The Great Stupidity

By Andy Lazris

"The Great Stupidity" is a witty work of fiction that offers a satirical look at an historic public health crisis. Author Andy Lazris transports readers back in time as the Black Death strikes a small village in France. Village leaders send off a blacksmith's son on a ridiculous quest to cure the disease – and on his journey he encounters many "experts" who "know" how to solve this crisis. A black comedy with 12 songs, the book is an historical mirror through which we can view ourselves, because as our heroes learn, those who think they know it all usually are just out for themselves, while goodness and friendship are really the best cures of all.

As the Black Death wreaks havoc and well – death – a young boy sets out to find the other half of Saint Ambrose's toenail which was stolen from their artifact collection, thinking that it is the reason for the plague. On his way, the boy encounters many who think they know everything, but actually know little to nothing. He encounters "experts" ranging from Flagellates who whip themselves, to zealots who seek to kill Jews, to scientists who claim everyone must wave their hands and build 6 foot walls, to the Pope who sells indulgences before running away, to well-off monks who dip holy artifacts into water and sell them, and to doctors and soldiers who believe you have to kill people in order to save them.

Most of the events and people in the book are based on historical reality, and the book's many adventures, encounters, and comedic moments reflect the truth of what transpired 800 years ago, and what we are experiencing during the contemporary pandemic. All the songs are performed by professional artists and are woven into the fabric of the narrative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667814148

Book preview

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Copyright © 2021 by Andy Lazris

The Great Stupidity

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,

or any information storage and retrieval system now known or invented,

without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes

to quote brief passages in connection with a review written

for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66781-413-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66781-414-8

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

How to read a 3-D book and listen to the book’s songs:

Dedication

Cover Design

Read More

Author’s Preface

Chapter One

Keeping the Bad Air Out

Chapter Two

A Half of a Nail Isn’t Wholey

Chapter Three

The Pope’s Third Girl and My Lady

Chapter 4

Whipping the World back into Shape

Chapter Five

The Plot

Chapter Six

Holy Water with a Splash of Toenail

Chapter Seven

The Road to Debauchery

Chapter 8

When Fate Arrives, the Physician Becomes a Fool

Chapter 9

Barking Dogs of God

Chapter 10

Poets and Blondes at the Steps of Fate

Chapter 11

The Frenchiest Man in All of France

Chapter Twelve

The Great Humanity

How to read a 3-D book

and listen to the book’s songs:

The Great Stupidity—like my recent book, the Geriatrics Vengeance Club—is a 3-D experience, in that the songs I wrote are weaved into the narrative. Each chapter has a song associated with it, and I have put a bonus song at the end.

All the songs can be found on my website at https://www.andylazris.com/songs-great-stupidity, on Spotify or Apple Music, or on CD (which I can provide). Lyrics and music are on the site as well. It’s best to listen to the songs as they come up in the book!

I must thank the four amazing and anonymous artists who performed my songs for both of my books. Their talent and patience with me are so very appreciated, and they helped me turn my songs into something amazing.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to all those who have taught me history over the years, from my dad and granddpop when I was young, to my high school teachers like Coach K and Mr. Muir, to my college professors at Brown, and to those who continue to teach me now through books and podcasts and my graduate studies at University of Maryland. Yes, true historians will scoff at this book’s parodied depiction of a significant historical event, but I hope that they can also get a few chuckles in as well!

Cover Design

Thanks again to my mom, Marilyn Lazris,

for designing the cover,

and for illustrating all of my books.

Read More

If you want to read my other books, see my podcast,

listen to my songs, or hear me on radio,

go to my website at www.andylazris.com

Author’s Preface

And for all the triumphs of modern science, infectious disease retains the ability to render us as impotent as our medieval ancestors. Today a demographic disaster on the scale of the Black Death would claim 1.9 billion lives. -The Great Mortality, by John Kelly

As a doctor and as a human being on the planet earth, I have been immersed in COVID as it transformed our society into one entirely unrecognizable to me. I treated hundreds of patients with the virus and watched helplessly as our approach to it took on more an air of religious and political zealotry than anything resembling science or medicine. I wrote about it in my novel, The Geriatrics Vengeance Club, as well as in several scientific books and blogs, and because I dared open my mouth, my State’s Medical Board has threatened to take away my license. To me, COVID was and will always be the great stupidity; we let a virus get the best of us, fell prey to deception and cheap tricks, and were no smarter or humanistic than our predecessors who confronted the Black Death—aka The Great Mortality, as it was known to its contemporaries—that ravaged the world almost eight centuries ago.

