Pandemic: A Century of Capitalism and Complacency

 

Women wearing face masks against the 1918 flu pandemic

It is a well-hackneyed, over-used nostrum that those who do not learn from history are bound to relive it; yet it is as relevant as ever in 2020 as the world reels from the impact of the first truly global pandemic since the 1918 to 1919 H1N1 “Spanish influenza”.

Covid-19 and H1N1 are both viruses that likely have their origin in poor animal husbandry, and both posed strikingly similar challenges to governments. The rapid onset of a new disease combined with gross economic inequality, ever faster modes of mass transit and increasingly diverse sources of information are also notably similar.

Influenza is a long-recognised disease recorded as far back as Hippocrates and Livy in classical times, but its pathology remained a mystery. By 1500 its range of symptoms, normally involving increased body temperature, sweats and nausea, were attributed by Italian doctors to the influence or “influenza” of either the cold or the stars. From the Enlightenment onwards, mass outbreaks were studied more scientifically and after the 1891 Russian flu epidemic doctors had formed the view that it was caused by a germ - anything from bad water to smog was seen as a potential breeding ground for what one medical professor referred to as “very clever little beasts”.

Influenza isn’t a germ, but rather a virus – Latin for poison – a tiny, non-cellular agent that is not alive but replicates inside the living cells of a host organism. They are sub-microscopic – 100,000 would just cover a fingernail. In 1918, before the invention of electron microscopes, this meant scientists were finding germ cultures that caused secondary infections rather than the primary viral source. Consequently, although some of the precautionary measures that were implemented were effective for both types of threat, there was a significant lack of understanding about how flu was transmitted.

The pandemic originated in the mid-West of the USA where in January, an unusually aggressive strain of flu emerged among livestock farmers in rural Haskell County in Kansas. The outbreak disappeared after 7 weeks, but one local farmer, Albert Gitchel, was shortly after drafted into the army ahead of deployment to the Great War front in Europe. He worked at Fort Riley as a cook before falling ill on 11 March. By the end of the month, 1126 of his comrades had joined him and 46 had died.

The disease was far more virulent than previous influenzas – tingling fingers led rapidly to high temperatures and severe vomiting. While many recovered quickly, the symptoms were more persistent in others and after 5 or 6 days developed into fatal respiratory infections. Although some medical scientists and doctors like William Welch urged quarantine measures, the US Army continued deploying infected regiments across the Atlantic Ocean on cramped troop ships where the virus spread exponentially.

In this way, the flu reached Europe. Army bases such as the British at Etaples became centres of infection as men moved to and from the cramped conditions of the trenches to equally packed barracks before embarking on crowded trains and ships back to England for leave. By July, Manchester recorded its first cases, while the German army delayed its final major offensive as the virus decimated its’ ranks.

The virus reached neutral Madrid and the King of Spain succumbed. Ironically, his death and the uncensored debate about it in the Spanish press led to the unwarranted moniker of the “Spanish flu” (resulting in hostility to Hispanic people back in the USA where the “Spanish Lady”, a skeleton in a black flamenco dress, became an icon of both the disease and naked racism).

Dr James Niven took the initiative in Manchester

The British Government censored anything they felt might damage wartime morale –  Arthur Newsome, the closest equivalent to a Chief Medical Officer, decreed it important to “keep calm and carry on.” Concerned to maintain munitions production, the government took few steps to counter the disease, even when Prime Minister Lloyd George nearly died from it – he was secretly treated in Manchester City Hall for several weeks after attending a crowded war bond rally.

Yet it was a Scots-born Manchester doctor, James Niven, who from the outset identified that this flu was far more aggressive and needed a proactive response. He lobbied to close schools, distributed at his own expense over half a million posters urging personal protective measures and presented the first public health films with a character called Dr Wise advising on social distancing and masks. The city’s death rate was possibly as low as one eighth of the norm, though it didn’t spare Niven from eventual suicide.

After a summer lull, an even more virulent strain emerged in September. Victims were much more prone to fatal secondary infections, many dying with a characteristic deep blue skin tone resulting from pus-filled lungs starving the body of oxygen.

Cities like Sheffield and mining communities across Yorkshire were particularly badly affected owing to the close working and badly ventilated conditions in heavy industry and mines, as well as often cramped housing. The illness led some to desperation – Joseph Meek, a Normanton miner, in a curious harbinger of 2020, drank carbolic disinfectant not to cure but to kill himself, while some parents facing their own deaths killed their children for fear of no one being left to care for them.

