26 April 2020

TRUMP THE CHUMP

Sent by a friend - and if you used to think George W Bush was the worst US President ever, all we had to wait for was Donald Trump in the North American continent and Bolsonaro in the South American continent and you start to get the picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkU1ob_lHCw

20 April 2020

SANDERS AND PALESTINE: A POST MORTEM


Sanders and Palestine: a Post Mortem




Photograph Source: shimriz – CC BY 2.0

Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary.  Now, I’m no operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or electability.  It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make it visible.

Sometime ago, I was added to an online group of Palestinian Americans organizing for Bernie Sanders’ campaign.  The specific identity of the group is immaterial.  Many such groups existed and as far as I can see the outcome of their work fit a standard template:  we’re Palestinian (and thus purport to speak for all Palestinians from within the United States); Bernie’s not perfect (but he really is kinda perfect); Bernie’s by far the best on Palestine (trust us); this isn’t merely about Palestine (Palestine is merely the pretext); we’ll be sure to hold him accountable (even though we just finished giving him unqualified support).  I don’t want to put Palestinians on the spot; all statements supporting presidential candidates look more or less the same.  Let’s call it a limitation of the genre and leave it at that.

So, members of this group were working on a statement explaining why Palestinians should support Sanders.  Somebody put up a shared document with various points exaggerating Sanders’ record as an advocate for Palestinian rights and some fantasizing about Palestine’s future under a Sanders presidency.  Again, pretty typical stuff, which is to say a whole lot of bullshit.

In the margin of the document, a user asked, “Is Sanders a Zionist?,” to which another person replied, “Yes he is.”  No discussion ensued.  The question and answer hung in silence until the document went public, at which point any consideration of Sanders’ Zionism had been scrubbed.

I’m less interested in the question of Sanders’ Zionism than I am in the reasons for scrubbing Zionism from the conversation about Sanders.  Sanders doesn’t call himself a Zionist, and the label can flatten a pretty wide range of thought, but if we examine Sanders’ positions against what the Palestine solidarity movement understands to be Zionism, then Sanders unambiguously fits the description.  He constantly affirms Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.  He opposes right of return.  He treats Netanyahu as the aberration from a humanistic norm.  Yeah, he’s a Zionist.  This fact wasn’t lost on his Palestinian American champions.  It just didn’t seem to bother them very much.

But let’s leave the question of Sanders’ Zionism to the side, for it has proved effective at putting colleagues at loggerheads.  Whatever Sanders or any other politician thinks about Palestine should have no influence on how Palestinians think about Palestine.  In fact, according to the mythography of electoralism, it’s the community’s duty to educate the politician.  In order to accomplish that goal, the community needs to convey principles it considers nonnegotiable.  For Palestinians, those principles would include right of return and full equality in all of historic Palestine.

That’s not what happened in the various statements of support.  Instead, their authors instrumentalized Palestine as an abstract commitment—an idea mobilized through performances of ethnic verisimilitude—in order to boost a campaign extraneous to the actual work of decolonization.  Rather than pressuring the politician, they made demands of the audience and assured people opposed to Zionism that voting for someone pledging to uphold Israel’s “Jewish character” wasn’t a pragmatic concession, but an act of virtue, a feat of devotion to Palestine.

What does it mean that groups visibly and proudly identifying as Palestinian felt it necessary to scrub Zionism in order to boost a politician jockeying to supervise US Empire?  By what moral calculus did those groups take vital demands off the table?  Did they have the consent of refugees for whom right of return is sacrosanct?  Of the Palestinian working class in the United States?  Or was it an exercise in unilateral leadership by the diasporic professional class?

I know what the response is:  we didn’t mythologize anyone; we regularly pointed out his weaknesses.  Well, not really.  (I didn’t see you pointing out that Sanders is a Zionist, for example.)  Exerting tremendous energy to conceptualize Sanders as a benevolent uncle figure and then occasionally saying “he needs more work on this issue” or “we need to keep pushing him” was a cardinal feature of mythologization, as was running interference with points of view more palatable to the mainstream when fellow anti-Zionists dissented from the consensus.  Saying “he’s the best on Palestine even though he’s not perfect” was the rankest kind of mythmaking.  It confused “being better than a terrible field” with “being good.”

