IF YOU live in Monrovia, especially if you’re poor, Ebola’s a very big deal, and rich countries like the United States ought to be doing everything they can to help you avoid catching and spreading it. But if you live in, say, Boston and you’re terrified of Ebola and rank it high among threats to your well-being — well, the most generous way to say this is that you’re highly attuned to the cultural sensibilities of our time. The “Ebola is coming!” frenzy has little to do with actual disease or rational risk assessment and a lot to do with other things — some old, like fear and loathing of Africanness, and some relatively new, like the retreat from the public sphere and the concomitant rise of screen-mediated relationships as the new standard in secure, hygienic interaction with other humans.
The American Ebola panic is a putatively nonfiction apocalyptic-contagion story, heavily indebted in both its form and its popularity to the zombie plague narratives that proliferate in our fiction. I have deep respect for humankind’s dark imaginative powers, and I share the common appetite for end-of the-world stories. Such stories offer, among other things, a way to consider the fragile splendor of life as we live it now, and I cultivate a strong appreciation for whatever order and civility we’ve managed to slap together. Because life as we know it is entropic chaos temporarily forestalled, I count as a significant boon every day on which the need to survive does not oblige me to snack on my neighbors’ femurs or to violently dissuade those neighbors from snacking on mine.
So I want to believe that what people are really saying when they say “Ebola is coming!” is something like “Despite all the difficulties and imperfections I complain about, this life is beautiful and valuable to me, and I’d hate to lose it.” I don’t presume to feel contempt for those who indulge in apocalyptic panic, which I regard as an art form. Remember the Y2K predictions that grass would soon be growing in the streets of the world’s great cities? A short-lived genre of poetry, but vivid while it lasted.
That doesn’t mean that the end of the world isn’t coming, because of course it is, for each of us. But when fate comes for you, the end won’t have the satisfying drama of zombie plagues or CGI fireballs. The end will come, instead, in the form of a nagging ache or cough, or a fellow citizen who’s trying to drive a morbidly obese car while drinking hot coffee, eating a glazed cruller, texting, and updating his profile on selfishcowardinaSUV.com. Normal life is the grim reaper who’s almost certainly going to get you sooner or later.
There’s not much compassion for those actually threatened by Ebola in our discussions of the disease, which are animated by inward-turning questions about how much we trust our government and how secure we should expect our lives to be. The answers abound with contradictions. Apparently, we want our government to guarantee our perfect safety from terrorists and Ebola, but not to do anything about more pressing dangers — like guns — that kill citizens all over our country every day. We rely on cheap goods and labor from abroad, but we want to hermetically seal our borders. We want to feel connected to others, but we shun the company of flesh-and-blood people in ways that seem mundane now but were confined to the realm of science fiction just a generation or two ago.
What we really don’t want to accept is that the routines of humdrum existence, accruing over time, can eventually add up to the end of the world as we know it. Our squeamishness about confronting that possibility hamstrings our current conversations about inequality, public health, climate change, and the state of our democracy, among other subjects. We’d much rather talk about Ebola. It’s, like, from the jungle, and you can put on this special suit that keeps you perfectly safe, sort of, and sooner or later there will be a pill you can take. Phew.
Ebola is coming. So is a tomorrow much like today. Which one do you think is more likely to do you in?
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment