I recently finished Albert Camus’ great novel, The Plague (1948). It vividly brought to mind the condition that our country is in today. The book is set in the early 1940s in the Algerian coastal town of Oran. Life in Oran, the narrator says, is “treeless, glamourless, soulless”; it’s lost all inkling of drama or anticipation—“in other words, completely modern.”