In case any of you were wondering how Michael Leunig is coping with the various machinations of a global pandemic and the scientifically-proven methods of germ and virus transmission between human beings, the answer is “about as normally as you’d expect.”
Leunig, who long revealed to the world through his art the he suffers from severe brain worms, has today put his own spin on a Christmas season being spent under pandemic conditions. This time, the 75-year-old cartoonist is seemingly suggesting that people expel droplets and vapours via their mouths during all sorts of normal Yuletide activities, which… look, to be honest I have absolutely no bloody idea what his point in this one is.
The cartoon, which was published in today’s print editions of both The Age and Sydney Morning Herald (both of which are a part of Nine Entertainment Co., of which this publication is also a part of) features Leunig characters in various stages of festive observance spraying droplets all over their unsuspecting kinfolk.
Yet another tilt at the ‘plandemic’ from Leunig. pic.twitter.com/6cgC6mnD9n
— Jack the Insider (@JacktheInsider) December 13, 2020
If you’re struggling to see the point being made there, you’re certainly not alone. I am stumped.
Is he suggesting that coughing droplets all over people is a fine and normal facet of everyday life? Is he suggesting that it’s somehow not a major factor in the human-to-human transmission of COVID-19? Is he making some sort of half-baked point about lockdowns being arbitrary? Or is he just doing that stupid fucking Leunig thing that he always does where he flits and flops around whatever asinine point he’s actually trying to make without ever saying it out loud directly, thereby giving him the coward’s backdoor of Tut Tut-ing and So Much For Tolerance-ing his way out of things when he gets rightfully harangued for being a miserable old crank who does and says miserable old crank things?
Hard to say this time around.
In Leunig’s world, though, it’s pretty apparent that “spooky airborne droplets and germ particles for Christmas” are merely flights of fancy, and not nearly the major public health concern that epidemiologists and health experts have patiently been screaming to us all year long.
Thank the ever-loving fuck for newspaper cartoonists. Wherever would we be without them.
