Saturday, March 14, 2020

THE POLITICS OF CONTAGION


Harry Targ

Growing Up with Fear: Polio

As an older person I remember the three fears of my youth (early 1950s): polio, the bomb, and communism. All three were interwoven into the public consciousness and even children like me learned fear early.

While the polio threat was real (as is the coronavirus contagion now) I internalized a sense that each of us was alone in an alien world, undefined others could be threats to our survival, and acting in and on the world could be dangerous. Sure I was a kid and did not think these “deep” thoughts per se but I, a child, internalized these ideas. As to the polio disease itself, every summer brought trepidation. Don’t exercise too much. Be wary of other kids I did not know. Perhaps most of all don’t go to the beach, the playground, the lake.

And the reality was that a few kids on my block did, in fact, contract polio. In a few cases victims of polio became paralyzed or could not breathe outside an oxygen tent. My next-door neighbor friend had an older brother who was disabled from polio and a friend down the street contracted polio; it affected his vocal chords. So we experienced polio directly and indirectly. (As I remember Jonas Salk sought no profit from his discovery).

So the fear of disease and death was/is in the air figuratively and literally. Inevitably it becomes part of our political culture. And, as I am arguing, the fear of polio paralleled the other fears, sometimes becoming a metaphor for them. (I was reminded of Albert Camus' powerful novel, The Plague, which was about a literal plague, and fascism, and how people responded to either or both).

This was scary stuff.

Fear of the Bomb

In addition, all people growing up in the 1950s, experienced “duck and cover” exercises in school. Since an atomic war was always a possibility (some media pundits tried to convince us it was inevitable), putting our bodies underneath a desk or covering our heads sitting in a hallway near our lockers would protect us from surprise attack. And we knew our only hope of survival was to construct enough bombs and airplanes to retaliate against the demonic enemy, the Soviet Union.

Fear of Communism

And finally, the most virulent unseen plague (to use the powerful metaphor of Albert Camus, in “The Plague”) was communism. Communism could be anywhere. As former FBI agent Herbert Philbrick immortalized in a popular television show, “I Led Three Lives,” communists were lying, cheating, malevolent human beings who were out to undermine our democracy. Alien communists were everywhere: in our schools, in trade unions, among well-meaning supporters of civil rights, in our churches. As polio destroyed our bodies, communism destroyed our minds and our democracy. The invisible germ of the polio plague paralleled the secretive works of enemies in our midst.

One Further Example of Politization: Continuing the Anti-Cuba Crusade

“There is COVID-19 in Cuba and I do not believe there is only three (cases). I believe there is a heck of a lot more and it poses risk to the people of Miami-Dade County and the state.” (Mayor Carlos Gimenez, Walter Lippman, Cuba News, March 12, 2020).

The mayor of Miami Carlos Gimenez joined by the governor of Florida on March 12 called on the United States government to cancel all flights from Cuba to the United States. Ironically, Cuba is the only country which has developed a medication that could mitigate corona virus and a country with only three confirmed cases of persons testing positive for the virus (all three arrived in Cuba from Italy). The mayor’s statement has to be understood in the context of Florida politicians who have made careers by opposing the Cuban revolution.

Contagions of Mind and Body

So the great fears of the 1950s, the bomb, communism and polio became fused in a cosmology that led us to quietism, fear, and self-absorption. Our elders became more susceptible to accepting the words and deeds of our political leaders. This made the world of the Cold War even more dangerous than it might have been, perhaps leading the world to take dangerous paths that could have been avoided.

Today we experience climate crises, growing inequality, global and national violence, and a return to virulent forms of white nationalism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia. And people all over the world are mobilized to say “no” to these disasters.  In addition, there is now another real threat to human survival.

The coronavirus could lead, of necessity, to human cooperation to defeat this disease, or it could be used as a pretext to build new walls, reify borders, blame others for the problem. And, in the face of this new crisis, we might withdraw from the world, seeking to protect ourselves and our loved ones and adopt the fatalism that gripped the popular culture of the 1950s.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned from this new crisis is that we cannot let pessimism and fear deflect us from our daily lives and continuing to work to achieve a better world.

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.