Page 54 - Sonoma County Gazette May 2020

REVIEW by Diane McCurdy
Twenty years ago I read a book by Laurie Garrett
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The original seven episode series will soon pawn an additional segment entitled Tiger
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Tiger King
Nothing in the shelter-in-place days has captured the imagination of the American public like the Netflix documentary series, Tiger King. It is number one on that platform as of this writing.
The Coming Plague
entitled, The Coming Plague----and here we are. I’ve been re-reading it and it is more pertinent now than ever. It is difficult to determine the genre
of this 700+ page dissertation. Is it a mystery as doctors and scientists try to discover how and why a pathogen is causing a disease? Is it a thriller as the “disease cowboys” jump from lush tropical locales to crowded cities in their quest for sources of illness? Or, is it a horror novel presenting a possible drastically dystopian future?
To begin with, the author wrote most of the book over a ten-year period at Harvard while using it prodigious investigative capabilities. The amount of research it entails makes my head explode: minutia, maps, graphs, statistics.
It is mentioned in magazines and newspapers, discussed on TV and online.
It is a cultural phenomenon.
g and I. There is talk of a spin-off starring Kate McKinnon as Joe Exotic’s antagonist, Carole Baskin.
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Joe is the “star” of the show. To say that he is eccentric is a euphemism. Owner of a roadside attraction that houses over 200 cats, he married two other men in a flamboyant ceremony.
All three wore matching hot pink
It is all of these and more.
shirts. He actually ran for governor of Oklahoma and came out third. Instead of handing out flyers, touting his candidacy, he handed out condoms graced with his face.
Most profoundly, a disease is never considered in isolation. It is always given a human face against the more technical aspects which removes it from a textbook format and gives it a personality and makes for a fascinating read.
He fancies himself a country- western singer and markets albums and videos in which he may or may not be actually performing. There are hints of a less than idyllic childhood which has probably contributed to his unorthodox approach to life in general. With his bleached blonde mullet and multiple piercings, he is a delusional megalomaniac.
For example the AIDS epidemic is considered in the social, geopolitical background against which it thrived. When it was thought to be an affliction relegated to gay men and drug addicts, it was not addressed seriously enough because it violated the powerful forces of Christian family values, morality and sex and drug use. Only when it spilled over into the heterosexual community was it recognized fully as a threat. The longest chapter deals with that epidemic and how it was eventually mitigated.
The subtitle of the series is Murder, Mayhem and Madness.
The plot, if there is one, centers around Joe’s
A much shorter section deals Toxic Shock Syndrome that was perpetrated by use of a certain type of tampon. Another part describes Legionnaires Disease and how a modern convenience like an air conditioner could take down hundreds because a biofilm scum that it harbored contained a nasty bacterium. Of course, the unusual sicknesses that flare occasionally are also covered: Lassa, Ebola, Marburg and the hemorrhagic fevers.
antipathy toward Carole Baskin, an animal activist in Florida. She is always trying to shut Joe down
as she feels he is abusing the very animals he pretends to adore. Now one might think that Carole is the voice of sanity in this carnival since all of Joe’s employees and those associated with them
The author also touches on the socioeconomic factors of poverty, poor housing and psychological despair that affect health. She never lectures. She just presents the facts and the facts are frightening. Especially disconcerting is a section on the “revenge of the germs”. Our big cities are metropolitan microbe magnets. As we have evolved so have the pathogens.
are marginal inhabitants of the fringes of society, runaways, addicts, those traumatized or molested.
The subtitle of the book is Newly Emerging Diseases in a
World Out of Balance. We have become environmentally arrogant, destroying habitats while over-using anti-biotics. Our population continues
to explode. Bodies crave space and sustenance. There is a whole panoply of microbiological agents lurking in ancient symbiotic relationships in caves, jungles, rain forests and wet markets and when those relationships are disturbed the infectious agents march forth looking for a new vector. A virus, similar to COVID-19, that lives in some unmapped section of equatorial Africa, with modern transportation can be dispersed to a San Francisco restaurant or a New York high rise in any 24 hour period.
The last lines of the book warns that as the Earth becomes more crowded, the advantage moves to the microbe’s court. “They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn to live in a rational global village that affords microbes few opportunities. It is either that or we brace ourselves for the coming plague.” And-----here we are.
after having been abused by her first husband, Carole is picked up by her soon to be second husband who is twice her age and a millionaire. But, that husband seems to have disappeared. Joe speculates that Carole killed him put his body in a meat grinder and fed the remains to her own tigers. Who knows?
But Carole, herself, has a checkered past. While weeping profusely and walking down a main street
Another character is Doc Antle who also runs a private zoo and has a menage of pretty young girls to tend to his animals. He comes across as arrogant as Joe only not nearly as colorful. Every single person connected with this series is weird. The narrator seems a bit off as well. Eric Goode, one of the main producers who spent much of his childhood in Sonoma where his mother still lives, now lives in southern California where he collects turtles.
Tiger King is high Shakespearean drama acted out by some very low-life characters. If it does nothing else the series highlights the plight of these majestic beasts who languish in small, dirty cages while unscrupulous people profit from their misery. There are more captive tigers in the U. S. than there are in the wild. There is legislation pending to relieve them of their torment.
That old adage about the inmates running the asylum is applicable here. I had the distinct feeling people should be in the cages - not animals. In truth, Joe is in a cage of sorts. He is in prison. He has asked Trump for a pardon.
54 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 5/20