This blogger is filled with a hopeless feeling that stretches all the way back to POTUS 43 (The Dubster) ignoring all of the warnings of a terrorist attack on the United States in 2001 and now The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed Lyin' King) ignored repeated warnings of an incipient viral pandemic that has this nation in a death grip. If this is a (fair & balanced) rendezvous with global disaster, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg).
[x NY Fishwrap]
Lawrence Wright Saw A Pandemic Coming
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
The epidemic begins in a teeming country in Asia, but despite the efforts of the government to contain it, it soon spreads throughout the world. Some victims experience an uncontrolled immune response called a cytokine storm, causing them to drown in their own fluids. In America, schools close as citizens shelter at home. Grocery store shelves empty, and the United States is plunged into the worst depression since the 1930s.
“We’ve had plans for years, at the CDC.and NIH and Johns Hopkins and Walter Reed, we’ve had lots of plans,” a federal public health official tells an administration that is slow to comprehend what is happening. “We just haven’t ever been given the resources and personnel to carry them out. Like ventilators.”
She describes a national shortfall of essential equipment: “We’re running out of syringes, diagnostic test kits, gloves, respirators, antiseptics, all the stuff we need to treat patients and protect ourselves.”
The vice president, a former governor and radio host who’s been made point man on the crisis, demands “deliverables” that he can offer to an impatient president. She can’t give him any.
These could be scenes from our current calamity, but they’re taken from The End of October, a thriller by the journalist Lawrence Wright that comes out next month [4/28/20]. The book is about a devastating illness that races around the globe, leading to apocalyptic upheaval.
Wright’s pandemic doesn’t exactly track the new coronavirus — his imaginary plague, the Kongoli flu, emerges in Indonesia, not China, and it is far deadlier than our own. And while the social fallout from the coronavirus has been ruinous and will likely get worse, there’s no reason to think it will cause the violent civilizational implosion and global war Wright envisions.
Still, reading The End of October while under lockdown from the coronavirus is an eerie experience. At first, I marveled at Wright’s literary divination. But as the news has unfolded over recent days, it’s become clear that for those paying attention, there have been plenty of warnings that a pandemic was coming. Wright, a perceptive generalist, picked up on them. The president and his circle did not.
The End of October is not the first time that Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize winner, has made a prescient foray into fiction. He co-wrote the screenplay for “The Siege,” the 1998 thriller in which America, hit by a wave of Islamist terrorism, jettisons civil liberties and becomes increasingly militarized. As Wright wrote in a recent New York Times essay, “It was a box office bust, but after 9/11 it became one of the most rented movies in America.”
How does he do it? He’s not psychic — he’s just a superb reporter. In a note to booksellers about The End of October, Wright described researching it as he would a piece of journalism.
“I have interviewed many scientists and epidemiologists at the heart of America’s effort to prevent a catastrophic pandemic,” he wrote. “I’ve spoken to top government officials. I’ve been briefed by military experts. They all share the concerns I’ve presented — that something like this could happen.”
Indeed, for years now, a whole chorus of Cassandras has tried to make society take seriously the possibility of a world-altering illness. It’s been 26 years since award-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett wrote The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994).
In 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk — now viewed over 20 million times — titled, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready.” The greatest risk of global catastrophe is no longer nuclear war, he said, but “a highly infectious virus.”
In Foreign Policy, Micah Zenko wrote that last year he spoke to a vice president for risk at a Fortune 100 company who laid out the threat of “a highly contagious virus that begins somewhere in China and spreads rapidly.”
President Trump’s own Department of Health and Human Services ran a series of simulations last year in which a respiratory virus from China spreads worldwide, sickening 110 million Americans. Despite Trump’s refrain that no one could have predicted something like the new coronavirus, many have.
A minor character in The End of October is Richard Clarke, the real-life former counterterrorism czar who tried but failed to get George W. Bush’s administration to focus on the threat posed by Osama bin Laden. It’s as if Wright were trying to signal — too late — that our government was poised for yet another spectacular intelligence failure.
Yet even Wright’s catastrophic imagination has its limits. In the novel, Wright writes, “The president had been almost entirely absent in the debate about how to deal with the contagion, except to blame the opposing party for ignoring public health needs before he took office.”
We should be so lucky. The nameless leader in “The End of October” is grotesque, but he doesn’t give daily press briefings full of dangerous misinformation, or expect governors to flatter him in exchange for disaster aid. Some horrors would seem too absurd for fiction if they didn’t appear first in fact. ###
[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]
Copyright © 2020 The New York Times Company
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