Hundreds die. The journalist Raymond Rambert who is in town to write about poor sanitary conditions for Arabs, just wants to get out of the place and be re-united with his wife in Paris; Joseph Grand wants to write about it and publish a book; Jean Turrou keeps notes. Some, including a crook named Cottard profit for a while, cashing in on shortages; housewives are forced to buy basic commodities from conmen cashing in on out-of-control buying/ feeding frenzies. Sound familiar?
straightforward story was open to misunderstanding. The allegory may have been tied to Vichy France, but The Plague transcends political labels. It was not “fascism” that Camus was aiming at – an easy target, after all, especially in 1947 but dogma, compliance and cowardice in all their intersecting public forms. The message, as I see it, is two-fold. First, the only real vice is ignorance. To which we might add “and those who encourage it.” Secondly, Albert Camus’s own words at the end say it all: “The
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ne of the best critiques I’ve read of this extraordinarily brilliant novel was written by the late Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books. He saw in The Plague one of the clearest examinations of the diverse ways in which we respond to pandemics (medical or political) ever written. In his long and wonderful analysis, Judt said Camus’s public standing guaranteed the novel’s success. But timing is everything, as any writer knows. The French in 1947 were beginning to forget the recent past, inventing heroes along the way. Baddies like Marshal Philippe Petain had been tried and imprisoned. The Goodies, led by General Charles de Gaulle, were polishing their images and spreading what the American poet Louis Macneice called “the myth of themselves.” Says Judt, “Such commentaries are doubly revealing. In the first place they show just how much Camus’s apparently
plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can be dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves: and that perhaps would one day come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city.” CT Trevor Grundy is an English journalist and author of Memoir of a Fascist Childhood published by William Heinemann, London in 1998
Tiger King and America’s captive tiger problem
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etflix’s new docuseries Tiger King takes viewers into the strange world of big cat collectors. Featuring eccentric characters with names like Joe Exotic and Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, the series touches on polygamy, addiction and personality cults, while exploring a mysterious disappearance and a murderfor-hire. To Allison Skidmore, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies wildlife trafficking, the documentary didn’t bring enough attention to the scourge of captive big cats. A former park ranger, Skidmore first started studying the is-
48 ColdType | Mid-April 2020 | www.coldtype.net
sue in the US after the infamous death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015. She was shocked to learn how little oversight there was stateside. We asked her about the legality, incentives and ease of buying and selling tigers. 1. How many captive tigers are in the US? Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer. The vast majority of captive tigers are crossbred hybrids, so they aren’t identified as members of one of the six tiger subspecies – the Bengal tiger, Amur tiger, South China tiger, Sumatran tiger, Indochinese tiger and Malayan tiger. Instead, they’re classified as “generic.”
