Infection

Posted by Lex Konrad in Opinions | May 15, 2004

The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence … and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still able to gobble it up.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

I’m getting that shell-shocked feeling again. It’s the way I felt back in the fall of 2001, wandering the streets of New York like a ghost. When the tourists would sidle up to the sarcophagus to take a good snapshot for the folks back home I’d stand there on the verge of chewing them out. This ain’t some spectacle packaged for your amusement, I’d think. Somewhere down in that hole I used to buy sweet bean pastries from the sushi place. And then I’d rush off to a meeting up there in the sky. With people whose lives would end mid-sentence.

There were small casualties too: the sudden end to a brilliant summer; the loss of a beacon, glinting in the late afternoon sunlight, reminding me that I was almost home and I wouldn’t have to see Jersey again for another twelve hours; the pretty English girl, the one I wanted to fuck, who fled back home; the affront to my cosmopolitan sensibilities as a New Yorker, this last point being what eventually angered me most. Walk the streets of this town and it’s a sea of humanity. This may be the one place on Earth where people basically get along—the mild, mutual contempt that characterizes city life notwithstanding.

Fighting and fucking: now these are things I can understand. A good old fashioned brawl, and when it’s done you grab your prize and go home. Not this. Our world’s infected by the madness of serial killers: this butchering over fetishized abstractions, over words written in obsolete instruction manuals, over ideologies and isms. There was a time, not so terribly long ago, when some people thought it was finally over—that we’d left all that muckety-muck behind. “Is Peace Breaking Out?” a magazine headline once dared to ask. Now it reads like black comedy. The 20th century is back with a vengeance.

Let’s blow something up. Let’s exact revenge on someone. If a thought like this hasn’t crossed your mind, however fleetingly, then you’re nuts. But it’s like that classic Twilight Zone episode: push the button and you’ll receive a million dollars. Someone you don’t know will die. The trouble is someone who doesn’t know you is next in line. You dig?

And what are we up against? Rage. Infection. The body’s response to infection is fever. More often than not it’s the fever that kills you.

Lacking any hard targets, people inevitably turn on each other. They grow obsessed with defining an other, someone they can wound. Arabs, Jews, the Right, the Left… the French, it really doesn’t matter. These scapegoats only serve to absolve the infected of responsibility for their own madness. The gas bags on the television, on the radio, on the internet, preaching from their bully pulpits, pull the poles farther apart. Sane individuals find themselves locked up in the loony bin. The infection spreads. Some liken us to animals, but animals simply fight and fuck. If only homo sapiens contented itself with that.

You’ll find the opportunists everywhere—terrorists detonating city blocks, heads of state moving bodies into conflict like so many chess pieces, demagogues inciting hatred—those who stoke the furnace of rage and profit from madness. It matters less to these people what side they’re on than whether their team is scoring points in this demonic game. They’re all making a play for a little bit of that War Pie.

So I’m inoculating myself against these false prophets, these schemers who use the spectacle of death to bait us into spreading their disease. It’s about time cooler heads prevailed. I’m not surrendering to rage.

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