Marilynne Robinson in the New York Review of Books:

In my odd solitude I stream the America of recent memory. The pretext for drama, in the foreground, seems always to be a homicide, but around and beyond the forensic stichomythia that introduces character and circumstance there is a magnificent country, a virtual heaven. In a dystopian future, children would surely ask what it was like to live in such a country. Candid memory would say, By no means as wonderful as it should have been, even granting the broad streaks of pain in its history. Before there was a viral crisis whose reality forced itself on our notice, there were reports of declines of life expectancy in America, rising rates of suicide, and other “deaths of despair.” This is surely evidence of another crisis, though it was rarely described as such. The novel coronavirus has the potential for mitigation, treatment, and ultimately prevention. But a decline in hope and purpose is a crisis of civilization requiring reflection and generous care for the good of the whole society and its place in the world. We have been given the grounds and opportunity to do some very basic thinking.

Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago.

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Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

When the history is written of how America handled the global era’s first real pandemic, March 6 will leap out of the timeline. That was the day Donald Trump visited the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. His foray to the world’s best disease research body was meant to showcase that America had everything under control. It came midway between the time he was still denying the coronavirus posed a threat and the moment he said he had always known it could ravage America.

Shortly before the CDC visit, Trump said “within a couple of days, [infections are] going to be down to close to zero”. The US then had 15 cases. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” A few days afterwards, he claimed: “I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” That afternoon at the CDC provides an X-ray into Trump’s mind at the halfway point between denial and acceptance.

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Joshua Hunt in The Economist:

The Diamond Princess has a steakhouse, a pizzeria and restaurants specialising in sushi and Italian cuisine. Buffets offer prime rib, escargots and crème brûlée, all served in gigantic portions at every hour of the day or night. The ship has its own mixologist, sommelier and chocolatier.

The Diamond Princess is one of about 300 cruise ships that circle the globe each year. Last year they carried 30m passengers through holidays that seem to belong to another time, before travellers prized authenticity over luxury, sustainability over excess and adventure over sedentary stimulation. However outdated the cruise experience may seem, more passengers are enjoying it than ever before. Last year Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise-ship conglomerate, which owns Princess Cruises along with eight other lines and carries half the world’s cruise passengers each year, brought in record-setting revenues of $21bn.

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Paul Street in Counterpunch:

History, literature, film, and scripture are loaded with stories and examples of redemption. Buddhism gives us the story of Aṅgulimāla, a pathological mass-murderer who became a follower of the Buddha and went on to be enshrined as a “patron saint” of childbirth in South and Southeast Asia. Rick Blaine, the character played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1942 Hollywood classic Casablanca, put side his cynical bitterness and seeming indifference to the rise of the Nazi Third Reich to help Isla Lund (played by Ingmar Bergman) – the former lover who jilted (and embittered) him – escape the grip of the Nazis with her husband, an anti-fascist Resistance fighter. The movie ends with Blaine declaring his determination to join the Resistance in Morocco. The New Testament tells the story of Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector and a wealthy man:

“Jesus looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.’ Zacchaeus stood there and said to Jesus, ‘Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.’ And Jesus said to Zacchaeus, ‘Today salvation has come to this house. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.’”

Zacchaues was perhaps inspiration for Charles Dickens’ character Ebeneezer Scrooge, a vicious exploitative capitalist turned into a benevolent and kindly employer when the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future visit him to tell him the story of his heretofore miserable, money-grubbing, and misanthropic life. Malcom X told his life story to Alex Haley as one of redemption. It was a tale of progression from violent and criminal hustler (known as “Detroit Red”) to the righteous and radical channeling and focusing his anger at White Society as a fiercely eloquent Civil Rights fighter for all the oppressed. When the leading munitions and arms manufacturer Alfred Nobel read a premature obituary that condemned his as “the merchant of death,” he bequeathed his fortune to establish the annual Nobel Peace Prize.

