The End of the Parade

There’s not much to say about horse dewormer, not really. The absurdity of it, the metaphorical potential, is built-in. Reality superseded satire years ago; we’re all living in a comic wasteland now.

Everything’s been spinning out of control for what seems like forever. Not one, but two extinction-level events threaten us, not to mention a third that’s been hanging over our heads since 1945, before most of us were even born. That all three are of our own making shows that we don’t need to wait for a meteor to finish the job.

You can argue that one of them is truly a force of nature, but just as truly, we had the ability to deal with it long before we had the means to prevent it, and now, long after we’ve had the means to prevent it, a significant minority of people are reaching for horse dewormer instead, and we’re looking at another winter that may look like last winter.

Only, if you can imagine it, worse. It’s not just that hospitals are overwhelmed again — it’s also that the people who work at those hospitals, the ones who have to deal with it, and more of it, than the rest of us, are burning out, calling it quits. It’s not like there’s a line of trained medical personnel waiting to take their places.

And the people insisting on taking horse dewormer, they’re also the ones insisting on gathering unprotected in mass groups, the ones insisting on sending children to unprotected schools, the ones who pride themselves on becoming human petri dishes for whatever the next Darwinian variant will be that finally overwhelms the protection we developed for the last variant.

There’s not much to say about them except that they’re sociopaths and psychotics, completely divorced from reality, inmates of humanity creating an Arkham America that the rest of us are doing our best to survive.

And that’s really what this is about: The rest of us, and how we’re going to survive this mad world of horse-dewormer aficionados, the world they’ll have left us when Darwin has finished with them.

In the Mr. Peabody intro that came to mind, after the horses and elephant and dancing ladies have passed, it’s the janitor who’s left to clean up after the parade. Only after a real parade, it’s not scattered flower petals that remain. It’s piles of horseshit.