Wednesday
My friend Glenda Funk has invoked Macbeth for how to deal with the coronavirus—or rather, how not to deal with it.
It involves hand washing. “Wash your hands frequently, and don’t touch your face,” we’re all being told. But as Glenda points out, “some things cannot come clean with a little soap and water”:
Perhaps the most famous hand-washing episode in literature is in Act V of The Tragedy of Macbeth. In this scene Lady Macbeth attempts to cleanse her hands of King Duncan’s blood, symbolic of her culpability in the king’s murder. At this point in the play the Macbeths are trapped in their deception. We hear the Doctor, a Gentlewoman, and Lady Macbeth:
Doctor: What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.
Gentlewoman: It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this quarter of an hour.
Lady Macbeth: Yet here’s a spot.
Doctor: Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Lady Macbeth: Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?–Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him. What, will these hands ne’re be clean?
Glenda observes that, earlier in the play following Duncan’s murder, Lady Macbeth sends her husband to cleanse himself. Evidence cleansing is one thing, however, whereas “neither Lady Macbeth nor Macbeth can cleanse their hearts and souls of the stain that blots them.”
Glenda then connects the dots:
Similarly, we’re witnessing the effect of a dirty administration mired in the muck of greed, science denial, deregulation, and dismantling of government institutions designed to protect our citizens. We see the muzzling of the CDC coupled with budget cuts that make disaster preparedness a shadow of its former self.
A makeshift cleanup crew has been summoned by the Grand Poobah: “We’ve ordered lots of medical elements” he promised during a press conference before heading out for a round of golf. It is an accustomed action with him. We hear him calling the coronavirus “a hoax. This is their new hoax.”
We have the great science denier VP responsible for an HIV outbreak in his home state Indiana on hand to dust off and reopen the office created to handle the ebola epidemic during former President Obama’s administration.
We hear the government cries: “Out damned spot. Hell is murky” amid 25 million dollars in cuts to the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response and eighteen million dollars cut from the Hospital Preparedness Program. Oh, and there’s the proposal to cut eighty-five million dollars from the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease.
I’ll just add that Trump, with his autocratic tendencies, shares Macbeth’s paranoia, with the Democratic Party as his Banquo. Unlike the Macbeths, however, Trump has no second thoughts about his past actions. It will take something comparable to the movement of Birnam Wood to oust him.