The detention of the World #1 and history's greatest tennis player and philosopher of the sport is an expression of a perverted form of meritocracy that has been emerging in liberal societies that has now crystallized in this depressingly unsurprising global political farce.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Granted a visa to enter Australia on the basis of an infection in the beginning of December and the natural immunity he now has, the locked-down and oppressed of the world once-again found meaning in the rallying cry of 'fairness, please god fairness to us all'. Their plight, misery and alienation plead upon the managers of the world to prevent this travesty of COVID decorum from being allowed to occur: 'how in the world are we supposed to now bear this indignity, it's a slap in the face to all Australians who have followed the rules'. And the rules say: only the vaxxed may enter.

And so, miles in the sky, the political maelstrom activated its most spineless political avatars to intervene in the situation so that, upon arrival, the world #1 was, rather than allowed to skip through the island prison colony's COVID defense network waving his middle finger in the sky, was, rather, detained, subjected to 10-hours of questioning and eventually denied entry. Consigned then to the flea-infested COVID-breeding chambers of a nearby hotel that has hosted refugees likewise prevented entry into the country, Djokovic has spent the past 4-days waiting for his hearing to appeal the decision. Finally, justice, as we are told by the New York Times and The Guardian, has been served: like the rest of us he is 'stuck in place, awaiting his fate'.

Never mind the fact that nearly all the 'science' upon which the locked-down and quarantined prison colony of Australia and its draconian border 'protection' depends upon has at this point been proven baseless (vaccines don't prevent transmission¹, protection wanes², masks don't make much difference³, and quarantining and locking-down create enumerable social, psychological and health problems all their own⁴). And never mind that, rather than being an expression of some kind of liberal egalitarianism of the enlightened Australian people, these political maneuvers and the explicit coercion they seek to effect ('he can leave at any time') exposes the rotten core of dishonest liberal politics whose real basis is in slander and smear. What this situation is most fundamentally exposing is the new form of COVID meritocracy that is now emerging through the logic of vaccine mandates, digital passports and myriad ways that movement and access to global liberal society is now being regulated and limited.

Not only are they not 'citizens' (as French President Macron has told us), not only are they sociopathic killers or democratic misanthropes with no moral concern for their fellow countrymen, but now their biological contamination that has not yet been purified by Pfizer becomes the basis for selecting for economic prosperity. Already, the way in which this is occurring at the level of the global population was beginning to become obvious in vast swathes of the Global South⁵. And already we had seen within the developed liberal West the way in which vaccine mandates were leading to worker's being fired from their jobs or being forced to resign, or of the way in which the laptop class has been able to continue working from home and prospering in an increasingly internet-mediated culture and economy. But never before has it become more obvious how profound this new meritocratic logic goes than now with this situation with Djokovic.

On the verge of surpassing Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer's 20-career grand slams and beginning a new tennis season where he hopes to again repeat the feat of last year where he nearly accomplished the Calendar Grand Slam, this COVID-19 farce is on the verge now of reshaping tennis history. And what does Nadal think about this? 'If the medical people say we should be vaccinated, we should be vaccinated'. It couldn't be more obvious what is going on here. Not only is Djokovic being used to perpetuate the farce of draconian liberal COVID restrictions by placating the hysterical COVID fanatics liberal governments have carefully cultivated over the past two years, but that farce is now being used to exclude certain types of tennis players from competition based on everything that has nothing to do with the sport itself. And while its easy to join in the liberal zombie hoard's latest phony argument about 'sovereign nations can do what they want; he can get vaxxed and enter or leave, his choice', the reality is that the baselessness of the COVID regime is mirrored again in the baselessness of Djokovic's visa rejection: he had a visa based in a medical exemption that resulted from natural immunity that had been approved before it was canceled mid-flight (not to mention the machinations of the government as they try to delay his hearing until after the deadline for entry into the Open)⁶. What is happening with Djokovic is precisely what is happening everywhere else in the COVID world: political coercion to effect the desired outcome of obedience to the State.

And so now, as Djokovic sits this morning to see whether or not justice will actually prevail, what is on the line isn't only his own individual liberty that has, like it has for so many countless billions, been repressed, oppressed, and suppressed; it is about whether or not we are going to allow the farce of the COVID-19 policy-by-metaphor to create an alternate timeline and history within which the greatest tennis player in history isn't actually the most talented player, but was actually the one who got a jab of Pfizer in his arm. And from that, an entire completely contrived and perverted meritocratic logic whose most profound principle no longer has to do with human ingenuity, creativity, or self-actualization; but whether or not, one is willing and able to give-up all those attributes and, functioning as machines in a simulacrum of free competition, perform the fiction that such freedom does in fact still exist for a population themselves no longer able to discern or remember the difference.

If that timeline isn't frightening, then one probably never did believe in human-being in the first place. To these people, rather, this entire perverse reality becomes the beginning of the possibility for their own slanderous, baseless, manipulated and handicapped success⁷. Yes, life has gotten hard, but has it really gotten that hard?

Apparently Nadal and Federer think it has.

Footnotes