For Misanthropes, Coronavirus is the Cure, Not the Disease

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama.  With Father’s Day coming up and social distancing measures being relaxed, Anne Joubert thought it would be nice if she and her husband Ted got together with their friends Bill and Jean Nielsen Saturday night.  “You would have thought I’d suggested we go to a leper colony,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief.  “He gets to go to work every now and then, I’ve been housebound for three months.”

Ted Joubert hasn’t previously been known to family and friends as a germ-o-phobe, but in the case of the Nielsen’s, he put his foot down.  “I’m not ready to start socializing until they’ve developed a vaccine that’s passed clinical trials and been extensively tested in a third-world country where massive loss of lives isn’t a big deal,” he says firmly.  “Why should I expose myself to the Nielsens, who for all I know are asymptomatic carriers as well as crashing bores?”

Ted’s fear of contracting the coronavirus masks a different, albeit psychological ailment he suffers from; he is an out-and-proud misanthrope who has reveled in his time of mandatory social isolation, even as others are tearing their hair out for lack of human interaction.

“Let’s face it,” he says to this reporter while watching the sweep second hand of his watch to make sure he doesn’t waste more than thirty seconds of his life on our encounter.  “Other people are vastly overrated, and to be completely fair about it, I don’t think it’s the rating system that needs fixing.”

A “misanthrope” is a person who hates or distrusts all people other than him or herself, a subset of the human race that has been the subject of great works of art such as “The Misanthrope” by Moliere and there may be another one I’ve forgotten about.  “Misanthropes get a bad rap,” says Egon Leonard, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Massachusetts-Seekonk.  “On the other hand, if you piss everybody off you tend to shrink your potential base of support.”

But Anne Joubert is nothing if not persistent, and her devotion to her marriage motivates her to prod her husband to tell her just what, exactly, he would like to do to celebrate Father’s Day after the obligatory mid-day phone calls from his sons.

“I think,” he says as he purses his lips in concentration, “I’d like to get together with 5,000 of my closest friends at Talladega Superspeedway to watch the Geico 500.”