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Many thought we had turned the corner on the Covid plague, but it turns out we only just went around the bend. Still pulsing in my memory is this image, reported by a doctor: an idiot in his final hours, dying of this disease while still denying that it exists. We could write that denial off to febrile delirium, but that same excuse cannot obviate the blame he deserved for eschewing proper healthcare and thereby assisting the virus to thrive and mutate, delivering Delta to darken our doorway, every one of us.  

Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's contemporary and for a brief time, his rival, created a dramatic protagonist called Tamberlaine, a medieval Asian empire-builder and monster, who arrived at the end of his life, feverish, hallucinating Death as a personal presence creeping up on him, and, still burdened by the delusion of his own physical invincibility, imagined that so long as he kept his imperious attention on that apparition, Death would not dare approach him. You can imagine how that turned out. But the people -- let's face it, the Republicans, for so they mostly are -- who now face an impersonal, invisible death, creeping up on millions of Americans, are now, as they have been for almost two years, burdened with a delusion savoring very much of Tamberlaine -- a symmetry of Tamberlaine: if we imagine, if we believe, that the Covid plague is not real, then it dare not approach us. How do we imagine that will turn out?