Category Archives: Nihilism

Anton wrote as if the end of the republic were upon us, and theres nothing like a rabble storming a citadel of American democracyassaulting police officers, ransacking the place and disrupting a constitutional procedureto shake confidence in the stability of our system.

Of course, it was the man Anton believed could be our savior who whipped up and urged on this crowd. The mob didnt charge the cockpit metaphorically, but charged the Capitol literally, in the grip of a more extreme, rough-hewn version of Antons logic and narrative.

Anton, who briefly served as a Trump official, is obsessed with a coming Democratic tyranny or coup. So, too, are President Donald Trump and his most fanatical supporters, who werent content simply to write highfalutin essays about how to resist the coup, or Stop the Steal.

No. If the pen is mighty, only baseball bats and projectiles can really make Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi afraid.

Make no mistake: A Flight 93 mentality led to the January 6 presidency, now defined not by any of the good it accomplished over the past four years but by a hideous act of extremism in its desperate, spittle-flecked final days.

In Antons defense, he never said he believed that Trump knew how to fly a plane. In the future, when hiring someone to pilot the most advanced jetliner on the planet, he might want to add that to the job description, and check a couple of references.

Anton wrote in the Flight 93 essay that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt time, could a Trump rise.

Rather than concluding that this spoke poorly of Trump, he made it into a kind of virtue. Anton poured scorn on anyone who fixated on Trumps character flaws. Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect, he wrote. So what?

So what, indeed.

Trump's most stalwart defenders have spent years justify everything Trump does because he supposedly wins when other Republicans are hopeless losers. Anton mocked conservative writers and politicians opposed to Trump in 2016 as the Washington Generals, on the court simply to provide a hapless opposition.

In the fullness of time, its clear how misguided this Trumpist triumphalism was.

Trump won a fluky victory in 2016, with just 46.1 percent of the vote. Predictably, he lost the House in a drubbing in the 2018 midterms. He failed in his reelection bid, this time with a slightly increased 46.9 percent of the vote (although still less than Mitt Romney in 2012). He then proceeded to concoct conspiracy theories for why he lost and lash out at Republican officeholders in Georgia, contributing to unnecessary Republican losses in two Senate runoff races and ending the GOP Senate majority. Trump thus completed a trifecta of defeat, wiping out any Republican control in Washington.

Meanwhile, almost every cultural institution has lurched further left, partly in reaction to Trump.

He proved himself a politician of considerable power, no doubt, but his support was too narrow to achieve all the winning his boosters expected from him.

He also indisputably did worthy things in office. Yet these werent saving-America-from-the-apocalypse-type victories, as one would have expected from Antons hysterical advocacy. Instead, they were the sort of solid achievements one would expect of a standard Republican with a populist bentin other words, tax cuts with some tariffs and new immigration restrictions.

In the end, though, Trump threw away his presidency, in large part because of the character flaws that Anton dismissed or valorized.

It is darkly amusing that in his Flight 93 essay, Anton gleefully attacked his conservative enemies as caring only about their careers and money, while throwing in with a rank egoist who fetishizes his wealth and status, who didnt care enough about his supporters or his own political cause to work a little harder in office or moderate his behavior slightly, who led his most committed supporters into a box canyon of lies and conspiracy theories after the election because he couldnt stand to admit that he lost.

Tens of millions of good people made the simple calculation in 2016 that Trump, despite his failings, would be better than Hillary Clinton, and thought the same about Trump and Joe Biden in 2020.

If this was all that Anton had argued in his essay, it wouldnt have been particularly notable. What made his essay so bracing was an undercurrent of nihilism, a sense that character and norms dont matter, not when all is nearly lost and we are engaged an existential struggle for power.

Trump has acted in keeping with an exaggerated version of this ethic in the postelection period, throwing aside truth and the law in pursuit of a second term to which he is not entitled.

We have seen that this path isnt suited to saving the republic but to tearing it apart and embarrassing it before the world. It cant and shouldnt work, and produced an immediate backlash and second impeachment.

Its not really fighting. Its giving up.

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Opinion | The Crash of the Flight 93 Presidency - POLITICO

One of the most pervasive criticisms that contemporary critics leveled at the earliest films of director Quentin Tarantino was one of nihilism the belief that his films embodied a cynical view of an amoral universe that was unraveling at the seams with nobody who could stop it.

These criticisms began with contemporary reviews of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantinos directorial debut. At The Washington Post, Desson Howe described the film as a nihilistic drama. At Variety, Todd McCarthy went further, arguing it was nihilistic but not resonantly so. Stephen Hunter in The Baltimore Sun described it as one of those pulpy endorsements of nihilism that ends up with just about everybody in the movie and several poor souls in the first rows of the theater on slabs.

