Bard none

By Paul Kandarian

Now is the summer of our discontent, made inglorious summer by the bastard COVID, and all the germs that lowered upon our homes, in the deep bosom of the pandemic buried…

I KNOW ZIPPO ABOUT SHAKESPEARE, but feel quite comfortable in copping his opening of Richard III, which I just now looked up. Good stuff that Bard fellow churned out, eh? I’m one of those actors who has not yet tackled Shakespeare because of the density (mine, not his), though the language is fairly thick and hard to understand unless you really, really listen.

I have seen a few Shakespeare plays and in all honesty, I just couldn’t keep up. The language is singularly gorgeous but also complex, just beautiful when you can read it, slowly, dissecting and absorbing every well-intended delicious word and phrase. But done properly on stage, it is a dance, speedy and fluid, ofprecise, descriptive language that boggles the minds of the listeners. If they can keep up to it. Which, frankly, I cannot.

So I just paraphrase and parody, in this case, to remark on what a remarkable summer this has been. Remarkable in ways good and bad – good around here, bad in other areas of the country that just can’t seem to do the right thing.

As of this writing, mid-July, things are looking up in Massachusetts and New England, indeed the greater Northeast. Here, we paid attention, led by a governor that in a perfect world, would be president and our governor at the same time. I wish Charlie Baker would run – he’d be a great president, though in all honesty, a small wet mound of beetle dung would make a better commander in chief than the one we have now.

But Charlie won’t run because he knows he’s needed here. Plus, selfishly, we don’t want to lose the guy and get some idiot governor like they have in southern and western states who whistle Dixie and look the other way as COVID makes an unimpeded return trip to their fevered population who are angry because they have to wear a tiny thin slip of fabric over their stupid mouths and noses.

I love memes, those wonderful cartoonish photos with funny sayings on them. Sadly, it’s how a lot of people get their news, even though it’s not news – it’s satire. Then again, some people read completely ridiculous stories online that can be nothing else but satire and take it as gospel.

If I may digress: we are a country of morons, it truly seems sometimes, and not

just our so-called leaders. But truly stupid people, or TSPs, seem to be everywhere, given permission to express their truly stupid ways – such as believing satirical stories are real and reposting them as such – by a TSP-packed administration.

Anyway, I saw this great meme directed at people who claim being forced to wear a mask is infringing on their rights: it had a hunter wrapped in camouflage gear, literally to toe, face encased in cloth with eye and nose holes only, with words like “So you can sit in the woods all day like this, but you can’t go 10 minutes into a store in a paper mask?”

The point is, we are all in this together, even TSPs, and masks help, as does handwashing and other preventive measures, along with believing scientists like Dr. Fauci, another guy I wish was president, when they keep saying this stuff is real, it’s not going away any time soon, so hunker down, folks, and just do the right thing.

I hate wearing the mask, to be honest. It’s a pain in the face, makes it hard to breathe, I keep tearing the elastic and then have to get another one. But then I look at the millions of people who’ve gotten the disease, the hundreds of thousands around the world who have died from the disease, the untold numbers of family members and friends who haven’t gotten it but are dramatically impacted by those who have… and I tell myself to shut the hell up, put on the mask, keep my complaints to myself, and stay healthy.

It has been a really tough summer, again not so much around here where the disease seems to be under control (“seems to be” a very loose term), but everywhere else. And it’s frustrating, because we can’t control it with any degree of certainty the way we can with other maladies, treatments like insulin for diabetes, vaccines for other viruses, and the like, the common denominator to all of that being scientists (like Fab Fauci for President, Charlie B. as his VP, I’m just putting that out there) who know what the hell they are doing and dabble in facts not politics.

Or as Billy the Bard wrote: “We do not learn for want of time, the sciences that should become our country.”

Then again Albert Einstein truly nailed it with this: “Only two things are truly infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I’m not sure about the former.”

Now that I understand.

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