The Spreading of a Virus

The spreading of a virus from the remote, primitive, exotic locations of the Third World to the modern First World really is just a plane ride away. Distance is no longer our friend as we learned during the SARS scare and as we may learn with the threat of the Avian flu.

Mark Steyn writes about the threat of another virus (and it's not capitalism as some believe) that has infected the world, and our distance from its geographical origin has not gauranteed our protection:

In a globalised economy, the anti-glob mob and the eco-warriors want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. But globalisation cuts both ways, and the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World - just because someone got on a plane.

Indeed, when you look at it that way, the biggest globalisation success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Disney, but Islamism: the Saudis took what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practised by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Buffalo. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalised insurgency.

What's the bigger threat? A globalisation that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalisation that exports the fiercest and unhealthiest aspects of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map - that, in the 21st century, America can be a 19th-century republic untroubled by the world's pathogens because of its sheer distance from them.