Dear Mr. Virus,
You are small and nasty ; even if you have selected your effects, compared to your predecessors, you have caused a lot of sorrows and misfortunes ; you wanted to ruin our economies and, at the time of this writing, you can still expect to succeed. But as harmful as you are, I would also like to say thank you, may-be not the bottom of my heart, but all the same : thank you. Because you have opened my eyes to many things.
Thanks to you, we know today where we were taken to our taste of the perpetual novelty. The spectacle of the distress of our representatives remains a hard revelation. Without doubt the most evil one – this is the case to say that the gent progressive, you already know that she would lose the pedals at the first blow of tobacco, that they would prefer the verb to the action (it had been successful until then), that the mexican army of the accounting of our State had done the opposite of what they promised. You felt that we did not know even the manufacture of masks, that our stocks of all would be quickly exhausted, as we had more little plants.
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It is true, we have reserved a bad surprise : there are still among us women and men who devote themselves to the other, and your attempt to weaken us by throwing us in the legs a professor that looks like Buffalo Bill has, it seems, are over. However, for a microscopic organism, you have done more in eight weeks than cohorts of travellers of our crazy train shot for years to sound the alarm. And even if, during the summer, you disappear as you came, the shock wave of your work has not finished to feel : the heads are squabbling already, the sub-heads open their umbrella, the trade unions form trade unions without stopping, the Untamed and the Gathered national sniff the good deal, any parent of a student or customer of the bistro wants to assert his opinion on the general interest. You are " too strong ", as say our teens.
nothing To spoil, without having done Sciences Po, you're also a virtuoso of the figures, and, again, not the kind of “small arms”.
You need to have a good laugh, from the bottom of the cells and droplets where you find refuge, when you hear them chant that, wooden cross, iron cross, nothing will be as before. Your cousins, the black plague, the Spanish flu or the asian need to keep the coast with you, as many that are silent, fear in the souls of the dead from the "der des ders" and the victims of all the holocausts. And the profiteers of your work rub already the hands. Not true, Mr. Unemployment, Ms. social Unrest, Ms. Misery, or Ms. Malnourished ?
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nothing To spoil, without having done Sciences Po, you're also a virtuoso of the figures, and, again, not the kind of " small arms ". Yesterday, we emptied the deposits of masks to make 15 million in savings, you took away 5 euros for allowances to rebalance the accounts, we haggled the ammunition and the extra hours to our defenders lattice or in white coats, it involved regular two-dozen european heads of State to reduce deficits of 4% to 3%. You have compelled the same men to count in the hundreds of billions and to continually add shovelfuls, to promise not what they do not have, but which is not the case.
And again, we have proven to ourselves : not to die, we are ready to renounce to live, to adhere to the health and well-being and health officer without barguigner, to castigate the neighbor who toussote, to do more to reach out. Yet, we were the ones who were screaming to the dictatorship, picnicking on the roundabouts, and then snapped at the slightest frown of those who govern us. It makes modest, not true ?
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we have confirmed that our lost territories are for good, that the disarmament of our forces of law and order, prayer to enforce the act with "discernment" – and the predicted defeat of those who respect the rules have, this time, crossed a true cap. We have learned that it is too late.
Cunning and diabolical virus
I tell you, evil... or should I say evil. Congratulations for having started your journey in the Middle kingdom. This is the place where we lie and where we cheat the better, the one where a human life is nothing, the one where we had placed all our eggs. Here we are safe without... while there, we picked up and it makes us pay even more dearly for this globalization which was supposed to be happy. I think, Mr. the Virus, you don't know Serge Lama, but you do it beautifully sing one of his arias, the most well-known : "Cuckolds and happy ".
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I have to stop here, the list of what we owe you. I would have been able to add things benign that do, however, offer beautiful subjects of insomnia : you've swept all the Greta of the world, reminding us that nature is stronger than everything ; that there is an economy "vital" and another not (and, in passing, that the book belongs to the second category) ; that of a robot without a soul and without contact have a boulevard in front of them ; the toilet paper has regained its letters of nobility ; that I can't go to the bistro, etc
this is what I wanted to tell you, Mr. the Virus. You have done a wonderful job. You have given us what we deserve, revelations, fears, and questionings. To do more would perhaps be too much. Between the microscopic and the nothingness, you should be able to find your way.
*Thierry Lentz is a historian and director of the Fondation Napoléon.
