Since there is no sign of this plague letting up—I am referring to the plague of hysteria that has descended upon the world—we may as well make the most of it by considering what we can learn by reading great literary accounts of previous plagues.
Torquato Tasso, and James Taylor, and Shemp Howard, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Hart Benton, and Roger Taney, Albert Einstein, Jerry Lewis, and Neil Sedaka, George Berkeley and Wyatt Earp, Fustel de Coulanges and Ovid ….
A close relative, in a comment “by the way,” hoped I was taking COVID seriously, since the problem was becoming acute in her part of California. It was a reasonable remark, and I responded: I take all potentially fatal diseases seriously, but the media are as usual lying to the public almost as badly as the Chinese government has been lying. Looking at at the Italian situation—far more drastic than here in the States—99% of the people dying have been old—average age 79 years nine months—and with underlying conditions, cardiac, respiratory, diabetic. Telling athletic young people to fear death is...
The word “weather” (in German, Wetter) is by etymological transmutation the Russian for “wind” (veter), and as it happens a Sicilian scientist has just come out with what to me is a very plausible explanation of why northern Italy is now the global epicenter of the Chinese plague. Hubei, the man suggests – the region where the virus first spread – is geomorphologically analogous to the Pianura Padana, if only in that both are windless enclosed flatlands, now under cloudy winter skies. Let us not laugh before we take aboard a few more suppositions. Wind and light are the reasons,...
When Prohibition was imposed in America in the 1920s, G.K. Chesterton, himself a famous bibber, quipped it was a good thing because it would bring families together to make beer and wine at home. My late father, born in 1917, remembered helping his father make wine in their basement in Detroit. I don’t want to downplay whatever is overtaking America, medically and economically, from the coronavirus. I recently got a takeout burger at a restaurant in Costa Mesa. The manager said the day before he had to personally call 60 employees to “terminate” them, an unfortunate but necessary technical term...
Don’t blame it on the Chicoms,
You’re a racist if you do.
You’re a wingnut ignoramus
If you ever mention flu.
With apologies to Bo Carter, Big Joe Turner, and Roger McGrath. This is the first few verses, but with ill-advised encouragement it could go on and on….
My first few crude verses.
Stray thoughts and whimsies, paradoxes and parodies in time of Plague. Send in comments and I’ll repost original contributions as part of next text.
Governments cannot save us from being ill. Governments cannot save us from dying. What they could do is engage people in helping rather than locking them down in their homes.
Botticelli and Michelangelo, Amerigo Vespucci, Sam Houston and Bob Wills, Marcus Aurelius and Kenneth Grahame, Bud Abbott and Rob Roy, Gregory La Cava, Micky Dolenz and Yuri Gagarin….