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Dan Einav in Financial Times:

There is perhaps no better individual showcase of The Beatles’ infinite variety than the “Yellow Submarine”/“Eleanor Rigby” double A-side record released on August 5 1966. One single was a nonsensical nursery rhyme, the other, an elegiac “ba-rock” threnody about the forgotten elderly, which served as an exemplar of emotionally profound pop songwriting. Not that “Eleanor Rigby” really is a pop record in the conventional sense — after all, it marked the first time that none of the group played any instruments on a track. Instead, two string quartets (both playing the same melodies to “double” the sound) create a funereal soundscape perfectly suited to the song’s tale of loneliness, anonymity and death. While poignancy had never been far removed from some of The Beatles’ best early compositions (“In My Life”, “Yesterday”, “Help”), in “Eleanor Rigby” the band delivered a tragedy in microcosm.

Sitting at a piano one night, Paul McCartney found that the arrestingly sad and evocative opener of “picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been” came to him almost spontaneously, as did the notion that they should become part of “a lonely old woman song”. Before anything else, McCartney needed a name for this character. “Daisy Hawkins” had been a placeholder in an early draft, but it wasn’t until he stumbled across a wine shop called “Rigby and Evens” in Bristol that McCartney found a satisfactorily “natural” name; “Eleanor” meanwhile was derived from Eleanor Bron, a cast member from the film Help! Those of a more psychoanalytic persuasion, however, may argue that the name was dredged up from the depths of his subconscious. For in July 1957, McCartney is known to have visited St Peter’s Churchyard in Woolton, Liverpool, where there is a grave belonging to the “real” Eleanor Rigby.

…Eleanor Rigby became a kind of metonymy for all the isolated and destitute; in Liverpool a statue was erected of “her” in commemoration of “all the lonely people”. And in the way it immortalises the overlooked and downtrodden, “Eleanor Rigby” can be seen as a pithy counterpart to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”.

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Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού*

After a Greek Proverb

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.*

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.
We’ve taped the broken window pane. tv’s still out of whack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,
Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

by A.E. Stallings
from Poetry Magazine, Jan. 2012

Rajan Roy in Margins:

The thing is, money has expectations. At an individual level, most of us have become accustomed to bank savings accounts effectively returning zero. That wasn’t enough for us though. Our money felt antsy, so it found index funds and other passive funds, to once again, find a bit of yield. They are certainly riskier than a bank savings account (where your only risk is the bank going under), but hey, no one has ever really lost in a Wealthfront account. Money swims towards yield.

That same, tiny behavioral shift takes place at every level of the risk curve, from your savings account to the trillions of dollars managed by large pension funds. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work; rather than that money sitting in your 0.01% savings account, you put it to work somewhere else. For a pension fund, they might even have a prescribed expectation of yield (to match expected liabilities), meaning, to maintain a consistent return, they have to move up the risk curve.

So all these dollar-organisms all start swimming towards riskier waters. Treasury investors shift to corporate debt. Public equity hedge funds shift to late-stage private equity. Late-stage private equity shifts to mid-stage, mid-stage to early stage. Seed rounds become bigger. Angel investors become a thing. Unicorns, unicorns, and more unicorns. Ashton Kutcher.

And that’s how we end up where we are. In the past, if somewhat risky corporate debt got you 10%. It now gets you 7% (I’m making up numbers here) so you start taking meetings with late-stage growth companies.

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Hal Foster in Lit Hub

I suck at predictions. Surely with the financial meltdown in 2008 the art market would crash and the art world would be transformed. Wrong. Surely the Occupy movement would prompt museum directors to rethink excessive reliance on plutocratic patrons. Wrong again. I could list other failed forecasts, but maybe these are enough to suggest why even I don’t listen to me anymore. So please don’t ask me what lies ahead for the art world if and when Covid-19 loosens its grip. I haven’t a clue.

