- The coronavirus through Poe-coloured spectacles
By: Haris Ali Virk
In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero, along with his favoured nobility, retires to the deep seclusion of an abbey to avoid the plague while it continues to devastate the poor. The Prince then hosts a masquerade ball to entertain his guests. At midnight, he notices a dark figure in a blood-spattered robe, and with a corpse-like mask depicting a victim of the Red Death. The Prince feels insulted and orders the figure to reveal its identity. When the figure turns toward him, the Prince falls dead. The enraged revelers throw themselves onto the stranger and remove his mask, only to find the costume empty. The mysterious figure is considered as the personification of the Red Death which goes on to kill everyone in the castle. One of the messages of Poe’s short story, first published back in 1842, is that a disaster has the ability to unveil truth in its most brutal form. This is why the mask needs to be torn off in order to reveal the truth.
Our world is in deep trouble, and the powerful few controlling our politics and economy are to be blamed. They have worked for decades to make sure that we are vulnerable, and now the most vulnerable among us are going to face the most terrifying fate.
If we try to imagine the coronavirus crisis in its entirety, we’ll find ourselves strangled right in the middle of a crazy political atmosphere. On the one hand, there is its impact on our health, and emotional wellbeing. Not only are we living under a constant fear for our lives and for those of our loved ones, but are also forced to stay in isolation as all our normal activities have been suspended for an indefinite period of time. And then, there is its impact on the political economy of global capitalism as it is not possible to sustain any kind of normal economic activity and growth, when people are not supposed to leave their homes. A total shutdown of vast sections of the economy means mass unemployment, a gigantic fall in consumer spending and complete chaos for the financial sectors of the global market. What is to come might blow past the 2008 recession and perhaps even the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In order to addressthe economic side of this crisis, we must look for solutions we’ve never tried before. We, like the Red Death, must penetrate the walls and castles of global capitalism and cause its downfall. We can’t just simply play with the old rules
While a global catastrophe looms over our heads, all we see is incompetence and greed emanating from the highest positions of power. The reluctance of the neoliberal ‘think tanks’ in responding to this crisis with permanent structural changes exposes the actual intent of the promises of capitalistic social Darwinism. Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, writes how capitalism feeds over disasters and exploits natural catastrophes in order to get rid of previous constraints and rob the people in an even more brutal manner. This is exactly what’s happening right now. The corporate vultures are circling the crisis, and they don’t care if millions of vulnerable working people die in helping them make more and more profits. We are on the verge of the disaster, and they want to ‘normalize’ the economy without having taken care of any of the issues. For them, it’s more important to save the big corporations than to take care of the small business owners, low-wage workers, the poor, and the older. This is why the Trump Administration is currently engaged in reckless policies and passed a corporate bailout bill that offers massive tax cuts for big corporations. The fact is that you cannot have a functioning economy if hundreds and thousands of people start dying. This is a fundamental contradiction within the capitalist economy. You cannot ask people to stay at their homes to save lives, and simultaneously continue running the normal economic activity.
The current crisis has also unveiled the extreme inequality in our society where some people have the privilege to stay at their homes, well protected and well fed, while so many others who are more vulnerable have no social benefits, no access to healthcare and not even the basic necessities to sustain themselves. All of this clearly implies that the way the global economy has been structured makes us ill-suited to deal with a crisis of this scale. Never has the debate about universal healthcare become more serious than it is now. People are finally listening to the likes of Bernie Sanders and demanding the right to free and universal healthcare. Even traditionally conservative and right-wing voices, including many of the Republican Senators, are now calling for a greater role of the government in economy. In The Atlantic, a writer recently said that there were no libertarians in an epidemic. And this seems to be true in the current situation. The question is whether we have all become socialists now, or are we just going to witness a selected socialism by helping out the big corporations through tax cuts and bailout packages.
We have never been in a situation like this. In less than four weeks, the coronavirus crisis has tremendously changed our perceptions of what is possible and what is not possible. It has unquestionably taught us the importance of public health and the uses of public finance for the benefit of the many, not a few. It has taught us that the powerful few do not care for the rest of us. They, like Prince Prospero, will seclude themselves in their castles with all their means of pleasures while we, the wretched of the earth, face the real consequences.
In order to addressthe economic side of this crisis, we must look for solutions we’ve never tried before. We, like the Red Death, must penetrate the walls and castles of global capitalism and cause its downfall. We can’t just simply play with the old rules and look up for internal changes to the economy, and continue to screw over ordinary people.
The mask has now been torn off. If this doesn’t change people’s mind about capitalism, I don’t think anything ever will.
Haris Ali Virk is a student of English Literature at Government College University Lahore.