Early pandemic conclusions
Having raged repeatedly throughout his life, plagues challenged William Shakespeare first as a child, then as an actor, and finally as the playwright who saw epidemics shutter London theaters for an aggregate 78 months during his most prolific decade, as Andrew Dickson noted in The Guardian this week.
Besides Mercutio’s “a plague on both your houses” and a quarantined messenger’s fateful failure to deliver Juliet’s message to Romeo that her suicide was fake, experts suggest Shakespeare wrote entire plays, most notably King Lear, while quarantined and under plague’s depressing weight.
Fortunately, our own pandemic’s impact will be nothing like what Shakespeare endured – a continuum of plagues that haunted successive generations before culminating, 40 years after his death, in the Great Plague of London.
Coronavirus, by contrast, will be eradicated hardly two years since erupting. Then again, its disruptions’ universality, intensity and shock will impact the future far more than previous epidemics, most of which were accepted as divinely delivered and therefore impossible to prevent.
Many pens will be broken in upcoming months in an effort to predict corona’s imprint. Now, however, as the plague’s first phase winds down, this column’s four conclusions are not about the future but about the present.
THE FIRST conclusion is that Donald Trump’s unfitness for his job was exposed in all its gravity.
After greeting the crisis with the fallacy that “it’s one person coming in from China and we have it under control”; and after claiming baselessly “we’re very close to a vaccine”; and after announcing he closed the border with Europe, which he had not, the leader of the free world publicly urged scientists to consider injecting corona patients with bleach or to expose them to ultraviolet light.
And after having thus compelled manufacturers to rush and warn that their disinfectants must not enter human bodies, an ever abrasive Trump told a journalist he had spoken “sarcastically, to reporters like you, just to see what would happen.”
If we thought that this man’s profanities, racism, sexism and habitual bullying were not enough, this served as a reminder that on top of all these he is so frivolous that he simply does not get what is at stake: not the science, not the psychology, and certainly not the poise, reflection, measure, and extreme caution a leader must mix at a time like this.
Instead, Trump has proved he lacks even the basic sense of responsibility that thousands of other leaders around the world, from police officers and hospital directors to supermarket managers and small-town mayors, have displayed in the wake of the plague.
THE SECOND conclusion is that Trump’s perfect inversion in handling the plague was Benjamin Netanyahu.
Initial suspicions that he was overreacting have proven unfounded. Yes, the jury will be out for a long time concerning his political motivation, and yes, Israel brought some advantages, like thick borders, a young population, and experience with emergencies. Even so, the bottom line is that Netanyahu made Israel react more quickly and efficiently than most other countries, and thus avoid Italy’s path and fate.
True, the crisis also underscored well-known problems in Netanyahu’s leadership, like his weakness for media appearances and self-congratulation, and his mental inability to share the limelight with anyone, in this case his own defense minister, at the expense of proper management’s basic demands.
Still, Netanyahu set out to personally manage the crisis, and the bottom line is that Israel emerged from the plague’s first phase with a minimal number of fatalities and one of the world’s lowest rates of infection.
Yes, this column has attacked Netanyahu repeatedly over the past quarter century, and in recent months has been doing so with particular zeal, for well-known reasons. This does not contradict its happiness to give credit where credit is due.
THE THIRD conclusion borders.
Two supreme courts, Washington’s and Jerusalem’s, have just held sessions in live broadcast, the latter about the new coalition agreement’s legality, the former about an esoteric appeal by Booking.com concerning its URL’s copyright.
Having come at the height of the pandemic, if even not in its wake (Israel’s move is part of an old plan to broadcast 10 annual sessions), the public’s virtual arrival in democracy’s holy of holies highlighted the growing softness of borders – whether institutional ones, like those partitioning between citizen and judge, or political borders, like those that the virus has so effortlessly crossed.
Like it or not, we live in a world as
is about transparent as water, and the only way to defy this evolution is to create an island as sealed, oppressed and impoverished as North Korea. And that leads to the pandemic’s fourth and most important early lesson, which is that China must change.
CHINA HAS been accused of having consciously manufactured and deliberately unleashed the virus that has spread worldwide. No evidence has been produced for this wild charge, which besides being unproven is also illogical.
China, unlike other civilizations, never was in the business of conquering the world. Moreover, in its current incarnation China needs the outer world as a commercially thirsty trade partner, not as an economically stricken intensive care patient.
Then again, by refusing to share information about corona’s outbreak, and by failing to quickly block foreign travel to and from its epicenter, China did mishandle the epidemic.
This was not about malice. It was about authoritarianism’s deepest fear and overarching quest: the fear of public panic, and the quest to control information. Beijing thinks that by blocking, manipulating and dictating information’s flow, it is guarding its system’s twin towers – the regime and the economy.
Now it was served a warning that, like the rest of mankind, it lives in an age of transparency, and that defying its demands will bring a plague on both its houses.
www.MiddleIsrael.net The writer’s best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019), is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.