To look at our own plague through the lens of the much more horrendous one the world faced in 1350 is to understand just how little has changed in medicine, politics, science, and faith. As one professor whose course I listened to in my preparation for this book said, People don’t change, only the world does. Or as Forrest Gump says, Stupid is as stupid was.

In many ways, both our plague and theirs demonstrate how overwhelming fear can strip from people their autonomy and sense of individuality and make them vulnerable to magical thinking, authoritative bullying, and unassailable submission to a power that promises them salvation. Historian Michael Foucault observed about the Great Mortality: History teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies…. When struck by the Great Mortality, society mobilized in many ways, as I show through parody in this book. There was some degree of central control, as is demonstrated in my chapter about the Soldiers of France, where towns were quarantined and people locked in their homes to avoid spreading contagium, often only to die of starvation or something else. But the preponderance of measures instituted to combat the plague—whether by a vibrant scientific community nestled in Paris, or Papal decrees, or medical innovations, or novel religious rituals and practices—were less centralized than what we are facing now. Today we live in an era of biopolitics, where the government and other ubiquitous institutions dictate how we will live and die and how we must respond to a biologic threat, demanding that we subsume all other aspects of our lives in order to save our lives, regardless of how that impacts our own wishes and our own freedoms. Says Foucault: Biopolitics is a matter of taking control of life and the biological process of us-as-a-species and of assuring that [people] are…regularized, meaning that all of us follow a regulated medical gospel that is designed to save and normalize us, one that preaches that the preservation of life must take precedence over our ability to control our bodies and live as we choose.

Giorgio Agamben, who has written about COVID and about biopolitics in general, states that More serious epidemics have happened in the past, but nobody ever dared declare for that reason a state of emergency which keeps us from moving like the present one does…. Experience has in fact shown that, once a threat to health is in place, people are willing to accept limitations of their freedom that they would never theretofore have considered enduring…. Bare life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that unites people: rather, it blinds and separates them. Fellow human beings… are now seen only as potential anointers whom we must avoid at all cost… He further states that It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion, the thing which people believe they believe in…. Health has replaced salvation; biological life has taken the place of eternal life….

During the Great Mortality, as we will see, religion, medicine, and science spun a similar thread as to from where the pestilence originated and how to best treat it, and never did religious/scientific experts seek to explore anything that sat outside their proscribed realm or examine past plagues to understand this one. There was a singular truth proclaimed by the scientific leaders in Paris, the Pope in Avignon, the doctors across the nation, and various other groups whose own idiosyncrasies verged somewhat from the universal truisms but not enough to trigger alarm. Leaders could have peered back at Justinian’s Plague a thousand years earlier, spread by rats and lice, and learned from that, but they didn’t, relying instead on prevailing religious and scientific gospel. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defines religion as: a system of symbols…formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that [they] seem uniquely realistic. He notes that in some cultures the word for science and religion is identical. During the Great Mortality there was a convergence of faith and science; both buttressed the other. In our own time of plague, as Agamben shows, science has become its own religion; dogma and ritual supplant investigative curiosity and humanistic solutions, censorship and shaming replace free and open discourse.

We often mock the doctors, scholars, and leaders back then. And yet, after I read more about that truly horrendous pandemic, and as I live through COVID, I realize we haven’t changed a bit. Our response to this virus is just as feckless, injurious, and unscientific as that of our ancestors. It is just as dogmatic and ritualistic, clothed in Geertz’s religious symbols that we proclaim to be scientifically derived so as to feel as though they hold legitimacy. We have our own experts spinning similar tales, telling us to engage in similar behaviors, and declaring that they speak the one and only truth. That we willingly relinquished our rights as free people, allowed pundits and politicians and TV doctors to scare us into believing that this virus is the greatest threat to humanity EVER; that alone is disheartening. But that we have strangled the world for two years and caused far more deaths and suffering than lives saved, and we have fallen prey to a contrived and self-serving gospel barked out by doctors and scientists, by political leaders and the media, by twitter trolls and self-described experts on social media; that has been unconscionable. Sadly, we discarded the lessons of history and repeated its foibles, clothing them in a deceptive robe of faux science, thinking somehow we are smarter and better than those who confronted far worse plagues than this year after year, especially during the Great Mortality, and thus did we willingly plunge our world into another Great Stupidity. As you read this book, the similarities of how people responded to these two plagues will be frighteningly apparent. The plagues themselves are worlds apart; one truly ripped through the fabric of society, one was a blip not much different than other infections that history has faced and largely ignored up until now.

