Alien Newsletter #23: Monkey Poxing (or Whatever the WTO Chooses to Call It) Around
In Which Our Alien Discusses His Encounter with the Latest Disease Traveling the Globe and Wonders to Himself: Is There a Doctor in the Cosmos?
Network Note: During the entire period that we have been translating and distributing the observations of our intrepid alien observer, we have never observed any real personal concern for the rampant spate of contagions, be they informational or biological, currently besieging the human race. However, it would appear that the monkeypox outbreak has somehow lodged itself quite thoroughly in the sights of not only exhausted public health officials worldwide, but our alien’s monthly report as well. And while it might not be as easily perturbed by the virus itself, we can say with absolute certainty that no race of sentient beings is immune from the distortions in perception and certainty that a viral outbreak can unleash.
First off, my apologies for pushing back this communication for the past few weeks. I suppose I really should have anticipated it more thoroughly, given my entry onto this planet during a time of increased viral invasion. But as bad luck would have it, for the past three weeks, I have been recovering from a painful illness. For the past few weeks, instead of perusing the Greatest Apes’ digital communications folkways and witnessing their public and private obsessions, I have been slowly building up the strength to finally address the Commission.
Interestingly enough, it was not their dreaded COVID-19. Since we do not breathe, we’re pretty well-protected from that invader. However, for the past three weeks, I have been flinging excrement at stationary objects, smoking loosies and collecting extraordinary amounts of digital currency from computer-bound GAs who wanted to turn me into ‘the future of the internet.’ In short, it appears as if I had caught monkeypox, and over the past few months, it’s possible that I may have spread it to other Greatest Apes in the process as well. A photo of myself during this difficult period is included below.
However, it should be noted that I am not the originator of this disease. The Greatest Apes have been aware of its antecedents for centuries, particularly smallpox, which assailed the world before finally being eradicated in the past century. However, its lesser variants persist. The monkeypox is one such relative, hailing from the arcadian climes of Southern Hemisphere Plate I (SHP1), where outbreaks are relatively common and flowing from animal to GA. However, at some point, no thanks to my own dalliances, it has spread past its usual confines into what is often called “the developed world.”
Of course, to a fractious race that could only hold together over a span of two lunar months in the face of the last viral invasion, divisions and innuendo have already followed in its wake. For instance, some discussion of the current outbreak centers on a war-games conference held last year by the Nuclear Threat Initiative which postulated the spread of a synthetic, vaccine-resistant monkeypox that emerged, surprisingly enough, on May 15th. This echoed a similar prophecy of another pandemic simulation involving a respiratory virus held approximately two months before COVID overtook the population. It has given a particularly suspicious portion of the global population enough material for any number of anti-elite narratives, which will surely confound an easy resolution to this.
Perhaps most unintentionally amusing in the midst of this outbreak is the overwhelming compulsion by the now thoroughly neuroticized GA health mandarins not to give offense to the monolithic construct often referred to as “the marginalized.” For instance, worldwide doctors have embraced a movement to rename the two “clades” of the virus from the “West African” and the “Congo Basin” clade to the far more memorable names “Clade 1” and “Clade 2.” (Yes, yes, I recognize to some of you on the Commission, even those terms are problematic. I’ll be getting to that shortly.) Not to be outdone, the World Health Organization has just announced they will rename Monkeypox itself (Which I support, incidentally. Perhaps the next time I contract it, I will be converted instead into an obscure scrawl plucked from one of the GA’s many dead languages, or whatever anodyne choice the GAs eventually make.) Perhaps more troublesome is the prevalence of the disease in the male portion of the GA species which prefers sexual intercourse with each other. This larger community that they belong to has struggled with societal stigma and oppression throughout many different planetary regions and historical eras. However, as I have explained to the Commission previously, they have made strong political advances in some social quadrants over the years. It is often celebrated in the “Pride” festivities taking place for the first time in many localities since the beginning of COVID. The emergence of monkeypox in a subset of the population already historically maligned by foes as a vector of disease has posed a difficult messaging dilemma. (Some on the committee may suggest that it could be as simple as people refraining from having sex, but this simply won’t ever be adhered to universally by this population — or any other GA population, for that matter — especially during this month.)
In the meantime, the greatest concern at the moment concerns endemicity. There are any number of animals that carry the disease in SHP1 that in turn give it to the GAs. But it only rarely appears elsewhere in the world. Should the disease enter into the animal population, the GA doctor caste fear it will continually haunt their populations, along with COVID, Zika, West Nile Virus and any other number of newer pestilences that eat away at their civilizations.
I cannot help but think of the Carthoogians, an ill-fated one-legged cyclops race which orbited the Clade 1 Red Dwarf (I ask that you refrain from alerting them about the recent actions of the GAs with monkeypox, as I doubt they will be pleased to hear it.) in the outer quadrant of the Northern celestial sphere. They were utterly skilled in focusing on one endeavor or project, all of them, until it was parsed down and understood to its smallest detail. You may remember how helpful they were for us in counting all the grains of sand on our planet once. However, it appeared that they were also horrid multitaskers. This was worrisome when all of a sudden, hostile microscopic invaders began to colonize their planet. It started with one, but just as they were examining it and handling it, then another came. And another. And another. Yet they were so focused on the first one that they could not see all the other dangers they faced. So the Carthoogians died of what the Mortician class of our society determined was 2435 separate microscopic invaders. One of the few exiled survivors of the race, however, could only say in response to this, “But at least it wasn’t 2436!”
Such is the plight of the specialist class of the GAs. Apparently their insights have been so shaped by COVID, it has become harder for them to effectively battle all the other threats currently besieging them, or even acknowledge their existence. However, unlike the Carthoogians, the GAs are not as myopically focused on one threat. Theirs is a far more thoroughly distributed, if not well-integrated, project of specialized and generalized perception. And it gives me some degree of hope, that no matter what the excesses of one class of GAs, another will rise to challenge and correct them. That’s at least how it works when things are going smoothly. Whether or not it can assist them now is uncertain, but it certainly keeps things interesting for me down here.
Dark Matters
NASA moves to fund a UAP study team. Request our moles in government to engineer a Bluebook-era disrupt-and-distract,
Missing a few stars here, apparently. Those cloaking devices we invested in are really paying for themselves.
If you are ever to extricate me from this planet, I suggest that you do it here.
