Updates to "Forever Spike"

Also, book discussion: "Poppies of Iraq."

A small addendum has been made to “Forever Spike!” Subscribers who have not already read the original email may wish to head to the online version instead.

For those who read yesterday’s version, the update is merely a small elaboration made to my own “Forever Spike Disaster!” theory. Namely, I added a consideration immediately before the conclusion for what would happen if boosters do, in fact, accelerate antigenic drift to facilitate antibody escape. I additionally extended the conclusion, and appended two new footnotes which are represented here by asterisk:

Or, will “relief” arrive in the form of the simultaneous application of antibody escape pressure by those entering the boosted part of the cycle, leading to more rapid antigenic drift? That would potentially take the tolerance disaster scenario off the table. But would it mean that what should have become just another seasonal “common cold” for the unvaccinated, is experienced as something more like an ubiquitous immune stressor, with a depleting effect on cellular immunity that could reduce overall immune competence (meanwhile, expect the rate of severe outcomes for “breakthrough” infections to dramatically increase when the virus does achieve “mRNA script escape”)?!*

Again - Who can say.

If the super-disaster of the last two centuries of medical interventions into the immune system has taught us one thing, it is that there is always a cost for replacing the patterns of nature with a lab-made simulacrum. If the farce of the Covid vaccine roll-out has taught us one more thing, it is that we, collectively and culturally, don’t even seem to care about that cost.** Perhaps this will teach us how.

Lastly, substack user dendroica, who inspired my tolerance disaster scenario, was kind enough to leave additional insightful thoughts in the comments.

Ruminations, Mid-September

Since Biden’s “prongs” speech, I have been surprised to find myself repeatedly thinking back to a particular book which initially made little impression on me, or so I thought.

This is Brigitte Findakly’s illustrated memoir, Poppies of Iraq, which recounts her upbringing in a bourgeois, Christian family amid Iraq’s slow descent from unstable party-based autocracy to the Hussein regime - as well as intermittent visits to extended family in Iraq during the latter era, after moving to France.

Copyright: Lewis Trondheim, Brigitte Findakly; translated by Helge Dascher.

The book replays her life in mixed order; including frequent flash-forwards to 2015, in the wake of the Paris terrorism attacks, which I find distract from the portrayal of her childhood.

Where the memoir excels, and I why I think it has returned to mind this week, is in its conveying of the endless malleability of “normal” in human life. Normal never goes away, in the totalitarian regime - except for those unpersons who are violently purged from society or shoved to its margins - through every removal of X activity from “permitted behaviors,” through every removal of X fact from “speakable realities,” normal persists, only in a progressively less animated, colorful form.

Copyright: Lewis Trondheim, Brigitte Findakly; translated by Helge Dascher.

This is no less the case for children - especially, children like her, those both born into the “new normal” (Findakly was born in the immediate wake of the fall of the monarchy), and culturally one step out of synch with everyone else, and thus less able to sense the unspoken (Findakly’s mother was French and Catholic; her father and extended family Iraqi and Orthodox Christian). The first of the following excerpts portrays her own childhood; the second the fully Orwellian conditions which prevailed during her last visit.

Copyright Lewis Trondheim, Brigitte Findakly; translated by Helge Dascher.

Copyright Lewis Trondheim, Brigitte Findakly; translated by Helge Dascher.

Hussein’s failed invasion of Kuwait took place shortly after Findakly’s last visit, disrupting the regime’s delicate stasis of party-allegiance caste alliances, and leading to three decades of revolts, violent state repression, civic dysfunction, and sectarian warfare.

On that incredibly happy note - thanks for subscribing to Unglossed!