S sends me Vanessa Gebbie’s Words from a Glass Bubble. I am captured instantly by the first three paragraphs of the title story, which begins–
The Virgin Mary spoke to Eva Duffy from a glass bubble in a niche halfway up the stairs. Eva, the post woman, heard the words in her stomach more than her ears, and she called her the VM. The VM didn’t seem to mind.
You think this is a voice, but it isn’t: it’s storytelling. You can’t easily find the point where “style”, “plot”, “characterisation” & “worldbuilding” separate, because they don’t. The result is, literally, to captivate. Myslexia called Gebbie’s “a blithe and energetic narrative drive”. I’d have called it that, too, if I’d been clever enough to think of it.
Meanwhile, far away from this, in Insane Town, the Guardian (& I’m sure every other corner of the media) is exemplary on how to make a panic out of a warning that people might be panicking about something. Is this the ultimate sophistication of the media’s relationship with politics ? We couldn’t squeeze enough panic out of the health panic, so it’s time to go for, yes, meta-panic. Surely we must be near the end of all this ? By which I mean not this particular panic, but the insistent ratcheting-up of mediation (which is a kind of panic in itself, the panic to know, the panic to tell) ? There are human characteristics which just don’t benefit by amplification, just as there are human systems which don’t benefit from being tuned.
This reminds of recent social science on the ‘risk colonisation’ that dominates contemporary organisations. Any attempt to deal with risks ‘out there’ opens up an organisation to new risks to its own reputation and function and so on ad infinitum.
Researchers at LSE called this a ‘spiralling logic’. I like meta-panic too.
The oink-flu meta-panic, and it’s effects on the capacity of public health service organisations to deal with themselves, is much the same here in Australia. Memos about memos about memos etc are so plentiful we’re thinking about using them to make a papier-mache forest in the hospital courtyard. Pointless H1N1 e-alert updates outnumber actual junk mail by a factor of twenty-to-one in everyone’s inboxes, to the point where H1N1 e-alert updates are now considered actual junk mail by the inbox’s software and treated accordingly. And, of course, patients with real illnesses are being ‘cured’ and evicted from beds even more quickly than before (ie. being sent home sicker) in order to free those beds for the imminent pandemic, which has been imminent for quite a while now (we thought we might write to the Macquarie Dictionary people and ask if they’d change the meaning of ‘imminent’ to something less, well, imminent).
If you go through that Guardian article and cut out all the H1N1 and swine references, leaving just plain old flu and influenza, it would still make just as much sense, be just as true (or ‘true’).
H1N1 has always been the hype-flu. A propaganda plague that couldn’t live up to its expectations. H1N1 is really the victim here, conjured up out of the slop of an agri-business shit heap in Mexico. It never really had a chance to find itself, figure out what it was about. It was just forced into a world that was ready and waiting to exploit it.
The great irony is that H1N1 is exaclty what we named it: a flu. Big deal. Personally, I think you could snort a line of pure H1N1 right off of a strpper’s tits and probably only miss a day or two of work due to a case of the sniffles. I guarantee that, in 2009, more people will die from choking on bacon than from swine flu.
Anyway, I’m not sure this is a case of mediation so much as an intentional rebranding the fear and panic. In April, it was In Your Face Panic and there was a Ground Zero and death was soon to follow:
Maybe the mediation was in the intent? Keep people 10 steps removed from anything resembling an actual fact at all times:
SWINE FLU!!! SWINE FLU!!! SWINE FLU!!! What was that you said about the economy? Climate change? SWINE FLU!!! SWINE FLU!!! SWINE FLU!!!
I mean, the same five or so corporations that own the government own the media. And people that consume the media aren’t that bright, so the relationship doesn’t need to be all that sophisticated, does it?
Now that the story has served its purpose, people need to be put back to back to sleep and the story needs to be ramped down, otherwise the next ramped up load of lies on the TV won’t have the same impact. So we get Meta-Panic until we’re all so annoyed with it that we forget there ever was a swine flu. We also get Panic Via Human Interest in crap stories like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/health/28flu.html?_r=1&8dpc
“Mommy, I have a temperature and I’m coughing, and they’re taking me to the hospital. I want to come home.”
