On the editorial page of today’s Houston Chronicle is a very timely editorial written by local professor Robert Zaretsky with the title of the editorial above. Prof. Zaretsky teaches history at the Honors College at the University of Houston. Unfortunately this fine editorial is behind the Chron’s paywall, so I’ll summarize it briefly here.
The editorial basically talks about the relevance of Albert Camus’ book The Plague to the COVID-19 situation today, and equally importantly Trump’s (and his followers’) response to this biological threat as it morphs into an ideological threat of totalitarianism. Camus started The Plague when he was trapped in France during its Nazi occupation, so that Nazi occupation lends some symbolic influence to the political and philosophical resonance of the book and its correspondence to our current situation. Here are a few relevant paragraphs from this very timely editorial (all bold emphases are mine):
Set in the Algerian city of Oran, the plague is the disease whose name dare not be spoken. After a massive invasion of dying rats, whose bloated and bloodied bodies litter the streets, residents develop symptoms that resemble the bubonic plague. Nevertheless, as the narrator, Dr. Rieux, notes, the residents refuse to recognize it as the plague. This was only normal. “They fancied themselves free,” Rieux explains, “and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”
At first, the authorities also refuse to name the disease. They do not want to alarm the public and, like the public, they cannot believe what they see. Seeing is not believing if only because believing prevents seeing. This is why officials, wrapping themselves in conditionals and subjunctives, finally agree to act “as though the epidemic were plague.”
Once the city is quarantined, the locals react in different ways. Some try to escape the city, others try to escape through alcohol, and yet others, who were visiting, insist they do not belong there. But as Rieux tells one visitor, this claim is absurd: “From now on you’ll belong here, like everyone else. We’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.”
Dr. Rieux and a few volunteer sanitation teams try to staunch the plague’s rise by cleaning the streets of the dead rats, and care for the sick and bury the dead, not principally because it was admirable but because it was merely logical. However in that city, logic can be treated as fatally as the plague itself. As Dr. Rieux says, “There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”
The editorial then goes on to further compare The Plague to our current situation today, not just in Trump’s America but around the world. The editorial ends with this final short paragraph:
Camus concludes his novel with the observation that the “plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” Indeed.
This was a very well-written and intelligently composed and researched editorial comparing the plague and the book to the epidemic we are facing here today and with Trump. I have never read Albert Camus’ The Plague but after reading this editorial by Prof. Zaretsky I intend to remedy that quickly. It brings to mind the old saying, “Everything old is new again.” I hope this editorial gets widely read in our Houston community, but given that it is written by a professor and intellectually explores current hot-button issues that some would rather ignore I’ll just keep my fingers crossed. I’m sure there will be Letters to the Editor praising and condemning this editorial. So it goes.