One of the few positive things about terrible events is the way in which they reveal our priorities, not just as societies but as individuals. We might live our lives in the twenty-first century imagining ourselves to be reasonable, rational beings, but then something elemental is thrown at us — a natural disaster, a virus, a plague — and we have a chance to remember what we actually want and what we actually are. These disasters reveal the atavistic faultlines that run through us all, for good and ill.
Consider those people who have found occasion in recent days to start bulk-buying particular products. A certain amount of hand sanitiser might make sense, but what is one to make of the footage of stores in major cities across the West where a new delivery of toilet rolls arrives and is greeted as a celebrity might have been treated only weeks before.
The crowd gathers, soon people begin to jostle and eventually push each other around in order to get a vast multi-pack of loo rolls. Why do certain items become especially essential? Primarily because others begin to deem them so, and once they do we worry we might be missing a trick and want anything other than to be left behind. So we join the stampede just in case.
In recent days, as the Italian public have found themselves in lockdown, unable to leave their houses other than to go to the supermarket or pharmacy, a number of people have started to reach back in time to make sense of this. Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 novel The Betrothed seems to be having a resurgence of a kind, as people turn to the chapters on the Italian plague of 1629-1631 to see what might await. In France, sales of Camus’s La Peste have likewise soared. Perhaps inevitably it transpires that in the modern world some people behave just as they always did.
America has given us one of the most prototypical examples. Some readers will remember the evangelical televangelist and huckster Jim Bakker, who ran a television programme hosted by his then-wife Tammy Faye, and turned out to be a poster boy for that type of moral preaching in which the preacher turns out not to be capable of living up to himself.
On top of this he was also found guilty in court of defrauding viewers of millions of dollars. Perhaps at a time like this we should expect such frauds and chancers to slime back out of the woodwork, but even so the re-emergence of Bakker is something to behold. The man of God is back in trouble with the state of Missouri after flogging a product to viewers, which he claimed was exclusively available through him and the only known cure for coronavirus.
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