Alarums and Diversions

False Alarm is on my reserved reading list, having browsed it past the point of decency from a library display. It should be on the reading list of anyone with a brain.

Among my several identities I'm a skeptic, a contrarian, and an American of immediate British ancestry. The latter makes me very much inclined to adopt the stiff upper lip approach to real calamity. The former two dispose me to ask for evidence of calamity, and to decline to panic when a well-oiled hysteria machine wants me to panic.

That's the bulk of my response to the bird flu calamity. Let me sum up the rest in the impious hope that Dubya has indeed forgotten the lesson of Gerald Ford and the swine flu.

Speaking of pious hopes... Does this not seem like a defining moment for the "people of faith?" It seems to me that such people should consider bird flu a test of their devotion. They should forswear flu shots, secure in the belief that pandemics are a scourge sent to rid the world of the ungodly hosts, and they will be protected by the sword and buckler of the Almighty.

I'll take the shot, thanks... And then we shall see.