It has not seldom happened to me that I have realized what a phrase, a book or a mere situation that seemed strange to me meant, time later, when the experience opened my eyes and I was able to see clearly what was happening. that an artist or reality itself wanted to express to me. I have lived the most recent example of this retrospective understanding with the film Contagionde Soderbergh, and I think this revelation is common to many people because the film has become a success of the confinement, after nine years of its release. As it is a strictly scientific film, inspired by the influenza A epidemic and with the exquisite advice of epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, I try to imagine my reaction as a spectator if I had seen it in a room a decade ago. To begin with, I would have placed it in the dystopian genre, so recurrent in recent times, when it is not, and some images, which seem so abstractly precise, would have been overlooked. The film, then, was not very successful, perhaps because of what I now fall into: we placed it in a genre, that of apocalyptic fiction, which prevented us from recognizing its truth. In the final moments of the story, the director summarizes the virus's journey with images: a deforested forest, a bat looking for other trees, flying over a pig farm in Hong Kong; the infected pig in the market, and from there, to the restaurant where an American woman enjoys oriental cuisine. The young woman returns to the United States suffering from a constipation that makes her feel worse every time. Along the way, he maintains a relationship with a former lover, and shares space and surfaces - credit card, mobile, support bar on the bus - with strangers. He leaves the trail of his evil. It travels, as the bat travels, leaving the imprint of the zoonotic virus.
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The movie of our lives- Denialists of the catastrophe
When the scientific disseminator David Quammen explained to us from these pages, the process of an announced pandemic caused us the same stupor as Contagion. It reproduced, in other words, the old phrase of Larry Brilliant: "It is not if this is going to happen, but when this is going to happen." The question that citizens can rightfully ask ourselves now is what has caused so much misinformation. Some people invent conspiracy theories, but I think the reasons are more pedestrian: the stubborn lack of high eyes, so common in the political class; not paying attention to a threat that does not have a fixed date and, of course, continuing with that destructive inertia that pushes to invest in defense for war and not in defense for the health and habitability of the planet.
Even now that coronaviruses have entered our lives through the front door, some people mock the connection that is established between a pandemic and human intervention in the environment. We are corny to those who think that the relationship of the human being with the environment must change, or fanatics of some kind of sect who attribute to nature a desire for revenge. They even affirm, in their desire to ridicule the conscience of others, that we personalize nature, as if it responded to a thought and could express resentment. Nothing is further from any rational mind. Ecologists or environmentalists are not those idiots that Ronald Reagan defined as tree huggers. This nihilistic mockery of those who express the need for a change to prevent greater evils obeys a trumpeting, Bolsonarian tone .
For the rest, there are more amateur virologists in Spain than we could think. Without having studied, they know, for sure, that greedy policies that privatized, depleted the public and expelled young scientists from our country did not intervene in the lack of health care. Irrational discourse triumphs, but, paradoxically, we are singled out as enemies of freedom who defend the need for change. The world upside down.
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