PUBLISHED TO
Horror Story
No-one can deny that the world is living through a cataclysm
the like of which has not been seen since the end of World War Two. No
place on earth is truly safe and no person is entirely unaffected. We
are all faced with social and economic upheaval and we all live in fear
of physical danger, or worse. Covid 19 is now the story of our time but
exactly what kind of story is it?Stephen King, the worlds most famous horror novelist, once posited that all horror stories fall into three types, epitomized by three classic novels. The first is Dracula, in which a monster arrives unbidden into our midst. The second is Frankenstein, in which we create the monster, and the third is Jekyll and Hyde, in which we are the monster.
This hypothesis generally proves out. Jaws is a good example of the first type - the shark literally shows up from the depths to chow down swimmers at random. Most futuristic dystopia stories are of the second type - the entire Planet of The Apes franchise hinges around man’s hubris - and post-nuclear war stories by definition are the product of a man-made monster. These first two types develop into situational conflicts, but the third type leads us to inner conflict, to questioning ourselves.
Covid 19 starts as the first type of story, as all such outbreaks do. No-one could have known that that particular bat, trapped unknowingly by some unwitting farmer, and sold in that particular meat market would start a global pandemic. It was an innocent, though tragic, random event.
But soon thereafter it morphs into the second kind. The heirs to Tien An Men Square seem to have reverted to type and tried to cover up and then down-play what was happening and in so doing allowed the monster to multiply.
In the end, faced with no other choice, they did act methodically and efficiently to stave off what would, at a morbidity rate of 3.5%, have otherwise killed forty million or more of their citizens, and they did so in full view of the world. Even before we could all see our spies knew what was up. And they told our leaders who told us not to worry.
From here on the stories diverge. Some states and some countries acted immediately and in accordance with the best scientific and medical advice. They still suffered and have yet to drive a wooden stake through the monster’s heart, but their citizens can at least take solace in knowing that they are fighting a monster not of their own making.
Others are not so fortunate. Not only will their death tolls be possibly orders of magnitude worse, they will have to come to terms with the fact that they, through their elected representatives, chose procrastination in the face of an oncoming plague. They fed the monster with their fellow citizens.
People who read and analyze manuscripts and screenplays for a living invariably dissect the material into Act One, Act Two and Act Three: beginning, middle and end. Act One of the Covid war is now over. The blitzkrieg has happened, we have been invaded and subjugated. Act Two is now being written and acted out. We are resisting the enemy, most of us passively, some actively producing the arsenal to fight with, and a heroic few at real and immediate risk to their lives. We know what the script is for Act Three: test for symptoms, test for anti-bodies, create a vaccine.
All of this is ghastly enough, but here in the United States we must also endure the third kind of horror story. For if ever there was a real life Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde it is our President. Donald Jekyll assures us all is well. Testing is plentiful. We will be sending ventilators to Italy.
Trump Hyde ignores the facts, deflects all blame and tells us that a death toll which will surely be higher than that of The Vietnam War is a success on his part. Not only must we live through unimaginable tragedy we must do so while being engulfed by an ocean of lies.
It is as if we are all somehow the brothers and sisters of Jamal Khashoggi, summoned every day to the palace to pay homage to the very person who murdered him. Trump paints a picture of greedy governors and thieving nurses and then, in his millionth Freudian slip, tweets to his followers that we must all forget this catastrophe the moment we return to work. And we would all be back at work now if he could only muzzle our public health officials or use his proxies to sell us on the fable that his malaria pills will save us.
He lies effortlessly, the fastest forked tongue in the west, a latter-day Pied Piper, luring the gullible and the greedy alike.
And yet, as painful as it is to have this duplicitous thug at the helm of this disaster, the split personality nature of what is happening does not stop at the Oval Office. Our entire society has evolved into a grotesque Jekyll and Hyde type of monstrosity.
As Barack Obama has more than once pointed out, Trump is but a symptom of a larger problem. We live in a time of rapid social, economic, cultural and technological change and not all of it benefits all of us equally, if at all, but it is for the most part inevitable and irreversible. And it provides a deep reservoir of discontent that has now been well exploited by those who stand to profit from a deeply divided society. Legions of Wormtongues, be they Russian bots, fossil fuel lobbyists, or Fox News personalities busy themselves to keep us disunited.
All horror stories begin with some Dionysian force invading our Apollonian world and end when that force has been vanquished, be it a shark, a ghost, a war or a virus. And we will defeat Covid19. This horror story will end though there will be casualties, some the inevitable tragic victims of the sudden arrival of this enemy, others the all too avoidable ones attributable to individual carelessness and collective negligence.
Be it Dracula or Frankenstein, the virus is doomed. The outcome of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is far less certain.
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