun the one and only Dave Chappelle.

This immortal figure of comedy, this demigod of hilarity, Chappelle chose to alight upon us from his vantage point in the sky at precisely the right time. Not merely right, the time at which he appeared was absolutely necessary (for the reasons stated above). Having descended upon us from so lofty and altitudinous a place, it’s no surprise that he cared little for the places, persons, and ideas upon which he landed upon touching down. Indeed, he crashed into nearly every one of those vaunted sacred cows in the course of his reverberative descent.

During his Netflix stand-up special entitled (with clever aptness, one might add), Sticks and Stones, there was no subject to which his humor was immune. All topics were assaulted and, frankly, that’s okay; omitted, of course, from his title is that while sticks and stones may break our bones, words never can do us ill. That is the vital conclusion of which we need be reminded time and again. Chappelle, with untrammeled confidence and wonted irreverence, spoke at length about all things from which we’ve grown accustomed to averting our eyes. He touched on such politically-combustible topics as gun rights and wrongs, impecunious and uncultured whites, articles of confession, ambivalences on abortion, the contentious state of racial issues in the U.S., and the inconsistencies in the LGBTQ community at large—the most inviolable topic of all. Deprecatory not only of society but of self, Chappelle also made himself the butt of more than a few jokes.

But those well-timed insertions, funny though they were, surely won’t be enough to shield him from the coming onslaught of castigations and reproach. His special, almost immediately after its release, was rather unfavorably reviewed by the professional critics upon whom his “Rotten Tomato” score so desperately relies. Known haughtily as the “critic’s” rating—in opposition to that of the common hoi polloi of viewers—it stood at a meager twenty-five percent. Chappelle’s audience, not unaccustomed to this game, quite disagreed with so unsympathetically low a rating; it responded by giving him a near perfect score. I like to think of this as a kind of Thermidorian reaction—an August response by a people fed up with the uncritical and merely political elite.

What Chappelle did was brave. Of course, it was also deeply offensive, inexhaustibly ribald, and morbid in every way, but that’s the path upon which the comedian treads. He knows no other, and we wouldn’t agree to follow him if he did. His is not a clean and well-defined street. It’s not one along whose periphery white picket fences stand. Nor is it one whose navigation is reliable and clear. It’s a road for whose conquest one must be bold. It’s a road upon which a dirty assortment of branches, leaves, tires, and sundry other rejectamenta rest. When impediments occupy it, they must be subverted, circumvented, or vigorously overcome. This last of the three options is Chappelle’s preferred choice, and we, his willing audience, follow him dauntlessly along the way. Even if there appears before him and, by extension, before us a sacred cow, one complacent, stolid, and mooing dead center in the street, it must be slaughtered or overcome. We hand to Chappelle the knife and sing to the gods his praise. Down with the sacred cows from which all of us are now free! Long live comedy, our deliverance! Longer live liberty, our raison d’etre!

Foundational to the pursuit of science—especially in this material and inscrutable age—is the study of thermodynamics. Confessedly, though doubtless to the exclusion of any wandering physicist by whom this humble entry might be read, it’s a foundation about which we average people know little. It’s certainly not one upon which our curiosity is raised and our scouring inquiry built. Acquisitive rather than inquisitive, profligate rather than scientifically literate, we Americans don’t much bother ourselves with the attainment nor the retention of basic scientific laws. We follow celebrities, not studies; fashions, not immutable truths.

That said, while we might concern ourselves distressingly little for its essence, we feel the effects of thermodynamics each and every day. One such effect, admittedly uncommonly seen, felt, or even known (to contradict my above point) is that of the “triple point” of a substance. It’s an astonishing phenomenon. If granted permission by the fickle confluence of temperature and pressure, of the atmosphere and of the surrounding heat, a substance can—if only for a brief while—exist simultaneously in its three possible phases. So long as this typically unnatural environment allows for it, the substance will bubble, flow, and sink with harmonious, amorphous gaiety. Like the Trinitarian doctrine come literally, rather than liturgically, to life, one substance will present as three. So long as the godly experimenter can dictate and control the conditions from which the substance can arise (no different a task, I shouldn’t think, from that executed by that grand Executive above), the substance will continue in a perplexingly coequal gaseous, aqueous, and solid state.

It’s a marvel to behold. Even more marvelous, however, is this—yet another phase. I introduce here another transitional state quite as comparably profound—that from thermodynamics to theatrics; from science to the stage. As if the process were magic or alchemic or something devilishly in between, the phase at which we arrive upon taking this leap is, of all possible destinations, the most sublime. After all, that’s what art, beauty, poetry, and all human endeavors in their most creative and studied forms combine at last to become—sublimity. That’s the end for which our vital bodies strive, the potted gold at rainbow’s end of which we’re in constant search.

Sublime, awesome, neoclassical, terrible—these, among others too numerous to list, are the words by which the work Britannicus might be described. Written by the seventeenth-century French tragedian Jean-Baptiste Racine, Britannicus reminds me above all of the aforementioned “triple point” of matter. Briefly a contemporary of Descartes, slightly longer as that of Newton, Racine admittedly wasn’t himself a scientifically-minded man. He was, first and above all else, a thespian more than he was a Cartesian, a dramatist more than he was a physicist. Though not uninitiated with those masters and matters that defined his day, Racine was a man whose poetic soul remained elevated, focused, and pure. It was, much to our future enjoyment, a spirit and a tongue untainted by academic verbiage and scientific prose.

