An odd opportunity for development has cropped up here in the Town of Dunn, a rural island with a strict land use plan in an otherwise rapidly urbanizing county. The Federal Government has finally decided to close the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and replace it with an even more secure facility, the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility. The new facility will be located in America’s heartland.
I have mixed feelings. There are those that say that Lyme disease and West Nile Virus are escapees from Plum Island, and if that is true what sane, right thinking community member would want something like that in his township? But then there are those who say that development of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus was an offshoot of boy-in-a-bubble research funded by the Hughes Medical Foundation and undertaken by select academic institutions in the seventies and only escaped the lab in the eighties when the Reagan administration tried to legitimize the black ops, or at least turn them from black to gray at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco. But what kind of nut ball would believe a thing like that? It would be as reasonable to think that the COINTELPRO operation targeting for death and “neutralization” the black Americans and other activists of the sixties was more than a figment of some liberal’s imagination.
I don’t think I have much to be concerned about as regards the laboratory being sited here. Texas A&M, home of the Bush Presidential Library, the school where Robert Gates — former CIA Director, Iran Contra alumnus and now nominee for Secretary of Defense — was president is on the list of institutions competing for the prize. Texas A&M has great relations with the Hughes Medical Institute and Texas itself is a much better location than Wisconsin from which to mount a germ warfare offensive against enemies of the American Oligarchy. And Texas is more the heartland than Wisconsin. We are more the bellybutton-land, or perhaps the armpit-land.
My best wishes to all the folks who are competing for these research dollars. It’s just too bad everyone can’t be a winner.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
