Julian Roup – My death and the stroke paralysing America Ep20

In Episode 20 of his new book, author Julian Roup considers death and the collapse of American leadership in this Covid-19 Empire.

In case you missed Episode 19, click here.

Life in a Time of Plague

Sussex, 26th April 2020

By Julian Roup

It is Sunday, but it feels just like every other day of the week. There is birdsong and silence and a sense that one has all the time in the world, when in fact, in my case, I know that is far from true. The handful of tablets I take each night to regulate my heart and my blood tell me that clearly, and now there is a pandemic devastating life for people in Britain and around the world. I may not have as much time as I think I have this morning.

The papers announce that the official UK hospital death count reached 20,000 today.

I go down to make coffee and let the cat out of the kitchen. Saffy yowls, annoyed at not being upstairs last night. But she is now 14 years old and her bladder like mine is shot. Like me she can’t last a night without a pee and so disturbs Jan who has never been the best sleeper, so she is relegated to her basket in the kitchen, allowed up once more in the morning.

After making the coffee, I go out into the front garden to greet the day, and a beautiful day it is too. I remember John Humphries, the acerbic host of the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, moaning endlessly over the years about too much sunshine and saying it was time for some decent rain; his  garden needed it. I suppose he might describe the weather as ‘relentlessly beautiful’. It is such strange weather for a time of plague, rain and gales and dark lowering skies like those in 18th century oil paintings would somehow seem more appropriate. But we have had sunshine for week after week, after week, in the most spectacular spring I can remember.

Standing in the garden, I see that the wisteria has sent out runners and reached the storm porch, its soft blue flowers unfurling against a yellow leaved bush whose name I don’t know. The scent of the lilac bushes in the side hedge by the wicket gate is heady; they now stand ten foot tall and are heavy with bunches of bloom in pale and dark lilac.

On the way back from checking on Callum yesterday, I ran into Ethan, the seven-year-old son of our neighbours Terry and Michelle. He is in the big chicken coop at the top of their garden where it abuts ours. He calls out: “Hello Julian!” something I find so touching every time he does it. He is such a confident little boy; his parents are doing well by him. I ask him how his two orphan lambs are doing and he says: “They’re back with their friends in the field now. They can eat grass.” I ask how the chickens are performing on the egg laying front and he says: “We get one big one and two small ones every morning.” I congratulate him on this happy harvest, and climb over our fence behind the stables.

Another neighbour, from around the corner, Miles, delivers coffee, salted almonds, and carrots which his wife Belinda kindly bought for us at Waitrose. In return, we give him a vacuum pack of dried yeast Belinda has been unable to source. We offer each other our parcels gingerly, with fingertip transfers. And the talk is of Dominic and yachting. Miles has sailed a bit himself, he says, and is interested in hearing about the yachting vlogs that rekindled Dom’s life on the water after his teenage love of sailing. I promise to email him links to some of my favourites.

Adrienne, my friend and work colleague these past ten years, sends me a document to proof. It is a pitch she has written for the South African Chamber of Commerce for a fundraising campaign on behalf of South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Solidarity Fund. The President is reaching out to the South African diaspora in the hope of attracting money to support the country through the pandemic crisis, and I will do the media element if we get the job. The country was in deep financial trouble even before the virus hit. The former President, Jacob Zuma, used his time in office to steal billions with the help of the corrupt Indian family the Guptas, who are now in hiding in Dubai. The country is in dire straits.

But it’s not only South Africa that occupies my thoughts.

The Atlantic Magazine has a brilliant feature article by staff writer George Packer about America, headlined: We Are Living in a Failed State: The Coronavirus Didn’t Break America. It Revealed What Was Already Broken.

He writes: “When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, and a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.”

He continues: “The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.”

Packer concludes: “Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.”

The article goes on to unpack the disaster in the USA with forensic skill and devastating insights. Another good read reaches me from The Guardian.

The brilliant author, Yuval Noah Harari asks: ‘Will coronavirus change our attitudes to death? Quite the opposite.’

The modern world, he says, “has been shaped by the belief that humans can outsmart and defeat death. That was a revolutionary new attitude. For most of history, humans meekly submitted to death. Up to the late modern age, most religions and ideologies saw death not only as our inevitable fate, but as the main source of the meaning in life. The most important events of human existence happened after you exhaled your last breath. Only then did you come to learn the true secrets of life. “Only then did you gain eternal salvation, or suffer everlasting damnation. For most of history, the best human minds were busy giving meaning to death, not trying to defeat it.”

“As humans, we have been so successful in our attempt to safeguard and prolong life that our worldview has changed in a profound way. While traditional religions considered the afterlife as the main source of meaning, from the 18th century ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife.”

And he concludes:

“When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.”

I must agree with Hariri, but wonder if the Coronavirus will not force the pendulum to swing back a little to a new interest in what happens after life. But that is a forlorn hope; there is no knowing what lies beyond. Death remains a profound mystery, however much we’ve been forced to confront it during this time of Covid-19.

As I write I am enveloped in the scent of the yellow Peace rose at the top of our garden and my mind wanders to my late mother, Elise Louw. What would she have said about all this, the pandemic? What if anything has it taught us? And, as ever, she comes up with a humdinger:

“My kind, ons moet leer om in vreede saam te lewe of ons gaan almal alleen sterwe.” My child, we must learn to live together in peace, or we are all going to die alone.”

I breathe deep of the Peace rose scent – and then I breathe some more.

Click here for Episode 21

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