Plague Mask Quotes

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask...A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?

Why are you doing this?" I asked as I turned and looked at her. "Because I can lay here and no one will know I'm crying," she said, looking up at the sky. I felt a pain in my heart when she said that. She was out here, in the pouring rain, to mask the tears that plagued her face.

The character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation. Of which I will state only one instance: When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows (Numbers xxxi. 13): 'And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, 'Have ye saved all the women alive?' behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, 'kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women- children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for Yourselves.' Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters. Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers, one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in the hands of an executioner: let any daughter put herself in the situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read, or for decency to hear.

Not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'.

You see, a plague doctor isn’t much of a doctor at all. We’re the ones left behind after all the real doctors leave. We tally the dead. We hold hands and stand sentry at bedsides. When the rest of the world flees, we become the unfortunate mask of any remaining humanity.

You've come all the way from London just for a joke, then?" I asked. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised." "No, no, my reason is of much greater importance. The entire city is in chaos. Buildings collapsing, streets flooding, the population plague-stricken, the Thames ablaze. But it was when an orphan boy I rescued from the rubble asked me, with his dying breath, 'Why did this all have to happen, sir? Why did Miss Wyndham leave?' that I solemnly promised to bring you back and restore peace.

In the Queen’s dream she ran hazily through an emerald mist. Behind her trailed caricatures of elves. Their bodies were shadows, long and twisted. Just one of their strides covered two of hers. They were like harlequins, and their smiles gleamed white as they fired arrows that left bare trails in the Nixus. She looked over her shoulder just as an arrow sliced at her face and severed locks of her scarlet hair. Her bones made an unpleasant jolt as the Queen hit what felt like a wall. A great shadow towered over her, its face a porcelain white mask. Unlike the elves, however, the figure did not smile. Claws plucked her from the fog as if she were a child’s toy, and the shadow's mask flipped open, revealing a familiar face.

Whenever any of them spoke through the mask, the muslin bulged and grew moist over the lips. This gave a sort of unreality to the conversation; it was like a colloquy of statues.

A plague rides on the air here. The smell of rot! This is Doal's realm. Can't you feel it? The keep is doomed, don't you see? No, I will not pass through this gate. There is a disease in there I will not touch.

She used to recite the poem as a schoolgirl in England until she heard that it derived from the Great Plague of London in 1665. Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.

Perhaps rooted in repudiation of President Trump’s less-than-full endorsement of masks, people were now full-blown zealots about masks, evidence be damned! They were so deeply, so emotionally, committed to the power of masks that facts literally did not matter to these people.

It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening.

It was always at the edges of our perception. Power out, technology slipping away, one aspect, then another. We've seen it happening repeatedly, this country and elsewhere, storms and wildfires and evacuations, typhoons, drought, dense fog, foul air. Landslides, tsunamis, disappearing rivers, houses collapsing, entire buildings crumbling, skies blotted out by pollution. I'm sorry and I'll try to shut up. But remaining fresh in every memory, virus, plague, the march through airport terminals, the face masks, the city streets emptied out.

No medicine and none of the vaccines developed then could prevent influenza. The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could. Nothing today can cure influenza, although vaccines can provide significant—but nowhere near complete—protection, and several antiviral drugs can mitigate its severity. Places that isolated themselves—such as Gunnison, Colorado, and a few military installations on islands—escaped. But the closing orders that most cities issued could not prevent exposure; they were not extreme enough. Closing saloons and theaters and churches meant nothing if significant numbers of people continued to climb onto streetcars, continued to go to work, continued to go to the grocer. Even where fear closed down businesses, where both store owners and customers refused to stand face-to-face and left orders on sidewalks, there was still too much interaction to break the chain of infection. The virus was too efficient, too explosive, too good at what it did. In the end the virus did its will around the world.

A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask. An Elephant in her disguise as a human princess, a Scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch’s hat, a Wizard’s showbiz display, a cleric’s stole, a scholar’s gown, a soldier’s dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?

Suddenly the world began to wither and blacken, rapidly secreting from itself a hallucinatory dusk that infected all things. The plague of dusk expanded venomously and insidiously in all directions, creeping from one thing to another; whatever it touched at once decayed, blackened and disintegrated into rot. People fled from the dusk in silent panic, but the leprosy soon caught up with them, smearing a dark rash across their foreheads. They lost their faces, which fell away in great, shapeless stains, and so they went on, without features, without eyes, dropping mask after mask along the way, until the dusk teemed with those abandoned larvae, scattered behind them.