I saw in these statements a yearning to matter, a desire to at long last be taken seriously after decades of abuse and disregard.  It’s a normal response to subordination, to the pain of continuous betrayal, but no amount of high-minded talk about an electoral revolution will compel sites of power to care about Palestinian Americans.  They shouldn’t be our audience, anyway.  Palestinians are admired by people around the world who value justice and resilience and dignity.  Let’s not forgot our place, which isn’t among consultants and technocrats, but with the ignominious, the surplus, the unbeloved.

During the primary, and during the 2016 election cycle, whenever I expressed skepticism about deploying Palestine in service of a presidential campaign, other Palestinian Americans quickly intervened:  “Well, I mean Steve’s making an, ahem, important point, but, here, let me butt in and do it, you know, more responsibly.”  I found it to be a pathetic move.  The idea was to keep radicalism in check, or to snuff it out.  Decolonization, however, is inherently radical in the metropole.  The interventions were thus a form of ostracism:  we don’t want disreputable elements of our community running a bus over this good foot we’re trying to put forward.  The limits of US electoralism came to define the parameters of Palestinian liberation.

Electioneering requires compromise, but compromise isn’t a neutral practice.  The people are made to sacrifice for the affluent.  That’s how compromise works under capitalism.  Every time, every single time, it’s some aspect of Palestinian freedom that must be compromised.  Never the candidate’s position.  Never the system’s inherent conservatism.  Never the ongoing march of settler colonization.  We’re volunteering to be captured by the settler’s notion of common sense.

And what would have happened if your guy won?  You already gave up right of return.  A one-state solution.  Anti-imperialism. Nobody was talking about general strikes until the pandemic. And nobody ever talks about armed struggle.  How did you plan to get these things back on the table after having surrendered them to a person whose first, second, and third priority is appeasing power?

  You gave up something Palestinians have struggled and died for over the course of decades, and for what?  Just to make the apocryphal and frankly useless point that this politician is a more tolerable Zionist than the other ones?

And when your guy loses?  This is the question of the moment, isn’t it?  You gave up all that leverage for nothing (except for individual benefits).  What happens next?  God knows I can’t answer that question.  I’m not saying don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t be interested in a candidate.  That’s not the point.  I dislike coercive forms of persuasion.   I’m simply trying to convince you not to give up the idea of freedom as it’s articulated by the downtrodden.  Not for any reason.  Certainly not for a goddamn politician.

There’s a question you ought to ask as necessary (which is to say constantly):  what happens to Palestine?  When we humor a system calibrated to exclude us, when we pretend that liberation is possible on the margins of a hostile polity, when we imagine liberal Zionism as a prelude to freedom, then what happens to Palestine?

Raising this kind of skepticism is a good way to get branded a hater.  (Treating the recalcitrant as irrational is a central feature of electoral discipline.)  I hate this sensibility precisely because I’m not a hater, because I recognize that defiance is a priceless asset in conditions of loss and dispossession.  Let’s please abandon this smug idea that skepticism ruins the party for sensible people.  It’s an ugly form of internal colonization.  Recalcitrance can be a deep, abiding act of love, in this case a devotion to life realized in the form of a simple question:  what happens to Palestine?

The system you deign to reform ranks nothing above ruling class accumulation—the system, in other words, is designed to betray, and performs its mandate with brutal efficiency.  And so the answer to that timeless question never changes:  Palestine goes away.  Any group that doesn’t facilitate a flow of capital into the imperial core is fit for disappearance.  Our mandate, in turn, isn’t to seek the approval of our oppressor, but to earn his contempt.

Instrumentalizing the persecuted is a critical feature of electoralism.  Promoting a Zionist presidential candidate and remaining faithful to the core tenets of anti-Zionism?  Forget it.  It’s not happening.  It can’t happen.  Electoralism is salted against insurgency.  It’s not a space for ideas, for creativity, for the simple decency of not asking the least powerful among us to defer their freedom; it’s hostile to anything that impedes the reproduction of orthodoxy.  Liberation has always required tremendous imagination.  That’s not on offer when the talking points are being written by David Sirota.

