Rhinocerization

 It is a great irony that fanatical Trump and GOP supporters should choose—as their term of abuse for those they see as insufficiently zealous—the word: RINO ["Republican-in-Name-Only"]. Because it is really they, the loyalists, and not their adversaries, the waverers, who have been turned into rhinoceroses. 

I am referring of course to the process of transformation due to "rhinoceritis" laid out in Eugène Ionesco's 1959 absurdist drama, Rhinoceros. Here, the inhabitants of a French provincial town witness the arrival of one, or possibly two rhinoceroses on a Sunday morning. In the days that follow, they gradually succumb to the urge to become rhinoceroses themselves, until only our laggardly antihero, Berenger, is left standing on two feet. 

We want out/We're staying put

 In the opening essay of his collection A Propensity to Self-Subversion, social scientist Albert O. Hirschman offers a variation on his famous theory of "exit" and "voice." These terms, for Hirschman, refer (perhaps self-explanatorily) to two different methods of responding to dysfunction in an organizational setting. The first, "exit," means picking up and leaving. The second, "voice," means staying put and protesting. Both are ways to register discontent with an existing state of affairs. But the two are not necessarily complementary. In fact, they can undermine one another. As Hirschman summarizes the original, "hydraulic" model of his theory, "exit" can operate as a "safety valve" that "lets off steam" that would otherwise find expression in voice. In other words, if people can simply leave, they may be less motivated to stay and try to improve conditions where they currently are. 

In turning to the example of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, however, and the country's 1989 reunification, Hirschman sees a far more complex dynamic at work. Here, exit or the threat of exit served to delegitimize the regime, while also providing a sense of "empowerment" to others to make freer use of their "voice." Ultimately, in Hirschman's telling, the two demands—for free movement and free expression—coalesced into two kindred chants of the East German protest movement. Wir wollen raus ["We want out"]—a call for the GDR authorities to let discontented citizens "vote with their feet"—was heard alongside chants of Wir bleiben hier ["We're staying put"]—connoting something like: "you can't get rid of us so easily." While the two messages may appear opposite and contradictory, they often came from the same dissenters at the same rallies.

"To break earth's sleep at all"

A thought has been circling around the outskirts of my mind and taunting me for the last few weeks: what if, for all our fear of extra-human events, the most dangerous natural hazard is really ourselves; our fellow human beings? This is, of course, not a new idea. It has been the stuff of eco-romanticism for generations; but I have in the past usually rejected it for just this reason. It seemed to me stale; overly simplistic in its dichotomy between humankind and nature, when in fact both are human concepts; to be founded more in the hangover of human mythology (hubris and nemesis; the wrath of the Old Testament Jehovah who floods the Earth) than in scientific analysis of our plight. 

But now... even given all that, a series of recent events has made me wonder whether there isn't something to it after all. And yes, this is partly about that COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis that I keep talking about. And look, I wish as much as anyone I could stop obsessing over that theory. And I recognize too that it remains unproven, and the precise pathway of how the virus came into being among us remains a mystery. But still, once admitted to consciousness as at least a possibility, I have found myself on the precipice of a paradigm shift. Up to now, I had understood the pandemic to be a tragic but fundamentally heroic story of humankind confronting a natural hazard, and having to band together to fight it... 

American Assassin (2017)

 In the never-ending self-imposed task of trying to find and watch the worst films ever made, a friend and I lingered the other night over an entry in the Netflix library that the platform's algorithm knew to recommend to us, based no doubt on our viewing of Jason Statham movies and similar atrocities. 2017's American Assassin caught our eye, because it seemed such a late date for a film to appear that was seemingly so lacking in self-awareness or any higher aspirations. In this day and age, after all—despite the heckling Hollywood receives from people who rarely go to the movies—it is actually verging on rare to find a movie that relies exclusively on the most tired tropes imaginable, that does not in any way attempt to subvert expectations or stereotypes, that makes no move whatsoever to reverse conventional roles, make a larger point, or at least put its tongue mercifully in its cheek. American Assassin, therefore, in its very utter conventionality, was sui generis. 

Observe: our film opens on a stretch of indifferent beach, where sunbathers loll on the sands and attractive young couples sport in the waves. A generic white guy approaches his blonde girlfriend with a camera. He pulls out a ring. "Will you marry me?" he asks. She smiles and sighs amidst happy tears, "Yes, yes I will marry you—" and then addresses him by both first and last name, because films have instructed us that this is how all people accept marriage proposals. Then, he leaves to go get drinks. Then, a bunch of terrorists storm the beach and slaughter various people for no reason, including his now-fiancée. Our main character is tormented by lifelong rage and a hunger for vengeance as a result. He trains in all the dark arts of espionage, combat, stealth, and murder. He is recruited by the U.S. government, who apparently long to work with a person of this description. We have our premise. 