March 1898 What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul. They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike! They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels. I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... and the girl in the next doorway was also masked... and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring... I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive. Their vitreous eyes were looking at me... I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... so that every one of them appeared to be squinting. Am I to be haunted by masks now?

Capps did write the JAMA article. He reported finding the masks so successful that after less than three weeks of experimenting he had abandoned testing and simply started using them as “a routine measure.” He also made the more general point that “one of the most vital measures in checking contagion” is eliminating crowding. “Increasing the space between beds in barracks, placing the head of one soldier opposite the feet of his neighbor, stretching tent flags between beds, and suspending a curtain down the center of the mess table, are all of proved value.” To prevent a few arriving individuals from infecting an entire camp, he also repeated Welch’s recommendation to isolate transferred troops.

rhyme jumped into Sienna’s mind: Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. She used to recite the poem as a schoolgirl in England until she heard that it derived from the Great Plague of London in 1665. Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.

You have no idea what this country truly is, my carefree young mistress. You've only shed tears for another dress you could not get, another dance you were denied, another piece of jewelry you lost. Do you know what starvation can do to a proud soul? Do you know the thoughts that injustice can bring to the innermost parts of a person's mind? No. You avoid beggars on the street as if they are plagues - instead of humans who wish they could be born to your birth; you enjoy your winter ice cream by the fireplace while hundreds of those ones whom you call 'dregs' are freezing to death on the street; you enjoy the feeling of superiority you get from bestowing your charity on those who receive it in trade for their pride. You don't care to give a thought to their pain or frustration when they have to wear their ingratiating smile as a mask. This world judges people not by their deeds, their talents, or their morals - only by their birth and wealth.

You make me afraid,” she murmured one morning when he came back to sit beside her on the bed. “The thought plagues me that I will see you slain and, like your mother, will have to flee to find a haven for our babe.” “By the grace of God, madam, I will prove wiser than my enemy.” He lay back across the bed, resting his head in her lap while he reached up a hand to caress softly her smooth, flat belly through the light fabric of her nightgown. “I have a fancy to see our offspring and plant other seeds where this one grows, so you needn’t fret that I’ll be foolhardy, my love.” Erienne ran her fingers through his hair. “I hope the hour quickly approaches when you may give up the mask and guise. I want to tell the world and all the women in it that you’re mine.” She shrugged lightly. “ ’Twould not overburden me to tell my father of our marriage, either.” Christopher chuckled. “He’ll croak.” Erienne giggled and leaned over him. “Aye, that he will. Louder than any wily toad that e’er’s been born. He’ll stamp and snort and claim injustice, but with your babe growing in me, I doubt that anyone will lend an ear to the question of annulment.” Her eyes gleamed with twinkling humor. “Besides, what suitor would look twice at me when I’ve grown fat with child?” Christopher raised up on an elbow and leered at her. “Madam, if you think your father or any suitor could get past me to try to separate us, then let me assure you that the highwaymen have not yet seen such a wrath that I would display should that happen.” His brow raised in question. “Do you doubt what I say?” Erienne gave a flirtatious shrug, then rolled to the edge of the bed and bounced to her feet with light, lilting laughter floating behind her. Before she could catch up her robe, however, Christopher swung around the end of the bed and caught her close against him, slipping his arms around her waist and holding her tightly to him. Their lips met in a long, slow kiss of love, and after he drew away it was a full moment or more before Erienne opened her eyes to find the grayish-green ones smiling into hers, and her arms tightly clasped about his neck. “I believe you,” she breathed unsteadily. -Erienne & Christopher

We have evoked the curious presence, in the empty city, of the armed guards and of the two characters whose identity it is now time to reveal. Francesca Falk has drawn attention to the fact that the two figures standing near the cathedral are wearing the characteristic beaked mask of plague doctors. Horst Bredekamp had spotted the detail, but had not drawn any conclusions from it; Falk instead rightly stresses the political (or biopolitical) significance that the doctors acquired during an epidemic. Their presence in the emblem recalls 'the selection and the exclusion, and the connection between epidemic, health, and sovereignity'. Like the mass of plague victims, the unrepresentable multitude can be represented only through the guards who monitor its obedience and the doctors who treat it. It dwells in the city, but only as the object of the duties and concerns of those who exercise the sovereignity. This is what Hobbes clearly affirms in chapter 13 of De Cive, when, after having recalled that 'all the duties of those who rule are comprised in this single maxim,"the safety of the people is the supreme law"', he felt the need to specify that 'by people we do not understand here a civil person, nor the city itself that governs, but the multitude of citizens who are governed', and that by 'safety' we should understand not only 'the simple preservation of life, but (to the extent that is possible) that of a happy life'. While perfectly illustrating the paradoxical status of the Hobbesian multitude, the emblem of the frontispiece is also a courier that announces the biopolitical turn that sovereign power was preparing to make.

