Monkey Meat And Ebola Vx421, The Big One - Panic And Hysteria From The Heart Of Darkness

 'Monkey meat', said Richardson Allen, longtime traveler to the heart of darkness, he called it, Africa, home to Lucy, the first homo sapiens, and the source of most of the world's problems.  

Rich Allen was a World Bank consultant, responsible for negotiating, concluding, and overseeing soft loans to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire and former home to one of the continent's longest ruling and most despotic rulers, Mobutu Sese Seko.  The Congo had not much improved over time, and typical of post-independence countries of the region, had fallen into civil war, bloody squabbles over resources, and brutal tribal rivalries. 

 

Not only did the genocidal Hutus find refuge there after the Rwandan civil war, but they joined forces with the various regimes in power to secure the eastern region's vast resources of rare earths necessary for all cell phones and computers.  Opposing tribes fought bloody war against the Hutu coalition.  The prize was worth billions of dollars and geopolitical power. 

Allen hated going to Kinshasa - more pestilential slum than city, a lawless place of violence and civil ineptitude - but he was obliged to by his Washington handlers.  o there or else he was told, and thrice-yearly visits to the country were now part of his routine. 

The ruling party's President in power for nearly a decade and like his forbears headed for a President-For-Life term of office, was particularly generous to Allen, for he brought a multi-million dollar loan package from the World Bank, one of the recent investments that came without the codicils and conditionalities of the past.  The complaisant, tolerant, and progressive Bank directors felt it was time to let Africans determine their own course, and far be it from an elite white cadre in Washington to set the ordre du jour. 

This of course was just what the President wanted.  He understood that the World Bank, little more than a shill for the United States, was only interested in securing the mineral wealth of the eastern region, and would do anything to curry favor with the present regime.  As such, they could be had.  The Bank had renegotiated loams with Tshilombo three times after his Minister of Finance had failed to perform adequately on the loan, and had insisted that this would be the last of the series.  'Sink or swim', said Harlan Rietveld, Director of the East and Southern African region of the Bank; but he knew that was just whistlin' Dixie. 

When Allen arrived this time, he began to hear rumors coming out of Kivu Province that suggested the emergence of a deadly Ebola-like disease, and that first indications were that the virus had jumped from monkeys to humans and made its way, thanks to dinners of roasted monkey brains and cassava, through a number of villages in the region.  Reports were as yet unconfirmed - the Congo had refused WHO or CDC assistance - and so one only had rumors to go on. 

The news of the disease of course could not be contained, and soon it found its way in the American news media.  'New African Monkey Virus!' shouted the New York Post headline, and from that tabloid word spread around the country. 

The New York Times having turned far left and sympathetic to the progressive movement in America took the Post headline as yet another example of conservative racism.  Calling Africans monkeys - at least by association - had been long retired, an editorial noted, and from now on the virus would be called simply by its scientific name.  But Ebola Vx421, although necessary to distinguish it from previous forms of the mother-virus, was too cumbersome for the popular press; and so the Times decided on 'Forest Sentinel', a convenient, memorable, and not entirely illogical nomenclature. 

Rich Allen had eaten plenty of monkey meat in his sojourns in the Congo. 'Bush meat', the catch-all term used by Africans to describe whatever you caught that day - snake, rat, bat, or monkey, was all he knew his meals by and was told not to ask further.  The meat was not bad when simmered in hot sauce with local herbs, and since there was nothing to eat on his long journeys into the jungle, he had no choice.

 

Besides, Allen was not a worrier.  After escaping malaria, rabies, hepatitis, hemorrhagic fever, AIDS, snakebites and road accidents - to say nothing of kidnapping, carjacking, armed assault, and tribal crossfires - he was not about to get upset about yet another jungle thing.  

Africa had given the world nothing but awful things, thought Allen - slaves, disease, filching, diverting, and out-and-out thievery of international foreign assistance, and more death and destruction than the rest of the world combined - so one more nasty bit coming out of the jungle was, in the scope of things, quite normal and expected. 

Of course he didn't share these thoughts with his colleagues and superiors at the Bank, for they would have jumped on him for latent racism, and assured that his career in the Bank would come to a quick and precipitous end.  Yet, the truth was unpleasant as it was, was unavoidable.

