The Global Financial Crisis, or GFC, is much like KFC without the “K” – It doesn’t originate from a specific location, and it doesn’t have a particularly good mascot.

Up until now, the solutions posed by this blog have been small, token, not relevant on a global scale. It is much like walking into a KFC and ordering a Nacho Cheese wrap. Sure, they look good on TV, and for $1.95 they should be a steal, but by the time you actually get around to purchasing one and pull it out of the wrapper, you wonder why you bothered. It might look like food, but after consuming the measly two pieces of popcorn chicken with a smattering of sugary sauce, wrapped in a small, stale tortilla, you realise that you should have put that $1.95 towards getting a decent meal somewhere else.

Like Maccas. You can almost get a cheeseburger for that much.

The point is, the worldwide economy is fucked. Whether you blame the decline in the sub-prime, prime-time TV, prime rib, or even Optimus Prime, anything we do in the next few months won’t have any real significant impact on a global scale. The fact is, this problem is just too much effort to solve immediately. And when a problem is too much effort to solve right away, like any good human, we look for a distraction.

World leaders have used the power of distraction to great effect in the past to their advantage, and to generally keep people from realising how deep in shit they really are. It worked for the Achaeans in the Trojan War, it worked for Napoleon, it even worked for Paris Hilton. It is time for our world leaders to utilise the powers of distraction and misdirection to get all David Blaine on everyone’s ass, and divert our attention away from how fucked we all are before we start stripping naked, rubbing peanut butter all over ourselves, and run through the streets pegging beer bottles and empty Pringles cans at passing motorists.

Because, you know, that could be dangerous.

Misdirecting the Public, or getting David Blaine on their Asses

The easiest way to take a person’s mind off their problems is to give them something else to think about. Like a kitten, most humans will stop clawing at the couch if you wave a shiny thing or a piece of string in front of their face. There is usually only room for one major thought in someone’s head at any given time, and all the Lindsay Lohan lesbian scandals in the world aren’t enough to dislodge the constant threat of spending the rest of your short life writhing pain-wracked and horribly disfigured in a dark alleyway while some mangy dog sits by waiting for you to die so he can gnaw off your face.

The first thought that comes to mind is to give the people something to believe in, a beacon of hope in an otherwise insurmountable chasm of despair – hey, it worked for the Obama election campaign.

However, as your girlfriend will tell you, any small glimmer of hope that this time will be different will ultimately lead to disappointment, awkwardness, and finishing yourself off in the bathroom while you lie mashed against the pillow in the foetal position, crying like a little girl. A wise man once said – “people will always want confirmation of good news, but will believe bad news at face value“.

That leaves the one great weapon of the politician – Fear. It is the one common God people the world over worship. The only way to distract people from being scared about losing their job, is to make them scared about losing their life.

And that is where the Fake Pandemic comes in.

It worked in the movies; we have all seen Outbreak – you know, the movie where an African Monkey dresses up like Steve Buscemi and has sex with a whole village in the United States, infecting them all with some sort of highly infectious supervirus? Well, we need something like that. People will be so worried about contracting this deadly virus that they will stop talking to each other, and won’t really mind losing their jobs anyway because, well, they catch a bus to work every day and that old lady sitting in the corner just looks so positively riddled with viruses and other killer germs and stuff.

It will attract media headlines, be plastered over the front of every newspaper and website, and be talked about on the TV and radio. No one will care about the state of the economy when all those illegal immigrants start bringing in their deadly strains of supervirus into our peace loving urban centres. Of course, in the interest of public safety, we would need to start cracking down on this as well, introducing tough new immigration laws, you know, “just in case”.

It’s been tried before, to various levels of success – SARS originated as a strain of Avian Flu, and there were some near misses with the Horse flu in 2007, as well as the Canine flu.

Mad Cow disease caused the elimination of whole herds of cattle in an attempt to prevent an outbreak in the United Kingdom last century.

The success of this strategy is evident – no one gave a fuck about the missing WMDs in Iraq when they were dodging SARS, and I think we will start seeing similar results with the global economic crisis.

If I know my global pandemic disaster movies, all the big superviruses need to originate from a Third World country, yet still be close enough to pose an immediate threat to a big world superpower. Say, somewhere like Mexico.

Now, all we need is a good, catchy name along the lines of “Bird flu”, or “Mad Cow”.

Maybe another barnyard animal.

…..

Please post any cool suggestions for names in the comments section below.

Tags: conspiracy, disney, Finance, gfc, gub'ment, pandemic, Steve Buscemi