A word from the wise:
Hypothesis: it was reports from Italy that finally hit home what was about to happen in the UK, and the US, for that matter. ‘Libertarians’ living in their own perverted bubbles read the warning as a warning against socialized healthcare and ‘socialism.’ The Americans were obsessed with the forthcoming election and the possibility of Bernie Sanders becoming the Democrat candidate. I have no interest in pursuing the delusions of that part of the world here. The response of the UK government was equally laggard and culpable. That there are people actually urging unity behind a government complicit in this crisis, seeking to silence criticism and suppress politics, indicates the depth of the predicament we are in. We have too few active, informed citizens and too many passive consumers. In the sophist politics that prevails today that is a recipe for disaster. Liberals keep claiming that Donald Trump is an idiot. He may well be, but not in the sense that they mean. It is an age of the idiotes, those interested only in their private interests. The polites, those interested in public affairs, are thin on the ground. Trump is the champion of reality TV politics and I am afraid for those adhering to truth in scientific and moral knowledge this is the world we live in today. And this is the world we will assuredly die in. I have been warning for years now that the dividing line is between transcendentalism and conventionalism. The sophists have won and justice and freedom is the interests of the strongest. There is no reality beyond subjective will and choice. Even when reality does hit, the evidence is that the subjectivists will content themselves with ersatz forms of community, communal singing and performance, clapping. It all follows the mania for running for the charity of choice. It is all surrogate community as a substitute for effective politics.
Now we have attained a clear-sighted view: Lonely deaths. Exhausted nurses. Dead doctors. Overwhelmed institutions: Stretched resources. But now that ‘it’ ‘really’ ‘is’ happening here, too many people still can’t see it. Such people don’t believe what they see; they see only what they believe. And they think they are still surrounded by normality..
Waitrose is still with us.
And the blossomiest spring ever.
And no-one we know has died.
And the news isn’t so bad, the curve is flattening.
And where are the bodies?
And there’s always Amazon.
Seen my sourdough?
The total unreality of this dystopian spring is too hard to process. And this is why these press briefings will go down in history. Because they are airbrushing reality in real time. And we are letting them.
This is news management on a truly Orwellian scale. And it’s not the fault of the press. It’s being managed! It’s the fault of parliament. This period is such a stain on British democracy.
MPs allowed parliament to be disbanded while voting in extraordinary executive powers. The press cannot hold the government to account! If there is one thing I have learned it is ‘this.’ It requires parliament to do its job. [Yes, governments must govern, which is hard for them to do seeing as they have been captured by politicians ideologically predisposed against government action for the common good]
We are Italy. The dystopia & horror is happening right here, right now. Except we can’t see it. Because the government has banned cameras from hospitals and staff from speaking out and instead they wheel out a homily-of-the-day...which then leads news agenda. Instead of death, horror, pit.
All the while they refuse to disclose data used to make decisions. And tell us they are ‘following the science’ but not which science, formulated by whom based on what evidence. Be in no doubt these are ‘political’ decisions. [Bear that in mind, all you who argue that ‘this is not the time for politics.’ It never is ‘time for politics’ for such people.]
Finally: where the f**k is Cummings?
Carol Cadwalladr.
But when it is time for politics, make note of this and have the nerve and the nous to draw the right conclusions – like many of you didn’t in the past when it was equally obvious what the proven liar you elected as Prime Minister was all about.
Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives
“I would really like to know why the decision to give up testing and contact tracing was taken.”
I’m disgusted and disheartened. I've spent an entire life opposing this kind of politics. Not enough people listen to reason or respect fact. Forget ethics, they would have to look the word up in a dictionary. Once you tell them what a dictionary is. But they don't even learn from crises and scandals.
As for 'the left,' capitalism has just collapsed - yet again - and the concern is how we are to quickly restore normality. This makes crystal clear the extent to which our erstwhile rebels, radicals, and revolutionaries demanding 'system change, not climate change' are capitalism's tame pets, content with being a permanently angry mob demonstrating and demanding changes, never actually mobilizing enough support to constitute a social movement capable of effecting system transformation. This is what passive radicalism looks like. And I have always known it. I spent a lot of time last year calling out climate 'rebellion' as a phony revolution which sought to instigate top-down environmental austerity with big demands leveled on government within prevailing and fundamentally untransformed social relations. A lot of people talk big, but basically their politics are timorous. The mountain heaved and brought forth ... the mouse of reformism. Comfort zone politics within the capital system, and no intention to go beyond the institutional parameters.
We shouldn’t have needed any ‘explosive revelations’ about Johnson and the Conservatives. It has been plainly obvious what this crowd of ideologues are about in politics. I’ll take the opportunity here to condemn the inertia, complacency, and lack of planning and preparation on the part of the Johnson government. But we’ve just seen a General Election in the UK in which the truth about the Conservatives, after years of privatisation, deregulation, and austerity, should have been plain. Of course, the fact that the Labour Party of Blair and Brown were complicit in the destruction of the public realm, indeed the public imagination, is a little confusing. But not that confusing. Corbyn was cut from very different cloth, and he was castigated for it and systematically rooted out. Where were you? We know the answer to that question. It’s a tough world for idiots. And for those who live with the consequences of their actions. And inaction.
