"As they say, mosquitos don't discriminate... We're all singing the West Nile Blues these days. Some call it globalization; I know it as the Mosquito Principle."
— extract from The Books of Nima
Honam mu nni nhanoa
(Humanity has no boundary)
— Akan proverb
Takes behaviour to get along.
Lots of behaviour to get along.
Do you really, really know that?
Social Living is the best
Do you know?
Social Living is the best
— Burning Spear - Social Living
II. Insatiable Appetites
"...Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied (politics?)."
— Donald Trump ostensibly complaining about the governors of certain states, but perhaps rather projecting his impulses onto others. (April 2 2020)
The U.S. allegedly snatched a planeload of 60 million Chinese-made medical masks that were initially intended for France, a French official said.
"A French order was bought out with cash by Americans on the tarmac, and the plane that was to fly to France took off for the U.S. instead".
— Snatched from the tarmac. (April 2 2020)
We need the masks. We don't want other people getting them.
— Donald Trump, April 3 2020
The German capital ordered 200,000 special FFP2 and FFP3 masks that are used to protect emergency staff and care workers from infection with coronavirus.
Andreas Geisel, Berlin's interior minister, confirmed that the consignment had been “confiscated” in Bangkok and never reached Berlin.
"We consider that an act of modern piracy," he said. "You don't treat your transatlantic partners like that."
— US swoop sees 3M masks allegedly diverted from Berlin (April 3 2020)
— Scenes from The Berlin Conference of 1894
Scramble for Africa by Yinka Shonibare at Brooklyn Museum (2005) - credit: DK
III. Manifest Destiny
From Cairo to Cape Town, The
Rhodes Colossus (Punch 1892)
"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives...
We know the size of the world we know the total extent. Africa is still lying ready for us it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses."
— Confession of Faith by Cecil Rhodes (1877)
Surely our simple duty here
Is both imperative and clear;
While they support us, we should lend
Our every effort to defend,
And from a higher point of view
To give the full direction due
To all the native races.
And I, throughout the expedition
Insisted upon
this position.
— The Modern Traveller by Hilaire Belloc (1898)
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
— John Kenneth Galbraith (1963)
The modern Republican Party is the result of collusion between a movement to take U.S. jurisprudence to the pre-Depression era, and a movement to take culture back to the pre-Enlightenment era. It is doomed because the latter would like a theocratic state to regulate culture, and the former want to smoke dope and look at dirty pictures.
— Maxspeak Maxim IX, Max Sawicky (2006)
IV. The Mosquito Principle (Redux)
"You don't make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline"
- Anthony Fauci on the novel coronavirus
Later: "There is no region in the country, in my mind, that's going to be exempt from an outbreak"
If you win mainly by convincing THEM that they are losers, and convincing them to give up fighting — and all of us, not just Trump, do this sort of adversarial reality distortion to a degree — what do you do when THEY is a virus? What do you do when there are no credible substitutes?
— taken from a discourse on our current global narrative collapse in Plot Economics
See also: You Can't Gaslight a Virus
In these days of insecticides and drained swamps, those of us who live in the rich, temperate world have become accustomed to the luxury of not thinking very much about mosquitoes and the risks they carry. But the insects are still killing more than eight hundred thousand people a year, primarily in Africa.
— How Mosquitoes Changed Everything
Item: The exact origin, locations, and natural reservoir of the Ebola virus remain unknown. Current suspicions are founded on cynomolgous monkeys, civets or bats...
Dig: The pressure of marauding warlords roaming the bush has forced many to start eating animals that had previously been left alone in the bush.
— Ebola and Marburg virus musings in Angola
Europe turned into a petri dish and travel from there impacted the world, with its most damaging effect in Africa and Latin America. “The colonial legacy lives in viral movements. I wasn’t surprised that Belgian travel preceded DRC’s first known case,”
— Coronavirus Started in China, but Europe Became the Hub for Its Global Spread
V. Pandemic Toli
Mosquitos don't discriminate
Previously: "You welcome the US to the fun of the Third World" - West Nile Blues
Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract
— The Financial Times editorial page ostensibly advocating for social insurance and a rebalancing of modern economies. A Road to Damascus moment. (April 4 2020)
The mitigation strategies have varied throughout humanity's long shared history with malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. There has been genetic adaptation (sickle cell disease), the observation that colder climates are less hospitable to mosquitos, quinine from the bark of a cinchona tree, good sanitation, (of late) artemesin, bed nets and an entire panoply of public health measures.
Only occasionally do we get a glimpse of the universality of the struggle (see the spread of Zika that threatened Rio's Olympics, outbreaks of chikungunya, Dengue fever and the like). That's when you'd read: "The mosquito is ubiquitous... You don’t need to travel to get the disease". Consider also the spread of West Nile Virus in California that resulted from Delinquent Mortgages and Neglected Swimming Pools in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Collateral damage of huhudious financial malpractice.
Still, to a large extent in the West, a sort of natural equilibrium has been established, even as we operate elsewhere under Mosquito Rules. Structurally, malaria and other mosquito-borne dieseases have been contained in the First World through strenuous public health efforts. In the third world, however, mosquitos remain a poverty tax.
