The Real News

          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.