The Nation's Pulse/Plagues and the Common Life
Shiflett, Dave
THE NATION'S PULSE PLAGUES AND THE COMMON LIFE G reat gallopin' trouser snakes, look at them gals!" Those were the days, sitting in the park while your sexual opposites (or otherwise, if you were...
...With these opposites simultaneously ricocheting through the skull, peace of mind will be hard to come by...
...Paul's index fingers and other indulgences) as a primary cause of the Protestant Reformation...
...Those were the days, sitting in the park while your sexual opposites (or otherwise, if you were depraved) filled your heart with fire...
...Even if these figures are high, one thing's for sure: The disease will stuff the ground with bones, and minds with mortal terror...
...But basically she gnaws at us...
...Many television shows, especially the jigglers, could also lose their appeal...
...The scientific conclusion: Those who deny reality will be best suited to deal with it...
...The Christian church took a direct hit, with some historians citing the plague (along with the selling of all 10,000 of St...
...Homosexuals will not quake alone...
...Believers will also have to tussle with Christ's commandment to care for the sick...
...AIDS could spay an entire generation of vixens...
...Even Erica Jong is talking about it...
...Experts may even start to envy the folks who tried to keep the lusting to a minimum, just like it says in the Good Book...
...These were supreme illustrations of the human spirit: hope even in the face of very slim odds...
...H ow will Dr...
...suffered from the fate of those who went on the Children's Crusade, many of whom we know fell into the hands of professional kidnappers and slavers...
...A microscopic virus, allied with the strongest of urges, may sire the largest graveyard in the history of disease—even war...
...The gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church, Christ promised, but a mob of flea-carrying rats was quite capable of diversifying it...
...surgeon general has predicted, and 40 percent develop the disease and die, that's 40 million dead...
...Someday it could be valuable, along with those Bette Midler albums and the copy of Blueboy he found under the stairs...
...Non-compliance, it is written, is to be rewarded with an eternal berth in the hot place, but despite this incentive, AIDS will probably claim more victims than will be reflected in the body count...
...Because a flat stomach or flexing thigh could trigger an anxiety attack in a potential mate, bodies will return to flab...
...With AIDS, nature returns with a vengeance...
...The National Catholic Reporter, which has no official ties to the Catholic Church, reported that 50 percent of the nation's 57,000 priests may be homosexual...
...The new economic order distressed the nobility and clergy, who fought back with legislation like France's 1349 Statute of Labor, which attempted (without success) to limit wages to pre-1348 levels...
...Pogroms are less likely this time around, but everyone should be prepared to experience other forms of non-progressive behavior...
...In all likelihood, most people tune in to see reports from the frontiers of sexuality, and make a real point of watching during watermelon season...
...He was so very influential...
...Impotence is tough to accept...
...Anita...
...A run to the monasteries began...
...Bikinis, which have brought more men to water than thirst, drape not the rose, but the venus flytrap...
...Nine of ten of the chadora-clad gals won't have a clue...
...Two responses followed...
...While the Piper pocketed his loot, other economic transformations were afoot to help usher in the modern age...
...She might pick us off one by one, and every once in a while throw a volcano or tidal wave our way...
...This may come to be seen as an unwanted talent...
...It could get stranger than that...
...The bodies, however, are not the heart of the problem...
...Its effect on the human psyche could rival that of the Black Death and the cycle of plagues that followed...
...Ruth cope...
...Things were in such disarray that, in January 1349, the bishop of Bath and Wells wrote a letter to parish priests ordering them to ". . persuade all men, in particular those who are now sick or should feel sick in the future, that, if they are on the point of death and cannot secure the services of a priest, then they should make confession to each other . . . or if no man is present, then even to a woman...
...By then, New York might have a great deal in common with modern-day Tehran...
...The visiting progressive observes all this, smacks his head, and screams, "There goes the business...
...The Village Voice classifieds will be about as thick as its current religion section...
...She may end her years hiding out in Paraguay...
...Six hundred years later, the plague continues to deliver its punchlines...
...And what a laugh it was hearing a toothless man with a face rash fantasize about the current Cosmo Girl...
...Man may have learned to split atoms, reverse rivers, and fly to the moon, but as far as fighting AIDS is concerned, he might as well be living in the stone age...
...Reading could pick up, and so literary conversations may become commonplace, ranging from critiques of Homer down at the bowling alley to remembrances of the good old days in the ladies locker room...