It seems that Dr. John Ashton has been proven right, yet again. What a career this man has had. I first knew John Ashton as a Liverpool supporter who was present at the Hillsborough Disaster. He told the truth about complicity, culpability, and cover-up then, and was blacklisted and sidelined for his troubles, and the same thing has happened again. He appeared on BBC Newsnight March 11th and BBC Question Time March 12th, sounding the alarms that Johnson et al didn’t hear. The alarms were loud and clear. Johnson and his government wasted a month. And now it appears that Johnson missed five coronavirus Cobra meetings. Dr. John Ashton went missing, too. He mysteriously disappeared from the airwaves. Right wing rags peddling propaganda claimed that he had 'lost the plot' for suggesting that 3,000 Atletico Madrid fans should never been allowed to travel to Liverpool. He was right, they shouldn’t. Ashton was blacklisted from the media for telling the truth about Hillsborough. And now, 31 years on, the same thing.
'Professor John Ashton was written off by many, but his words and warnings appear to have been on the money so far.'
I've been fighting this battle my entire life. I may well be a 'ranting lefty.' The biggest mistakes I have made, though, lie in overestimating the reason and courage possessed by most people and underestimating cowardice and complicity. Like John Ashton, I saw it all on Hillsborough. In retrospect, it is amazing that the Hillsborough campaigners won the victory that they did. From government down to the people who masquerade as citizens of a public realm, the whole set-up is rotten and stinks to high heaven.
Let’s be honest, we are f***ed. There’s not enough of us with brain cells and backbone. The people who are clued up are few and isolated. It’s not the predators and exploiters we are up against so much as the lumpen passive mass clinging to normality. They have found a comfort zone, they have their reality TV and bucket lists that they tick off as they count down their pointless existence on Earth. Consumption used to be a wasting disease. It still is. I wonder if all those who fell for the concerted efforts to derail Corbyn are having second thoughts. I doubt it. But if enough of them had voted for Corbyn, who knows how many lives could have been saved, not just from coronavirus but from austerity. I wonder how many of those people who insist that ‘it is not the time for politics’ know how many deaths can be attributed to the austerity that has been imposed as political choice. I wonder how many care. The fact that they don’t know is a sure sign that they don’t care.
I read that John Ashton doesn’t care anymore. There has been a complaint made against him. They are complaining that he is exposing them. The authorities managed to keep him quiet after Hillsborough by threatening him, but he doesn't care anymore. And neither do I. This is all I have known my entire political life, government lies and cover-ups, and too many members of the public complacent and complicit and conformist. This is how it ends, a national scandal that costs lives, but the wrong people applauded and vilified.
I’m tired of all the war analogies, too. Someone claimed that the British are Lions led by Donkeys. That’s not true and never was. Lions that let the Donkeys keep leading them to death and destruction were never Lions in the first place. Too many passive consumers and not enough active, critical citizens, it is that simple. We don’t have the institutions and practices that breed citizens. We have a society that cultivates passivity and consumption rather than the intellectual and moral virtues. It is time for a root and branch change, not timorous tinkering. We need a full-blown socialism that has all parts of society working in concert, a society in which each and all look out for and look after each other.
And while I am here, it is gratifying to be thanked by people as I do my deliveries. ‘You are doing a grand job,’ I was told on Thursday. I enjoy my job, always have. But this public applause for key and essential workers is phoney. People do it because it is easy. It may be well-meaning but to have any real effect it requires a political commitment to restoring solidarity across the whole of society. Trade unions with some teeth, workers’ rights, effective legislation, much higher minimum wage, a maximum wage for the rich, too. Are you clappers up for any of that? Presuming that it is ever time for politics for you, that is.
"Cashiers and shelf-stockers and delivery-truck drivers aren’t heroes. They’re victims. To call them heroes is to justify their exploitation," Karleigh Frisbie Brogan writes.
As someone classed as a ‘key’ and ‘essential’ worker, I wholeheartedly concur with that statement. I know that come the end of this crisis that I will be back on the bottom of the social heap, doing a job that no-one valued much before, not even the company I work for. That is if I am still alive. I am braving work in the community despite two chronic illnesses that put me in the at risk category. I am now experiencing chest pains having been on the receiving end of yet more annoying, stupid, bigoted, abusive comments on Facebook. One minute I am looking forward to having a peaceful Easter Sunday with Andrea Bocelli in Milan and memories of my father, the next I am having to deal with a particularly nasty and vindictive assault on Pope Francis. That angered me deeply, had me shaking with rage and upset me profoundly. The effects have burned deeply into me. In isolation we should be maintaining contact and supporting one another. Instead, I have shut my social media connection down in an attempt to preserve my health and sanity. The last thing I need is heart trouble. Just over a year ago I was taken to hospital by ambulance with a suspected heart attack and had tests in the months following. It was down to deep anxiety as a result of some annoying American who insisted on encroaching on my time. And now this.
