War is the metaphor of choice for the national effort against the pandemic: it is a fight, or a battle, and NHS workers are heroes; raising questions about government strategy feels treasonous; Johnson issues exhortations in cod-Churchillian style. Even if this is simply the favoured national cliché, it feels wrong: the virus is unmoved by grit and resolve, and the economic problem is quite the opposite of that faced by a war economy – not how to turn over all production to the effort but how to stop everything and survive.
James Butler, Follow the Science: the government’s response to the virus. London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 8,16 April 2020
‘War is the metaphor of choice for the national effort against the pandemic,’ James Butler writes (LRB, 16 April). That brought to mind Mike Marqusee’s writings on living with cancer, and the use of the ‘martial metaphor’ for illness today: ‘Why must every concerted effort be likened to warfare? Is this the only way we are able to describe human co-operation in pursuit of a common goal? And who are the enemies in this war?’ The underlying purpose of the metaphor, in his view, was to make it ‘ripe for political and financial exploitation’, especially by the pharmaceutical industry. ‘What we need,’ he argued, ‘is not a war on cancer but a recognition that cancer is a social and environmental issue, requiring profound social and environmental changes.’ As for cancer, so for Covid-19.
Daniel Whittall. Letters, London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 9, 7 May 2020
The language of 'defeating the virus' is misleading. As is being widely recognised, we will need in the future to 'co-exist' with it. We have had a shock as great as this, and we now can come to terms with what it is like to live with the alien nature of where we find ourselves.
Rt Revd Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds, Ad Clerum letter to all Clergy in the Diocese of Leeds, 5 May 2020.
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