THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 |A
F
rom the next aisle of a super-
market in southwest Florida
the other morning, it sounded
as if a fistfight might break out. I fol-
lowed the raised voices and shouldn’t
have been surprised: Toilet paper.
The argument was over the last four
packages on the shelves. One man
wanted all of them for himself; the
other was furious that the first fel-
low wasn’t willing to share.
As I watched the men get in each
others’ faces, a memory came back,
of a tattered little booklet I found in
western Nebraska while doing re-
search about American life during
World War II, when essentials, in-
cluding food, were in genuine short
supply. I’d heard of such publica-
tions, but had never seen one: a ra-
tion book.
It had been issued in 1942 to aCoronavirus and the Ration Book
woman named Irene P. McKain, 50,
whose address was listed only as Ru-
ral Route 2. The U.S. Office of Price
Administration granted ration stamps
for all kinds of items that were in
scant supply: sugar, coffee, meat,
lard, shortening, cheese, butter. If
your family needed such staples, you
had to make your case in person be-
fore a local ration board.
The warning printed inside Ms.
McKain’s ration book was stark: “Any
attempt to violate the rules is an ef-
fort to deny someone his share and
will create hardship and discontent.”
For some Americans, such an ad-
monition was unnecessary. Irene
McKain was one of the Nebraska
women who donated their coveted
ration coupons to the railroad-depot
canteen in North Platte, where train-
loads of soldiers and sailors passing
through were fed all during the war.
From a single day’s logbook:“Contributions from the Moorefield
group yesterday were 25 birthday
cakes, 149 dozen cookies, 87 fried
chickens, 70 dozen eggs, 17½ quarts
of salad dressing, 40½ dozen dough-
nuts, 20 pounds of coffee, 22 quarts
of pickles, 22 pounds of butter, 13½
quarts of cream...”
That is how, during a dark Ameri-
can time, those ration coupons were
used: to provide sustenance for oth-
ers. It was the opposite of every man
for himself.
Do we still have that spirit inside
us today? When supplies are short,
sharing them with strangers may not
be easy, yet it can send a precious
message, one that begs to be heard
in terrible times:
You are not alone.Mr. Greene’s books include “Once
Upon a Town: The Miracle of the
North Platte Canteen.”By Bob GreeneOPINION
The Restaurant at the Edge of the Pandemic
Omar Popal apolo-
gizes mid-call:
“Sorry, I have to take
a telephone order.”
His sister, Fatima Po-
pal, stays on the line.
“We’ve had just 12
orders all day,” she
says. This last one is
for leek dumplings—
made from a family
recipe—and lamb pi-
laf, around $25 for the till. It’s nearly
6 p.m. on March 22. What should
have been a swamped (and satisfy-
ing) Sunday at Lapis—an Afghan bis-
tro in the Adams Morgan neighbor-
hood of Washington—has been,
instead, a fiasco.
On the first Sunday in March this
year, by comparison, Lapis seated 120
people for brunch and 150 for dinner.
With the ban on in-house dining in
Washington, the restaurant—like tens
of thousands across the country—has
switched to a bare-bones takeout-
only service. Omar handles the cus-
tomers’ calls, and Fatima the kitchen,
though their real jobs are COO and
CFO, respectively, of the Popal Group,
their family business, which also
owns a French restaurant and a Ger-
man beer hall in the capital.
“Lapis serves the food we eat at
home. It’s our pride,” says Omar. As
of this writing, their French and Ger-
man joints are closed. Lapis “will
most probably be at less than 25%,”
Fatima says, “at the rate we are go-
ing.” Their three restaurants, she
adds, have “laid off pretty much ev-
eryone except for our salaried em-
ployees,” including their bread-
maker. “He used to run a bakery in
Afghanistan. He’s an elderly gentle-
man. We don’t want to expose him to
anything, so he hasn’t come in.”
The Popals had 75 people working
for them before the new coronavirus
struck. Now they have seven: four
chefs and three managers. Their
mother, Shamim, is the executive
chef at Lapis, but she no longer
comes in to work. “We’ve quaran-
tined my parents,” Omar says.
(Shamim is 65, and their father,
Zubair, 69.) “My mother kept coming
in here, and the last day she was here
was very emotional for her.”
She has been sending her children
instructions from home, but the cri-
sis is proving unfathomable. “We
have no idea what to expect,” Fatima
says when asked how they’re plan-
ning to cope. “We don’t understand
the volume of business that’s coming
in. Do we buy groceries? Are we go-
ing to be closed in the next day or
two?”