Yet the government continued with its complacency, advising treatments such as rest – impossible for people scraping by in a time with no sick pay – consuming Bovril and opium, or even inhaling potash. Trains and trams ran unaffected and shops, pubs and theatres stayed open. Where local authorities did take measures, these were half-hearted – in York, for example, American soldiers were banned from cinemas, but locals were free to attend.

Other countries similarly had at best disparate and inconsistent responses: in the USA, municipalities often took responsibility for public health and were often at odds with the preferences of state governors. While some areas had draconian rules on, for example, mask wearing, others were much more lax and in several cities demonstrations were held to complain about measures viewed as affronts to American individualism. All the same, the Federal government passed the Defense of the Realm Act to censor any stories in the press that it deemed could spread “fear or dismay” – a bizarre line of reasoning not unknown to the President of the USA in 2020’s pandemic.

Nevertheless, the USA reeled from the disease. Cities became ghost towns as it spread and mass graves became commonplace. In all some 550,000 US citizens were to die of the flu – 40% of all the US military casualties in the Great War succumbed to it rather than German guns. And the end of the conflict brought little lasting relief - armistice celebrations in November led to a further round of infections, unwittingly causing many more deaths around the world.

By the turn of the year however, the virus had largely run its course in Europe and North America. A final wave in Spring 1919 was much milder as the virus had by then infected most of those it could – cleverly, they know not to completely destroy their hosts, although in June one of its final victims was Yorkshireman Mark Sykes, of Levantine Sykes-Picaud infamy. (He was dug up in 2008 to recover viral remains to help treat the Swine flu outbreak, a variant of H1N1.)

Of course, alongside France and the USA, Britain was an imperial power and trade and military activities carried it round the planet to their colonies. India, where British military railways injected the virus across the sub-continent, was to endure over 17 million casualties, while one in fifty Africans – one in ten in Tanzania – perished. China and Russia were also badly affected, though civil wars in both countries meant only estimates are possible.

Notably, Australia quarantined itself, banning all entrants – like its New Zealand neighbour now, it consequently avoided the devastation wreaked elsewhere. At home, working class civilians and troops were by far the worst affected. Over 30,000 British troops had succumbed, while in the UK itself around 200,000 people died, with many others facing long-term problems.

In all one in three of the global population was infected and between 2.5% and 10% of those died – btween 100 million and as many as 200 million people, depending on the estimate. The normal flu death rate was about 0.1% by comparison.

Angela Friedman survived both pandemics. 

 

 

Today, there are parallels with 1918 but differences too. Covid emerged suddenly. The UK Government was more focussed an international crisis than on public health and social media has spawned a range of debate from the highly intellectual to the dangerously ill-informed. 

However, viruses are much better understood and treated infintely more effectively by modern medicine, leading to a significantly lower death rate. Parallel to this, the implementation of social distancing, protective face masks, and proper quarantines - rather than the confused, partial ones in the UK - clearly make a significant difference. 

This is borne out in many places, but perhaps most poignantly by Sweden's ultimately awful death totals following its decision to avoid large-scale lockdowns. Per capita, with 36 covid deaths per million, Sweden stands between the UK (35  deaths pm) and USA (43 deaths pm) in having a high level of deaths - in contrast, its more precautionary neighbours in Norway (6 deaths pm) and Denmark 10 deaths pm) have very substantially lower mortality rates. (Source - Statista)

One heartening personal story of how things have changed is that of Angela Friedman, who was born on a migrant ship from Italy to New York during the 1918 pandemic. Aged 101, she survived contracting covid-19 earlier this year - in spite of previously suffering cancer, sepsis, internal beleeding and several miscarriages. Angela may have superhuman genes, as her daughter proudly declared, but even with these her chances of survival were doubtlessly much better this year than when she was born.

While the current pandemic is dreadful, having taken over a million lives and blighted millions more, and has been badly managed by many governments, the death rate is much lower than 1918-1919: a year which now stands as a striking example of what happens when almost nothing is done at all. It is a lesson right-wing politicians in the UK, USA, Brazil and India would have done well to have learned rather than indulging conspiracy theories about Big Pharma or secret Chinese biological warfare - both with striking antecedants in 1918 when either asprin manufacturers or the Kaiser were blamed for the flu.

