Places that still require facemasks – A new theatre season – Not all Shakespeare plays bear repeated viewings – Possible lab origin of the COVID virus – Evening statistics
We continue to get mixed messages as to whether or not the pandemic is ebbing to the point of being considered endemic. Facemasks are still required at the assisted living facility where my mother has an apartment, which seems reasonable enough for a residential building whose inhabitants are old and frail. Masks are required at the post office as well. On the other hand, I received an advertisement in the mail for a theater subscription with live performances for the forthcoming season. Regrettably, of the five plays they offer, three are by dramatists who do not interest me in the least, and although the remaining two are by Shakespeare, they are Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice, neither of which I particularly enjoy.
Much Ado About Nothing is a moderately agreeable bit of fluff. The sparring between Beatrice and Benedick is certainly entertaining, and worthy of a much better setting than the play in which it is to be found. But the other parts are flat and uninteresting. I have watched several performances that involved skilled actors tackling the roles of Hero, Claudio, Leonato, Antonio, and Don Pedro, all of them struggling in vain to bring a flicker of life into these cardboard characters. The humor of Dogberry and the others in his “watch” (police force) I have always found rather feeble. In short, it may be worth seeing once or even twice, but it is not play that I want to see repeatedly.
The Merchant of Venice, on the other hand, I find positively distasteful – not for the reasons one might imagine. Yes, I am Jewish and thus might be supposed to be alienated by its anti-Semitism; but this feature actually is a less prominent component of the play than its reputation would lead one to believe. The real problem of the play is not Shylock, but Portia. We are obviously supposed to regard her as a vivacious, intelligent, spirited, “feisty” girl; whereas I consider her to be the most disagreeable young woman in the entire range of Elizabethan literature. Shylock is cast is the villain of the piece, but there is nothing particularly villainous in calling in a loan once it becomes due. Admittedly, the penalty of losing a pound of flesh for defaulting is somewhat unusual. Neither is it usual, one might legalistically remind the legalistic Portia, for a woman to set up a riddle contest for winning her hand in marriage and exacting a vow of eternal celibacy from any contestant who fails to guess the answer correctly. As far as entering a bargain with either is concerned, I cannot see much difference between the two. At any rate, when Regan, in King Lear, excoriates and tortures the Earl of Gloucester, we are – quite appropriately – meant to recoil in horror; when Portia humiliates and torments Shylock, we are meant to cheer her on. She makes eloquent and explicit claims to mercy, but she is not in the least merciful. The entire trial scene, in fact, reads like a weird adumbration of a political trial in China during the Cultural Revolution: Portia is the officer in charge of making the accusations and orchestrating the abuse of the defendant, Gratiano is the eager lackey anxious to make brownie points with any officials who might be watching, the Duke is the administrator from Beijing visiting to ensure that all is going well with the stage-management of the affair, and Shylock is the unfortunate victim being “struggled against.” Think of an alternate version of Othello that ends with everyone giving Iago high fives and congratulating him on the ingenuity of the methods he uses to get promoted to lieutenant, and that will give some idea of how jarring this scene is. At any rate, I have no desire to see it again.
The U.S. intelligence community has said that it is unsure whether COVID-19 originated from a lab leak or through human contact with infected animals, and Dr. Fauci has indicated that he is uncertain as well. Biden has ordered the community to investigate whether the virus in fact originated from a lab and was inadvertently (or even intentionally) released to the public at large. This claim has some interesting ramifications. It would mean, among other things, that Donald Trump was to some degree correct in blaming the Chinese government for originating the virus. It is certain that the World Health Organization, which is responsible for the original claim that the disease was transmitted from animals to humans, was much too compliant with Chinese authorities in the early stages of the virus, blindly accepting assurances that all was under control and censuring Trump for restricting Americans traveling to China, one of the few responsible steps he took as the crisis accelerated. The possibility of the virus originating from a lab leak comes from the discovery that three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care for sudden illness in November 2019. It is not clear, at this point, which illness they were treated for. It is quite possible that they had severe bouts of influenza. If it were COVID, however, the claim from the Chinese government of the first case of a man falling ill from the virus on December 8, 2010 is invalid. The Wuhan lab has yet to share raw data or lab records about its work in studying coronavirus in bats, supposedly the most likely origin of the virus. Now the WHO has back-pedaled: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, its director-general, has said that he does “not believe this assessment was extensive enough” and has called for an additional investigation into the Wuhan lab. The Chinese government has furiously denied the suggestion that COVID-19 could have originated in one of its labs, calling such a theory “slander” and “a conspiracy by the U.S. intelligence agencies” – which naturally leads one to believe that the story might be true.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 169,597,651; # of deaths worldwide: 3,523,179; # of cases U.S.: 33,994,213; # of deaths; U.S.: 606,790. In absolute numbers, we are now no longer the nations with the greatest number of critical cases: India, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia all have higher counts than our own. We are no longer among the top ten of nations with the highest incidence rate of COVID. We account for 20% of the world’s COVID cases to date and a little over 17% of the deaths from the virus – considerably lower ratios than they were some months ago.