The plague

By Jack J. Woehr
web posted October 1, 2001

I've found the perfect bedtime book for those reflective souls
pondering the present instant of American history. May I highly
recommend that you grab a copy of The Plague by Albert
Camus and read it through.

Written in French (La Peste) in 1947, The Plague is the tale of
the town of Oran in what was French Algeria being struck by
bubonic plague. The epidemic descends upon the town not
totally unperceived but wilfully unrecognized. In the smug and
torpid colonial, commercial, bourgeois community of Oran, to
recognize the advent of the plague would be to acknowledge that
the Muslim quarter of the city, where the plague first strikes, has
been permitted by the authorities and by the social system to
descend into the filth of extreme poverty. Further, it would be an
admission that what transpires in the Muslim quarter affects all
Oran.

When the nature of the contagion is no longer deniable, the
public begins to exhibit intense interest in the matter. The plague
is on everyone's lips at all day and and every day. The national
authorities take cognizance of the outbreak and seal off this
ancient walled city. Anyone who has departed may return, but
no-one may leave Oran. Suddenly, all classes of citizen find
themselves thrown together in quarantine, beseiged by an
invisible enemy.

The public struggles to come to grips with the new reality. At
first, dominant in their minds are their own privations and their
personal separation from loved ones who remain safely outside
the city. They grapple with meaning, many rushing to the
crowded cathedral the next Sunday to hear Fr. Paneloux preach
on the topic of the day. The priest takes as his theme, "My
brothers and sisters, you are in misery, and my brothers and
sisters, you have earned it." The plague, holds the reverend
father, since the dawn of history has come to cast at God's feet
the proud and blind. "Meditate on that and fall on your knees,"
he preaches.

Many in the town take the priest's words to heart and
concentrate on religion. But the majority, oppressed by an
intangible foe, take to libertinism. The streets of Oran become
gay with nightlife, with respected members of the community
staggering home drunkenly in each other's arms in the early hours
of the morning. Meanwhile, those charged with resisting the
plague, the bureaucrats, the doctors, the guards of the gates, the
gravediggers, carry out their increasingly wearying and thankless
labors. One of these, Dr. Rieux, is too thoughtful to take either
the course of religious obscurantism or dissipation. "I've lived too
long in the hospitals to care much for the idea of collective
punishment," he tells the priest. "Christians sometimes talk that
way, but without really thinking about it. They are better than
they appear."

The plague grows worse, and spreads everywhere, into every
community within Oran. The people comfort one another that it
can't possibly continue, that there will be a slackening, and
abatement. None comes, and the mortality figures keep
increasing. The authorities cease giving figures per week and
announce them in the hundreds per day. Hurried burials of the
victims give way to mass interrments in lime pits. Disorders and
arsons break out. Curfew is established. Nightlife ends.

A moral change comes over the city. No sympathetic ear is left
into which to pour out one's anguish. Everyone has enough
anguish of their own. Forgotten are the loved ones left outside
the city. All that one can focus on is the daily struggle to go about
one's business under the shadow of imminent infection from a
neighbor, from a stranger. People avoid physical contact with
one another, avert their nostrils from each other's breath.

The authorities are driven by circumstance to increasingly harsh
measures to maintain order, measures to which no reasonable
person can object, for what else can be done? If order breaks
down entirely, the city will go down in flames, disease and death.
And still the bone-wearing labor of caring for the sick falls on Dr.
Rieux and others, labor which the doctor can no longer fool
himself into believing is an act of curing, merely an act of isolating
the infected and recording their deaths. The city prefect
comments with satisfaction to Rieux that their system of
disposing of corpses via the tramway is vastly superior to the
donkey carts of the African natives during epidemics of previous
centuries. "Yes," says Rieux, "it's the same interrment, but we,
we keep files. The progress is incontestable."

We of North America are in for the long haul. We've engaged
ourselves to root out sacs of poison infecting the body politic of
at least a score of nations. The flags are waving now and many
people are cheering the troops as they march off to war. We sit
echanted before the opiate of the modern masses, the television,
anticipating eagerly the thud of the first bombs of revenge and
invasion. Camus bids us to bear in mind what mood the public
might be in a year hence, two years hence, when the novelty has
worn off and the siege presses in on every family.

Now, more than ever, God bless America. I wish my country
every success in the unavoidable conflict, although I do not
believe that it was always inevitable. No nation can permit the
disaffected and the wronged of a foreign nation to go about
blowing up occupied office buildings, whatever the grievance.
But if a monument is to be erected over the ashes of the World
Trade Center, let there be written upon it in gold letters one
hundred feet high, "Bad Policy Has Consequences."

To the charming and simple George W. Bush, we may be
engaged in Zoroastrian conflict between purest good with vilest
evil, but the road to this particular hell was paved with good
intentions in the form of epic foreign policy blunders leading to
the emergence of radical Islamic suicidal terrorists. This chain of
blunders starts at the overthrow of Mohammed Mosadegh in the
1950's and extends to the cold-war abandonment of Egypt to
the Soviets, to half a century of blindness to possibility of an
equitable solution to the Palestinian problem, to the seemingly
self-serving arming of the mujahedin to our own detriment, to the
utterly pointless bombing of the Baka'a valley under Reagan, to
the arming of Iraq against Iran, to the ultimately fruitless and
interminable conflict with Iraq, to the aimless and brutal cruise
missle strikes against Somalia and Afghanistan under Clinton
which magically transformed Osama bin Laden from a dangerous
maniac to a prince ensconced in a pirate kingdom, and beyond.

A few months back, we held a neighborhood party here in
Fairmount. In attendance that day happened to be four cheery
young police cadets, apparently college sophomores, two boys
and two girls. As they joshed with one another in the
refreshments tent, I asked a neighbor lady in her 60's, a
Republican precinct woman, if she thought that these youngsters
found it at all odd that police cameras were being set up in public
places.

"No," she replied wistfully, "to them it's just something that's
happening when they are young. They don't remember what
America used to be like."

Most Americans seem to have lost not only their taste for
freedom, but their memory of it. It's important for America's
sake that those of us who remember endure the present world
crisis. We must live and remember that the police spy cameras
were going up on every street corner before September 11th,
that America was well on its way to authoritarian government
before the heinous attack. Without that rememberance, there is
little chance to preserve even a remnant of American freedom in
these days of the plague.

Jack J. Woehr of Fairmount, Colorado is an adept francophone
but still hasn't mastered his cellular phone.

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