Swine Flu or Pig Lie?

We'd sort of been here before. Illness emerges in the headlines and strikes a few human souls down. I was barely in high school with Gay Cancer emerged in the early 1980's, going through a few names before all the world except US president Ronald Reagan knew HIV/AIDS, which like sex and violence, became one concept and often erroneously used interchangeably. Today, Swine Flu is reportedly sending Mexico into a panic. Schools and shops shuttered closed. Sport events played to empty stadiums. And the crisis shows no sign so slowing. The Mexican military were redeeming themselves by passing out face masks after bloodying themselves in the mid-1990's with Zapatista Rebellions. I myself saw them go from doing the best a modern, civilized military could by tidying the streets of Mexico, DF to behaving like any pre-modern imperialist milita.

This morning, only a handful of cases were reported north of that arbitrary, politcal boundary that delineates the Third World from the First, the United States of Mexico and the United States of America. By afternoon, more cases, further inland. The speed with which this epidemic seems to spread is interesting and triggers the horrors of our medical history.

Something in this morning's reportage made me think back to the earlier time of Gay Cancer and or need to seriously investigate our medicine: NPR reported that most of the deaths in Mexico were of men 25-45. They themselves noted the strangeness of this, just as I did.

Was I simply suffering from post-trauma from being a queer man who has seen men go from health to being dead, and any mention of young men dying "myseriously" triggers in me a flash-back from the 80's?

I wondered if these Mexican men were gay.

I wondered if they had been the victims - as many of our Third World brothers and sisters - of an experimental vaccine gone awry.

I wondered if they had been the victims - as many of our Third World brothers and sisters - of a vaccine made on the cheap, and then sold to the Third World. "Scientists" wonder aloud if this isn't already incubating in the corners of the globe: I wonder if it's not already been injected or dispensed, like in the antibiotic I had to take recently for a bad sinus infection picked up from the ocean waters (and: what's being dumped into that water that knows nor respects boundaries).

I wanted to know the profiles of those sicken in the United States [at this writing, no one has died in the US from this], like some New York school children who had visited Mexico.

I readily admit to retaining a healthy skepticism for modern medicine. When I have approached its labs, it is with the utmost reservations and only after exhausting - even to the point of near-death - the other options short of a witch's incantation.

Swine flu: human, pig, and bird virus. What a bizarre jury for Mother Nature to bring together, no? But a creepy mad scientist: indeed.

Our vaccines are harvested from animals after all as are some medicines for chronic ailments. Do you know where your medicines come from, swine, human, bird, or what?

Who is being experimented on, the cats in cages or you and me and our comrades in the Third World and in Third World communities within the First World?

And while I am sounding paranoid, I remember that the West has used germ warfare on countries as innocent as Cuba, just to ruin its economy so its socialist experiment would not succeed; the US spread dengue microbes over the island to sicken the workers. Our esteemed scientists tell us unconvincingly that HIV/AIDS came from Africa, a tribesman, and a monkey he dined on. Constantly, the narrative is of our pristine, angelic, well-meaning societies put in peril by the Dark Corners of the World!

Our official scientists, like from the World Health Organization or National Institutes of Health, cannot air such speculations. But they are puzzled: they are airing a deep perplexment. That's enough for me to have pause.

Nature is a tempramental force, but she is not perplexing. She does not one morning change her laws. Man does that. Industrial society attempts that. Greed does that. Power does that.

Hundreds of thousands of human beings die daily from curable diseases because our for-profit drug companies cannot see it profitable to produce basic antibiotics. When they do produce these medicines, they do so on the cheap.