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Thursday, 01 December 2005 05:32 |
| Mark West
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I suppose, when all is said and done, that my primary emotion concerning the neoconservative revolution is anger.
I??m frightened, of course; the neoconservatives never seem to have met a war they didn??t like, and seem to share the defining characteristic of having themselves sought out every available deferment while being only too glad to send the sons and daughters of others into harm??s way.
And I??m repelled. I dislike the easy hypocrisy of some of them, like the Straussian willingness to use people??s religious impulses to further their own political ends. I dislike the willingness of the current administration to bend the truth, as in the WMD debate. I dislike the current administration??s penchant for smashmouth politics, and I abhor the venomous and bizarre rantings of some of the spokespeople for this horrid New World Order ?±?± watch out, Dover, Pa.!
But the neocons have crossed a final line this time.
The avian flu has been a threat for some time ?±?± long enough that,
about a year ago, I wrote about it in this space. And if I knew about
it, sitting on a mountainside in rural North Carolina, surely the brain
trusters in Washington knew about it, too.
The Bush administration??s response, like its response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, was a day late and a dollar short.
On Nov. 1, the president finally outlined a plan for dealing with the possibility of an influenza pandemic.
?®Because a pandemic could strike at any time, we can??t waste time in
preparing. So, to meet all our goals, I??m requesting a total of $7.1
billion in emergency funding from the United States Congress. By making
critical investments today, we??ll strengthen our ability to safeguard
the American people in the awful event of a devastating global
pandemic,?∆ said the president.
Better late than never. But Congress instead chose never, when House
and Senate negotiators dropped a plan that Democrats had developed in
the Senate for $8 billion in funding for stockpiling vaccines and
anti-viral medications.
Their rationale was that such funding would cut into other programs, or call for a tax increase.
Perhaps I??m the odd man out here, but I would rather pay more in taxes than die in a pandemic.
You may have heard another piece of good news: A vaccine against the virus that causes cervical cancer has been developed.
It turns out, though, that there are conservative groups that actually
want the vaccine to be banned. The virus that causes cervical cancer
can be spread through sexual contact, and so the weeping Nellies of the
far right ?±?± the people who Bush counts as his base ?±?± think that the
deployment of this vaccine might lead young people to have more sex.
I can hear the teens now: ?®I won??t get cervical cancer! Woot! Let??s have sex!?∆
One thing is clear: On a number of fronts, the assault on rationality
is ongoing. From a war we don??t know how to win, to the failure to
prepare for a pandemic the WHO describes as inevitable, to the attempts
to inject creationism into school curricula ?±?± the forces of
irrationality are moving forward.
Perhaps at this point, our only hope is to pray.
And even that won??t help you if you??re in Dover, Pa.
?ÿ
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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