Imagine if you will, an exceptionally ambitious city Fire Department, located in a city with very few naturally occurring fires.
These ambitious firemen don’t have nearly enough work, prestige, or pay for their liking. Uninterested in simply polishing their trucks, lifting weights, and cooking chili, these firemen want more. A lot more.
They construct a plan. They will start a research program, funded by taxpayers, whereby they will develop an arsenal of the biggest, scariest, most flammable products on earth. They will justify this program under the pretense that these destructive creations are absolutely necessary for the development of bigger and better fire extinguishers. Incidentally, they will also develop, market, and sell these fire extinguishers themselves.
These proprietary fire extinguishers will net the ambitious firemen an incredible fortune – if they can just get every man, woman, and child in the city to buy one.
The Fire Department, working with the corporations that would manufacture their miracle extinguishers, actively publicizes the supposedly tremendous, ever-increasing risk of fires that they claim threaten the population. According to the ambitious firemen, risk factors for worsened fires are everywhere and are ever-increasing – global warming, population growth, take your pick – and the next “big one” is just around the corner.
Credulous, fearful citizens and heavily lobbied politicians fall for their story, pumping ever more tax dollars into the Fire Department’s research and development program.
The Fire Department develops and grows its stockpile of manufactured fire super-hazards, until one day…
OOPS!
Somehow, one of the flammable products is released, and a raging conflagration ensues. No one knows exactly how it started – in fact, the chief firemen gather together and publicly deny that any of their products could be responsible.
But by terrifying the public and confusing the politicians, the firemen coerce the population to shelter in place and follow their strict instructions, lest they perish in the holocaust. After all, the firemen are the experts.
They heavily promote their special fire extinguishers as the only solution, even managing to get water outlawed for firefighting purposes! (Water wouldn’t work on this kind of fire, they insist. Only the Fire Department’s special extinguishers will suffice.)
Using a huge injection of taxpayer funds, the Fire Department gets their fire extinguishers built in record time, and they hard-sell them to everyone they possibly can. In the meantime, large swaths of the city burn to the ground. And due to the fire extinguishers’ poor design and hasty construction, these devices turn out to be every bit as deadly as the fire, if not worse, for their damaging effects linger long after the fire has burned itself out.
But the firemen and their corporate cronies have secured their fortunes.
The bewildered, traumatized population can’t figure out what happened, any more than the feckless politicians. The Fire Department emerges as the most powerful entity in the city. They resume their “research,” fortified by their growing wealth and power.
After all, the next big conflagration is just around the corner.
Sound implausible? Think again. Because in the realm of “pandemic preparedness,” the arsonists are running the Fire Department.
Hellbound and Down 