Viral Alarm

 

This chapter of Viral Alarm — China Heritage Annual 2020 forms a bookend of sorts with ‘A Golden Monkey’s Journey to the East’, the essay with which we launched China Heritage on 1 January 2017. That meditation on US-China relations appeared in sardonic anticipation of the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. This ‘Trumpty Dumpty Denouement’ is published as a gleeful gesture of prolepsis.

For the moment, the Great Disrupter remains in orbit and there is little doubt that his constellation of malevolence will continue to ensnare the heart-minds of many long into the future. Meanwhile, we offer as a diversion two poems from the collection Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown: Verses for a Despotic Age, written and illustrated by John Lithgow.

The previous chapter in this series featured the words of Leonard Cohen: see ‘Democracy & The Future — 3 November 2020’.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
6 November 2020

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