Although he certainly didn’t have the intent of flashing before my eyes thermodynamic sparks in the midst of reading his play, I was brought to that explosive endpoint nevertheless. I couldn’t help myself from thinking of the applicability of the “triple point” to the character development of a particular person that was so brilliantly orchestrated by Racine. Rather aesthetically than scientifically applied, I thought this “triple point” representative of the transitional phase through which the play’s (and possibly history’s) leading antagonist, the Roman emperor Nero, goes.

Last of the five Julio-Claudian kings, Nero was—to borrow loosely from the language above—a thoroughly thermodynamically unstable person—if so entropic an individual could ever be thought to exist. An adopted son of the emperor Claudius by whom he was, until the seventeenth year of his age, preceded on the throne, Nero matured into one of the most ignominious, tyrannical, depraved, and injurious of all Roman politicians to date. That, of course, is placing upon his infamy a morbidly lofty status; many frightful politicians (among whom we might number Commodus, Caligula, and a much more recent Mussolini) have graced those same seven hills between which that ancient center of the Mediterranean still heaves. Nero, in the estimation of most Italians today (who, on matters politic, very seldom find a friend with whom to agree) was without a debate the worst.

Capricious and cruel, insolent and self-obsessed, he was, by the time of his death, a man entirely hated by all. Loathed by those over whom he ruled, feared by those at his kingdom’s furthest reach, he was a universally despised man. Inheritor of a once honest name, he became a rank despot upon whom his family’s increasingly inglorious dynasty was to end. None was immune to suffering under his reign. For proof, he was the bane of both Christian and Jew. So infrequent is it in their long histories of persecution that these two religions find themselves aligned, but their shared oppression at the hands of Nero was commensurable. Perhaps, in time, it might even be a point over which they will gather, lay down arms, and commiserate. Still, we await this day. They suffered mightily, and they suffered alike. These peaceful, albeit divergent children of Abraham became the equal recipients of Nero’s wrath.

In the case of the former, Nero sided with the Romanized Hellenes against whom those wretched Hebrews fought. What began as an earnest struggle for political legitimacy, regional sovereignty, and religious pride became a desperate conflict for life. At stake was the preservation of the Jews’ identity—so often besieged and besmirched. Nero dispatched to that still tumultuous land of Palestine his trusted general Vespasian—who was, in his own time, to become the future fount of the Flavian kings.

Naturally, when it came to the judgment of the Jewish cause, Nero was royally unsympathetic to that ancient people’s plight. He was rather unimpressed by their morally-dubious monotheistic creed and the insularity of their shtetls. As have done most anti-Semitic leaders ever since, he pursued his generation’s “Jewish Question” with unmitigated and sanguinary zeal. Beginning with his violent suppression of the Jewish revolt in the year AD 66, the course was set in place for the eventual razing of the Second Temple four years later. With the alternatively guiding and hammering hand of Nero, the walls of Jerusalem would be soon made to fall.

As it pertains to the latter, nearly all of Christendom is cognizant—no less so after the passage of two millennia—of Nero’s unforgivable sins. Indeed, his bigotry, scurrility, and irreligiosity hardly requires my retelling if you’re a Christian capable of holding a grudge. And, based on my experience, most Christians—bless their hearts—are. Affixed to his fiddle while his own city burned, Nero found in the Christian people a ready scapegoat upon whom a great deal of the blame for the fire could be placed. Still an unformidable and juvenescent faith (Mark, first and best of the authors of what would come to be at century’s end the Synoptics, was only then finishing his famous biographical, Christological sketch), the Christians hadn’t yet the numbers, the power, nor the political clout to defend themselves against his tireless persecution. Nero found in the religious bigotries of his day and in the common Pagan animosities toward the sect of Christ an expedient of which he was in desperate need. How else was he to explain to his charred and singed population the spontaneous flammability of the ground through whose tear-laden weeds it was made to grovel?

Ultimately, it’s Nero’s arrant depravity and Rome’s resilient grandeur that draws us in toward a closer inspection. The combination compels us to admire the age and to abhor, while persisting to study, the man. But the man, hard though it is to believe, wasn’t always that bad. Indeed, at the outset of his reign, he was considered by the masses to be innocent, outwardly benevolent, perhaps even innately good. Surely, no one expected brutality and malevolence from a king so sensitive to poetry, to music, and to art. He was smitten with himself, enamored of his own vanity, and thought his own voice and theatricality the greatest in the world. Could he even deviate his attention from his own reflection to enforce a decree, much less a monstrous, genocidal edict? Most thought he couldn’t.

And so, his coronation augured well for a Rome desirous of peace. Warmly, the city invited to the dais this young and self-proclaimed athlete and aesthete—this stripling of a king who wanted not royalty, but poetry to serve as the muse and scepter his life. It was hoped that he would be a fine continuation of the sapient, gentle, and only occasionally amorous Claudius by whom he was adopted.