Fortunately, most countries have taken a more collective and interventionist approach to the current public health emergency, otherwise there is no doubt the death toll would be much, much higher. Strong public health systems have proven their efficacy: such as the one in socalist Cuba, the South Korean track and trace process and the remarkable achievements of the west African country Senegal which, with few medical resources, has achieved the second lowest death rate on the planet by drawing on its long experience of fighting infectious diseases such as ebola and dengue fever.

Yet so too remain the true causes of our maladies – the exploitation of our environment and animals; the inequality of our health, housing and welfare systems; and politicians who advocate for profit over people and planet. We live in a world where, in the middle of this pandemic, water, that most natural and life-essential substance, has become a tradable commodity on the Futures market - this means people are now speculating on its availability to profit from its anticipated (and from investors' perspective, its preferred) scarcity. 

This is the same world where an invisible dot with some nasty prongs has almost brought our system to its knees in a matter of weeks, so you might be forgiven for hoping we would have learned to treat our habitat with greater respect and vow to pursue new ways of living in harmony with each other and our environment. Yet so far, such a change is, to put it mildly, elusive. 

Covid is not so much an existential biological threat to our species as a piercing wake up call we ignore perhaps literally at our peril. The next pandemic may well be much worse, and much sooner than we imagine, as we continue to degrade our world and tangle and tear and transform the very threads of existence. All for cash.

Capitalism remains the true virus - and socialism the only effective vaccine.

 

Below: from the British Film Institute; a colourised version of the 1918 public health film Dr Wise

Cold Blue Eyes: Make It One for Covid...

Drinking in pubs resumed at 6 a.m. this morning in England as Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed back to "normality" in spite of the UK death toll from Covid19 remains stubbornly higher than the combined European Union members. The Tories have been accused of pushing the country back to "normality" to satisfy the profits of their funders ahead of the safety of the public.

It's quarter to breakfast

Everyone's in the place

Including you and me.

So set 'em up Gove 

You obsequious bell-end

I think you should know

That you're not my friend, 

At the end of this dire episode

So make it one for blue Boris and one more

For covid.

I've got the routine
Put more fake news in the machine
I'm feeling so bad
Can't you make the stats easy... less sad???
I could tell you a lot
But none of it true, you old toad
Just make it one for blue Boris, and one more
For covid...

You know I talk shit,
but Mikey we're a great fit
And hid all these deaths we kept off TV.
So when I get boozed, won't you listen to me
'Til I've snoozed away
For my doze on the commode?

Make it one for blue Boris and one more
For covid.

Well that's how it goes
And Mike, I know you're gettin' anxious to close...
In on wasted old me,
So hope you didn't mind my not paying the fee
But this truth that I found,
It's gotta be drowned
Or the voters might explode.
So make it one more for blue Boris and one more
For covid...

The long, it's so long, the long, very long.... Oh God...

Johnson with ally Tim Martin, owner of Weatherspoons, who initially refused to pay his staff during lockdown and angrily told them to get other jobs. He also briefly tried to stay open during lockdown.

The CovidWealth

I watched a program about coronavirus in Italy last night. So sad, seeing an 18 year old guy on a ventilator and a teenage daughter sobbing with fear over the safety of her two doctor parents. While here we have Bournemouth and in the USA people coughing over others to proclaim their right to not wear masks.

I remember the start of the Aids pandemic. It was new. It touched gay men especially, at a time when they were stigmatized even more than now, some even having been to jail for their sexuality in the not so distant past.

And I remember the panic, the fear and discrimination. I remember the plastic gloves put on the board in the staffroom where I worked in Liverpool for us to wear in case a customer bled on some of the building society's money. I remember the obscure iceberg adverts and the prejudicial bile smeared over tabloid front pages. The horror when Diana touched "these people".

And I remember the dead. So very many of them.

There was prejudice aplenty and alongside that discrimination and lack of care. But one thing stands out - no one doubted Aids was real. No one said it was invented or caused by TV ariels or whatever. No one said it was made up. No one said it didn't pose a danger, although admittedly there was plenty of misunderstanding and exaggeration, a good dollop of it the product of homophobia.

But now, 30 to 35 years on, as covid spreads, what has happened to us? Tens, hundreds of thousands die while millions have been on ventilators or at death's door, yet tens of millions more ignore simple safety measures, demand the right to have a haircut or get to a pub. They've not been sick. They don't personally know any corpses. They want a f***ing burger and they want it now.

We shouldn't be surprised. For 30, 40 years, our rulers have told people to look after themselves.  No such thing as society, community is the nostalgically misplaced wetdream of smug liberals' imaginations. If you have a hard time, it's the fault of migrants, shirkers, malingerers and thieves.