The Pashtun Popal family has
faced—and overcome—adversity be-
fore. They fled Afghanistan in 1980
when it looked certain that Zubair
would be jailed by the Moscow-
backed Communist regime that ran
the country at the time. He worked as
a manager at Kabul’s Intercontinental
Hotel—an American company. “Plus
he wasn’t attending any of the educa-
tion meetings of the regime,” Omar
says. The family was cosmopolitan, in
the way of many educated Afghans of
that era. The mother, Omar says,
“wore miniskirts when she was
young. My aunt wore black for a
week when Elvis Presley died.”
The family bounced around as refu-
gees between Bahrain and the UnitedArab Emirates. In 1987 they secured
political asylum in the U.S. Zubair, no
longer a hotel manager, worked as a
salesman at a Honda dealership in Ar-
lington, Va. Life was hard but digni-
fied. Both Omar and Fatima went to
George Washington University. She
got a master’s degree from George-
town, he from the London School of
Economics. They opened their first
restaurant, a French bistro, in 2003,
and started Lapis—named after the
semiprecious blue stone found in Af-
ghanistan—in 2015.
“Each dish is my mom’s own rec-
ipe,” Fatima says, “and she makes
sure everything is healthy.” This isn’t
filial hype, as this writer can testify
from personal experience. The food is
delicious, and distinctively nongreasyfor Afghan cuisine, with more vegeta-
bles than you would expect on the
menu of a carnivorous culture. “Ve-
gan Afghan” might seem an oxymo-
ron, but Fatima assures me that they
do brisk business with young vegan
Washingtonians. Traditional eaters
get what they want, too, and Omar
boasts of an ambassador from a
“prominent Islamic country” who
dines on lamb—with his booze served
in a teacup.
Those happy days now seem part
of a lost age, and Omar and Fatima
are stressed. “There’s a lot happen-
ing, in addition to figuring out the fi-
nancial side of what the business is
doing.” The siblings have to provide
emotional support for the laid-off
staff, many of them immigrants fromEl Salvador, Serbia and Afghanistan.
Then there are the pressing physical
questions. “Do we have the symp-
toms or not?” Fatima asks. “Is some-
body sick and doesn’t know it?”
Yet in the midst of a global crisis
that is crushing their small business
in a corner of Washington, the Popals
take solace in their own history.
Omar is tenacious—and philosophi-
cal. “I would say the fact that we
were refugees, and that we came
from nothing, makes us a little bit
more resilient. Because, you know, we
understand what it means to go back
to nothing.”Mr. Varadarajan is executive edi-
tor at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution.Like many small-business
owners, the Afghan owners
of this Washington joint
are staring into an abyss.
CROSS
COUNTRY
By Tunku
Varadarajan
T
o put the coronavirus
pandemic in perspective,
consider what happened
when the bubonic plague
struck London in 1665.
The onset of the disease could be
sudden, says Yale historian Frank
Snowden: “You actually have peo-
ple afflicted and in agony in public
spaces.” Trade and commerce
swiftly shut down, and “every eco-
nomic activity disappeared.” The
city erected hospitals to isolate the
sick. “You have the burning of sul-
fur in the streets—bonfires to pu-
rify the air.”
Some 100,000 Londoners—
close to a quarter of the popula-
tion, equivalent to two million to-
day—died. Some sufferers
committed suicide by “throwing
themselves into the Thames,” Mr.
Snowden says. “Such was their
horror at what was happening to
their bodies, and the excruciating
pain of the buboes”—inflamed
lymph nodes—that are the classic
symptom of the bubonic plague.
Social order broke down as the
authorities fled. “Death cart”
drivers went door to door, collect-
ing corpses for a fee and some-
times plundering the possessions
of survivors.
The plague’s violent assaults on
European cities in the Middle Ages
and Renaissance periods created
“social dislocation in a way we
can’t imagine,” says Mr. Snowden,
whose October 2019 book, “Epi-
demics in Society: From the Black
Death to the Present”—a survey of
infectious diseases and their social
impact—is suddenly timely.
I interviewed Mr. Snowden, 73,
over Skype. We’re both home in
lockdown, I in California and he in
Rome, where he’s gone to do re-
search in the Vatican archives. In
the mid-14th century, Italy was
“the most scourged place in Eu-
rope with the Black Death,” he
notes. In the 21st century, it’s
among the countries hardest hit by
Covid-19.
