Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 68

64

Popular Culture Review

Rarely, a contagion analogy may even offer a positive slant, as of civic boosterism
(“Catch Augusta - It’s Contagious!”) or of a recent Newsweek film review an
nouncing that “a kind of sweet virus of romantic nostalgia is abroad in the world”
(R. Davis 34, Kroll 75).
These are exceptions, though. A more typical use of the concept of idea-asvirus was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s notorious 1920 roundup of four
thousand resident aliens on suspicion of “a disease of evil thinking” (Brown 76).
In fact, nearly all uses of contagion as a metaphor in literature and popular culture
involve the mortal fear of transformation and degradation. This is no doubt attrib
utable to the long dark history that humans and microbes have shared. Useful
bacteria such as those in our gut, and the so-called “friendly viruses,” bacterioph
ages that were once thought to be the answer to all bacterial disease, do not get
much press, and the weight of history goes entirely the other way. It is perhaps
understandable, then, that metaphors involving contagion should be almost uni
formly negative and our culture filled with virus-on-the-loose paperback thrillers
with names like Omega and Reaper; apocalyptic films with similar themes (Out
break, The Hot Zone); non-fiction cautionary tales like Laurie Garrett’s best-sell
ing The Coming Plague; frisson-inducing adventures among the lab coats such as
Level 4 and Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the CDC; and
lurid, anthropomorphizing headlines like “Revenge of the Killer Microbes” (a Time
cover story in 1994) and “The Troubling Ghosts of Scourges Past: Deadly Infec
tious Diseases Are Coming Back, and the Germs are More Clever Than Ever”
(V.S. News & World Report, 1992).
One of the things that have made the microbe so attractive in the twentieth
century as a symbol for implacable evil and an emblem of fluid identity is the fact,
agreed upon just decades ago, that contagious agents are alive. While in their dis
regard for humans and their works viruses and bacteria can be called “natural” in
the sense of earthquakes and floods, they are vitally different in that they operate
both within and between us as fellow creatures. While serious illness of any kind
can be disorienting - everyone is familiar with the dissociative quality of even a
mild fever - the modern concept of contagion adds the distressing notion of being
not only less of yourself but more of (inhabited by) another: an alien entity whose
characteristics you face the prospect of sharing with fellow sufferers. More than
older theories invoking environment (miasma) or the gods (communal sin), germ
theory invites associations between disease and specific human otherness.
As a nation we have been frequently riven over what is now called identity
politics, and our fears of subversion have fueled bouts of credulousness over the
dangers of infiltration by Papists, anarchists. Communists, and the like. Just as
often, though, the perceived danger is alread 䁅