Some facts are in order, the first one reflected by the quote to start this prologue. The Black Death was brutal in its killing power and its dissemination. That it would have killed two billion people today should quiet all those who have elevated COVID into the status of the plague to end all plagues. Forty percent of the entire world’s population perished during the Great Mortality, and it struck the young and old with equal viciousness. Plagues of horrid severity—but not quite as lethal as the Black death—have choked the world since the beginning of time. In the decades before the Great Mortality, various plagues and infections spread across Europe and Asia, often killing large percentages of the population, especially in the Italian city states, as I describe in the book. Almost every year in recorded history some plague or disease slammed into the world and left its mark, even if history barely mentioned these common and accepted events. At the end of the First World War, the Spanish Flu killed the equivalent of 300 million people by today’s population standards, including almost 3 million Americans. It wiped out 5% of the earth’s population and 10% of all young people. Smallpox eradicated 95% of all people in the Americas in a matter of months, and killed tens of millions of people every year for centuries until its elimination in the early 1900’s. Just in the first two decades of the 1900’s, it killed over 300 million people. AIDS, cholera, influenza, pneumonia have all killed hundreds of millions of people year after year, and some of that was in our own lifetime.

To the present, COVID killed 3 million people world-wide and about 600,000 people in the US, a tiny whiff compared to those other pandemics. 3/1000 people infected by COVID die, 1/2000 if you don’t live in a nursing home. Compare that to the Black Death, which killed about 750/1000 of those infected. And, unlike other infections, COVID killed very few youths. While the Spanish Flu—to which CNN and many medical pundits compare COVID—wiped out 10% of all young people on earth, COVID killed about 300 young Americans. No, not 300 million, not 300 thousand, but 300, about the same number who die from lightning strikes. This small number of deaths caused us to close schools, mask and vaccinate kids, and fill the air with suffocating fear. The overall COVID death rate, when populations are compared, is similar to that of the 1957, 1968, and 2017 influenza outbreaks that we never hear about, and far less lethal and less likely to kill young people than the AIDS epidemic that ravaged the world and still does.

Why we felt the need to escalate this pandemic into the likes of the Great Mortality, the Spanish Flu, and Smallpox, and to stamp out all life and joy for over two years in its wake—frightening people with myth and incessant fearmongering—while clothing manufactured rituals and cures in a thin veneer of faux science that we fed to gullible people to swallow and proselytize—that I will never understand. Perhaps Agamben and others are right to believe that we have entered an era of biopolitics in which such states of exception—declared biological emergencies that demand us to abandon our own freedoms in exchange for our lives—are a prelude to a more insidious totalitarian submission under the guise of a democratic infrastructure. We will vote, we will think we are in a democracy, but our rights and freedoms will have dissolved in the wake of an unending biological threat.

We could say that a massive wave of fear caused by a microscopic parasite is traversing humanity, and that the world’s rulers guide and orient it towards their own ends. Limitations on freedom are thus being willingly accepted, in a perverse and vicious cycle, in the name of a desire for security — a desire that has been generated by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it, Agamben writes. What, in the tradition of bourgeois democracy, used to be the right to health became, seemingly without anyone noticing, a juridical-religious obligation that must be fulfilled at any cost.

And thus are we a society professing to be scientific and democratic, while abandoning our own selves and freedoms in the wake of fear; adapting ritualistic behaviors that we declare are lifesaving and necessary; elevating our experts into prophets whose words are unimpeachable and whose critics we label as heretics who defy the will of our prophets and threaten us. Sure sounds like religion to me.

This is the progress of eight-hundred years?

