Speaking of historical amnesia, Buzzflash last week published an excellent editorial on its offshoot, a kind of amnesia on the media’s part:

For those Americans who don’t watch FOX News, CNN or MSNBC, it is despairingly unbelievable that the Bush Cartel has gotten away Scott-free [sic] with its failure to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. It was the most frequent cudgel that they used to try and get the U.N. Security Council to authorize an invasion of that country. We heard Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, Perle and the crew rail on and on about how time was running out before Iraq would attack America. We might all be incinerated within weeks by Saddam’s nuclear capability — and wantonly killed in subways by his chemical and biological weaponry.

There’s an awful lot of rejoicing about the fall of Baghdad, with pictures of grateful Iraqis kissing U.S. marines, and P.O.W.s coming home — but no one seems to be asking the WMD question.

…the media in America has little, if any historical memory, beyond the latest news cycle. The Republicans… are masters at creating “unfolding factoids” that become news events with ongoing stages. This means the media covers each stage almost separately. News cycles turn over in a matter of minutes and hours… This process eliminates the likelihood that the Bush Cartel will be held accountable for the fact that a new stage of the “unfolding factoid” completely contradicts a former Bush Cartel statement. The press is too busy reporting about the new crumbs tossed to them as the story moves onto another “stage.”

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Abraham Verghese, a writer whom I generally enjoy reading, has a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine where he essentially advocates the use of quarantine to contain SARS or we — meaning the U.S. — would totally regret it. (He points out that Singapore, with its authoritarian government, was able to reduce the spread of SARS more effectively than Hong Kong, which was more democratic.)

So he writes that

‘quarantine’ is a loaded word with metaphorical implications that many of us in America have fortunately forgotten…. Fear of catching disease from immigrants (as well as fears of losing scarce jobs to them) caused citizens to rally against immigrants and immigration. Indeed, it is not far-fetched to think of race-based immigration bans as the ultimate form of quarantine.

And towards the end:

But the virus that causes SARS has no political agenda, no jingoist banner to wave, and it has not read John Stuart Mill’s ”On Liberty.” The virus is democratic to its core, affecting rich and poor, doctor and patient, crossing borders with impunity and thus freezing commerce, threatening a global recession.

But this is surely true of most viruses when ripped from their social contexts, except for certain diseases for which certain ethnicities show a genetic propensity.

Verghese’s invocation of history is also somewhat selective; as scholars have shown, Chinatowns in the U.S. (and in Hawaii) were the targets of harsh, burn-the-village-in-order-to-save-it disease eradication programs. The point I’m trying to make here is that the people most affected by SARS — from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and now the Philippines — are of Asian origin. Quarantining people before entering the U.S. proper is one thing — and doubtless panicky people in Chinatown, who are avoiding certain restaurants and so on, would even agree — but Verghese’s hint of more drastic measures, with explicit comparisons to civil liberties just after 9/11 (hey, we’re still living it!), is another. The coronavirus may have “no political agenda, no jingoist banner to wave,” but people do. The last thing one wants to see (especially with the New York Times ratcheting up the buzz every other day against their new Mata Hari, Kristina Leung) is a resurgence of Yellow Peril on these shores.

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Via Fark: suddenly I feel vindicated.

My friends and colleagues know about my long, penny-pinching quest for good cheap beer: Schaefer, Stroh’s, Schlitz, Old Milwaukee, Steelhead Reserve, Rolling Rock (ok, that’s a little classier), Bud, Miller, Michelob — whatever the Safeway down the street stocks, I’ve tried it.

And nothing — okay, no other cheap beer — can compare to that good ol’ red, white and blue can of PBR. (My good friend Jeff’s reaction to seeing me drink it in a bottle: “What are you, some kind of communist?”)

(Personally, though, Full Sail Golden Ale is my beverage of choice, followed by Anchor Steam, and maybe Riptide Red Ale from the Beach Chalet (also down the street), and then maybe Sierra Nevada…)

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