I'm probably going to regret this, but I've got a bad cold, the news from Indonesia has been both confusing and worrying, and it's been a long day. So I'm going to respond to a post on another person's blog: Michael Fumento.com: Everybody chickened out of my avian flu challenge.
In the larger scheme of things, Mr. Fumento's opinion and mine are equally trivial. He's a lawyer and journalist; I'm a teacher and journalist. Neither of us is going to influence the flu pandemic (or lack thereof) in the slightest.
The people who died in Jakarta this week, I'm pretty sure, never heard of either of us. I do get an occasional visitor from Indonesia, but Antara has never quoted me and I doubt that Indonesian health authorities ever ask themselves: "What will Crawford say about this?"
So I wonder why Mr. Fumento makes such a fuss about the disagreement between himself and the little group of Flublogians who spend their time following H5N1.
Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 new blogs appear every day. Essentially none of them deal with avian flu. Compared to the attention given to heart disease, cancer, malaria, and other mass killers, Flublogia gets very little indeed.
Yet Mr. Fumento seems to think that somehow he will gain something of value if he points out that no one will take him up on his inane betting challenge.
Why Bother?
My thought, from his first arrival in Flublogia, has been: "Why does he bother?" If Mr. Fumento were really intent on changing minds, he ought to be posting on sites with seriously large audiences—not on this backwater blog.
His argument is that bird flu is just a pretext for extracting grant money from terrified taxpayers. The "alarmists" are just cynical charlatans pretending to be health experts. This is disturbing if true. After all, they're the only health experts we seem to have.
E. B. White, one of the 20th century's greatest American writers, once observed that as soon as you start writing, you reveal who you are. This is why most people sensibly write as little as possible, and also why I try to mind my manners here. (Not that it matters; after publishing 20 books and hundreds of articles over 40 years, my wretched character is there for all to see.)
So Mr. Fumento reveals himself in his blog, whose banner reads: "Factual, Powerful, Original, Iconoclastic." Great adjectives, but no writer can claim them for himself. They belong to his audience, to grant or withhold as they choose...like the word "artist."
What's the Motive?
I realize that I'm skirting close to an ad hominem argument here. But as a novelist I am always concerned with my characters' motivations. I can't figure out Mr. Fumento's. His appeal to scientific authority has consisted, since this time last year, of one scientific paper. That paper has not been followed up, and no one appears to have confirmed that thousands of persons have had low-grade H5N1, recovered, and gone on with their lives. Beyond this lonely journal article, he offers us nothing but appeal to himself.
Will we undergo a pandemic? Eventually, the scientists tell us, and the historians back them up. Will it be H5N1? Maybe, say the scientists, and they seem to have good reasons for saying so.
As a teacher of business English and a freelance writer, I am no authority at all, and it creeps me out when people sometimes email me to ask when I think the pandemic will hit. The best I can do is choose the experts who seem to know what they're talking about. In an age when we are lied to by champions, this is not always easy.
But I do find the H5N1 issue a fascinating phenomenon, especially in the online world, because it teaches me something about the virus, about the health systems of the world, and about the way we communicate over the web about things that concern us.
The Usefulness of Being Wrong
Twenty years of messing with computers, and forty years of teaching, have taught me that being wrong is far more instructive than being right. When you're right, it's thanks to your brains, talent, and good looks. When you're wrong, you have to study the mess you've made and draw some conclusions.
We are already finding ourselves wrong about the nature of the H5N1 virus, and therefore learning more about it. I hope we learn that it's not the menace it first seemed to be. But right or wrong, our attention to this virus will likely equip us better to deal with all kinds of other health problems as well.
Mr. Fumento seems determined not only that he be right about H5N1's harmlessness, but that he be seen to be right. I hope he is indeed right, and I will happily stand beside him, high-fiving him and spraying him with champagne, if only he will give me some god-damn evidence.
Being powerful, original, and iconoclastic is not evidence, in court or in science. And inviting bets on the arrival of H5N1 is no evidence at all, except of Mr. Fumento's lack of clarity on the concept of scientific debate.
A Little Webwriting Advice
I am prepared to listen to Mr. Fumento as an expert on American law, and on his experiences as an embedded journalist in Iraq. In that respect, I hope he'll listen to me as someone who knows something about writing for the web.
His blog is basically well designed. He would be more readable, however, if he narrowed his text column so that most lines averaged ten words per line. He also needs to break paragraphs into no more than six or seven lines, with twenty words maximum per sentence.
This is because online text is harder to read than text on paper. So if we respect our readers, we should make our posts as readable as we can. (Where a complex argument really needs longer sentences and paragraphs, we can always provide the post as a PDF to be printed out.)
He also needs to create a comments function. The best he can offer is a "Hate Mail" page—not exactly the way to go about exploring topics until we are closer to being right than being wrong. This is an interactive medium, after all.
I certainly welcome his posting comments here, and the responses of other visitors to his comments. All I expect from my commenters is a reasonable degree of civility and an absence of efforts to sell stuff via my blog.
But I still wonder why he bothers to make such a fuss about flu bloggers, when he might simply ignore us and put his time to better purposes.