These accusations haunted Tarantino through the decade. In 1998, Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan reported a colleague lamenting how the gleeful and nihilistic mixture of bloody violence and comedy associated with Tarantino had infected cinema. Although Manohla Dargis was careful to avoid directly implicating Tarantino in what she christened the new nihilism that same week, the fact she felt the need to mention him at all suggested his association with the movement.

Jonathan Rosenbaum complained that a nihilistic pop masterpiece like Pulp Fiction could win the Palme dOr at the Cannes Film Festival ahead of Krzysztof Kieslowskis Red. The decision of Clint Eastwoods jury to award the prize to Tarantino remains controversial among a certain class of film critic. However, there is not as much difference between Kieslowskis Red and Tarantinos Pulp Fiction as Rosenbaum would claim. Both are meditations on a chaotic, detached world.

Tarantino himself describes Red as a masterpiece. It is a study of anomie and disconnect. It is a French film shot in Geneva that was deemed too Polish to be eligible for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. It focuses on a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who listens in on the phone conversations of the people around him. The film suggests that the love of his life might have been the student and model Valentine Dussaut (Irne Jacob), but they were simply born too far apart.

Kieslowski has described how he was motivated as a filmmaker by observing life in the wake of the Cold War. I was watching people who didnt really know why they were living, he explained. Red is part of Kieslowskis Three Colours trilogy of films so-called not out of any patriotic fervor, but because the money to make them came from France. At their core, these three films are about the unlikely and unpredictable intersections of lives that seem to be moving without direction or purpose.

These themes echo in Tarantinos films. This is obvious in the sprawling ensembles and non-linear structure of films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Indeed, his script for True Romance had been nonlinear before director Tony Scott restructured it to make it linear. While critics complained that Tarantino was just showing off with these complex structures, the writer and director rejected that assertion, Those stories were better served dramatically to be done the way I did them.

The disjointed and non-linear structure of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in some ways reflected the cultural anxieties of the decade around them. By designing the films to separate and reverse the concepts of cause and effect in many cases showing consequence before inciting event Tarantino invited the audience to question the idea of causal relationships. Similar to the idea of the lovers displaced in time in Red, Pulp Fiction displaces action and reaction.

This could be seen as an extension of the idea of the end of history, proposed by economist Francis Fukuyama at the end of the Cold War. If there was no progress to make, of course cause and effect would unravel. More specifically, it reflected what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would describe as the illusion of the end in 1992 the same year that Reservoir Dogs was released. Aleksandar S. Santrac summed up Baudrillards theory as a short circuit between cause and effect.

This disentanglement of action and consequence gets at a larger fear. The same year that Reservoir Dogs was released, author Neal Gabler lamented the breakdown of moral consensus, Without a consensus, we will have not just moral anomie; we will have a society so fragmented that it ceases to exist. The same year that Pulp Fiction was released, author Tom Wolfe argued, Now theres hardly an educated person who would say right and wrong is written in stone.

Indeed, just as Red lost the Palme dOr to Pulp Fiction, Pulp Fiction lost the Best Picture Oscar to Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump was seen as part of a major conservative push in contemporary mainstream movies, an assertion of a comforting narrative about the arc of history that imposed a comforting external meaning and structure on a chaotic decade. It is a warm reassurance. This external meaning and reassurance is largely absent from both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

After all, Tarantinos films are set against a chaotic urban Wild West of contraband, drugs, bribery and professional destruction. They focus on criminals and murderers. The robbers in Reservoir Dogs cannot even agree on the order in which events occur. In Pulp Fiction, the boxer Butch (Bruce Willis) goes from the organized crime fight-rigging of Robert Wises The Set-Up to the horrific sexual assault of John Boormans Deliverance in the single weirdest day of [his] life.

As such, on the surface, Tarantino would seem to be embracing this chaotic nihilism, acknowledging that the world operates without any driving principles or moral logic. The world is insane. However, a closer look at Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction reveals something much more interesting. Instead of rejecting the idea of a moral order to the universe, Tarantino instead acknowledges that it is increasingly hard to find. However, it is there for characters and audiences willing to discern it.

This is reflected in the structure of both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. For most of Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) is bleeding out on the floor of a warehouse, having been shot during the botched robbery. Over the course of the film, it is revealed that Mr. Orange is actually an undercover cop named Freddy. Initially, the idea that an undercover cop would die so slowly and painfully and certainly seems to reinforce the films nihilism. Shouldnt Freddy be the good guy?

Gradually, the film offers flashbacks for the various characters. Freddys story is last. The particulars of Freddys wound are treated as a big deal; Freddy was shot by a woman that he attempted to carjack. He reflexively shot back, killing her. She was neither a cop nor a criminal; she was what Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) would call real people. It happens by train tracks, suggesting the crossing of a line. The camera lingers on Freddys face. This is Freddys big sin. Crucially, he knows it.

