I have an established history at this point of thinking I'm the first person to note a resonance between a literary work and contemporary events, only to find out later that I'm actually relatively late to the discovery, and have long since been scooped.
In the terror of the few days before the last presidential election, I poured over Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and thought I discerned in its study of demagogy and personalistic autocracy unmistakable resemblances to the tactics and propaganda of our then-commander-in-chief. I dashed this off in a hurry, hoping to register it in print before anyone else got ahold of the insight. Only later did I realize that in the first year of Trump's presidency, a production of the play had already been staged in London that had the main character in telltale orange hair, and the set littered with MAGA placards.
Same thing happened with Robert Coover's postmodernist fable about the Cat in the Hat as president. Unearthing it from the high shelf in a used book store, I thought I had made the find of the century when I saw how closely the clownish buffoonery of the Cat, masking a deeper undercurrent of cultural malaise and socio-political nihilism, resembled the increasingly circus-like antics of the Grand Old Party and its chosen candidate for office. Once again, I wrote this discover up, pointing out the analogy and thinking I was the first person to spot it. But, alas, again I was wrong. I found out later that its publisher had already done a second print-run in 2017. On its cover, the cat's famous striped hat was replaced by a pile of multicolored MAGA caps.
Having learned from this experience, there is now no doubt in my mind whatsoever that someone has already resurrected Czech writer and science fiction progenitor Karel Čapek's 1937 play, The White Plague, and placed it in context for our present moment. But it seems to me that a play that manages not only to offer another on-point commentary on right-wing populist demagoguery and bombast, but also to place it in context of a bungled state response to a deadly pandemic, seems altogether too on-point to pass up. Thus, I am going to once again choose not to google this in advance and will blithely persist in ignorance, assuming I am the first to spot the similarities.
And whether I am in fact a latecomer to this discover or not, this play seemed like exactly the thing to be reading and writing about on this afternoon in May 2021, immediately after I received my long-awaited second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, as the pandemic continues to rage around the world and our democracy remains haunted by the after-effects of the Trump presidency (the latest development this past week being congresswoman Liz Cheney's ejection from key House leadership positions due to her unwillingness to attest to the falsehood that Trump was the "true" winner of the 2020 election.)
I had known prior to now that Čapek—a Czech liberal most famous perhaps for being the originator of the word "robot"—wrote a work of this title, The White Plague; but it wasn't until I saw the play referenced in Susan Sontag's essay "AIDS and Its Metaphors" —also recently devoured in my quest to make sense of our present pandemic disaster by reading about some of its historical and literary analogues—that it occurred to me the play might have something to say about our present political and medical predicament.
But indeed it does. In some cases, the parallels are so close as to be eerie. Sontag's essay references the debate that occurs in the play between the public and scientific community as to what to call the new disease (that is, the white plague of the title). Scientists have a Latin name for it, of course, named after the Chinese doctor who discovered it, but the populace prefers to dub it the "Peking Leprosy." Think of Trump's race-baiting efforts to get the public and media to use his proclaimed term for COVID-19, the "China virus" or the "Wuhan virus." Just like the real-world pestilence we are currently confronting, Čapek's fictional "white plague" originates in China, and various fascist-leaning characters use this fact as a basis to stoke xenophobia and to write the plague off as someone else's problem—a Third World issue that will never come to their own door.
"Some fascinating new disease emerges almost every year in China," says Professor Sigelius in the play, for example, after defining for us the term "pandemic." He goes on: "It's the poverty, you see. But none has hitherto been as interesting as the Cheng virus. It's the disease of the moment!" In the scene following, an unnamed "Father" who works as head of accounts in a munitions factory—and therefore eagerly supports the country's militaristic rulers—opines as follows upon the plague: "[I]t's just scare stories! See, Sigelius here says it comes from China. Why should we pay to support these backward countries? Hunger and poverty, plagues and viruses—they're breeding grounds for disease! Make them a colony of Europe, I say[.]" (Majer and Porter trans. throughout).
