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Tom E ngelhardt
America’s two pandemics And how they mixed and matched
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Art: From Year of the Plague
magine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The famed author of Robinson Crusoe – Defoe claimed it had been written by the fictional Crusoe himself – was five years old in 1665. That was when a year-long visitation of the bubonic plague decimated London. It probably killed more than 100,000 of that city’s residents or 15 percent of its population. As for Defoe, he published his “journal” in 1722, 57 years later. He wrote it, however, as if he (or his unidentified protagonist) had recorded events as they were happening in the way that all of us, whatever our ages, have been witnessing the ravages of the many variants of Covid-19 in our own alltoo-dismantled lives. Still, give Defoe credit. As a grown-up, he may not have lived through the worst version of a plague to hit that capital city since the Black Death of 1348. He did, however, capture much that, four centuries later, will seem unnervingly familiar to us, living as we are in a country savaged by a pandemic all our own. We can only hope that, 57 years from now, on a calmer planet, some 21st-century version
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ColdType | March 2022 | www.coldtype.net
of Defoe will turn our disaster into a memorable work of fiction (not that Louise Erdrich hasn’t already taken a shot at it in her new novel, The Sentence). Sadly, given so much that’s happening right now from the mad confrontation over Ukraine to the inability to stop this world from heating to the boiling point, that calmer future planet seems unlikely indeed. Call me a masochist, but at 77, in relative isolation in New York City as the omicron variant of Covid-19 ran wild – hitting a peak here of 50,000 cases a day – I read Defoe’s novel. All too much of it seemed eerily familiar: stores shutting down, nightlife curtailed, people locked in their houses, others looking desperately to none-toowise figures for any explanation but a reasonable one about what was happening to them. And so it went then and so it’s largely gone now.
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mean, a passage like this one on the way so many Londoners reacted to the plague should still ring a bell, no?
“…[N]ow led by their fright to extremes of folly… they ran to conjurers and witches, and all sorts of deceivers to know what should become of them (who fed their fears, and kept them always alarmed and awake on purpose to delude them and pick their pock-
