So, when are we going to apologize to France, say we were wrong, they were right? No weapons have been found, no imminent threat has been uncovered. It turns out that there was no justification for going to war, or at least the justifications that were given were lies and errors. The poor Frenchies have gotten a lot of shit from us, their refusal to go to war being likened to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. We called them cheese-eating surrender monkeys. That would have been infantile even if we had been totally vindicated by evidence unearthed from the rubble of Baghdad that proved Saddam was planning to extinguish the sun with a secret freeze ray, but it’s especially disgusting given the fact that they were right and we were wrong.

France, I’m sorry.

But the bigger issue is that nobody ever says they’re sorry, especially people in power. Newspapers print accusations on A-1, retractions on A-7. What they would do if they had any dignity left is print the retractions at the top of the front page, right under the newspaper logo, or between a pair of naked breasts on a special fold-out section. Perhaps they could put them in the Jumble, like so: “EW ILED GANIA”.

What I’m getting at is that there were all kinds of posts like this on Metafilter where people discussed why everybody was going to die of SARS, in which people could not be persuaded that perhaps they were falling for another plague of the week story, and that there was even the most remote chance that they would die of other causes, like murder or coconuts or pancreatic cancer. People who questioned the utility of panicking over something they had no control over (ME) were generally ignored or shouted down.

And it turns out we’re not all going to die from SARS. It’s been contained worldwide, says the World Health Organization.

So where are all the posts about how we’re not going to die? Where are all the people retracting their dire predictions and offering me cookies and candy for being so clever and brave? Why isn’t anybody saying, “well, we learned our lesson, best not resign ourselves to death just because TV said so.”

Oh, we’re going to die, and soon, but not in the way the so-called news media would have you believe. The real threat to this species comes from the robotic ants that the government has developed. In five years you and I will be working in a sugar mine, my friend, and by then, the apologies will be too late.