boris johnson ‘worse than the plague’

got a sudden craving for this one.




‘re-reading illness as metaphor now, I thought:... one cannot think without metaphors. But...’ 
- susan sontag, AIDS and its metaphors (1988)

sontag was inspired to write illness as metaphor (1978) when she contracted cancer. she found the whole health promoting, if you get cancer you can’t have been taking enough care of your health ideology deeply unhelpful (as it is). this made her think about the metaphors that are attached to cancer and to other illnesses (in themselves mere biochemical and physiological facts), that this disease ennobles the sufferer (tb), that this other makes them more creative (syphilis), that this disease humiliates and degrades the sufferer (cancer), and how unhelpful these all are.

she wants to strip these metaphors away, and do without. if it is not possible to entirely extract metaphor from language then in these cases (at least she argues) it would help. now horsemouth likes metaphors, it’s how he thinks, he can barely write a sentence without summoning two or three but he wants the doctors treating him and the science that backs up their decisions to be as good and clear and reproducible as possible.

humanity is always telling itself stories about magical treatments that can defeat this disease or that disease. vitaminD, vitamin C, sunlight, fresh air, less sexual repression, more sexual repression, avoiding mobile phone masts, blah, blah, blah. one of the joys of the two essays is that she cites the metaphor makers - procopius, the emperor maximilian, donne, defoe, camus (the plague gets an honourable mention), artaud, thomas mann, karel capek, dostoievsky (via his mouthpiece raskolnikov).

curiously there is no 1918 influenza pandemic, nothing on the 57 flu.

by the end of AIDS and its metaphors one metaphor she definitely wants to reduce the usage of it the medico-military metaphor, fighting disease, the disease invades, the disease has a fifth column of secret spreaders, and perhaps the one we are hearing the most about at the minute the frontline.

the families of dead doctors and nurses and bus drivers appear on tv arguing that it can’t be right to send people out to fight the disease not equipped with the right PPE. horsemouth doubts the usefulness of an idea derived from the trench warfare of world war I with its vast inhuman loss of life, for it is already to concede the idea that medics will not be properly protected and will die in large numbers. this is the case. it is the fact 

but the frontline runs down the middle of the the tube train, the middle of the assembly line, the middle of your 2m social distancing in the supermarket, it is there on the tape that stops you going up and talking to the bus driver, in the plastic shield that stops you breathing on the woman at the checkout. it there in the daily lives of the 51% of people who are still at work and are still travelling to work. and of course as the lockdown ends and the factory hooter goes for back to work it will be there for more of us.


this frontline has a rear as well, the lockdown, the place of the phony war, where horsemouth types this, where we must be loyal and observe blitz spirit.

 ‘an affliction from god for the sins of men’ said the emperor maximillian of the plague. procopius went further describing the emperor justinian and his wife theodora as worse than the plague, as demons sent to plague humanity. and boris, prime minister of the country with the highest death toll in europe, how will he look when this is over.

some friends have been making better use of the lockdown time than horsemouth.