The last time I wrote…i just checked – 4 days ago…the number of deaths was 85,000. Now at 118k it is 33k larger….the numbers are getting so big as to dazzle us into bemusement.
Whatever innocence there was about this unique journey the world has embarked upon, a unthought appreciation for the novel wierdness of events, that’s all gone; what’s left is a dawning appreciation for just how heavy this shit is.
I met that said a jogger, with that ashy straw coloured blond hair frequently found in this country, who cheerfully told me she was loving the lockdown…the nature, and the nice weather…and quieter roads. Just loving it. So there’s that.
I was out walking the dog for his nighttime prowl and just on the way back saw the gang from Graig Garden, formerly part of the global collective, Kebabish, leaving the shop. Most of the time, it’s run by a wonderful team from Pakistan, but occasionally they have an Irish person to help out.
“Good night”, I greeted. My contribution to the war on Covid is to greet everyone I meet in an act of humanity. ” “Good night” she replied, “Tis a quiet town now’, she added. ‘This a quiet world everywhere”, I replied, half pleased with myself with a spot evaluation: average content mediocre delivery. “I hope til end soon” she rejoindered in a voice that expected the opposite to happen, an almost religious air of blind, desperate belief in her delivery. I admired the strong flowing lilt of her voice and we on cheered by my excursion into the execution of greetings on behalf of humanity.
So that’s where we are now…we are on the first mountain, our first climb. We have no idea how this one will go, how long it will take, we have an idea on height from data so far but just how long, not really. After that there will most like be other peaks, but for now we need to focus on this hill, this one, right here right now.
Up and up go the numbers of cases and deaths. The stock markets remain in positive territory for the week as investors are buoyed by the stabilisation of numbers in black spots Italy, Spain and France. On the other hand there are nauseating reports of bodies being dumped on the streets in a city in Ecuador, a news story that signals the next phase of this global catastrophe, shocking images and stories from the less wealthy regions of the world, those places with crappy housing, public health and unresponsive governments. Such a drag!
The stock markets may feel that the initial storm has been weathered but I believe that they are failing to comprehend the nature of this storm. This is a storm where the initial devastation of high winds and heavy rainfall is replaced by a longer period of extensive rain. The drama of the high winds will have passed but the exhaustion of reservoirs and flood plains as the rain keeps falling will cause deeper and more traumatic damage. The recovery of the global economy at the same time as the virus is still circulating, still infecting people, will be slow and uneven.
On April 7th, a couple of days ago, the moon was full. And it claimed our attention more than a super moon normally does. And people who normally are oblivious to celestial landmarks were looking for a big, pink moon, as that is how it was presented online…a super pink moon. And people were wondering why it was not pink and if they had actually read one of those online articles instead of just the headline they would have learned that the ‘pink’ name comes from a flower which blooms pink in early North American spring.
That I see as an example of a phenomenon that occurs quite a bit in the global information age, the one where something local, in this case a name for a seasonal moon, quite suddenly becomes global due to it dominating online commentary. And things which for decades have had a local reach do not seamlessly transition to a global roll. Confusion and misinterpretation often ensue due to a lack of cultural context. With the c-19 making the world a giant petri dish, countries are looking over their perimeter at neighbouring countries to see how they are faring, and due to to a lack of cultural context, are misinterpreting what they see. This ‘glocalisation’ of the world, where social, economic and other systems are subject to simultaneously globalising and hyper localising tendencies is a feature of the modern world. However, I need a word for the confusion that results.
We climbed our local hill on the 7th to enjoy the super, pink moon. It was a super moon because it was bigger and it was bigger because it was at perigee, its closest point to earth. We had headlamps but for the most part made our way up the rocky path by the light of a rising moon. The town-village we live in looked so tranquil as we gazed down at the huddle of lights on a Tuesday evening. C-19 has of yet put human civilisation into hibernation rather than destroying it. Human civilisation stripped of its manic movement can appear very charming indeed. Some towns are better looking than their population.
Here’s a couple of pics to tell the story
smart
smart
smart
At the top of Brandon hill there is both a rusting cross and a cairn of stones. The metal cross dates from the 80ties the last spasm of hard core Catholicism in Ireland. Rage, rage against they dying of the light, and that’s what those soul soldiers of Rome did. That’s how I see the new right with its nationalism and raging against globalisation – a spasm made more intense by a realisation that the time of nationalism and countries and all that Victorian shit is coming to an end. The whole world is using Facebook for chrissakes. The path towards globalisation of this planet in economic, technological and political terms can be stymied but never stopped. It is human nature. C-19 will lead to more global collaboration on a political and health level, because the magnitude of the failings as countries compete for face masks, is just too overwhelming.
