Swine Flu Versus Dengue fever

Even though as every good reader of discreetly sensationalist press, inevitable in a sensationalist reality (and even more so because even in its most noble use money never ceases to speak) I find myself always drawn to the headlines of the drug trafficking when leafing through the news, I don’t plan to make it my theme for a while yet. These days I am finding myself more all the time in the marvels of sociolinguistics, which like the emersion in any science, seemingly gives a new spin on the world. It’s through language that we comprehend our world, and what better example than a news paper, the daily source of current knowledge, concrete and objective about our reality. But fortunately the current 90-person death toll of the ongoing problem of influenza was mentioned yesterday in the Informador, and I remembered one particular Saturday about eight months ago; a Saturday when all the plazas of Guadalajara were abandoned , when no one was on the streets or in cafés, when no one was in the movie theatres; the same Saturday that the Informador reported more than a thousand cases, a hundred and fifty dead only a week after the problem had arrived from Mexico City, and a guide to which of the few public places still open would stay open during the epidemic. Three weeks went by with no class, no work, no movies, even without the tortas ahogadas on the corner, followed by months of mouth covers in which no one dared cough on any public bus, and during which there was no mention whatsoever of dengue fever. Everyone blamed the government of Jalisco once they began to realize that not they nor anyone they knew had come down with or knew anyone with the swine flu; for some reason the government had provoked or at least scandalized a bout of flu not much worse than normal, and by August when we were definitely before an epidemic, the solution wasn’t mouth covers but rather bug repellent. Suddenly the entire city was coming down with dengue. There was no one without at least someone sick at home, without neighbors, friends, uncles, children, a boss, school mates, that didn’t have it. And the media? Just fine, thanks. Nothing was suspended, just a couple feeble intents to fumigate, and the paper without more than a small, regular peep of ordinary coverage. So it’s not like the public was lied to. There aren’t lies per se in politics or in the media, but rather there is careful management of information something like the image of the vase or the profiles, a dynamic of opposites, of suggestions to provoke a certain reaction in the public, of excluding what isn’t opportune and exploiting what is, and for this maybe the first lesson to read a paper should be to ignore the order in which it comes; to read everything equally, read facts and always look for blank spaces, as full of information as they may seem to be.