The stew he tucked into at an Ngoma roadside stall was probably field rat or vulture and not monkey, and even if it was, the probabilities of infection with a still only rumored disease were small.  However, when he returned to Washington and saw the increasing new stories about the Congolese virus - the moniker 'Monkey Disease' had stuck no matter how much the woke Times had tried to give it a euphemistic turn - he was not surprised. The country had gone apoplectic when COVID hit American shores, and had become hysterical over a relatively mild disease which affected old people and the immunologically infirm. 

The thought of a true killer, one which did not simply cause congestion and aches and pains but foul discharges, bloody weeping eyes, pustulating sores, and rabies-like delusions was very scary.

As in the early days of COVID, the government was quick to act.  The show of immediacy and federal concern and responsibility would pave the way for more extensive and politically rewarding influence, so regardless of whether the rumors coming out of Africa were true, it behooved the government to act. The conservative government in power was reluctant to press the panic button, but the liberals in Congress saw the same political advantages they had reaped during COVID.  

Although Dr. Fauci, the COVID czar was being brought before Congress and challenged for his authoritarian shutting down of America, concealing the truth about the virus' origins, and his revealing arrogant statements in his purloined diary, there was no reason not to set off alarm bells and rally the country around the Democrat party. 

The far right had had enough of Africa, and with the new muscularity of President Trump's foreign policy and the decimation of Iran, they suggested that the next bombing run should be over eastern Congo and blow the whole place to smithereens, wait till the dust settled and the bodies are picked clean, and then set up American mining operations to secure access to the rare earths. 

Surprisingly, at least to liberal Democrats, the fact that this racist, nationalistic cant was spreading, and not a few Americans agreed with the principle.  Just look at what's happening in Europe - another African problem as tens of thousands of sub-Saharan 'migrants' storm a Spanish territory in Morocco to gain entry to the EU while thousands more cross the Mediterranean to Italy and beyond. 

The worst came from the underground paper 'The Freedom Gazette' published somewhere in the Humboldt County, California deep woods, in which its editors wondered whether the virus could be contained in Africa and 'do the job for us'.  A hateful screed condemned by the Left and given berth by the Right, but an unfortunately common, although thoroughly rancid idea. 

Politics aside, the rest of the country had quickly moved past the jittery stage and was in full-throated pre-panic aphasia - howling, barking, and frenzied.  'How can we stop it?  Can we contain it?' were the most rational statements coming from the populace who unwittingly and indirectly had mouthed the same foul ideas of The Freedom Gazette'.  Containment was a kind of genocide after all, no one could deny that; and so the New York Times hounded their editors to be careful what they wrote. 

Rich Allen went back to the Congo in the midst of the furor.  By that time he had a beautiful Fulani mistress and spent long, languorous hours with her in the Presidential Suite of the new, five-star Hotel Independence built with Bank 'easements' and rival to the best hotels of Asia.  Renegotiating the loan was a piece of cake since both parties wanted closure, so triplicate copies of the new loan agreement were signed and delivered early in his stay, so the next two weeks were simply delightful. 

Kivu and the eastern Congo were far away, too far away for any concern whatsoever; and even if the rumors were true and he died of some fulminating jungle fever, better it be in bed with lovely Amina Diallo. 

The rest of America was neither so sanguine nor stoic, and the hysteria about The Big One spread and intensified.  Congressional spokespersons were warning that COVID was kindergarten play compared to Ebola Vx421, and that the time to prepare was now. 

Finally epidemiologists from WHO were let into Kivu, but they had been screened and vetted.  Only African doctors were to be allowed to investigate, so the team was led by Elvis Adebayo, a Nigerian Ministry of Health Associate Director, an Ibo appointed because of his tribal loyalties and with nothing whatsoever to do with his medical qualifications.  The rest of the team was cobbled together with the same political favorites and Africa-first nationalists. 

As a result, nothing came of the visit except 'Nothing to worry about', but as soon as the composition of the team was provided to the press, the anti-African sentiment only increased. Concern, which had turned to indifference, had become sheer screw you fed up nastiness.   Old General Curtis Lemay was resurrected thanks to AI and he was seen virally repeating his famous, 'Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age'

Luckily EbolaVx421 turned out to be nothing - a few dead monkeys and a hundred dead from fulminating dysentery unrelated to the virus but mistakenly reported as the epicenter - and slowly but surely the American panic dissipated and disappeared. 

Richard Allen reluctantly left the warm embraces of his lover and returned to Washington already planning his next trip.

