The depression hits me on a warm and humid Bangkok evening. I am just through with dinner in the city's crowded Sukhumvit business district, my head full of the war on Iraq, and I spot these people – people with masks on their faces.
A couple of weeks ago anybody with a cloth covering his or her face in this city would have been branded a jihadi, a possible Arab/Muslim/dark-skinned/dark-intentioned 'terrorist'. The city had been on alert well before the war on Iraq started to prevent 'Arab looking' people from doing bad things – for eg, looking Arab. Just around the time of the Anglo-American attack on Iraq, if an 'Arab' had been seen behind a mask in Bangkok the entire city would have been evacuated.
Apparently, not anymore. Respectable people wear masks now in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. In fact, they say wearing a mask is mandatory to save yourself from SARS – the flu-like virus that has much of South East Asia in deep panic. Tourists are cancelling their trips in droves, schools are closing down, economies plunging, governments in crisis and the Chinese – oh those 'super-contaminating Chinese' – are being spurned everywhere.
Suddenly, an irrational panic grips me: there is no escape. If the Apostles of Armageddon running the White House do not get you, some mysterious, malevolent microbes will. For a fleeting moment, a deep frozen moment, I lose hope. We are finished. They will get us one way or the other. This is what the new/old colonial world order is going to be all about – complete helplessness for us common citizens. Caught between SARS and their wars the only safe place is soon going to be – you guessed right – on planet Mars.