Postcard from the Land of The Plague

Written by David Dykes
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 22:55

Foreign Correspondent David Dykes reports from Ground Zero of the Swine Flu hysteria.

Driving to the Office of Immigration this morning I passed a fellow alone in his car with a blue surgical mask over his face.  Even in solitude he felt compelled to wear it.  The mask is the escutcheon of the times here in Mexico, the avatar of anxiety.

Sitting in the Immigration Office I watched the news, where there was only one story, a series of numbers representing where the swine flu had hit around the country and around the world.  San Luis Potosi, just under a couple hundred miles to the north, is second to Mexico City in infections, and the cameras showed sparsely populated streets and the ubiquitous blue mask.  Street vendors and businessmen wearing it, the pharmacies beginning to sell out of them, all in spite of the fact that I have yet to hear a credible source say that the flu can be airborne (short of someone sneezing or hocking a loogie in your face).

Here in San Miguel there is a strange tension, a balance that people are trying to strike between precaution and hysteria, a balancing act familiar to New Orleanians during Hurricane Season.  For many of us there is a sort of cynicism about disaster, that either it is inevitable and precaution futile, or a belief that while horrible stuff happens, it doesn’t happen here, to people like me, wherever here happens to be or whoever me is.  For some, having weathered disasters, from hurricanes to earthquakes to germs to guns to steel, breaks down that sentiment, for others it reinforces it— “What are the odds of my going through another disaster?”

The gambler’s folly is that the dice having come up snake-eyes once somehow affects the probability of the next throw, and the larger folly is that somehow I am the one throwing the dice.  So I don’t want to be dismissive of the real danger of contagion, but also want to keep my ears open to reports from the CDC that once one realizes it’s the swine flu, treatment almost certainly will mitigate the effects, that in terms of percentage of the population infected it is more dangerous to walk ten blocks in New Orleans without body armor than ten blocks in Mexico City without a mask (pollution notwithstanding).

My wait at La Migra was short, since the elderly gringo retirees who are generally packed into the waiting room had largely chosen to stay home today, and I got my resident alien documents stamped for another year and went back to school.  When I got there, the director (who happens to be one of my oldest and closest friends) came into my class to distribute masks, regulation sea-foam/hospital blue.  There was a lecture on hygiene, a demonstration of how to put them on, and a tiny bit of levity for leavening.

I was handed a mask, which I put in my pocket until informed that for me it was not optional.  I made my case against masks (hysterical, ineffective, uncomfortable, largely symbolic) and she made the case for them (peace of mind, parental pressure, liability, because I say so) and I conceded the point.

By the end of the school day the stress level among the kids had reached the huddling together phase, school had been cancelled nationwide for the next 9 days, and a rumor had begun to circulate that unless you were out of the country in the next 48 hours, there was a strong chance that even citizens wouldn’t be allowed to enter the US of A.  Then the news came on the Internet that an earthquake (though a mere 5.8 or so) had hit Mexico City and the peso had dropped 5% in the last 5 hours.

The director and I stood out on the sidewalk talking for a good while after the last of our kids had gone home.  A troupe of rowdy kids on bicycles swooped by, happy and loud at the prospect of a week of freedom, each with a surgical mask affixed over their mouths.  Shortly after, the police rolled by in their white sirened pickup truck on their customary patrol through the neighborhood, and we waved and smiled and I feel certain that the officer smiled, too, judging by the crinkling of his eyes above the blue escutcheon.