A virus of Olympic proportion
March 26th, 2008, 9:49 pm Hobbies News
It may be the most contagious virus ever known. It sweeps suddenly through whole populations. It severely debilitates the rational mind. And yet it has undergone little study.
The few medical researchers in the field know it as cardiosanguiniensis cunctatus optatus, or selective, delayed-onset, bleeding of the heart.
The most remarkable characteristic of this disease is that its apparent cause is not its true cause. Take, for example, the epidemic that has swept through the West in the past few weeks. The apparent cause is Chinese repression of Tibet. But the true cause is harder to define.
Part of it is simply exposure to the virus through the media. The media themselves are immune but they suffer from a mimic virus which exhibits all the external symptoms of bleeding from the heart %26mdash; grave looks on newsreaders faces, earnest editorial tones %26mdash; but involves no actual bleeding. Nor, indeed, does it involve a heart, but rather a stoutly beating commercial nerve.
How exposure to the mimic virus spreads the virus proper through the general population is not yet understood. Current research suggests that the virus attaches itself to the bandwagonicus gene, the gene that dictates the human instinct for following the herd. At the same time the virus generates a warm sense of virtue in the host for championing an underdog.
That pleasant feeling may explain why the immune system does not attack the virus. The immune system simply does not recognise it as hostile to brain function. But brain function is severely affected. The virus causes the brain to simplify the world into good and bad. The host then sides with the good.
If we return for a moment to the diseases full clinical name, note the term cunctatus, meaning delayed-onset. The West has had plenty of time to feel sorry for Tibet. Even if we ignore the history of Chinese involvement with Tibet which goes back 1000 years or more, (glossing over as we go the British military expedition to Tibet in 1904 when the brave Brits mowed down 1000 or more peaceable Tibetans with the newly invented machine gun), and if we concern ourselves only with current Chinese occupation (which began, I might add, with what was effectively an agreement between the Tibetans and the Chinese and which included a period when the Tibetans were covertly backed against the Chinese by the CIA), we have still had more than 50 years to feel sorry for Tibet. For most of us thats our entire lives.
I am not arguing that the Tibetans do not have a case. Nor am I arguing that the Chinese rulers are nice. I am merely pointing out that Tibet has suddenly become everyones cause du jour, after 18,000 similar jours when it was very few peoples cause. Thats how the virus works. It is sudden, arbitrary and selective.
It pays no attention, for example, to Xinjiang, another supposedly autonomous region of China in which the indigenous Uighurs regularly rise against their Chinese rulers and are brutally put down.
This may be because the West finds it harder to bleed from the heart for Muslims than for Buddhists, just as the West is slow to save an endangered species of spider, but rushes to the cause of endangered furry mammals.
The virus is also fickle. Within a month or two Tibet will drop from the view of the herd and hearts will start bleeding instead for the Inuit Indians, perhaps, or the three-toed sloth. Neither the Inuits nor the sloths will profit.
The bleeding of the heart is harmless.
But other symptoms of the virus are less appealing. The ugliest of these is hypocrisy. Those suffering from the virus often require others to act as consciences on their behalf. This is illustrated in the present epidemic by sufferers calling for New Zealand athletes to boycott the Olympics.
One has to feel sorry for the athletes.
There they are, approaching the pinnacle of their brief careers in strange activities, when suddenly they are asked to give it all up by people who plan to give up nothing themselves. Moreover, those same people have spent the past 20 years or more cheerfully trotting down to Farmers and Bunnings to snap up cheap Chinese underwear and cheap Chinese power tools, and are even now probably eyeing up a cheap Chinese wide-screen high-definition plasma television on which to watch the Olympics, without ever giving a thought to the way they have been supporting a regime that the virus is now causing them to denounce from the pulpit of moral superiority and general ignorance.
Its not a pretty sight. More research into this terrible contagion is urgently needed.
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