In Pulp Fiction, the audience is introduced to career criminals Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) in the first section of the film. In the movies middle section, Vincent is killed rather ignominiously by Butch while emerging from the bathroom. Jules is nowhere to be seen. Jules absence is only explained in the third story told, which actually happens before the events of the other two. Vincent and Jules were almost killed in an ambush, and Jules took it as a sign.

One of the big debates between Jules and Vincent is about whether the miraculous series of events that spared their lives was divine intervention, the action of a higher power. Vincent scoffs at the idea, treating it as luck. Jules treats it as a sign. He sets out to redeem himself. He does this by peacefully negotiating a stand-off with two armed robbers (Roth and Amanda Plumber) instead of killing them and by retiring from the life. This means he is not killed by Butch along with Vincent.

When the events of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are laid out linearly, they are surprisingly straightforward morality tales: Freddy kills an innocent person and so dies with the criminals; Jules renounces his life of crime while Vincent refuses, so Jules lives and Vincent dies. At the end of the movie, Tarantino explained of Pulp Fiction, the guy who actually becomes the lead character after the movies over with is a killer who has a religious epiphany! And its played straight. Its not a big joke.

Tarantino being Tarantino, he frames this morality in terms of Hollywood history. I never intended it to be this way but in some ways my films go by the old Hays Code, he confessed. Still, morality plays throughout Tarantinos career, particularly his later films whether the righteous anger directed at historical villains in Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, or the fantasy of saving Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and punishing the Manson Family in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Despite accusations that his work embraces nihilism, Tarantino rejects the idea of meaninglessness in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Instead, the director acknowledges that the world is a chaotic and arbitrary place, where meaning can be difficult to discern as the relationship between cause and effect blurs. However, it is not impossible. Tarantino responds to this confusion by insisting that it is still possible for audiences and characters to discern a moral path through that chaos. It takes work.

Im trying real hard to be the shepherd, Jules tells Ringo (Roth) towards the end of Pulp Fiction. Maybe nothing worth doing is easy.

Read more here:

Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction Offered Morality Plays for the 1990s - The Escapist

When Mike Tyson appeared on Good Morning America this week to promote his return to the boxing ring at the age of 54, the significance of the word on his sweatshirt almost obscured what he had to say. It simply read: Brownsville. And it spoke multitudes.

His Brownsville will always be the ravaged east Brooklyn 1980s wasteland whose streets fuelled Tysons nihilism and paranoia and was the source of his suspicion and alertness even as his preternatural ferocity and athletic strength catapulted him into the glare of the worlds fascination.

At last it has become a place he can salute. From the safe distance of his mid-50s he can wear Brownsville as a badge of honour. He wore a different top with the same slogan on a CBS interview and looked pared and content as he said all the right things and completed what must go down as one of the least likely redemption stories in American sporting life.

This weekend, Tyson will step into the ring to fight against Roy Jones Jnr. It brings together two of the most explosive and compelling fighting talents of the post-Ali era for what is essentially an exercise in nostalgia. The eight rounds will be two minutes each. There will be no judges and therefore no winner. If either man is cut, the fight will be ended. And knockouts are precluded: given the records of both boxers, its hard to see they can be sure of preventing that besides lowering the dial on their punches.

Iron Mike is in the shape of his post-boxing life, hopping up on the treadmill for two-hour slogs to drop his body weight by almost a third and having his promotions team posting, throughout the pandemic drear, a series of tantalising social posts of the iconic style: the pit-bull stance, the balletic feet and almond shaped glint and grimace as his face appears after one of those ferocious hooks, as though from behind a curtain. The body is chunkier, of course and the greybeard he rocked until this week was a salient reminder of just how long Tyson has been bobbing around on the flotsam of fame and notoriety.

And when you see him this week it feels like a minor miracle that he has made it through. Even the condensed history of the macro episodes in Tysons life 38 arrests before he was even a teenager, world heavyweight champion at 20, convicted of rape at the age of 29, jailed and a pariah, portrayed then as a walking freak show in the years afterwards and enthusiastically giving that role oxygen, now reciting Wildes Ballad of Reading Gaol, now chomping on the ear of Evander Holyfield, getting older, retiring on his chair with an exhausted wave of resignation against big Kevin McBride in 2005 . . . washed up, done but somehow not finished . . . reveling in a cameo in the global Hollywood comedy The Hangover, unleashing his dramatis personae in the series of one man monologues, suffering a terrible family tragedy and emerging in the social media age as a savvy entrepreneur of a budding cannabis empire to reach this point, where he is kind of cheating time by allowing a new generation of sports fans to at least get a theatrical sense of the dark energy his fights created: he sure made it out of Brownsville.

After the news of Diego Maradonas death flashed around the world on Wednesday, a photograph popped up on Tysons home page. The boxer is carrying the football genius in the traditional bride-across-the-threshold pose during Maradonas time as TV host. Both men are well past their sporting prime and their faces informed with a kind of wildness and anarchy and a shared recognition of where they had travelled in their respective sports. They inspired different responses from their public: while Maradona always generated an international warmth and admiration, fear and fascination were Tysons traditional calling cards.

