Tuesday
I am devoting this week to plague literature because America is still not taking COVID-19 seriously enough. Although some have awakened to the threat it poses, the fact that only a few are taking radical measures is an indictment of Donald J. Trump. If he were to tell entire country to “go home and stay home”—to whatever extent that is possible, of course—then every state in the union would be taking action.
Instead, while Washington, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, the San Francisco area, and others have started ordering universal closures, my home state of Tennessee is one of eight states taking no policy action and providing no guidance. Lack of national leadership means that far too many jurisdictions are winging it.
What we have is a “Masque of the Red Death” situation. Harold Bloom once wrote that Edgar Allan Poe dreamt America’s nightmares, and he certainly dreamed our present nightmare in his famous plague story. Just as Trump’s first impulse, in the face of contagion, was to institute travel bans, Prince Prospero’s is to build a wall:
The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.
But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.
I’m still stunned that there were massive light-hearted parties in cities all across America this past weekend, that certain Republican legislators were still pooh-poohing strong measures, and that Trump was still downplaying the threat. Granted, COVID-19 is not as deadly as the red death, but given our lack of testing and strong measures, it will overwhelm American hospitals. We know, from the examples of Italy, Spain, and now France, that this is an inevitability. It will happen!
And yet, because we are “amply provisioned,” far too many Americans think they “might bid defiance to contagion”:
The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”
There comes a reckoning, of course. As many have pointed out, epidemics don’t pay attention to walls or boundaries. Who knows which of the revelers brought the Red Death to Prince Prospero’s party. In any event, he is a presence so imposing that even the wildest stand still and pay attention:
At first, as [Prince Prospero] spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who, at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth a hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and while the vast assembly, as with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first…
Poe’s story horrifies, of course, because the fatality rate upon contact with the red death appears to be 100%, not the estimated 3.5% of COVID-19. Because I am living with a 94-year-old mother for whom one slip could be fatal, however, that is small consolation. (For that matter, I myself am 68 and therefore in the danger zone.) If drastic measures—which should have been enacted weeks ago—are not put in place soon, we will have our own version of Poe’s finale. Not as dark, to be sure, but dark all the same:
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Stop your frantic avoidance dancing, America! Prince Prospero’s travel bans will not save you.