The shifting goalposts of a poorly-written story

It has been well said by a certain Canadian that people do not receive life as just raw data, as just plain facts, but as story.

This author must agree, and given his penchant for narrative, feels some evaluation is in order for the story we are currently participating in. More accurately, though, we should call it the story that is being told about what we are participating in.

This story had some real potential from its opening pages. There was a murky and villainous threat affronting us, in the form of an unknown and deadly virus. The protagonist of this story was made to be us, the people, the nation. Our call to action sounded something like this: ‘15 days to flatten the curve’. Like a brave but under-resourced rag-tag bunch of grizzled warriors, the story went that the whole country would likely be overrun by this plague, and the best we could do was slow it down so that as we all needed a run in hospital, we wouldn’t overwhelm the system.

Admittedly, this created a rose-tinted camaraderie as many of us felt a sense of unity in what would be our common struggle. There was also some comedic relief as we ran out of toilet paper… The complication that had been built was about hospital beds and infrastructure, and we received regular updates about how we were going. The story unfolded before our very eyes, and to crank up the scale, this same quest was being faced all around the globe, nation by nation.

However, then we, the engrossed reader, found that something odd happened. The quest changed, but the narrator didn’t skip a beat. The reader was staring keenly at the page, to see if she had accidentally skipped from page 34 to 37, missing 35 and 36 like those thin bible pages that are so hard to separate. However, that was not the case, but neither did it seem like a big deal. Just a plot development, or perhaps a twist?

Some readers at this stage put the book down, because they had their hearts set on the resolution that was implicitly promised to come at the end of fifteen days. Other readers found that the most enjoyable parts of those fifteen days were the last three months.

All things being equal, the story had become one about cases. We, the nation, were still the protagonist. We had our Ben Kenobi type character (a character of assumed authority who in both cases had more or less no prior influence or authority in our lives) advising us how we should complete the quest. We had our words of wisdom, and our amulets against the evil adversary. ‘Stay safe, stay home’ we would echo in solidarity.

For many Victorians, there was a deeper level to this part of the story, which we have previously analysed in The sacrament of vaccination. At this point in the story, two essential things changed, and one of those was the end goal. Imagine if, when watching ‘The Castle’, Darryl Kerrigan quietly decided that he was now in fact fighting for a ‘new Castle’, which functionally meant living in an RV, because the complication in his story was so great that defending his castle as it used to be was just unrealistic. That would be a disaster, and no one would watch it.

This was one of the errors, seen in the soggy disappointment called ‘new normal’. From the start of the story, the protagonist was convinced that he or she was fighting for ‘back to normal’, not ‘whatever we decide to call normal at the end of the story’.

The most essential goalposts had shifted. The reader had already the early onset of a frown from the plot change from ‘15 days to flatten the curve’ to tracking cases, then hospitalisations, then deaths, then people coming into contact with one another, then vaccine development, then vaccine production, then vaccine availability, then vaccine options, but now the full wrinkles of a scowl were developing as the very motivation for questing had dissolved into the mire of PR and terminology. If this story wasn’t going badly enough, we shall turn our eyes to its next great blunder, as aforementioned.

There was a most victorious time, a splendid tranquility which in normal genre fiction is called ‘the end of the story’ or ‘the resolution’ or ‘darl, can you return this one to the library now?’ However, as if starting the sequel film as the patrons were leaving the cinema, or as if including in the first book the first two chapters of the second book, the protagonist discovered that the end state they achieved was not in fact a resolution.

To be clear, this was when the ethically bonkers strategy that got us to zero cases fell apart as soon as international travellers entered the country. To the reader who dismisses this allegorisation to story form as unfounded, do not be so quickly sure of our folly. The narrator, who in this case is being played by the mainstream media talking heads, had made a critical error in storytelling, and now cannot be trusted to get their story straight. To be frank, they told us a bad story, and a false one at that.

Admittedly, the narrators didn’t actually know where the story was going, or how it would resolve, or how the protagonist should solve it, or who the real protagonists were, so that did complicate things for them. They were attempting to cook us a barbeque, and were only missing the sausages, the burgers, the olive oil, the onion, the tomato sauce and mustard, the bacon, and the barbeque- but they made sure we had beer and deck chairs.

This is a call for honesty. It’s ok for the narrators to admit that they aren’t actually narrators, but fellow adventurers with us on the quest. If the news media wants to claw back even a skerrick of authority or reliability, those entities need to repent of their constantly failed attempts to sell us a story they aren’t writing, and don’t know.

Finally, this is an exhortation to optimism and hope. The one who actually wrote the story, who truly commands the flow of time and the passage of history, has written every detail beautifully and perfectly. The fact is that there is victory in history for the True Protagonist, King Jesus, and for all who trust in him, because our story started before the world was made, and will continue on into everlasting upon everlasting.

For you formed my inward parts;

    you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

    my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;

in your book were written, every one of them,

    the days that were formed for me,

    when as yet there was none of them.

Psalm 139:13-16