Since any journey naturally carries more weight and entertainment than the experience of reaching its destination, I purposely lost myself this morning musing about figs, crooks, poetic dead albatrosses around atoning necks and gross viruses, encompassing the current state of the world and how to elucidate it all in my own words, or rather run away from it as fast as I can to not become disillusioned or cynical, desperate even.
In this expanding search for interrelatedness I found myself overly interested in fun facts, like how paper money reportedly can carry more germs than a household toilet and is capable of transporting live virus material for up to seventeen days, making it highly unlikely for Trump to be infected with Covid this way, a favorite guilty pleasurable thought I admit to, because thanks to the New York Times we all know he has none, yet this knowledge doesn’t seem to bear any meaning: you don’t have to be rich to rule this world.
My personal propinquity to financial wealth or lack thereof is way too much attached to the Dutch calvinist preachings of my parents, forever linking work ethics and effort to its monetary value, to serve as a beacon in this changed world, where one can get away with playing a successful business mogul without actually being one, but still enjoy its perks extensively and lastingly.
The drama of it should appeal to a vaunter like me, not averse to a bit of theater and ostentation, but I obviously do abhor this malicious sham and the way it takes reality hostage, like a perpetual tombola of disgust and distaste, while absence of penance is entirely efficient only for the elect. The growing common inability to formulate an effective response to this intense ugliness and malice, a rejoinder we can all believe in being just, frightens me to my core.
I’m well aware of running the risk of becoming the target of general ridicule, little laughing stock me, by suggesting that I have some clarity to offer my American friends in these turbulent times. I nevertheless wish them buckets full of fresh figs, traditionally the representative of wealth, meekness and fertility and a guaranteed delicacy. Throwing them might work too.