Of course, this didn’t come to pass. Experience, as is its wont, diverged from expectation. Hopeful though they might’ve been for the prospects of a long and peaceful reign, the citizens of Rome were quickly disappointed with the accession of Nero; his magnanimity proved ephemeral—his stability, entirely absent. But there was a moment of transition, for he was never entirely good, nor wholly bad in the early part of his reign. This is the point at which Racine captures his snapshot of the king. This, in my opinion, is the most interesting part of the man, for it is man—a species ever vacillating between a hunger for power and an unslakable thirst to be loved; a species forever caught between an appetite of evil and good. He was, at this time, neither the depraved beast of his more advanced years (a reprobate, as shown, for whom nothing better than odium ought to be reserved), nor the sheltered, lyric-strumming, stoic-mouthing innocent of his youth. Racine portrays him in a terrifyingly transitional, and indeed recognizably human stage. That, if I don’t speak amiss, is the Neronian “triple point” at which this character explodes.

Rather than solid, liquid, and gas, the three phases in which Racine concocts Nero are as statesman, sadist, and as son. And, just like the matter found here on earth, Nero exists in them simultaneously. Emerging from the combined tuition of the Stoical Seneca and the martial Burrus, Nero wasn’t at all deficient in education. It wasn’t for a lack of intellect and its careful fostering that his character so precipitously and violently declined. Seneca, after all, was the first-century’s inaugural member of that ancient and phlegmatic sect (to whose later roster the names of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius would be added). As did Aristotle to Alexander, Seneca delivered to his royal pupil all of the learning of which he was in possession. Even after having emptied himself of a lifetime of thought, it wasn’t enough for the fulfillment of the prince. The pedagogical pursuit of a king proved once again evasive, and history was made to suffer for the loss. The lesson remains: young kings aren’t usually the most educable of students, Prussia’s Frederick the Great excepting. On balance, though, the Peripatetic’s project was the better success of the two, but we blame not Seneca for his pupil’s failure.

While I’m at pains to emphasize the presence of Seneca in the young king’s life, Racine mentions him not. In fact, the philosopher isn’t even listed on the dramatis personae. Burrus, on the other hand, finds himself given a role. Of the two men by whom Nero was formally educated, only Burrus is gifted a speaking part in the play. A character somewhat ancillary to the plot, the audience is forgiven for not focusing its attention on him, but it’s clear to see his effect on Nero as the statesman—first of the three phases. Due to the stimulus of Burrus, Nero began to realize the newly-gained totality of his power. It was by Burrus’ direction that Nero came to understand the indomitability of his fist, the plenary nature of his persuasion, and the forcefulness of his decree. As first consul, he was the Jupiter of this cosmos to which we apply the name of state. His will, however mercurial it may be, was his law and the spark of his lighting was severe.

That exhausts my comments on Nero as statesman. The second of the three phrases in which Racine sets the king is in that of son. And of what good is a son if not for the status of his mother? And of what good is a mother if not for the shrewd and protective tenacity that’s shared between both human and lioness? What is her relationship to her son if not solicitously attentive to his future prospects and, god willing, to her own personal fame? Nero’s mother, as it turns out, was lacking neither in prominence nor in surveillance, nor in an ability to effectuate her aims. Known to Nero as mother, to Rome as machinator, history knows her by the name of Agrippina the Younger.

Agrippina, this matron of monarchs, is herself deserving of a digression. Conscious, however, of my own verbosity and the constraints upon your time, I’ll spare the cherished reader a longer walk along this tempting path. A brief jaunt will suffice. Agrippina was, among so many things, a youth of royal blood, an endangered adolescent, an incestuous lover, and almost a queen. She was the sister of Caligula—a relation by which her sexual notoriety profited little. Politically, though, her proximity to and intimacy with the crazed emperor was a boon. Wanting to replicate the Pharaonic style of sister-love, Agrippina approached her unstable, regal brother with arms outstretched and legs invitingly open. Caligula, prone to profligacy himself, was in little need of convincing. The union proved disappointingly unfertile—a fact much to biology’s relief.

Racine captures Agrippina not in the familial prurience of her youth, but in the political tactfulness and eventual descent of her elder age. Trading assignations for machinations, she’s shown to be a star waning in the firmament of her son, while her grasp—once tightly held on her power—begins to slip. Heretofore, she’s led a life as something of a blessed regent, one wildly and equally popular in both city and town. Scornful of the Frenchman’s Salic Law—whose dictates bar from authority any woman’s touch—Agrippina dominated Roman politics against all norms and in the absence of her son. Now, Nero has come of age and has come to the conclusion—first slowly and now resolutely—that his mother’s is no longer an influence by which he need be burdened. Spurning his mother’s counsel, wise though it may be, Nero completes the divestment from his mother for which he’s begun to yearn. A son now shorn of his mother’s influence, Nero enters upon the transitional state of becoming his own man. Rome, he concludes, wants not a mistress, but a master and this son was made to be free.

Thus, we’ve seen the two states of the “triple point” in which Nero appears: that of statesman and that of son. The third, final, and ghastliest phase of which Nero partakes is that of sadist. This phase, so to speak, is introduced by Racine in relation to the character for whom the play is named. Britannicus, we learn, is by marriage Nero’s younger brother-in-law. The laws of primogeniture should stir in the anxious Nero no sense of disquiet—he being the elder—but the suspicion by which he’s constantly bothered is that Britannicus might have a stronger claim to the throne than does he. The insight of historians tends to agree with young Nero’s well-grounded fear. Probably, Britannicus—the son begotten of Claudius and Messalina, his penultimate of four wives—was the more legitimate heir of the two; Nero was rather adopted than sired by the emperor. Britannicus was regal by blood (although the adoption of distant relations by outgoing emperors for purposes of succession was customary in the eyes of the Roman kings).