...The scourge fits neatly into that view of things, with AIDS representing God's judgment on illicit sex...
...Art and music became obsessed with death...
...Role models may include June Cleaver (the Beave's mom) and Art Linkletter...
...In the AIDS world, fantasies become death wishes, a wolf whistle the first movement of a dirge...
...Whither Fort Lauderdale...
...Imagine it: When the final tale is told in the battle against AIDS, Xaviera Hollander—a.k.a...
...Sensing an opportunity, he had the dead catapulted into the heart of the city, ridding himself of the corpses and dispiriting his foes...
...Bryant), "I found a relic...
...Warrior/scholars hail Janiheg as the father of biological warfare...
...Mass murder established man as the master of his fate in a way nothing else could...
...Spas will promise to give you a body just like Grover Cleveland's...
...Mainline religion could take another hit...
...Ragged tenants, looking in on the master and his missus, found a houseful of corpses...
...During the peak months of November and December," writes historian Robert Gottfried, "it was reported that 800 people died each day...
...More than enough heterosexuals are going to die from AIDS to rattle the survivors...
...Reaction, in short, will reign...
...He was hanged for his trouble, but his philosophical descendents rule huge sections of the Earth...
...Religion wasn't the only thing that changed...
...A third of the world died," said Jean Foissart, as was the case in Paris, whose population was between 80,000 and Dave Shiflett is a writer living in Virginia...
...The message: retreat, or die...
...Blond bombshells become biological warheads...
...The survivors were devastated, their institutions shaken...
...The Village, hard hit by the scourge, will be undergoing gentrification—by Baptists, Pentecostals, and Mormons...
...Meanwhile, those whose understanding of the universe is based on Darwinism—i.e., the people who run the developed world—will have to watch the folks who disdain natural selection (one way of looking at plagues) actually drawing strength from its machinations...
...The World Health Organization says 100 million people could be infected within five years...
...What's the point...
...Professor R. J. Rummel added it up last year and found that war has killed 35.7 million people this century, and the total number of people killed by their own governments, by the conservative estimate, was 119.4 million...
...The poor children...
...Nature herself is seen as a subdued force, even when itcomes to performing the death function...
...he will call out to his wife (she having been named after Ms...
...I t's easy, of course, to kick a plague 1 around, but some good did come of it...
...Philandering preachers have always produced skeptics, and they have generally been caught messing around with women...
...Occasionally, during the process of stripping down an apartment, a homesteader will come across a bullwhip or some other artifact...
...A wink here, a reciprocal glance there, and the lamest ego stood up and sprinted...
...Heady stuff, in its own, perverse way...
...Instead, it is a thing to be celebrated...
...All of us, after all, are going to die...
...Some will suffer more than others...
...Any mass killing is handled by man himself...
...The monks of Auwa packed up and beat it over to Olm, where, according to author Philip Ziegler, "they dissipated the monastery's treasure in riotous living...
...It will shake many people to their very souls...
...Secularism crept into other art forms: Chaucer and Boccaccio, the era's most famous writers, stepped from the straight and narrow to celebrate the sensual life, going so far as to celebrate the spiritual benefits of breaking wind...
...The sexual revolution encouraged fantasizing, and it's likely that the skill is at its highest historical level of development...
...You remember Sidney Sheldon, Alexis...
...A useful arrangement—while it lasted...
...The Happy Hooker —may go down as a war criminal...
...As sex and death become linked—as is inevitable—that which attracts will also repulse...
...Liberation-types will burn their running shoes, and you won't be able to find a wheat germ with an electron microscope...
...It could remake man...
...C onsider what AIDS could do to man's self-image...
...her steady death knell is background music...
...The clergy did its part to shake the faith, having asserted itself as the way to salvation, then bolting in the hour of need...
...Maybe so...
...If 100 million people have the virus by the turn of the century, as the U.S...
...Provocative styles are long gone, and women no longer worry about "street harassment"—not even from construction workers...
...Surely, AIDS is going to force a slowdown among the exotic adventurers...
...In England, the King's Council froze wages and levied taxes, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 27 leading to rebellions like the English Peasant's Revolt of 1381, during which organizer Wat Tyler urged his mates to "kill all lawyers and servants of the king...
...The same with rock 'n' roll, which, without sex, is like beer without alcohol...
