Rant

kidney condition which allowed the patient to incubate and transmit huge amounts of the virus.
    Gregg Denney: Some bitch gets herself knocked up and says she wants to have my rabid baby. She wants to see, can she go all the way to a baby without curing her infection. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
    Hudson Baker: Amber was always telling me, “Rant Casey is the father of my rabies…” Like Amber met him and knew him and everything. Their love was, like, sealed with a kiss.
    Gregg Denney: Maybe I put babies inside some daytime bitch, but, no, I never had the rabies for real. I only let on I was infected, to keep me in clean tail.
    Hudson Baker: Amber was living with Gregg Denney by then. She expected her baby to be, like, part man, part animal. Like, one time she told me, “I’m taking human evolution one giant step backward…”
    Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: As with the Rant serotype of the Lyssavirus, most modern epidemics have “jumped” from animals to human beings: SARS being a form of bovine Coronavirus, or cattle “shipping fever”; Creutzfeld-Jakob disease being the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease”; and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome most likely being derived from the simian immunodeficiency virus.
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Once he’d died, or at least disappeared, Rant Casey became a very effective bogeyman for our government. Anytime the federal government needed to distract public attention from its own incompetence, the surgeon general simply announced a new development in the rabies epidemic, or the hunt for Rant, or both.
    Neddy Nelson: Don’t you see how there is no actual rabies epidemic? Can’t you see how Rant Casey is just a political scapegoat? Do you really accept that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? Or that James Earl Ray really was a “lone gunman” when he assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? How about Sirhan Sirhan? Or John Wilkes Booth?
    Do you really believe one man caused an entire nationwide rabies outbreak?
    Gregg Denney: A bitch with her hormones exploding and some serious brain damage happening from the rabies, that sounds like nothing I’d want to hang around. Forget it. People I heard of can carry the spit around for years; could be she was one of those.
    Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Other terms for superspreaders include “superinfectors” or “supershedders.” Due to the deadly, invisible fog of saliva and mucous droplets that surround these infectious individuals, epidemiologists sometimes refer to them as “cloud cases.”
    Neddy Nelson: Doesn’t it scare you that the Emergency Health Powers Act now preempts all legal rights of the individual?
    Shot Dunyun: The way you lock up all your enemies without charging them with any crime, or providing lawyers, it’s called a quarantine. Doctors are the new judge and jury. Disease is the new weapon of mass destruction.
    Neddy Nelson: Why do you think every political radical gets “diagnosed” as rabid, then locked up until his inevitable death is announced? Don’t you see how this is legalized assassination?
    Hudson Baker: When I couldn’t help it any longer, I called Mr. and Mrs. Nye and told them everything about Amber and the chewing-gum notes and Party Crashing, and they went and hired a detective.
    Only, when they went to where Gregg Denney lived, Amber was gone.
    Neddy Nelson: How can you say Rant Casey overreacted? How’s an intelligent person supposed to react when he discovers that he’s merely the product of a corrupt and evil system? How do you continue to live after you learn that your every breath, every dollar you pay in taxes, every baby you conceive and love will only perpetuate some evil system?
    How do you live knowing your every cell and drop of blood are part of the big evil?
    38–Communitas
    Dr. Christopher Bing, Ph.D. ( Anthropologist): The phenomenon commonly known as Party Crashing is simply the latest manifestation of a liminal space which provides a cathartic sublimation, generating a normative communitas, thereby deflecting any pent-up hostility toward the status quo and preserving the existent social structure.
    From the essay “Liminality and Communitas” by Victor Turner ( Anthropologist): Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, “edgemen” who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital