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Anthrax leave
November 04, 2001
By Denis Solomon
EVERY time I see a vehicle with the idiot sign "How is my driving?" painted on it, I am tempted to make a sheaf of stickers saying, in bold characters, "f *** ing horrible", and attach one to any such vehicle that stops for long enough.
But I would get no satisfaction out of the procedure, because nobody would know the authorship of this example of scintillating wit. I would not even be present to enjoy people's reaction. I could call the Express to send a photographer, but Sunity Maharaj would probably just tell me to grow up.
For the same reasons I often wonder what fun people get out of writing graffiti, even humorous ones. Anonymous authorship is a type of public-spiritedness I find very hard to understand. I am baffled by people who write letters to the editor under pseudonyms. Whatever I write in the press has to bring me payment, recognition or (preferably) both.
The same applies to more harmful and disruptive forms of hoaxing, such as disseminating computer viruses, or mailing phony anthrax letters.
Of course, either of these hobbies could get the hobbyist into trouble with the law. But I don't see that as a reason for doing it anonymously. It is a reason for not doing it at all. Unless you have moral or political motives for wanting to bring capitalist society to a standstill, what satisfaction can you get out of crashing all the computers in Wall Street, if nobody knows that it was you who did it?
Perhaps the computer criminals are really hoping to get caught, for obscure psychological reasons, or in the expectation of being offered a job at Microsoft at the end of their jail sentence. (This has happened; the United States is a very pragmatic society).
By and large Trinidadians seem to take the same view of these things as I do (except for their predilection for anonymity in writing letters to the newspapers). Hoaxing has never been common here. There is a bomb scare from time to time, but perhaps the perpetrators get a giggle from watching the evacuation of the building. Funny washroom graffiti are unknown. Local graffiti artists operate exclusively in the scatological mode, and are in any case barely literate.
So the immediate and widespread popularity of anthrax hoaxing needs to be explained. The general explanation is of course that the perpetrators derive benefit from it. What remains is to determine what that benefit is.
I found a clue in a statement made by a caller to the TV6 Morning Edition programme. The first letters containing anthrax had been discovered in the States, and the question being discussed was whether it might happen here. The caller was obviously hoping it would. Any TTPost employee who got anthrax, he said, would richly deserve it, because they were always opening his mail. When he worked in the United States he had to send money to his family by American Express, because he daren't use the mail. But the events in the States had given him an idea. What he ought to do, he said, was to sprinkle a little baking soda on the envelope, and no postal worker would dare meddle with it.
I sympathise with that gentleman because I have been the victim of mail tampering more times than I can count. Sometimes the envelopes were simply torn; sometimes they were re-sealed and marked "received damaged". When I complained I would be told that it was not the Post office but the Customs who had opened the letter. I thought that if the Customs suspected a letter of containing dutiable goods they called you in and asked you to open it, not opened it themselves. It was useless to subscribe to magazines; they never arrived. This was before privatisation, but from what the Morning Edition caller said, the situation has not changed.
In fact, there is confirmation in a story in Friday's Express about the latest anthrax scares. TTPost is quoted as explaining that "a local letter passing through one of the corporation's cancelling machines was torn, exposing a white powder". Now, if one letter torn accidentally by the machine contained powder, the law of averages suggests that there must have been thousands containing powder. What is far more likely is that the letter looked as if it contained something more valuable than powder. Perhaps the Morning Edition caller has put his plan into practice.
The Express story contains another strong clue to the reason for the hoaxes. Every time a suspected anthrax letter turns up, the staff is sent home. What easier way of getting a day off? It is even simpler than the flea infestation, asbestos residue, cow-itch or spirit possession to which teachers and schoolchildren resort for that purpose.
Speaking of nuisance mail: the "Sword of Allah" letter faxed to the Guardian bears one unmistakable stamp of local authorship: not the various illiteracies the Guardian marked with the word "sic", but the persistent and ineradicable Trinidadian use of "would" for "will". Which the Guardian, of course, didn't notice.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon