I cannot be the only one who is enjoying this.
Despite the disaster unfolding in intensive care units and the awful economic impact, the current crisis may be the best thing that’s happened in my lifetime. As a Boomer, I say this in the full knowledge that Covid-19 may kill me.
In part this is similar to the wartime generation’s refrain that WW2 provided the best years of their lives. (Mind you, the ones who said that never fought in the front line but were either civilians or had support roles in the armed forces.)
There is also an element of the same dark enjoyment that drives the popularity of movies and video-games about a zombie apocalypse, or any other end-of-days scenario, from War of the Worlds to Contagion (which I believe is currently the most in-demand movie on Netflix).
This darkness is the shadow of a larger feeling that society is failing, that we are being led to global catastrophe and that there is little we can do about it. Hence we live in a state of barely-suppressed rage, which feeds a desire to wipe the slate clean and also generates a thirst for justice and retribution.
The main focus for retribution should be the failure of political leadership that has been exposed in every continent. Totalitarian China first tried to suppress the truth, thereby ensuring the virus’s success, and now stakes its dictator’s survival on proving that only the strictest authoritarian control can save the people. If Xi Jinping succeeds, then China will complete its transition into Orwell’s nightmare 1984 state. If he fails, then he and his whole rotten system will fall. I vote for the virus.
In Russia, Putin has shown himself to be just as stupid as the Ayatollahs of Iran and the petty bureaucrats of Wuhan. The virus thrives on disinformation and will shortly demonstrate the limitations of the current Tsar’s power.
In America, Trump is being brought down by the one enemy he doesn’t know how to fight. No matter how much he insults and belittles the virus, it doesn’t care, it doesn’t stop and it is going to achieve huge success amidst a population that is particularly unhealthy and ill-informed.
The democratic anarchy of Italy and the bumbling of Boris are proving neither more nor less effective than most other systems in managing the disaster. Only the rigid conformity of Singapore, South Korea and Japan seem to offer any hope of success: and even they have no exit strategy.
Religion makes things worse. In several parts of the Muslim world, imams and the faithful believe that mass prayers will protect them, thereby ensuring that the virus (aka God or the devil) will correct their delusion.
The virus mostly kills old men. Fortunately, that covers most of the world’s leaders. If I believed in God, I would see this as Divine Judgement, or Comedy.
For a couple of years now I have been telling people that our societies and especially our cities are fragile and that a pandemic or a different global catastrophe will expose their vulnerabilities very soon. With this in mind I took my family to Dubai, saying that I wanted them to see it now because it won’t be there for very long. They thought I was exaggerating but if ever there was a monument to hubris, which deserves to have the giant portraits of its rulers replaced with the words of Ozymandias, “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair”, then Dubai is it.
I thought the most likely cause of collapse would be global warming, which is set to make most of the Gulf region uninhabitable within the next 30 years. What I hadn’t anticipated was that a relatively mild pandemic would do in two months what all the world’s governments could not achieve in twenty years.
The satellite pictures are unequivocal. The great concentrations of pollution in China and Northern Italy have dissipated as quickly as the contrails in the skies. Those in Flanders and elsewhere will soon follow. Even Greta Thunberg could not make our idiot rulers take quick and effective action: but a tiny virus that only kills about one in a hundred of us, has transformed all our so-called leaders into action heroes almost overnight.
Or so they would have us believe. If the eventual relaxation of lockdown measures leads to a resurgence in the virus, they will be universally seen as super-villains. From this, two wonderful outcomes may emerge. The first is a realisation that their malign incompetence is the true threat. The second is the discovery that real change is not just necessary but possible.
When the Black Death killed over a third of Europeans, it changed society in ways that ultimately benefitted most of the survivors. Feudalism died out, wages and social mobility increased and the church’s stranglehold on thought was broken. We can achieve even greater benefits at much lower cost.
Unless the virus mutates to a more lethal form that kills the young, we have the prospect of a corrupt old political order being swept away, dead or discredited. Their worship of economic growth may be seen for the idolatry that it is; their inability to own their mistakes and change their policies will be judged unpardonable; and the hold of religious fundamentalism can be weakened from the Bible Belt of the USA to the madrasahs of Iran. We may even come at last to recognise that there are too many of us, that our lifestyles are suicidal and that we must change if we are to avoid the fate of every parasite that kills its host.
The virus is neither our enemy nor our friend: but it can be the saviour of our species, if we are willing to learn from it.
Alan Brunstrom, Author Site 