And even now, the sense of his life as a bleak adventure is never far from Tysons conversational turns. After becoming fascinated by boxing history through his coach and saviour Cus DAmato, the figure whom Tyson saw a kindred spirit was Sonny Liston. In 2000, when Tyson a pariah, portrayed as scarcely human, Nick Toschess book Night Train was published, a terse, cinematic account of maybe the least loved champion in boxing history.

I think now that my boyhood fascination with Sonny Liston had to do with his being as feared and hated by blacks as by whites, Tosches writes early on.

He was the ultimate outlaw. Man, those narrow-lapelled sharkskin suits the felling left and that slaughterhouse right and that scowl: it transcended race.

Tyson did his best to run with that concept, reveling into Baddest Man On the Planet slogan until it ate him up and left him with nowhere to turn. And in the last years of his boxing life, he seemed likely to go down the same path as his anti-hero.

And yet here he is, just this week, welcomed again on the couches of Americas family friendly television shows: a man rehabilitated and invited to reflect on the lessons learned of the experiences that have shaped him. And he has always been a fast study, Tyson, with an uncanny ability to remain just in front of social trends when he spoke of his favourite subject himself and his mission to attain humility, to shed the ego, to remain present in the moment: the kind of pseudo-psychological fizz that has spawned a small army of by-the-hour gurus. Mike Tyson 2020 is not the fighter of 35 years ago.

But then there is this Thanksgiving Day photo from Thursday where Mike is at home in full tuxedo standing in front of an edible concoction made in the image of Roy Joness face and head. He is ready to carve. I like ears, he tells his family. What would you like? The clip cuts to Tyson munching happily on an edible ear as he says that it tastes better than Evanders.

Of course, its just a promotional lark. But the dark manic twinkle is there in the eyes. And it leaves you wondering always just who is really behind there.

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Has Mike Tyson completed the least likely redemption story in American sport? - The Irish Times

Last Thanksgiving, I wrote about the certainty of hope. Never could I have imagined how relevant that message would be the following year. In 2020, we have experienced a pandemic, witnessed violent riots in the streets, and plowed through perhaps the most divisive political election in American history.

In light of COVID-19, lockdowns, and tribalistic divisions, it may become easy for our eternal perspective to become obscured and skewed toward nihilism. I am a Christian, after all, and so I place my hope in the coming restoration of creation, inaugurated by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God become human.

But this year I want to briefly write about what I am chiefly thankful for in our unpredictable year: marriage.

In July, I committed myself in covenant marriage to my wife, Savannah, a gentle and kind woman who has an enormous capacity for love, grace, empathy, mercy, and compassion.

What I quickly learned about marriage and what I imagine most newly married people learn is that I am way more selfish than I ever thought. In fact, prior to promising my life to another human, I did not have the ability to comprehend the extent of my self-centeredness.

Many people find such self-revelation deeply troubling or scandalous. But there is something profoundly beautiful about the forging fire of marriage. The marriage covenant is where we are fully known, yet fully loved; the place where we can be fully ourselves, without posturing, knowing our spouse has committed to us the same investment.

When two self-centered people come together before God in total commitment to one another, out the other end they come reflecting the beauty and love of the God who created them. For Christians, marriage is the great incubator for sanctification. It's the privilege of walking alongside someone for the rest of their life, witnessing, and perhaps even having a hand, in that person's transformation.

This year was difficult for most everyone. But in my corner of the world, I have been able to experience but a small taste of the gloriousness of marriage, and what it means to be truly selfless and loving. There is much more work to be done but this is a gift for which I will always be thankful.

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What I am thankful for this year: The gift of marriage - TheBlaze

Dont you love gazing up at the night sky and enjoying the beautiful light show that nature provides- the stars, galaxies and constellations. And dont you wish youcould capture and live in that moment forever?

Konstantinos Vasilakakos dream came true- he got to sleep, dream and take pictures on the peak of Mt Olympus, Mytikas.

Vasilakakosinsanely captured the beautiful celestial creations in the sky, while on top of the mountain of the gods.

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Posted by Konstantinos Vasilakakos onThursday, November 19, 2020

The sleep of the gods

According to legend, a human soul that will sleep more than 1,000 nights out on the peaks, free from selfishness, conquests and ideals, will be able to cross to eternity

I will tell you an eerie story It took 5 years, 3 failed nights at the top of Olympus and a big gap to get this photo here. In 2014 I slept at this point under a pattern of clouds and lightning. In 2015 in the same landscape I cuddled with clouds and humidity. In fact, I had uploaded a photo from the same place in the clouds where you could not see anything

From 2015 until last year, 2019, I had not been to Olympus again. I went through my own hardships, periods of despair with big doses of nihilism. My mind was stuck on this diamond sky that I never photographed.

