"everything is connected"

[Doug Millison]

"The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of
four nerve-jangling months. [...] What joined these
men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and
germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a
researcher at the University of Miami School of
Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as
anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks
from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and
before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform
cruise missiles into biological weapons. The chain of
deaths -- these three men and eight others like them
-- began last fall, back when emergency teams in
moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postal
workers were dying, when news agencies were on high
alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its
mail.  In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths
might not have been noticed, but these are not
ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors to the
F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because
they make other passengers nervous; medical journals
debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be
read by evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by
stories like these -- all these scientists dying
within months of one another, at the precise moment
when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The
stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a
curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the
specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the
Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are
the odds, after all?  What are the odds, indeed?  For
this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence --
unexpected connections that are both riveting and
rattling. Much religious faith is based on the idea
that almost nothing is coincidence; science is an
exercise in eliminating the taint of coincidence;
police work is often a feint and parry between those
trying to prove coincidence and those trying to prove
complicity."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/11COINCIDENCE.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

"Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than
the onset, the leading edge, of the deiscovery that
everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a
secondary illumination--not yet blindingly One, but at
least connected, and prhaps a route In for those like
Tchitcherine who are held at the edge. . . ."
(Gravity's Rainbow, 703)



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<www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com>

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