Playing at Prevention: A Catastrophic Game by Peter Christian Hall

Woodcut of Krakatoa, a legendarily destructive volcano.

As promised, Peter Christian Hall (author of American Fever) has come aboard today to join in our most somber of subjects: The End of Times. Peter writes today about the concept of preventable and unpreventable disasters and why we, as mere humans, possess much audacity (and foolishness) to think we can control or prevent certain disasters. He argues that we love to apply controls after the fact, enjoying a postmortem (CSI New York et al style) and accosting those we perceive as responsible. No wonder there is so much crime related TV programing. We are a nation of wannabe lawyers.

Here, I'll let Peter do the talking. I highly recommend you check out his novel, American Fever. He's doing some very innovative things with it.

Playing at Prevention: A Catastrophic Game
by
Peter Christian Hall

There used to be times when things just went terribly wrong. The mountain towering over your city blew to pieces. A titanic storm drowned your village. Shaggy invaders swept the kids off to slavery. Survivors didn’t sit around suggesting that someone ought to have taken practical measures to prevent Vesuvius, a century monsoon, or the Huns. They gnashed their teeth, rent their garments, and looked for someone to condemn for bringing on catastrophe by annoying the gods.

Provocation—not prevention—was the issue.

Nowadays we worry about both. It seems as if everything that goes wrong must have been preventable. A disaster occurred through someone’s fault, if not their agency. Then we pursue a kind of grand social entertainment in which alleged perpetrators are denounced and defended along the political spectrum. This applies to all kinds of issues.

A lot of people still think the CIA cooked up HIV/AIDS. A killer retrovirus that’s spent decades killing people must have been created by…one of us. Since we can‘t even find a vaccine for it, this amounts to hubris on an Olympian scale.

A lack of respect for nature’s power similarly greets a case of cancer, which is popularly perceived as stemming from that old devil, bad behavior. But whose? Fault is thought to lie in something the victim did—perhaps a vice. Unless it was caused by a polluting entity. Or might it have been the inaction of a government regulator? Soon genetic testing will enable people to curse their ancestors for having bequeathed so many diseases. That’s medical progress.

When we don’t like something, we try to ensure that someone is punished, or at least sanctioned pointlessly. In the 1990s, irresponsible play with Super Soakers inspired some angry, armed targets to shoot children. Pro-gun legislators responded by trying to criminalize squirt guns.

Now, as we bumble our way through this century’s first influenza pandemic, blame is spreading faster than swine flu. You’d think people would agree that a global wave of unfamiliar influenza constitutes an unpreventable natural phenomenon. Nope. The pandemic’s early chapters have generated anger against giant pig farms, pharmaceutical companies, the Centers for Disease Control, nurses who don’t wish to get vaccinated, governments that advocate vaccination, the World Health Organization, and of course, the Illuminati.

Rather than fight the disease, enormous numbers of people are fighting the vaccine. It’s preventable.

Having written an illustrated, linked online novel about a far worse flu pandemic, I think our predilection for preventability reflects an irrational need to establish that we are in control.

In American Fever: A Tale of Romance & Pestilence, I present an H5N1 bird flu that has merged with traces of swine flu to turn American civilization and law on its head. Amid riots, blackouts, water shortages, near-famine, and the burial of loved ones in local parks, the authorities ultimately seize control. They raid dissidents, draft flu survivors, and effectively throttle free speech on the Internet.

Engulfed in a national Katrina that won’t stop raining troubles, Americans in my novel do what human beings tend to do during monumental catastrophes. Like the Europeans who sacked Jewish communities during the Black Death, they seek scapegoats, among immigrants.

American Fever’s blogger-narrator takes the high road. Fascinated by the nature of viruses—and stunned to discover how poorly science comprehends influenza—he writes: “Looking back, I marvel at our hubris in attempting to contain a planetary process that’s more like continental drift than the common cold. Try soothing El Nino with a shot and a few pills.”

Does he accept that the bird flu pandemic is unpreventable? Up to a point. Weaving together a lot of research, he points his own finger at man’s ecological recklessness, global chicken factories that help cook up so many flu strains, and the greed and fear that keep people from responding nobly to crisis. (He also takes swipes at our penchants for religious and ecological apocalypse on the pandemic’s 24th and 27th days, with a hand from Homer Simpson.)

In recounting the U.S. Army’s brutal suppression of an unauthorized demonstration in Times Square, my blogger notes a band of marchers who contend that the government plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, which removed a dominant presence from New York’s skyline more neatly than any volcano ever dislodged a totemic mountain:

"I’ve never been drawn into the mystery over 9/11, an unlikely event by anyone’s standard. I am as prepared to believe that a bunch of fanatics did it as that the US government could pull off such a neat and complex set of activities. I think people prefer to think that a president whom they might conceivably control (though they never did) was responsible. By personally sorting out the lines of a mega-plot, they feel that they are battling the forces behind 9/11. How do you fight the idea that some nondescript guys with box cutters can wreck your life?"

Behind everything in American Fever lurks the shadow of Hurricane Katrina, an event that helped inspire me to write the novel. Humanity has yet to think it can prevent a hurricane, but Katrina nevertheless illustrates a lot about our approach to problems. First, Americans shun expensive solutions to threats that may not materialize (unless they involve military preparedness), so proposals to construct Dutch-style storm-surge barriers in Lake Pontchartrain were dropped in the 1990s.

Far uglier is what came after Katrina’s destruction—everything but a commitment to prevent further flooding. The city isn’t much better prepared to handle a big storm now. According to General Robert Van Antwerp, chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it never will be. “We cannot keep levees from being overtopped and the city flooded,” he told The Guardian last month. When asked if New Orleans should be abandoned or relocated, he replied: “That is outside my brief.”

This was reported in a British newspaper, with no follow-up here. Americans still don’t seem to care about saving New Orleans. That could be achieved, but it would entail vast expense and effort. Where’s the fun in that? Ivor van Heerden, the renowned engineer who warned for years that cataclysm loomed, has been fired without stated cause from his job at Louisiana State University. The guy just wouldn’t shut up.

Prevention, it seems, is dull. If nothing bad happened, what would we talk about? Prevention may best be served up in lectures, election attack ads, rumbles among talking heads. Americans prefer a good catastrophe.