Outbreak

I'm at the Narita airport, near Tokyo.  Asian people sure do love their facemasks.  I first noticed them at LAX.  One, then two, and by the time my plane took off I'd spotted eleven people with face masks on--all of them asian, except for one wiry-haired white guy wearing a full on respirator.  I wanted to go strike up a conversation with a naive, face-masked little Japanese girl and start acting all sketchy, coughing and sneezing and whatnot.  It would've made me laugh, but she might remember me, and report me to the H1N1 gestapo, so I decided against it. 

We landed in Tokyo and the first thing we had to do was fill out these forms about whether or not we had flu symptoms.  The plane pulled up to the terminal, and a few minutes later the doors open and in comes an eight-person squad of "quarantine offiicials" covered head to toe in full CDC/Dustin Hoffman/fear-the-african-monkey regalia.  Facemasks, goggles, the whole deal.  Mostly, they just collected the questionaires and looked people up and down, but it definitely stimulated my prejudices against freakish, germophobic, control-obsessed societies.  They had a thermographic camera to record peoples temperatures.  Seeing stuff like this really drives home the plausibility of apocalyptic scenarios like the one in Children of Men, and I don't mean apocalyptic in the nature of the outbreak itself (or whatever natural disaster) but moreso in the human (over)reaction.  Swine flu sounds like a mighty fine pretext for martial law, wouldn't you agree?