Communicating When No-one Is Listening
Dr Alex Starling, HART writer
“This is a work of fiction… any resemblance to actual events, locales, organisations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental”.
Derek calls Yin at the national broadcaster again.
“We need to stop people questioning our lockdown policy… we will run a story comparing [this] to the Black Death. And release a daily stats bulletin exaggerating the number of people it has killed, using the questionable assumption that all deaths where the deceased tested positive for the virus within the past 30 days were indisputably caused by the virus. That should frighten people into compliance”.
“I’m not sure that’s wholly objective”, ponders Derek. “But I like it”.
Yin frowns, trying to remember what ‘objective’ means. “And we can also do a separate piece saying anyone who disputes the government narrative is a conspiracy theorist and probably also a fascist”, she continues.
Managing A Pandemic, published in 2025 by Berishmak
HART’s scribes and scribblers are a varied bunch, but we have emotions too – even those of us whose backgrounds lie in the physical sciences. One could even go so far as to observe pathological tendencies – not in the usual manner of the idiom – but moreover of repeatedly attempting the impossible, namely to overturn hysteria and confusion with facts and reason. Collectively, it can feel somewhat demoralising when – despite our best efforts – misunderstandings, confusions and outright lies continue to fester in the public consciousness.
This is not to say that we should not have taken the approach we did, but perhaps we should have realised that our overly sober approach was doomed if not to failure, then at least to – at best – moderate levels of success. Even a cursory glance through the history books should have made this abundantly clear. Human nature is such that breaking the hypnotic spell of a cosy consensus – or, for that matter, the collective delusion – of the day is hard to do by reason alone. And as the life and times of Franz Mesmer – and the quacks that promoted Mesmerism in Victorian times – also teach us, reason can flounder when so many others are muddying the waters.
We have therefore cast about for other approaches, and reached for alternative methods of writing. We have tried parables. We have reviewed works of literature and looked to read across our learnings. We have pointed to historical precedent. We have arbitrarily used literary mechanisms such as repeated repetition.
There is, however, an approach that we have not necessarily sought to maximise, which is that of dark comedy. Not that this is an easy path – as we all know, there is nothing so boring as a boring person trying to be funny. And for all our sparkling wit, we are not so presumptuous to assume that we can turn our hand to slapstick entertainment, even though we have occasionally dabbled with dark humour.
But given the fervour with which authorities fear being lampooned, perhaps we have been wrong not to maximise the use of this approach vector. There is a reason that there is at least one joker in every pack – imparting bad news is a job best left to the professionals. After all, why else did kings, rulers and despots employ a court jester?
This brings us to the subject of this article, which is a review – the latest in an ad hoc series of book reviews by the HART bulletin team – of a recently published work of satirical fiction entitled “Managing a Pandemic” by an anonymous author and published by Berishmak. The story is constructed loosely in the style of a Penguin Ladybird children’s story, with single page chapters accompanied by appropriately tasteless AI-generated artwork that nonetheless help reflect the dystopian picture being painted in the prose.
We have some quibbles. The very title is objectionable – as we have previously outlined, using the ‘p word’ as a noun implies the implicit acceptance of the mainstream narrative, therefore helping to justify the mainstream narrative that “something had to be done, though mistakes were made”. Yes, the usage of this single letter indefinite article (turning pandemic-the-adjective to pandemic-the-noun) is possibly the root of much of our troubles, though squabbling over this word has created farcical Monty Pythonesque sceptic-on-sceptic confrontation and – sadly – subsequent schism.
Argh. You can see why comedy does not come naturally to us. Paraphrasing a laugh-out-loud cult review from a simpler time, “the critics said [our] writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said [our] prose was mired in a sea of mixed metaphors”.
Thankfully, none of these criticisms can be levelled at the anonymous scribe behind Berishmak’s latest offering. In 37 one-pager chapters, this compact tome very clearly summarises the ridiculous s/State we find ourselves in, showing with bitingly cynical humour how a relatively small group of individuals imbued with a combination of ignorance, incompetence and greed can – when they find themselves nudging the levers of power – can ruin lives and livelihoods in a trice.
Never in the history of society was so much destroyed for so many by so few.
“Managing a Pandemic” is darkly cynical, but highly readable and rams the message home very clearly. It is the work of a satirical expert (given the authorities’ uncompromising approach to satirists, it is understandable why they seek to remain anonymous).
Buy this book and give it to the mockers and nay-sayers who have derided your lockdown scepticism over the years.
They may read it, and it may help save their lives the next time the state recommends them to do something incredibly stupid and harmful.
Managing a Pandemic was published in 2025 by Berishmak and can be purchased online. You will not be surprised to find it unavailable in all book shops, regardless of whether said book shops are good or bad.
