Stop doing Pandemics wrong.
"Ya know...In a real pandemic people shouldn't gain weight. Check your privilege."
Yes, I've been on social media again. Yes, I really should find something more productive to do. But we're stuck in the house and for better or worse, very definitely for worse, social media is now our window on the world. Its like an old person's dog in its charming little tartan jacket: its company for us. And like an old person's dog it is a nippy little shit: rolling over one minute and coquettishly demanding a belly rub and then snapping your hand off at the wrist. And here I am: spoiling the carpet with my raw dripping stump and with nothing to keep my watch on.
"Ya know...In a real pandemic people shouldn't gain weight. Check your privilege."
That wasn't said to me directly. A friend posted it as the sort of borrowed wisdom that thrives in the feverish soup of the internet. I'm surprised it wasn't attributed to Alice Walker or Abraham Lincoln. People are busy. They haven't time to formulate their own thoughts in the frenzied work-a-day world. So an off-the-peg truth-bomb is just the ticket. It almost fits.
Does it? Does this one fit though? Who is expressing it? (the original post was anonymous) And who is it being said to? Me? It is me, isn't it? After all it turned up on my Facebook feed, posted by one of my friends. They presumably wanted me to read it and to "check my privilege" as that is an important thing to do in these uncertain times.
People are stuck at home. They're watching TV. They're snacking. Baking is pretty popular right now so people are posting pictures of the cakes and scones they are making. Seems pretty harmless, right? And if you have a load of cakes and you're stuck in the house you better eat those cakes, otherwise its a waste and you'd have to throw them out and when do you think the brown bin is going to get emptied again? You don't know, do you? So eat your cakes and shit them out again. At the moment the sewers still work so it really is the safest and most effective way to get rid of your waste products. More news as it happens.
But that's not good enough for the anonymous pandemic realness chief. Sat safe in a house eating a cake? You call that a pandemic? That looks suspiciously like "leisure". Like what you'd like to be doing even if there was no pandemic. That's not "real": you sat on your arse, self-shielding, grazing like a Serengeti Ibex just like the Government told you to. We want "real" pandemics from the good old days when death stalked the land scything away at anyone he didn't like the look of: gingers, left-handers, people with outie belly buttons. The Spanish Flu of 1918! That was a cracker! Riding hard on the heels of The Great War was the Great Pandemic. Over 500 million people were infected and the mortality rate was between 10 and 20%. You think people sat around stuffing themselves with bourbon biscuits and watching back to back repeats of "Escape to the Chateau"? No, they got on with the hard business of dying wretchedly in terrible pain.
Or what about the Black Death with an estimated death-rate of between 75 and 200 million. And that was when 200 million was a lot of people. It devastated three continents! People coughed, they got a rash, their armpits and groins filled with stinky, black apples and then they properly carked it. They didn't shift the clothes that were drying on the Peloton and joylessly peddle half a kilometre while tutting at their elderly neighbour going for an unsanctioned SECOND walk of the day before raiding the freezer for Birdseye Potato Waffles.
No. The Black Death was a proper, slimming pandemic, where people actually looked better naked if you discounted the buboes and the agonised death grimace. Where are the lean, concave corpses of yesteryear? If we want posterity to take us seriously then we should endeavour to look more like an Egon Schiele painting than a Beryl Cook one. Egon actually died of Spanish Flu which shows tremendous commitment to checking his privilege I'm sure you'll agree.
We are lucky to be living in what Brian Aldiss would have called a "cosy catastrophe". If the worst that happens to us is that we can't go to the pub for a year then we are very lucky indeed. That is something which should be celebrated. But I would hesitate to tell somebody who can't attend their parent's funeral because they're self isolating they should check their privilege. And it would be foolish to describe the situation we are in as not a "real" pandemic when we have barely started this lengthy lock-down and we are relying on a government who has bodged it every step of the way. What we have discovered as we hide away from one another is that the NHS is an astonishing and irreplaceable jewel in our society and we should treasure it, that the BBC's The One Show is more effective at disseminating useful information than the Prime Minister and that we are better and stronger together, even when we are forced apart.