When we look back on the Great Mortality, we see a similar mangling of facts and a reliance on mythical cures. People were scared, and they turned the world upside down, willing to kill and maim in an effort to understand and mitigate a horrible pandemic, one far worse than what we face with COVID—they would have considered our year with COVID a break from the death—and one for which they had fewer scientific tools. They too had their bizarre theories and cures, some more barbaric than others, some almost comical, most of them universally embraced as fact. And yet, they didn’t do any worse than we did given the gravity of the threat. Nor did they wrap the world in a vice of subservience. In fact, when we compare the two plagues, the dictates of experts were eerily similar, the cure was equally ineffective and damaging, but the Great Mortality was an event largely experienced locally and with diverse responses, while a unifying, almost religious dogma draped the planet earth for the relatively tiny plague that we are currently experiencing.

We label the Middle Ages the era of Christian theocracy. And yet, compared to our own response to COVID, religious zealotry and an all-encompassing truth are far more prevalent now than then, just as freedom was less threatened by the claws of Medieval religion than by our own scientific religion.

I conducted copious research for this book, although I took poetic license in writing it. Many of the quotes I use are verbatim, such as the chants of the Flagellants, the jokes I give to the Queen of Naples, the medical information uttered by the doctors, among others. There really were Flagellants, really were gruesome pogroms of the Jews in the very locales I discuss based on the very plot I describe, really were Priests who dipped artifacts in holy water and sold them as a cure for the plague (and some of them really became saints), really were monks and nuns who abandoned their vows and engaged in debauchery and gluttony, really were soldiers who locked people in their homes for 3 weeks so that they died of starvation instead of plague, really was an ongoing war between France and England, really was a Pope who had a harem and who ran away, really was the Queen of Naples, really were the Italian dignitaries who are characters in the book, really was a group of scholars in Paris who scripted the dogma and theories uttered by my fabricated character The Great Frenchie, really were doctors who wore long masks with flowers and who bled people and studied their excrement.

I took some liberties in talking about hand waving. Likely that did not occur, but it was so tempting to manufacture an absurd ritual that could be compared to our obsession with masks and distancing during COVID. And while there was no Great Frenchie, there were scientific leaders in Paris much like him, and again, how could I resist creating a figurehead that so resembles he who led us and pretended to be so smart? Overall, my goal in this book was to show that a peoples’ response to any calamity can be framed in many ways, but when it is devoid of a scientific backbone, when dogma and ritual become an unassailable truth, when it pits people against each other instead of promoting cooperation, when the cure only adds to peoples’ misery instead of reducing it, when humanity and decency fall prey to dogma and absolutism and fear, then it can’t be called anything other than the great stupidity.

I was also particularly fascinated by the philosophy of doctors then and now. Much of their wisdom derived from the work of a Roman named Galen and his Muslim adherents. Europe’s doctors twisted their theories into a profitable if deceptive enterprise. A quote from the Great Mortality struck me, in that it shows that the medical profession has not advanced much from what it was in 1350. In describing how European doctors handled situations they didn’t fully understand, the author states: Another cardinal ‘don’t’ in the new etiquette was to admit to diagnostic uncertainty. Even when in doubt, said Arnauld of Villanova, a physician should look and act authoritative and confident. For the uncertain physician, Arnauld recommended prescribing a medicine, any medicine…. How little has changed; just pretend you know the diagnosis, act authoritative, and give the patient some pills! I also pulled direct quotes from the Medieval physician textbook called the Compendium, which fed doctors a litany of protocols, pills, examination techniques (mostly involving examining bowel movements and fixing abnormal bodily humors by bleeding people in a very particular way); this was the nidus of my chapter and song about doctors. Again, with some modification, it could easily provide guidance to our doctors today, especially during COVID, who seemingly embrace the Medieval philosophy of care.

Similarly, Frenchie’s scientific proclamations—not much different than that of our very own Frenchie during COVID—were based on the dictates of Europe’s scientific leaders, situated in Paris, who concocted bizarre theories of both the origins of the Black Death and how to best stop it. Writes the author: In the new medical schools like the University of Paris, students also learned that earthquakes, unburied corpses, decaying crops, stagnant water, poor ventilation, and even poisons could infect the air; but in the case of epidemics, which affected hundreds of thousands of people in widely separated places, infection was thought to result from a global disturbance, like an unfavorable planetary alignment. May sound crazy, but have you heard what our guys are saying? Yea, crazy doesn’t evaporate very quickly over the centuries; it merely changes color and texture to make it seem more palatable as time moves forward.