I do have a few thoughts, though, on what has happened lately; that’s the subject of my book What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism as a Time of Debacle. The current state of emergency didn’t begin in March 2020; it runs back to September 2001. Since 9/11, in the US and elsewhere, we have lived in a world where the rule of law is sometimes suspended and often spotty, in ways that have put countless people at varying degrees of risk. The virus has just made this all the more blatant.

Historically, the avant-garde aimed to contest the oppressive presence of law, whether that law was understood as artistic, social, political, or all three at once. But how are artists, writers, and others to respond when law becomes highly erratic, arbitrarily enforced one moment and just as arbitrarily absent the next? How to create, how to survive, in a state of emergency?

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Corey Robin in The Nation:

he communist stands at the crossroads of two ideas: one ancient, one modern. The ancient idea is that human beings are political animals. Our disposition is so public, our orientation so outward, we cannot be thought of apart from the polity. Even when we try to hide our vices, as a character in Plato’s Republic notes, we still require the assistance of “secret societies and political clubs.” That’s how present we are to other people and they to us.

The modern idea—that of work—posits a different value. Here Weber may be a better guide than Marx. For the communist, work means fidelity to a task, a stick-to-itiveness that requires clarity of purpose, persistence in the face of opposition or challenge, and a refusal of all distraction. It is more than an instrumental application of bodily power upon the material world or the rational alignment of means and ends (activities so ignoble, Aristotle thought, as to nearly disqualify the laborer from politics). It is a vocation, a revelation of self.

The communist brings to the public life of the ancients the methodism of modern work. In all things be political, says the communist, and in all political things be productive. Anything less is vanity.

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Riya Al’Sanah and Rafeef Ziadah in Jacobin:

After the initial discovery in early March of seven COVID-19 cases in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel swiftly imposed a security lockdown on the West Bank. In parallel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) declared a state of emergency, which has now been extended until June 2020. 

The pandemic has compounded the problems of an already deteriorating economy, characterized by high levels of unemployment and the loss of wages for working families due to the lockdown measures. 

Those who work in Israel’s construction industry are one of the worst affected parts of Palestinian society. For decades, Israel’s systematic de-development of the occupied Palestinian territories has pushed hundreds of thousands into this sector. 

These workers don’t just come from the West Bank (and Gaza before the siege). They also include many Palestinian citizens of Israel, and constitute a cheap, captive, and ultimately disposable labor force for Israeli contractors and construction firms. Their experience of the pandemic encapsulates many of the key aspects of Palestinian life in the shadow of Israeli domination.

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Oliver Eagleton at The Guardian:

If oppositional art can neither parody nor demystify the operation of power, what glimpses of the future can it provide? Whereas Foster’s previous books surveyed the art scene by identifying a small number of key trends, his approach here is more scattergun: we get 18 telegraphic essays on as many artists, whose work is used to illustrate competing forces in the culture industry. This kaleidoscopic perspective has its pitfalls. Breadth of analysis is often privileged over depth of insight. Sculptors, painters, conceptual artists and cultural theorists all make cameo appearances, yet the links between their work go unelaborated. Even so, the rapid pace of Foster’s prose captures the frenzied historical moment he is exploring; and his reluctance to offer simple answers acknowledges that multiple possibilities for reshaping our culture are currently ranged against each other.

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Oliver Wang at the LARB:

IN THE FALL of 1994, American radio and club DJs began receiving a promotional single in the mail: “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” by the Queens rap duo Mobb Deep. Those early promos came with little fanfare — no cover art, no liner notes, just a plain center sticker with the group’s name, song title, and record label logo. The reaction to “Shook Ones, Pt. II” was as spectacular as its arrival was understated. Its dark, discordant track and violent braggadocio powered the single onto hip-hop mix shows, and the song sparked fights in rowdier nightclubs whenever it rumbled over the speakers. Eminem’s hit 2002 film 8 Mile paid “Shook Ones, Pt. II” the ultimate homage by using it in the film’s cold open, a shot of auditory adrenaline jabbed into the heart of B-Rabbit as he prepares for an MC battle.