During these years I learned from my mistakes, I looked for ways to fight the humidity on the mountains and upgrade my equipment. At the same time, my knowledge of mountaineering has improved considerably. So, on this occasion, I returned in September 2019 to the Plateau of the Muses. I had to finish some pending issues with the gods

It was 9/25/2019 when I decided to go to Mytikas for the night. Alone, as always. The climb was a pure pleasure. On the other hand, when I reached the top it was cloudy and foggy. But now something had changed inside me.

In the past I had approached the top and had a plan to photograph the night sky. Having experienced eerie and unique things on mountaintops, this obsession has gone. Now I climb to the top because only then do I get the courage to continue to live in this human prison of mine.

It had been very dark when I found myself in a cloud of fog with minimal visibility. No stars or magic, nothing Just a cloud on top. Having eaten dinner I lay down in my sleeping bag to be warm. The temperature was close to 3 to 4 degrees. There were very few spots of clear sky.So I lay down, listening to the Rainmaker and looking at the void. I was so calm inside. So calm, passionate about photography and at the same time enjoying the moment. Anyway, I have all the paranoia to go up every day in a row until I find a clear sky

With this thought I was looking at the void and I was so calm. I have never been so calm. I was not asking for anything from the mountain, just to be there, at the top .. Suddenly this magic happened: The clouds were gone!

The night had a westerly wind where humidity and clouds rose from Kazania. I never understood what happened. Simply, the clouds disappeared in a minute! Frightened, I jumped out of the sleeping bag, grabbed the camera and barefoot on the rocks I started photographing the universe .. I said to myself it would last a few seconds, all this

Finally the whole night passed with a clear sky! I photographed everything that I had repressed inside me for so many years .. I felt a peace of mind and completion. One of the biggest and most difficult chapters is over. In the end I took this photo to show you what it is like to sleep on the top of Olympus, the house of the gods and legends

It is eerie, you feel the whole mountain in your hands. You feel the whole world in your breath and life / death fade. For as long as the night lasts, time has stopped.

Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece. It is located in the Olympus Range on the border between Thessaly and Macedonia, between the regional units of Pieria and Larissa, about 80 km (50 mi) southwest from Thessaloniki.

Mt Olympus has 52 peaks and deep gorges. The highest peak, Mytikas meaning nose, rises to 2,917 metres (9,570 ft). It is one of the highest peaks in Europe in terms of topographic prominence.

Olympus is notable in Greek mythology as the home of the Greek gods, on Mytikas peak. It is also noted for its exceptional biodiversity and rich flora. It has been a National Park, the first in Greece, since 1938. It is also a World Biosphere Reserve.

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Sleeping Under The Stars On The Top Of Mount Olympus - Greek City Times - GreekCityTimes.com

Dr. Fauci says the speed of the COVID-19 vaccine process did not compromise its safety or scientific integrity. USA TODAY

Dr. Paul Farmers friends accuse him of being pathologically optimistic. That may explain how hes managed to spend his life helping people in some of the most traumatized parts of the world: Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake; Rwanda after the genocide there; West Africa during the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015; and now the United States during COVID-19.

He'ssorely disappointed inhow his home country has handled the pandemic. "There's a lot to be done," he said. Buthe remains confident that the pandemic can "be brought to heel."

Farmer chairs the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founded Partners In Health, a Bostonnonprofit that provides medical care in developing countries andthe U.S. His work is the subject of a recent Netflix documentary, "Bending the Arc."

Dr. Paul Farmer, chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Partners In Health, has treated patients in Haiti, Rwanda and West Africa, and is now helping to tackle COVID-19 in the U.S. and elsewhere. He recently published a new book, "Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds," about the Ebola epidemic of 2014-2015.(Photo: Partners In Health)

Farmers latest book, Fever, Feuds and Diamonds, published this month, focuses on the Ebola outbreak and the public health mistakes that made it worse.

He tells harrowing stories about people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guineawho lost parents, childrenor spousessometimes all three. He argues the outbreak could have been less lethal if the French, British and American colonial powers had left the regionwith a medical infrastructure, and if international efforts had focused onhelping Ebola patients get better, rather than containing the diseases spread.

With COVID-19 raging across the country and the world, Farmer talked with USA TODAY about what the lessons of West Africa, Haiti and Rwanda can teach us about our own struggle.

Dr. Paul Farmer treats a boy in Haiti in 2019.(Photo: Partners in Health)

In the U.S., we tend to think of disease outbreaks as something of the past the plague of the 15th century or the 1918 flu epidemic not something that happens to us.

Farmer: Theres a long history of declaring plagues over. Not just individual plagues but all plagues. With the advent of effective and non-toxic antibiotics, there were declarations of the end of the infectious pathogen from the American Surgeon General on down.

Of course, thats never going to happen. We live in uneasy symbiosis with viruses theyre the worst, usually bacteria, parasites. Thats the way its going to be.