Even if we do not suffer from religious mania, unrequited love, loneliness or jealousy, most readers can identify with Burton’s account of information overload over three centuries before the invention of the internet, an extraordinary broadside which is worth quoting in full: I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland &c. daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news.37 And that way, Burton reminds us, that way madness lies…

In a world devoted to the satisfaction of private wants, the good life can be at best a marginal concern, an affair of eccentrics and enthusiasts. Its adherents are liable to be plagued by the thought that they are not 'up to' the pressures of competition, that their ideals are a mere mask for failure. Thus, although it is true that a liberal society permits any number of visions of the good life, it is by the same token hospitable to none of them.

but at heart, he was still a coward which he masked by being a bully. 

Society is only a thin veneer that masks the animal that man really is’, or

The smell of smoke and sulfur. Three figures in the distance. The masks that the doctors wore, painted in black and white. They carry large machines, Lavinia gasping on the floor. I am not alone here. I am not alone. Not alone.

This is the gift I bring for you now, my brother,’ he breathed, his metallic voice rattling against the strictures of his corroded rebreather. ‘The gift that only I could bring, the reason the god set me here, in this place, at this time.’ He closed his hooked fingers over the bastion, snuffing it out, masking it with his sealed fist. ‘The last sensation you will ever have. The last emotion you will ever feel. And you will understand, in your soul, who gave it to you, and why you remain powerless against it.’ The sun slipped away, drenching the entire Palace in darkness. All that remained was the vice, the grip, the merciless application of pressure. ‘Despair,’ rasped Mortarion, ascended daemon-king of life and death, plague-maker, hope-ender. ‘I send you despair.

They weren’t books meant to be taken seriously. They were supposed to be an escape from the everyday reality that plagued them, and that was why Mercia adored them so. No matter how terrible her life got, the books were always there, ready to take her somewhere else.

The government insists that the many shall not be placed in danger for the few and that EVERYONE SHALL WEAR A MASK. Those who are not doing so are not showing their independence - they are showing their indifference for the lives of others

Especially in times of unrest, it is advantageous for these corporations if the masses are angrier at one another for not masking or distancing than they are at those above them in the economic hierarchy.

Sorry, I just had to think of something I read about the last few years before the Fall. There was a worldwide plague that could only get so bad because people were so trump back then. Simple cloth masks in front of their faces could have saved most of them, but they refused them for fashion or convenience." Kyara shook her head. "A legend, nothing more. No one can really be that stubborn.

That fact was not acknowledged by government officials until nearly a month later; instead, authorities instructed the medical staff not to wear masks or gowns because they might give rise to panic.

There’s a charge to being around Duncan, like one of those light bulbs you touch in the science museum that make your hair stand up, and we hadn’t stopped talking—urgently—since I arrived. We bounced from topic to topic, frantically, like fast friends excited to find someone else who also wanted to talk about religion, mysticism, sex, ghosts, and drugs. We sat down next to the incense like two kids in a dorm room trying to mask illegal aromas, and Duncan hit Record. I told him I wasn’t used to things getting so deep and so interesting so quickly. “That’s what happens when you’re with cool people,” Duncan said. “You end up getting in great conversations.” I wondered in this moment if Duncan knew how unique he was. I wondered if he knew how bored and dismissive people can be when you try to talk about dreams, or out-of-body experiences, or the afterlife, or if you suggest that the physical world is only just a small piece of what’s really going on here. “The plague of the world is that so many people allow themselves to be surrounded by vampires,” Duncan said, using the classiest monster as a word to describe all the what-you-see-is-what-you-get people, the ones who are busy cockblocking the curious weirdos from tripping out on their basic wonder. “Their whole life is one shit conversation to the next to the next to the next until they’re on their deathbed, and that’s the one real conversation they have. They finally say, ‘I love you so much!’ And then they die.” This is Duncan, the opposite of a vampire. He doesn’t drain life from people, he infuses them, resuscitating their awe and bringing color back to their cheeks. The vampires, he warned, “will keep you stuck in the harbor of sorrows. They’ll try to keep your fucking anchor down.” I cackled with laughter. Duncan is one of those rare people who remind you that we’re all here, stuck in our human bodies, confused and curious since we all emerged from the interdimensional space portal commonly known as a vagina. He wants to get into it; he wants to touch, taste, scream, laugh, and sing his way toward enlightenment, and as I sat with him that day, he made me think he just might bring me along with him.

