Juan Villoro
Each event derives from circumstances that are not always logical. On August 9, 1945, the Bockscar bomber took off from its base in the Mariana Islands to Kokura, on the island of Kyushu, where the Nippon Steel factory, decisive for the Japanese military industry, was located. The mission commander was Major Charles Sweeney. He had orders to locate the target with enough precision to destroy it with the atomic bomb he carried on board.
Upon sighting Kyushu, the smoke from the factory mingled with a dense cloud. Sweeney could make out the baseball stadium, a row of trucks, and a foundry segment, but he lacked visibility to hit the target. He made calculations on a yellow pad: he had fuel left to go around the island twelve times. On the tenth round, he pondered three alternatives: using radar to hit an approximate target, going to another destination, or dumping his deadly cargo at sea.
On the eleventh round, he spoke to his superiors on the radio. The sky was clearing, but the fuel was diminishing. Did they authorize him to take one last lap?
“There are no clouds in Nagasaki,” they told him. At 11:02 a.m. that day, about 75,000 people died in that city. If the weather conditions had been different, the bomb would have fallen at the Nippon Steel factory.
The order that Sweeney received when he could still make one last turn was a crime against humanity. The nonsense increases, knowing that it depended on the amount of fuel in his plane and where he could still get to. Historical events stem from an intricate chain of coincidences and rash decisions.
The coronavirus crisis has confirmed the surprising fragility of an interconnected planet. Pollution generated by Chinese industry has diminished to the benefit of the atmosphere, and cruise ships have become floating hospitals that no one wants to receive. Yet, the virus passed from one species to another in a mysterious way and followed Marco Polo’s route: from China to Italy.
Reactions to the pandemic not only depend on the dictates of the WHO, but also on the resources available to each country, the pressure exerted by the media and government strategies (some seek to reassure with the rhetoric of “nothing happens” and others propose cancellations that range from the responsible to the paranoid.)
Unlike fires and earthquakes, where volunteers can provide an answer, epidemics require doing nothing. The need to be on the sidelines increases the feeling of helplessness and prevents the relief that comes from trying to help.
The uncertainty of the phenomenon allows discretionary measures to be taken. Many institutions and authorities have contracted a social disease: the pathology of the image. They do not act by scientific criteria but by the way they will be perceived.
The coronavirus coincides with the pre-campaigns for the United States Presidency, and the adoption of measures has become politicized. A public health issue is already an electoral trophy. The handling of the crisis will influence, if not decide, the November votes.
I’ve been teaching at Stanford University for five months. The campus has become an abandoned setting where we teachers teach by computer, and in New York, the congress on the coronavirus was suspended … because of the coronavirus! Meanwhile, political parties held mass meetings without thinking about health risks.
In the United States, the coronavirus will have a public image and financial consequences beyond any public health consideration. Higher mortality diseases, which affect the poor especially, do not receive the same type of care. The thousands of homeless people living in the open in California have been named “risk populations” (instead of fighting the inhuman condition in which they live, they are stigmatized as possible carriers of the virus).
Does the fight against the coronavirus follow scientific criteria, or does it seek political profitability? Is it due to a medical opinion or factors as sudden as the amount of fuel in a plane and where it can go?
The answer, as the poet said, is blowing in the wind.
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind Bob Dylan
This column was first published in Spanish on March 13, 2020, in Reforma.