Thats another reason for us to think really hard about our investment in public health and safety nets in the United States.

In many countries, medical scourges are still common. What can we learn from them about how to deal with COVID?

Farmer: Some of the places that Ive worked in over the last 35 years, people are living in so much proximity to that kind of danger, that they know more about the lessons.

(Photo: The Associated Press)

Thats one of the reasons Rwanda has done a great job of responding to COVID: They had just been trying to protect their western flank from Ebola when COVID hit.

They knew what contact tracing was (the process of identifying people who may have come into contact with an infected person). They had hired and trained, not just a few thousand community health workers to do contact tracing, but probably 60,000 in a very poor country of 11 million people.

Weve had to struggle in every state in the union to get contact tracing elevated and supported fully,so when you call someone on the phone and say, "You need to isolate, you have a close contact (who has COVID),"that youre able to provide the necessary support for those people (whichPartners in Health does).

Some of these lessons are just closer to home in places that have not been spared the kind of risks we usually are spared here.

What concerns you most about Americas fight against COVID?

Farmer: We have clear evidence of "clinical nihilism"in a lot of places Ive worked the claim that theres nothing we can do for this patient, theyre beyond recall, this disease is too deadly. All the things that were said again and again and mindlessly about Ebola.

In the United States, what Im seeing now is a "containment nihilism,"where people are saying, "Its too much for us to hope to contain this."

Travelers wearing protective face masks walk through Concourse D at the Miami International Airport on Nov. 22, 2020. With the coronavirus surging out of control, the nation's top public health agency pleaded with Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving and not to spend the holiday with people from outside their household.(Photo: David Santiago, AP)

What do you think is behind that sense of hopelessness?

Farmer: Theres been a real toll of under-investment andlack of clear federal guidelines.

Do you think that will change when Joe Biden takes officein January?

Farmer: I think itll help. Leadership matters, tone matters, how our leaders conduct themselves matters. But tone is not enough. We need to invest much more heavily in public health.

Ive lost friends and family to COVID. I have friends and family whove lost their jobs or are furloughed. Im waiting to see more relief and support for those people as well. I think there are innumerable things we can do.

I never shame people for not wearing masks. ... COVID-shaming strikes me as no more appealing than shaming people around AIDS. Im disappointed, but thats not the way to move forward.

What about masks? Are you upset more people arent wearing them?

Farmer: I never shame people for not wearing masks. Its not the way I roll. COVID-shaming strikes me as no more appealing than shaming people around AIDS. Im disappointed, but thats not the way to move forward.

So why do you think people arent doing things like mask-wearing that clearly benefit both themselves and others?

Farmer: Were dealing with an epidemic of mistrust.

Angry residents react when the Utah County Commission meeting was adjourned before it even started, Wednesday, July 15, 2020, in Provo, Utah. The group protesting against face masks being required in schools removed the social distancing tape on the chairs and filled the Utah County Commission room to over flowing, prompting Commissioner Tanner Ainge to call for a vote to adjourn the meeting.(Photo: Rick Egan)

You describe a similar epidemic of mistrust in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak. How did they counter that?

Farmer: Changes in policy and laws that were, by the way, very unwelcome, often. I saw families who bitterly resisted a lot of these laws and rules, and were also deeply relieved by them, because they allowed people to say,"Im sorry I cant help bury our uncle,"or "Im sorry I cant clean up the mess of our niece or my sister in another house, but its the law."

That was something that changed me: seeing the ambivalence, the doubt and the relief all in the same household.

How do you explain the fact that Black Americans and other people of color are falling sick and dying at much higher rates than whites?

Farmer: Theres nothing genetic or essential about this. This is social. And thats good, because if its social, that means its in humans hands, not Gods hands. I think that lends (itself) to a kind of optimism.

I understand if African Americans, Latinos, the Navajo, I understand if theyre not optimistic about this. Why should they be?They have ample historical reason not to be optimistic. But it does mean its not carved in stone. I am convinced that we can bring this to heel. We will bring it to heel.

Deadly discrimination: America's history of racism was a preexisting condition for COVID-19

Maria Guadalupe Ortega Valladarez worked in the fields of Imperial County for 40 years. She was infected with COVID-19 and was hospitalized due to medical complications. She has partially lost her sight due to diabetes that she didn't attend for years. (Photo: Omar Ornelas, USA TODAY Network)

How would you compare the COVID-19 experience in the U.S. with that of other countries?

Farmer: Weve clearly done very poorly compared to peer nations meaning, other rich, industrialized nations. But weve done very poorly compared to Rwanda. We can draw on those lessons. Why shouldnt we?

Do you think Americans can overcome the lack of trust and nihilism you describe?

Farmer: We have no choice but to try. Were not going to succeed by demonizing huge segments of the population. That too was the case in Rwanda. By some estimates, up to 15% of men who were called Hutu were involved in direct execution of orders to kill.

