They used to ask you to kneel. Now they are asking you to bend over. The Middle Kingdom for centuries insisted that foreign visitors prostate, sorry, I mean prostrate, themselves before the emperor at court. While we might have thought this impulse would weaken in modern times, it now appears it has grown stronger instead.
Visitors to China are being required to submit to a COVID-19 test conducted through anal swabbing. And our leaders seem quite willing to comply. Here’s Benvolio in Romeo & Juliet, describing how smitten with love are the tech oligarchs, I mean Romeo, with China, I mean Juliet:
Benvolio: “Come, he hath hid himself among these trees,
To be consorted with the humorous night:
Blind is his love and best befits the dark.”
So blind with love are the tech titans that on their next visits to China, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google), and Jeff Bezos, who sources so much of his company’s wares from the Middle Kingdom (oh, and let’s throw in Hunter Biden, who sources his money from there), they would all eagerly comply with the Chinese requirement. This is indeed a love that best befits the dark.
Mercutio: “If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.”
The next quotation requires some explaining. The flower of the medlar tree exhibits a large cavity at the end of the fruit between the persistent calyx lobes, and according to the unflinching Oxford English Dictionary, in Elizabethan England a nickname for this flower was the “open arse.” Mercutio is not one to shrink from using this term, although plenty of Shakespeare editions excise it. Even Open Source Shakespeare, my usual go-to, can’t stomach it, and substitutes “et cetera.”
Oh, and Mercutio chooses the poperin pear for a play on words with “pop her in.” Little did Mercutio know that, four centuries hence, the pear would come to represent an anal swab in the hands of a dutiful Chinese health worker at an airport customs checkpoint. Don’t shoot the messenger:
Mercutio: “Romeo, that she were, O, that she were
An open arse, and thou a poperin pear!
Romeo, good night: I’ll to my truckle-bed;
This field-bed is too cold for me to sleep:
Come, shall we go?”
Benvolio. “Go, then; for ’tis in vain
To seek him here that means not to be found.”
P.S. I wanted to let you all know that my recasting of Hamlet as the 2020 election is now up for sale as an e-book and paperback through this link.
‘Hamlet’s 2020 Vision; A recasting of Hamlet as the tragedy of the 2020 election,’ reimagines Hamlet as the 2020 election by substituting the main players on our national stage for the play’s original cast of characters. I think the result is highly entertaining, but it also provides surprising insights into our current predicament, and it gives readers a chance to enjoy Shakespeare’s great tragedy from an entirely new angle.
