Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Bacon

By Al Giordano

On a sixteen day swing through the United States, I led a three-day workshop in Massachusetts, two lectures at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, organized and co-hosted the annual Narco News anniversary benefit celebration in New York, held dozens of meetings, attended two birthday parties for Pete Seeger, a comedy club appearance by Katie Halper, and performed three times with guitar, which is a roundabout way of explaining the light blogging schedule of late.

Last night I arrived in Mexico City, the reported epicenter of a swine flu panic drummed up by public global health officials that, speaking strictly for me, seemed all hat and little cattle swine. As I documented from afar last week, a swine flu epidemic near a US-owned pig slaughterhouse two hours away in the state of Veracruz had been evident since March and publicly reported nationwide since early April. Authorities waited until after the "Spring Break" travel exodus and a visit b y US President Obama before sounding any alarm at all. But, boy, did they overcompensate for it later.

The originally reported "153 deaths" in Mexico City vanished from the media without a single victim identified or even described. (By my own rough estimate, in the month of April there would normally be about 200 deaths from familiar flu strains in the Mexico City and I frankly wonder if authorities jumped the gun assigning them to swine flu.) Later, authorities have amended their statements to claim 22 such swine flu deaths, which would still be 0.0001 percent of the metropolitan area population, if accurate. But, again, not a single name or reported story about any person or family struck by it. (Note and correction: The AP did report the name of one deceased person, Gerardo Leyla Lolis, in the town of Xonacatlán outside of Mexico City, on April 27. Thanks to Jorge Parada in the comments section for the link.)

Of course, the World Health Organization and every other medical bureaucrat from top to bottom saw a wonderful meal ticket with visions of fatter budgets dancing in their heads through the media-generated panic, and pumped all the gasoline onto the fire that they could. Although the wearing of hospital-grade masks would have only a marginal, if any, prophylactic effect to shield against such a contagion, virtually the entire population donned them whenever stepping outside. Schools, restaurants, bars, government services and so many other buildings were locked shut for the past two weeks, by decree.

Things have clearly calmed down, now. (You can panic some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't panic all the people all of the time!) I just took a stroll through parts of the city and can report that less than ten percent of the pedestrians sport face masks, and half of those had them hanging around the neck but not over their mouths. I didn't hear any coughing or wheezing (and controlled my smoker's hack so as not to drum up any spontaneous pitchfork mobs to come after me). And since my Detective Monk-like phobia of the pestilent human species anywhere on this planet already had me washing my hands too many times a day to keep count, the place seems much the same as the last time I was here.

But one thing has changed: Two weeks without work in a megalopolis where most folks live hand to mouth. Mexico City author David Lida explains the real problem, here:

Yep. It's the economy, tonto!

(That interview, by the way, is part of an excellent series by Dyana Pari Nafissi who has filed 46 such video reports on YouTube in English since the outbreak began last month: If you want a more accurate sense of what has been happening in Mexico City than the international media has offered, these are don't-miss-'em reports.)

For weeks I had been planning a gathering here tonight in a city cantina. The Ameneyro trio from Chiapas was going to be in town for a national jazz festival and so I booked a venue to which to invite the rest of the city's musicians, music critics, and other interesting friends and colleagues to hear them play. The event had to be cancelled from all directions: the festival itself was postponed, leaving the virtuosos in Chiapas. The cantina is still closed because the law even now forbids it from remaining open after 10 p.m.- and what's the point, then, for a cantina that usually does most of its business after that hour? The Maître d' (Capitán, in Spanish) called me last night and mentioned that he's been unemployed for two weeks, with no support or subsidy, and yet his rent, gas, electricity, phone, must still be paid on time and the kids have gotta be fed, too. Repeat that story 22 million times, and you can get an idea of the real symptoms of Public Panic Flu in the age of NAFTA.

What has been set in motion is a regional economic crash that will of course hit hardest upon those without any savings at all (a majority, here). I saw something similar happen in Lower Manhattan in the wake of September 11, 2001: so many mom-and-pop restaurants and stores, and citizen tenants, made no income for various weeks as everything under Fourteenth Street had been shut down by writ. The renters could not pay rent, and landlords used their nonpayment as the trigger to evict them. They are now replaced with Starbucks and Walgreen's and other chain stories, and a more upper class population paying higher rents where the workers used to live. As in New York, everything that was wonderful about Mexico City may be about to go under, or at least enough of it to permanently damage its best people-centered qualities.

On the other hand, it may come true that chilangos, what residents of Mexico City call themselves, prove more feisty and organized than New Yorkers had been eight years ago, and an interesting push back against such destruction by the twin horsemen of market and panic may be the next chapter in this saga. I've got my pen and notepad out, waiting for a miracle to report...