709-218-7927 The Landfall Garden House 60 Canon Bayley Road Bonavista, Newfoundland CANADA A0C 1B0 |
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Disease and Decimation
So there I was, slouched on the couch, reading another John Grisham, it being Tuesday, May 19, 2020, and nothing to do outside until this morning’s snow fall has melted away. Sigh! Well, anyway, twice in “The Testament” young Grisham uses the word “decimate” in the wrong sense. The right sense is “one out of every ten”, and the Civilized Romans used to kill every tenth roman soldier as a punishment or warning. (“Smarten up!” they would scream at the poor sod’s by now blood-spattered companions). Nowadays of course the term is used in the opposite (numeric) sense, and we hear that “the economy has been decimated”, when they mean “ruined by the politicians” but are using “decimated” to suggest that nine out of every ten soldiers or dollars or buildings has been destroyed, or that nine out of every ten politicians is corrupt.
But I digress.
Made me think, though, as to how one can corrupt a word to assume the opposite (in the numeric sense) of its original meaning. And if you don’t believe me, go look it up.
Most of us, or our brains at any rate, use a mechanism to deliver the meaning of a word. Familiar prefixes such as in-, a-, dis- and the like alert us to a (Boolean) negation of meaning. Most of us learned “deceased” before we got to “decimate”, so the “dec-“ prefix already had a connotation of being dead, or wiped-out, at any rate.
So it is easy for a subconscious morpheme processor to raise its Molesworth hand excitedly “Oh! Me, Sir! Sir? I know the answer, Sir!” and on seeing the “dec” at the head of “decimate” associate a meaning of de-ceased with the word before the analyzer has reached the end of “decimate”. Strange, really. Your mind has decided that “decimate” means “almost all dead” before you have finished reading the word.
But there you go.
It made me think about “disease” (as distinct from “de-cease”) which is not exactly bumping Covid out of the podcasts, but is pushing its way to the forefront as tempers cool and some quiet university-types get a bit of microphone time. Podcasts are starting to discuss something other than “Covid” (Guardian Science has begun to beat a retreat, I suspect after protests from folks who are tired of yet-another-Covid-podcast). So nowadays we find that “disease” is in the air, to coin a phrase.
So. I was raised to think of “dis-ease”, which is to say “not at ease”, which makes it easy to discuss “a dis-eased mind”, a term used to pigeon-hole humans, males especially, who watch porn movies, despite the sexual urge being the sole reason for the existence of bi-sexual life forms.
I am dis-eased if I am not-at-ease, and that, to my mind, accounts for the wave of panic that has swept large parts of the world.
You can think of Covid as a “disease”, but you have to think of the draconian measures as being the result of minds that are not at ease, starting with the politicians who have to be seen to be doing something, and working all the way upwards to the plebs who have been stampeded into a panic of state-imposed self-isolation, walking into the traffic to avoid walking past me on the four-foot wide footpath, stocking up on toilet rolls (one of our Bonavista grocery clerks stashed away as many rolls as he could get AND he works in a local supermarket!).
I hold firm in my acceptance that as far as viruses go, this Covid thingy is a tad more lethal than our regular crop of winter ‘flu, and I hold firm in my belief that the human bodies walking the planet today, as you read this, are the apex of development of a mechanism to fight off viruses. That is, that the best technology we have for fending off this, and the next virus, is the human body. Those human bodies that were not so well-equipped to fight off viruses died a long time ago, and in general died before they could reproduce (“Not one of your ancestors died in infancy”), so if we take a human at random from the 9 Billion (Thanks Raf!) humans walking the planet, bet serious money on that human being able to survive the next hundred viruses.
As usual I except what we call “the vulnerable”, which is a bit of a cop-out. Rather like saying “No one will die except those who will die”.
You are vulnerable if you are not in robust health. If your defense platoons/regiments are undernourished, or have just completed a sixty-mile non-stop march, then they will have trouble loading six-inch shells into a howitzer. If you haven’t been eating properly, have been watching TV until three in the morning, or are trying to juggle three major projects, you are vulnerable, no matter that the blood tests always come back looking good and your weight is down. Too, you are vulnerable if your body hasn’t had enough time to develop its defense tactics (you are very young) or if your body is beginning to fall apart (you are 74 years old and live in Bonavista where it snows, still on May 19th, and you have a mountain of compost to shift).
Back to disease.
It seems to me that the population is pretty well diseased, in mind, but not in body. A loose statement from me would read “one out of ten people shows symptoms of Covid (runny nose, cough) and nine out of ten people are herded into panic by the ill-thought plans of the politicians”. We are getting back to “decimate”, aren’t we?
Not everyone in Bonavista agrees with the policies of self-isolation, two metres, shuttering the stores and so on. I am amazed at the number of folks who have volunteered to me that this “is a load of crap”, without me engineering or prompting a conversation. Most people who can go on living their lives without a formal façade (that is, those not working in cafes and stores) seem to be congregating as usual, as ever they did. The churches are still closed, but then their prayers weren’t being answered anyway.
I suspect that this is true right across Newfoundland, right across Canada, right across North America, and wherever humans strive to be human, which is to say, “naturally gregarious”. Only hermitic intellectuals like me derive perverse satisfaction from adding bells and whistles to an absolutely useless (but nonetheless stupendous) Turing Machine Interpreter written in Microsoft Word VBA.
I put it to you that ten times as many individuals of your local population is dis-eased in the mind over Covid than dis-eased in the body over Covid.
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