dirty harry, global inequality, and the bird flu
28 October 2005

Unless you’ve been living in a cave or are an average college student who gets his news from Sports Illustrated, you’ve surely heard about the avian flu by now. Oh yes, friends, this nasty little bugger also known by its influenza A subtype as H5N1, is basically coming for us. It is gunning hard, and with a few evolutionary mutations, it could become transmissible between humans. And then we could be staring down the barrel of a very long gun.

To borrow from Dirty Harry, “are you feeling lucky, punk?”

I’m not.

This is a nasty bugger. Like the 1918 flu, it ravages the young and healthy, and were it to mutate into a virus capable of being transmitted human-to-human, it’d likely take out some debatable number of millions of people worldwide. In short, this is something not to be fucked with. Nevertheless, it is important to understand some of the emergent problems, and in this way, I see the avian flu as a problem of both animal and human exploitation and oppression.

animal oppression

In all the reporting, there’s scant attention being paid to the fact that this is a disease that’s gained steam because of the problems with intensive chicken confinement. In his recent, excellent, and scary-as-hell book The Monster at Our Door, Mike Davis details how the drive to bring the “livestock revolution” to China and Thailand helped create exactly the right conditions for the disease to spread rapidly throughout birds in Asia. Much like the problems with mad cow and hoof-in-mouth, this is a problem that has been deepened by the unnatural, hideous, and torturous ways in which we raise livestock. These massive systems for the delivery of animal protein not only rely on the suffering of animals as units of production—they also are built upon plentiful and cheap antibiotics and other medicines injected into animals to keep the intensive confinement from producing excess disease that could “damage profits.” In this way, this disease is just finding its perfect evolutionary niche in what is otherwise a completely unnatural system that depends on the oppression and exploitation of animals.

human oppression

Davis talks about the questions of intensive animal confinement in his book, but the real strength of his work is that it also highlights how this is a problem of human inequality as well. Because of the entrenched problems of global inequality and human oppression, we’re apt to see this disease spread even more rapidly. In discussing this, Davis writes that “Third World urbanization with the attendant growth of megaslums are responsible for turning influenza’s extraordinary Darwinian mutability into one of the most dangerous biological forces on our besieged planet.” Sadly, in the book, Davis paints a portrait of a world system that is besieged by urban poverty and people so poor in parts of the developing world that their chickens represent all of their worldly wealth. On top of all of this, public health sectors the world over have been gutted in favor of free-market solutions which under-value vaccine development as “unprofitable.”

fuck newsweek, again

Does much of this excellent analysis that Davis does come out in the pop media? Not really. And here’s where we take another jab at our beloved weekly ‘news’ mag Newsweek. Some of you may recall us telling Newsweek to fuck off a few months back, and we’d never miss another opportunity. In the most current issue, they have a small box describing what one can do to protect one’s family from the bird flu.

Given that intensive poultry confinement could be part of the problem, do you think Newsweek would ever look to the heart of the issue? Oh, hell no. Instead, they assure their readers that there’s no reason to stop eating chicken. Considering that I’m a vegan and any advice to eat chicken bothers me inherently, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this advice would get under my skin. But beyond that, doesn’t the advice of Newsweek basically ignore the role of factory farmed chicken and eggs in potentiating this whole disease? Hey, maybe instead of eating more chicken mindlessly, we could begin to think about what role our consumption of cheap, factory-farmed chicken might have in this whole scenario.

But why would we do that?

dirty harry, again

In the 1971 flick Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood says:

I know what you’re thinking: “Did he fire six shots, or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But, being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya punk?

I can’t help but feel like the guy who’s on the other end of the gun in this particular scene. I mean, is the sixth shot going to be fired, and are we going to watch as the world suffers under a virulent strain of the flu, potentiated by the oppression human and non-human animals? Or are we going to get our shit together and recognize that this massive and oppressive system is coming back to bite us in the proverbial ass? Pardon the black humor, but the chickens are coming home to roost.

you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya punk?

Even if you do, luck may not be enough this time. Only by toppling all of this interlinked oppression can we begin to fight the root causes of the spread of this disease. Until then, we’re going to be doomed by the systems that we’ve created.

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under:

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