Frankly, looking at the future that is coming shortly, I really have no hope and, for my own sanity’s sake, I can no longer care. There is little evidence that this civilization has what it takes to turn things round. Too many don't learn by hard experience, too many fall for the lies and propaganda. I am not disillusioned, though. I have always known how deep the problem lies. I recall here Max Weber's argument that the modern nation-state in waging war does a better job at providing meaning and community for modern men and women than does religion. The horrible truth is that, in a modern meaningless world that has dissolved the good and fractured ethics and society into the subjective choices of discrete individuals, Weber is right. The individuals of this society lack what it takes to discern real meaning and establish genuine community. They are idiotes withdrawn into their own concerns in the private sphere. It is never time for politics for such people, they have long since disengaged from political activity in a meaningful public sphere. They are easy prey for ersatz meaning and surrogate community. They will make a public show of clapping for the NHS workers because it is easy and costs them nothing in terms of time and money. They could have voted for the public good over the years. Not enough did.
Almost as bad is the sight of progressives persisting in their attempts to check Donald Trump by way of reason, evidence, and ethics. Their commitment to truth, justice, and decency is commendable and does them well. But they still haven't grasped that this is not the world we live in. We live in a sophist world in which truth and justice is whatever the strongest power says it is. To beat the strongest, you have to re-constitute the world. People call Trump an idiot. He may well be, in the ancient Greek sense of idiotes, appealing to the self-interest of individuals, his own as well as that of the electorate. You can't beat a sophist at his own game, he will trump you every time. Trump is a master of reality TV politics and, let's face it, that's the world we are in. With everything we know about the Conservative Party and privatisation in the UK, people are only prepared to elect the Labour Party to government so long as it works within neoliberal parameters. We have just had over ten years of austerity, cutting public services and social welfare, weakening society within, and people vote Boris Johnson in in a landslide. The reason is the immediacy and shallowness of people and politics in a TV reality age. People don't think, don't reflect, don't actually know much and don't want to know. Even if they knew, it wouldn't make a difference. Because the structures of a genuine politics and public life don't exist. In the book Consumed Ben Barber developed the concept of 'infantilism' to argue that too many individuals in the contemporary age are not citizens at all, informed and active in public life, but consumers passively receiving the world around them. They respond not to reason and evidence but to soundbites, the shaping of images, the manipulation of emotions. These are the people who vote for 'Boris' (not Johnson) because 'he's a character.' He's also an incompetent lying toxic toff who is now responsible for who knows how many deaths. But like Weber said with respect to the surrogate community of the nation-state at war - it does a good job in investing the meaningless lives of modern men and women with meaning, and the more sacrifice the greater the meaning.
We could establish the communities of character and practice cultivating the virtues but here's the punchline, many leftists are actually liberals who rule the creation of this social, moral, and institutional infrastructure out as 'repressive of difference and otherness.' Great. The political and cultural counterpart of the economic libertarians whose anti-government ideology now dominates government and renders it impotent for collective ends. Two cheeks of the same backside. This will not end well.
And I need to pull clear and calm down. I am so deeply disappointed and disheartened that I fear that these chest pains I have been having will intensify and have me seeking medical attention at the very time I am trying to avoid hospitals and so keep well clear of this coronavirus. I'm in the at risk group, and the way that the idiocy of people encroaches on my time and life has put me even further at risk. I just feel like giving up entirely, taking what's left of me out of circulation. I can't see enough people learning and acting. People do actually read me on Academia, but they are too few to make a political difference in the world. It's like a little Republic of contemplatives, with no bridge to the world of action. The world of action seems irredeemably lost, mired in its self-validating self-absorption, deaf to reason and value.
What kind of people vote for Trump and Johnson? The same people whose inertia checks radical solutions and forces left alternatives to keep offering a middling moderate mediocrity that is designed to fail, thereby justifying even further reactionary lurches. All are complicit in institutional and system failure. There's just not enough people enabling us to muster the collective wit and will to even address, let alone resolve, the problems we face in the world. There is a lot of complacency and conformism, and a lot of passive radicalism. Even those seeking change are locked into a politics of permanent protest, forever issuing demands on government, whilst being utterly incapable of constituting that government for themselves. They can't motivate and mobilize people as actual change-agents, only as a passive public engineered to give their consent to pre-determined positions. And maybe people can't be the change-agents the scale of the problems we face requires. Hence the continual recourse to 'government' as rescue squad. The day is coming soon when rescue will not be possible, for the very reason that the resources have run out, in terms of political will as well as the finance.
I've been fighting this cause my entire life and now I am tired. I have precious little support. In fact, I don't seem to have any. I live entirely on my own resources, and they are now so thin as to be dwindling away to the non-existent. There are too many things going too wrong in too short a time; not enough, if anything, going right. And nothing to hold on to that contains even the seeds of a better future. Life has become a holding operation, with less and less to hold on to, hope for this world least of all.