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Terminal Case
for release The Ides of March 2006
Washington D.C.
According to the World Health Organization, there have been 97 deaths attributed to avian flu worldwide over the past four years.
To refer to this as a human pandemic is a bit like Chicken Little announcing that the sky is falling. It's just not borne out by the facts, but the news media are parroting it anyway. I think it's a wild goose chase.
Considering that over a hundred thousand people die every year in this country alone from accidents and that four times the number of Americans die each year by falling from ladders than have died in four years worldwide from the avian flu, it strikes me as hyper-vigilant to call it a pandemic. We're not talking about The Black Death here.
We have been following the progress of the H5N1 avian flu virus for several years now. We've followed it from Southeast Asia to Russia to Eastern Europe and now to England. Short of requiring all migratory birds to carry passports and go through customs, there is not much we can do to check the spread of the virus in birds.
But before we do a pre-emtive nuclear strike on the Canary Islands or before you begin looking askance at your parakeet, consider what it would require for the avian flu to be a serious problem for humans. First, the virus would need to mutate to a form that would be transmissible from birds to humans. This may have already happened in some places. The greatest number of human cases have occurred among people with direct contact with birds. Birds have also transmitted the virus to pigs. But in these cases the virus has not shown that it is likely to transmit from human to human. So, that would require another mutation.
Viruses are in the business of mutation. It's their job to adapt to a host. Certainly it could happen. But there are millions of viruses out there hiding in the nooks and crannies of every living thing. Any one of them could take a replicative left turn and mutate into the disease from hell. We don't know when that might happen.
It is in fashion these days to pander to the fears and insecurities of the public. Politicians do it, and advertisers and preachers. If George Bush and Dick Cheney can make you believe that there are wild-eyed, satanic, well armed and organized terrorists out there just waiting to knock more of our sky-scrapers down and that the only reason it hasn't happened again is because they are so tough and mean that those ole terrorists know better than to fuck with them, if they can convince you of that, then they win the fear vote. It's just the same as Pat Robertson knows that if he can make you believe that the fires of hell are licking at your toes, your dollars will be in the collection plate on Sunday.
If a drug company can convince you that you are just a heartbeat away from having no heartbeat at all because of some formerly unknown malady which was discovered in a study that they paid for, they can sell you their new elixir for the rest of your natural life. Fear sells almost as good as sex. If you combine the two, it's really dynamite. Whoever came up with the idea of selling a pill to prevent the fear of not being able to get an erection was a marketing genius.
The Poet's Eye saw the first robin of Spring today. It didn't scare me at all.
Terminal Case
you could die en utero
or maybe strangle during birth
you could suffer crib death
be tickled and die of mirth
you could be hit by a car or
a truck or a bus you could be
bombed by a terrorist it could
happen to any of us. you could
be stalked by a madman and rendered
the sum of your pieces or drop into
a frozen river and lose your homeostesis
or even be infected with tropical diseases
or parasites or cancers might secret in
your creases but this is all i'm saying
my fundamental thesis is:
somethin's gonna gitcha
--Lightning Rod
listen to it here: Terminal Case
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