Pun Salad

Born in 1884, Duranty had become a disciple of Aleister Crowley in 1913, joining with the self-appointed Satanist messiah in Paris in opium consumption and “sex magic”. Crowley’s motto was “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, and Duranty seemed to have followed this immoralist maxim throughout all of his life. For the elite of Übermenschen — to which the British-born, Cambridge-educated journalist imagined he belonged — morality was a fetter to be cast off.  Anything was permitted, truth was a fiction and a superior few were entitled to live “beyond good and evil”. When Duranty described Bolshevism as a ruthless creed he may have been praising, not condemning it.

Duranty’s career was based on this philosophy. Freedom from ethical restraint, he believed, guaranteed success. In the end, however, his philosophy failed him. After FDR’s death in April 1945 Duranty found himself neglected and forgotten: during the Cold War, his skills in white-washing Soviet totalitarianism were no longer in demand. Like Crowley, whose last words when he was dying in a Hastings boarding house in 1947 were reported to have been “I am perplexed,” Duranty seems to have been baffled by his fall from grace. He died practically penniless in Orlando, Florida ten years later.

We often hear that what this country needs is an honest conversation about race. Here’s a whole lot of “honesty” for you, from an unexpected place:

Black people are less likely than white people to be self-reliant. Black people are less likely to emphasize “rational linear” and “quantitative” thinking. They are less likely to think that “hard work is the key to success.” They believe in punctuality less, and instant gratification more, than whites do. Black people aren’t as likely to believe in a Christian God and more inclined to be tolerant of pagan or polytheistic religions.

Given that we are living in the age of cancel culture, I’d better explain what I’m doing lest anyone think I believe this nonsense.

All of this stuff — the bigotry, the stereotypes and the outright falsehoods — isn’t my view. Nor did I get it from some white supremacist Web site. Nope, it comes from a graphic sourced and linked to by the ­National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

On April 18, 40 days after Italy became the first Western country to go into lockdown to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, found solace amid the worsening pandemic in the words of Jennifer Lopez. “What I know is how much we need each other,” he tweeted, attributing the words to the star of such pop hits as “Booty.” Then, not content with quoting (as Emerson would have it) “some saint or sage,” he imparted to his 1 million followers a few exhortations of his own. “No to hate,” he said. “No to stigma. No to divisions. Yes to unity. Yes to solidarity.”

Anyone surprised by this rhetoric from Tedros (as he is known) hadn’t been paying attention. Stigma, especially, was the bête noire of the leader of the WHO, which for weeks in late 2019 and early 2020 was all but asleep at the wheel as the virus spread around the globe. More than once since the beginning of the outbreak in Wuhan, Tedros had taken it upon himself to admonish the masses not to disparage the Chinese. “It’s so painful to see the level of stigma we are observing,” he declared in early March. “Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself.” Two months later, a quarter of a million people would be dead, though not of stigma.

In an apparent tie, the chief funders are the UK, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, followed by Germany and the US. But there are a few other surprises on the list, including three members of Big Pharma, the National Philanthropic Trust (based in the US) and the Rotary. Japan and the EU, through their executive arm, the European Commission round out the countries making significant donations. Member states cover less than half of the WHOs expenses. 

Not long ago I was in Whole Foods, in the produce section where foods are not packaged, and a perfectly healthy-looking woman in her 30s was the only one not wearing a mask. No one said a thing until I approached her and said she needed to wear a mask and that it had been the law in Connecticut since April. I was told to mind my own business. It is my business, of course, and everyone else’s business in that store, yet no one said or did a thing, as she continued to breathe all over the produce. I even went to store management and said something. They had to let her in because she said she had an underlying medical condition that prevented her from wearing a mask. It just so happens that the law in Connecticut allows for that exception, but no doctor’s note is required. That is just dumb. [Excerpt]