Curie×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Marie Curie sits down with James Baldwin for TITANS. The subject — At least 100 dead in Ebola outbreak in DR Congo, official says.
2. 00:12
   Marie Curieshare moment

   One hundred dead. They say at least one hundred. That number will climb, of course.
3. 00:17
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Of course it will. I'm struck by the phrase 'at least.' As if they're preparing us. As if we should be grateful it's only a hundred so far.
4. 00:25
   Marie Curieshare moment

   The World Health Organization has called it an international emergency. We are to understand this means something. That designation.
5. 00:34
   James Baldwinshare moment

   It means they're afraid it'll reach somewhere that matters to them. The Congo has been bleeding for a long time, Marie. This is just a different kind of blood.
6. 00:43
   Marie Curieshare moment

   I do not deal in metaphor when we are speaking of contagion. This is hemorrhagic fever. The virus attacks the vascular system. The blood is quite literal.
7. 00:53
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I'm not being poetic. I mean the country has been bled by Belgium, by rubber companies, by everyone who wanted what was in the ground. You worked with radium. You know something about what people will do for what's in the ground.
8. 01:05
   Marie Curieshare moment

   I worked with radium in a laboratory. Under controlled conditions. Though I grant you the controls were insufficient—I did not know then what I learned later about exposure.
9. 01:16
   James Baldwinshare moment

   And they didn't tell you when they did know. That's always the sequence, isn't it? First we don't know. Then we know but don't tell. Then we call it an emergency when it threatens to spread beyond the people we were willing to sacrifice.
10. 01:29
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You are suggesting this outbreak was foreseeable.
11. 01:31
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I'm saying that when you destroy a country's infrastructure, when you leave people without hospitals, without clean water, without the basic conditions for health—yes. Yes, Mr. Baldwin is suggesting that epidemics follow empire like smoke follows fire.
12. 01:47
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Ebola is a zoonotic virus. It passes from animals to humans, likely from bats. The mechanism is biological, not political.
13. 01:55
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And who is living close enough to bats to get infected? Who doesn't have the option to live somewhere else? The mechanism might be biological. The vulnerability is absolutely political.
14. 02:07
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I am trying to keep us precise. The virus has a structure. It has an incubation period of two to twenty-one days. It spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids. These are facts.
15. 02:19
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Here's another fact. They're calling it an international emergency now. Not when it was twenty dead. Not when it was fifty. When it became clear it might travel. That's a fact too.
16. 02:30
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You want me to be angry about the delay. I am angry about the delay. But anger does not contain the virus. Isolation protocols contain the virus. Contact tracing. Supportive care for the afflicted.
17. 02:43
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Who's going to do that contact tracing, Marie? In a country where people have every reason not to trust authorities? Where hospitals might be a day's walk away, if they exist at all?
18. 02:54
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Then those are the problems to solve. You build the infrastructure. You train local health workers. You do not—
19. 03:01
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You build the infrastructure. After you spent a century extracting everything valuable and leaving nothing behind. You'll forgive me if I find the verb tense interesting.
20. 03:11
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I did not extract anything from the Congo.
21. 03:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. You extracted radium from pitchblende, in Europe, for science. But you know what it costs to work with dangerous material. You paid that cost in your own body.
22. 03:23
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I chose that work.
23. 03:24
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. That's the difference.
24. 03:26
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You are telling me that one hundred people—more than one hundred now, certainly—are dying because of choices made by others. By colonial powers. By corporations. By history.
25. 03:36
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I'm telling you they're dying of Ebola. And also of that. Both things are true.
26. 03:41
    Marie Curieshare moment

    This is not a useful framework for a scientist. I cannot work with 'both things are true.' I need the mechanism. I need what can be measured and altered.
27. 03:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Then measure this. How many people have died of Ebola in Brussels? In Paris? How many outbreaks start in countries with intact public health systems?
28. 04:00
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The virus does not consult a map.
29. 04:02
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. But it reads a history. It finds the weak places. And we made those places weak.
30. 04:07
    Marie Curieshare moment

    So what is your solution? We cannot undo the past century.
31. 04:11
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We can stop pretending it's not connected. We can stop calling it an emergency only when white bodies are threatened. We can tell the truth about what makes people vulnerable.
32. 04:21
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And then?
33. 04:22
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And then maybe we actually build the hospitals. Maybe we do it because we understand that their bodies and our bodies are not different categories of problem.
34. 04:31
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The World Health Organization has declared an international emergency. Perhaps that is the beginning of such understanding.
35. 04:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Perhaps. Or perhaps it's just them being afraid the virus will finally treat everyone equally. That it won't respect the borders we've drawn.
36. 04:47
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The virus already does not respect borders. That is the nature of contagion.
37. 04:52
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. But we act like it does, right up until the moment we can't pretend anymore. Right up until the body count reaches us.
38. 04:59
    Marie Curieshare moment

    One hundred dead. In the Congo. That number will climb.
39. 05:05
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It will. And we'll keep counting until we have to.