In the course of three months, the COVID-19 coronavirus has turned the whole world on its head. Countless businesses, large and small, are gone, and many won’t be coming back. Millions of people have lost their jobs without warning. The global economy is tanking. The situation is so bad that no one, and I mean not one goddamn person, can quantify just how bad it is, or how bad it’s going to get. The one thing that is certain is this: our history is being altered every day. And that’s the way the viral game has always worked since the dawn of human history.
I was reading a fascinating story in a recent New Yorker, by Elizabeth Kolbert, entitled “The Spread – How Pandemics Shape Human History”, in which I discovered that pretty much every time an epidemic hits the earth, the course of human history is significantly altered. And here are some of the more fascinating examples.
Smallpox was the first virus to take the world stage. There are records of it popping up intermittently as far back as the ancient Egyptians. Pharaoh Ramses V, died in 1157 BC, and his mummified remains showed signs of the pox. But the first plague pandemic surfaced in Constantinople in 542 AD, and it quickly made a total mess of the Eastern Roman Empire. So many people died there weren’t enough soldiers to defend the Roman territories. And the pestilence burned hot and cold until 750 AD. That’s over two hundred years of bodies in the street and cities in permanent lockdown. It is no coincidence that Islam made its grand entrance in the former Roman colonies of the Middle East as all hell was breaking loose. The deadly little microbe that hitched a ride on the fleas, that hitched a ride on the rats, that hitched a ride on the merchant ships, ended up killing around forty million people, about half the world’s population. And the leadership vacuum created by this fearsome infection ultimately led to the end of one of the mightiest empires, along with it’s magnificent capital Rome.
The plague returned for another epic world tour, starting in Europe in 1347. Four years later, 200 million people were dead and Europe was in shambles. Science didn’t exist, so no one knew where the invisible killer came from, but they did figure out that social distancing was a good idea, and that’s where the Italian word “quarantine” comes from, meaning forty, the amount of days of forced isolation. Why forty? Well, from the Bible of course. There’s the forty days and forty nights associated with the great flood. And the Jews wandered the desert for forty years. And there are the forty days of Lent. So, like the current magic number of 14 days, it made everyone feel like they at least had a game plan, and that gave people some much needed hope.
Some places, like London, experienced the plague about every twenty years between 1348-1665. Self isolation became a way of life, and Shakespeare did some of his most prolific writing while under house arrest. People who had infected family members had to carry a white pole when out in public. And most people suspected the disease came from cats and dogs. Unlike today, this was not a good time for pets.
But the native peoples of the Americas would be the biggest victims of the plague. When the Spanish and other European explorers arrived, starting in Hispaniola in the Caribbean in 1518, the plague spread like wildfire throughout the continent, laying waste to monumental civilizations like the Incas and Aztecs. The Spanish, being sadistic Christians, thought it proved that god was on their side. By the 1700s, only ten percent of the original inhabitants of North and South America were left standing. Smallpox defeated the American Indian, not the U.S. Cavalry. And as the final twist of cruel fate, the Spanish had to import slaves from Africa because there were so few native peoples left to do the hard work.
Just imagine how different the history of the world would be if smallpox hadn’t allowed the Europeans to conquer all of the America’s and Africa.
The next big pandemic chart buster was cholera, a bacterium found in dirty water. It originated in India, in the Ganges Delta, and the first outbreak took place in 1817 in Calcutta, eventually making its way to virtually every corner of the world and rewriting the course of human history. For instance, the violent mob hysteria accompanying the fifth cholera pandemic helped to usher in the Russian Revolution.
And cholera is still with us, in the Republic of the Congo in 1994, and in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010. Wherever there are dead bodies lying around that contaminate the drinking water, BINGO! We have another loser.
The monster hit parade of Infectious diseases — smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, polio, influenza, typhus, and measles — have shaped the world we live and die in. The history of the Jews is a road map of the plague. Colonial powers like Spain and France lost their colonies in the the Americas because of yellow fever. That’s why the French sold the Louisianan Territory to Jefferson. What would America be like today without the Southern states? Obviously given that the French were not slavers, it’s likely there wouldn’t have been a Civil War. Everything we take for granted today, every border, every religion, every political ideology, is a product of disease. And where it will lead us, no one knows.
Every pandemic leaves its own particular fingerprint. And each one marches to its own beat. But the Top 10 common denominators of all pandemics are as follows:
- Societal norms and finances break down fast.
- People do some really stupid shit.
- Everyone and everything suddenly becomes suspect.
- People look for scapegoats because someone or something is going to take the blame.
- People who get infected, or have family members who are infected, try and hide their illness.
- People will do anything to protect themselves.
- Governments are slow to respond and rarely make a big difference in the overall scheme of things.
- The truth is usually irrelevant.
- Snake oil cures will abound.
- The rules are always the same: cleanliness is the key; stay the fuck at home; and follow your doctor’s — a real doctor’s — orders.
The year 2020 hearkened in the birth of the novel corona virus christened COVID-19. It picked up the world game board and flung it into the howling wind, scattering the pieces far and wide, many to be lost forever. And history makes one irrefutable fact perfectly clear: things will never be the same again.