Thats worse than what were facing.It was a decades-long buildup and explosion and much shorter rapid dismantling of structural violence. It was a deeply moving thing to see.

Partners in Health provides contact tracing services, identifying people who may have been exposed, encouraging them to stay home so they don't get others sick, and connecting them to resources to get food and pay rent. But so far, contact tracing hasnt worked well in the United States. Why?

Farmer: Contact tracing (has to be) linked to a real commitment to social support. If we cant think about the needs of those who are being called to isolate themselves, if we dont tend to their everyday needs for food, shelter (and) pay their rent and cell phone bills, were not going to have good contact tracing.

Public health nurse Jennifer Morgan, right, checks-in via phone with a patient self-quarantined at home who had some risk of exposure to the coronavirus as University of Washington epidemiology student Erika Feutz observes at the public health agency for Seattle and King County on Feb. 13. Washington state now has about 700 people focused on tracing contacts, with plans to expand the workforce to 1,500 by the second week of May.(Photo: ELAINE THOMPSON / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

That sounds pretty idealistic: that were going to provide enough support for vast numbers of people to stay home, away from work and families long enough to bring the epidemic under control.

Farmer: The thing about idealism, is if you can always link it to pragmatism, youre going to be OK.

I think theres nothing more pragmatic than trying to stand up a 1,200-person team to do contact tracing in eastern Massachusetts (as Partners in Health has done). Infusing that pragmatism with idealism is probably whats going to turn the epidemic around in the United States.

It seems like you were very personally affected by the Ebola survivors you met and the stories they told.

Farmer: It was very hard. Its always hard to see young people wither away like that or hear about people like some of these folks who lost their parents, children and spouses. It was just very hard.

Do you keep in touch with many of them?

Farmer: Thats one of the reasons (Im)optimistic. Weve seen these devastated families and devastated individuals weve seen them get better. That squares with my experience everywhere in the world. Usually our patients get better.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.

Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input

Benhur Lee, Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, handles a coronavirus sample in his lab on Sept. 29, 2020. Lee has been researching the COVID-19 virus since January. Through August, his lab worked round the clock on nothing but COVID-19. They are now doing research on COVID-19 as well as other forms of the coronavirus. (Via OlyDrop)(Photo: Seth Harrison, USA TODAY Network)

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Why this Harvard doctor is optimistic about US overcoming COVID-19 despite 'epidemic of mistrust' - USA TODAY

Even Metallicas staunchest defenders would find it hard to deny they had a rotten start to the 21st century. The Napster controversy, the departure of Jason Newsted, James Hetfields rehab stint, the much-maligned St Anger metals most superhuman band suddenly looked less than bulletproof.

But this is Metallica were talking about. Having survived the biggest test of their career, the San Francisco band rediscovered their mojo with 2008s Death Magnetic and served-up an equally heavy-hitting follow-up with 2016s Hardwired To Self Destruct. And while the albums they have made this century dont quite measure up to the landmark albums they made in the 80s and early 90s, they still produced their share of classic Metallica songs. Here are the 10 best.

After the trials of the whole St Anger period, Death Magnetic was the corrective the band and their fans needed. Cyanide may have been buried smack bang in the middle of the album, but it was emblematic of their rebirth, from the knotty riff to James Hetfields deathwish vocals.

Hardwired To Self-Destruct was a long album full of long songs too long in a few cases (hello, Here Comes Revenge). But its longest track was one of its best. At eight minutes and 15 seconds, Halo On Fire felt like an 80s Metallica epic updated for the 21st century, full of light and shade and dynamic twists that were there for a reason rather than just for the sake of it. Killer closing solo from Kirk Hammett as well.

Released as a taster for Hardwired To Self-Destruct, Atlas Rise! felt like a whistlestop tour of Metallicas career to date. The tighter-than-a-ducks-quacker riff evoked Kill Em All track Jump In The Fire, the swinging groove wouldnt have sounded out of place during the Load era and there were enough cunning time-changes to keep the prog-metalheads who champion And Justice For All happy. Swagger, confidence, a killer riff: what more do you want from Metallica?

After eight years of talk and the odd underwhelming stop-gap release (2011s Beyond Magnetic EP, 2014s one-off Lords Of Summer single), the band properly returned to the fray with this three-minute blast of noise and fury that rattled like an old school Metallica album opener. Were so fucked, shit out of luck, hard-wired to self-destruct, spat a never-more-nihilistic Hetfield. A few months later, Donald Trump was elected President. Go figure.

The title track of the album that Metallica fans love to hate, and its chief redeeming feature. A crunching tour de force of snatched riffs and a melee of drum sounds, poised and cleverly layered with Hetfields voice double-tracked; spoken and sung over a riff reminiscent ofBattery. It was knotty, unlovely and sonically frustrating, but the further we get away from it all, the more it seems like that was the point.

