DISLOCATED TIMES LIKE THESE inevitably create scattered thoughts. My own directionless thinking has strayed, unsurprisingly, to Daniel Defoe’s compelling 200-pager: A Journal of the Plague Year.

It’s not what it might seem from its explanatory subtitle: Observations or Memorials of the most Remarkable OCCURENCES, Public as Private, which happened in LONDON during the Great Visitation.

For a start, Defoe was not an in-person observer during the great pestilence of 1655. He was five years old when it ‘happened in LONDON’. And his account wasn’t published until 1722, when he was 62. But it’s not entirely historical fiction, either, though it came over the centuries to be classed as a novel, like his Robinson Crusoe, published three years before the plague book.

The writer seems to have relied considerably on plague recollections from his uncle Henry Foe (indeed the Journal’s narrator is given the initials H.F.) although it’s hard to check this since no diary written by the uncle himself has survived. And Defoe certainly conducted voluminous research into facts, figures and anecdotes about just how London really fared during the last outbreak it was ever to suffer of bubonic plague (Yersinia Pestis). Through his marshaling of massive factual detail, verisimilitude and credibility are Defoe’s most substantial achievements throughout this thought-provoking work. And perhaps oddly, perhaps not, what he gives us is a more cohesive and full overview of that calamitous year than the celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys, who actually lived through it.

And perhaps ironically, since the story’s overall framing is a creative sham … one of Defoe’s successfully expressed themes is the severe stress-test that’s exerted on truth when rumors run riot and official pronouncements from centralized authority cannot be relied upon. The judgement that H.F. frequently has to employ in the Journal when trying to discern the truth about any particular loudly-bruited development is summed up in his sardonic label: “more of tale than of truth.”

Such widespread unreliability of information during a crisis is a feature of other great writings about pandemics, from Albert Camus’ La Peste to Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera, and more. (Marquez, by the way, wrote the screenplay for a little-known but powerful Mexican movie, El Año de la Peste, based solidy on Defoe’s Journal – six years before Marquez published his more famous Cholera work.)

COUNTING THE DAYS seems to be a phenomenon of plague and pandemic conditions, too. One of my few but regular sorties outdoors – permissible in New York State for human and canine exercise, I’m assured – takes me within sight of a gigantic countdown clock (right  – photographed yesterday) that beams a numerical message out over my city’s East River.

It’s easy to forget that while all of our virus-threatened lives matter, politics still matter too. I don’t see many, if any, media outlets reminding us, as this clock does, that there are now fewer than 300 days until a new Presidential oath of office has to be sworn at the western front of the US Capitol. (The last two digits, 09 in our photograph, indicate that hours need to be counted too, down to precisely noon on January 20^th, 2021.)

The clock was erected, by an artists’ and activists’ collective named The Creative Independent, on the shore of New York’s Roosevelt Island – which is named of course for a President of the United States celebrated for some highly effective crisis-management. There’s some grim irony in that too, I’d suggest.

Journalists covering the Presidential race now have to, for perhaps too much of their time, pay close attention to the daily White House briefings on the state of Covid-19 across the nation. They have to parse erratic, often nonsensical  pronouncements from the man charged with ultimate responsibility for the well-being of his 330 million fellow-citizens.

These pronouncements have ranged from the wholly unrealistic promise of chloroquine pills bringing us a cure, and impossibly quickly at that … to the delusional threat that we can ‘open up’ the country again in time for Easter Sunday (and a countdown for that event would read out just 17 days) … to the broad, repeated and outrageous myth that the disease “is very much under control in the USA” … to … oh, it’s impossible and pointless to list all of the misleading idiocies he’s scattered out over the Briefing Room.

And our most reliable civic leader in this whole circus, Dr Anthony Fauci of the Center for Infectious Diseases is left, along with other experts, to attempt what correctives they can to the Confuser-in-Chief. But, as Science magazine probed and prompted a wearied Fauci to say, “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down”. Others have wondered: “Why ever not?” It’s really hard, no doubt, living in the court of the Emperor With No Clothes.

What the rest of us most certainly have to do is decide definitively, like H. F. in London’s plague year, is whether our leader is a man “more of tale than of truth.” And whether we can any further abide his tawdry ‘tale’ continuing after next January 20^th.