…and it’s killed all my nostalgic affection for him and his music, too:
Let’s count the facepalms here, shall we:
Okay, dude, here’s where you lost me: The moment you started to whine about having to cancel your LUCRATIVE concert series, from which you stand to make literal MILLIONS.
And you have the gall to call the Chinese “some fucking bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards”? And to tell people who can’t afford that bourgeois lifestyle of yours to “go vegan”? How far out of touch and up your own ass ARE you, anyway?
With all due respect: Vegan lifestyles are NOT going to save this planet. They are expensive and highly petrochemical-dependent, and often both nutritionally and environmentally unbalanced. Ultimately, they are not natural to our species, which is naturally omnivorous, not herbivorous. And even if they weren’t, they still wouldn’t solve this crisis any more than drinking bleach, shooting Lysol, popping malaria pills, or shining a sunlamp on your ‘nads.
When people live at close quarters with animals (which they do all over the world), they run the risk of catching viruses that are native to those animal populations, and foreign to us. The current novel coronavirus outbreak isn’t a simple matter of people eating animals, it’s a complex matter of people sharing an entire fucking global ecosystem with them.
And it’s only the latest in a long history of animal-to-human transmission of devastating viral diseases. The Kansas flu pandemic of 1918, for instance, started on a farm, then jumped to a military base, and thanks to American soldiers shipping out to fight in World War I, it wound up wiping out millions more than the war itself did. The virus itself is of avian and equine origins, and may have links to an earlier epizootic outbreak of influenza in horses, in 1872, which wiped out so many horses that travel and trade throughout North America ground to a standstill:
And no, nobody was “eating bats” then, either. Just as the Chinese aren’t doing now.
In fact, the species from which this coronavirus jumped to humans was not even a bat, but a pangolin…a species much in demand with rich, air-headed status seekers who have much more in common with Bryan Adams himself than they do with his audience. Maybe this outbreak will finally kill demand for the species, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
Meanwhile, thousands of poor folks who’ve never tasted pangolin meat have died of this pandemic and are still dying now. Some of them may even have been “clean”, ostensibly healthy-living vegans. Their lifestyle hasn’t saved them from what is, in fact, an airborne virus. One that you could catch simply by breathing within a few metres of any critter that’s carrying it — be it bats, pangolins, or who knows what.
And in the midst of all that, ol’ Bryan is pissing and moaning from the safety of his mansion about how much richer he won’t be getting this year off the backs of fans who can ill afford to see him anyway.
It’s enough to make you sick, if you aren’t already.