Yes, I've been on social media again. Yes, I really should find something more productive to do. But we're stuck in the house and for better or worse, very definitely for worse, social media is now our window on the world. Its like an old person's dog in its charming little tartan jacket: its company for us. And like an old person's dog it is a nippy little shit: rolling over one minute and coquettishly demanding a belly rub and then snapping your hand off at the wrist. And here I am: spoiling the carpet with my raw dripping stump and with nothing to keep my watch on.
"Ya know...In a real pandemic people shouldn't gain weight. Check your privilege."
That wasn't said to me directly. A friend posted it as the sort of borrowed wisdom that thrives in the feverish soup of the internet. I'm surprised it wasn't attributed to Alice Walker or Abraham Lincoln. People are busy. They haven't time to formulate their own thoughts in the frenzied work-a-day world. So an off-the-peg truth-bomb is just the ticket. It almost fits.
Does it? Does this one fit though? Who is expressing it? (the original post was anonymous) And who is it being said to? Me? It is me, isn't it? After all it turned up on my Facebook feed, posted by one of my friends. They presumably wanted me to read it and to "check my privilege" as that is an important thing to do in these uncertain times.
People are stuck at home. They're watching TV. They're snacking. Baking is pretty popular right now so people are posting pictures of the cakes and scones they are making. Seems pretty harmless, right? And if you have a load of cakes and you're stuck in the house you better eat those cakes, otherwise its a waste and you'd have to throw them out and when do you think the brown bin is going to get emptied again? You don't know, do you? So eat your cakes and shit them out again. At the moment the sewers still work so it really is the safest and most effective way to get rid of your waste products. More news as it happens.
But that's not good enough for the anonymous pandemic realness chief. Sat safe in a house eating a cake? You call that a pandemic? That looks suspiciously like "leisure". Like what you'd like to be doing even if there was no pandemic. That's not "real": you sat on your arse, self-shielding, grazing like a Serengeti Ibex just like the Government told you to. We want "real" pandemics from the good old days when death stalked the land scything away at anyone he didn't like the look of: gingers, left-handers, people with outie belly buttons. The Spanish Flu of 1918! That was a cracker! Riding hard on the heels of The Great War was the Great Pandemic. Over 500 million people were infected and the mortality rate was between 10 and 20%. You think people sat around stuffing themselves with bourbon biscuits and watching back to back repeats of "Escape to the Chateau"? No, they got on with the hard business of dying wretchedly in terrible pain.
Or what about the Black Death with an estimated death-rate of between 75 and 200 million. And that was when 200 million was a lot of people. It devastated three continents! People coughed, they got a rash, their armpits and groins filled with stinky, black apples and then they properly carked it. They didn't shift the clothes that were drying on the Peloton and joylessly peddle half a kilometre while tutting at their elderly neighbour going for an unsanctioned SECOND walk of the day before raiding the freezer for Birdseye Potato Waffles.
No. The Black Death was a proper, slimming pandemic, where people actually looked better naked if you discounted the buboes and the agonised death grimace. Where are the lean, concave corpses of yesteryear? If we want posterity to take us seriously then we should endeavour to look more like an Egon Schiele painting than a Beryl Cook one. Egon actually died of Spanish Flu which shows tremendous commitment to checking his privilege I'm sure you'll agree.
We are lucky to be living in what Brian Aldiss would have called a "cosy catastrophe". If the worst that happens to us is that we can't go to the pub for a year then we are very lucky indeed. That is something which should be celebrated. But I would hesitate to tell somebody who can't attend their parent's funeral because they're self isolating they should check their privilege. And it would be foolish to describe the situation we are in as not a "real" pandemic when we have barely started this lengthy lock-down and we are relying on a government who has bodged it every step of the way. What we have discovered as we hide away from one another is that the NHS is an astonishing and irreplaceable jewel in our society and we should treasure it, that the BBC's The One Show is more effective at disseminating useful information than the Prime Minister and that we are better and stronger together, even when we are forced apart.
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