Poor David's Irrelevant Almanack

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

-         Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

For a brief period, the Kansas State Board of Agriculture enjoyed national relevance. Its apotheosis occurred in 1874, when it faced down the Grasshopper Plague of the Great Plains. As plagues go, the Grasshopper did not rise to the destruction of the Bubonic or the Spanish Flu, although there were reliable reports of wool being eaten from the backs of live sheep and wooden tools being devoured.

The Ag Board swept into action and eventually defeated the voracious trespassers. The Rocky Mountain Locust is now extinct, the last one having been sighted in 1902. The Ag Board receded into prosaic domesticity, and now governs the quarantine of Noxious Weeds, such as the giant hogweed ( heracleum mantegazzianum ).

It is not an easy matter to maintain relevance. Yet once tasted, the desire to try appears to be an unusually tempting siren song. By some accounts, Coronarama Commissar Dr. Anthony F. Ouchey made more than 350 tee-vee appearances in 2020, on his way to becoming a national figure and media personality. As a new SARS-CoV-2 variant stimulated a reflexive overreaction, F. Ouchey instantly attempted to reprise his fame. The project failed. No more masked pitching at Washington Nationals games with national audiences.

So it has gone for countless others, whose prominence rested on a temporary edifice. Websites, floor sticker-manufacturers, local health officials cum tee-vee personalities in lab coats, bloggers, university apparatchiks, infectionographers, apocalyptic predictors and social media scold-trolls have all been scrambling for relevance.

Relevance can be a close cousin to necessity for innovation. As the grasshoppers chewed through Kansas, enterprising farmers devised clever tools to snag them from the fields, including this deceptively simple looking device that scooped up grasshoppers and deposited them in…….why, in a hopper, of course. Dozens were sold.

Relevance is the mother of innovation

The Kansas City Star reported that face-mask providers had by August 2020 snared approximately $346 million in revenue selling custom SARS-CoV-2 gear on Etsy.

But the quest to remain relevant can also lead to a curious by-product: exaggeration. At the zenith of coronarama, the world witnessed a number of interesting claims, including these chart-toppers:

·       40-70% of the world will become infected with SARS-CoV-2

·       SARS-CoV-2 protein bears a close similarity to HIV

·       Case Fatality Rate > 3% { actual CFR < 1% }

·       The appropriate response is to “lock down” entire countries

·       Once in a century pandemic comparisons to the 1918 Spanish Flu

In many of these exaggerations, the virus goes viral, rewarding the exaggerators with extended media coverage and professional relevance. Academicians measure the attention their work generates with a metric called an Altmetric Attention Score. The highly distorted  SARS-CoV-2 + HIV connection soared to a stratospheric Altmetric score before the paper was retracted.

Even today, inflated talk concerning SARS-CoV-2 is common, often emanating from lapsed coronalebrities seeking an encore audience. No less a worthy than Ms. Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, recently vaulted herself back into global relevance by locking down her entire island empire at the appearance of a single  SARS-CoV-2case.

Long before fake news and visual deep fakes, plains hustlers capitalized on the Grasshopper Plague by creating comedic enlargements of the ungainly insects. It was Kansas’ time to shine, and no exaggeration was off limits in the state’s quest for national attention. Even after the locusts were eradicated into extinction, photos of stupendous ears of corn and mutant tomatoes the size of automobiles were a feature of desperation on the flatlands.

The World’s Largest Prairie Dog may still reside in Oakley, Kansas.

Relevance is also the mother of exaggeration

Relevance-seeking lacks the dignity proper to human beings, whose corporeal existence is intrinsically transitory. Attention, fame and glory, should they visit us at all, are guests to be treated in the same manner as a head-cold. The visitors arrive and depart within a short time, and while they stay, there is little to be done except manage their effects. There is no encouraging extended or return visits, and to do so is to give warrant to a certain unseemliness.

The Rocky Mountain Locust is no more, the Kansas Board of Agriculture continues its humble work largely outside the publick view and Kansas farmers grow wheat in abundance, without grotesque claims of giant insects or produce. Dr. Anthony F. Ouchey and hundreds of other corona enthusiasts must also gradually accept their decreasing relevance as national figures. Their work is done.

As for the Almanack, it sputters on in moments of enlightenment and fulmination in equal proportion, never aspiring to prominence other than in the mind of its creator. That mindspace, it can be said definitively, is always perfectly irrelevant.