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Vanity will be the death of us

Joe Bennett As Usual.

Covid is clearly trying to teach us something and that something is the Greek alphabet. Who knew there was a letter called Omicron? Not me, and that’s a source of regret. ‘‘Regrets,’’ crooned Sinatra, ‘‘I’ve had a few.’’ He’s not alone. Regretting anything is like wanting a river to flow uphill, but we’re all human. And one of my regrets is that I never learned Greek.

My school offered good Latin, which I liked, and bad Russian, which I loved, but it drew the line at ancient Greek. Today whenever I see anything laid out in that seductive alphabet I feel excluded.

I don’t need Greek for any practical purpose. It’s little use on a Greek holiday and I don’t want to read Homer in the original. Nor do I feel the need to settle once and for all which out of Socrates and Sophocles was the tragic playwright and which the Brazilian footballer.

All I want is to see myself as classically learned. I want to feel that I’m a crack Greek soldier in the belly of the horse, rather than some Trojan oik scratching his crotch. The nub of it, in other words, is vanity. And vanity is the Covid lesson we don’t seem to be learning.

Like all living organisms Covid is engaged in a struggle against extinction. To survive it adapts and mutates and has already found its way from Alpha to Omicron. If it gets to the end of the alphabet it will probably have got to the end of us.

For we too are living organisms, but we don’t see ourselves in a struggle against extinction. Our vanity precludes it. So we see Covid as an inconvenience, but one that will pass, whereupon we will carry on much as before. We assume, implicitly, our own dominance of the global ecosystem. There is no evidence, however, that the global ecosystem shares the assumption.

Early in the pandemic Trump embodied human nature. Nothing and no-one is vainer than Trump. He is blinded by self-love. So when Covid arose as a threat to American wellbeing, and with it his presidency, he engaged in magical thinking. The virus is a hoax, he declared. One day it will just disappear. The result was months of government inaction and the needless death of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Vanity isn’t just the repulsive Trump. It’s there in any religion that sets us apart from the rest of the natural world. It’s there in the Jesus-is-my-vaccine dingbats. It’s there in the Declaration of Independence which asserts that people are ‘‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’’. And it’s there, in spades, in Frank Sinatra.

My Way is among the most popular of popular songs. The lyrics are terrible, embarrassingly terrible, but they are known by heart around the world. My Way is prized so highly in Filipino karaoke bars that people have been shot dead for singing it badly. Why? Partly because it’s a stirring tune, but mainly because it’s one long boast. It’s Trumpian nonsense. It’s drawn straight from the core of our vanity.

Every funeral director knows the song by heart. Thousands of corpses a year are wheeled down the aisle to its strains. Having succumbed to the fate that awaits every organism from bacteria to Bactrian camels, we people nevertheless choose to go on our way insisting on our difference, our rugged independence, our indomitable uniqueness. Self-deluding to the last.

I’ve just learned that the tune originally came from a French song with a title that translates as

Says it all, really.

Opinion

en-nz

2021-12-01T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-01T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuff.pressreader.com/article/281968905964409

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