Why the coronavirus outbreak is like Stephen King's The Stand in reverse

The Outline

"No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND," King tweeted Sunday evening. "It’s not anywhere near as serious. It’s eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions." But as Sean T. Collins notes, coronavirus is like a mirror-universe run-through of The Stand, which is being turned into a CBS All Access miniseries. "The Stand’s implicit argument that a world-historical cataclysm would be required for such people to coalesce into a large-scale political force — that the chaos wrought by a pandemic would be required for a Flagg-like folksy strongman to attract those people to his side — now seems quaint and sad," says Collins. "In our world, the cause-and-effect have been reversed: We have had the flag-hugging, McDonald’s-eating, elite-bashing black-eyed monster for years, and we’re getting the pandemic after the fact. Indeed, the presence of our preexisting Flagg figure at the height of power seems bound to exacerbate the plague’s spread. In our mirror-universe run-through of The Stand’s story arc, we’re about to find out how bad finally stupid can get."