You have no cause to be angry with Sanders.  Not now.  He hasn’t broken a single pledge.  He never hid his intentions.  There was plenty of reason for concern when he kept repeating liberal Zionist platitudes.  It was you, not Sanders, who folded Palestine into a campaign that always promised to maintain the status quo.  The outcome was easy to predict because it has many decades of precedent.  Palestinians, victim of a million betrayals, should know this better than anyone.  We also know that struggle has no easy trajectory.  Mass movements predicated on voting make for attractive sources of relief.  Then they go up in smoke and you’re left to find the next shiny figure to exploit, the next fount of excitement and pageantry and social capital.  This isn’t a serious politics.  It’s terminal naivete, or industrial self-promotion.

And now what?  You disposed of the most radical members of our community, systematically excluding so many brethren from the life-sustaining pleasure of shared resistance, in order to assuage a bunch of faceless assholes waiting for the first opportunity to dispose of you, all that love sacrificed for no reward beyond some retweets and an evanescent sense of importance, your moment of being accepted by the polity now replaced by angry regret for having again succumbed to the gravitational pull of authority, of the state and its functionaries, of the very institutions that maintain our dispossession.  But our nation, Palestine, is neither temporary nor ephemeral.  Our politics should match the condition.

This essay first appeared on Steven Salaita’s blog.

More articles by:

13 April 2020

JULIAN ASSANGE: ONE YEAR IN BELMARSH


Julian Assange: One Year in Belmarsh


It should not be a matter of distinction, but Julian Assange is a figure who is becoming the apotheosis of political imprisonment.  This seems laughable to those convinced he is an agent without scruple, a compromiser of the Fourth Estate, a figure best packed off to a prison system that will, in all assuredness, kill him.

That’s if he even gets there.  Having spent a year at Her Majesty’s Belmarsh prison, the WikiLeaks publisher faces the permanent danger of contracting COVID-19 as he goes through the bone-weariness of legal proceedings.  Even during the extradition hearings, he has been treated with a snooty callousness by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser, which does not bode well for a favourable finding against the US submission.  As he endures them, he suffers in a facility that is succumbing to the misrule caused by the coronavirus.

On April 9, Assange’s friend Vaughan Smith gave a description of conditions that gave little cause for Easter cheer. “Julian is now confined alone in a cell for 23.5 hours every day.  He gets half an hour of exercise and that is in a yard crowded with other prisoners.”  Smith also had a shot at the running of the prison.  “With over 150 Belmarsh prison staff off work self-isolating, the prison is barely functioning.”

The UK Department of Justice has adopted a mild approach to the issue of releasing prisoners in the face of the coronavirus epidemic.  Despite the Prison Governors’ Association suggesting the release of 15,000 non-violent prisoners, the Department of Justice has opted for the lower total of 4,000.  To date, a meagre 100 have been released.  Assange insists that the situation is graver at Belmarsh than is otherwise advertised.  Official figures put the number of COVID-19 deaths at one in the maximum security facility.  There are at least two, with the possibility, argues Assange, of more.

By any reasonable assessment, Assange fits the bill of a non-violent prisoner, and one with genuine political credentials.  He was granted asylum by Ecuador, a point of little interest to Baraister.  His condition both physical and mental has appalled friends, acquaintances and a number of officials.

Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has spent much time beating the drum of awareness about his plight.  Since 2010, he stated in May last year, “there has been a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr Assange, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Sweden and, more recently, in Ecuador.”

Rather than turning their attention to this state of circumstances, news outlets prefer to gorge themselves on other details, such as the newly revealed identity of his partner, which Judge Baraitser refused to keep concealed.  The writing on this subject is needlessly though predictably tawdry.