Fetters

 The Guardian ran a piece yesterday on the increasingly widespread practice of requiring asylum-seekers in the United States to wear electronic ankle monitors—aptly described by advocates as "shackles"—as an alternative to being detained within four walls. As the Biden administration promises eventually to wind down the "Title 42" policy—which involves the summary expulsion of asylum-seekers without a screening, in violation of international refugee covenants—fears were they might turn to arbitrary long-term detention instead. Faced with this prospect, the growing use of a mobile app to monitor asylum-seekers' movements inside the United States, and increased reliance on electronic surveillance via ankle shackles, may seem like relatively humane alternatives. 

Yesterday's report calls this into question. Let us leave untested and unchallenged for today the assumption that the movement of people across borders needs to be policed at all; the idea that asylum-seekers should be presumptively constrained in their movements; that states can legitimately interfere with the physical liberty of people who have done nothing wrong, simply presenting themselves for an asylum hearing in accordance with their rights under international law. (If we think it odd the French government held refugees fleeing fascist persecution in concentration camps in the 1930s, as depicted in Anna Seghers' Transit, why should we tolerate the same practice today, from the U.S. immigration detention system, to Australian offshore detention camps... but enough! enough!)

The Professionals

 I discussed at length last time the writings of Ivan Illich and his critique of the professions; and it occurred to me afterward that—particularly in light of the fact that he was specifically discussing the health care sector—this might seem like poor timing. After all, nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals around the world have spent the last year and a half putting themselves at heightened risk—and, in many cases, dying—in order to save lives during the pandemic. By what remote logic do they merit anyone's criticism? 

This is why it is important to add at this point that the widely-felt human suspicion of professionals does not rest on the assumption that any particular person is bad at their job or insufficiently committed to their calling. Rather, it has to do with the simple fact that, even with the best of intentions, the outcome of a particular case will always matter somewhat less to the professional than to the client who engages their services. (Just to show I am casting no stones, I will observe that this same objection is frequently raised against people who work at advocacy NGOs, and with equal justice, as we'll see below.)

What's at Stake in the COVID Origins Controversy?

 In the last piece I wrote on the controversy surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, I tried mightily not to exceed the range of what we can positively assert at this stage (which is very little, since the one thing seemingly everyone can agree on is that much of the salient evidence that would help us resolve the matter has likely been lost or suppressed by this point). To the extent I came down on anyone's side, however, it was to plump for what I dubbed the "weak" version of the lab leak hypothesis: namely, the thought that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the wild, but may nonetheless have made the jump to human-to-human transmission through contact with scientific field researchers, or within a lab where bat populations were brought in from the field to be studied. 

This remains one available theory of the case; but I no longer feel as confident as I did earlier this week in rejecting the "strong" version of the hypothesis out of hand. (Indeed, I would challenge anyone to read this piece by Nicholson Baker, this one by Nicholas Wade, and this one by Milton Leitenberg, and emerge from them without a new—if discomfiting—openness to the "strong" lab leak scenario). According to this version of events, recall, SARS-CoV-2 never existed in the wild—and may not even have been inside a bat—but rather was engineered in a lab through gain-of-function research conducted with "humanized" mice (that is, research animals genetically altered to more closely resemble human susceptibility to viruses). 

Lab Leak—Strong or Weak

 As others more competent than I to judge have noted elsewhere, the last few months have brought a sea change in the media coverage on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The previously-stigmatized "lab leak hypothesis" has gained increased credibility among politicians, journalists, and some scientists, though it also continues to have its vocal critics. As a layperson with minimal understanding of genetics or infectious disease, I feel unequipped to address the scientific issues at the center of the controversy. I will state, however, that an excellent recent write-up of the available evidence by Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times has convinced me of at least one thing: there are more options available to us than the simple binary form of the question (was it a lab leak? or not?) often leads us to believe. 

As I understand from reading Tufekci's article, speaking of "the lab leak hypothesis" in the singular is somewhat of a misnomer; we really are talking about a cluster of different possibilities. I propose we divide these in two: the "strong" and the "weak" versions of the lab leak hypothesis. The strong holds that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in a lab—most likely one housed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—through gain-of-function research. The weak version, by contrast, is agnostic on the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 was created through human genetic tampering or evolved via natural selection; it posits merely that the virus—however it came into being—was stored in one of these facilities and accidentally escaped, causing the first detectable human outbreak.

Fatalism

 In his renowned study of the role of pestilence in global history, Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill cites a hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammed that seems rather salient to our present situation. It reads: "When you learn that epidemic disease exists in a country, do not go there; but if it breaks out in the country where you are, do not leave." 

I felt called out. In the days following the expiration of my two-week post-vax period, after all, I had at first felt a sense of freedom. The long confinement is over! The world is my oyster! I can travel again! A friend and I almost instantly joined what seems like the majority of newly-immunized Americans in booking plane tickets to fly overseas.