Monthly Archives: March 2021

In fiction too the record is sparse. The novel One of Ours (1922), by Willa Cather, is the first and last depiction of the pandemic for almost a generation. In 2017, the writer Laura Spinne wrote: There is no cenotaph, no monument in London or Moscow, or Washington DC. The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively. So why did this period of cultural history fail to manifest? And if this omission was deliberate, what was to blame?

Firstly, there was the rise of Modernism. From 1920 onwards, the idea of wiping the slate clean with a tabula rasa emerged with the Modernists. This was typified in Le Corbusier designs for a new Paris (Plan Voisin, 1925) in which he planned to destroy two square miles of historic Paris and replace it with modernist tower-blocks, his machines for living. Modernists, like the Bauhaus, the Soviet Constructivists, the Italian Futurists and the British Vorticists, depicted the pre-1918 years of war, plague, overcrowding and contamination as symbols of the imperialist structures they wanted to tear down.

Bauhaus furniture and architecture, such as that of Marcel Bruer (1902-1981), was even created in direct reaction against the pandemic. Bruers minimalist pieces were made of hygienic wood & tubular steelto facilitate cleaning. Out went the heavy, ornate Victorian furniture with its contamination by viruses, dust and the dated values of Empire, and instead a radically new utopian International Style was invented.

The Modernists, and the many Communists among them, consigned the memory of the 1918 pandemic to the pyre of progress.In literature, modernism took hold with Pound, Shaw, Stein, Wolfe, Joyce, Proust, HD and DH Lawrence, and they too swept away social values and language structures.

The second reason for the historical erasure of the 1918 pandemic was hedonism. This was the Roaring Twenties with its exuberant explosions of wealth and decadence. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said: The parties were bigger, the pace was faster...the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper. The Roaring Twenties was like a party with hangover amnesia, erasing the time that came before it.

But there was also the fact that the pandemic was eclipsed by the memorialisation of the First World War. In a 2014 paper, Elizabeth Outka, associate professor of English at the University of Richmond, in America, noted that the two tragedies of the First World War were entangled into a single tragedy. The flu dead, she claimed, were counted among the war dead, and infectious disease had been a leading cause of death among armed forces during the war.

Now, in 2021, there are calls for a reborn Modernism to wipe the historical slate clean once again. This is The Great Reset, proposed by the World Economic Forum, and voiced in unison by an alarming number of world leaders. Its creator, Klaus Shwabe, represents the recovery after Covid as a unique window of opportunity [for global leaders] to reflect, reimagine and reset our world with a utopian plan to create a greener, smarter, fairer world. All of this echoes the idealistic projects of Le Corbusier and the Communists from the Twenties with their universalist beliefs in blank slate solutions for all the world. Have we learned nothing?

So it has fallen to artists to save our memories. In terms of culture made so far that addresses the pandemic, there is the play Bubble a tender tale of love under lockdown, by James Graham. There is also Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knights film Locked Down, about a struggling marriage, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway. It would be a great shame if this kind of cultural production ceased as soon as the pandemic is declared over.

The crisis has forced us to explore so much about ourselves; the horrors, but also the unexpected versatility of people inventing solutions together. There have been upheavals in work and in family structures in divorce, cohabitation and child rearing. The modern family has been forced (with support bubbles) into new formations. Generations have been either pushed together or further apart.

Then there are the vast changes in travel, in the meaning of national borders, the impact on places of worship; the questioning of the idea of globalisation and of a career. Ive seen formerly career-driven people give up their ambitions and commit to delivering food to old people. I know of millennial couples who were postponing having kids for economic reasons suddenly decide to try for a baby, because of Covid.

And these personal questions weve had to grapple with: what is it like to home school three kids? What is it like to slowly go bankrupt or to keep (an illegal) romantic affair alive during lockdown? How does it feel to lose someone and not get to say goodbye?

All of this should be the subject of our art and our fiction right now. We should not be wishing the next year away, killing time, using culture as escapism. We have a social and moral duty to leave a record of all these powerful changes for future generations. We cant leave a chasm in culture like the one that occurred around the pandemic of 1918. If we fail to learn from the past as the Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said then we are doomed to repeat it.

