The Origin of Origins
I have been thinking about where things come from. If you're paying any attention, I'm sure you've noticed that what to call the distemper that has kept us all inside for a month now has taken on a political bent. If you are scientific or neutral (or, truly, just want to be understood) you may call it COVID-19 which is the name of the disease, or the coronavirus, which is the name of the family of viruses that cause the disease, or you may even call it SARS-COV-2, a more specific name of the virus that stands for "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2." On the flip side, if you want to stick it to the Chinese or own the libs or some other aggressive political posturing you may say the Wuhan virus, the Chinese virus or, if you are particularly craven, Kung Flu.
These names are meant to remind people that the coronavirus did indeed originate in China. Smart people who know better hide behind the fact that this is true and claim that saying it's the Chinese virus isn't political at all but "just being accurate." Maybe. We're not entirely sure where the virus that caused the 1918 global pandemic came from but it may have been Britain, France, China or the United States, specifically kansas. We do know it did not come from Spain. Why, then, is it referred to so often as "the Spanish Flu?" When the pandemic began, most of Europe's big nations were still at war with each other. As bodies racked with illness started competing with bodies racked with bullets, governments downplayed the seriousness of the flu to avoid affecting morale (unlike today, where all governments have been totally upfront about the danger of coronavirus). Spain, which remained neutral during World War I, was one of the only nations reporting on the spread of the disease and became Europe's default source of information about it. Other nations were struggling with the pandemic but only Spain was covering it, which led others to assume that Spain was ground zero. The Spanish, for their part, called the disease "the French flu" as they assumed that's where they got it from.
Names of things can certainly shade our perceptions of them. Last week, Jonathan Turley, a Georgetown law professor who was last seen in our ongoing political drama speaking on Capitol Hill about the limits of impeachment during the Senate trial of the president, tweeted "The most popular uber eats orders in Oklahoma is spicy tuna roll and in both Missouri and Wisconsin crag (sic) Rangoon? California is chicken tikka masala? I don't even know what that is beyond the chicken. If true, we have an outbreak of the panpompous." I'm not 100% sure what he's driving out because I don't speak Bama but I believe he's saying that an American crisis calls for American food and that such foreign invaders on our plates represent a moral failing. If so, he should be relieved to know that crab rangoon is as American as apple pie (I don't know what crag Rangoon is but I'm assuming he means the cream cheese-stuffed wontons), invented as they were by Victor Bergeron in California in 1934. Bergeron was the owner and operator of Trader Vic's tiki bars (which inspired Trader Joe's) and noticed an interest in foods of the South Pacific. Thus, crab rangoons were born (Bergeron also allegedly invented the Mai Tai).
Turley is right to be skeptical of the freshness of spicy tuna rolls in Oklahoma but his put down of chicken tikka masala, and his professed ignorance of it, just makes me sad for him. However, if he thinks the dish is Indian, he's wrong once more. Chicken tikka masala is the most popular dish in Britain, which makes sense as it is as British as shepherd's pie. The dish was invented in Glasgow in the 1960s and has become a national dish, so much so that they export it to restaurants in India. Before the Scottish get too proud, they should be reminded that some of their foundational national items were invented somewhere else including kilts (Ireland), tartans (England), haggis (Greece), bagpipes (central Asia) and whiskey (China).
That Scottish tartans are actually English inventions must be a blow but then being responsible for items that have taken national definitions other places seems to be an English past time. Frenchmen that take grisly pride in the efficiency of the guillotine should raise a glass of champagne to the English, who invented both the guillotine and champagne. Hell, the limeys even invented apple pie. The first recipe comes from none other than Geoffrey Chaucer in 1381.
The naming of the guillotine holds some fascinating parallels to the naming of the so-called Chinese virus, both deadly entities whose namesakes would rather not be attached to it. The guillotine was invented in Yorkshire in the middle ages but came to be used in the French Revolution when a doctor named Joseph Ignance Guillotin reported to the National Assembly that he was totally against public executions but since the state had deemed them necessary they should consider standardizing them since the way they killed the poor (by hanging) was more brutal and inhumane than the way they killed the rich (by swift beheading). The state listened and in the way governments do, came to this conclusion: "Your'e right, Dr. Pacifist, we'll bring a medieval beheading machine out of retirement, use it on everybody and name it after you!"
Despite Guillotin and his family's attempts to separate the man from the machine he despised, it remains his namesake. France has killed an estimated fifteen thousand of its own citizens with the guillotine, the last in 1977. They would hold the world record except for the Germans, who not only appropriated the pretzel from Italy and sauerkraut from China, but the guillotine as well, using it on forty thousand between 1938 to 1945. With all these means of killing people, who needs a virus, you know?
Well, anyway, let's keep our heads this week and remember that the origin of a thing doesn't necessarily reflect its nature. More important is our reaction to it when it comes to our shores.