France's bed-bug delirium is more an online dilemma than real-life problem
A Red Skelton bit from 50 years ago featured a Texan visiting the North and snorting at everything he came across — stores, hamburgers, stadiums, hats — with the rejoinder, “We’ve got ’em twice as big in Texas.” Finally a fed-up Northerner puts turtles between his hotel sheets and when the shrieking Texan asks what they are the Yankee responds, “Them’s bedbugs and don’t tell me you got them twice as big in Texas.”
This was, frankly, about the only thought I’d given to bedbugs until I started reading about how they are overrunning France, of all countries.
I know there are more important events going on in the world right now, but a developed nation succumbing to vermin would seem to be news.
Scientists say we almost — almost — eradicated bedbugs in the 20th century. But nature, stupid as it is, only seems to designate cute animals for extinction. Before they were entirely gone, bedbugs developed a resistance to our pesticides, so now, not only are they coming back, they’re coming back with a bad attitude. It’s the old adage, if you shoot at the bedbug you best not miss.
The bedbug invasion comes at a bad time for France, which is hosting the Summer Olympics and wants to put on a good face for the world, a face that does not include stemmed eyeballs and quivering antennae.
“Concerns had bubbled up in recent weeks over bedbugs — flat parasites, no bigger than quarter of an inch, that hide in dark, cramped spaces and that feed on the blood of sleeping people and animals,” The New York Times reported. “Cinema-goers in Paris reported being bit. Pictures or videos of what appeared to be bedbugs on trains or subways were posted online.”
Oh dear, there’s that word again: online. It’s gotten to the point that whenever I see “online” I slam on the brakes of whatever conclusion I’m about to jump to, because probably whatever I’m reading is going to turn out to be wrong.
And that may be the case here. Because of online hysteria, people are starting to see bedbugs, well, in their sleep.
French health officials say that bedbugs have been spread across the world by global travel (TSA agents don’t pull you out of line for a bedbug unless it is armed with a gun, which in America is not an indistinct possibility) and that the Parisian infestation is no better or worse than in any other major world city.
What’s happened, they say, is that social media has “completely amplified the situation.” And it’s had some help. Pest-control trade organizations are sounding the alarm that “they’re everywhere! they’re everywhere!” But of course, they have a financial stake in the matter. And they’re getting help from another insectile subgroup: politicians.
According to the Times, “In France’s lower house of Parliament, a top opposition lawmaker held up a small vial (of dead bugs) for all her colleagues to see. Its contents, she warned in a fiery speech this week, were ‘spreading despair’ around the country.”
“Must we wait for your office to be infested before you finally react?” the lawmaker shrieked at Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne.
Obviously, no politician can be seen as being soft on bedbugs, so the Macron administration is more or less being forced to dispatch an imaginary army to deal with this imaginary crisis.
The Times reports “a flurry of top level meetings” that will probably be a lot heavier on deep sighs and eye-rolling than anything to do with pest control. But of course appearances matter, so issues like child poverty and mental health will be pushed to the back burner while their government develops a $57 million, nine-part, unified, bipartisan response to a photograph of a bug someone posted to Instagram.
I’m sure bedbugs will be an issue here before long. The Democrats will blame climate change and the Republicans will blame Hunter Biden. Thank goodness our Congress is currently paralyzed with inaction.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Social media amplification likely cause of France's bed-bug hysteria