The Great Stupidity is a parody of one of the most disastrous epidemics that struck earth during a time when people were already dying in droves. It mocks people in power and on the fringes who believed they had all the answers, even if their answers killed and harmed without seeking to truly understand and ameliorate the plague. It extolls the quiet few—like the book’s three heroes—who see the perfidy and hypocrisy of these experts and, as the final song states, turn their back on them all.

In the end, this book is an indictment of how fear mixed with blind faith can turn people away from humanism, freedom, science, and decency. My Lady in the book calls it The Great Rudeness, and in many ways, as everyone seeks to blame everyone else and elevate their beliefs and rituals to the one and only truth, this is just what our world has become as well.

COVID is but a wad of spit compared to the ocean of death and devastation of the Great Mortality. It is not much different than pestilences the world has faced and ignored many times before, including—despite the declarations of experts who claim otherwise—in our own century. As a pandemic, COVID barely ranks among the most lethal in the past two centuries, let alone historically. As a health crisis, it pales compared to many others that strike us every day. But as a window into humanity, COVID offers a glimpse of how we as a society, of how we as doctors and scientists, of how we as human beings, confront something that scares us into total submission. Our fear of COVID, and our extreme reaction to it, does parallel that of the Black Death, even if they had more reason to be scared. One day history will judge us, not just for the virus that we magnified into something that it was not, but for how we shelved human decency and science and resurrected the tricks of artifact dippers and doctors wearing flowered masks. Sadly, sometime in the future, another frustrated soul like me will write a book about it and will have no problem making readers laugh at the horror and comedy of our own great stupidity.

For now, enjoy the songs, the stories, and the characters. I hope you can find humor in this, learn a little history, and maybe even laugh at us as well as them, because people really don’t change, and their great stupidity is not much different than ours, even if we think otherwise. The hope is that one day it will be different, but today is not that day.

Andy Lazris, September 2021

Song One. Listen at https://www.andylazris.com/songs-great-stupidity for all the songs.

The Great Mortality:

Countdown, the Mortality’s coming

Countdown, we got to keep it away

Countdown, we’re killing our sinners

Following science and scripture as we bow and we pray

It’s true, we can’t be too careful

Blocking bad air is the way we’ll survive.

We know, that waving our hands fast

And building up walls will keep us alive.

Because the Great Mortality,

Is coming after me,

It swoops from the south, flies from the east, and sails across the sea.

If God’s the guy who sent it here, then I’m sure He’ll make it very clear

That the pure and pious just like we, we’ll survive without a plea .

Oh, the Great Mortality

It’s a lesson in morality,

For guys like, us, who never fuss, there’s a certain guarantee.

We do stuff like this and that

Follow science, God, and all that crap,

Then God will squawk, Hey, you guys rock,

And we’ll live through out eternity.

All we got to do, is act the right way

Do what we are told, don’t ever stray

It’s not that fun, but for God’s one son

We got to work hard night and day.

Let’s go, build all the walls up

Right now, put the sinners to the sword

Doing shit, to push the bad air out

Working together in the name of the Lord.

Black death, you’ll keep your distance.

You know we’re stronger than you.

We got a lot of advantage

Because we got the people who know what to do.

When the Great Mortality

Swoops down, we will not flee.

It’ll pass us by, as long as we try, and leave us safe and free.

Because we follow what they say, and know there ain’t no other way.

Why would God hurt those who service him?

The ones who bow and pray?

All we got to do, is do what they say

Don’t ask no questions, never stray.

We do the work, they use their heads

If we follow their rules, we don’t be dead.

All the peasants doing the hard work

As the master ties up his shoes

The Priest is slaughtering sinners

And our science crazed boy says what to do.

It’s our one job, keeping the air out.

We don’t care if we wither away

We just want to stop it from coming,

Make sure that the manor and the lord are ok.

Because, the Great Mortality,

Ain’t faced a group like we,

We’ll kick it the nuts, punch it in the face,

And throw it to the sea.

We are the best France can display

And when it passes us by, we’ll get to say,

Screw the rest, we are the best

The Mortality will go away.

Oh, the Great Mortality,

Will leave us without travesty.

As the others die,