The private has replaced the public. The individual trumps the collective.

So if you've not been sick.... Or maybe even if you have been, mildly... Other people's problems aren't yours, though maybe they are inconveniences, problems in themselves. Why should you stay at home, or wear a mask, or miss a pint or haircut or the sales...?

It's actually wildly against human nature not to care, not to help. The folk who claim otherwise are misguided or signed up sociopaths. Our nature is to pull together, to hold each other up. The archaelogical table, historical records, psychology, even faith... All speak to the essence of homo sapiens being our social nature, our compassion and empathy, our ability to see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others.

Apart of course from when we've been subjected ceaselessly to propaganda saying we don't, that we are inherently selfish and need to look after ourselves as otherwise no one will. When we have been excluded, stigmatized, fed a diet of hate by supposedly responsible media and with ultimately anti-social "social media" amplifying rumour, innuendo, conspiracy, threat and downright falsehood multiple times over, the common breaks down and the individual stands, and falls, alone. Thatcher's legacy comes finally to its toxic fruition in a bleak, terrifying wasteland.

But set aside our inherently good Nature, our compassion and empathy. Atomise our society, look inwards and destroy the solidarity and deny the common good, and one day the problem, the barrier bayed at by the Angry, the scapegoat driven into the Wilderness...
Today it may seem a ridiculous thought, but it could so very easily be you.

Travels In Time And Space: Cummings to be new Dr Who!

 Who?

Dominic Cummings, adviser to Boris Johnson, has landed the prestigious part of the new Doctor Who.

BBC producers insist that this is not to mollify the eugenics advocate and former night club manager's plans to castrate the corporation, but is rather down to his ability to be physically present in two spaces at the same time, as well as his astonishing power to cure covid without so much as a twist of his sonic screwdriver.

Who could have failed to be moved to tears just four weeks ago, as the BBC gave his wife, Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield, a special slot to talk about how she had fallen to her knees and begged the Timelords to spare her gravely ill partner? Who wouldn't have had to stifle a sob as she recounted how, after rushing home and bravely nursing her, he struggled breathlessly with the apparent insolence of the covid virus in daring to infect a genetically superior body like his ripped torso? As the presenters choked back their grief, she compellingy described his existential battle, seemingly confined in their London home, something she later wrote more about in her rightwing magazine.

Yet at the same time, neighbours of Dom's parents were peering over their hedge 260 miles away on Teeside to observe the Master Race's mightiest hoofer bopping to a high volume outdoors rendition of Abba's Dancing Queen in his age-vulnerable Mum and Dad's garden. Given that he had until then been apparently hovering between this world and the next, some have speculated if he may have been undergoing some form of regeneration process.

It was this astonishing ability of Cummings to alter the very fabric of truth and reality, while also dispersing any traces of shame or hypocrisy at a sub-atomic level, that apparently swung him the part. "And he comes complete with eccentric clothing," a BBC spokesperson enthused, though adding wistfully, "At least, when he actually wears some."

She did go on to admit though that scriptwriters are in crisis conference trying to work out how to explain to Cummings that "exterminate!" is in fact the catchphrase of his dalek enemies and that it would not be a good plot twist for the new Doctor to put them in charge of managing care homes.

A World Made Small

Once I dreamt
Of galaxies of fire
Streaming stars of possibility
And supernovas of desire.

A future potent
with hope of a dawn
that would never set
Never darken again.

But you with golden locks
And loafing, languid mind
In oak-dark boardrooms
Spun while all declined

Exhaling tyrant breath
In dreadful mirth
At fate's misfortune -
Your accident of birth.

Bumbling and fumbling
Like an adolescent in the dark,
In a world made small
By your jolly jape, your prefect's lark,

Like a cuckoo in straw,
You might bluster and fluster
And wheeze and deny
With all the deceit you can muster.

But the lyre is broken,
Curtains torn in Empire's hall,
Your days draw late
Whispers echo in coming Fall.

With empty heart and hollow eyes
What spectres you must flee,
In this once-sceptred Isle
Set on a septic sea.

But no Antony, only Brutus
Shall the tin throne attend,
A kindless, covid kiss
Thy final, foolish, bloody end.

Jonestown, USA: The Death Cult of Donald Trump

"I could stand on the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters."

So Donald Trump lauded his supporters for their blind loyalty ahead of the 2016 Presidential election. His comments typically divided opinion - his detractors saying he was fomenting violence, his supporters claiming it was a joke.