Science has consigned the
plague, caused by the flea- and rat-
borne bacteriumYersinia pestis,to
the margins of public-health con-
cern (though it remains feared as a
potential aerosolized bioweapon).
Yet its legacy raises challenging
questions about how the coronavi-
rus might change the world.
For all the modern West’s bio-
medical prowess, some of its blunt
tools against a poorly understood
disease are similar to what was
first attempted in the 14th century.
Take quarantine. Hundreds of mil-
lions of Americans and Europeans
are isolated in their homes in an
effort to slow the spread of the
coronavirus.
Isolation as a defense against in-
fectious disease originated in the
city-states of Venice and Florence.
Italy was the center of Mediterra-
nean trade, and the plague arrived
in 1347 on commercial ships. The
dominant theory at the time was
“miasmatism”—the atmosphere
was poisoned—perhaps by visitors’
garments—and people get sick
“when they breathe that in, or ab-
sorb it through their pores,” Mr.
Snowden says. “That is, there is
some emanation, and it can be
thought to be coming from the soil,
or from the bodies” of sick people.
After plague visitations, the Ve-
netian navy eventually began to
force sailors arriving at the harbor
to disembark on a nearby island,
where they remained for 40 days—
quaranta—a duration chosen for
its biblical significance. The strat-
egy worked when it was enforced
as disease-ridden fleas died out
and the sick died or recovered. Mr.
Snowden notes that Americans re-
turning from Wuhan, China, in
early February were “detained on
army bases for a quarantine pe-
riod”—14 days rather than 40.
“We can see the roots of many
aspects of modern health already
in the Renaissance,” he adds. An-
other example is the wax “plague
costume” worn by physicians. It re-
sembled modern-day medical
garb—“the protective garments
that you see in the hospital for
people dealing with Ebola, or this
sort of space suit”—but with a long
beak containing resonant herbs.
They were thought to “purify the
air that you were breathing in.”
The costume “did, in fact, have
some protective value,” Mr.
Snowden says, because the wax re-
pelled the fleas that carried the
disease.
Antiplague efforts dramatically
changed Europeans’ relationship to
government. “The Florentines es-
tablished what were called health
magistrates, which are the ances-
tors of what today we call boards
of health or departments of
health,” Mr. Snowden explains.
“Endowed with special legal pow-
ers,” they coordinated plague coun-
termeasures.
The plague was more traumatic
than a military assault, and the re-
sponse was often warlike in its fe-
rocity. One response was a “sani-
tary cordon,” or encircling of a
city-state with soldiers, who didn’t
allow anyone in or out. “Imagine
one’s own city, and suddenly, in the
morning, it’s cordoned off by the
National Guard with fixed bayonets
and helmets on, and orders to
shoot if we cross,” Mr. Snowden
says. Cordons were regularly im-
posed in European cities in times
of plague risk, leading to terror
and violence. In the 18th century,
the Austrian army was “deployed
to prevent bubonic plague frommoving up the Balkan Peninsula
and into Western Europe” by halt-
ing travelers who might be carry-
ing it.
The sociologist Charles Tilly
(1929-2008) famously argued that
“war makes the state”—that bor-
ders and bureaucracies were
forged by necessity in military con-
flict. Plague had similar effects, re-
quiring “military commitment, ad-
ministration, finance and all the
rest of it,” Mr. Snowden says. In
addition to a navy to enforce quar-
antines, “you needed to have a po-
lice power,” a monopoly on force
over a wide area. Sometimes
“watchmen were stationed outside
the homes of people who had the
plague, and no one was allowed in
or out.”
Yet while the plague saw power
move up from villages and city-
states to national capitals, the cor-
onavirus is encouraging a devolu-
tion of authority from supra-
national units to the nation-state.
This is most obvious in the Euro-
pean Union, where member states
are setting their own responses.
Open borders within the EU have
been closed, and some countries
have restricted export of medical
supplies. The virus has heightened
tensions between the U.S. and
China, as Beijing tries to protect
its image and Americans worry
about access to medical supply
chains.T
he coronavirus is threatening
“the economic and political
sinews of globalization, and
causing them to unravel to a cer-
tain degree,” Mr. Snowden says. He
notes that “coronavirus is emphati-
cally a disease of globalization.”
The virus is striking hardest in cit-
ies that are “densely populated and
linked by rapid air travel, by move-
ments of tourists, of refugees, all
kinds of businesspeople, all kinds
of interlocking networks.”
