A Devil Speaks

Many are cheering on Rand Paul in his demand that Anthony Fauci be fired for his role in funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab and then repeatedly denying this fact to the U.S. Congress. Is it wrong for me to hope that Fauci will never be fired, and on the contrary that he will continue to live in the public eye — way out there in the public eye — for the rest of his earthly life, as we enjoy the admittedly somewhat sadistic pleasure of watching him squirm and dig himself into deeper holes, while becoming increasingly angry in the way a caught bureaucratic schemer who knows he is caught, and knows that his career of lying and fudging is collapsing around him and there is nothing he can do about it, is wont to do? I say keep him in his exalted position for life, and let him live for at least ten more years, as the truth of this pandemic, and of Fauci’s personal involvement with the communist research lab that almost certainly caused it, continues to leak out, fact by damning fact. 

I harbor this nasty hope not because Fauci helped to secure funding for foreign labs to do research that his overseers in the United States federal government judged too dangerous to be conducted on American soil. Not because he knowingly used the jargon of administrative obfuscation to conceal the true nature of the work he was helping to fund. And not because he has undoubtedly known all along that if the so-called lab leak theory became the standard operating assumption, there would be no way he could escape being implicated in the chain of events that caused the pandemic. 

No, I would like him to stay in the public eye through this process because he clearly lacks the basic humanity to experience an honest “What have I done?” moment — to face up to the reality of what he condoned and assisted, the dangerous game he chose to play with a theoretically unlimited number of human lives, merely to further his professional ego gratification, even against the explicit decision of the government which employed him as its leading authority and expert on such matters. I want him to stay out there, denying himself hoarse, for as long as possible, just as I want Donald Trump to stay out there, ranting about how no one in history ever had an election stolen as badly as he did, as the mountain of obviousness standing opposed to his fantasy world continues to grow and grow and grow, finally leaving him in the most absurd echoing valley of self-refutation — because, similarly to his old underling Fauci, Trump lacks the humanity to accept his loss as any mature adult must often do, but instead was (and still is) willing to sacrifice his country, the souls of millions of faithful supporters, and the last breath of liberty on this planet, to the cause of his ridiculous attempt to salvage his puny, shriveled ego.

Yes, I know those are cruel hopes. That is my little devil talking. I do not really wish for such things — most of the time. But we all have our moments of weakness, our resentful, all-too-tantalizing moments of hoping to see a bully get his. In truth, such men will always get theirs in the end, whether we wish for it or not — and whether we witness the event or not. So why sully ourselves by desiring to witness it? 

Okay, enough of this. 

A few days ago, a student who has recently enjoyed writing her daily observations sent me the following disconcerted message: “When I turn some thoughts into letters, I feel their value decreases.”

My reply to her: “Well, they might lose urgency. Sometimes we write to release something, to let go of it.”

Thank goodness for writing. It is often the best way to shrug off a devil trying to prey on one’s weaknesses. Perhaps the pen’s proverbial superiority to the sword has no deeper meaning than this. Pens are the weapons with which we may fight the wars within ourselves.


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