Nero, having come this far, was determined not to be subverted by a brotherly coup. No one, be he Roman, distant German, menacing Iberian, or even, heaven forbid, next-of kin, was to threaten his crown. Under the doubtful veil of romance, he decided to steal from Britannicus’ somber clutch his beloved Junia—seemingly the only light for which this lugubrious Britannicus continued to live. She was, for this heir of an empire shorn of crown and soon of life, the only happiness and the sole consolation of which he was availed. Nero, for no reason other than the infliction of pain it was sure to cause his poor brother, inserted himself between the two. He forced, at the risk of death, Junia to lie to Britannicus about her feelings. Tolerating no deceit, not even that of a subliminal look of which only lovers are mutually aware, he made her mislead Britannicus by thinking she cared for him not.

Britannicus, as tender as was Nero hard, felt himself ruined. After all, what good would be an empire if dispossessed of love?

Nero was little concerned with the answer. “I have the art” said he, “to punish an arrogant rival”, and punish him he did. He sent his agent Narcissus to poison Britannicus, the first of many murders for which his sovereign order would be responsible. Many more punishments, each as perverse, macabre, and unspeakable as the last, would ensue. Five years hence, Nero would kill his own mother. He’d graduate from matricide to sodomy, tethering to poles and fornicating with young girls while himself dressed as a bull. Racine, however, shows restraint—as every adherent to the classical model ought. He gives us only this first, and comparatively quite tame entrée into what would be many courses of Nero’s sadism.

The portrayal of this “triple point” of Nero, this moment of combustible strife, is a testament to the brilliance of Racine. He, with an ability untouched by any other, captures with artful possession and boundless scope a man—nay—a monster in between three states: that of statesman, that of son, and that of sadist. It is a man with whom we can associate, if only briefly and with consequent unease. The dramatist, here, becomes the scientist as the theatrics change to physics and we’re made to feel more alive. We all feel the energetic impact of this story’s afterglow and we bask in the explosion.

One of the peculiarities, indeed the unavoidable pitfalls of being an American consumer of news, is that the subtleties of international politics often evade my grasp. If not my grasp, as if to say my intellection, they certainly escape by awareness and my concern. Being ever the center of attention around which lesser satellite-nations revolve, America—this noble land to which my allegiance remains forever pledged—has become accustomed to others looking to it for a demonstration and a show, while not deigning to reciprocate the exchange. Sadly, we’ve become quite incurious in the process, bothering ourselves little about the goings-on in the foreign affairs of other states.  

In my attempt to seek political pastures somewhat further afield, to broaden my provincial scope into a slightly more international view, one affair of state has captured my eye. Rather, it was a representative of a state upon whom my fascination had fallen. A man of whose slight stature and of whose towering import the American public is surely and sadly unaware, the English statesman John Bercow—the speaker of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom—is retiring at the end of next month. Come the 31^st of October, an ominous day in more ways than one, the diminutive, combative, often garrulous, and always eloquent Bercow will descend from his position atop England’s most cherished assembly. Exiting this chamber of stiff-lipped Conservatives and Labor Party devotees, of titular Tories and of custom-weary Whigs, Bercow will leave behind a House of Commons mired in acrimony and disrepair.

The fault, of course, is not entirely his; the House over which he presides has been, since at least the year 2016, in an intractably schismatic state. On the one side of this chasm, between which—one might add—the future of the United Kingdom stands with tremulous knees, the advocates of Brexit clamor for the consummation of the people’s will. The citizens and the nations of which the U.K. is composed (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) voted in that year on David Cameron’s explosive and probably ill-conceived referendum asking whether or not they should leave the European Union altogether. Never before had a single issue provoked a society as entirely as did this. No prior issue to which a plebiscite had been set had seen so many ballots cast—of which, as we know, the majority answered in the affirmative. Not expecting this result and unencouraged by what it might portend, the liberal wing of Parliament began a campaign of dithering and delay. Loath to effectuate the people’s decision, to ossify their democratic will, British MPs have stalled their kingdom’s detachment from the continent for over three years. The successor to former Prime Minister Theresa May, the bumptious Boris Johnson, now finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to reap what the British population has sowed.

It’s under these circumstances that Bercow takes his premature leave. Ostensibly a “Euro-phile” (as opposed to those Eurosceptics for whom there’s no other feasible option but to leave and to reclaim British sovereignty), Bercow’s politics seem to have evolved as the situation’s grown untenable. Originally, upon his arrival to Parliament, he was of a more conservative bent (thought that certainly doesn’t classify him as necessarily contemptuous of the E.U.). But it’s not to his personal political agenda that my attention turns. I haven’t acquired sufficient knowledge of it to judge it one way or the other.

Embarrassed though I am to admit it, I only learned of Bercow’s existence, much less of his political inclinations and his imminent expiry, a bit earlier this past week. As is my aimless wont, I stumbled into a few of his “greatest moment” highlights on YouTube—videos to which that site was ever so kind, intuitive, and dare I say intrusive to avert my eyes. Immediately, I was dazzled by his idiosyncratic wit and the clever acerbity of his thought. Combining aspects of both statesman and of showman, Bercow appeared entirely at ease atop the dais or on the stage. His rejoinders, while always intelligent and respectful, were invitations to laughter from the crowd. His commentary, usually spoken in a measured and disinterested tone, was a lofty standard to which any MP might aspire. Amongst the monotony of Parliamentary quibbles and the enmity of its disputes, he was a self-contained comedy. He was a reliquary of insight and a breath of fresh thought in whose cooling presence all would be made to feel alive.  

