Corona’s Gone Viral
There’s a masked man running down a deserted street with what appears to be an oversized leaf-blower in his hands. I’ve been witness to such scenes before. As a child, my father on the farm, with bandana covering his face, blowing leaves into a pile for burning. A fumigator I once set off inside our home after a number of cockroaches had been found inside the exterior walls, releasing its insecticide in a vertical, volcanic stream. A history textbook from high school with a sepia toned image of a British soldier, ventilator attached to his bug eyed mask standing in the midst of billowing yellow mustard gas.
However, in this case, our masked man isn’t blowing something into a pile for burning, not “cleansing” an enclosed, isolated space, and he himself, remains protected from something, but it’s ambiguous exactly what from? Is he worried about the white cloud and all it contains or what the white cloud is there to contain? Or maybe it is both.
And as I watch the image play out, I see this masked man move through the public spaces with white clouds billowing forth from the mouth of the blower and covering street, sidewalk, building, door way, desk, chair, and university student in what is described by state-sponsored media as an anti-viral disinfecting campaign.
The softness and associative “whiteness” of the cloud hides its true nature then. If the smoke pouring forth was thick and black, we could obviously categorize it as bad, like some evil coal factory expelling its dark smoke into the sky (let the poor use candles if they need light). If it was yellow or orange, we might pause thinking something has gone wrong (like yellow snow, I’ve been told it’s best left uneaten). If green or blue, the sheer unnaturalness would cause disbelief. But who doesn’t like the idyllic, cotton-like clouds of the blue sky? Who can help but see the all-white, pure smoke and think that everything will be made right again?
But what else is being killed? What am I killing when I weekly spread such unnatural poison across kitchen countertops and bathroom floors? Or semi-weekly, well at least monthly, though not always with disinfectant. On second thought, please provide notice before visiting. But I digress. Instead, we are led to believe that such mass “disinfecting” is the sole solution to combat epidemic viral contagion. Good hand washing discipline will not suffice. Any who refuse to wrap their lips around the tube and intentionally fellate the machine will be shot on site. We must scorch it all, down to the last paramecium.
Good Lord, I think, as I watch such a scene, if their own government is willing to countenance such widespread destruction with long-term health effects entirely unknown, what threat must such a virus pose? How contagious must it be? How lethal? The answer to all three questions is: “Not enough to keep me from getting my new Amazon shipment!”
There are many things Americans are willing to sacrifice and not one is their desire for comfortable consumerism. So as the thickening cloud spreads across deserted Wuhan streets while 15 million citizens remain in government imposed quarantine, I scroll my Huawei phone googling clearance items to Fedex overnight; Foxconn direct. I kid. Instead, I watch with a mix of fascination and horror as the largest quarantine effort in human history goes unreported.
Instead, the “Stranger Things” reboot trends on Twitter the day after, John Kelly’s new revelations about the Trump Presidency takes center stage, we learn Pornhub will make its premium service free for Valentines Day (I’m sure the welded shut citizens of Hubei and Ghuanjiang will be thankful). Stories about Bernie Sanders’s outlandish economic proposals (imagine the horrors of a future where people get access to healthcare and Jeff Bezos is only worth 20 billion dollars), President Trump’s clownish appearance (look at his hair-piece, what kind of dummy ends mandatory minimums and releases 3,100 prisoners?), inept policies (HOW DARE WE STOP FLIGHTS FROM CHINA!), inept policies (THIS IS THE TRUMPVIRUS!), or worse yet, breathless pieces about Joe Biden’s ascendence to presumptive Democratic nominee (a man who literally said, “Poor kids can do just as well in school as white kids.” A freudian slip that would chasten David Duke).
Any reporting on the viral outbreak is relegated to French journalists ill-advisedly traipsing about China with video cameras in hand or standing on the corners of deserted city streets looking for all the world like tourists on some Universal Studios soundstage. “Look Mom, it’s Rick Grimes from “The Walking Dead”. Meanwhile, the leaf blowers continue their microscopic holocaust.
Eliot has a line about that in one of his pre-christian poems. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, we find the following image:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
The yellow, not white, smoke poisons the very air Prufrock breathes in. Is it the literal pollution in the London air that pollutes the author’s mind, or is the pollution all around us the inevitable outgrowth of minds polluted? A pollution of plastic, CO2, and smog; symptoms of the current diseases brought on by modernism, secularism, and techne dislocated from its teleology.
It is the state of modern man we see contaminated. Men without chests, hollow men, people who have built and believed a fantasy dislocated and detached from reality. The fantasy that at the heart of real happiness lies unnumbered packages from Amazon filled with endless pairs of Jordan’s or the most recent iPhone 74 (this one has 65 cameras so you can take inverted pictures of your open butthole and then upload them to a 3D printer so you can reconstruct your own rectum). Unlimited Walmart warehouses with ten thousand plastic coat hangers displaying slave-labor clothing and shelves filled with cheap trinkets purchased for children only to be broken and discarded hours later. The ceaseless greed at the heart of consumptive desire.
Financial desire, political desire, sexual desire, desire for power, for more, clutching, gnawing, scratching squeezing. Work without purpose. Money without meaning. Cities without families. Marriages without direction. Homes without children. Children without parents. As Pope Francis said in his homily to the Congolese Church, “One lives for things, no longer knowing what for; one has many goods but no longer does good; houses are filled with things but emptied of children. This is the drama of today: houses full of things but empty of children, the demographic winter that we are suffering. Time is thrown away for pastimes, but there is no time for God or for others. And when you live for things, things are never enough…”
Is he right? Asks the tech VC popping a pill as he boards his private jet for Burning Man. Is he right? Asks the Hollywood executive as the starlet removes her blouse walking toward his camera. Is he right? Asks the man, a weekly churchgoer as the doctor prepares him to be snipped. Is he right? Asks the 36 year old recent lesbian preparing for insemination. Yes he’s right. I say as I scroll Amazon ordering my third pair of basketball shoes. You won’t believe how much I saved.
Walmart miracles.
This yellow smoke, yellow because of cowardice. Yellow because of contamination. Yellow and catlike, ready to pounce and devour us is so unlike the white clouds pouring forth into the midst of 780 million quarantined Chinese. Like a snowfall, the comforting illusion summons us into a false security. Everything will be alright, they say. There’s no reason to worry, they say. We can hold hands with all strangers, they say. Hell, leave your kids in school, all that sneezing and coughing is good for them! Life doesn’t have to change at all.
But I say, let the winter come. Let the white clouds roll upon us and resolve our too, too sullied flesh into a dew. Let the corona proliferate. Bring every cruise ship to harbor and spill their inhabitants upon our soil. It’s not a stranger to these lands; having lived among us for months already. So let us welcome it. Let the virus dance amongst us and then cleanse us with the white smoke. Let the infection disinfect. In what remains, may we rethink how to build a nation worthy of its calling. Let us try to start again.
This is the way the globalists end
This is the way the globalists end
This is the way the globalists end
Not with a bang but a cough.