Ewan Morrisons How To Survive Everything - a novel about a teenage girl abducted by her pandemic-survivalist father - is published by Contraband.

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Only the arts can help us understand our lives in lockdown - Telegraph.co.uk

Daniel Whitlock, St. Cloud Published 8:12 a.m. CT March 19, 2021

Most colleges will have spring break sometime between March 9 and April 21.An annual migration of young women, resplendent like colorful butterflies with dazzling white orthodontic smiles, will migrate to the white sands of Florida and Texas. They will be followed, in pursuit, by young wannabe he-men with straight white teeth, well-groomed hair, over-built pecs and arms and booming voices. The rites of spring!

Undoubtedly the COVID-19 virus will hitchhike its way to the busy beaches of the South and is preparing to have its own unbridled hedonism, during and after spring break.

In this gravid environment, the virus is laying plans to develop variants of itself, in effect giving itself a genetic promotion so that it can spread easier and kill more people.

Daniel J. Whitlock(Photo: Submitted photo)

The virus never sleeps and will be an unplanned companion at spring break.Its always working, planning and taking whatever opportunity it can.Spring break, with its partying and invasive privilege, presents the ideal chance to invade, multiply and eventually spread itself to every community in the country, in a more dangerous mutated form, a variant." This environment is perfectly tuned, allowing this COVID-19 to take full advantage of a unique opportunity.

Fortunately for the revelers, their youth, absence of obesity, paucity of diseases like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease make them generally resistant to COVID-19 infection that results in serious hospitalization and death.Tens of thousands may become infected but will just suffer mild cold-like symptoms. Oh, to be young!

But the virus never sleeps.Its business is invading a persons cells, to steal the cells metabolic machinery and make copies of itself.When the cells of the lung die from this invasion, thousands of new baby COVID-19 viruses are released and expelled in breath, by vigorous young adultsin close contact.

Multiply this invasion of millions of individual cells with the thousands of viruses created in each cell. And then multiply that by the tens of thousands of beach revelers and you have a lot of virus running amok.

Because of the large number of viruses created, there is also the increased chance that a variant may be created. Viruses, and possibly a new variant, will be spread by celebrators, in bars, by kissing, shouting and being closer than the CDC suggests.Masks will not be a deterrent because most beach states are, irresponsibly, loosening their restrictions paving the way for the success of the virus. Spring break is nirvana for the virus.

The energetic young partiers on a beach are ripe to become super-spreaders of a new variant, to each other and to their communities once they return.They and the virus can generate variants and amplify the spread and aggressiveness of COVID-19.This is a potential disaster.

What Im describing is obviously a worst-case scenario. Its not highly probable but it is possible.And this is a legitimate warning.

However, we learn a lot from planning for the worst case, because it reveals weakness and vulnerabilities in a system vulnerabilities that may return to haunt us. For example, planning for a worst-case scenario in Texas, for a grid failure resulting from a snowstorm, might have saved many lives even though it was not a probable happening.

Plunging into a week of feeling good, especially in the context of yearlong lives of isolation, is understandable but dangerous.Spring break should make us all cautious, especially those of us with college and high school age kids who crave the southern beaches to let off steam.

The virus never sleeps or takes a break.Its always looking for an opportunity to improve its ability to spread and kill.

Daniel Whitlock retired from St. Cloud Hospital CentraCare after 16 years as its vice president for medical affairs. He has no current ties to CentraCare other than as a patient. He and his wife live in St. Cloud and have enduring ties to Quiet Oaks Hospice House.

Read or Share this story: https://www.sctimes.com/story/opinion/2021/03/19/your-turn-virus-wont-take-spring-break/4722377001/

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Your Turn: The virus won't take a spring break - SC Times

BRUSSELS BEHIND THE SCENESWeekly analysis and untold storiesWith SAMUEL STOLTON

Other Brussels behind the scenes stories:Reporting on Brussels away from BrusselsThe Privilege of the VaccinatedEuropes Wine DilemmaEurope is lyingDesperate for an injection

The future of the European Rave

It came as no surprise when the European Commission recently disclosed that it had not been keeping tabs on the spate of underground raves and illegal festivities occuring across the EU during the coronavirus pandemic.