A quarter century later, “Shook Ones, Pt. II” and its associated album The Infamous, Mobb Deep’s second LP, are now embraced as consensus classics from hip-hop’s “golden era” of the early/mid-1990s.

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Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

IF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION were a medieval court, and some, including the man at the top, would like it to be, then Stephen Miller would be the sly and artful courtier ever in search of hospitable moments in which to further his cause of an all-white America. He may sometimes get shafted and shamed, but Slinky Steve never gives up. Take a look at his most recent failure: after Trump tweeted with relish a Miller-inspired plan to “suspend immigration into the United States,” the plan ended up lifeless on the castle floor. Reportedly through the interventions of Jared Kushner, the luminescent son-in-law of the ruler, what would have been ambitious plan to install a gator-ridden, extra-deep moat around all the land was reduced to a mere puddle.

By the time it was signed on April 22, Trump’s executive order did not, as hardliners would have wished, halt all immigration; it only stopped the processing of green cards for immigrants not already in the United States—with a number of major exceptions, including for spouses and children of U.S. citizens and health care professionals—for sixty days. Foreign workers, both the highly skilled and the migrant laborers, could stay. It was a dud document, its teeth extracted by Kushner and other powerful men who had held the president, a devoted xenophobe, back. Miller likely spent the day after this defeat sulking in his West Wing dungeon, sharpening the proverbial knives he would need for the next battle. He still believed that victory was imminent, he told supporters of his moat-and-wall vision in a phone call, assuring them that he wouldn’t “leave them hanging.”

They will be left hanging, but not owing to the vertiginous details of Trump court politics, nor the mercurial fortunes of those who want the president’s ear. For an interminably long three-and-a-half years, Trump Inc. have been dangling the halcyon apparition of an all-white America before their followers. Every few months, they have been thrown a travel ban, a limitation of asylum, or a ban on refugees, so that their ardor for Trump never cools. This most recent order would have been another iteration of throwing scraps to this herd, a juicy bit of xenophobia to look forward to in uncertain times.

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James Hamblin in The Atlantic:

Over the past month, Jennifer Leiferman, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, has documented a tidal wave of depressive symptoms in the U.S. “The rates we’re seeing are just so much higher than normal,” she says. Leiferman’s team recently found that people in Colorado have, during the pandemic, been nine times more likely to report poor mental health than usual. About 23 percent of Coloradans have symptoms of clinical depression. As a rough average, during pre-pandemic life, 5 to 7 percent of people met the criteria for a diagnosis of depression. Now, depending how you define the condition, orders of magnitude more people do. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, extrapolates from a recent Lancet study in China to estimate that about 50 percent of the U.S. population is experiencing depressive symptoms. “We are witnessing the mental-health implications of massive disease and death,” he says. This has the effect of altering the social norm by which depression and other conditions are defined. Essentially, this throws off the whole definitional rubric.

Feelings of numbness, powerlessness, and hopelessness are now so common as to verge on being considered normal. But what we are seeing is far less likely an actual increase in a disease of the brain than a series of circumstances that is drawing out a similar neurochemical mix. This poses a diagnostic conundrum. Millions of people exhibiting signs of depression now have to discern ennui from temporary grieving from a medical condition. Those at home Googling symptoms need to know when to seek medical care, and when it’s safe to simply try baking more bread. Clinicians, meanwhile, need to decide how best to treat people with new or worsening symptoms: to diagnose millions of people with depression, or to more aggressively treat the social circumstances at the core of so much suffering.

Clearly articulating the meaning of medical depression is an existential challenge for the mental-health profession, and for a country that does not ensure its people health care. If we fail, the second wave of death from this pandemic will not be directly caused by the virus. It will take the people who suffered mentally from its reverberations.

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