But there were many who had always seen capitalism as a producer of a parallel chronic and deadly virus, one of low self-esteem created by the eternal pressure of the competitive machine and colonizing forces of branding. They saw the chunky mean orange man as the ultimate purveyor of carcinogenic comparison and suicidal self-hatred. He had, through trickster practices convinced the people that he was the modern-day king of monopoly, that singular individual who had managed to erect phallic gold towers in many cities and have his name plastered across the universe. He was what was called in those days a huge success and it was believed that it was the unlikely and extreme combination of envy and awe that had propelled him to the top. The fact that no one was able to really determine if he was a huge success (as his tax returns were never made available) seemed bizarrely irrelevant to his followers, as did the many cases he had declared of bankruptcy. Fantasy carried the day, an incurable strain of delusional devotional father fever. It was astounding to see how long this fever persisted.
Then there were the environmentalists, mycologists, biologists, botanists, entomologists, geneticists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, neuroscientists, and many others who were actually in agreement that climate change was at the core of the virus, because it had a less direct but definite effect on infectious diseases. Climate and weather alterations impacted viruses and the animal and insects that host them and could radically change how humans were exposed. During the time of the orange man, for example, the world had seen radical increases in childhood learning disabilities, ADD, autism, Lyme disease, depression, anxiety, and suicide of teenagers and even a return of the bubonic plague. All of these were directly linked to environmental damage. So it was wildly agreed that the virus hosted by the orange man was caused by extreme pollution of some sort—air, the loss of coral reefs, pesticides, warming of the seas, or a combination thereof.
There was a whole school of acarologists in Massachusetts who had serious data proving that the virus was linked with the “nine iron tick,” a nine-legged arachnid only found on golf courses buried deep in sand traps. It was the conjecture of the acarologists that the parasitic properties of the tick were transmuted into the host and that he in turn fed off the blood of the people he infected.
The oncologists had a very different reading and believed the virus was a tumor-causing agent and was somehow related to diminishing testosterone, which manifested as a brain lesion/ tumor rendering the host or infected one into a violent fool. It is not clear whether the tumor made the host violent or being a fool made him violent or if they were one and the same. The tumor, constantly pressing on the brain, created a sense in the host that he was always under surveillance which is why he despised the press and the former leader of the land who he constantly accused, without a drop of evidence, of surveilling him. The orange idiot would have constant mad outbursts of this violence on something at the time called Twitter, a bizarre technological mechanism that shot word pellets into the public.
And, there was evidence that this virus was spreading and worsening. It began appearing in other men who were suddenly going on shooting rampages, murdering hundreds at concerts and shopping malls and other public gatherings with no apparent motives. It became known after many of these incidents that white men over the age of fifty were the main carriers of the disease as they had not, due to privilege and arrogance, developed the necessary and flexible antibodies mentioned above to fight off the virus.
This enraged a powerful community of feminists who thought little of the virus theory. They were thoroughly convinced that the so-called virus was not a virus at all but the final manifestation of malignant racist patriarchy. They were disturbed that it was being called a virus as it took responsibility from the rotund oinker with orange hair and all his followers and made it seem like something they had caught rather than something they were perpetrating. But even some amongst them had to admit that the qualities, persistence, and recurrence of racist patriarchy made it seem much like a virus, and they were still at a loss to explain how thousands of white women had voted for the chubby gangster after he had bragged about being able to grab their pussy parts because he was famous.
There were many women who believed the orange round slime was no longer a man at all, but through the deteriorating impact of the virus had become a kind of octopus, (not to insult octopi as they are highly-evolved creatures). Yes, they thought he had become a soft-bodied, eight-armed mollusk whose flaccid body could rapidly alter its shape and whose many groping tentacles would sometimes, at parties, on airplanes, or during job interviews, travel up women’s skirts attempting to get through their panties or into their blouses, sliding and ejecting a dark goo around their breasts. These mushy octopi seemed to replicate throughout the land. They would station themselves at the head of entertainment and news companies where they would incubate for years and were able to easily shoot their goo and wrap their tentacles around hundreds of women in broad daylight while other men with low-level infection, awed by the octopi, longing for similar position and fortune, watched and said nothing.
Some saw the octopi as the ultimate performer in a culture hinged on fantasy and entertainment. They blamed the TV executives for the original spread of the virus as from the onset the corporate leaders understood that the vicious carrot man increased their ratings and sold more Subarus. The populace was glued to the corpulent con artist with an all-consuming fascination that verged on obsession. Because they had long ago lost the ability to distinguish the real from unreal they were transfixed by the on-going sideshow, somehow disconnected from the catastrophic outcome.
And there were a small group who believed the nation had simply been seized by a scary clown and that the population was suffering from coulrophobia, a fear of clowns that rendered people paralyzed, terrified, anxious, and dysfunctional. The man with the orange hair smiled when he was murderous, he told lies by the minute, and committed crimes daily. Like the notorious John Wayne Gacy, a clown who was actually a serial killer who had murdered thirty-three people, he understood, as Gacy said, “Clowns can get away with anything.”
Then there were those who kept believing the virus would pass, that it was only momentary, and that it couldn’t possibly hold or spread further. They were sure it was simply a strange aberration that would never be tolerated and if they did not give it attention, it would disappear. These are the same people who feel a bump under their skin or see blood in their poop and believe that if they ignore it really, really hard, it will somehow go away. It is hard to tell whether these folks had actually already been infected by the virus, as one of the major symptoms of the virus was an inability to know that you have it.
Another major component of the virus that ravaged privileged people was their refusal to resist it. The privileged were simply unable to give up their daily comforts in order to fight the virus when it began to infect and destroy the lives of the less fortunate. The virus created a superstitious delusion in them that if they did not focus on the virus they couldn’t catch it. If rather than ignoring it, if they looked at it or touched it—the privileged truly believed—they would get it. This delusion later proved to be fatal.