Ebola Virus; The bunker state mentality always requires a dangerous outsider for its sustenance

Oct 5 2010 10:47 am

벙커주의… 우파적 병으로서의 에볼라 바이러스 ; 에볼라 바이러스는 무수히 많은 "타자"로 대치될 수 있다..

Ebola Virus

We recently received the following email from New Orleans ;

It’s interesting that an Ebola outbreak has become headline news at the same time as it is published in a national bestseller (HOT ZONE), feature film (OUTBREAK) and TV movie-of-the-week (Robin Cook’s VIRUS) - Nick Marinello

Interesting all right. Third World viruses for First World profit.

The Ebola virus is the first of all the media-assisted diseases.

Providing just the right metonymic touch of veracity for the “real” outbreak of the Ebola virus in the internal organs of the mediascape, the Ebola outbreak was diffused by a media system in desperate need of a truth-referent to prop up the sagging mass of hysterical (media) reports about body invasion by viral infections. Not only fear of viral infection by alien contaminants in novels, films, and TV movies-of-the-week, but hysterical anxieties about the invasion of the American social body by alien viruses on the network news, Prime Time scoops, Night Line and particularly all the talk shows.

But if the Ebola outbreak could so quickly become a viral star for the day, It was probably because there was no outbreak at all, only a bunker culture that has long ago successfully immunized itself from alien invasion. Not a Hot Zone, we’re actually living in a cold zone, immunized from uncontrollable outbreaks and certainly innoculated against strange viruses. In this case, the Ebola virus is a perfect virtual disease, a right-wing-disease – an ideological support in the form of panic viruses that play subliminally on fear of the breakdown of the immunity system of the social. The media appearance of Outbreak, Hot Zone, Virus, and the Ebola virus are perfect supports, then, for the will to (viral) purity. Less interesting in themselves, the virtualization of the Ebola outbreak says a lot about the political conditions that gave rise to their popularity and acceptance.

The bunker state mentality always requires a dangerous outsider for its sustenance. What could be better than the Ebola virus with its barley hidden traces of a more ancient fear of African immigrants coming to infect the West? Just because the panic fear of the spread of the Ebola virus is so (medically) far-fetched, it’s perfectly (media) reasonable ; it supports, in the end, the will to bunker down and blockade the whole continent, and all this with a strong feeling of moral righteousness.

The media is getting ready for millennial frenzy. It projects the Middle Ages onto the end of the century. The Ebola virus is perfect. Like the “establishing shot” in cinema, the Ebola virus is the “establishing disease.” It anchors down all the media frenzy about our disappearance into an infectious mediascape.

- [Hacking the Future] by Arthur & Marilouise Kroker, 1996