I have always thought on that hilltop cairns were built up by climbers carrying a stone up from the bottom of the hill. And Wikopedia agrees with me. But not too long ago I had the ‘awakening’ that people might just have gathered stones from around the top of the hill. Maybe they wanted a marker and just grabbed the nearest stones. I wonder why it took me nigh on 54 years to think that thought.
Well, the cairn is doing better than the rusting cross. It is more in harmony with its surroundings and does not give the impression, as the cross does, that it is insecure about its relevance and incapable of longevity. Irish people, I sense, are drifting back to a pagan like celebration of nature and an appreciation of how it can alter our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing. The rites of the church are too bound up with the institution in Rome. Who loves an organisation made of sanctimonious bureaucrats? Only those who find comfort in the rituals of bureaucracy, that’s who.
Posted inPandemic Timelines|Comments Off on Super Pink Moons & Spring in a time of Covid-19
Small towns are shaded places, and weird stuff grows weirder when in the shade. Conspiracy theories, those bedside stories for the marginalised, are endemic in small towns, and when it comes to plagues and pandemics the small town has seen it all before. This is not its first rodeo and that sense of we have been here before and despite whatever hardships we will be here tomorrow is the essence of a small town…clannish, phlegmatic, doughty and hard to impress.
The US had over a 1,000 deaths yesterday to take their grisly total over 10k. And from I read, on the admittedly left wing, young and morose biased reddit.com, suggests that the Republican heartlands in the centre and in the south are going to get hit hard. There, the citizens are taking their cue from Trump. They are eager to dismiss, and if cornered by reality they shrug their shoulders and put their chin out cornered and defiant, no longer interested in arguments of the mind bent instead on survival. They will go deep into the valley of death before casting off their beliefs…in Donnie.
And that’s why I have shorted the S&P500, because it represents the stocks of companies that serve the domestic American market. And I think those companies are going to be hit hardest in the southern and centre states because that’s where Covid is heading and that’s where they follow the Gospel of Donnie. Now, the S&P went up 6% today. I might be very wrong but I am in for the ride.
In other news Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in intensive care in the UK. There is what amounts to an online vigil for him. Reddit threads spanning thousands of messages and contributors all saying a few words…marking what is another remarkable moment in this very fucking trippy Covid world.
I’ll share a front page or tow to give a flavour of the vibe at this moment at 22:08, Mon 6 Apr, Ireland
It’s been another hectic few days in the squash that is a multitude of global stories continually evolving, stories that are largely similar in structure but each uniquely human in detail and effect.
Economically, the analysis has moved on from recession to depression. What is happening, newspapers report, is the biggest shock to the world economy since the great depression of the 1930ties. The centre of case growth and thus attention is starting to move from Europe to the US. Over the weekend, the numbers from Spain, Italy and France have started to show consistent drop-off, and this morning, Monday, the stock markets in Europe and Asia are up.
I have shorted the S&P500 with a moderate amount of money. I picked the S&P because it is more representative of the US domestic market, where a lot of pain has yet to be unleashed as Covid makes its way from the coasts into the heart of the continental country.
I took screenshots of some online newspaper front pages on Friday. I was stoned and the once-in-a-lifetime quality of this timeline we are living through…struck home, and I wanted a snapshot. The English right-wing mouthpiece, the Telegraph, which by its nature abhors public spending, restrictions on individual behaviour, and any limitations on business was forced to cast off its tendency to downplay the seriousness of things by the sheer volume of bad news…
never too late to panic
The left-wing newspaper the Guardian at the same time had a story titled, ‘Modern Piracy’ about the US Government diverting a PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) consignment meant for Germany to the US. That is some weird shit.
Modern Piracy in a Global Pandemic…the civilised world is displaying its undergarments
The level headed Financial Times was ready to call the situation a depression.
Global Cases:1,033,210; Global Deaths:54,442; Recovered:220,017
Yup, we have passed the million mark. Well done global humanity, you are hitting this one out of park! As Donald Trump is famous and much derided for saying, ‘we are going to win so much you’re going to be sick’. And how right he was!
Meanwhile, locally here in Ireland, we had our biggest one day jump in infection numbers. The new case number, 402, was received gloomily, as there was hopes, based on declining numbers in previous days (April 1 cases: 212), we were starting to see a trend of decline. Not so. In fact the messaging this week from Ministers and Health experts is that we are in this for the long haul. After ramping up the social restrictions in the last 3 weeks, clearly the powers-that-be feel they now have us where they want us and the messaging has moved onto one of settle in, these restrictions are going nowhere soon…despite the initial announcement of two weeks duration.
