"The world is bracing for a pandemic." We've all heard that phrase lately. Jon Stewart ran a great show on that notion this week, showing how various news channels used the phrase "we're not trying to freak you out" while they were all the while trying to freak the hell out of us.
Media sources, which drive our economy, get ratings by freaking us out. In turn, we've all got to decide, by re-evaluating details with a critical eye, if there's something solid in the world to freak out about.
Facts: The current manifestations of this flu has killed about 150 people. Any year's flu strain kills about 250,000 to 500,000 world-wide. This year's flu is dangerous because it's a new strain, and it doesn't have a direct vaccine. That said, ample evidence shows that two existing antiviral drugs, Tamiflu and Relenza, can save a person's life if taken as soon as symptoms develop. This strain is frightening on another level because of how easily we can pick it up from animals. The Avian Flu of 5 years ago was highly fatal for birds, but we could not easily catch it, because our genome is so different than a bird's is. One frightening fact about this new flu is that it infects three species: birds, pigs, and us. We have a genome much closer to a pig's than to a bird's, and so it can more easily be passed from the animal to the human world than the Avian Flu could.
That said, not many people have died from this flu yet. Still, we're "bracing for the pandemic." In some sense, the very words which are at play in the media these days--i.e. "swine flu"--can freak us out by way of mere linguistic power. The pork industry has done a lot of work to remove the word "swine" from the tagname of this flu. They'd prefer we call it by its less symbolic name: the H1N1 virus. For one, you can not get this flu by eating pork. Point two: They know how much the word "swine" touches a nerve. They know how hard it is for us to stomach that we're closer to pigs than to birds in the genome.
After all, there's a moral necessity to see ourselves as a qualitatively different species than--as very distant from--pigs. The Bible itself told us that we were categorically different than swine, and that if any transmutation happened between humans and pigs, the world was to end:
Leviticus 11:7-8:
"The swine...he is unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you."
Matthew 7:6:
"[Do not] cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you."
Isaiah 66:17:
"[He who eats] swine's flesh, and the abomination...shall be consumed...saith the LORD."
In today's world--before this flu came to light--a lot of us already felt guilty, as if we'd transversed some human order. Since the Avian Flu, we have attacked foreign countries with an animalistic greed; we have built false businesses on piggishness; we have created a racial dialogue that some people think transgresses the "natural" order. This unsettling of moral and racial categories causes anxiety in the majority. Some people fear we've dropped the ball as a distinct moral species. Some anticipate an Apocalypse which we deserve. We're also frightened by the biological fact that we're more likely to catch a cold from a pig (that lowly thing) than from a bird (that thing we wish we were).
There is probably some group guilt behind the media frenzy around the phrase "bracing for a pandemic." Perhaps we're living out the dynamic that the psychologist Reich once described: The masochist, he said, is that person who feels some guilt, and so damns herself by self-administering some punishment, just to preempt someone else (like God) doing it for her. When we're haunted by guilt, we tend to flagellate ourselves--just so that other powers don't impose punishment on us first. We say "we're guilty and accept this plague." Naming the plague helps us defuse it.
Is a national sense of guilt in any sense fuelling our hysteria about a "pig" pandemic? Are we exhausted with a fear of world collapse, and so say, "At last, it's already here"? There is certainly a real, factual threat to us, called the H1N1 virus. I simply also want to know if you think that metaphors have allowed a certain hysteria to blossom in our media. Are we releasing guilt by naming our own darkest plagues?