One gets the very strong sense that this character, were he a present-day U.S. citizen, would enthusiastically endorse the slogan and principle of "America First." That he would support hoarding vaccines and doing little to stem the raging outbreaks in India and the Global South, falsely believing a pandemic can be confined to other nations. That he would have been among those downplaying the seriousness of the virus, dismissing public health measures as "hype" and "hysteria," while at the same time calling for ever-more stringent anti-immigrant blockades and visa shutdowns on the basis of spurious public health arguments. The lethal agent, whether white plague or coronavirus, is seen by such individuals as the fault and problem of other countries and other people, and so long as they can be walled out and isolated, it need not concern us.
As this character winds up his speech about what really ought to be done to stop the plague: "Pack them off to camps so they don't contaminate us! Simple as that!"
This is ultimately the policy that his country decides to adopt. This unnamed nation is ruled by a "Marshal," who could stand in for any number of interwar fascist and authoritarian European dictators, but who is most immediately Hitler, seeing as he wages war by "lightning strike," and bearing in mind that Čapek wrote his play in 1937, not long before the German occupation. And although this fictional country is blessed to possess one doctor who has discovered a vaccine that cures the white plague, he refuses to share the recipe with the rich and powerful except on one condition—namely, that they foreswear war and shut down their munitions factories and other forms of military profiteering.
The Marshal, of course, is not willing to consider meeting any such conditions. He therefore seeks to contain the disease by simply disappearing everyone who manifests its symptoms to quarantine camps, enclosed with barbed wire, and trusts that the rest of the population—especially those under 50, who are immune to the virus—will be so enthusiastically engaged in his lightning-war efforts that they will largely forget the pandemic is even taking place. And this strategy largely works. The people are whipped up into a war frenzy. But then, the Marshal sees on his chest the dreaded "white spot" that heralds the first stage of the disease. Under pressure from his family, he finally starts to repent. He calls the doctor and urges him to come save him with his vaccine, saying he will call off the war in gratitude for his salvific efforts.
As the doctor rushes down the street to make good on this pledge, however, he is heard uttering a pacifist sentiment. The jingoistic crowd turns on him, threatening to string him up, and ends by trampling him to death. His precious secret of the knowledge of the cure dies with him.
Čapek's political commentary here is not subtle; nor should it have been. He was writing on the eve of fascist takeover and seeking to warn his compatriots against it. And if the play is straightforward democratic and liberal propaganda, it is emotionally effective as such. Humanity could have been saved, in Čapek's story. It loses its chance, because of the ego and self-aggrandizement of one militaristic ruler and the willingness of the populace to fall in line behind him.
It's not hard to see in this prophecy something of relevance to us, in our present era, when a pandemic has killed half a million Americans, and more than three million people worldwide (both figures likely massive undercounts); when a demagogic right-wing politician who could have saved lives in this country and around the globe by listening to scientists and encouraging people to follow public health protocols instead sought to downplay the dangers of the virus, distract people from it, hawk fake cures, and yet also use it to stigmatize racial minorities, stoke xenophobia, and wall out foreigners; who ultimately sacrificed the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of Americans to feed his own ego and political ambitions, and was egged on by his chauvinistic followers all along the way.
It is true, of course, that Trump is no longer in office. U.S. case loads are trending down. The vaccination campaign has been at least partially successful. Liberal democracy won out over personalistic autocracy. The public health experts who tried to warn us before it was too late were not left mangled and bloodied in the streets, but were instead re-installed in positions in government and treated with deference by the new president. Čapek's starkly pessimistic conclusion has not quite been borne out.
And yet the disease is still with us. It is still ravaging whole countries, many of whom have been denied the vaccine too long by the greed and apathy of rich countries who assume, falsely, that pandemics can be walled out and treated as someone else's issue. The coronavirus is still mutating and creating new variants which may someday prove vaccine-resistant, and calling it the "China virus" or the "India virus" or whatever else will not keep it from overflowing borders and coming back to the world's wealthy countries in new and more deadly forms. Trump's pandemic-era border restrictions against asylum-seekers are still in place and still being used to expel people to danger, even though they have been widely condemned by public health experts as ineffective and even counterproductive to containing the virus. And the party that elected Trump has very much not escaped his shadow, and they now appear to be plunging even further into election disinformation and conspiracy theories, becoming what Masha Gessen recently called a "party of autocracy."
The future Čapek predicted for us has not been ruled out, then. In some ways, it has already played out, and we now are in the position of the provisional survivors, trying to pick up the pieces, before the Marshal returns or his even more dangerous successor comes to power.
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