Both rather missed his point: his voters, his "base", were and remain so loyal that any normal contract of mutuality between a political leader and their supporters has been pretty much suspended in these days of populist farce with the coronavirus crisis somehow the surreal icing on the most amazingly beautiful cake. Ever.

As Trump's already crowded tableau of the grotesque has expanded exponentially, many have asked how such a character has come to lead what remains in destructive terms at any rate the most powerful nation on the planet. He has comprehensively failed to deliver any of his promises to his disenchanted base, instead delivering tax cuts to the rich like himself, and plundering the White House budgets and sinecures with an unparalleled nepotistic largesse. His behaviour ranges from the bullying to the bizarre and back again, his own loyalty to his staffers as thin as his thin skinned ego.

And yet still he remains a not unlikely victor in the November elections, assuming he allows them to take place (not as frivolous a conjecture as a few short weeks ago). While many Americans are clearly terrified and embarrassed by him, just as many love him and hang on his every word, rebutting his many lies as either the Deep State forcing him to do its evil bidding or alternatively denouncing the reportage of his comments as biased "fake news", even when the man is broadcast mouthing his verbiage.

We may have thought he had reached his nadir last week when amidst his latest of many ramblings on the covid pandemic, he encouraged armed groups to go onto the streets to "liberate" themselves in States that were following the lvirus lockdown rules set his own Federal government. With the President effectively calling for an act of treason by his followers, it has to remain an open question as to what these same groups of nascent fascist militia will do with their heavily armed arsenals if Trump does lose the election, the so-called "boogaloo" insurrection fostered enthusiastically on social media by the US far right. But, incredibly, there was worse yet to come.

Recently, the medically ignorant President waxed on TV about hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that a rogue French doctor briefly claimed could help cure Covid-19 based on a very limited trial. Later research has in fact indicated that it actually leads to a higher than average death rate among covid patients treated with it. But this was too late for one elderly Arizona couple who were scared of contracting the virus. They watched the President speaking on the alleged "game-changing" virtues of chloroquine and took it in the form of a treatment for fish parasites that contained the drug. The man died and his wife was hospitalised. 

At least chloroquine is a drug, approved for treating some conditions even if Covid-19 virus is not among them. But yesterday, in what must surely become a moment of infamy for the USA, Trump mused in yet another eclectically self-centred press conference on the merits of intravenous administration of disinfectant and ultraviolet light into human bodies to kill coronavirus. Dismissing the objections of a reporter as fake news, he "consulted" with a rather awkward looking, but criminally silent, White House doctor on whether she had heard of such treatments and suggested she was going to experiment on them.

 "I am not a doctor," he candidly admitted. "I am a person who has a good... you know what..." - he gestured to his head.

The reaction across the world has range from humorous disbelief to frustrated anger but Trump's supporters have rallied to him, predictably denouncing the scientists and reporters who highlighted his shocking statements as misrepresenting him or not sharing his genius-level insight, or both. Some claim he was referring to ozone therapy, an as yet unproven treatment touted by some as a potential response to the virus.  Much more likely, he was thinking of the intensive lobbying by Mark Grenon, who has been marketing a form of industrial bleach, chlorine dioxide, as a cure for cancer, autism and, now, surprise, surprise, coronavirus. Like Trump's monologue suggested, Grenon, who manufactures chlorine dioxide and sells it to be taken orally in water, apparently believes that if disinfectant kills something outside the human body, it can be taken internally as well.

Consequently, in the hours following his diatribe, government officials and cleaning manufacturers have had to scurry anxiously to the airwaves to warn people not to drink or inhale bleach or other disinfectants given the potentially fatal consequences. And yet, the very pleadings of these "experts" may well be like a red rag to some raging Trumpites to believe in their President's self-proclaimed genius and damn the advice. There must be a high chance indeed that some, out of faith or confusion or both, will be mixing dettol with their beer right now with possibly fatal consequences.

Liberals may sneer at the seemingly moronic nature of Trump's base. Social media is awash with jokes about Darwinism and faked pictures of rednecks demanding their right to die. But snake oil peddler Trump is very much a product of the society liberals created, a reaction to the bloodless pseudo-meritocracy of the Clintons, Obamas and Bidens of this world. They it was who presided over the destruction of swathes of US industry and the communities associated with it through their imposition of the free trade NAFTA framework over the 25 years up to Trump's election. As industry after industry folded, lives were ruined as liberals proclaimed a place called Hope, a comfortable Nirvana for some, but for many a distant, unreachable mirage.