BRUSSELS BEHIND THE SCENES is a weekly newsletter which brings the untold stories about the characters driving the policies affecting our lives. Analysis not found anywhere else, The Brussels Times Samuel Stolton helps you make sense of what is happening in Brussels. If you want to receive Brussels behind the scenes straight to your inbox every week, subscribe to the newsletter here.

Former French Minister and now right-wing MEP Thierry Mariani lamented that secret parties had been taking place across France ever since the first lockdown most notably a recent case in Brittany on new years eve, attended by around 2500 people and drawing international crowds.

As such, Mariani had wanted to know what the Commission had been doing to follow up on such illegal gatherings, and whether EU polices forces had been coordinating on the most efficient ways to combat these assemblies.

In short, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said that such items come under the competence of EU national authorities, and that, as far as the Commissions knowledge extends, the issue had not yet been raised to relevant working parties in the Council of the EU.

This got me thinking: In what ways could the ideology of the rave, historically borne out of the strife of post-war economic hardship and the desire to break down cultural silos, evolve to meet the new social discontent wrought by a semi-captive experience, living under the spectre of a global pandemic?

It was the subcultures of post-world war II Britain that proved fertile ground for the emergence of the raver. A hangover of ennui from the War coupled with a foreboding cynicism for a nascent consumerism that was gaining a foothold across the Atlantic, had begun to attract the countrys subcultures to a place of common revel, where experimentation and hedonism was in ample supply a curative breaking of bread for Britains abandoned youth, in a world making itself anew.

After a brief affair with the mods in the 1960s, however, it wasnt until the 1980s that rave culture across Londons illegal warehouse party scene truly took hold as a counter-reaction to hyper-consumerism, which had started to cartelize musical tastes. Young people sought diversion and difference in musical expression free from dominant cultural norms. They had wanted to challenge the isolationary codes that had resigned musical preference to siloed demographics.

The rave was truly a broad church which appealed to the primal instincts of individuals to congregate in a judgment-free environment with people from all walks of life. Even in my own experience, I recall being somewhat taken aback by how this domain could be a place where previously disparate social classes and subcultures were able to come together in a form of degenerate harmony. My personal stomping grounds in the early post-millennial years in the garden of England the forests and fields of rural Kent, played host in the twilight hours to a contingent of goths, Indie kids, grungers, and wannabe jungle and drum-and-bass MCs.

The illegality of raves is an essential component to its authenticity. For whatever reason trespassing, drugs, public disturbance without the knowledge that the activity was in some fundamental way prohibited, there would have been a lack of sincerity and a large dose of hypocrisy for the denizens of the rave to stomach. For the raves populous, there drives through the veins an unbridled yearning to rebel against authority.

A similar force has struck many of Europes disenfranchised youth over the past year. Resigned to their own homes and denied any wider human contact, their existence has been reduced to predominantly cerebral landscapes, with little in the way of social interaction other than that playing across the vacuous terrains of social media. In the current context, with the restrictions that we now have, it has become so much easier to dissent the rewards of freedom expand coterminously under new and more prohibitive regions of law and order.

So, during the pandemic reports of twilight parties on Lisbon beaches, clandestine gatherings in Berlin parks, and revelries in English motorway underpasses, were, frankly, to be expected. Lets not forget that even Belgiums very own Prince Joachim couldnt resist attending an illegal gathering in Spain to which he came in for a 10,000 fine.

This week the Commission also unveiled its plans to roll out a Digital Green Pass effectively a voluntary certificate that would allow the vaccinated and those tested negative for the coronavirus to travel across borders without hindrance. For its part, the Spanish party haven of Ibiza is eagerly waiting in the wings for this initiative to get off the ground.

In the meantime, half-hearted attempts to stage virtual raves just dont cut the mustard there lacks the fundamental communal coercion that throbs throughout the rave model. In a weird way, such virtual raves where each participant logs into a live feed with a synthetic nightclub background, only serve to exasperate further our profound isolation from one another running in direct contrast to the principles of the rave dynamic.