The numbers in the US are unlike anywhere else. Many defenders of Donald Trump spend their time online, not defending his efforts because they are indefensible, no, instead, they spend their time questioning the Chinese numbers. That’s the playbook. When Donald does something really stupid, their defence is whataboutism, that is they accuse somebody on the other side of doing the same thing. When he started separating migrant children from parents, he claimed that Obama did it first; likewise, the Wall Street Journal accused the Obama administration of deporting more migrants than Trump. The unwillingness of the populist right to defend Trump’s policies, primarily because those policies are based on an unpalatable prioritisation of capital over people, is, other than those policies themselves, the populist right’s least attractive quality.
The US will have a longer time of it than most. The virus has hit the globally connected coast states first. These are mostly democrat and have for the most part taken the threat more seriously. The fly-over red, Republican states are yet to see the surge, but will be hard hit when it comes due to their reluctance to embrace socialist concepts such as social distancing.
Our Covidiot award of the day goes to Brian Kemp, Governor of Georgia, who months into the pandemic, announced that he introduced quarantine restrictions yesterday after just discovering that asymptomatic carriers can transmit the virus. As the top rated comment on Reddit put it, ‘when When admitting you’re an idiot is the best defence you can come up with’. Truly one of Trump’s sonderkommandos.
So…yesterday the UN Secretary General described the Covid pandemic as the worst crisis since WW2. And that about sums up the general mood out there. Trump has cast off the cloak of breezy American exceptionalism and is now appearing with charts that describe projected infection and death rates. Shits just got serious. In the UK, they are as always comparing themselves to the Germans and not liking what they see. Their PM and Health Minister both contracted the virus and their response, though at this point little different from anywhere else, suffers still from the characterisation of their initial approach as ‘pursuing herd immunity’…which people of course heard as ‘culling the herd’. Stay away from bovine comparisons in a time of pandemic.
The clocks went forward yesterday, summer time and long evenings are here. I had to look that up, I wasn’t sure you see if it was backwards or forwards, the description that is, I knew 7pm became 8pm but was that change backward for forward? Could be either to my mind. But forwards it is. Ireland went into deeper lockdown on Friday, March 27th with further closings on non-essential businesses, a strengthened proscription of unnecessary travel, and a distance limit of 2km from home for exercise and other non-essential movement. This is due to end April 12 but that’s unlikely. The first significant local step was the closing of schools on March 14th. We have a ways to go. The Dow Jone index sits at 21,636 before the opening bell on March 30th. It peaked in February at 29,500, a drop of close to 27%. This is after a week in which it climbed off lows by over 10% to ‘have its best week since the 30ties’. Global cases continue their exponential increase, they are now at 734,994. Global darts are at 34,781. The US continues to set the pace with 142,746 cases while Italy leads the macabre death chart, with 10,779. Ireland’s numbers continue to creep up with 2,615 cases of infection and 46 deaths.
I expected with the new restrictions on travel that the river side walk would get busier. You know, get out of the house, get some exercise…that kind of thing. Not so. It was as empty and devoid of people as the streets. People are heeding the government and staying indoors. This shit’s better than a Netflix story of small town supernatural weirdness. Do we have any Covid-19 cults yet? Any doomsayers to tell us that this is part of the plan, and that we will regret not heeding the warnings? As with the scammers just give it time.
13 days since restrictions really kicked in in Ireland with the closing of the pubs. In the last 3 days, the United States has shot to the top of the charts in infections. It now has 100K with 1,543 dead. Next is Italy with 86,000 and 5,909 dead. Ireland’s numbers are 2,121 and 22, daily delta: +302 infections and +2 deaths. The infection rates are creeping up daily but there’s been no big spike. People around seem to think that the strategy of tamping down the numbers with aggressive testing, social isolation and contact tracing is working.
Back to what I was talking about above, my pet theory on the groups that make up the new right – the capital gang and the anti-immigration cohort. The economic hit from Covid-19 is so severe and so abrupt that the small government, pro-capital faction has had to accept the unacceptable: the massive monetary and fiscal intervention by governments around the world, for the simple reason that the shock is so large it threatens to savage all in front of it. There is no survival of the fittest when the jungle and everything in it is washed away in a cataclysm. So between gritted teeth, these champions of the efficient market welcome the billions of monetary and fiscal support as a necessary evil, aligning themselves more completely and truly with their right-wing fellow travellers that I they probably ever imagined. In their articles and commentary, they stress the uniqueness of the situation, how this can only be short term, and how the government must never seek to supplant that which can be better performed by private business, but a line has been crossed and I, for one, think it will be hard to uncross it.
