SOMEONE ASKED ME YESTERDAY if I knew how long the Black Death lasted, I knew it had lasted a number of years but I had to look it up, figures vary slightly but from 1347 to 1352, a year or two on either or both ends probably a safer guess. We've been in this pandemic for a year and a half. While the two illnesses are quite different, the plague being a bacterial disease spread by fleas and Covid-19 being an air-borne virus, I'm not sure which would be the more dangerous. If Covid-19 lasted five or seven years and if it generates variants that are more transmissible and deadly, with world travel and the larger population of human beings, I doubt anyone can guess what's in store with any accuracy. I think one thing is certain, it is likely that this is far from over and will be far worse than it is now, and it is too bad now to tolerate the anti-vaxx-anti-mask antics of Republican-fascists here or the Conservative-fascists in Britan or their like in Canada or anywhere else in the world to be allowed to make it even worse than it could be.
By the way, one of the things I looked at and am still going over is this fascinating article from The Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, the official journal of the Australasian Military Medicine Association.
Walter Brueggemann's idea that what the Prophets in the Bible warn against is the human population, individually and as a nation, going past "non-transgressible limits" past which the rules of the universe, the Creation of God, will permit tolerable human life within. I don't know enough about the actual life of 14th century Eurasians and Africans - the populations who suffered the Black Death - to know what limits may have been violated leading to that plague were. But it's clear that the violation of the truth in the permission and protection of mass media spread lies is playing a huge role in this pandemic as it has in other, modern, fairly well documented pandemics. As very well may be the cruelty to animals that the meat industry has as an intrinsic feature of its origin.
If you thought I was being hyperbolic in either of those things I said yesterday, I wasn't. We know where the annual flu pandemics come from, we know where the worst one in relatively recent times came from, we know the role that lies, politically and economically motivated lies had in worsening those.
If, as the best guess of researchers seems to be as of now, Covid-19 arose in the notoriously cruel wet markets where exotic and rare animals were kept for slaughter to thrill the appitites of affluent people, that meat market was as relevant to this pandemic as swine farming was for the Influenza of a century ago. That pandemic had its own political uses, its own anti-masking cult of death, one which was, in part, responsible for the far worse second wave of it. So lies, as well, have had a major and historical part in previous pandemics.
Yet our legal system sees no need to do something about lies even as those get hundreds of thousands, going into a million, of us killed. Lies amplified immediately on FOX and other fascist media and on the fascist channels on online media, so much worse than the newspaper syndicate-word of mouth transmission of the anti-mask mania of a century back. I don't know if the early movie industry played a role in it (send me links, PLEASE!) or telegraph but other electric media wouldn't have since those didn't exist yet.
Our notions of freedom of the press and freedom of speech, absent a requirement that those do not tell lies that will get hundreds of thousands, millions killed is an idiotic "enlightenment" stupidity that our decidedly "enlightenment" benighted age refuses to learn from.
That is with even the large majority of the population, today, being literate, being hooked into "information" networks and even having the benefits of the best science in the history of our species. The refusal to acknowledge that we have transgressed the limits of the tolerability of lies even as we are seeing the results in preventable deaths, in terrible pain and hardship shows that there is nothing more benighted than the idea that you can escape the reality of moral obligation and not suffer the consequences.
I have recently pointed out that what the Prophets perceived as the consequences of sin could, in many cases, be seen as them perceiving the transgression of the Law of God, as expressed through the way the universe is set up. If that is true it is among the most impressive feats of insight in the history of our species among those iron-age (not "bronze age") peoples. For someone who believes that God created the world it is to be expected that the so-called "laws of nature" would be in line with the Law of God. I don't think that the idea that such transgressions of moral law will have real consequences in physically lived life is anywhere near as silly or farfetched or superstitious as the idea that a human society, a nation, its legal system can get away with lying at all levels at any magnitude and not have catastrophic results. Nor that a limitless level of cruelty and killing of animals is something human beings can manage and not suffer consequences forever. I look at the history of the well-documented pandemics of the modern period and the idea that those are knowably an aspect of them is rather blindingly obvious, no matter how difficult that may be to articulate in a pseudo-scientific form. Science, clearly, could not encompass that insight because it, by choice and design, cannot contain the moral concepts necessary to hold it.
I have to say, one thing I've learned in this is what a bunch of fucking crybabies a large number of Americans are. Whining and bawling like babies ABOUT WEARING A FRIGGIN' MASK! Jeesh, imagine if they had to really face a hardship. The American cult of "freedom" without responsibility has turned us into a nation of whiny brats. Such is the legacy of the cult of Madisonian "rights" and movie epics about the "wild west" and other such "outlaws" who work in makeup and costumes.
No comments:
Post a Comment