The show epidemic
This article was published, in a slightly reduced version, on La Verità on Friday 7 February.
Like many, I also try to keep myself informed on the evolution of the Coronavirus 2019-nCoV epidemic, on the probabilities of contracting it and on its severity. But it is not easy. As I extricate myself from the updates and recommendations of the health authorities, the seed of the microbe has taken root on the ground of a public opinion hungry for symbols and obsessions and from there has generated a narrative forest that says nothing about the possible dangers of the disease, very much of those of a society imprisoned in the intangible plots of the "show" (Guy Débord).
The first to move were the standard bearers of compulsory vaccinations. There is still no vaccine to defend against the Chinese Coronavirus therefore (!), Explained our WHO representative to the Radical Radio microphones , "the main remedy is the flu vaccine" and "a fortiori" against pneumonia, ie against other diseases. Boulders. If a tooth hurts we will bandage our foot, which does not hurt. Moreover, he added, "we are a very vulnerable country. Since 1999, when Parliament suspended or eased the vaccination requirement to enter schools, there have been tens of thousands of young people … not vaccinated. These are predestined victims. " While we try to understand that we guess with the Chinese epidemic, we timidly note that from 1999 to 2017 (when the obligation was reintroduced) the adhesion rate to the polio-tetanus-diphtheria vaccination remained unchanged , while that at anti-measles has even grown by twenty percentage points . Corn passons . Others made the jump even longer, brandishing the imaginary vaccine to annihilate their enemies: imaginary. "I would like," a well-known virologist on Twitter writes , "that a coronavirus vaccine should be found immediately [also] for the pleasure of seeing antivaccinists begging for vaccination on their knees on chickpeas." The reference of this technical and Olympic hope is clearly the fairy-tale subgroup of those who would shy away from any vaccine as garlic vampires, not those who would just like to choose whether and which to make, or perhaps more simply discuss it with their doctor without making him risk radiation and pillory. Since this second group has the defect of existing, it would not lend itself well to the script.
Then there are those barricaded in the fort of love, the ever-good people who fight against the country, unkind and cruel. Here is the mayor of Florence appearing on video with a gentleman with oriental traits to denounce "the looting that some do to find only an excuse for hatred and exclusion". The virus is just "an excuse", the hashtag #AbbracciaUnCinese (seriously). Here is every attack or hypothesis of aggression to people with almond-shaped eyes become a "synophobia emergency", the symptom of a "racist psychosis" that must be expiated in public with special eaten repairers of spring rolls, in favor of Instagram under the inevitable hashtag . And here are the reporters chasing mothers worried about the return to class of a companion from China. "There is a risk of a grease hunt," warn the same people who call thousands of healthy children "little greasers" and rejoice if you kick them out of kindergartens. According to the WHO it is possible that the virus is also transmitted by asymptomatic guests, but Alberto Villani (SIP), the same one who " was very pleased " that the past government confirmed the ban on school attendance for those who do not get vaccinated against diseases that have disappeared for decades in our country or for which no epidemic is underway, informs us today from the pages of the Corriere that if an epidemic is looming then it is unfair and "it makes no sense" to impose a short quarantine on pupils from the areas where it rages. Because, now yes, the risk is only "theoretical" and in any case "if it exists it is highly improbable". UNICEF sings on the same score. In 2018, the spokesman for Italy expressed "appreciation for overcoming the [suspension of] the vaccination obligation as a requirement for enrollment and school attendance" and launched an appeal for the "protection of the health of children – especially children more vulnerable – do not be entrusted to the sense of responsibility of individual citizens »Today, as there are no punctures, we discover instead that we must« say no to any prejudice and discrimination »because« no child is a virus ». And "the most vulnerable"? Here they are not needed, so they remain on the bench.
For MEP Alessandra Moretti , "if each state remains sovereign, it limits the authoritativeness of Europe to be relevant also for these cases". He therefore wonders if "we will be able to renounce … a piece of sovereignty also as regards health and health safety … to spread a European protection system". Of course: if disease flies on the wings of globalism, it takes more globalism. There is no shortage, nor can it miss, "the climate", which is nowadays in the news such as curry in Indian cuisine: "The coronavirus epidemic in progress", writes a doctor on the Daily Fact , "is part of the consequences of climate change in act. " Who said it? Al Gore, so. To close the circle, a reader writes worriedly: "But the cash? Is it possible that nobody has said yet that it carries viruses? ». No, but we are confident. In the meantime, good news has arrived that the virus genome would have been isolated in an institution in Rome. What has emerged? What are the practical implications of the discovery? We do not understand, we do not know, because the real scoop is something else: that the research team would be made up of women only , it seems even "southern". Except for who cares, hearing it announced as an extraordinary fact by the defenders of gender equality always has a certain effect.
More than one commentator has complained about too much politicization of the story, but frankly it seems to me an understatement . What I see is rather a systematic and centrifugal avoidance of the object, the inability to consider its data and the compulsion to digest it in an immaterial grid of desires, representations and obsessions to deform it to the point of making it unrecognizable and inert, prostitutable to any. I see a windowless theater on reality, where only a few shadows of reality enter to make a pretext for a script already written. As in the theater, everything becomes a show with the collective clownesic rites on social media, the repeated formulas in chorus, the clapping on command, the stars to be acclaimed, the extras and the action that converges on the final devised by the authors and awaited by the public, between vicissitudes free to develop without constraints of verisimilitude, reasoning and coherence.
In this theater or circus you have fun and reassure each other, you enjoy watching the elegant making of your dreams on stage. However, there remains the problem of fiction which, however collective and repeated, cannot affect the reality to which it is so freely inspired. I do not know how serious the Coronavirus epidemic is, but the fact of not being able to focus it in its substance is trivial, all in all, indicates a problem that overcomes any possible health emergency: that of a civilization blinded by its consoling fictions and contemptuously unaware of all this does not come true. And therefore destined to suffer it.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/l-epidemia-dello-spettacolo on Mon, 10 Feb 2020 06:25:10 PST.