Fauci, 'The Science', And Neighborhood Gestapos - The Dismantling Of Civility By A Corrupt Man

Alicia Kent lived through the Hong Kong flu of 1968 although she was unable to get out of bed for a week, was unable to walk more than two blocks, and took a month to recover.  Others were in the same boat, laid low by a virus which disabled even the young, strong, and healthy. 

Yet nothing was closed, there were no mask mandates, no social distancing.  Children went to school, barber shops and restaurants stayed open.  People took reasonable precautions and stayed away from crowded theatres, walked rather than rode the subway when possible, and in time the epidemic slowed and disappeared. Life went on, people assumed the risk, hoped that they would be spared, and went on with their daily lives. 

Influenza was a fact of life, some cases worse than others, but in the scope of cancer and heart disease which killed vastly more people yearly than the flu did in its entirety, the only sensible response was to carry on. 

So when COVID arrived on the scene, Alicia was concerned but undisturbed.  From what information should could glean from CDC and WHO authorities, the disease mostly affected those with already compromised immune systems; and since most elderly were ipso facto immune-compromised, it would certainly be they who should receive priority attention.  In other words, COVID should be treated like any other epidemic - locate the epicenter and the vectors, and focus on them for quarantine and care. 

She was surprised when the first edicts came out from government which claimed that this was The Big One, the existential one, and only if life as we knew it was shut down, coast-to-coast Black Plague level deaths would occur. 

Yet his was nothing like polio or measles, airborne diseases which spread like wildfire and infected thousands in a day.  It was not Ebola or other unknown, virulent viruses cutting swaths through the population; and it was certainly not the Spanish flu which was indeed a worldwide, killer epidemic.  Most people who contracted COVID got a bad cough and symptoms of a bad cold, recovered quickly and went on with their lives, certainly nothing like the Hong Kong flu. 

Anthony Fauci, new COVID Czar, said that we must follow the science, and that one must be patient while the epidemiology of the disease was investigated.  In the meantime, it was only prudent to assume that it was transmitted by all means - airborne, aerosol, contact, bodily fluids, etc. - and proper protection should be taken against all of them.  

Furthermore since we did not know who was most at risk and who were the most important vectors, it was only sensible to assume that all people were equally capable of spreading the virus. As far a government's role, it would exert its full authority to protect the nation. 

Panic followed these announcements.  Every person looked at every other as a Typhoid Mary, and before long civility and good sense turned into vigilantisms and hysteria.  Homes were turned into refuges, sanitized, protected, inviolable redoubts to which no one was allowed entry, all mail and packaged deliveries were left outside and untouched until the life cycle of the virus had run its course. Kitchen counters, tables, and all surfaces were scrubbed with industrial strength lye, air purifiers were installed, No Entry signs were posted on every lawn. 

Children were interned at home, trying to adjust to home schooling, fumbling with online courses and put upon by overwhelmed, frustrated parents.  Old people were incarcerated in retirement and convalescent homes and kept from seeing outside relatives. 

All while the science came up with new, contradictory evidence daily.  It wasn't the surfaces after all, expensive new industrial air purifiers putting dentists out of business really didn't have an effect on infection rates, outdoor social distancing was unnecessary.  Yet Fauci asked Americans to 'trust the science' which is always evolving. 

Alicia was one of the few who was never overly concerned about COVID. For one thing she had worked in the most pestilential, disease-ridden, miasmic places in Africa, and had been exposed to every kind of noxious disease, had near fatal misses on chaotic roadways, and had barely missed kidnapping and carjacking. If she had survived decades of serious risk, COVID was not something to get exercised about.  That plus the life-as-normal Hong Kong flu episode of her youth gave her a practical stoicism and calm. 

As far as trusting the government, she had long given up.  It was when the government was insisting that AIDS was 'everyone's disease' when it clearly was not that her suspicion began. Because of the well-organized and influential gay lobby, the fact that the epicenter of the HIV virus was in the bathhouses of San Francisco and that the vectors were gay men was disregarded.  In order that already stigmatized gay men should receive no more censure and alienation, the disease must be portrayed as everyone's. 

As a result warnings were everywhere, school children indoctrinated, and general worry and concern spread throughout.  Although most populations never saw a case of AIDS and were legitimately skeptical of the 'everyone's disease' meme, the informational juggernaut kept on. 

So, any person with at least some worldly experience should have doubted the Fauci edicts, warnings, and closures; but panic and hysteria are resistant to logic; and the more the hysteria is fueled, the more intense the fire.  