Propaganda that tied Jews to unhealthy and unnatural sexuality made it easier for Christians to blame them for the spread of disease. For instance, according to Sennett, when Venice suffered a syphilis epidemic, the city relied on its Jewish doctors to treat the disease, but at the same time blamed them for its spread: in 1520, the Venetian surgeon and scientist Paracelsus attacked the city’s Jewish doctors who “purge [syphilitics], smear them, wash them, and perform all manner of impious deception.” Jewish doctors who treated victims of disease—syphilis, leprosy, and especially plague—often wore distinctive clothing designed to protect the doctor from the vapors thought to spread the disease—a precursor of the iconic bird-beaked plague doctor’s mask that developed in the seventeenth century. Because many doctors in Venice were Jewish—especially those called upon to treat the victims of communicable diseases—this strange costume and its associations with disease and death became associated with Jews. The resulting aversion culminated in 1516 in the physical segregation of Venetian Jews in the district after which isolated ethnic neighborhoods have been named ever since, the industrial ward named for the Italian verb “to pour,” or gettare: the ghetto.

The mask resembles a plague doctor’s mask with emerald polypropylene eye lenses. It has a long beak-like nose to allow excess pollution to linger. The nose is connected to a series of distributor cables tucked under the bar. The designer ones are made from real leather and on some occasions, endangered animal skulls and other fine materials.

Society is only a thin veneer that masks the animal that man really is’,

The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert’s hand—notably short on its middle and ring fingers—reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love.

That seductive aroma of unchecked power was more than enough to commit genocide and mass sexual assault while unashamedly carrying their nation’s flag draped around a crucifix. People completely devoid of introspection, flaunting their entitlement and a self-importance that masked an endless pit of dejection that demanded more gold, land, and power. The Spanish crown was a plague of miserable dimensions for Chamorros.

Nevertheless, I was warned by several prominent medical scientists, well-meaning colleagues, and friends that I should stay silent about masks. Their rationale was based on the idea that people would never accept evidence that masks are not effective. They told me people desperately needed to feel like they had some control, and the simple face covering, absurd pseudoscience or not, provided it.

In sum, the evidence shows that masks did not control rises in infections from COVID-19. Yet anyone questioning the efficacy of broad mask mandates was subjected to vilification and outright censorship.

We had a row about it, actually. She claimed Drek had nothing to do with Jewish people, that he was a kind of chaotic demon and she’d been inspired by a plague doctor’s mask, but I mean, we all need to examine our unconscious biases, right?

While Leonardo lived in Milan, a terrible disease spread through the city, killing thousands of people. Its victims got black spots all over their bodies before they died. People named the disease the black death. Today we call it the bubonic plague. At one time, the plague wiped out about a third of the people in Europe. In Renaissance cities like Milan, sewage ran in the streets. Rats and their fleas were everywhere. Infected fleas bit people and infected them as well. In Italy in the 1600s, doctors wore beaked masks stuffed with herbs they thought would protect them from the plague. We’re not sure if the masks were used in Leonardo’s time. Leonardo knew that Milan was not healthy. So he planned a special city, where people could live better and cleaner lives.

She gazed over her oxygen mask at the small, smiling Christmas tree that sat on the table behind her.  Tonight, the whirling sound of the disk in the drive was a song that was sweeter than any lullaby.

Enemies to God’s truth are to be found within as well as outside the church. “There is no plague more destructive to the Church than when wolves go about under the mask of shepherds,” Calvin wrote.

Because his men wanted to bite, fuck, and eat. The captives represented something for his men: They were avatars of a poisoned and progressive world. Educated, which meant they were against hard work, against blisters on your hands, against calluses on your feet. Science-minded, which meant they were against God. Experts, which meant they were liars. Diverse, which meant they were against the supremacy of whiteness. To his men, to the Creel Coalition, the captives were the reason the world fell in the first place. Creel told them so. Said this was the CDC. This was where White Mask was made, and released. A bioweapon. A leaked plague. Devil-born, evil-endorsed.

But the virus, even as it lost some of its virulence, was not yet finished. Only weeks after the disease seemed to have dissipated, when town after town had congratulated itself on surviving it—and in some places where people had had the hubris to believe they had defeated it—after health boards and emergency councils had canceled orders to close theaters, schools, and churches and to wear masks, a third wave broke over the earth.

Federal, municipal, and state courts closed. Giant placards everywhere warned the public to avoid crowds and use handkerchiefs when sneezing or coughing. Other placards read “Spitting equals death.” People who spat on the street were arrested—sixty in a single day. The newspapers reported the arrests—even while continuing to minimize the epidemic. Physicians were themselves dying, three one day, two another, four the next. The newspapers reported those deaths—on inside pages with other obituaries—even while continuing to minimize the epidemic. Health and city workers wore masks constantly.

