Word count: 846 | Reading time: 4 min read
Pretzel Logic
Even as I am on the phone, I feel kind of stupid.
I have a cold. The usual sneezing, sniffling yucky kind of achy-painy minor misery that I often get every autumn.
But this is the time of The Stand. There is a constant blather of information, disinformation and misinformation about the risks of a bio-warfare attack unleashed by our enemies.
Already, two or more individuals at the Sun newspaper in Florida have been diagnosed as having come in contact with the spore that causes anthrax. One has died.
Nearly everyone I know is sniffling and feeling similarly achy-painy.
I know that, in all likelihood, I am feeling under the weather because of the weather; last Saturday I stood in the cold, driving rain for about an hour with my son waiting to coach a soccer game that never was.
Still, I want to know for sure, or as reasonably sure as sure can be now. And I also want to know the level of panic that exists in Philadelphia.
“What are your symptoms?” my doctor asks me after I sheepishly explain why I am calling, a step I usually reserve only when my back goes out and I haven’t been able to walk erect for a month.
Aches, pains, sniffles, sore throat, fatigue. Symptoms in another time I would completely ignore, partly because I am not a big fan of doctors and partly because I have always had an aversion to the wily-nilly taking of antibiotics; you never know when you might really need them to work.
He asks me if I’ve had a fever. Not at the moment, I tell him. He asks me the color of the mucous I am sneezing and hacking up. I guess that it is a yellow-green, though I really haven’t looked all that closely.
Both of these answers lead him to a diagnosis we both knew he would come up with.
The common cold.
No need to come in for a nasal swab to test for anthrax. No need to worry.
“Have you gotten many calls from other people worried about bio-war?” I ask him.
His answer was equally emphatic and reassuring.
“No,” he says. Nobody has called him, in panic or otherwise, about wanting a test for anthrax, smallpox or any other potential biohazard.
So why the Sun?
Given all the potential targets, why would anyone mail the anthrax virus to a supermarket tabloid with headlines like “MYSTERIOUS PSYCHIC VOICES SAVE LIVES!” And “DOLPHINS ARE SPACE ALIENS”?
I have heard many theories.
According to one, the place is crawling with ex-CIA and other covert-ops folks. Maybe it was a plan to strike them.
Or, what better way to scare the hell out of this country than to attack one of this nation’s most widely read publications, a weekly rag that is in the face of every man, woman and child who’s ever purchased a bag of groceries?
Maybe it was payback. On Dec. 19, 2000, the Sun ran a story, titled “SADDAM HIDING DEADLY WEAPONS IN SCHOOLS!” About “the Iraqi maniac using his own nation’s schools to hide deadly nerve gas and other ghastly weapons!” (the dreaded exclamation point apparently being de rigueur at “America’s Best-Loved Weekly”). Perhaps the writers of Men in Black knew something when they penned the lines about these tabloids actually being on the money.
City Paper managing editor Frank Lewis is convinced that whoever mailed the virus to the Sun’s South Florida office was no terrorist, but some sad, lonely celebrity stalker angered by the paper’s coverage of his would-be love Calista Flockhart’s latest sex-change operation or another nasty expose of J.Lo’s nasal hair problem.
“You watch,” says Lewis about his theory.
Speaking of theories, I have been inundated, since Sept. 11, with tens of thousands of megabytes of e-mail about who did this and why. Most of the theories, which come to me via the CIA-Drugs Yahoo! Listserv, have the U.S. government at the center of a plot with ultimate goals ranging from world domination, the castration of the Constitution, the gold underneath the rubble of the World Trade Center or the furtherance of world Zionism.
Among my favorites were the early “reports” of the 4,000 Israelis who didn’t go to work on Sept. 11 upon the orders of someone in the Israeli government, who purportedly wanted to protect Jews from the pending disaster, which they knew about in advance. I supposed I should be miffed by this dispatch. I never received my ZOG-issued warning.
While some of the CIA-Drugs Listserv posters give the lunatic fringe a bad name, others are ex-law enforcement officers like Rodney Stich or Mike Ruppert, whose postulations about government foreknowledge or malfeasance — born as they began to learn about CIA involvement in international drug dealing — cannot be totally dismissed as the rantings of the deranged.
Now that I think about it, the more I read this stuff, the less crazy I feel about asking my doctor if I should get tested for anthrax.
