Here’s what will happen in 2013: The new disease will emerge over the summer, with reports first coming from New York City. A day later, word will come from other cities—Chicago, London—of similar cases. The symptoms: increased heart rate and fever, a fast-moving red rash, and a creeping numbness, beginning at the feet and gradually overtaking the heart. Once the symptoms appear, death comes in a matter of hours, even minutes.
In the cities, order will break down along class lines, the working class turning on the rich. The escape of the wealthy, by car and by air, will merely spread the disease faster. By the end of the year, civilization will have collapsed. The few survivors—one out of every million people, if that—will flee into rural areas, to eke out a primitive existence.
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I can’t help but note that London’s Smith has the same name as Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 and also that Kurt Weill used Johnny Johnson, the most common name on American casualty lists in World War One, as the title of his 1936 opera that I saw powerfully performed with only piano accompaniment at Glimmerglass last summer. That being said, another free association would be to Poe’s The Mask of the Red Death with its theme of the rich and powerful believing that they can wall themselves off by virtue of their wealth and power from social chaos or service in the military. Art, politics, history do have a way of intersecting, looking forward and looking back. The here and now is dominated (increasingly?) by those that think it is only the here and now that matters.