Friday, September 02, 2005
The Pope’s got it and so do you
More unusual South African newspaper headlines: “Penis Flytrap Chomps Would-Be Rapists!” Presumably, this is referring to some new invention, hearkening back to countless myths of the vagina dentata, serving as a miniature, crotch-mounted beartrap to confound rapists. It seems to me that this would only incite a violent criminal to yet greater acts of violence, but I can appreciate the need to find something, anything, to allay fears in a country where rape is absolutely omnipresent. And because such a frightening percentage of the population here is infected with HIV, rape is, in effect, a prolonged death sentence. That’s assuming that the person doesn’t already have HIV, of course; in several of the countries bordering South Africa, the life expectancy is capped at 30 as entire generations are being born into the disease. That song, “Everybody Has AIDS” from Team America: World Police? In the U.S.: hilarious Broadway parody. Here: sad reality. On the bus yesterday, a college-aged kid asked me what the major pandemics in the U.S. were, which seemed like a very weird question, because we don’t have any. I mean, yes, HIV/AIDS is a huge problem in the U.S., and West Nile has been getting a good deal of press lately, but there’s nothing producing hundreds of orphans a day, like the kinds of diseases he was referring to. (And technically, pandemic refers to a global disease crisis, of which HIV is the only one currently in force, but I realize that “pandemic” has become such a buzzword of late it is now used in place of the more accurate “epidemic” for a severe outbreak.)
More unusual South African newspaper headlines: “Penis Flytrap Chomps Would-Be Rapists!” Presumably, this is referring to some new invention, hearkening back to countless myths of the vagina dentata, serving as a miniature, crotch-mounted beartrap to confound rapists. It seems to me that this would only incite a violent criminal to yet greater acts of violence, but I can appreciate the need to find something, anything, to allay fears in a country where rape is absolutely omnipresent. And because such a frightening percentage of the population here is infected with HIV, rape is, in effect, a prolonged death sentence. That’s assuming that the person doesn’t already have HIV, of course; in several of the countries bordering South Africa, the life expectancy is capped at 30 as entire generations are being born into the disease. That song, “Everybody Has AIDS” from Team America: World Police? In the U.S.: hilarious Broadway parody. Here: sad reality. On the bus yesterday, a college-aged kid asked me what the major pandemics in the U.S. were, which seemed like a very weird question, because we don’t have any. I mean, yes, HIV/AIDS is a huge problem in the U.S., and West Nile has been getting a good deal of press lately, but there’s nothing producing hundreds of orphans a day, like the kinds of diseases he was referring to. (And technically, pandemic refers to a global disease crisis, of which HIV is the only one currently in force, but I realize that “pandemic” has become such a buzzword of late it is now used in place of the more accurate “epidemic” for a severe outbreak.)
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