No, Kinsey was no scientist; he was a sex cult leader—utterly psychotic and vicious. His carefully engineered short hair and bow tie mask could not change that.

But the virus, even as it lost some of its virulence, was not yet finished. Only weeks after the disease seemed to have dissipated, when town after town had congratulated itself on surviving it—and in some places where people had had the hubris to believe they had defeated it—after health boards and emergency councils had canceled orders to close theaters, schools, and churches and to wear masks, a third wave broke over the earth. The virus had mutated again. It had not become radically different. People who had gotten sick in the second wave had a fair amount of immunity to another attack, just as people sickened in the first wave had fared better than others in the second wave. But it mutated enough, its antigens drifted enough, to rekindle the epidemic. Some places were not touched by the third wave at all. But many—in fact most—were.

Unless the weather broke, it would not be long before the plague that had killed his parents arrived and the physicians departed in haste for the countryside, leaving the sick to the quacks and charlatans who were only too eager to put on plague masks and take their places. That fearful, hateful disease could fly through houses and streets and wards like a carrion crow, spreading its poison and sparing neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor.

But in this rain at night they rest from their perfections, they lay aside for a few hours their paper masks. And one can contemplate them with a curious absence of indignation or criticism. There is something warm and intimate about the vision of many people sleeping in the beds above the darkened store fronts of this little street. Their bodies have been in the world so long—almost as long as the stones out of which their houses are made. So many things have happened to them, so many debacles and monsters and horrors have swept them off their feet … and always they have kept on—persisting through floods, volcanic eruptions, plagues and wars.

And on Hijacking of Contemporary Islam, And the last of Brethren Kings. Is King Fahd of the Saudi Arabs, Who pretends to be fighting terrorism. With abundant petro-dollars. Allied with vicious imperialism. Oppressing freedoms and scholars. A most subtle mask indeed. As the mighty rich Saudis, Plagued with tribal family greed, Are hijackers of Islam, In fact audacious King Fahd, Recently declared a real sham, As he went on attacking Islam, Using terms of monarchial deceit, Calling it a government by the elite, Devoid of Western-style Democracy, What ignorance, what hypocrisy! A self-serving declaration, For a dictatorial theocracy, So now the Saudis are carving out. Their "Hypocritical Protocol," Bringing down their entire nation. Under Saudis' solid control, With their polygamist breeding wives. Delivering thousands of Saudi lives, As a one-famliy-government body. Of corrupt men with dozens of wives, No longer armed with daggers and knives, Thanks to their loyal imperial powers, Their arms are missiles and radar towers, Whence their grip on political power, While thoughts of democracy and freedom leave them ill- tempered and even sour.

Seattle, like many other places, became a masked city. Red Cross volunteers made tens of thousands of masks. All police wore them. Soldiers marched through the city’s downtown wearing them.

Ironically, given the high-tech quality of the diagnostic and monitoring effort, the containment policies were based on traditional methods dating from the public health strategies against bubonic plague of the seventeenth century and the foundation of epidemiology as a discipline in the nineteenth century—case tracking, isolation, quarantine, the cancellation of mass gatherings, the surveillance of travelers, recommendations to increase personal hygiene, and barrier protection by means of masks, gowns, gloves, and eye protection. Although SARS affected twenty-nine countries and five continents, the containment operation successfully limited the outbreak primarily to hospital settings, with only sporadic community involvement. By July 5, 2003, WHO could announce that the pandemic was over.

The gauze masks Capps was so proud of, the masks Welch had praised, were no longer being made; Capps ran out of material and personnel to make them. The medical staff itself was collapsing from overwork—and disease. Five days into the epidemic five physicians, thirty-five nurses, and fifty orderlies were sick. That number would grow, and the medical staff would have its own death toll. Seven days into the epidemic soldiers still capable of work converted nine more barracks into hospitals. There were shortages of aspirin, atropine, digitalis, glacial acetic acid (a disinfectant), paper bags, sputum cups, and thermometers—and thermometers that were available were being broken by men in delirium.

However, the opinions of experts had always been divided on this matter. For greater safety all sanitary workers wore masks of sterilized muslin. On the face of it, the disease should have extended its ravages. But, the cases of bubonic plague showing a decrease, the death-rate remained constant.

polite society is just a paper thin veil that masks the true animal nature of man”. 

Making love in a mask . . . a real turn-on that would be.