2022
The Mask of Sorrow, a Tragic Face Revealed malcolm sharps
H
ere’s a name: Wolski. Veronica Wolski. An American with Slavic roots, you might conclude, not rare in itself. It’s a name that, lacking any other reason for taking note of, you might pass over without further thought and forget. So why might you have heard of Veronica Wolski in stories going back some months now? And why might that name have kept cropping up from time to time and each time you said to yourself “here she goes again, that terrible Veronica Wolski?” Well, Veronica Wolski became notorious on You Tube, amongst other internet sources, as a Q follower and anti-masker who scoffed at convention and the restrictions they tried to place on her. “If they want me to wear a mask, thought Wolski, they’ll have to accept this one.” And by wearing a Zorro (or Zorra)-style mask with no nose or mouth covering, just a simple masquerade job in black with two eye holes, to her local supermarket, she caused confusion amongst staff and customers alike. And on all the YT stuff I’ve seen of her she is gleeful about the success of her little trick in out-smarting authoritarianism, though as someone said later, she put as much effort into wearing the wrong kind of mask as she would have done wearing the right one, so what was the point? But the real point for Veronica Wolski wasn’t simply not to wear an effective barrier mask against a killer virus, it was to tell the world, and possibly to tell Covid itself, that she wasn’t falling for the sham, she didn’t believe in masks, she didn’t believe in the threat of Covid, she didn’t believe in all the fuss and manufactured case and death statistics, she didn’t believe in the multiple risks of infection to herself, though she was one year off the “at high risk” category of sixty-five and over. And lastly and certainly, as it turned out, not least, she didn’t believe in vaccination. The next time we hear of Veronica Wolski some months after her Zorra antics began, we get news of her not from her own set-up videos but from reporters on national news networks standing outside the hospital where she has been fighting for her life in an Intensive Care Unit. These are the same units which at the moment are being rationed and even denied to some potentially terminal Covid cases and sufferers from other maladies. On the tenth day of her hospitalisation things go very badly for libertarian warrior and Covid denier Veronica Wolski; her struggle against Covid-caused pneumonia fades and fails, the ventilator is switched off, she is declared by the doctors to no longer be of this world. But true to the histrionic character of the deceased, during her last days a dramatis personae of supporters assembles and bombards the hospital with literally hundreds of demands and threats (don’t the two seem to go together nowadays?). They demand, in
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The Lowell Review