  “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fathered two sons while hiding in embassy,” has been a favourite formulation. The Daily Mail can barely resist stirring the sauce pot, giving Assange the appearance of an international man of fornicating mystery.  “Gabriel, aged two, and his one-year-old brother Max were conceived while their father was hiding out to avoid extradition to America, where he faces espionage charges over the leaking of thousands of classified US intelligence documents.”  But the man who sowed his oats was also, the Mail is thrilled to remind us, “wanted in Sweden where he was accused of rape.”  It was rather good of them to also tell readers that Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation, though it does so with customary scepticism.

The old hacks can barely resist regarding the entire matter of Assange having a partner and children as peculiar.  The Mail seemed to think it had uncovered a stunning morsel of information that would shock all.  “The news will come as a bombshell to Assange’s friends and enemies since he was widely understood to have led a near-monastic life since entering the embassy in 2012.”  Monks would surely disagree with that flawed assessment, as would his friends.

The theme of oddity has also made it across the Atlantic.  The New York Post, for instance, considered it “an even odder twist” that “British rapper M.I.A. is a godmother to the children”.  Hardly – M.I.A, along with a large clutch of celebrities, has been a vocal supporter and barracker.

This mixture of lazy scribbling, creepy curiosity and saccharine interest will do little to aid Assange.

 His partner, now revealed as lawyer Stella Moris-Smith Robertson, attempted to take some of the edge off perceptions of the publisher in a court statement supporting bail.  “My close relationship with Julian has been the opposite of how he is viewed – of reserve, respect for each other and attempts to shield each other from some of the nightmares that have surrounded our lives.”  Retaining that shield will be an increasingly difficult matter now.

Assange’s scalp is precious.  The application for bail made by his defence team on March 25 was denied.  Access to him from his legal team is limited, hobbling the case.  Even during a raging pandemic, where entire states have mobilised their resources, there is always room for little bit of vindictiveness.  Scores need to be settled; the balance sheet ordered.  To that end, Judge Baraister and the UK justice system, have not disappointed.
 
 More articles by:
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

11 April 2020

SOLIDARITY IN THE AGE OF CORONAVIRUS: WHAT THE ARABS MUST DO

Solidarity in the Age of Coronavirus: What the Arabs Must Do





Photograph Source: Kamyar Adl – CC BY 2.0

While the Coronavirus continues to ravage almost every nation on earth, Arab countries remain unable, or unwilling, to formulate a collective strategy to help the poorest and most vulnerable Arabs survive the deadly virus and its economic fallout.

Worse, amid growing international solidarity, we are yet to see a pan-Arab initiative that aims to provide material support to countries and regions that have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 disease.

The lack of collective Arab responsiveness is not unique as it mirrors Europe’s own systematic failure, exhibiting ‘solidarity’ when it is financially convenient, and turning its back, sometimes at its own brethren, when there are no economic incentives.

For example, when Greece defaulted on its debt to international donors in 2015, Germany, and other European Union countries, pounced on the opportunity to dismantle the country’s major financial institutions and to profit from Athens’ mounting miseries.

All the talk of European solidarity, fraternity and community floundered at the altar of greed and unhindered profits.

That was not the first – nor will it be the last – occasion when the opportunistic EU showed its true colors. In truth, Europe is united, not by common history or unbreakable social bonds, but rather by the shared belief that a united Europe is a stronger economic unit.

The same sordid scenario was recently repeated. As Italy began buckling down under the unbearable burdens of the deadly Coronavirus, it immediately, and naturally, sought the help of its European sister states. To no avail.

Despite its sizable debt, Italy is a major player in the economic arena of Europe and, in fact, the world. Indeed, Italy is the world’s 8th largest economy. But the country’s economy is now experiencing a rare freefall, especially in the poorer regions of the South, where people are literally going hungry.

The first country to come to Italy’s aid was neither France, nor, unsurprisingly, Germany, but China, followed by Russia, then Cuba, and others.

This palpable lack of solidarity among European countries has further empowered the ethnocentric view already prevailing in Europe, and championed by far-right movements like Italy’s League Party of Matteo Salvini. For years, the latter has advocated against European integration.