Excluded from the highest ascendancy of British society, the place from which most of that kingdom’s eminent statesmen were selected, Bercow seems to have achieved his great success in spite of the humility of his beginnings. His father was a motorist of the public weal—a cab driver by another name. His mother was Jewish, and by that creed’s matrilineal law of descent, so too was he. This made him, from the outset, an unwitting minority—a guiltless designation with which I’m profoundly empathetic. A vaunted tennis player in his youth, in age his greatest skill became that of the repartee. The sword of the spoken word would become his sport. Ailed by a permanent condition of respiratory distress, he was made to relinquish his pursuit of his tennis dreams. But, like a youthful stuttering Demosthenes, he trained his oratory toward a state of eloquence. Considering his origins and his impairments, the status to which he was able to ascend is all the more impressive, as it was with that grandiloquent Greek.

I mean this entry not as an encomium for a man about whom I hardly know a thing. Perhaps there’s much more about Bercow that, if exposed before my view, I’d heartily despise. Doubtless, any inhabitant of the island could abridge me of his shortcomings and his foibles—but are we not all men, a wretched and erroneous species to whom foibles are simply inherent? While not typically prone to political panegyrics nor eulogistic declarations, I simply felt in witnessing this man, an urge to comment on the rarity, the perspicacity, the Voltairean wit, and the Ciceronian subtlety of his manner. I know not if the U.K. will be better off upon his departure, but I know I’ll be dispossessed of a fabulous source of English entertainment in which I all-too-briefly relished. The coming aftershocks of Brexit don’t, at least at this point, appear to be as conducive to distant fun.  

Bestriding two continents, with one foot atop the European Alps and the other on the shores of Asia, stands the figure of William Tell. Swiss in origin, German by dramatic exportation, and international by the widespread application of a great and universal ideal, Tell is the liberal colossus under whose invigorating shadow the world walks free. He’s the giant in whose presence we’re made to feel not small, but quite large; the man by whose accomplishments and endeavors we’re ceaselessly inspired; the myth and the very legend at whose feet we sit in imitation and in awe. He was, in his time, a slayer of tyrants and a protector of the average man. In ours, he’s the much-needed symbol of liberty and justice for all.

Initially, though, he was a singularly national idol. Tell, before all others, was the man upon whom the Swiss people, finding themselves now wretched in the oppression of their plight, relied for deliverance from the Habsburg Empire’s avaricious clutch. An archer of nonpareil accuracy and a hero of fabulous daring, Tell shot dead the terrible and gratuitous Gessler—the Habsburg Empire’s regrettable gubernatorial choice. Gessler, you see, was the man—painfully ill-fit for the job, probably a fact unbeknownst to the slightly more benevolent Austrian king—under whom Tell’s Canton was to be administered.

Contemptuous of the people’s long-cherished liberty and desirous of his own veneration as a European god, Gessler impressed upon the people’s throat his unrelenting heel. He forced upon them countless indignities and personal affronts. He imposed upon them shameful rites of passage and embarrassing procedures to which they were compelled to conform. A vigorous and an independent people, these patriots of Switzerland were made to genuflect before the governor’s royal cap. A pole was stuck in the earth upon which this symbol of despotism would flap before their eyes. All were made to acknowledge and to kneel before it, as if it were an emblem of the messiah and sacrosanct. Failure to do so would be a capital crime. If not that, Gessler would punish them in whatever way that he pleased. Such is the will of a tyrant. As callous as he was capricious, interminable imprisonment (without hope of release) wasn’t an unusual sentence. Nor, of course, was that of a torturous and ignoble death.

Tell faced both. Somewhat disingenuously, he ignored the legally-required acknowledgement of the governor’s cap. Abstemious of even the thought of servility and defiantly proud of his unfettered pedigree in every way, he walked past the cap without a second thought. For his troubles (and for being so insufferably troublesome), he was detained by the imperial guard. It was a body from which there was no escape. Failing to feign ignorance of the newfangled law, Tell was then brought before the governor and apprehended without trial.

The puissance of his bow and the accuracy of his aim weren’t solely the plaudits of his neighbors; Gessler knew of this formidable gift as well. Desirous of some evidence or validation for the claim, Gessler forced him to shoot—from a distance of over one hundred yards—an apple from his young son’s head. Desperate for a reprieve, Tell presented to the sanguinary governor his own beating chest. Barren of all humility and pride, he was willing to sacrifice his own life, if only to preserve that of his son. Gessler was unmoved. He insisted upon the proceeding as dictated before.

Tell’s son, with insouciant, confident, and hortatory pleas, urged his father to take his shot. Withholding one arrow in the case he should fail, the infallible Tell did just that. The apple, now cut through the core and bifurcated in two, tumbled down to the merciful earth. The reserved arrow, an admission made upon Gessler’s inquiry, was destined for the governor’s head. Had his son been slain, Gessler’s fate would’ve matched.

