A long time ago I read an essay in the New Criterion whose title—“The apostle of inversion”—stuck with me. It was a review of Edmund White’s biography of the French writer, Jean Genet. I was reminded of this essay when I listened to Joe Rogan’s recent conversation with Dr. Peter Hotez. The description of Genet’s characters struck me as especially apt.
His [Genet’s] boys play at being girls, become girls; his maids become mistresses, his blacks wear white masks; and so it goes, good is bad and vice is virtue and betrayal is faith; everything is—in the end quite predictably—turned back to front and upside down….