It will take months, if not years, for the political fallout of the Coronavirus to be fully assessed. But what is already clear is that international and regional economic hubs are actively hedging their bets to consolidate their geopolitical positions in the post-Coronavirus world.

Despite bashful American attempts to join the politically-motivated international solidarity, US President Donald Trump’s humble moves arrived too little, too late. In fact, a sign of the times is that Chinese and Russian aid is pouring in to help the United States, which now has the world’s largest number of COVID-19 cases.

A compelling question, however, is where are the Arabs in all of this?
Italy and Spain, in particular, share historical and cultural bonds, and broad political interests, with many Arab countries, interests that will remain long after the Coronavirus is eradicated. Failing to register on the radar of international solidarity with Italy and Spain will prove a strategic miscalculation.

Israel, on the other hand, is activating its aid agency, IsraAID, which has previously worked in Italy between 2016 and 2019, after a major earthquake killed nearly 300 people and left behind massive infrastructural damage.

Israel uses ‘humanitarian aid’ as a political and propaganda tool. Israeli missions are often under-funded and short-lasting, but their impact is greatly amplified by a powerful, official media machine that tries to project Israel as a ‘peace-maker’, not a war-monger.

The truth is, some Arab governments do, in fact, provide badly needed funds and aid to countries that are devastated by wars or natural disasters; alas, these efforts are often disorganized and self-centered – and frankly, not at all motivated by true solidarity.

That said, the absence of Arab initiatives in the field of international humanitarian solidarity dwarf in comparison to the lack of Arab solidarity within the Arab world itself.

According to United Nation estimates, there are “101.4 million (people) in the region who already live in poverty, according to official criteria, and around 52 million undernourished.”

A new policy brief issued on April 1 by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), projects that an additional 8.3 million people are set to join the poor and undernourished masses throughout the Arab world.

Aside from empty rhetoric and useless press releases, we are yet to witness a major collective Arab initiative, championed by, for example, the Arab League, to provide an Arab equivalent to the many economic stimulus plans that have been set into motion in many other countries and regions around the world.
Late March, United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, issued a ‘global ceasefire appeal’, pleading to the world, especially to warring Middle Eastern nations, to cease fire and to unite all efforts in one single war against the Coronavirus.

Sadly, that call has so far gone unheeded. The war in Libya is escalating, not subsiding; Israeli killing of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank continues unabated; the flood of refugees out of Syria, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern countries is yet to slow down.

Times of crisis, especially the kind that targets all of us regardless of race, religion, or geography, often constitute a wake-up call, present an opportunity for a new beginning, a new social contract so that we may resurrect from the ashes of our collective pain to build a better world.

Let COVID-19 be that opportunity that will allow all nations, especially in the Middle East, to take a stance against war, hunger and disease, to share their wealth and to extend the hand of solidarity to Africa and our historic allies throughout the world.

More articles by:
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.




08 April 2020

WERE SO MANY OF US WRONG? CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS ON THE NEW UNCERTAINTY

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty


In times of uncertainty, you deserve understanding.


He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. Talleyrand

We are on day six of our self-isolation. Has it been less than a week since we caught the flight from London to Dubai, then Dubai to Melbourne? The COVID-19 virus has done many things, the most daunting and terrible being the lives that it has taken, but one of its aftershocks that has surprised me most is the alteration it has caused to our sense of time.
Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''

Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''Credit:Eddie Jim
Three weeks ago, we landed in Britain and though we joked and bantered about touching elbows rather than kissing, we did hug and embrace friends, we went out to dinners and we got drunk and sat shivering around outside heaters, shoulder to shoulder, in the freezing English spring night. Day by day, however, the anxiety and fears grew.

Throughout the first week, and then into the second, I receive constant emails from home announcing that first this festival and then another would be cancelled. On a train to Glasgow, preparing my reading for an event, my phone vibrates and a text informs me that the AyeWrite Festival has also been cancelled. By the third day in Scotland, reading the escalating warnings on the internet, my partner, Wayne, and I make the decision to return home.
We are fortunate. We booked our journey through a travel agent and within minutes of emailing him, he has got us on a flight departing London in two days. We know that there are many people not so lucky. The websites of all the airlines are crashing. The phones are not being answered. All we want is to return home. That very notion, home, one that I have questioned and resisted and challenged for so many years; that notion, too, has been altered by the virus. I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.

