I love the book World War Z, by Max Brooks.
It’s amazing to see how some of the things he wrote about for a zombie apocalypse have come true, in milder ways, during the Coronavirus outbreak.
Take this article from the New York Post:
Rich people doing chores for first time: ‘It’s been a complete shock’
Kenneth Mark never had much time for domestic duties. The dermatologist, who runs three high-end practices in Soho, the Hamptons and Aspen, Colo., typically spends “north of 60 hours a week” jabbing patients with Botox and fillers. His housekeeper of 20 years keeps his home in order, and when his first son was born last year, she became his nanny as well.
“She really takes care of everything,” Mark, 50, tells The Post. “She cleans the house and also watches the baby. She is almost like a house manager, cleaning lady and nanny rolled into one.”
So for the last month, he’s been on diaper duty.
“It’s been a complete shock to our normal day-to-day life,” says Mark, who is still paying his housekeeper/nanny despite being unable to lean on her services. “I’m doing way more than I would under normal circumstances.”
Across the country, elites like Mark have been struggling to figure out how to deal without Jeeves during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Others, like Mark, find themselves in the awkward position of doing chores for the first time ever.
“You want to talk about the great equalizer?! People like us take things for granted,” says Seth MacFarlane on a recent episode of HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.” “We take our housekeepers for granted. Things like laundry and changing the cat box . . . Even figuring out how to do floors. My God, it’s a hell of a lot harder than making TV.”
I have read this before. Almost exactly.
It is Arthur Sinclair’s first interview in Chapter 5 of World War Z.
I found it described our reconstruction efforts rather well. “Talent” describes the potential workforce, its level of skilled labor, and how that labor could be utilized effectively. To be perfectly candid, our supply of talent was at a critical low. Ours was a postindustrial or service-based economy, so complex and highly specialized that each individual could only function within the confines of its narrow, compartmentalized structure. You should have seen some of the “careers” listed on our first employment census; everyone was some version of an “executive,” a “representative,” an “analyst,” or a “consultant,” all perfectly suited to the prewar world, but all totally inadequate for the present crisis.
These are the people the New York Post is writing about.
Now for my favorite part.
Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.
Once, on a fact-finding tour through LA, I sat in the back of a reeducation lecture. The trainees had all held lofty positions in the entertainment industry, a mélange of agents, managers, “creative executives,” whatever the hell that means. I can understand their resistance, their arrogance. Before the war, entertainment had been the most valued export of the United States. Now they were being trained as custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting director, exploded. How dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five seasons and she made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lifetimes! She kept addressing that instructor by her first name. “Magda,” she kept saying, “Magda, enough already. Magda, please.” At first I thought this woman was just being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman’s cleaning lady. Yes, it was very hard for some, but a lot of them later admitted that they got more emotional satisfaction from their new jobs than anything closely resembling their old ones.
This is why celebrities are on social media and trying to be part of a COVID-19 benefit concert.
Nobody needs them. They have no vital skills at the moment. They are trying to stay relevant in the world that has more pressing needs.
A guy who can mop a floor in a hospital with disinfectant is far more useful than some warbling asshole on Instagram. They know it and we know it.
I deeply believe this is the reason the Zombie Apocalypse genre was so popular. So many people with valuable, sometimes life-saving, skills were tired of barely making ends meet while the most useless fucking people on the planet were making millions shaking their asses on TV.
To imagine a world in which the celebrity whos only appreciable talent is filling a bra gets eaten while anybody who can grow food, service a rifle, or keep an engine running is suddenly transformed into an indispensable national hero appealed to a lot of people.
I think the Coronavirus has made a little bit of that come true. Hopefully when things return to normal, we won’t forget it and remember that truckers were far more vital to our nation that all of the movie stars put together.
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