Last spring, at the start of the covid lockdowns, I ordered some books from Capitol Hill Books, a used bookstore that was offering mystery boxes where you give them a topic or some authors you like along with a budget and they put together a stack of books for you. I asked them to send me books on pandemics throughout history, because I believe that's what an educated person does when she wants to understand the world around her rather than flipping on cable news or reading garbage on the internet. They sent me books about the Spanish Flu pandemic, smallpox, a history of plagues and people, and two works of fiction that are based on real events.
I started right in on The Great Influenza by John M. Barry and Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. The Great Influenza, about the 1917-1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, was a real eye opener. Fights over masks, conservatives crying about the economy, and conspiracy theories abounded. Same bullshit we're dealing with now. We may top the 600,000 Spanish Flu death total if we don't get enough people vaccinated and these more contagious strains take over.
Year of Wonders was a fictional account about the real plague in England in 1666. A small town becomes infected with plague and the town's preacher convinced the town to quarantine itself so other towns wouldn't contract the plague. The quarantine worked, but people fought it all the way, just as they fight covid lockdown measures now. One woman was even murdered by a mob for being a "witch" who caused the plague.
I started Alexandro Manzoni's The Betrothed next. This story has it all - police brutality, corrupt and inept politicians, misogyny and piggish men, the rich oppressing the poor, mob riots, religious nonsense, and of course, plague. The year is 1629, but nothing, it seems, has changed today. The setting is Milan and the surrounding areas of what would become Italy, the country in Europe where covid hit the hardest, partly because people wouldn't follow lockdown measures.
The main characters of The Betrothed are a poor couple who just want to get married, but a rich feudal lord sees the wannabe bride one day and decides he will take her for himself. He threatens the priest who is supposed to marry the couple the next day, so they are unable to get married. Then they have to flee their town because his private police force is after them. They split up for safety - he is supposed to hide out in a monastery and she in an abbey. She does get to the abbey, where a nun murders a guy for sexually harassing her. The rich guy convinces another rich guy to help him kidnap her from the abbey and he agrees, but when his own private police force brings her to his castle, he has a spiritual crisis, goes to the archbishop who happens to be visiting the town, and has a religious conversion that turns him from one of the most evil and feared men in the land to one of the most beloved. He releases the girl and arranges for her protection.
The would be groom gets caught up in the mob riots in Milan before he gets to the monastery and makes a series of mostly drunken speeches that suggest the poor should rise up against their oppressors. He is arrested for incitement but manages to escape before being executed, and is on the run.
Then comes the plague. I have 120 pages left of the book, but I've slowed way down because the parallels to covid in America are so striking that I keep stopping to reread passages and think about how so little has changed in four hundred years despite the discovery of germs, DNA and RNA, vaccines, evolution, air currents, and so many other things we take for granted about knowing now.
In The Betrothed, the commission of public health of Milan can be compared to the CDC today. Its members consisted of three administrators and two doctors. Alessandro Tadino was one of these doctors. Tadino, whose full report of the plague still exists, repeatedly pointed out the pressing need to adopt public health measures to prevent plague from spreading, but Governor Don Gonzalo and his successor Ambrogio Spinola ignored him.
Tadino is Fauci. Gonzalo and Spinola are every Republican governor in the US except Hogan and a handful of others.
Chapters 31 and 32 are largely historical descriptions of what actually happened and the characters don't appear at all.An excerpt:
"...reports came in from Lecco itself and from Bellano; and then the commissioners did take a decision, though only to send off a representative, who was to pick up a doctor at Como and go on with him to visit the places indicated. But both of them, to quote Tadino, either through Ignorance of some other Cause, did let an ignorant Barber of Bellano to persuade them that such maladies were not the Plague, but rather in some places the normal result of autumnal vapours from the marshes..."
"Autumnal vapors!"
"It's just the flu!"
As the news of more and more deaths came in, Tadino himself went out to investigate and saw that proofs that it was plague were everywhere. Tadino wanted
"to draw up the Orders to exclude from the City all those who came from Places where the Contagion had manifested itself..."
He wanted to close the borders. He told the governor as much, the second time he had tried to persuade the governor to do something to prevent the plague from spreading. But the governor was preoccupied with other things. Then, a couple of days later, he issued a proclamation, but not to close the borders or order a quarantine. No, instead, he held a superspreader event, a birthday party for Prince Carlos, the heir to the throne of King Philip IV, and the whole city gathered to celebrate.
