Blogging is not writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation

Hollywood star Matt Damon recalls a notice attached to the copy of a screenplay he received. Written by Scott Z. Burns, the note read, “Read this then go wash your hands.” That instruction to ‘wash your hands’ from ten years before the current crisis, foretold a plight that later grew into a crucial truth in 2020.

         Burns’ manuscript was for a movie called Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh and released in 2011. The film contains many uncanny similarities to the COVID-19 pandemic inflicting suffering on a global scale almost a decade later. To put the script in perspective, Burns researched many pandemics before starting the script. The 2009 flu pandemic was “really helpful” he said. At the time, the scriptwriter examined issues not solely relating to the virus, but how society handled the situation. The 2020 pandemic is very much about society and the disruption caused by lock-downs and the imposition on individual freedom.

         When the world was first alerted to a novel coronavirus in December 2019 after a fish vendor became ill in a market place in Wuhan, China, comparisons found in fiction spread via social media. A 1981 novel by Dean Koontz titled The Eyes of Darkness referred to a deadly virus named “Wuhan 400”. History reveals a long a varied tradition of telling stories about torment and carnage.
           

During the 8th century BC, the Greek gods did not take kindly to Agamemnon’s disrespect of Apollo. According to Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, the gods fired arrows tipped with disease to afflict the Greek army. When Chryseis, who was held captive by Agamemnon, is returned to her father, Apollo ends the scourge. Along similar lines of suffering The White Plague published in 1982, Frank Herbert writes of a scientist bent on revenge creating a pathogen that kills human females. By the time a vaccine is found, Earth’s genetic balances had shifted to leave a few women with thousands of suitors to choose from. Not to be outdone in dominating the genetics pool, The Female Man penned in 1975 by Joanna Russ wiped all the male species, leaving a feminine utopia. Fortunately for humanity, none of these stories eventuated, yet.

         There are, however, a few novels whereby elements in the story are strikingly similar to what transpired throughout subsequent history. Buzz Windrip is a character in It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. Windrip defeats FDR in 1936. His campaigns rallied around America’s white working class, and he spearheaded the cause of the ‘Forgotten Men’. An article in the New York Times outlined similarities between Windrip and Donald Trump. Tom Clancy in his 1994 novel, Debt of Honor, tells of a hijacked 747 crashing into the Capitol Building. In his 1968 novel John Brunner foresaw things thought impossible back in the sixties: the decline in tobacco use, decriminalization of marijuana, global terrorism, and the advent of gay marriage.

         Few would have imagined facial recognition and public areas under the scrutiny of cameras in 1949. Neither would they believe personal details would be collected by mega- corporations such as Google. When George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four he imagined totalitarian governments using mass surveillance to control the population. This argument that humans can not invent or imagine something they have not seen is curious. Einstein imagined the theory of general relativity whereby a large object could bend time. It took some 100 hundred years for astronomers to discover the fabric of space-time to be ripped around much more than expected and proves Einstein correct. When it comes to creating something not seen before, Douglas Adams in his Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency credits the renowned inventor, Sir Isaac Newton, for inventing the cat flap. “A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity, and invention. It is a door within a door, you see.”

          The line, “Blogging is not writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation,” is from the film Contagion. It was said to online commentator Alan Krumwiede when he asked for information about the virus. No one took him seriously. If we took stories about time-travel or mankind inhabiting planets other than the Earth as proof the stuff of imagination can or will become reality, then books and blogs should be taken seriously.