Before long neighborhoods had become no different from mental wards with inmates crawling the walls, howling, bawling, scratching and accusing. Not only were homes sealed off, all social contact forbidden, and began smelling of the antiseptic and harsh cleansers of a hospital, but vigilantes were sent out to find, identify, accuse, and censure anyone who broke the mask and social distancing laws.

Society had broken down.  Vigilantism was everywhere, schools and public institutions closed down, small businesses shuttered, commerce interrupted and dire warnings and forecasts dominated the news. 

All because of one little man, Anthony Fauci who was given a blanket pardon by outgoing President Joe Biden who knew that his actions were liable to prosecution,.  Fauci was finally has been brought up before Congress to answer the accusations of his totalitarian, oppressive, damaging regime; but took the Fifth over a hundred times, even though he had received complete immunity from prosecution by Biden, and in so doing risked contempt of Congress. 

His absurd, ridiculous show went viral, and any semblance of respect offered him disappeared.  Comedians like Len Chappelle pilloried him in hilarious skits, and the AI-sphere had a field day. 

Finally a comeuppance for the Little Caesar, or so it seemed likely; but the damage had already been done. Years of community, productivity, education, and civility had been compromised by him.  

There is only one good to come out of this regrettable episode - that the American public had become more skeptical of government, took what it says with circumspection and a grain of salt, and was less reticent and complaisant when it came to government policies and programs. 

But have they?  The persistent and increasing popularity of 'democratic' socialism and its philosophy of government uber alles belies the fact.  Americans are even more credulous and naive than ever before, and it won't be long before another faux epidemic is unleased on the public. 

Democrats have already caused an intellectual epidemic, and have convinced millions that sex is fungible and a choice, that men can become pregnant, that mothers are dispensable, and that the gender spectrum is reality. If these outrageous ideas can be so universally believed, than the certainty of a far worse viral campaign of idiocy is in the offing 

So Fauci should be clapped into irons but will probably escape punishment, the whole smarmy truth of the COVID episode will never come out, and Americans will just have to suffer the long-term consequences of official arrogance and unlimited power. 

A Good Hand - How Mrs. Linder's Dancing School Taught A Natural Beauty The Art Of Deception

Mrs. Linder's Dancing School, a relic of the now distant past, was the place for all proper, well-brought up children of New Brighton to learn social grace. On Mrs. Linder's polished floors, boys and girls learned how to dance and the courtesies of courtship. 

Every Saturday morning Artemis went to Mrs. Linder's Victorian home on Lincoln Street, adjusted the bow in her hair and her crinoline dress, smiled at the reflection on her patent leather shoes, and walked onto the dance floor. 

Mrs. Linder - a wealthy Victorian widow with time on her hands and a love of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, decided that a dancing school for the well-to-do children of the West End would be just the thing to occupy her time and add to her already comfortable financial portfolio. 

Mrs. Linder, a tall, imposing woman with a turn-of-the-Century aplomb, had more than just the fox trot and rhumba in mind when she opened her doors.  She was a fierce conservative, a believer in survival of the fittest, competition, and the raw sexual ambition which propelled it and meant to probe its meaning.

Boys sat impatiently on one side of the dance floor, girls on the other; and at the sound of Mrs. Linder's clicker, the boys slipped and slid over the polished, waxed floor, and picked their dancing partner.  It was a free-for-all, a charge, a stampede, a pure, unadulterated show of male ambition and desire. 

To today's inclusive, compassionate eyes, the scene seems barbaric, a throwback to raw human tribalism and sexual aggression.  No one today would even contemplate such an untoward show of boys stumbling over each other to be the first to grab the most desirable girl and would never allow - as Mrs. Linder deliberately did - more girls than boys, leaving wall flowers who danced with each other.  

 

No, that would be unconscionable today, but to Mrs. Linder it was the apogee of the day.  She waited until near the end of the class to stage the happenings.  She whetted the children's appetite with waltzes, instructing girls to seductively embrace their partners and boys how to take them firmly and closely in their arms and then engaged them.

By the time the moment of the gantlet approached both boys and girls had been primed and prepared, and were not just expectant but aroused. 

Mrs. Linder reveled in the moment - the boys lined up like hurdlers in a 200 yd. race, on their toes, arms ready to pump and propel them across the floor, the girls making last-minute adjustment to bows, hair, and frills. 

