the world is going mad the world is going mad

i seem to have gotten this most curious disease sooner than most; it can take years for a cure.

who knows if we have those years. if we will Suffer in illusion and delusion, in Macondo or Tlon:

if we will live or die.

a friend said that anyone who, ten years ago, could have seen today, well, that ren would surely go mad.

i cannot see ten years into the future, but i can see five.

five years ahead is still enough to go mad.

this is no trick, no time machine, no psycho-history; just an ability to see patterns in the folly of man.

perhaps it was always fated that we would make a rich fool king (or President, as we call him in America; or even more accurately the P-Resident - the letter P is always the most magical of letters) and perhaps it was always fated that P-estilence should make a return

a writer no less than Terry P-ratchett suggested that pestilence Was defeated for good decades ago. he may have said that but not believed. the scientists all knew (or should have known) that disease would always come back.

there are a thousand ways to kill a ren yet that ren only needs one to die. there are a thousand thousand germs not yet dreamed. Biology is a mistress who is never truly defeated nor truly tamed. a line at a drunken revelry: “rule number 1: don’t fuck biologists” and of course the paramours of the biologists were first to agree;

but it is not disease that is the true killer, it is madness. the powers of medicine have never been as truly Loved by the public as elites assume.

for who could hate a cure so effective the ancients would have called it Magick? that riddle was solved by young scholars, who knew all ren should fear magic - which can heal bodies and wound souls.

is it enough to live a human life and to never truly be sick? to live in a bubble until the bureaucratic death panels give a painless jab? (for the benefit of the slow readers i must slow down and remove all hints of subtext. no, the vaccine is not death. it is exactly what the scientists [not the politicians] have said. it is not perfect, but it is plausibly good enough; it is surely better than nothing, or folk medicine. we live in a world of fools who read about Wood and Wei and assume every needle has death behind it.)

but the madness. we must not forget the madness. conservatives have been denying the madness in front of them. now it is time for the liberals to deny the madness behind them. if the emergency is good, it must continue so long as even one life is at risk (for did the patriarchs not say that to save one life is to save the entire world?). and they will continue draconian measures unless a dragon arrives and eats them.

draconian measures! for such a mild pandemic. ten million dead is terrible for a disease but mild for a pandemic. when ‘dem powers that be declared we should panic it still looked as if it could have been five hundred million (a far worse number). and this year we have a disease which would barely have been a pandemic in the Before Times. the ochlocracy is stirring. the bums may never win but that doesn’t mean their enemies never lose.

yet where P-estilence retreats, the madness advances. we are on the way out, for whatever that means.

some ren may say it is already done. perhaps the P-andemic is done, but the madness has just begun

on the madness to come, perhaps i must say no more for fear i shall merely fuel the fire.

P-rophecies come in P-oetry, and secrets in cryptic crosswords (i do suppose i can tell you that now) and the future comes to all of us;