The real long term impacts of this pandemic will be proportional to the costs born during it. This week, right now, possibly thanks to a fresh supply of weed, I’m of the opinion that the cost will be high, very high, and the long term impacts will be pronounced, exceeding so. It is a global crisis for a globalised world, and how we think about our world of today will change. The last great goal conflagration was WW2. That awful, dehumanising blood bath of a war between nation states gave rise to the United Nations and other international bodies. What started of as an expression of power by nation states ultimately exposed their limitations. The same will happen this time. After the period of fear driven border shutting and export restrictions has passed, once again nation states will shake their collective heads in frustration at their inability to cope with global problems and they will look to international collaboration as the way forward. Covid-19 will become a rallying point for those who believe in internationalism, many of whom have in recent years felt despair as the new nationalists who elected Trump pour disdain on international collaboration. The world is about to enter a new chapter, where the realities of climate change and the risks around global connectedness will become mainstream concerns. The globalisation of economies, powered by free flowing capital, relative global peace and the information revolution wrought by the internet has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty around the world; furthermore, it has removed the spectre of inflation, and made war between economically powerful nations almost impossible, such are the mutual dependancies in supply chains, ownership and markets.
Even with the global shutdown for the pandemic the global market place continues to ship products all around the world. Ali Baba continues to link manufacturers in China with customers around the world, Amazon continues to sell and ship products bought from its online marketplace, and Apple, Facebook, Google and Netflix continue to serve their global user base with ads, apps, content and connections. This globalisation will not stop because it brings new technologies and thus new opportunities to individuals, rich and poor, all around the world. No, the impulse will not be to stop globalisation, it will be to regulate it.
This virus is a nightmare for the new nationalists. The sheer uniformity of global response undermines their core message of single country exceptionalism. According to the nationalists in each country, theirs is unique. This idiocy puts to mind the image of dogs in front yards. Alsatians, collies, Jack Russels, mongrels, all kinds of dogs, all barking at the postman, all proclaiming with those barks that this place is special because this place is mine. When viewed from above with a cheap Chinese drone, all those front gardens look the same. Despite the differences in size and shape, they all have the same purpose and thus the same elements. They share a role and a function and so do the dogs that mind them. How much more do they have in common than what separates? How much more logical to gang together to find better ways to maintain the gardens and improve doggy health? It’s a no-brainer. There is no going back.
Last night Boris Johnson announced a lockdown for the UK while today Leo Varadkar stiffened the restrictions here, shutting down businesses and curtailing individual behaviour. The crisis continues its slouch towards Babylon with a viral pandemic that has reached all corners of the globe. The pubs in Ireland have been shut since March 15th and over the weekend, a couple of days ago, I saw through our window that faces the street something new, late night ramblers, slouching past zombie-like, prompted either through dislocation because with the pubs shut they didn’t know what to do with themselves, or because late night was the best time to avoid other people and the risk of contagion. Each day brings something new. Overnight the US Senate reached agreement on a 2 trillion USD package to support businesses and employees. Yesterday, I noticed that wearing plastic gloves in public had overnight became standard for ladies around here. Not so much if any mask wearing, but gloves, yes, all the way, but only for the ladies. The guys are still working on getting their social distancing game up to scratch.
It’s interesting to observe the behaviour of conservative governments in this crisis. The electorally successful flavour of conservatism that is seen in the UK, US and Brazil is called the new right, also alt-right, also populism. To my unschooled, non-rightwing observation, it appears to comprise of a coalition between small government Regan-ites who want low taxes, less regulation and unrestricted flows of capital, and nationalists who dismayed at the loss of economic security in Western countries want to restrict immigration bring industry back on-shore and put in places trade barriers to competition from overseas, especially China. These two groups differ in temperament, tastes, and motivation – one cares about capital and is motivated by greed, the other cares about security and is motivated by fear – but they share a common enemy – the largely urban, progressive class who want coordinated global action on climate change, public heath care provision and for whom immigration is a positive and an inevitable side-product of the global inequalities that persist and from which they themselves have benefited. During the Brexit saga, it seemed to me that the champions of capital group were the officer class while the Neo-nationalists were the rank and file. The Officer class were happy to champion the concerns of the ordinary soldiers in return for obedience and votes. However, in their house organs and among themselves, the officer class revealed their true intentions – a further rolling back of the state to allow productive private industry to flex its muscles and get things done, and antagonism to any trans-national efforts to regulate and tax flows of capital. The Officer class was happy to support the rank and file’s priority of immigration control for as long as capital is free to roam the seven seas in search of return there will always be places to source labour at an attractive price point. Capital things global, labour is obsessed with local.