Piqued by so impudent an admission of infidelity to his reign, Gessler ordered Tell be taken away. He was stripped of his bow, detached from the embrace of his son, made into a formal prisoner, and carried away from the Canton of which he was now, inarguably, the most eminent man. He was chained to a boat and brought across Lake Lucerne—a stunningly picturesque body of water around which those glorious mountains climb. Desperate for the intervention of a providential or a mortal hand, the boat encountered a terrible storm. This divine tempest, made all the more powerful by Tell’s own cunning, was able to spring the man free.

Unfettered of his chains but bound to his commitment for vengeance, he stole away to those glorious, inconspicuous hills. He found himself in a set of mountains behind whose jagged angles and daunting crags he might be concealed. This was an altitude, after all, with which he was intimately familiar—having inhabited it for the entirety of his life.

Patiently, he awaited the caravan of the governor to arrive. It did so through a discouragingly narrow mountain pass. The governor’s henchmen advised an alternative route, but Gessler was resolute. Just then, a woman and her children, indigent and desperate for her husband’s reprieve, begged the governor to see to his case. She supplicated the insensate Gessler, but succeeded in moving his sentiments not. Just before he could trample her dead, if only to disburden himself of her cries and continue on his merry way, he himself fell to the ground. This was no paroxysm, internal though it seemed. Branching from the felled noble’s head was a wood-carved arrow—a projectile for whose release none other than our heroic Tell was to be named responsible.

This display of utmost temerity, this intrepid assassination of a government official, this incalculable act of risk—all of this combined to guarantee forever the preservation of the Canton’s liberty. Forevermore, its people would be free, as they forever had been up until that time. This genuine race of ancient Swiss had “kept their freedom from the first till now. Never to princes had they bowed the knee”—and, thanks to the efforts of Tell, never would they do so again. They would shake off from their shoulders a thralldom so acutely abhorred and keep for themselves and their posterity their ancient and inviolable right. They would be free.

This arousing message, this liberal sentiment, this shout from the lungs of every person who breathes free is as relevant today as it was in age of Tell. His story, forever abiding, speaks to me with particular force and acuity as I watch from afar the situation occurring in Hong Kong. The citizens of this Westernized, quasi-autonomous state are being led to the yoke of the Chinese machine. The autocrats of that speciously “emerging” state are leading Hong Kongers from the liberty that they love to the foreign servility of Beijing. For weeks, at this point nearly three months, Hong Kong’s citizens—a people to whom no right is of greater moment than that of its untrammeled freedom—have been demonstrating in the streets. Tumultuous would be too mild a term to describe the circumstances in which this all has taken place; perilous is the situation as it continues to unfold.

When—it’s asked in the play by Friedrich Schiller by which we remember the tale of William Tell—will come deliverance from this doom-devoted land? Probably, sad though I am to say, not exceedingly soon. Although Carrie Lamb, Hong Kong’s chief executive, has rescinded from the government’s agenda the proposed extradition bill—the piece of legislation by which these fourteen vigorous weeks of protests were originally incited—its permanent removal seems unlikely. We here in the west, complacent with the pettiness of our own concerns, should be aware of the fact that it’ll surely re-appear. Possibly, as if a sanguinary sequel to that event at Tiananmen decades ago, it might do so with Chinese military force—the exertion of which is enough to make the entire region tremble.

Until then, we mustn’t neglect our Hong Kong neighbors (if they aren’t so by geography, they doubtless are by ideology). We must attend to their calls for liberty, as did the valiant Switzer William Tell. China’s thralldom now weighs the Hong Kongers down. The former seeks to impoverish the latter, to swell her lust of sway. Hong Kong must combat her influence and remain forever free.  

The summer’s end is near. When inevitably it comes, a surfeit of twilight will be upon us—a waning of the day and an advent of the night. While we might hope with wishful dreams of warmth to delay its forward march, this changing of the seasons simply can’t be stopped. Darkness, especially in those parts of the country where the latitude stretches high and the sun—with unusual celestial timidity—sinks bashfully low, will arrive daily with ever-greater haste. Of long and of radiant days we’re soon to be deprived. We’ll be left here longing for their premature return.

But let us not, in the course of our slow and lifeless progression toward the winter season, neglect the autumn. It is, in my opinion, a lovely interlude through which we happily pass. Indeed, sooner than winter, it will be fall, and no later than at its outset, we’ll be importuned to purchase, to receive, or in some cases, to administer the vaunted “flu shot”. The shot, as it were, is seemingly the one intervention on which the majority of our healthcare providers is unanimously keen. It’s the annual remedy, amongst a nostrum of current remedies, behind which all doctors and nurses seem buoyed in placing their support. Nearly all are in agreement of its efficacy, and it’s with uncharacteristic unity that they join in encouraging its use.

The flu shot, shorthand for an inconvenience in the middle of ones’ day and in the upper region of ones’ arm, is an admittedly remarkable occurrence in the history of health. I belittle its annual advent if only to emphasize its historical importance. Appearing each year at the beginning of the fall, the influenza vaccine has safeguarded from the febrile clutches of this most noxious disease millions of people worldwide. It has made fleetingly banal that which was once devilishly fatal. We mustn’t forget that many in our species’ past succumbed to its ravages. Exposed to its innumerable viral variant forms, an extraordinary number of our own died because of it while we, the beneficiaries of so many centuries and so many sciences, think but little of it today.

