{"id":479,"date":"2012-07-12T09:28:46","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T07:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=479"},"modified":"2012-07-12T09:28:46","modified_gmt":"2012-07-12T07:28:46","slug":"journal-of-the-plague-year-2012-with-zombies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/07\/12\/journal-of-the-plague-year-2012-with-zombies\/","title":{"rendered":"JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, 2012, (WITH ZOMBIES) <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read Daniel Defoe\u2019s ultra-realistic fake diary Journal of the Plague Year<\/em> (1722) with great pleasure a few weeks ago. I was intending to devote the whole post today to Defoe\u2019s novel but reality insists on intruding, this form in the shape of a new pay cut (civil servants will not receive the Christmas pay \u2013anymore?) and I\u2019ve lost my concentration. Thinking about it, though, I realise I am<\/em> writing a journal of the \u2018plague year\u2019, only in this 2012 the epidemic is not caused by a virus affecting bodies but by the virus that affected minds in the so-called \u2018fat-cow years\u2019: greed.<\/p>\n

Defoe\u2019s classic narrates the Great Plague that swept the streets of crowded London in 1665, when he was a mere five-year-old boy (he seems to have borrowed the pungent first-hand impressions from his the diary of his uncle, Henry Foe). It\u2019s a relentless account of the spread parish by parish of the bubonic plague (yes, caused by bacteria not a virus), with its appallingly fast-mounting death toll and its gruesome symptoms. I haven\u2019t read Samuel Pepys\u2019s version of events in his famous diary but I\u2019m sure I will soon, out of curiosity knowing he was a direct witness. The question is that Defoe\u2019s point in the Journal<\/em> is to praise the authorities of the City of London for their reliance and general good management of the crisis (although he is also adamant when it comes to criticising them for the stern measure of containing households with a sick inhabitant, thus condemning the rest).<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure you\u2019re beginning to see the analogy. In this, our \u2018year of the plague\u2019 2012, the authorities are sadly mismanaging the epidemic and generally behaving like the unenlightened doctors of 1665, who thought that nice smells and lots of smoke could drive the \u2018pestilence\u2019 away. They couldn\u2019t even understand what was going on beneath their noses, much less dream of penicillin. Same here right now. If you think that the recipe to stop unemployment is stopping public expenditure you should get yourself quickly familiarised with the concept \u2018New Deal\u2019. Maybe it\u2019s the impact of Defoe\u2019s melancholy text, with its families being quickly wiped out amidst razor sharp pain and hair-raising screams but I do feel terribly downhearted these days. I comfort myself by thinking that at least we don\u2019t have to send carts every night to pick up the dead lying abandoned in the streets but, surely, there are other kinds of death.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the matter of the zombies. I have spent a good many hours watching the TV series The Walking Dead<\/em> and hating every minute of it (also the British equivalent, Dead Set<\/em>) \u2013call me masochistic. The idea behind these new plague fictions is just the opposite of Defoe\u2019s defence of civilisation: it\u2019s all about survivalism (in the American case) and plain despair (in the British). This is the most direct metaphorical use of the plague to signify the collapse of our 21st century white, Western civilisation. I don\u2019t like it because in narrative terms it\u2019s dead boring \u2013pun intended\u2013 and also because I suspect that the constant ripping apart of undead bodies spells out a hardly concealed wish to let go of our thin veneer of civilisation. Yet, funnily enough, when reading Defoe I chuckled now and then, missing the zombies very much.<\/p>\n

Here in Spain they crowd the streets. I myself feel right now like a zombie, I\u2019m walking dead as the civilisation I believed in slowly crumbles \u2013\u2018Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold\u2019. In the conference I attended last week we got really dystopian yet there was a speaker who claimed again and again that nothing<\/em> will happen, apocalypse will not come, it\u2019s just a crisis. Actually, he made the point of stressing that for the average Chinese and Indian person hope is just rising. The problem is that I happen to be one of those devoting their working lives to the service of a certain idea of public education right here and right now. This is being swept from under my feet and what lies beneath is not the bare ground but a frightening hole. Full of zombies who do know I\u2019m one of them.<\/p>\n

Having still 24 more years to endure, I wonder whether at the end of my career I\u2019ll see this \u2018plague year\u2019 with the same relief Defoe transmits towards the end. Right now, I don\u2019t see how far we still have to go. I wish it were only one<\/em> year (yet scattered remnants of the plague lasted until 1750 it seems). Sorry about the black mood \u2013I was going to write that \u2018hopefully\u2019 the world will end, as announced, next December but I realise that\u2019s unfair to the Chinese and the Indian. Poor things, we\u2019re their<\/em> zombies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read Daniel Defoe\u2019s ultra-realistic fake diary Journal of the Plague Year (1722) with great pleasure a few weeks ago. I was intending to devote the whole post today to Defoe\u2019s novel but reality insists on intruding, this form in the shape of a new pay cut (civil servants will not receive the Christmas pay […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}