There is a strange and befuddling moment in Dubai airport. All the world seems to be there. We are Australians and New Zealanders, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, North American and Latin American, many of us scrolling on phones and laptops and iPads, seeking information on which borders have been closed, whether we can indeed go home. Some of us are sitting still and staring out into space, shifting in those uncomfortable vinyl chairs, trying to not touch and not to breathe on one another.

I am two seats away from a young woman, poised and elegantly dressed, her hair hidden under a rainbow-coloured turban. She is speaking on her phone in rapid French. My own French is weak but I gather she has managed to get on a flight to Lagos and from Lagos she will do her best to head home. Wherever home may be. “Paris was strange,” she says into her phone. “Everything was closed, everything was shut. I’ve never seen it like that.”

And it’s at that precise moment, overhearing her conversation, looking around me at the people staring at their screens, that it strikes me how bizarre and ridiculous it is that we all have only so recently been zig-zagging around the world, taking this freedom and this movement and this privilege for granted. It isn’t a moral aversion that I am experiencing. It isn’t righteousness; it is more a recognition of absurdity. I turn to Wayne when he comes back from the long wait for the toilets.
“All of this, it’s unnecessary.”

“No, we need to get home, this is serious.”

“No, not that. All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.”
''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''

''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''Credit:Getty Images
On returning home, I find a series of emails from Australian literary festivals and arts organisations bemoaning the deleterious effect of COVID-19 on the arts sector. I understand and share these fears. I’m one of the lucky ones, able to support myself from writing. But for most of my friends, their creative work is subsidised by work in hospitality, in retail, in the public sector and in non-government welfare organisations. The abrupt and shocking collapse of the economy has us all reeling. And has us all frightened. Theatres are no longer putting on plays and cinemas are shut; book launches and writing classes are cancelled.
Again, time has refracted back on itself and the arguments and politics and conversations we were all so engaged with, so furious and so passionate about only a few weeks ago, seem ephemeral and unimportant. Unemployment is now the most pressing issue affecting us all.
It isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will be our lifetime.
Of course, there is the desire to avoid the getting and the passing on of the virus. But those images of thousands of desperate souls lining up outside Centrelink are what has brought the severity of what we are all undergoing into deepest focus. The people in the queues are clearly ourselves – how we dress, how we use our mobiles, that negotiation of both digital and physical space – yet they also are evocative of a past that we never really imagined we would see again: the echoes of the Great Depression.

Writers and filmmakers and artists have always imagined apocalyptic scenarios, and climate change and rising inequality has made that a central concern of recent speculative art and fiction. But whether it is the savage and nihilistic violence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or the scenes of zombie rampage and annihilating natural disasters that have proliferated in popular cinema, what we hadn’t conceived was the moment of in-between. I think this is why the dole queues are particularly frightening. They remind us that it isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday – blithely assuming that the future would be ever-progressive and ever-prosperous – to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will take years. The in-between will be our lifetime.
So I worry for my friends who are writers and artists and playwrights and filmmakers. But I am equally worried for my friends who are nurses and couriers and administrators and teachers. All those differences we were extolling and idolising only a few weeks ago, they don’t matter much any more. In this moment, community trumps difference.
In between the pinging emails announcing the cancellation of one more writers’ festival and one more play, there have also been links to performances and artwork that people are creating online. There is indeed something exhilarating and defiant in the determination of the artist to keep making work. It might be my age or merely my disposition but I also sense something melancholy in the production of such work. A chamber orchestra plays in an vacant auditorium, a drag artist mimes in front of a DJ in an empty room. What is missing, and what is wretched, is that without the physical bodies of an audience, the work seems mere rehearsal. It is not unlike the few minutes of an AFL match I watched played without a crowd. The emptiness was deafening. I switched off the game. Guiltily, I switched off the music.

