There’s a bloke who, somewhat
eccentrically, cycles slowly and continuously round town playing music, loudly,
from a large, lo-fi boombox strapped to his back. Now that there is no traffic
noise, he can be heard approaching from several streets away. Lockdown has not
deterred him, nor does he seem to mind the lack of an audience – which puts
paid to my theory that the motive for his activity is to annoy people. But then
lockdown is proving to be an other-worldly dimension, where the accepted state
of affairs is re-ordered, re-prioritised or called into question altogether.
I count myself fortunate not to be in
a position whereby staying at home is any kind of hardship. I know this is not
the case for millions of people around the world, which is just one of the issues
that I have more time to contemplate now that the clutter of life outside has
been pared down to essentials. Things are quiet – too quiet. In fact, after
waking in the night and imagining myself completely alone on the planet, I was glad
to hear the sound in the morning of roadworks starting up outside the window.
Searching the media for news of
anything other than the covid-19 pandemic, I am struck by the fact that all
things are connected with it though some, nevertheless, appear to have an
upside. For example, residents in the Lancashire village of Cartmel can now get
a £5 takeaway meal from the Michelin-starred restaurant at its centre, the
chefs having no other work to do. And there is a Bavarian-based distributor of
sex toys who, in the first week of lockdown, reported a sharp rise in orders,
including a 3,000% increase in demand for fetish nurse uniforms. Cruel irony? Based
on this news alone, it seems likely that we can expect another generation of
baby boomers that will, one day, rebalance the aging demography of the rich
nations. Then there are some items that are puzzling: for instance, the
government’s plea specifically to video-gamers to stay at home. I had always assumed
they were already the stay-at-home bedrock of the take-away pizza industry.
But behind all the news items,
whatever the source and regardless of the subject, there lurks one over-arching
issue: geopolitics. The most obvious example of this comes from the most obvious
source – President Trump – who, in his anxiety to deflect his critics’ attention
from his own blasé handling of the pandemic, seeks to blame the Chinese
government, the WHO or any other party that he thinks he might successfully
rally his supporters to condemn. His motive? To ensure that he gets re-elected.
And if he does get re-elected, the world will be in even worse shape to resist
the next global pandemic. In his book, America: The Farewell Tour, Chris
Hedges explains why. Donald Trump’s mission is to do the bidding of America’s monopolising
corporations, whose appetite for profit is insatiable and whose disregard for
the public good in the quest for that profit is unconscionable. Unrestrained
capitalism has left America with relatively few publicly owned facilities, an
expensive, profit-motivated health-care system that is beyond the means of
millions of its citizens and a military establishment bloated out of all
proportion to the purpose of national defence. The more Trump blusters, the
more it becomes evident that the covid-19 pandemic, in exposing the weaknesses,
is also exposing to view the excesses of the economic system over which he
presides.
It is the pandemic that makes the
headlines but, if you look critically, the overstory is this: the present trend
of capitalism, whereby all resources become privately owned by an ever-concentrating
elite, is a route back to the impoverishment and servitude of the masses, last
seen in the middle ages, when eccentrics were burned as witches.
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