Posted on 10/24/2005 4:10:40 PM PDT by Pokey78
I had lunch the other day with someone who'd just bought a photograph of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural. "There they all are," he said. "Look." And he pointed to a vaguely familiar figure in the crowd just a few feet from the president: John Wilkes Booth.
And then his finger zipped over the photo picking out the other conspirators standing around Lincoln and already well advanced in what was then a plot merely to kidnap him. March 4, 1865, a rainy Saturday in Washington, and the chief of state is giving his speech unaware that he's in the last six weeks of his life and that he's surrounded by the group of men who will end it.
Proximity is all. If they can't get to you, they can't get you. Most of us locate our fears on the far horizon - like the old maps where the known world dribbles away and the cartographer scrawls "Here be dragons". Sometimes, as Lincoln discovered, the problem's right there standing next to you.
Which brings me to bird flu. If I get the gist of the media coverage, by the time this column appears most Britons will be dead of it, and the last surviving Daily Telegraph reader will be sliding this page into the cage of her new imported parrot with the strangely triumphalist gleam in his eye. But it's only Tuesday morning, so perhaps things won't be that bad.
The scoffers argue that this is just nutty and way out of proportion, One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest stuff - the usual Blairy-scary mongering from the Government. After all, avian flu is supposedly very hard to pass from human to human - just as it was supposedly impossible to pass from human to human, until Pranee Thongchan caught it from her daughter Sakuntala in the Thai village of Ban Srisomboon. I don't know if Britain is full of Pranee Thongchans-in-waiting, but whether or not Clwyd succumbs to a toxic cockatoo will be, in large part, a matter of luck.
Consider this: in rural China, pigs are valued possessions and sleep in the living room. That's why hundreds of members of a Catholic charismatic group from New York State had to go into isolation for a hitherto unknown respiratory disease in April 2003.
A doctor from Sars-riddled Guangdong province went to a wedding at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong, where he managed to infect 16 other guests with rooms on the same floor, including Kwan Sui Chu, an elderly lady staying there for one night. She flew home to Toronto and died, her death being attributed to a "chest infection".
Her son Tse Chi Kwai went to Scarborough Grace Hospital and, as is traditional in Canada, was left on a trolley in Emergency for 12 hours, exposed to hundreds of people. Despite all the memos warning them to be on the look-out for this new and highly contagious disease, after discovering that his patient's mother had recently died after returning from Hong Kong, the doctor concluded that, even if Tse was infectious, it was only with TB.
So Tse died, but not before infecting the man lying next to him on that ER trolley hour after hour: Joe Pollack, who was being treated for an irregular heartbeat. He was eventually isolated with symptoms of Sars, but apparently it never occurred to the hospital also to isolate Mrs Pollack. So she wandered around the wards and infected an 82-year-old man from a Catholic charismatic group. Mr Pollack, Mrs Pollack, the octogenarian charismatic and his wife all died, and their sons infected at least 30 other members of their religious group, plus a Filipina nurse, who flew back to Manila and before her death introduced Sars to a whole new country.
The fellow with the irregular heartbeat, the Catholic charismatics, the Filipina nurse: none of these people went anywhere near rural China. They didn't have to. They were, in effect, like Lincoln in that photograph: the Catholic charismatics from New York State didn't know the infected doctor from Guangdong was, metaphorically, standing next to them.
If something new and infectious shows up in a harassed, crowded, hygiene-challenged NHS hospital in Swansea or Glasgow, how differently would things go from the above chain of events? And, if the Chinese have got some kooky new strain of avian flu, don't expect to get an advance press release: with Sars, they spent three months lying about the disease and its spread, even as they were exporting it around the world.
Or look at it this way: suppose the lady in the Metropole had flown home not to Toronto, but to Johannesburg. Sars killed 44 Torontonians and made 400 more seriously ill. In South Africa, where the collective immune system has been dramatically weakened by Aids, how many thousands more would have died?
In a globalised economy, the anti-glob mob and the eco-warriors want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. But globalisation cuts both ways, and the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World - just because someone got on a plane.
Indeed, when you look at it that way, the biggest globalisation success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Disney, but Islamism: the Saudis took what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practised by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Buffalo. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalised insurgency.
What's the bigger threat? A globalisation that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalisation that exports the fiercest and unhealthiest aspects of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map - that, in the 21st century, America can be a 19th-century republic untroubled by the world's pathogens because of its sheer distance from them.
But, in an age of globalised proximity, all of us in the modern multicultural West are like Lincoln on the steps of the Capitol that Saturday
bump
Funny! I always pictured him as much older and somewhat balding. He certainly has a lot on the ball for a young guy.
But, in an age of globalised proximity, all of us in the modern multicultural West are like Lincoln on the steps of the Capitol that Saturday morning: the world is in the room with us. © Copyright of Telegraph
Just goes to show you what it means to assume. Of course, no FReeper would ever assume anything about someone based on thier age (/sarcasm)
George Bush and the conservatives understand that you have to go out and slay the dragons actively. It is the liberals that act as if they are not a threat!
prong
There is no equal! /prostrate self
An Avian flu type disease will be the weapon of choice for terr perps.
That's right, Mr. Steyn. Sometimes it runs into you viciously, and at other times it really gets inside your head.
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
Oh darn, I was hoping to escape death in my lifetime. Guess I'll have to find Jesus and prepare the next life.
Would love to see the Lincoln picture
Or -- drum roll -- I opened the window and influenza.
I think Booth is on the level above and to the right, directly over the corner balustrade.
Bingo, I agree with you about liberals for the most part. I suppose there are some conservatives who bury their heads in the sand, but not as many.
Well with him its not just his age. It's when he talks of historic events he speaks as if he was alive and is remembering them. He's too young for that. He must've studied his American history for he knows it very well.
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