Apocalypse Again

Even those of us who are internationalist in spirit watched the initial events in Wuhan unfold as something happening over there, somewhere far away. Given how much rhetoric is routinely expended on China as a strategic threat to the West as well as its significance as a factory for global capitalism, this surely should not have been the case. But it was, and media reports on the lockdown in Wuhan came across as something strange, a scattering of images of yellow construction equipment and green surgical gear, the ravages of the COVID-19 virus blurred in a distant strangeness that would never affect us at all.