Early on in the Covid pandemic, there were lots of articles about how the 1918 flu disappeared from our collective memory and the historical record. Alfred Crosby famously called it "America's Forgotten Pandemic" in his 1989 book.
A short 🧵 1/
Crosby's book "probes the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event."
The 1918 pandemic killed between 50 - 100 million people in two years. Encyclopedia Britannica's 1924 history of the 20th century so far didn't even mention it once. 2/
More Americans died in the 1918 pandemic than in all 20th century wars combined, but there is exactly one monument to them - in Barre, VT, erected by a man whose grandfather died. 3/ nytimes.com/2020/05/14/bus…
"One searches for explanations for the odd fact that Americans took little notice of the pandemic,” Crosby wrote, “and then quickly forgot whatever they did notice.”
In 2020, the idea of collective pandemic amnesia seemed wild, unthinkable. 4/
But reading about the collective forgetting of the 1918 pandemic now starts to take on a different light.
We are witnessing a similar thing happen in real time. 5/
The Times of 18 December 1918 commented: “Never since the Black Death has such a plague swept over the face of the world, and never, perhaps, has a plague been more stoically accepted.”
People rarely made movies or wrote books about the 1918 pandemic. 6/
Prior to the 1918 pandemic, people regularly memorialized plagues in literature. There are countless examples of people using storytelling to process the costs of mass disease. Homer. Sophocles' Oedipus the King. The Decameron. Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. 7/
Coping with plague and disease is a major theme of classical and early modern literature. Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. Jack London's The Scarlet Plague. And so on. 8/
It's a stark contrast with the almost-total absence of literature, film, or other storytelling about the 1918 pandemic.
What changed? Mass media. 9/
In 1918, there were vested interests intent on people NOT telling stories about the pandemic because it might affect the war. Information about the pandemic was actively suppressed by most governments around the world, with the exception of Spain (hence "Spanish flu"). 10/
How can you tell a story about something that isn't being acknowledged as really happening?
How can you process the pain and loss of a mass health catastrophe in an environment where those in power keep telling the public that everything is fine and normal? 11/
You can't and you don't. So you don't write books about it, you don't make movies about it, you don't use the storytelling tools that humanity has used for centuries to process threats of contagion. 12/
You just hunker down and write and watch books and movies about a world where there never was a pandemic or a world where it's over, and move on.
No memorials. No moments of silence. No iconic movies or books. Just - "normalcy" and silence. 13/
Back in 2020, it was inconceivable to me that the 1918 pandemic was ever so "forgotten." But now, it makes perfect sense.
As a society, we're collectively doing our damndest to forget this one too. Even as it's raging on and people are dying. 14/
We urgently need to tell the story of what happened - and what's still happening - in this pandemic. We need to publicly grieve the 1 million Americans we lost, and make plans to try to prevent any more casualties. We need to tell the stories of Long Haulers and survivors. 15/
Or, we could just choose to forget and hope that things really will feel "normal" eventually, if we're lucky.
/end
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I'm a professional theater historian who writes about Yiddish theater. I also write about contemporary theater/film and culture at large.
I tweet about theater (and general) history and what we can learn from it. In short: a lot.
My post on Rhinoceros-as-Covid-parable seems to be making the rounds, which means that there are a LOT more Berengers out there than I thought.
I teach Rhinoceros in my theater history classes. I never thought it would be so relevant again, but here we are.
So, here's some more about the history of this bizarre, brilliant play.
Rhinoceros is typically taught as an allegory about fascism and Nazi Germany. In this reading, Rhinoceritis = fascism, and the more people who become fascists, the more difficult it is not to conform. 3/
In 1959, Eugene Ionesco wrote the absurdist play Rhinoceros in which one by one, an entire town of people suddenly transform into rhinos. At first, people are horrified but as the contagion spreads, (almost) everyone comes to accept that turning into a rhinoceros is fine. 1/
Rhinoceros is a play about conformity and mob mentality and mass delusion, about how easy it is for people to accept outrageous/unacceptable things simply because everyone else is doing it.
In the end, the protagonist Berenger is the only human left. 2/
I've been thinking about Rhinoceros a lot this week, as we enter this new season of "return to pre-Covid normalcy" on hyperdrive.
There are many good reasons to try to avoid getting infected with Covid. It's not innocuous and it's dangerous to pretend otherwise. 3/
We have a police brutality problem in the United States.
But it doesn't have to be that way. There are plenty of other countries that have robust police forces without anything like the number of civilians shot by police that we have here. There are plenty of models.
In Norway, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Iceland, the police don't carry guns at all, except in certain situations.
That's one way to cut down on police brutality, though maybe not so practical in the US where many civilians are armed.
But there are a lot of relatively simple things that we COULD easily do to cut down significantly on police brutality.
Eastern European Jews lived in turbulent times, and it's reflected in their language. So here are some Yiddish phrases and expressions that might be useful as we live through a world-altering pandemic. 1/n
Yiddish is basically obsessed with health, and the notion that good health is a prerequisite for happiness. In Yiddish, there are "tsores" (problems) and "gezunte tsores" (healthy problems). You can't take gezunte tsores too seriously. 2/n
Yiddish also has a lot of words for things that we don't have words for in English.
"krenkn" in Yiddish means "to get sick"
"farkrenkn" means "to use up all of your money on an illness" or "to go bankrupt due to medical bills"
As hard as this is, it isn’t likely to be short haul.
In 1918-1919 there were three waves of the pandemic. The first was the mildest. The second was the deadliest.
People who were infected in one wave were less likely to be infected in the next. /1
Social distancing measures and other non pharmaceutical interventions were imposed in the first wave, then relaxed. But when the second wave hit, they were imposed again in many places. Relaxing distancing measures too early led to a serious spike. /2
So, the return to normal life wasn’t sudden or permanent. People returned to normal life, and then went back into quarantine, and then returned to normal life, and then dealt with another wave of pandemic. It was more than 18 months before normal life permanently resumed. /3