It’s as easy and common to see a conspiracy theory attempting feebly to explain noxious motivation as it is to denigrate those tendencies as a matter of grasping at straws. And while all too often there is certain truth to that, the opposite conveyance of expression can also at times apply, of inquisitors being not crazy or desperate but simply unwilling to rationalize what’s booming right in front of their faces as a thing beyond its representation.
The #coronavirus is admittedly a convenient, after the fact validation of the rampant xenophobia unleashed by Brexit, and of the Trump administration’s ongoing desire for travel bans and border walls. The public, informed that this is mere happenstance, how antisocial precautions are warranted at a time of protests both long-running and growing abound in places as diverse as China, Brazil, France and Venezuela; opposing austerity, extradition, surveillance and regimes backed by the government of the USA. A government which openly uses against its own civilians the same chemical weapons banned by international law from battlefields of war could never possibly consider stooping so low as intended contagion. Total conjecture to infer those with absolute control over lives and livelihoods may also be the ones with means for causing the problems with lives and livelihoods, of course. Manufactured consent for a mass hallucination of normalizing battered wife syndrome, more like.
The natives of North America were given blankets contaminated with smallpox for fucksakes. Theories behind the true origins of AIDS and Lyme Disease aside, shit magically happens, shit such as a century-plus of experimentation among its own soldiers, whether informed or not, as replaceable guinea pigs and lab rats. The public again, long grown accustomed to an overeager acceptance of avatars and proxies, of packaged marketing as the god’s honest truth and a preference for phenomenon as opposed to the noumenon, the thing itself.
Friends and allies reveal their uselessness in tragedy, just as markets reveal their foundational house of cards wherever the wind blows. The Department of Justice manifests scapegoats for injustice, the Department of Defense manifests wars, and federal antitrust laws empower monopoly. The most indebted economy in world history cannot prolong its self-gratifying, laissez-faire mentalities short of crippling its debtors and devastating competitors, clashing egos and inadvertent bystanders alike. The world is its oyster, its fodder, its toilet paper.
And yet no matter the cost to life and livelihood, the public are made to preternaturally rationalize what’s right before their very eyes as something, anything else but what it inherently is.