8th January 2021

Trumpism; Spanish flu between the lines

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I plan to write daily, five days a week, if I can manage it. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Replies should come to me by email.

#1: Trumpism

Looking at the photographs of the violence and vandalism on Capitol Hill yesterday, I was reminded of an article over Christmas in the Irish Times by the fine Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole. He traces one of the defining moments of Trumpism to the previous Transition: Chris Christie, who had been managing Trump’s Transition Team, turned up at Trump Towers with 30 binders full of Transition detail, and Trump’s then adviser Steve Bannon dumped them all in a bin. This seems to me to be the bureaucratic equivalent of what happened yesterday. Here’s an extract:

A transition plan implied some kind of basic institutional continuity, some respect for the norms of governance.

At the beginning, as at the end, the idea of an orderly transition of power was anathema to Trump.

Why? Because a timetable for action and a commitment to appoint, to the thousands of positions filled by the incoming president, people with expertise and experience, would constrain him. He was not going to be constrained….

It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.

#2: Spanish flu between the lines

One of the mysteries of the Spanish flu of 1918-19, which was far more lethal than the current pandemic, is how invisible it seems to be. The conventional wisdom is that it was overshadowed by the violent deaths of millions of young men in World War 1. But it may be more complicated than that. Literature academic Elizabeth Outka was interviewed by Slate last year. She argues that there are effectively ‘pandemic readings’ of works such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Yeats’ poem Second Coming:

[T]he Yeats poem “The Second Coming” [that’s the one that starts: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer”]. That’s a canonical poem. He wrote it in 1919, and it has been read, quite rightly, as sort of a poem that captures the terrible aftermath of world war, and all the revolutions that were going on at the time, the political violence in Ireland, the Black-and-Tans … all this violence.

But in the weeks preceding his writing of the poem, his wife, Georgie, who was pregnant, caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the 1918–19 pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, it was an up to 70 percent death rate for these women. Just really terrible. He was watching this happen, and while his wife was convalescing, he sits down and writes “The Second Coming.”…

The threat in that first stanza is all in the passive voice, right? “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”; “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”* This amorphous threat coalesces into this vague sort of lurching beast at the end. It’s a terrific description of a pandemic.

Then specific imagery like the “blood-dimmed tide”—when one of the most frequent effects of this flu was bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears. Just floods of blood. And then, the way people drowned in their beds, from their lungs filling up with fluid … and he has a line about the “ceremony of innocence being drowned,” when it’s his wife and unborn baby who were in the process of drowning like that.

Related: The Christie connection

In a related vein, Caroline Crampton hosts a frankly niche podcast, Shedunnit, on the golden age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. During 2020 she became interested in the fact that Agatha Christie’s escapist detective stories were one of the biggest sellers. In her podcast episode, A Christie for Christmas, (24 minutes) she argues that the ‘golden age’ was a response to the experience of pandemic, and was also shaped by it.