But the vaccination, not just of the influenza virus but of countless other maladies once pervasive and now obscure, is an occurrence in the medical history of man of which we ought to take note. We first take note of the flu shot vaccine—a vaccine of which I’m generally in support, a preventive injection to which I’m personally opposed.  

In general, the vaccine’s production is no easy task. Many minds and many dollars must gather and exert themselves to achieve its final, pharmaceutical end. With a heightened confidence, one atypical of their normally cautious bent, the medical and epidemiological communities will first agree on the type of influenza that will blight us this year. To this strand they’ll direct their efforts and concoctions toward an effective vaccination to which, in the best of circumstances, we’ll all be voluntarily exposed. We can do no more than hope that in so doing, their predictions prove themselves right. Our immunity and our longevity depend upon them being so. Ailing years have passed when they’ve missed their mark and failures linger longer than successes in the valetudinarian’s mind. As on the balance sheet of the gambler, losses are of greater impact than gains. No truer is this than when it comes to wagers of health.

Yet while we invest in them our blind and bodily faith, we can’t expect of them the same unshakeable certitude that roots our own convictions. Disease seems not to be so conformable to prediction. It’s a bit more Protean than that—insidiously transforming shape as soon as it’s grasped. How are they to know in advance the strand of influenza by which so variable a society as is ours will be afflicted? Surely, without hesitations and insalubrious second thoughts, they can’t. Much, then, is to be left to chance. It’s here that we hope for the synchrony of science and prescience, of medicine, foresight, and of luck. We’ll need the combination and the benefits of all if we’re to survive this and every subsequent viral year of the flu.

Momentarily secure in their knowledge of the winning strand with which this “flu” season will force us to contend, our dauntless scientists will produce a vaccination to this predetermined bug. Having made it, they’ll disseminate it to the pharmacies, democratize it to the people, and hope—with prayers of salutary piety to gods of healing above—for the very best of outcomes. It’ll be the primary advertisement of the apothecary, the ardent recommendation of the physician, and the breathless exhortation of both mom and pop. It will be requisite in most places of work, incumbent in all those of play. All are to be the flu shot’s happy recipients, none its mistrustful evaders.

Sill, I’m tempted toward truancy. The flu shot’s celebrated benefit, of which—I think—I’m right to be suspicious, doesn’t always justify the inconvenience by which it’s to be procured. I’m not in the least impressed by the discouragingly high rate of failure it’s been shown to bring. A frustratingly capricious disease, the influenza strand that ultimately ends up in circulation for the appointed year is often dissimilar to that for which the vaccine was originally built. That impotent strand now coursing through your veins is absolutely useless, and your vulnerability to another flu-like illness remains just as high. It’s also not unusual to become ill after the receipt of the flu shot for reasons beyond my grasp. This seems to me a risky, perhaps unnecessary exposure of one’s otherwise unmolested health.

It’s here that I risk sounding unappreciative of science. Nothing could be further from the truth, as science in every way is the truth. It’s not only one of the chief objects of my reverence, but an awesome fascination to whose study I’m humbly and continuously devoted. I’m especially appreciative of the confluence of history and science (less so of the science of history). I’m inspired by the slow, glacial development and recognition of what we now know objectively, verifiably, and immediately to be true. But how do we know this, and by whom are we taught? Enthralling is the process of reading about the men and women upon whom responsibility for our knowledge is to be bestowed. It’s a continual excitement to read of their rudimentary hypotheses, their primitive experiments, their daring, often impious presumptions, and the cautious conclusions to which they were led. Now diffident, now confident, these became the results upon which our modern standards of care and practices have been quietly built.

The development of the vaccine, in the general but also the particular sense, is one such fascination of mine—however stubbornly I might decline to receive that importunate little vaccination that is the flu shot. A succession of contributors, of whose names we recognize but a few, was responsible for lending both mind and hand toward its creation. That said, there must be one star upon whom our adulation rests. For the vaccine’s successful integration into the norms of modern medical care, we have the English physician, zoologist, and scientist Edward Jenner to thank.

This “Father of Immunology” as he deservedly was to be named, was—if not the most inventive—then certainly the most perceptive doctor of his time. Pastoral predecessors of his (by whom he was doubtless inspired while living at his Gloucestershire home) had shown a somewhat tenuous correlation between one’s exposure to cowpox (a milder, bovine version of the disease) and subsequent immunity to the human virus with which we’re better acquainted. That virus specific to homo sapiens is, of course, small pox. The name was a misnomer; nothing, sad am I to say, was small, subtle, nor diminutive about it. It was, perhaps outside of the Bubonic plague, the greatest and most persistent bane under which our species had the occasion to suffer. All but unknown to us today, small pox was a horrible viral disease for which there was no cure. What’s more, it found no confinement to one particular land; all nations were affected by its undiscriminating infectious glee.

Ever the humanitarian, the French philosopher Voltaire—balancing his roles as Europe’s preeminent controversialist and scientist—was very much distressed by the disease. Though not afflicted by it personally (though thin, for eight decades his health was invidiously robust), he saw with dispiriting clarity the thousands of people around him who were. Being that nothing human was alien to this most universal of men, he set upon exploring small pox’s cause and its possible eradication. A solemn interruption of his playful banter about regents and his nonpareil wit, Voltaire remarked in his Letters on the English that “in a hundred persons that come into the world, at least sixty contract smallpox; of these sixty, twenty die, and twenty more keep very disagreeable marks of this cruel disorder as long as they live”; that’s to say, the mortality rate was moribundly high and if you didn’t perish, your scars would forever persist.

