ON WHETHER HE WILL MASK HIS LOCKDOWN BEARD IN PUBLIC
“To be, or not to be: that is the question”.
Shakespeare’s line from Hamlet keeps echoing round the mind as I try to get my head round the debate over wearing surgical masks.
For most over 70’s like myself, who never saw the benefit, we are now continually asking, as Shakespeare did, “whether ‘ tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows . . . for by opposing them . . to die; to sleep”.
Indeed even before the Covid-19 health crisis the regular sight of citizens of other - mostly Far Eastern countries - wearing masks as an environmental protection, looked pretentious.
No self-respecting Irishman, or woman, would dare wear one, for fear of being called a poseur or a big cissy.
Now of course Covid has changed that, and masks look like becoming the normal dress code in public, just like a scarf in winter.
Soon we’ll have fashion parades on TV, showing the latest fabric designs in masks.
How long before the first bride walks down the aisle in a mask, causing the suspicious groom to unveil the mask to make sure he has the right girl.
We even have a whole new ‘do-ityourself ’ masks industry prospering to relieve the boredom of the lockdown, with fabric shops, like ‘ Trimmings’ in Clanbrassil Street showing their usual enterprise in meeting new customer demands.
The masks have one advantage for people, like myself, acting as a convenient camouflage against revealing the lockdown stubble until vanity permits or the nerve goes.
It would help us all of course if there was a bit more clarity in the expert advice available on the benefits of wearing the mask.
It doesn’t help the undecided either when some experts take to the airwaves to use the most basic analogy to reason why we all should be wearing masks in public.
“Look at it like this” one expert suggested “we should be looking at the mask like a pair of under pants, or knickers - they’re there to do a catch all job”.
Bet you never thought of that - and trust me, don’t dwell too long on the thought.
Maybe that’s the reason why we have never seen Leo, or indeed Dr. Tony or Boris wear one, and why Donald, stubbornly maintaining that infallibility, refusing point blank to wear one.
Not that anyone should be all the concerned about taking advice for Donald - he of the bird-brain cures - or Boris for that matter, for he changes his mind as often as his under pants.
There’s that reason again for wearing a mask.
Indeed it is interesting to see sections of the foreign media make comparisons between the leadership and medical advice we are receiving and that which the Americans and British have to endure.
One online site goes as far as to conclude that Ireland finds itself watching the two countries it knows best—Britain and the United States—with a partially justified (though rarely acknowledged) sense of schadenfreude.
What’s schadenfreude, well my limited vocabulary sent me scurrying to Collins to discover it’s “one person’s delight in another’s misfortune”. Now there’s one up for Leo.
The same article also makes the conclusion that many of us have reached long before now that the pandemic has seen the emergence of largely anonymous public-health experts as overnight celebrities, trusted authorities, and, to varying degrees, surrogate leaders.
In war, it is generals who vie with prime ministers and presidents for power and affection; today it is chief medical officers.
Not that everyone is entirely unhappy with Dr. Tony, for only a ten minute walk from government offices in Dublin a mural has gone up on the boarded-up window of a pub, paying tribute to the country’s leadership through the pandemic.
It depicts a balding, middle-aged man in a suit, opening his shirt to reveal a Superman-style top with the letters TH emblazoned across his chest.
This is our Dr. Tony the country’s chief medical officer—the man whose advice is at least partly responsible for shutting the pub in the first place.
The sudden prominence given to Dr Tony and his counterparts worldwide reveals as much about the political culture in which they operate as it does about the advice they have given.
Yet it also raises questions about the nature of leadership in modern crises — and the temptation among today’s leaders to avoid taking responsibility for the controversial decisions required to manage them.
Increasingly more and more contributors to newspapers and social media are starting to ask questions from the experts, like one letter writer to the ‘Irish Times’, in my own age category, who accepted that he may be obliged to wear a mask but was unhappy about the segregation in creches and schools, the removal of soft toys with the underlying subtext that unless they obey the children risk killing their grandparents.
The continued advice against attending churches services has also revealed an interesting dichotomy by which those who once argued against church interference in the State, now maintaining the clerical leaders are much too passive in arguing for the early reopening of churches.
You’re wrong if you interfere . . . and you’re wrong if you don’t.
Take your pick - it’s like wearing the mask.
It may save your life may not.
It may do a better job than your under pants - than again it may not.
Perhaps Shakespeare in Hamlet had it right all along for these are “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that we all encounter at this exceptional time of our lives. - then again it