Boll Weevils & Artaud

When the last bale of toilet-paper is lifted triumphantly from the barge on the shores of the river Styx, declaring the virus dead, and free-market capitalism returns in the form of socialist bailouts to privately-held corporations and their stockholders, those of us still alive will all be better for it.

Then and only then will we be able to return to 'normalcy'--a partially dysfunctional catastrophe in which the boll weevils have once again wormed their way into positions of power.

We thought we had conquered boll weevilism after the Civil War. Or was it World War I or 2, the good war and the great war, or the Korean War or the first televised war, or the War on Terror which came after the War on Drugs, all of which preceeded this war, the current war in which we're all encouraged to stand 6 feet apart from one another and sneeze only into our gas masks, manufactured in some shithole country our great leaders can't pronounce...

Those cotton-growing (metaphor) deal-making (not a metaphor) geniuses of governmental shrinkage, those who wash their hands 30 times a day in a gold-plated sink as advised by the second-in-command, that bible-thumping pitchfork of a human being, now want the nation "to open by Easter", at which time Jesus Christ himself will come sliding down the chimney of every business big and small, every household no matter its political persuasion, sexual orientation, or racial composition, with bagfulls of Bibles signed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a great man if ever there was one, a paragon of the truth, honor, and courage as embodied by the humble boll weevil. Since it does hurt to laugh, laughter may be the next thing to be declared a national emergency so that the new cotton-kings can take advantage of yet another profit opportunity.

Artaud, never one to mince words, wrote in an essay on Van Gogh (1946)--

However heartbreaking it may appear, contemporary life preserves itself in its old atmosphere of lechery, anarchy, disorder, delirium, dissoluteness, bourgeois inertia, psychic anomaly, deliberate dishonesty, flagrant hypocrisy, sordid contempt of everything which shows distinction, laying claim to a whole order founded on the fulfillment of primitive injustice--an order of organized crime, in fact.