Quarantine

Monrovia, Liberia. A US airman uses razor wire to delimit an Ebola treatment center. 

(AFP Photo/Pascal Guyot)

We've been watching The Blacklist. It's a very formulaic cop show with lots of secret spy stuff. One episode from last season had a guy die in a bank. An official somebody was on the scene in seconds and declared that he had died of a contagious disease and placed the bank under quarantine, which means the coppers drew guns on all the customers in the bank who were rushing for the door. On one hand it was very silly, on the other hand the show was only 40 odd minutes long, so it's understandable that the writers would want to compress a week-long procedure into a two minute long scene. I mean, we have a bunch more stuff we have to cram in here.

All this talk about Ebola reminds me of Typhoid Mary, which is where a lot of these public health issues first got some attention.

The basic premise of The Blacklist is that there are all kinds of people operating outside the law, and some of them are very organized and very powerful, and possibly insane. For instance, some of the tragedies we hear about, like where a ferry capsizes or an airliner crashes, are not accidents at all, but deliberate acts taken to kill one particular person (see "The Freelancer"). All the other people who die in the tragic accident are of no concern to the killers, just so much collateral damage.

The same idea was floated in The Madmen of Benghazi: the 747 was blown up over Lockerbie Scotland in order to kill one person. It wasn't done to call attention to themselves, that was a mere side effect. What's worse is the person they were trying to kill was not even on the plane. It's doubtful the "true" reason will ever be proven, and even if it is proven to some people's satisfaction, there will always be some who won't accept that version of the story.

There are a couple of reasons I like The Blacklist. One is that I like the idea that there vast criminal operations going on all over the world. I much prefer it to the Disneyfied version we keep telling ourselves. The other is the idea that someone not restrained by rules of evidence and those nasty constitutional amendments can obtain all the information they need to make a snap judgement. Oh, yeah, forget about the 'reasonable doubt' thing as well. All we need is one good whiff and boom! We know who the culprit is. Makes for a much more satisfying story.

Update: Posthip Scott sent me a link:

NBC's Medical Correspondent Is Quarantined for Ebola, Goes Out Anyway