So the Americans, in their infinite technological arrogance, have been brought low by a creature of pure, unthinking, squirming evil: the New World screwworm. Yes, the flesh-eating maggot. And their solution?
More flies. And dogs. One can almost hear Gibbon weeping into his tea.
British scientists, ever the sober custodians of colonial memory, now offer their containment expertise. The irony is exquisite. This is not merely a biological incident.
It is a parable. The same nation that put a man on the moon, that dreams of silicon valleys and Martian colonies, finds itself wrestling with a parasite that would be familiar to a Victorian stockman. The sterile insect technique, pioneered by our own imperial entomologists at the height of empire, is now the West’s last, best hope against a crawling apocalypse.
The Americans, with characteristic vigour, are bombing the screwworm with irradiated flies. And they are using dogs. Sniffer dogs, to detect the stench of rotting flesh in the living tissue of livestock.
We have returned to the age of the hound, the farmyard, and the pestilential fly. The British offer is to manage the containment, to apply the lessons of the Panama Canal, of the colonial campaigns against the tsetse fly. We are the archivists of pestilence, the curators of decay.
The American problem is not just screwworm. It is a crisis of forgetting. They have forgotten that civilisation, like a wound, must be constantly cleaned, drained, and dressed.
They have forgotten that the flies are always waiting. And so we, the old imperium, step in to remind them. The dogs sniff, the flies drop from the sky, and the flesh heals.
For now. But the lesson remains: the empire of decay is patient. It waits for the moment when hubris meets a single, ill-timed egg.