The social dynamics of a pan-
demic are determined partly by
who is most affected. Cholera, for
example, “is famously associatedwith social and class tensions and
turmoil,” Mr. Snowden says. A vi-
cious gastrointestinal infection, it
was most prevalent in crowded ur-
ban tenements with contaminated
food or water. “We could pick Na-
ples, or we could pick New York
City in the 19th century,” he says.
“Municipal officials, the authori-
ties, the doctors, the priests, the
middle classes, the wealthy, who
live in different neighborhoods, are
not succumbing to this disease.”
That led to conspiracy theories
about its origin, and to working-
class riots.
Similarly, the bubonic plague
struck India, then a British colony,
in the late 19th century. The British
responded by introducing Renais-
sance-era antiplague measures—
“very draconian exercises of power
and authority, but by a colonial
government, over the native popu-
lation,” Mr. Snowden says. “The
population of India regarded this
as more fearful than the plague it-
self” and resisted. Britain, worried
that “this would be the beginning
of modern Indian nationalism,”
backed off the measures, which
were mostly ineffective anyway.
Respiratory viruses, Mr.
Snowden says, tend to be socially
indiscriminate in whom they infect.
Yet because of its origins in the
vectors of globalization, the coro-
navirus appears to have affected
the elite in a high-profile way.
From Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson,
people who travel frequently or are
in touch with travelers have been
among the first to get infected.
That has shaped the political re-
sponse in the U.S., as the Demo-
cratic Party, centered in globalized
cities, demands an intensive re-
sponse. Liberal professionals may
also be more likely to be able to
work while isolated at home. Re-
publican voters are less likely to
live in dense areas with high num-
bers of infections and so far ap-
pear less receptive to dramatic
countermeasures.
Infectious disease can change
the physical landscape itself. Mr.Snowden notes that when Napo-
leon III rebuilt Paris in the
mid-19th century, one of his objec-
tives was to protect against chol-
era: “It was this idea of making
broad boulevards, where the sun
and light could disperse the mi-
asma.” Cholera also prompted ex-
pansions of regulatory power over
the “construction of houses, how
they had to be built, the cleanli-
ness standards.” If respiratory vi-
ruses become a more persistent
feature of life in the West, changes
to public transportation and zoning
could also be implemented based
on our understanding of science—
which, like Napoleon’s, is sure to
be built upon or superseded in
later years.
In ancient literature, from
Homer’s “Iliad” to the Old Testa-
ment, plagues are associated with
the idea that man is being pun-
ished for his sins, Mr. Snowden ob-
serves. Venetian churches were
built to demonstrate repentance.
Mr. Snowden also highlights the
Flagellants of the 14th and 15th
centuries, who would embark on a
“40-day procession of repentance,
self-chastisement and prayer,”
whipping themselves and others.
For Europeans who survived the
plague, Mr. Snowden says, it im-
pressed the idea that “you could be
struck down at any moment with-
out warning,” so you should focus
on your immortal soul. Paintings
often featured symbols like “an
hourglass with the sands running
out, a flower that’s wilting.”C
oronavirus is far less lethal,
but it does shatter assump-
tions about the resilience of
the modern world. Mr. Snowden
says that after World War II “there
was real confidence that all infec-
tious disease were going to be a
thing of the past.” Chronic and he-
reditary diseases would remain,
but “the infections, the contagions,
the pandemics, would no longer ex-
ist because of science.” Since the
1990s—in particular the avian flu
outbreak of 1997—experts have un-
derstood that “there are going to
be many more epidemic diseases,”
especially respiratory infections
that jump from animals to humans.
Nonetheless, the novel coronavirus
caught the West flat-footed.
It’s too early to say what politi-
cal and economic imprint this pan-
demic will leave in its wake. As Mr.
Snowden says, “there’s much more
that isn’t known than is known.”
Yet with a mix of intuition and
luck, Renaissance Europeans often
kept at bay a gruesome plague
whose provenance and mecha-
nisms they didn’t understand. To-
day science is capable of much
more. But modernity has also left
our societies vulnerable in ways
14th-century Venetians could never
have imagined.Mr. Willick is an editorial page
writer at the Journal.How Epidemics Change Civilizations
KEN FALLINMeasures developed for the
plagues of the 14th century
are helping authorities
fight the coronavirus now.
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Frank M. Snowden| By Jason Willick