God, I hope Oliva really has Ebola.
I love Olivia. “Everyone,” she reports, “was tan and dirty, and there was laundry hanging everywhere.” I love “tan” for tanned; but especially I love the idea of a tan as an index of poverty & otherness & threat to the Safe Place. The only solution to our culture is a proper pandemic, & enantiodromically we all know it, even Olivia. I can’t get over Olivia, or Olivia’s dad. I never read anything so balanced on its own thin edge as their unacknowledged, terrified perception of the future. No wonder sf is dead. Olivia is doing it right there in front of us, for free. Magnificent, chilling, scary entertainment & I want more & more of it. Many, many thanks for that Dave.
Glad you enjoyed it. I laughed at it, but it also made me want to break something.
I can’t believe that a “White House correspondent and former science writer for The New York Times” is still allowed to pedal Tamiflu on the sly.
You want to have some fun? Try Googling “Tamiflu and Donald Rumsfeld”. If you haven’t already read that stuff, you’ll have a blast.
Swine flu is a money maker if you have the right stock options.
>>The only solution to our culture is a proper pandemic
I think you have to be more open minded in your consideration of possible solutions. Peak oil, food riots, and an ice age will solve things just fine. Not that I’m opposed to a pandemic, mind you…
I just don’t know, man… I think I’m losing the ability to laugh at Olivia or be entertained by her. I see her everywhere: at work, at the bar, at the gym. She’s pedestrain and boring now, but I think she’s also probably more dangerous than H1N1. And I’m well past the point of maintaining good will towards the people that think Olvia’s story is actually relevant to their lives. These are the ones that really get to me. I think it’s right to regard them as victims and, as such, they should be probably regarded with empathy and humanity, but, quantitatively, we’re hitting a tipping point. As they pile up, it seems they want to overwhelm anyone who is still standing. And that’s just a bit too Night of the Living Dead for my taste.
We have Olivia over here, but we don’t have anything like that quality of parodical self-enactment. It’s so genuinely unselfconscious & yet so saturated with the panic of its own unthought known. The perfectly performed nonperformance of being of your class, of your time, & not knowing anything else even when it’s staring you in the face. Heartbreaking, infuriating, as palm-sweatingly tense as a circus act. Will she fall ? Of course she will. & you’re right, Dave, of course you are: but meanwhile look at the grace of it…
>>but meanwhile look at the grace of it…
I can’t. Not any more. In fact, I can’t see anything at all with the windows boarded up like this.
I met Olivia’s friend Emilee Saturday night at the climbing gym. She went to NYU and studied theater. Out of some sort of morbid curiosity, I befrended her on Facebook. Her profile picture is a head shot. There’s also this Barak Obama quote on her profile: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” During the day she works at the New York City Center, no doubt in an administrative position. She’ll be teaching yoga classes at the climbing gym. And she looked me in the eye and told me that it’s important to stretch my psoas because “we store so many memories there in our hips”.
That’s the bad god at work. I’m sure of it. And I am absolutely terrified.
“Tan” may be just an under-the-counter way of saying “yellow” in these enlightened times. Also the contrast with the white and shiny place that feeds you pizza. I somehow share the bread of your cynicism, just as I though choke on the wine of an emerging misanthropism, a virulent variant of which seems to round on people on account of a perception that they are vectors of inerrant bad taste and meagre discernment. I am uncomfortable with this, because it also inhabits me, along with the desire to witness an incandescent expression of purification, after which we might still tolerate the charity cases. Where are the human beings after we have mashed the constructs, and derided their flimsiness? I am pretty sure that if I were stuck in a lift with Olivia I too would be beside myself with incomprehension but I would also be breathing the same air with someone whose endocrine system pumps identical hormones, whose eyes see on a common wavelength, and in whose fingers all the same lies domiciled a singular cast. Does anyone have the capacity to stand up and announce “No, I am Olivia!”? No, we are scared shitless of the interchange.
I didn’t even want to go there.