In some ways, I have been surprised by how much I have enjoyed this period of enforced isolation. In saying that, I know that I am fortunate. That I have a partner, a lovely home and shelves stacked with books and with LPs and with DVDs. We have friends and family and neighbours who make sure there is food on our doorstep and wine in our fridge.

I’m not a complete Luddite: YouTube and streaming have also kept me company. Yet it is the pleasures of the analogue world that have been the most satisfying and the most sustaining. I am halfway through a wonderful book, Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club, a tender requiem for the generation of eastern European dissidents who fled totalitarianism and wound up lost and exiled in Paris. It has been sitting by my bed for nearly two years now.

This morning, I was dancing to Hiperasia, a cheerfully inventive album by the Spanish electronica artist, El Guincho. As with the Guenassia novel, I’ve had it for some time. Only now do I give it a proper listen. Refracted through the changes brought about by the virus, the recent past seems an aeon ago. All the same, it has made me thankful for the present moment. Real time. The time of minutes and hours. The time of patience and reflection.
I miss people. Wayne and I discuss the progression of the virus, the responses globally and locally, the uncertain future that is coming. We both miss other voices, other perspectives, the opportunity to have one’s argument contested and opposed. Of course, this is possible online but Skype crackles and falters, the thin sounds on the other end don’t have the resonance of the human voice. Digital communication also exacerbates the limitations and prejudices of only speaking to those who think the same way you do.

There will come a time when we can return to the world, when social distancing will be the past. But there will be a ruined economy and there will be fractured communities. It is inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the writing and the art that is to come. Every day, I wander the hall, the rooms of our house, I walk into the garden and tell myself I should write. But all my ideas seem paltry and inadequate. It is a cliche, and also a truth, that writing is a solitary labour. It is only now, physically separated from friends and colleagues, that I realise how much sustenance and inspiration I receive from their insights, their conversation and their argument. A room of one’s own is a necessity. It is not enough. These are the conversations that I want to have.

So many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the urgency and virulence of this virus.

Yet there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting?
I worry about the overreach of state power in the responses to the virus. They are necessary, they are medically and scientifically sanctioned, but the powers of surveillance and control now being deployed are deeply illiberal. And once enacted such powers may be difficult to reverse. I am shocked at how little weight the notion of liberty seems to have among my peers. A formative political awakening for me was the politics of AIDS. Some of the finest writing and the best art of the 1980s came out of provocation and resistance at the demonisation, and the attempts of state control, over people’s bodies. That suspicion of the state – of its courts and judiciary, of its police and its military, of its bureaucracy and of its power – seems to be a matter of little concern to a present generation of writers and artists.

An equal shock has been the relative silence over the actions of the Communist Party of China. Other governments have made mistakes or have had to backtrack on initial responses but it has been the CPC that has been the most appalling actor in this short history of COVID-19; in its initial recklessness in turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed for its incubation, and in the terrifying repression it has visited on its own citizens.

I worry that we writers and artists have been woefully undergraduate in our rage over the past decade, tilting at the same bloody windmills. And maybe our understanding of history has been equally pitiful. The greatest gift reading history has done, is make me suspicious of certainty. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m really hankering to have. After the past few months, after these transformations, can a writer still adhere to certainty?

When we emerge out of our isolation, the world will be smaller and our horizons will be local. The priority will be solidarity and communion with the unemployed; everything else is not unimportant, but everything else will be secondary.
I also hope we emerge hungry for argument and conversation and debate. I hope our writing and our art asks more questions and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

RED JOS - ACTIVIST KICKS BACKS



Welcome to my blog and let me know what you think about my postings.


My web pages also have a wide range of topics which are added to when possible. Look for them in any search engine under

"RED JOS"




I hope you find items of interest!

Search This Blog

Followers

Blog Archive

Total Pageviews

About Me

My photo
Preston, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
90 years old, political gay activist, hosting two web sites, one personal: http://www.red-jos.net one shared with my partner, 94-year-old Ken Lovett: http://www.josken.net and also this blog. The blog now has an alphabetical index: http://www.red-jos.net/alpha3.htm

Labels