Jim Hopkins: Penning their own demise, the swines

There's something murmursome and debauched about the word "zoonotic". It has the sensual sound of some illicit pleasure, as you'll discover if you whisper it, softly and slowly to yourself. "Zoooonotic."

Savour the electric buzz of the "Zzzz" in your mouth. Let the "ooooo" pucker your lips as if to kiss. Slide into "notic" gently, with the consonants lingering on your tongue like a good malt whisky or fine schadenfreude.

If the dictionary had any poetry to it, "zoonotic" would be a word that lovers would use, perhaps to describe the pleasure they discover in each other ("Oh, my angel, your toes are so zoooonotic") or, alternatively, something equally beguiling, like "the sound of a warm tropical breeze stirring the palm trees at night".

But there's precious little poetry in the dictionary, and no justice in language or life either, so "zoonotic" is just the adjective we use to describe those maladies, manges, afflictions and agues that leap, uninvited, across the species barrier, spreading from peacock to penguin, bat to bishop, with equal and malign indifference.

Which is what confronts us now, apparently. A zoonotic pestilence, a viral vengeance, a disease so dire it will leave us all dead on the floor, our face masks futile.

And it's all happened so fast. One day, we're noodling along, coping as best we can with the usual calamities - the rising price of plastic bags, the falling value of everything else thanks to the GFC, the various indignities likely to be inflicted upon White House visitors and carpets alike by this grossly over-reported little mutt, Bo Bama - then, whammo, before you can say, "Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down" some flaming great pandemic turns up.

Not out of the blue, but rather the grey of Mexico City's smog-ridden skies.

So this is the thanks we get for saving the Patagonian toothfish. A bleedin' zoonotic illness incubated in the very same continent. Well, Asta la Vista, Senor, but next time your gormless fang fish finds itself in a spot of bother, we'll tell the Navy to stay at home, if you don't mind.

Discovering we're all going to meet our maker because some warring drug lord's pig sneezed is a tad too ironic for even the most post-modern amongst us.

As is the realisation that this particular zoonotic malignancy has actually jumped three species, from swine to journalists to ordinary people. And it's that second leap which really sticks in the craw.

Most of us like pigs. They're intelligent creatures, we can use their organs in transplants and they make a jolly good sandwich as well.

But the other species, journalists, the direct source of our infection, are an entirely different kettle of fishy. For pity's sake, these drongos have been spreading disease for years, long before this latter-day baconic bubonic plague reared its ugly herd.

Some of us can recall the toxic egg, deadly ovum of oblivion. Scoff a single cackle berry and your cholesterol was through the roof, your ticker on the blink and your bucket thoroughly kicked.

Then there was bacon, the merest whiff of which would turn your tummy into a fatally carcinogenic swamp. Unless the hole in the ozone layer got you first. Or bird flu or Aids, or coffee (remember how bad coffee used to be?), or mad cow disease or greenhouse gases or the raging seas unleashed by vast sheets of melting ice bearing down upon us before we can get our Ark into gear.

Put simply, these poor hoarsemen of the apocalypse have been screaming "Fire!" in our theatre for decades now. To no good effect, it must be said. And pundits wonder why television audiences and newspaper readership are both imploding.

It's because we're bored, you plonkers. We've only got so much skin to be scared out of. We don't believe you any more. And we don't like the lascivious enthusiasm with which you embrace each awfulness, either.

Disaster is the new pornography. Journalism's become the domain of grief maggots and catastrophe dealers, an inverted world where the worst is the best and drooling nihilists slather over their amplified litany of horrors like dirty old men leering at hookers.

It's the eagerness that's unfathomable. The compulsive glee with which everything unspeakable is embellished, as if the direst outcome is not only inevitable but welcome. Were hyperbole notifiable, most journalists would have been in quarantine years ago.

They're not, of course. So the headlines howl and the babies, scarce out of polytech, stand before their cameras, positively quivering with ill-suppressed arousal as they clutch, illiterate and unquestioning, at words like "pandemic" and "killer" and "deadly" and any other cliche the profits of doom dictate.

With "the tentacles of swine flu gripping more around the world" (as One News so dispassionately advised us on Wednesday) the necrotic rapture of those predicting its lethal course is as palpable as its outcome is inevitable. Any trade so besotted with the End is likely only hastening its own.

Shock, horror, fearful citizen
Have I got news for YOU!
Calamity, catastrophe
A pocalypse or two
Well, a pox on your apocalypse
Unless I start to cough
Till then, hysteric howlers
Please, kindly, bugger off!