Apocalypse February 2021
New Times, Old Systems
When was it decided that this would, that this should be the end state? Tories, and Republicans, know with time and demographic shifts they’ll likely never win majorities again. So they gerrymander victories, suppress opposition, suppress voting, change the system, drift away from democracy. Bots are literally manufacturing consent, spraying out identical tweets of unconditional love and support for Johnson. It’s on a knife edge. We let them through the democratic door and they try to close the door behind them. They bend and subvert laws by creating precedent when crimes go unpunished. We’ve seen it work before. They dance the fascist dance, win the attention of all the tired, hopeless, isolated voters, to whom the vial of poison is more stimulating than the glass of water.
None of us were able to predict the coronavirus would mutate or variants would emerge, says Dido Harding, head of the National Institute for Health Protection. I see reports of second dose Pfizer vaccines delayed for NHS frontline staff. I suspect the government is manipulating the numbers by racing out single doses, gloating at the leaderboards, at beating the French (hoorah!), as they have done in every instance, cashing in on a big hollow perceived win now and kicking consequences further into the long grass tomorrow.
The day the judgement ruled that Hancock did act unlawfully in dishing out PPE contracts, secretly, for obscene sums of public money, to cronies, with scant evidence of work rendered, the BBC leads with Harry and Meghan probably not returning to their official royal duties, sidelining a huge story of corruption that affects us all and not letting us just leave those two alone, really, like we all still care about the monarchy. Can’t qwhite figure why they’re angrier at Meghan than at Andrew, the actual nonce, the actual national disgrace, but anyway. The Mail runs eleven pages (!) on the Royal Sensation: Have They No Respect?
Starmer, in response to righteous anger riled by Hancock, said that calling for people to resign is not what the public want to see. Both main parties are still worrying about upsetting the people who voted for the isolationist fantasy, taking the remaining half (or more) of the population completely for granted, complacent that their votes will be secure in ’24. The expectation is that politicians should move towards the (right) people to become electable, not that people should vote with more imagination and empathy and moral conviction. Left and centre shout at each other, You’re enabling the right! You’re enabling the Tories! What if the leftists don’t think Starmer’s up to the job in ’24, doubt he can corral the numbers, so he’ll be… unelectable? The trouble is, there aren’t really just two sides.
A problem has come up that proves what we feared. We have the solutions. We’ve been sitting on the answers for decades already, but they essentially contradict the capitalist superstructure of the status quo, when short-termism rises to the top, when corners are cut and results now are always chosen over greater rewards delayed. The solutions to the coronavirus pandemic are the same solutions to the climate crisis, the growing wealth gap, global and local inequality, hunger, financial insecurity, mental health instability. It is possible for all of us to live, in peace and health, prosperity and fulfilment, in community, within the means of the planet, in a greener future. But we are living still in the images of past centuries, growing and growing, making less and less sense. We are living through the era of knowing all this and not acting; the justice demanded of us might well be beyond us, and the present global health pandemic, long forecast, ill prepared for, might be just one symptom in the slow breakdown of this civilisation, at least as it currently stands, stumbles.
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