Imagine being the f**kup who started the global pandemic
Also: Louis CK's still cooking with gas.
(Obviously the big news of the week is the SCOTUS leak of a majority opinion overturning Roe; see my June 2021 post for my take on abortion.)
I believed since very early in the pandemic that the lab leak theory was extremely plausible, and I was incensed that Facebook censored posts that mentioned it, while elsewhere condescending “experts” dismissed the hypothesis as wild-eyed, bigoted nonsense. (There were also those who seemed to implicitly acknowledge that it was possible, but maintained that it shouldn't be talked about because it might inspire attacks against Asian Americans, which is its own kind of crazy.)
But what this “30,000 feet” debate leaves out, and which I never even thought that much about until recently: if the theory is true, what must it be like to be the person or persons who let it out?
Assuming they haven’t killed themselves or something, they get up every day and live their lives, knowing or strongly suspecting that they committed the biggest “oopsie” in the history of everything. (Can you think of any more impactful examples? The only things I can compare this to in my own life are not comparable at all in terms of magnitude, because what is?
When I was in high school, I had a slingshot my dad had given me a few years earlier to go squirrel hunting with him and his .22 rifle (we never got any--though as he told it, when he was young he did bag them regularly and took them home to make squirrel stew). One day I was screwing around with it in my mom’s study, which was the room in the house on London Road in Duluth with a big picture window looking out on Lake Superior (it was on the “wrong”, i.e. cheap, side of the road, so it wasn't “looking out on the lake” so much as “peeking at a narrow sliver of the lake through the yard of the rich neighbors across the street”).
The thing you shot with this slingshot was basically a little BB. I didn’t even pull back the rubber band that hard at all, but one of them let fly into this window...and, to my horror, left a little round blemish. It looked like a bullet hole—although weirdly enough, if you ran your finger over it you couldn't feel anything. But it was quite visible, especially when you got close to the window. So of course my mom noticed it right away, and questioned me about it. I steadfastly professed my total ignorance as to how it could have happened, suggesting that maybe some kids shot a BB gun at it? I felt at that time, and for decades afterward, that I could never breathe a word of it—not to her, not to anyone. I thought I might take the secret to my grave, but obviously I have now neutralized that possibility.*
The other instance was three or four years later, when I was in college. I stupidly brought some weed up to the house of my mom’s fiancé (let's call him CJ) in Canada. It was not legal there yet, so I don't know why on earth I would take the risk of bringing it through border inspection for a trip of only a few days, and actually I realized after getting there how stupid it was so I resolved to smoke it all before going back. I had a little “bat”, a one-hitter, to smoke it with:
However, I had no “dugout” to pack the bat with:
So I just put the buds on CJ's nice antique dining room table, and pushed down on the bat while spinning it back and forth to grind the weed into the little bowl. Again to my horror, after doing this a few times I discovered that in sharp contrast to the glossy but dark wood finish, there were little circles of light unfinished wood color! This was even more noticeable than the window had been, and CJ was (and still is) kind of a hardass, so I was in a panic.
I had a little light bulb moment, that we had been served chocolate cake for dessert, and there were leftovers in the fridge. Maybe, I thought, if I rubbed some chocolate frosting on these spots and then wiped it up, it would darken the light wood enough so it wouldn't be as noticeable, and I could at least make it back across the border before CJ got wise. So I tried it, and much to my astonishment it worked far better than I had ever hoped. I stared as closely as I could at the area where I remembered these very distinct contrasting circles, and I could not tell they had ever been there even though I knew they had been, just a minute earlier. It was a perfect “refinish” of the wood. Amazing stuff. Once again I resolved never ever to confess what had happened, and maintained this resolve until now.
But so imagine this putative lab tech at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They accidentally get bit by one of their infected bats, or spill a sample when they are not properly suited up in protective gear. They know they ought to report it, but they are leery of getting chewed out for their mistake or don’t want to deal with the hassle of quarantining, so they just kind of sweep it under the rug. A couple days later, they start to get fairly sick and begin to think “uh oh, I've been out to the market and so on, hope I didn't infect anyone”. Then the local news starts lighting up with reports of a new flu that is making a lot of people really sick, even sending people to the hospital, and they're like “oh shit, I definitely can't tell anyone about this”. As it snowballs into a global pandemic, they go from sick with worry that they’ll get caught to reeling from the prospect of millions of deaths that can be laid at the feet of their carelessness. But they have to keep on living life, and when people bring it up in conversation they are like yeah, what an awful virus, yeah I work(ed) at a lab where they studied stuff like that, I know, weird coincidence.
And if it did somehow come to light that it was this one person’s fault, how should the loved ones of the millions of Covid dead feel about them? Angry, obviously; but would it really be right to want to tear them limb from limb? They weren’t an architect of Nazi death camps. just a technician who got a little careless and never dreamed what kind of impact it would have. So in that sense I feel some sympathy for this person or persons who are out there somewhere (still in Wuhan or somewhere else in China, probably).
*My mom may be reading this, and if so I hope she forgives my youthful indiscretions!
Louis CK's still got it!
Just this month I caught Louis CK’s latest comedy special “Sorry”. It’s not on a par with his best specials, but it’s still pretty damn funny. $10 well spent (and it was wonderful to see the giant crowd giving him a standing ovation after all he’s been put through). Now if we could only see his 2017 homage to Woody Allen, I Love You, Daddy.
He is reported to have purchased the rights to the film back from the distributor, but it is not one of the digital products he offers on his website, or I definitely would have purchased and watched it by now.