...Taken all together, the AIDS world 1 will look pretty grim...
...Sensing a flush life—three squares, a bunk, a crack at the offering plate—shysters moved in as the clergy thinned out...
...Taking all this in, many of the faithful decided to navigate their own celestial course...
...The subsistence crisis that had plagued Europe disappeared...
...Poor things," and "We're Rich...
...The mother of invention would produce a great and wondrous brood: Jim and Tammy, Oral Roberts, Reverend Ike...
...With AIDS, lust bares its teeth...
...Or a Bowery bum imagining trysts with Princess Di...
...It would be wrong, from the fundamentalist position, to get upsetabout God's will...
...Oh yes...
...So did the Pied Piper of Hamelin, an operator of the first order...
...What on Earth will people do with themselves...
...I understand his work helped take out half of Southern California...
...The yeoman, too, is a child of the rat...
...The star may have a great physique, but maybe she also has the bug...
...It's like thinking about nuclear war, except for one vital difference: AIDS is here...
...Probably the most creative entrepreneur of the age was Janiheg, the Mongol khan of the Kigchaks, who was besieging the port of Kaffa when plague broke out among his troops...
...Some estimates go as high as 50 million dead overall...
...Indeed, the people most likely to pass mentally intact into the post-AIDS world are religious fundamentalists, currently the second-class citizens of the intellectual world...
...As you walk along 42nd Street, you might overhear a kid asking his mother "Who was Frederick of Hollywood...
...rr he Black Death itself lasted from 1 1347 to 1351, and when it was over, the Catholic Church estimated that 23,840,000 people died in Christian Europe alone...
...That means thinner pickings at the meat market, and more weddings graced by a virgin at the altar—maybe even two...
...Church officials dispute this number—and surely it's inflated—but no one knows what the true figure is, as is the case with other denominations...
...The most unsettling thing about AIDS is that it is, basically, anti-progressive...
...Chastity for instance...
...Just as Ronald Reagan came along to roll back Communism, AIDS seems designed to roll back the modern age...
...Caution in sexual matters will probably reduce the number of welfare dependents, abortion providers, and divorce lawyers...
...Mao and Stalin outkilled smallpox, and Hitler surely killed more people than God's Great Flood...
...Quantity was preferred to quality," according to the late Yves Renouard...
...the Pied Piper made his appearance (whether a charlatan or lunatic cannot be said) and offered to charm the rats away...
...Her telephone may end up in the Smithsonian...
...Positive contributions aside, however, the plague earned its reputation as a world-shaking event...
...Wages shot up, as workers were scarce...
...Mobs will pull down all statues of Mick Jagger, replacing them with monuments to Pat Boone...
...No matter the number, a priest or minister dying from AIDS is a faith-shaking event...
...The old world shatters...
...Prostitutes will have moved from the streets to the wax museums...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987...
...William Jennings Bryan will be in, Clarence Darrow out...
...So will it be with AIDS...
...the practice of offering ten- to fourteen-year-old children to the Friars Preachers as oblates became general...
...Even calendar pictures got gloomy, with pre-plague by Dave Shiflett spring and summer scenes giving way to studies of winter and fall...
...The question becomes: Is a roll in the hay worth dying for...
...Ruth...
...But the more you think about the effect AIDS could have, the more you shudder...
...What probably happened at Hamelin," explains the late and gifted James Westfall Thompson, "was this: the town was infested with rats...
...200,000 when the plague struck in the spring of 1348...
...Mel Brooks owes his own debt to the rats...
...Writes Gottfried: ". . . many parish priests fled, leaving no one to offer services, deliver last rites and comfort the sick...
...For sure, plagues haven't brought out the best in the Christian community, as we witnessed in the treatment of European Jews during the Black Death...
...The rats probably stayed, but the Piper's strange costume and stranger power which he declared that he possessed, united with intense, even hysterical emotionalism of the people, working upon the natural curiosity of children at the sight of such a wondrous spectacle as the Piper in their streets, lured the children after him and they were scattered, never to return...
...AIDS will do more than reduce confidence in human institutions...
...An extreme view...
...A very strange one takes its place...
...Imagine a group with current attitudes being transported to the year 2000, when the disease will have had time to alterthe landscape...
...No wonder the Kremlin thinks the disease was hatched in a CIA lab...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
