Okay, it looks like I won't be going to France anytime soon

I wasn't planning to visit anyway, since I don't care for travel. Years ago, after my divorce, I told people loftily "Maybe I'll go to Paris for my 50th birthday," and I am sure they all rolled their eyes while they waited for me to get over my fit. I did. 

Now the President of France with his tiny firm blue eyes is announcing "You're all either getting the Jab or you can't live or do anything," probably with much the same firmness as Robespierre announced "You're all going for a shave at the National Razor." Any and all events, places, and activities in France involving human beings, including tourists I suppose, will require either proof of Vaccination or a negative Covid test every 48 hours. Unless M. le President is obliged finally with a Gallic shrug to order the needle ....

As a minor point, a curiosity, note that the address of the President of the French Republic is 55 rue du Faubourg St-Honore, the same address as the demolished Hotel Sebastiani where the Duc de Praslin murdered his wife, the Duchesse, on a hot, silent August dawn in 1847. (If you are wondering what the hell, I refer you to the great old movie All This and Heaven Too, 1940.) Do bad forces cling to places where bad things have been done? That seems a little superstitious. Or is the problem more ordinary? -- namely that mankind is deformed by original sin, and that we resemble no one so much as our first elder brother, Cain the murderer? The first wrong Cain thought to do, when he felt outraged by Abel, was not to remonstrate with him or even set his hut on fire but to kill him. There must be no power more satisfying than the power to give death. Even in our imaginations we sometimes "string up politicians by their thumbs," don't we. At least my grandmother used to talk so. 

I'm reminded also of a short passage in Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self-Help Book (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1983). Percy, who deserves the attention Flannery O'Connor gets, writes of the devolution of language during the same 20th century that saw man's wars speed from technological strength to strength while his personal involvement in war, whether its causes or combats, grew less. Twentieth century people were already far removed from the medieval knights who galloped into the field for a kingdom or for Christ. And battle is gruesome. But modern man tends to drive a train to a camp or push a button somewhere; the dead are numbered in tens of millions. In the new millennium, Percy guessed, when the overused fuck had turned the same as any other word, fish or fowl, emptied of meaning, there would also come "War without passion: one billion dead."      

Of course I am thinking of the people who think this is happening. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko: "this is a war against God." Dr. Peter McCullough: "this is bio-terrorism." Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA technology himself, Dr. Michael Yeadon, former head of vaccine development at Pfizer, Dr. Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV and Nobel Prize winner -- all have impeccable credentials and all are not happy with this. The question pops up more regularly now: who is behind it? The depravity of the vaccine campaign seems to find proof in the fact that this experimental gene-therapy, whose prototypes have failed in all previous animal trials, could not have got underway at all unless the human race were persuaded, lectured, screamed at, terrified that, "there is no treatment for this virus! There is no treatment! It is death, it is death!" But what about Ivermectin or hydroxychlor -- . "There is no treatment!" Dr. Fauci says so himself, baldly and boldly to the camera and to a world and a God he does not fear.   

Is it really just money? Dr. Fauci is over eighty. How many more years can he expect to live and spend money? And he may be a wealthy, aging little mosquito compared to the much younger, billionaire stallions, most of them in this list Chinese, who "got rich fighting Covid 19."  Do money and power give that much satisfaction, so that a man does not dream of facing judgment in a few more decades, or tonight? Or are these men true pagans, like Caesar or Cleopatra, who simply could not know of any choices except jungle success or jungle failure? Jungle revenge?

One more small thing. When I first learned of the SARS vaccine animal trials which failed in previous years, because the ferrets who did well after their two shots died upon the "challenge" of the virus itself -- I stupidly wondered at what point, at what number of animal deaths the trials ceased. As if the ferrets were Disney cartoons, personalities named and heroic. After the tenth or eleventh loss, say, that was too much. Failure. Then it dawned on me. Surely it wasn't a certain number of lab animals that proved it was all too sad to go on with. It was that they died at all. That was the pertinent information. 

Only now human beings die, and the information is not pertinent. Who is behind this? and --

is there anyone they should fear? 

Notre Dame, priez pour nous.