Of course, I dont condone in any way such illegalities, but I do hope that the coronavirus does not change the essential components of the rave. Perhaps thats the point of it all: The rave shouldnt in any way evolve but should remain tightly woven into its primal tapestries. Lets hope the rave, for now, remains as it is, until we are once again let loose on the forests, nightclubs, and abandoned buildings of Europe.

BRUSSELS BEHIND THE SCENES is a weekly newsletter which brings the untold stories about the characters driving the policies affecting our lives. Analysis not found anywhere else, The Brussels Times Samuel Stolton helps you make sense of what is happening in Brussels. If you want to receive Brussels behind the scenes straight to your inbox every week, subscribe to the newsletter here.

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The future of the European Rave BRUSSELS BEHIND THE SCENES Weekly analysis and untold stories With - The Brussels Times

VLADIMIR Putin has drawn up a kill list with six of the targets living in the UK, it has been reported.

The Kremlin strongman is planning a post-pandemic assassination campaign, saying no scum can hide from us, a Russian intelligence officer warned one of the targets.

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Russian agents have been accused of attempting to kill former KGB officer turned defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia using the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018.

The murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, using radioactive polonium 210, is also highly likely to have been ordered by the Kremlin.

Now other Russians living in the UK - Vladimir Ashurkov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Evgeny Chichvarkin and Boris Karpichkov are also on Putins hit list, the Mirror reports.

Also being targeted are long-time Kremlin-foe Bill Browder, an American-born UK citizen, and Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer.

Steele was identified in 2017 as the author of the "dirty dossier" that claims Russia collated a file of compromising information on Donald Trump.

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Vladimir Ashurkov, 49, was forced to step down as an investment banker in Russia because of links to Kremlin-foe Alexei Navalny, whose Anti-Corruption foundation he now heads.

Navalny was himself targeted with novichok and was jailed after returning from treatment in Germany, a move that sparked widespread demonstrations in Russia.

Ashurkov, who was granted asylum in 2015, told the Mirror he hoped the UK authorities were working to thwart any assassination attempts.

I have no doubt Russian security services are capable of executions anywhere in the world, he said.

There are at least 10 unexplained deaths in the UK. I feel safer on the streets of London than in Moscow, but nothing can ensure total safety.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a 57-year-old Siberian oil billionaire, now living in exile in London, who spent eight years in jail after being charged with fraud in 2003.

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Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience and he was released from jail in 2014.

If Putin wants to kill me no bodyguards will help. I am a well-known opponent of Putin, he said.

Browder became a thorn in the side of the Putin after he tried to expose the "looting" of his investments in the country by corrupt officials.

This needs to be taken very seriously, said Browder.

"Putin tried to kill Navalny with novichok and anyone on Putins hitlist, including me, must take precautions. Putin is not constrained by any moral or geographical boundaries.

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Boris Karpichkov, 62, is also a former spy who defected to Britain, arriving in 1998 with two suitcases of secrets with him.

He survived two attempts to poison him when he was making a visit to New Zealand.

He says Putin's targets - such as himself - are keen for their names to be public as it is the only way to stay alive.

It makes it more difficult for Putin to deny responsibility if one of us is killed, he said.

Billionaire Evgeny Chichvarkin, 46, made his fortune after founding the countrys largest mobile phone retailer and reportedly picked up Navalnys medical bills.

He now runs Hedonism Wines in central London, which charges up to 120,000 a bottle, and the upmarket Mayfair private dining rooms Hide.

Steele and Chichvarkin have not commented on the reported hit list.

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One of the six was sent details of Putins intentions by a sympathetic Russian intelligence officer.

The same officer reportedly also warned Skripal was earmarked for assassination and has said Putin has stated: We have long arms. No scum can hide from us.

The spook tells the target: They are out to shut you up completely. Take the precaution of quickly changing your place of residence, even if only temporarily.

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Vladimir Putin draws up new kill list of opponents and six of the targets are living in Britain... - The Irish Sun