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Hollywood panic peril { April 26 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-659179,00.htmlhttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-659179,00.html
World News
April 26, 2003
Stay calm, it’s an alien peril of the Hollywood kind
Nicholas Waspshott on America
IN THE thriller film Outbreak, an American scientist is bitten by a monkey infected with a highly contagious and deadly virus. The virulent strain threatens first a small town in California, then the whole of the United States.
In Michael Crichton’s science fiction chiller The Andromeda Strain, an American satellite returns from outer space tainted with a killer germ that menaces the earth.
In “Sars”, still in production, a mystery virus from China goes on the rampage, killing hundreds of people. While the communist authorities try to cover up their incompetent attempts at suppressing the virus, unwitting travellers from the Far East carry the disease across the Pacific and start spreading it simply by shaking hands.
Doctors declare the disease to be untreatable, but not before the medic who isolated the virus falls victim himself and dies. Before long Toronto, the fifth-largest city in North America, is quarantined as Sars claims more lives and, by randomly mutating, evades all attempts at its destruction.
The prospect of an intangible force invading the country and threatening the American way of life is one of the most durable horror plot devices in Hollywood, as capable of re- invention as any superbug.
Nor are killer viruses on the rampage new. Ebola, the unstoppable virus, has ripped through communities in Central and East Africa. Aids, which continues to ravage both the developing world and the West, kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.
The invention of penicillin and other miracle drugs has lulled us into believing that infection can be avoided and that most diseases are curable. The arrival of a new strain of a life-threatening virus has induced an hysterical reaction.
No one in the United States has died of Sars, yet the experience of Toronto has sent a shiver through the country. Memories here are so short, and the sense of history so absent, that it is impossible for Americans to put Sars into perspective. Ethnocentricity has wiped out memories of how European settlers easily overran the New World by giving blankets deliberately infected with smallpox to Indians. More native Americans were killed by germ warfare than by guns.
And, as terrible as Sars is, it is small fry compared with the Spanish influenza pandemic that, between August 1918 and March 1919, killed 25 million people worldwide — four times the number murdered in the Holocaust. More than 600,000 Americans died in the outbreak, far more than the number of US soldiers killed in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq war combined.
The lack of an historical dimension to the Sars outbreak is stoking America’s sense of unease. Since September 11 and the anthrax attacks, Americans have been convinced, with justification, that many foreigners are out to cause them harm. Each innocent tragedy — the aircraft crash in Queens, the burning up of the space shuttle Columbia, the fire at an oil depot in Staten Island — is assumed immediately to be an act of terrorism.
The threat of attack from outsiders has always been a useful political tool, even in those distant days before September 11, when America felt invulnerable. Such was the spirit of intimidation and fear in the 1950s that not even the war hero President Eisenhower, who privately hated Joseph McCarthy’s methods, was bold enough to point out that it was McCarthy himself who had been impregnated with the un-American bug.
How will it all end? In Outbreak, the major-general charged with stemming the runaway monkey plague decides that the only way is to isolate the Californian town and obliterate it with bombs. Citizens of Toronto, isolated from the rest of the world by the World Health Organisation, would do well to follow the advice of the film’s advertising line: “Try to remain calm.”
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