Rigorous Intuition: Inoculations

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Rigorous Intuition: Inoculations

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:12:00 -0800

 

 

 

 

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2006/03/inoculations_16.html

 

 

 

Rigorous Intuition

 

What you don't know can't hurt them

 

 

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Inoculations

 

Through the days of shame that are coming

Through the nights of wild distress

Though your promise count for nothing

You must keep it nonetheless - Leonard Cohen

 

I've been recovering this week from a nasty stomach virus. A bit like

an ayahuasca ceremony without the ayahuasca, and piss-all

enlightenment, too. But it's reminded me that illness is more than a

metaphor, and sometimes not entirely natural.

 

Smallpox, for one bloody precedent. In a postscript to his letter of

July 16, 1763 Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of British forces in

North America during the French and Indian War, instructed Colonel

Henry Bouquet to " do well to try to innoculate the Indians by means of

blanketts, as well as to try every other method that can serve to

extirpate this execrable race. " (I don't see inoculate used like that

these days, except by those whom the mass culture deems to be in need

of medication themselves.) Infected blankets wasn't a one-off for

Amherst. In other letters he calls the natives " Vermine [who] have

forfeited all claim to the rights of humanity, " and expresses his

desire to " put a most Effectual Stop to their very Being. "

 

Of course that was then, before genocide was even a word, much less a

crime. Though at Massachusetts' Amherst College, china plates

depicting sword-wielding, mounted Englishmen in hot pursuit of Indians

were still in use as late as the 1970s. Dictionaries and law books and

generations of bad examples haven't crimped the style of the

pro-active eugenicist.

 

" The forms of warfare are changing, " said Russian Communist party

leader Gennady Zyuganov in a Tuesday press conference. " It's strange

that not a single duck has yet died in America - they are all dying in

Russia and European countries. This makes one seriously wonder why. "

Asked whether he was suggesting Avian Flu was a US biological weapon,

he replied " I not only suggest this, I know very well how this can be

arranged. There is nothing strange here. "

 

I think Zyuganov is wrong on at least a couple of points. For one

thing, Lord Amherst could tell him that nothing has changed. And for

another, if Avian Flu is a weapon of either design or opportunity, its

intended victims are also American. Because at the top of the food

chain, where it's whole nations that are consumed, the fattest and

most tender of all is naturally also on the menu.

 

As a third US beef cow tests positive for BSE, Newspapers move US mad

cow story off front pages. One infected cow is the End of the World;

two is worrisome. Three, and it's yesterday's news. The horror is in

the novelty. Make something bad, bad enough for long enough that it

becomes part of our landscape, and we just don't care anymore. It

seems whatever doesn't kill us outright we can make peace with until

it kills us eventually. It's another way in which we are inoculated.

And so, the alarmingly predictable development that, " Despite the

confirmation of a third case of mad cow disease, the government

intends to scale back testing for the brain-wasting disorder blamed

for the deaths of more than 150 people in Europe. "

 

The Democratic dithering over Feingold's modest resolution is

engendering considerable counter-dithering by those who still hope to

see a political solution they can recognize to a parapolitical crisis

they can't imagine. " The majority of the American people agree with

what the president's doing, " said a Democratic aide. " A lot of people

outside the beltway see [illegal surveillance] as a tool that's

keeping Americans safe. "

 

Illness is also a metaphor, and the sickness of American politics is

not indeliberate. Democrats and Republicans have both been taking

strange medicine for a long while, and those who've refused their

inoculations have been prone to other kinds of magic bullets: fatal

accidents and character assassinations, and the receipt of envelopes

filled with white powder bearing the return address of Fort Detrick.

Bush in 2006 should be the most vulnerable president since Nixon in

1974, yet he isn't. To ask why he's not may take the courage of a

microbiologist.

 

I've been thinking of the family in Tikrit who were murdered yesterday

morning in an American raid. Eleven shot to death, including five

children, one as young as seven months, before their house was blown up.

 

Another policeman, Colonel Farouq Hussein, said autopsies had been

carried out at Tikrit hospital and found " all the victims had gunshot

wounds to the head " . The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in

one room before the house was destroyed, Hussein said. Police had

found spent American-issue cartridges in the rubble.

 

Despite the eyewitness accounts and the photos of dead babies, the US

Army admits to only the deaths of two women and a child, and most

American reports of the incident preface the news with the advisory

" Iraqis Say - " . It needs reminding that, unlike three years ago, the

Iraqi police and US forces are now supposedly on the same side. Though

just the day before, also in Tikrit, an American " security contractor "

was arrested travelling alone with explosives in his car.

 

Charitably, though inaccurately, the US mission in Iraq could be

described as a clinical test gone horribly wrong, while the " men in

smart suits, " like Francis Fukuyama, make themselves scarce. But the

US isn't dispensing that kind of inoculation. It isn't the neocon

fable of intravenous democracy, even if it kills the patient. It's

Lord Amherst's blankets.

 

Many German and Austrian neighbours of the camps knew well enough what

happened after the box cars rolled through the gates. Still, they

didn't see until the liberators forced them to walk the grounds and

bury the innocent dead. The victims were foreign and faceless, and it

was easy to continue believing one was a good neighbour for minding

one's business.

 

Things are different now. The dead babies are on , and Salon

hosts hundreds of Abu Ghraib photos and videos. No people in history

have had greater access to the atrocities of their own force of arms

even as they are being committed. Americans are growing accustomed to

the spectacle of broken and beheaded bodies, and I think that's the

idea. Because it's getting old. Meanwhile, the only truly forbidden

images are those of flag-drapped coffins. The Pentagon certainly wants

Americans kept in the dark, but darkness can mean more than mere

ignorance.

 

One dead baby is the End of the World. Too many dead babies and we

have a new world altogether.

 

posted by Jeff at 4:52 AM

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