Until that gathering, plague was mostly affecting the outside villages and Milan itself had relatively few cases. So the Milanese mocked the idea that plague was there.
"Anyone who even mentioned the word 'plague' was greeted with incredulous mockery or angry contempt. The same disbelief, or rather blind obstinacy, prevailed among the senators, the decurions, and all the magistrates."
"It's a hoax!"
Have you seen the videos of people having absolute meltdowns in grocery stores because they have to wear masks? Have you heard people calling others sheep for wearing masks? Have you seen the governor of South Dakota whining about not getting more covid funds because they don't have high unemployment because she refused to implement lockdowns? (One in 500 South Dakotans are dead because of it, by the way.) Have you heard senators Cruz, Rubio, Hawley, and company mocking lockdowns and demanding businesses remain open?
It's the exact same thing.
"The commission of health begged and pleaded for cooperation, but with little or no result. And in the commission itself far too little sense of urgency was shown. As Tadino several times remarks, and as appears still more clearly from the whole context of his story, it was the two doctors who realized the seriousness and the imminence of the danger, and proceed to stir up their fellow-members, who then had to stir up the other authorities."
It's Fauci! And the non-doctors were political appointees! The political appointees and the politicians wouldn't listen, just like in the damn Trump regime that failed to respond to the pandemic with any sense of urgency or concern and that killed half a million Americans.
"The proclamation restricting entry to the city, which was the subject of a resolution by the commission on 30 October, was not finally drafted until the twenty-third of he following month, and not published until the twenty-ninth. By then the plague had entered Milan."
Jesus. The same thing happened here. The borders weren't closed until it was too late despite months of warning. Months. And then, when the borders were closed, they were done in such a way that it actually spread covid. Remember when they flew that plane from China into San Francisco knowing there were covid passengers on board, and they lost track of them when they got here? And how everyone in Europe was allowed a window of time to get into the US before the flights stopped, so everyone rushed to go at once?
"The infection that had already been distributed...was reinforced by the fresh infections that kept on coming into Milan because of defects in the regulations, of the slackness with which they were administered, or of the skill with which they were evaded. It wound its way slowly and secretly through the city...now in this quarter and that, the contagion would choose its victim, and someone would die. The rarity of the cases itself diverted most minds from the truth, and progressively strengthened the public's stupid, fatal belief that there was no plague in Milan..."
Then there's this bit:
"The main odium fell on the two doctors - Tadino and Senator Settala, the son of the Chief Physician - and it reached the point where they could not cross the squares of the city without being assailed with curses, or even stones. The situation of those two men during the next few months was certainly strange, and worthy of record, as they saw a terrible catastrophe coming nearer and nearer and did everything they could to avert it; and at the same time encountered obstacles where they looked for help, became the butt of popular indignation and were regarded as enemies of their country..."
Fauci has been called a traitor by Trump supporters and has received numerous death threats. Fauci is Tadino. Tadino is Fauci. Tadino and Fauci are the doctors of every historical pandemic where the idiot masses refused to accept the reality of disease.
When the deaths became too numerous to pretend the plague didn't exist anymore, these people turned to conspiracy theories. They said foreigners were spreading a poisonous ointment on things to kill people. They called them "anointers." Compare that to people shouting "China virus!" and even believing that the coronvirus was engineered as a bioweapon.
When another gathering spread the disease enough that the poisoned ointment idea was no longer plausible, people changed their conspiracy nonsense to it was a poisonous powder blown into the air by foreigners and evildoers. Even on their deathbeds, people denied they had plague. We've heard countless stories of Americans with covid doing the exact same thing.
In the end, a quarter of the population of Milan died. One in four people. There wasn't a family untouched by death.
They didn't have vaccines back then so we can only imagine what the conspiracy nonsense would have been. We see misinformation about vaccines every damn day. It's the same mentality. Conspiracies, egotism, thinking that you know more than the experts, even despising experts. Half of Americans polled say they won't get the vaccine. The vaccines are working, but people just don't care enough to save lives. It's a dereliction of civic duty as Americans, and it's a moral travesty.
We've lost 500,000 Americans to covid. Half a million human beings, dead because we made the choice to let them die. We have countless historical examples from which we refuse to learn. We have science we choose to ignore. And we have a hell of a lot of sociopaths who just don't give a damn.
