Hey, coronavirus: get in line with all of the world’s other problems

M ay you live in interesting times. While seemingly a blessing, the words are bitter. I’ve always accepted them as advertised, as the “Chinese curse”, one predating the coronavirus. But knowing this magazine’s sub-editors double-check my columns for accuracy, I decided to research it myself. Only to find that neither Confucius nor any other oriental sage can be blamed. Indeed, its origins are English. Very. The nearest thing to “the Chinese curse” can be found in the parliamentary speeches of Joseph Chamberlain in the late 19th to early 20th century. Particularly this one, dated 1898: “I think you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times… in which history is so full… of new objects of anxiety.”

And so say all of us. Apart from the woes of wars, particularly in the Middle East from Syria to Yemen, the current list of “interesting” includes, for my fellow Australians, at very least the following. (Leaving aside the fact that the Doomsday Clock of nuclear danger is back at one minute to midnight.) Melting ice caps, rising seas, bleaching reefs, expanding deserts… just some of the blessings of climate change. We’ve a “new normal” of drought – still unbroken at my farm – with subsequent conflagration. To be quenched by flood, with subsequent erosion. The stench of fish kills filled the air, along with the stench of millions of land animals burnt alive. Add to which we have the stench of political corruption, for which Covid-19 has provided, for the miscreants, a useful distraction.

Even before the virus put us in harm’s way our body politic was on the nose, with PMs having the shelf life of yoghurt, our dilapidated democracy in the direst of straits. Interesting times when all our institutions, even our churches, had lost our trust.

But with Covid-19? The cancellation of everything. Take Italy. Total lockdown. Venice abandoned, its waiters and pigeons starving, and the curse of that city – the cruise ships – turned into prison hulks everywhere. Throughout Italy weddings and funerals banned – don’t dare die or you’ll be fined or imprisoned. Elsewhere around the world, Everest closed to climbers. Festivals cancelled. Sports played in empty arenas. The US presidential primaries postponed, the election imperilled. (Though POTUS, until recently, assured us that the virus was either a hoax or a Democratic Party plot.)

Here in Australia, Sydney’s Royal Easter Show has lost its crown. We can’t be judged by our peers, with jury trials suspended. We’re forbidden to shake hands, ordered to isolate ourselves, to work at home in jobs that may soon cease to exist as recession looms. Bull markets replaced by bears – and now by vultures pecking at corporate carcasses.

By the age of 80 I’d witnessed many dark days – hot wars, cold wars, famines, vast armies of refugees, GFCs, other pandemics such as HIV-AIDS. But never such “interesting times” when talk of chaos or apocalypse seems understated.

Mind you, the virus doesn’t discriminate – as its infection of the British health minister and our own Peter Dutton attests. Good God, even James Bond has been laid low. And poor Tom Hanks. (I did warn Tom. Follow my example, I said, and avoid all contact with Baz Luhrmann films.)

If we can find enough loo rolls I suppose we’ll survive. Or 98 per cent will, leaving the 2 per cent (oldies like your ancient columnist) to fall off the perch. Two per cent meant some 50 million dead after the 1918 Spanish flu, so with the increase in population perhaps we could double that. Oh, to live in boring times.