While the disease’s incidence rate of Ebola
has been declining in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Guinea saw its highest
incidence of the virus just over three weeks ago, according a recent Economist piece.
Why then are American politicians no longer afraid of infected people wreaking
havoc on American cities via
air-travel and African “bush
meat” being smuggled into the country? Because it’s January 14th,
midterm elections are over and Congressmen are getting cosy in their seats for
at least the next two years. There is hardly anywhere clearer case of
essentialization of ‘the Other’ for personal gain than the GOP fear mongering
about Ebola that ripped through the nation, conveniently, at the height of
midterm election season. Let’s take a jog down memory lane. A travel ban to
West Africa warranted opposition by health officials including the World
Health Organization, CDC
director Tom Friedan, and public health researchers at institutions such as
Harvard,
Northeastern,
and Johns Hopkins,
to name a few. Despite these experts warning that a travel ban could actually
hamper attempts to limit the spread of Ebola, 89
United States Congressmen backed a flight ban on flights from West Africa.
Of those Congressmen, 78 were Republicans and 11 Democrats. Standing with the
experts in official opposition to such a ban: 14 Congressmen, all Democrats.
And to back up the overwhelmingly
Republican support for an irrational travel ban, came a host of fear mongering
from media across the spectrum. After being assured by Doctors Without Borders
U.S. executive director that all protocols concerning health-care workers
returning from Ebola-ridden countries were developed from “medical science” and
being followed, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd pressed,
“Is there any new protocol you can add simply to assure the American public?” Throughout
media and politics, the American public was being assured that there was more
that could be done to protect them from ‘that African disease’; and the
Democrats in power were simply not getting it done. Right-wing media outlets
used a frame of the Orient, the backward other, to convince people that they
were not safe. Fox
News, not a new transgressor in ignorance, prejudicially stereotyped an
entire country to promote fear: “I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again—in
these countries, they do not believe in traditional medical care. So, someone
could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor who practices
Santeria.”
But all of this is old news; everyone was
around for the ‘Ebola scare’. The point is, as the 114th Congress
opened its doors last week, the Ebola scare must be contextualized. No longer
on the home-page of American news websites, plastered in big info-graphics on
the nightly TV news or on the legislative docket, the very politicians and news
anchors who so feared Ebola only two months ago seem to have forgotten almost
entirely about its existence. HR. 5688, HR. 5693, HR. 5694, HR. 5746, and S. 2953,
all bills proposed in November by Republican Congressmen to deny or limit the
issuance of visas to persons from countries effected by Ebola, have been sent
to die in committee now that election season is far away and the public has
stopped paying attention to Washington. Ebola was used
as a tool to scare people into thinking Republicans could protect them from
‘imminent threats’ (that turned out not to be so imminent). Look no further
than John Boehner’s urging
President Obama to use executive action to implement a travel ban for proof.
John Boehner, who in response to Obama’s executive action on immigration
reform, said: "... we have a broken immigration, and the
American people expect us to work together to fix it. And we oughta do it
in the democratic process, moving Bills through the people's House, to the
Senate, and to the President's desk...”. Of course, when the threat Ebola could
be used to convince people Democrats are not protecting them, executive action
should have been used; when executive action was used to fix a problem that
Boehner himself admits is broken, shame on Democrats.
In the process of using this tragic disease as an
electoral tool, politicians and the mainstream media further engrained the idea
of backward Africa in the minds of the American public. The proposed
legislation to deny visas to anyone from those countries affected by Ebola suggested
that all these people are threatening and diseased. Americans must be protected
from them. Fear of the Other, fear of Africans, fear of ‘African diseases’, all
unjustified according to health scientists, painted entire nations (perhaps an
entire continent) with a single prejudiced brush. And now that the next election
is out of sight, Ebola seems to be off the radar of everyone except the families
and loved ones of the over 8,000 people that have died from the disease.