4. Dystopia in a Time of Pandemic

John Rember wrote the small essays neatly bundled in 10 chapters of 10, in his new book, “a hundred little pieces on the end of the world,” before we knew of COVID-19. When he doesn’t imagine the world’s end with rising seas and temperatures, unbridled wildfires and vicious weather, Rember remembers his grade-school duck and cover exercises, and Jonathan Schell’s 1982 book about nuclear annihilation, “The Fate of the Earth.” (Now add COVID.)

Rember’s central argument is that unbridled capitalism and its concomitant radical individualism will lead to the world’s end—if nuclear explosions do not. It’s a matter of time—and he isn’t optimistic about the half-measures that people advocate to stave off catastrophe. He sees the fulcrum at which our current civilization took its final downward turn at the 1963 killing of John Kennedy. I’ve always seen the Vietnam War—which I didn’t directly participate in—as the pivot point in my own life, and to some extent in the life of our nation. Like Rember, I’ve seen the regimes of Thatcher and Reagan and the visions of Ayn Rand as stopping points on paths to destruction.

Rember’s meditations are more organized, rigorously developed—and darker than I dare let mine become. But they are also beautifully conceived and written, and, even if my mind or your mind doesn’t want to travel the entire Rember road towards apocalypse, there are nuggets of recognition and joy. I don’t think it is giving away too much to say that love, kindness, and empathy are continuing chords in the work.

On reflection, I can see it all as a love letter to his wife Julie, the woman who arrived at the right time in the right way to share a unique life journey.

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