It is not lack of intelligence nor some form of inherent misanthropy that drives most Trump supporters to lionise and pump up the ego of this narcissist. It is the desperation of decay, of the decline and fall of the American Dream and its transformation for many into a Nightmare of impoverishment. It is the hope of a quick and simple solution that will bring instant results - as with most forms of populism, there is no patience or planning, just a visceral desire. Trump may peddle lies, but so did Democrat after Democrat, from Clinton to Obama, and Trump's falsehoods are at least ones that chime with their sense of loss and anger. That his claims are incredulous matter little - for in this context incredulity is synonymous with hope.

It is not an isolated phenomenon in a state of social collapse, which is effectively what the USA has been in for two decades or more. History has repeatedly shown how tenuous any society is and how quickly the veneer that marks civilisation can fall away.

In the fifth century, as the Roman Empire collapsed, the astonishing logic of philosophers accurately calculated the distance of the Moon from the Earth to within a few thousand miles. Yet this triumph of rational enquiry fell away in barely two generations to a dislocated world filled with levitating saints and talking serpents. This destruction of reason in favour of the fantastic was driven by the religious dogma of Church and Emperors who closed down the classical schools of philosophy and science on the grounds that it was heretical to seek to understand or explain the God-given world. Rather it was simply to be accepted.

This has distinctly uncomfortable echoes over fifteen centuries later in the growing power of evangelical Christians within American government , which has fervently dismissed science as worthless or even malign in the covid crisis. Pastors and preachers excuse Trump's self-evident abundance of sins on the grounds that he has been sent from God Himself and publicly bless the Orange Prophet. And while Trump's definition of monotheism is almost certainly intimately concerned with placing an idol named Donald at its centre, he obviously does nothing to deter the fawning adulation of the evangelical priesthood.

Heaven sent, allegedly.

So unsurprisingly, wrapped up in a combination of existential despair and millenarian fantasy, like so many religious zealots throughout history, Trump's base in no small numbers would seemingly contemplate giving their own lives for the President. When some of his elected supporters suggested older Americans would be willing to die to save the economy from the impact of the covid lockdowns, they found an abundance of apparently willing victims. And similarly, when Trump ruminated on opening the churches for Easter in spite of the virus, plenty of pastors were happily jangling their temple keys.

Yet while his opponents detest him with a vengeance, there is a little festering Trump curled up inside every centrist: Hillary Clinton's disparaging characterisation of his supporters as "a basket of deplorables" in 2016 wasn't a one-off accidental comment. It simply illustrated how contemptuously removed from ordinary Americans the US elite has become with the same remote Political Class that plagues the pseudo-democracies in much of the rich world. They may sarcastically dismiss the demands of protesters for an end to the lockdown, but seem relatively impervious to the fact that without their next pay cheque, many of them are financially ruined in a nation with little welfare support. Work or starve: it is even today an all too familiar choice for the US poor.

And so while they will emphatically deny it, for liberals, Trump is a necessary evil, distasteful but hypocritically serving the purpose of focussing discontent on ethnic minorities, Muslims and migrants. However shrill, however embarrassingly stupid he may be to them, he keeps the line of sight well away from the real thieves of hope and helps them neutralise any true insurgency, such as Bernie Sanders' now kettled socialist movement.

Trump may or may not win at the polls this autumn, but either way, post-pandemic, the social dislocation will accentuate rapidly and new movements and leaders will emerge. A younger generation is rising which will inevitably have to face the increasingly sharp choice to be made: co-operation or conflict, Utopia or Bartertown.

But for now, the USA is hostage to a cult, one led by a man whose phraseology and thinking have become increasingly infantilised. He has no plan beyond the next cowardly boast, the next demand for praise, the next incredible, simple solution to our complex world, revealed to it by He Himself. In this insatiable quest for his personal aggrandisement, he may not shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue, but like a latter day Jim Jones with the USA as his very own Jonestown, he will happily take sacrifices in honour of the divinity he deep down believes himself to be.

The only difference, of course, is that at least Jim Jones took the poison himself.

Pandemic

PANDEMIC

The streets are empty
The hospitals full.
The last bread gone
The final bell tolled in school.

Stop the trains
Then shut your gate
To this land of silence
And quiet isolate.

But in space so sudden so small
Behind such fearful fences,
Our minds become the Universe,
Awakened realms of senses

Where technicolour dreams might fashion
The world that we can have
Of sharing, and of caring
And always, always, of love.

#StayAtHome