Happy Birthday Dear Virus

Covidian Authority

The ‘white men’ of China during Covid

This is my slightly delayed annual essay titled, “Happy Birthday, Dear Virus.” I had decided to skip writing about the pandemic this year. The end of this month I’m presenting a paper at the AWPA (American Wood Protection Association) on the History of Barrier Wraps in Wood Protection. I write more on Substack than I present at meetings, so I thought I would write it up here first. I hope my readers find it interesting, it’s coming soon. Only marine borers, shipworms, and certain insects find wood boring,

The problem is: I still wrote about the pandemic. It’s not easy to forget about it. So, dear readers, it’s a two for one rewrite. I am publishing two separate essays at the same time. My editor calls me Rambling Rose. …why you ramble, no one knows.

March 11th is my birthday. For the last three years I have written an essay and published it on Substack around the 11th and titled it, “Happy Birthday Dear Virus,” or some variation thereof. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, (SARS-CoV 2) a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. We are forced by fate to share our birthdays. Osama Bin Laden, Qasem Soleimani and I were all born within twenty-four hours of each other in 1957. But I am not a terrorist, nor am I dead yet. Both the 2004 Madrid Train Bombing and Japan’s 2011 tsunami and the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster also happened on the 11th of March. I suppose September 11th is my birthday’s equinoxial fate. The train bombers in Madrid chose March 11 for that coincidence. We always share our birthdays with someone, even if we have no twin.

So, no best wishes for the virus, no happy returns of the day, not this year. But I do want to make an observation or two about how raw our collective psyche remains: This year the flu season is, as they say, virulent. We aren’t talking about it, not much at all. It may turn out to be the worst flu season in over thirty years when the counting is done, and the corpses are buried. But… we don’t want to hear about contagion or think too much about the effectiveness of flu vaccines. Me too. Pandemics? We are all against them. No one wants to start another one. One pandemic was enough. What exactly happened to us? Maybe twenty years from now, we can have that civil conversation. Maybe we can form a, ‘truth and reconciliation committee.”

For the present, let’s not talk about the virus. Let’s forget about the ‘pandemic’ and all the silly things we did. ‘We are the world’ and we manufactured 390 billion facemasks in 2020, not counting homemade. Silly us, we made the toddlers wear them. And the schoolchildren at school. Oh wait, that was after we reopened the schools. And those silly vaccine mandates, take the jab, or you are fired. At least the vaccines saved countless lives. What does countless mean anyway? Asking for a friend.

China has a raw collective psyche too, and the virus really inflamed it. They don’t talk about it. But they listen. There are almost 1.5 billion people in China. Over thirty percent of those logging onto the internet, do it with a VPN at least weekly. They wander around the internet like cowboys, or even mountain men, free to follow the path wherever it leads. “VPN is very useful.” When the Great Chinese Firewall is working as designed, it breaks the internet. The Chinese government has to have an internet that works, or their economy won’t. Virtual Private Networks are just exactly that, private; private and encrypted. The government can fine you for using one, but… they don’t.

Covid silliness in China had iron teeth and strong jaws. The ‘Whites,’ the army of lockdown enforcers in their white Tyvek coveralls. Test, test, test. Cellphone surveillance, poor, elderly old women locked out of everywhere, digital outcasts, the new unclean. Lockdowns, lockups, shutdowns: commerce and travel denied, delayed and detained - not for a few weeks, but for years.

Sometimes the oracles of authority think they are telling us noble lies: When we are all going to die, even if we don’t believe, it’s easy enough to trust them, just in case. But believing ‘untrue’ narratives needs insulation from the true story to persist. Far be it from me to tell you the truth is not a slippery fish. But the global information network humbles all authorities. “Sure, we are winning the war… but maybe I don’t believe you, I read something, I saw something… I heard something, …différent” If you don’t trust authority, you start listening to authority with a skeptical ear, because, in this age, with the internet, you are free to listen to anyone. And everybody is talking on the internet. Who are voiceless? Only those who are afraid to speak.

In November of 2022, China had a revolution. It even has a name, The A4 Revolution, or the White Paper Protests. It began on November 25, 2022, following a tragic fire in Ürümqi that sparked widespread discontent with the country's strict zero-COVID policies. Suddenly millions and millions of people all over China, especially students, were holding up blank pieces of white copy paper. It was a fitting symbol of the voicelessness the Chinese feel before their, “Oracles of Authority.” Twelve days later, on December 7th, the government stood down. All the Covid restrictions were rolled back, everybody got Covid, and the country started going back to normal, but I don’t think the A4 Revolution is over.

And I don’t think Xi Jinping is very worried about Trump. How do you govern China in the Age of The Internet where everyone is listening to any oracle of authority they choose. Xi has bigger worries than Trump, worries closer to home. Xi is standing on terra incognito; an autocrat in the Age of Show Business. Everybody is looking at the internet, even in China, and that network is the solvent that dissolves everything. The only foreseeable thing about change - is change. This is a horse no man can ride. The internet is changing the Chinese people - big time.

In my last Substack, I proposed that the American political settlement, with its representative government, president and two-party system, was much more buoyant and resilient than Europe’s parliamentary democracies. Change is the only constant. I think the American system handles change rather well. In China, politics is labeled, fragile - handle with care. The Oracles of Authority all over the globe are being humbled in this new age of unbelief. Nobody believes the authorities anymore. Authoritarians beware. The pandemic, in a special, changeful way, made the authorities look forever ridiculous. It was a party we will never forget. Hey, I had clowns at my birthday!

Shenzhen Virus Police - in uniform