Searching for solutions, he noted the universality of the practice of inoculation among the Circassian people. A population bordering the Black Sea, one since absorbed into the various hues of the Caucasian race, he observed with curiosity the infrequency with which they succumbed to the disease. It was surprisingly low. This act of inoculation, he rightly thought, not only immunized them to small pox, but beautified their daughters as well. So pretty were they, in fact, that these girls became the region’s chief export to the seraglios of Turkey and the harems of Persia (an amorous commerce that proved, then as now, unprepossessingly lucrative). Voltaire, as often was the case, was only half correct in his conclusion. Inoculation was affective, however dubious its ability to confer beauty might be.  

Jenner, freshly aware of Voltaire’s commentary and the Circassian success, began conducting his own experiments on the effects of inoculation. Hitherto, people were inoculated with the serum of the small pox pustule emerging from a fellow human being. As you can imagine, this was a quite dangerous approach. Often, this putrid infection was of a slightly milder type, and thus conceivably safe to be introduced into the system of another untarnished human being. An improvement on doing nothing but writhing and awaiting death, this method hadn’t an encouragingly high rate of success. But still, at the time (especially in Cotton Mather’s America where, at the behest of that progressive Puritan sect, the procedure became widespread) it was better than relying on divine intervention for the procurement of a cure.

As secular in his approach to small pox as he was careful of his scientific conduct, Jenner, this Father of Immunology, noticed the resistance to the disease enjoyed by an unassuming milkmaid to whom his attention now turned. Quite literally awash in dairy all the day long, this and every milkmaid in England were often exposed to the viral cowpox by which their bovine friends were regularly infected. Not nearly as dangerous in them as was small pox in us, cowpox offered very little threat to those in whom it was introduced—be it woman or cow. After having come in contact with it, dairymaids were noticed very minimally to suffer because of it. Additionally, and this was of great empirical import, its human effects were equally mercifully mild. Consequently, however, it was noted that these same women would be immune to the cowpox’s small pox cousin—the plague of European society. This, to steal an exclamation from another famous scientist, was Jenner’s and Europe’s Eureka moment.

Sensing a watershed moment in the history of the health of man, Jenner proceeded with his ingenious experiment. He grabbed by the arm the eight-year-old son of his personal gardener—a guiltless boy by the name of James Phipps. We’d do well here, if only in passing, to take note of this boy’s name. Scientific scruples, as Phipps quickly was to learn, weren’t then what they’d become today. The reservations of a young flower boy were of no moment, certainly of no impediment to the inquisitiveness of a noble scientist’s aim. Surely, this wasn’t a venture to which Phipps, a boy of only eight, would consent with a full understanding of the risk it entailed. He was, however, chosen to be the experiment, the in situ medium in which this historic attempt was to take place. His health, we shamefacedly admit, wasn’t of overarching concern and history, as I said, would do well to acknowledge the sacrifice he unwillingly made. This innocuous boy was to be inoculated, and with all the involved peril, the world of science was to turn.

In both of his arms, the cowpox virus was to be administered. Jenner, likely ignorant, if not outright disdainful of the benefits of sterilization, scraped from the finger of a handy dairymaid some of the exudate of her cowpox mark. The cow, by the way, was named Blossom—a fitting name for so germinal and consequential a procedure to which she lent her pus. As a further aside, vacca, whence the word “vaccine” derives, means in Italian “cow”. Perhaps, after all, that culture to which we once affixed the epithet of “heathen” (the Indians) isn’t so wrong in venerating so highly these lowing beasts.

Having milked the milkmaid for her invaluable secretion, Jenner proceeded to inject it into both of the arms of Phipps—his stripling-turned science experiment. A fugacious fever ensued, but it was not so serious, certainly nothing about which the eager Jenner was inclined to worry himself. A few months passed, Jenner observed in the boy no deleterious effect, and he carried on with the boldest part of the experiment yet. Confident in his science and assured of the grandeur of his aim, Jenner injected into that same boy’s arms the terrible smallpox virus. The sample was as active and as virulent as it could be. This was an immense and, heretofore, un-trialed risk. Openly he introduced into a boy less than a decade old an ancient disease from time immemorial. Not only that, it was a disease by whose contagious indefatigability an entire continent had been decimated.

The risk was great, the reward far greater. After days of close and anxious observation, there was no evidence of an injurious result. The boy, as invested in his survival as was the good Dr. Jenner, showed no signs of anguish nor of pain. The predictable, odious pustules by which the skin would be covered never appeared. He remained afebrile and was manifestly okay. There was no lethargy, no emesis, nothing of the like. The conclusion, as Jenner realized it, was immunity—the consequence, as we perceive it, history.

It’s upon this extraordinary moment of the eighteenth century that my mind rests as the end of summer nears and as the flu shot season gets underway. I may still forgo the shot—obstinate as I am toward inoculation. But I assuredly won’t fail to acknowledge the origin, the importance, and the story of the vaccination. Insouciant in the face of illness, I have only Edward Jenner, Voltaire, and of course, the unforgettable James Phipps to thank.