Diseases like Ebola that jumped hosts and spread disastrously in repeated outbreaks in recent decades are thought to be confined, to the global, poorer south. The 3 years of Ebola epidemic that affected 10 countries and decimated 3 countries that could hardly afford it (recovering as they were from gruesome civil wars) didn't make a lasting impression. Similarly SARS and MERS were big scares in recent memory but, at length, they too were largely contained. The West was largely unscathed fron the calculus of contagion.
Hilaire Belloc had keen insight about the complacency in the face of a common enemy, and the almost
liquidationist impulse that drives the Social Darwinist attitudes, and Empire writ large. Think about the past
several months squandered in the face of
clear and present danger. The following panel perhaps captures the insouciance, and the attempts to deny, or cage, the dangers of the predator. Call it the
herd immunity strategy.
The Lion never will attack
A White, if he can get a Black
And there were such a lot of these
We could afford with perfect ease
To spare one here and there.
It made us more compact - and then -
It's right to spare one's fellow men.
If COVID-19 is the pandemic disease of the moment, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is just a virus; it is not a parable or extended metaphor. Like the plasmodium falciparum, and the mosquito that transmits it through its bite, this coronavirus doesn't discriminate. Whether spread by symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers, it is no respector of princes or prime ministers. It is oblivious to all boundaries, navigating between its unknown primary host (bats?), its intermediate hosts (say that initial pangolin or civet in the Wuhan wild animal market or that tiger at the Bronx zoo), and the human prey that it afflicts with COVID-19. It merely reproduces, evolves, and occasionally mutates its RNA as it navigates between hosts.
The current flight to safety in this covidious depression may be to US bonds - that, after all, is the financial norm that befits the US having the world's reserve currency. The literal airplane flights, and the longer-term larger scramble, however, may now be to China. The evidence is already there: if that Cairo to Cape Town railway is indeed ever built, it will be financed by China's belt and road initiative. In just a few more weeks, Wuhan province may well prove to be safer than New Orleans and Catalonia. Just weeks ago, African elites were precipitously withdrawing their children from European boarding schools. Thousands of Chinese students are yearning to be repatriated from the US rather than take their chances, uninsured in America where bad faith actors keep beaches open against all sense.
We are all passengers on cruise ships (operated by soon-to-be bankrupt Princess Lines, flying their Liberian flags of convenience). The underpaid crew (essential workers with compromised immune systems) labor to find a port of respite working with creaking infrastructure, hollowed by austerity policies, offshoring and deferred maintenance. We pray that we are being piloted by sensible Captains (no Ahabs or Blighs). Some of us, however, have been dealt the mayor from Jaws preaching herd immunity and necessary sacrifice, hucksters touting quack remedies, or contrarian chancers with no naval experience save navel gazing.
We are all rather wishing we were being steered by no-nonsense Taiwanese or Singaporeans crisis managers. At this stage, locked down and self isolating in windowless interior cabins, we'd gladly accept plane shipments of personal protective equipment from China or South Korea. We worry and look askance at Italian or Spanish tourists, and especially the quiet Americans (quiet, perhaps, in dismay at the observed competence of their political leaders measured in the mounting, grim body count). Africans facing the pandemic would gladly substitute the gunboat diplomacy of yore for Asian supply chain competence, German engineering efficiency, and a Danish social safety net. Such is life in a state of narrative collapse this season of coronavirus. Our lifeboats are soap and running water, face masks, social distancing and, in extremis, ventilators. We can't breathe.
By all rights, solidarity should overcome rapacious hoarding or looting. There are tensions between the demands of capital, labour and now public health. If power is never given up willingly, it is clear the costs of the pandemic we are facing are human lives, thousands already, and perhaps millions of them. There is a marketplace of ideas and cooperation, human ingenuity, and the systematic application of science and operational excellence ought to be our guiding posts, acknowledging our common humanity
There is an emergency on planet earth. As far as coping strategies go in dealing with the Mosquito Principle, I suggest we revisit The Great Game, eschew the insatiable appetites of Manifest Destiny, and embrace Social Living.
I give you fifty songs on the theme starting out with Burning Spear's take. He had it right: Social Living is the best. I'm also quite fond of Amel Larrieux's injunction to "tap into your magic" and D'Angelo's ecological lament, 'Til it's done.
Bonus playlists:
- Manifest Destiny (liner notes)
A soundtrack of irony
- Insatiable
You can't go wrong between Prince and Omar
- Contagious
From Taja Sevelle's infectious pop confection, Love is Contagious, to The Isley Brothers and Chanté Moore's soap opera (the record's producer is currently muted and worried about the coronavirus in federal jails), and The Whispers' shiny 80s electro-funk.
And the band played on...
This note is part of the Things Fall Apart series under the banner of Social Living.
Previously: Ode to Betty Brown
File under: culture, interplay, observation, perception, quotes, pandemic, disease, virus, coronavirus, public health, Africa, USA, politics, power, values, philosophy, empire, malaria, mosquitos, disaster, Great Game, Social Living, Things Fall Apart, toli
