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opinionAlso in this section: Last night, Patty Hearst came to mind by Eric Jackson This is not a column about indoctrination, the discrepancies between justice for the rich and for the poor, the fate of the late Symbionese Liberation Army or the justice or injustice of what happened to its erstwhile Comrade Tania --- not that those are unworthy topics in their own right. But maybe what I say here has a little bit to do with violence and terrorism between hostile species. What was it that Patricia Hearst said in that communique from the underground way back when? Oh, yes --- "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the people," so the slogan went. Panama City is experiencing a mosquito population explosion at the moment. There are blood stains on my sheets, left when I managed to make the meals that members of the Aedes aegypti horde took at my expense their last. But those were the unlucky ones. For every little winged Nazi I managed to exterminate, several others made successful strafing runs in or about my ears. Judging from the little bumps on my arms, the great majority of the fascist swarm fed well and flew off to commit further atrocities. (Hmmm --- does that almost symmetrical bite pattern on my right shoulder imply precise experimentation? Was that, much more than a fascistic compulsion about order and efficiency, some Aedes analogue of Dr. Mengele using me to test his crackpot theories?) Could I have resolutely smashed the fascist insect aggressors by taking a Stalinist hard line against them? Yes and no. I live without air conditioning, so a Stalingrad-style freeze out was out of the question. And though The People's Revolutionary Insect Spray may well be far more powerful than the little brownshirts, long before I read Rachel Carson's pioneering work of environmental journalism I had decided that I'd rather not live in a toxic petrochemical fog. The Green militant response was only slightly preferable. Waking up at about 3 a.m. with the long-legged goose-stepping little biters swarming to my nocturnal breath as this species is wont to do, I lit a piece of Chinese punk. No, I didn't incinerate some spiky headed kid from Shanghai who wears a safety pin in his nose. I broke off a piece of one of those green coils made of plant material, set it smoldering in a holder that I placed near the fan and thus created a smokescreen that made flying conditions difficult for the reactionary vermin of the Culicini tribe. Die, fascist insects! And don't think you'll get any mercy from me by way of some Wagnerian song and dance about how you were only following orders. And in fact, the little Luftwaffe that blitzed me in the night did take some casualties in my smokescreen. Come the light of day, I noticed several non-squished but very much dead mosquitoes around my sleeping space. But by then my sinuses felt slightly raw, too. (I confess! Their torture made me talk. But it was only muttered curses in the night, I swear! I never told them how long I've been working for the Allies, or any of that. I'd never betray The Broad Masses of Workers, Drones and Revolutionary Intellectuals!) But reality intrudes. Neither ultra-leftist slogans nor extermination campaigns are all that effective against the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that are swarming across our city. In the first instance, the only language that fascist insects understand is irrelevant, because we don't want them to understand us, but rather to die for their miserable cause. Moreover, by now it's well known that with each successive generation poisonous gases become less effective against insect swarms of any sort. The way that you eliminate these pests, which spread the miserable flu-like dengue fever --- and if the right reservoir appears on the scene can also cause an epidemic of the deadly yellow fever --- is to make sure that they are never born in the first place. They breed not in swamps, but in tiny, clear bodies of water. Like the water that accumulates in beer cans, styrofoam cups or old tires discarded by the side of the road. The way to beat back the insect stormtroopers is not through militant sloganeering, but by rigid militaristic discipline. As in policing your surroundings, removing the refuse, and refraining from the creation of new mosquito breeding grounds. As in the police and health inspectors issuing tickets to slobs, and corregidores sentencing litterers to fates worse than KP. Be advised: this means you. And me, and everyone else. It's time to show resolution, solidarity, and above all, just a little bit of culture, in the face of the nightly blitzkrieg.
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