I realize all too well how following this outbreak can stress us. Stress happens we confront a threat we don't think we have the resources to deal with, and that is certainly the case with COVID-19.
Nathan Vanderklippe, the wonderful Asia correspondent for The Globe and Mail, superbly describes the damage such stress can do in his story about John Zhu, who has kept his family safe in Wuhan but at a terrible cost to his marriage and his own mental health. It's a reminder that the outbreak won't be over when it's over; society will be quick to forget, but those who experienced it will feel the consequences for the rest of their lives.
As someone right smack in COVID-19's preferred demographic target, I'm trying not to take this personally, and I'm not about to turn my basement into a bunker. (I'm old enough to remember fallout shelters, for heaven's sake.) But I do spend hours online trying to understand what COVID-19 is doing not just to me but to the societies I live in: my neighbourhood, my province, my country, and the larger world.
In Creative Writing 101, aspiring writers learn that stress reveals character, and therefore teaches us something about the human mind and soul. That's why novelists play Jehovah to their characters' Job, afflicting them with one misery after another.
So I'm learning something about 21st century societies' character under the stress of a virus unknown four months ago and still poorly understood today. And I must admit, we're not handling it very well.
Rather than climbing into a nice hot bathtub with a nice sharp razor, however, I have found surprising consolation in a radio program that first aired almost 70 years ago on the BBC. It involved a crew of World War II survivors who dealt with their PTSD and other mental health issues by creating a wildly funny postwar Britain that poked fun at the decaying empire that had sent them into harm's way. I didn't get to hear it until moving to Canada; the CBC re-broadcast some recordings in the 1970s that left me asphyxiating on the floor.
The key performers were Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, supported by a brilliant cast. To modern listeners, some of it might seem politically incorrect, but they were laughing not at people's class or ethnic accents, but at the imperial bigotry that thought class and ethnicity were funny. They ridiculed the anxieties of the 1950s, which are still around: the inadequacy of government institutions, the romanticizing of past imperial glory, the absurdity of the media's vision of the world, and the fantasy of getting rich quick.
Milligan wrote the scripts (between nervous collapses), voiced some of the characters with a range that rivalled Sellers's, and created sound effects never heard before on radio. He could also play with language like few others; John Lennon's A Spaniard in the Works, and many of his songs, owe everything to him. So do the geniuses of Monty Python.
Perhaps following the traditions of British music halls, the show also included musical intervals featuring the pop hits of the day; they must also have been a welcome relief from high-pressure live comedy for the performers (Milligan can often be heard collapsing with laughter at others' improvisations). They may seem archaic to fans of Billie Eilesh, but today's musical world came out of the Tin Pan Alley of the 1950s. Ray Ellington wasn't Duke Ellington, but he was pretty damn good.
The show I'm referring to is of course The Goon Show, which is available as a free streaming service on Abacus Radio (top row, far right). You may need to listen to two or three programs to get to understand the characters—Neddy Seagoon ("I'll be rich!"), Hercules Gritpype-Thinne "(You silly, twisted boy"), Major Bloodnok ("It's all lies, I tell you!"), Eccles ("Ha-llo!"), and the wonderful Bluebottle ("I don't like this game!"). But I think you'll agree that the Goons can do for us what they did for their contemporaries: teach us to laugh through a very tough time.
