By Rabies —
Let’s say you’re a hardworking, get-‘er-done, Joe Lunchbox viral pathogen that’s been out there in the trenches, silently doing your job, with a 99% kill rate for, oh, I don’t know, the last 90 million years. And, let’s say you hardly ever see your name in the news. In other words, let’s say you’re me.
Then you wake up one day to find that some upstart, scene-stealing diva of a virus with a wimpy 2% fatality rate, who’s been around for maybe 30 days, has managed to get its little membranous spikes splashed all over the front page of every major media outlet.
No names mentioned, but I’m talking about a particular over-hyped string of DNA from China, whose last major gig consisted of infecting pangolins. I mean seriously — pangolins? For fuck’s sake.
This shows you everything that’s wrong with our celebrity-obsessed, famous-for-being-famous culture. Here I am, working my parasitic, replicating tits off for 90 million years, quietly killing pretty much everything I get inside of, and nobody cares. Then some zoonotic freak crawls out of a pangolin‘s asshole, racks up a paltry 98% not-so-dead record, and next thing you know, they’re up there in the spotlight with the top hat and tails, and I’m down in the back row of the theater scrubbing gum off the bottom of the cheap seats.
But hey — don’t get me wrong. There’s no resentment or hard feelings. Everybody deserves their 15 minutes of fame, including a certain bullshit-artist, attention-seeking virus whose name I’ve studiously avoided mentioning, but just think of a shitty beer that closely resembles piss with a lime in it.
And by the way, not that I’m obsessively hung up on this or anything, but if I knew that anyone gave two fucks about pangolins, I would’ve started infecting the damn things back when the bunch of you were still banging Neanderthals and getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers. Just saying.
By Joe Lichtblau
Well, I love you.