Artemis was the one girl that all the boys wanted and for whom they tussled and fought over the floor to her, a tangle of them until the lead boy took her hand and the rest dispersed. 

She knew she had 'It' as her mother, a flapper of the Twenties had called it - some mysterious combination of pheromones, beauty, allure, and come-hither seductiveness that men could not resist.  Even at a very young age, she had this preternatural sense of sexuality that comes to a very few. 

Vladimir Nabokov wrote about it in Lolita where Humbert Humbert is irresistibly attracted to the 'nymphet', a pre-pubescent girl with an uncanny sense of her sexual power; and was definitely a Lolita clone. 

More than that, the stampede at Mrs. Linder's was epiphanic - a bolt of understanding not only of male sexual behavior but of their vulnerability. Men could be had, she instinctively knew, and felt a power over them that only the most beautiful, limitlessly desirable women could know. 

She had no compassion for the girls who were left behind, the plain, unappealing ones that no boy wanted; and felt only confidence and pleasure at her own success.  She had done nothing to attract the horde of boys who had stumbled over each other to reach her, done no act, no performance, had no conscious intent so common in every other pursuit.  If her simple being had so much power, imagine what she could do with it?

It was almost too easy, this business of sexual conquest.  No flirtation or innuendo was required, no parlor tricks or subterfuge, nothing. Men buzzed around her like bees to a fragrant flower which had done nothing to attract them, had no intent, purpose, or desire. Flowers just were, and so it was up and down the phylogenetic scale with the most attractive of the species the most successful. 

The women of Shakespeare's Comedies - Rosalind, Viola, Portia, and Beatrice - ran rings around the men who courted them, not because of anything they did, but simply because of who they were and how they used the stuff apportioned unequally at birth. 

 

So with very little effort, Artemis made her way up through the ranks - college, the law, courtroom victories as decisive and cruelly delivered as Genghis Khan's, and a Georgetown matron, arbiter of political influence and kingmaker.  Washington had never seen anything like her, and she had done little to achieve her success.  

She understood male weakness - men's fragile egos, native presumptions, dependency, and desire for youth, beauty, and sexual conquest. They were easy targets, so much so that promise alone was a leveraging tool. To be sure, she entertained men in her quarters, an interlude in the more important business of Washington politics but only with men who deserved a reward, or for whom sex exacted a promise.  

Men have always underestimated women, and been duped by them even when their guards were up but still remained hungry for their attention. Men were helpless when it came to Artemis who with a gesture, an innuendo, a nod, a posture, a pose brought them in line, kept them in tow, and pulled them along until it was time to cut them loose. 

From a more liberal, compassionate, kind and considerate perspective, Artemis was an Amazon, a vixen, a woman without principle; but that was to misunderstand the nature of women.  Gifted with this unexpected, gratuitous sexual power, specially endowed women like Artemis used it just as any other animal in the forest would - in a moral vacuum.

It all started with Mrs. Linder's Dancing School.  As she expected the boy who won the race and took her hand was the head of a Wall Street investment bank; and Janie Fisher, Mrs. Linder's wallflower, never married then married badly and was last heard of living alone in Burlington. 

Darwin was right, and so were Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg who got the picture and created women of agency.  It isn't a war between the sexes so much as it is feral competition. 

'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, [my father] told me, 'just remember that all people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had', says Nick Carroway in the first few lines of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - a conservative statement of inherited worth. 

There is such a thing as natural ability, superior intelligence, talent, and insight.  Nurture helps, but little improves on the hand that one has been dealt at birth. 

The lesson of Mrs. Linder's Dancing School was that, too; but rather than turn the gift into something of communal importance - the importance of giving back - Artemis took it as an unsolicited endowment; and to squander it was to deny Nietzsche ('The only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will').  Artemis owed nothing to no one. 

Comeuppance? Never.  Coming a cropper? Hardly.  Anyone with such a natural endowment, such indefinable but irresistible sexual power, can never fail.  Artemis could no sooner end up like Janie Fisher than the sun never rising.  Her fate was predetermined, inevitable, unstoppable and enviable. 

For all those who thought that privilege implies noblesse oblige, thousands more took it as a desirable if unattainable right. 

The New York Times made an exception for her obituary which ran far longer than most.  Despite her ineffably conservative credentials, The Paper of Record felt bound to give her the space her eminence deserved.