A pox on the main monkeys

Word of the week goes to – pause for drum roll, fanfare and that especially ominous bit from Carmina Burana – monkeypox. Rarely has a word been more sure to seize attention. Rarely has a word been better suited to the times. Let’s start with the pox.

Strictly, a pox is any disease in which pustules erupt from the skin and leave pockmarks. Poxes are disfiguring and we dread disfigurement.

Colloquially, a dose of the pox refers to syphilis, or any of the other sexually transmitted diseases. These diseases so alarm and embarrass us that we reduce them to STDS to draw their sting.

Also inherent in the word pox is the idea of easy contagion. We’ve all known chickenpox race through a school, so pox carries a hint of plague. And now is a fertile time to sow hints of plague because Covid has tilled the soil.

Covid is no Black Death but look what it’s done. It’s killed millions, locked down billions, grounded planes, tied up ships, ruined businesses, fostered violence, bred doubt in science and emboldened the crazies. At the same time it’s brought the forgotten fact of mutation to mind, and thus added to our sense of a hostile world where the bugs and the viruses roam, breeding, adapting, getting more cunning. Billions of human beings now walk the planet and every one of us is a potential breeding ground, a bug lab, a pox factory.

So pox is a fine and doomish word. But the masterstroke is monkey.

The monkey house at any zoo is always full of laughter. What people are laughing at is the sight of themselves. Monkeys are mirrors, are amoral children. ‘‘Oh you cheeky monkey’’, my mother used to say. Implicitly, then, we acknowledge our kinship with monkeys, and we like them. But only at a distance. We want bars between us and them, or David Attenborough.

With this pox the monkeys have come far too close, both literally and metaphorically. If we can share their diseases we can’t be as far removed from them as we choose to pretend. Monkeypox obliges us to admit we’re just the ape that prospered, the monkey that made it. And we don’t like to.

Look at the trouble we’ve taken to conceal that truth. Look at the religions we cling to, the origin myths that ignore evolution. Look at the cities we’ve built to exclude the rest of the animal kingdom. Then monkeypox shows up to remind us our cousins are still out there, lugging round DNA that is effectively identical to our own. The species barrier is no barrier.

What is monkeypox? It doesn’t matter. What matters is what we instinctively presume it to be, which is transgressive. Someone somewhere, we think with a shudder, has been having sex with a monkey (though we never know who, or indeed how. It just happened, the sin was committed, and we’re all copping the consequences.)

Already, of course, the finger’s been pointed. The gays are the culprits, as usual. They’re spreading this pox. But it might as easily be the Jews, or the Muslims, or the blacks, or the Roma. Any outsider will do.

You will not die of monkeypox and neither will I. But there isn’t a news channel that hasn’t covered it, because it chimes with our sense that something has gone wrong, that the time is out of joint.

The word monkeypox, then, is perfectly pitched to tap into our unease about the world and its changing climate, our dim apprehension that nature is catching up with an upstart species. This monkey’s getting the pox it deserves.