Reset or Renaissance

Reset or Renaissance: Life, Liberty, and the Quest for Enlightenment in a Post-Covid World

Lest we Forget . . .

Reset or Renaissance offers a real-time chronicle of events unfolding during the heated core of the Covid pandemic: the latter half of 2021, shortly after the rollout of the Covid vaccines. The book is no dull factual affair, but an impassioned critical engagement, distinctly literary in style, that offers a broader and deeper understanding of the scientific, sociopolitical, and spiritual dimensions of the Covid moment.

Combining documentary poetics with rigorous analysis of the flood of Covid misinformation, this volume records one American citizen’s concerted attempt to make intellectual and moral sense of a tumultuous time that shook the foundations of the world.

The historic drama surrounding Covid continues to unfold. Daniel Polikoff aims to translate knowledge of the recent past into a vision of the future guided by truth rather than illusion, perspicacity rather than prejudice, and conscience rather than calumny.

C O N T E N T S:

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction

PART I: THE OPENING SETUP
1. March Snow Storm
2. Setting the Scene for Covid-19: Early (Non-)Treatment
3. Some Pretty Bad Actors: Avenues of Pharmaceutical Influence
4. Deadening Dialogue: Science, Society, and (What?) Freedom of Speech
5. “Safe and Effective”—The Whole Truth, and Nothing But?
6. Newsbreak: A Federal Lawsuit and Data Analyst Jane Doe
7. Dissing Democracy: Power and Misinformation
8. Newsbreak: Holding the Line: Journalists against Covid Censorship
9. Lines of Force: Undermining the Commons
10. Newsbreak: A Journalistic Conflict of Interest? Reuters, Pfizer, and the TNI
11. The Tale of the Untold: Current (Adverse) Events
12. Action Alert: A Letter within a Letter
13. Two Roads

PART II: INCREASING F(R)ICTION
14. A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated?
15. A Colossal Blunder
16. The Ivermectin Angle
17. Newsbreak: “You Are Not a Horse”
18. The Emperor’s (Not-So-) New Clothes
19. The Right Way to Fight Viruses
20. ICU Interlude: In-hospital Mistreatment
21. Newsbreak: A Window on Pandemic Politics
22. Closing Argument: McCullough et al. versus the ACLU

PART III: INFLECTION POINT
23. The President versus We, the People
24. More Scary: In the Belly of the Healthcare Beast
25. The People’s Eyewitness: Deb Conrad and the VAERS Scandal
26. A Dirty, Not-So-Little Secret: America’s Impending Healthcare Crisis
27. Joining the Ranks

PART IV: ENDGAMES
28. Mountains of Power: From Rome to Slab City
29. Abbot of Unreason, Lord of Misrule
30. Losing Strategy
31. Biodynamics versus Vaccine-Distance

PART V: POST-MORTEM
32. Who Will Help Us?
Who Will Help Us?
33. The Matrix
34. Fantasy Football: Pitching the New Normal
35. The Crumbling Wall
36. The Real Anthony Fauci

PART VI : POSTSCRIPT I
Covid World, August 2023

PART VI I : POSTSCRIPT II
The Kennedy Candidacy and the Anatomy of Pro-Vax Prejudice

PART VI I I : CODA
“Prague” (A Poem)

Notes
Index

About the Author

Daniel Joseph Polikoff, PhD, is a poet, translator, and independent scholar. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and his Diploma in Waldorf Education from Rudolf Steiner College. In addition to work in numerous literary journals and anthologies, he has published two collections of poetry (Dragon Ship and The Hands of Stars) as well as Parzival/Gawain: Two Plays, his edited translation of a dramatic version of the Grail legend. Dr. Polikoff has taught literature in Waldorf schools and shared his passion for Rilke in a wide variety of venues, including the Festival of Archetypal Psychology at Notre Dame (where the idea was born for his book In the Image of Orpheus); the San Francisco Jung Society; and seminars in literary circles. He has also taught at Sonoma State University, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and Pacifica Graduate Institute.