High John de Conquer came to be a man,
and a mighty man at that.
But he was not a natural man in the beginning.
First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope,
a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song.
Then the whisper put on flesh.
His footsteps sounded across the world
in a low, but musical rhythm
as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum.
The black folks had an irresistible impulse to laugh.
High John de Conquer was a man in full,
and had come to live on the plantation
and all the slave folk knew him in the flesh.
The thousands upon thousand of humble people
who still believe in him,
that is, in the power of love and laughter to win
by their subtle power,
do John reverence by getting the root of the plant
in which he has taken up his secret dwelling,
and dressing it with perfume.
So the brother in black offers to these United States
the source of courage that endures and laughter.
High John de Conquer. You will know then,
that no matter how bad things look now,
it will be worse for those who seek to oppress us.
John de Conquer will be working for you,
from his secret place,
he is working for all America now.
We are all his kinfolks. Just be sure our cause is right,
and then you can lean back and say,
“John de Conquer would know what to do in a a case like this,
and then he would finish it off with a laugh”.
White America, take a laugh out of our black mouths, and win!
We give you High John de Conquer.
Zora Neale Hurston, 1943
Watching RFK jr defend his “anti-vaxx” agenda with a slightly sympathetic, yet misinformed hostess was painful. High John needed to turn down the heat in hell for Bobbie (like Conquer did for his friends), struggling to explain forty years of scientific research without soundbites and quips.
He needs to find that root and patchouli oil, because we aren’t going to debate our way out of this mind trap. She wasn’t persuaded and couldn’t be. A Minotaur Maze, that even a crystal ball can’t illuminate. Only humor penetrates the propaganda ear wax. Covid Tinnitus ensures ears of brass. Irony isn’t lost in the inner canal, for those with ears to hear.
Just say I’m for Safer Vaccines. No Mandates. Informed Consent. Few will know these are developmental dead end for most jabs. Even Dr. Proffit, the Rockstar of Inoculations, admitted as much. There’s no incentive to research, test and manufacture new, safer replacements for current childhood mandated vaccines, (or possibility) .
It’s an $8 billion a year guaranteed domestic market, every batch bought up by the federal government, hot lot or not, with no legal liability for harms. What’s not to love? Yet, we’re the crazy ones. You gotta laugh.
Antivaxxer’s are widely despised, because our evidence is siloed in a dust cloud. We can ‘splain, but they hear only lunatics raving. We might as well be autistic incoherents, or on the spectrum listing train schedules to car drivers.
The spear point of humor can pierce their bubble of certainty. Instead we’re the butt of derision. You, a netflixseries about a serial killer couple, provides a chuckle now and then over the rationalizations they make for having to off someone.
Typically their victims aren’t sympathetic characters, so when she kills an anti-vaxxer whose twin daughters spread measles to their baby boy who almost dies, the global audience presumably cheered. This poor schmuck didn’t have a chance to present his evidence for preventing harm to his child, after apologizing for the contagion of hers. She brained him that quick.
Women’s Voice, a free magazine promoting supplements and alternative health by naturopathic doctors I picked up in Good Earth, reported “deaths from heart attacks rose significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, reversing a downward pre-pandemic trend. The age group hit the hardest was people between 24 and 44, who saw a 29.9% increase in heart attack deaths over the first two years.” Well, they didn’t die from a coronary in 2020, because that year excess deaths among this cohort were from opiate overdoses.
WV is not a provaxx rag, like the AARP’s monthly magazine. In another article on preventing cervical cancer, they don’t even list getting the HPV vaccine series. Yet, these sudden deaths are mysterious only if the timeline is disguised. In 2021, the covaxxes caused sudden deaths among healthy younger people, heart attacks spiked after they were double tapped.
Women’s Voice brags their high gloss pages are from “well managed forests that protect forest health and fish and wildlife habitats”and recycled paper, so they’re covered by the sustainable woke code. Mothers with higher education and wealth were the first vaccine resistant fringe. Their school districts were called “crazy clusters” because more children had mandatory jab exemptions. When WV’s pronouns evolve into anti-vaxxer, then woke won’t be a joke.
Immune Resistance to Propaganda begins with a belly laugh. Humor strikes us as funny for many reasons, surprise, curious juxtapositions, schadenfreude, fright resolved, social politeness, us and them exclusion. The first time I got high on cannabis fifty years ago this summer, we bubbled over even when we rolled gutter balls in the bowling lanes. No rhyme or reason to our mirth. Smoking pot was never that hilarious again, and God Nose I’ve tried. Nowadays, it only brings an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile to my mug when I Praise High John de Conquer!
Zora Neale Hurston: You Don’t Know Us Negroes and other essays, edited by Henry Louis Gates. Jr. and Genevieve West, Amistad, 2022
COVID-19 and Cardiovascular Disease in Healthy Young Adults, Women’s Voice, Volume 20-U
Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022, Ed Dowd, Skyhorse Publishing, 2022