Amidst the flood of absurdities and violations known as ‘the pandemic’, much has been lost to memory. One BBC headline from March 1st 2021, for example, will read like new to many people: “Covid: Japan asks China to stop anal tests on its citizens.” The procedure, the article helpfully explains, involves inserting a cotton swab 3–5 cm, or 1.2–2 inches, for those wondering, into the anus before “gently” rotating it back out. The fact that, in the third paragraph, we are informed that China has “largely brought the virus under control” is of course purely incidental – only a literary scholar would read that as any kind of endorsement.
Mercifully, we might console ourselves,
excesses of this kind are unique to generational ‘emergencies’ and
far-flung dictatorships. From the comfort of the ‘free world’, as we
used to boast, there is little to worry about.
On closer
inspection, however, we find that such stories reflect something
essential about everyday life in the 21st Century West – that the entire
“Covid regime”, as the German journalist Aya Velázquez calls it, did
not spring from nowhere but merely made explicit what had been there all
along.
Airport security offers by far the best example. With its routine body scanners, bag searches and – soon – biometric border checks, it is only slightly less invasive than China’s cavity probe. After the taboo-breaking experiences of 2020–2022, is it really so hard to imagine anal swabbing as a future condition of flying? Would it even face much resistance?...<<<Read More>>>...