How many riffs can a band cram into one song? For all the back-to-basics talk surrounding Death Magnetic, All Nightmare Long was a callback to And Justice For Alls head-spinning ambition. It was accompanied by the best promo video Metallica had made in years, combining mock-historic documentary footage of Soviet tissue revival and an animated zombie apocalypse.

Amy Winehouse was the unlikely inspiration behind Hardwired To Self-Destructs second single James Hetfield wrote it after watching a documentary about the doomed singers struggles with addiction. Musically, this was as solid modern heavy metal gets, packing just the right amount of riffage into its six-minute running length. And if those twin guitars that kick it off arent a nod to their NWOBHM roots, nothing is.

The Black Albums blockbusting ballad gained a sequel with 1997s Unforgiven II and officially became a franchise with this Death Magnetic-era third instalment. Continuing the themes of its predecessor sin and consequence, according to Hetfield it cranked up the grandiosity to epic levels while retaining its country-and-western undercurrent. Not as good as the original, but better than Part II - and apparently Hetfields favourite out of the trilogy.

Sure, the intro riff might have been lifted from Martha And The Muffins New Wave hit Echo Beach, but The Day That Never Comes was the sound of a band who had completely regained their confidence. With its gradually escalating sweep from atmospheric, slow-burning opening section into heavy-as-hell finale, this was nothing so monumental as a 21st century Fade To Black. Stellar version on S&M2 as well.

Where had this version of Metallica been hiding for the past 20-odd years? Turbocharged, full of piss and vinegar, Spit Out The Bone is a circle-pit inducing thrash masterclass that wouldve sounded perfectly at home ending any of their 80s albums. A blast of thrash nihilism with a lyric celebrating humanitys extinction at the hands of genocidal machines. Utopian solution! Hetfield barks, finally cure the Earth of Man! The relentless energy is almost palpable, and longtime fans breathed a sigh of relief: the old Metallica really were, finally, back.

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The Top 10 best Metallica songs of the 21st century - Louder

Kingdaddy Sunday, October 18, 2020 1 comment

I used to think that nihilism was an active philosophy, rather than a passive mindset. Nihilists, in an active sense, would be people who reject all isms liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, veganism, Protestantism, Daoism as inherently silly or pointless. From this perspective, if we are just bags of protoplasm, living in an uncaring universe that is rushing to his heat death, whats the point of any kind of belief? Isnt belief in something beyond these rude facts just a waste of time, a pleasant fiction covering unpleasant realities? Life for the moment until the last day that you can.

This active, aware form of nihilism always seemed weird, contradictory, and unsustainable. Isnt the proposition that all beliefs are ultimately pointless is itself a belief? Having never met a nihilist of this sort, I had doubts about whether anyone truly adhered to this worldview, outside of a few goth poseurs, psychopaths, and the Elmer Gantry-ish opportunists who put on the costume of principled behavior to get what they want money, fame, power, sex, whatever.

Thats not to say that there arent nihilists of a different sort. The commonplace form of nihilism is more passive and unaware, and far more dangerous.

Nihilism, in this other meaning, isnt the rejection of all beliefs. In fact, many people who are nihilists consider themselves to be true believers in some set of principles. Nihilism is really the absence of any motivation to follow these principles in practice. For the common breed of nihilist, current exigencies always trump principled behavior. The opportunity to do the right thing, to behave in a principled fashion, is a luxury for the future. Of course, that future never comes, so practically speaking, the principles dont really exist at all, except as a self-congratulatory litany of what makes me a better person than you, even while Im doing terrible things to you. For instance, many Soviet commissars believed in a future workers paradise, even as they were shooting living, breathing workers in the head.

The passive, unaware version of nihilism is what has poisoned the American body politic, and led to the events of 2020 as the most troubled year in American history in generations. COVID-19 killed 1,009 Americans yesterday, and the Current Occupant continues to lie about whether the pandemic is even still a threat. People shrug and say, thats just him, or thats just politicians, or he is a flawed human being on the road to do greater things. A nominee to the Supreme Court is unwilling to admit that she has any real judicial opinions, a truly unbelievable claim. So when does the voice of ambition stop whispering in that persons ear when she becomes Chief Justice? Or perhaps never, since there is always some perceived threat to ones position, even when it is life-long? The man who is pushing this nominee, Mitch McConnell, famously abandoned his principle from 2016, and has otherwise destroyed all norms of bipartisanship, comity, and fairness from the Senate, in order to install a certain breed of judges in the federal courts. The erosion of the judicial branches legitimacy as an independently thinking part of the government doesnt seem to enter into McConnells calculations. And for some of the people who, in the face of a pandemic, fires, economic catastrophe, civil unrest, international disgust, the corruption of public agencies, structural racism, the emboldening of white supremacists, the use of phrases like enemy and traitor to describe ones neighbors, and environmental collapse, is it unfair to say that they, too, fall into this category of nihilism, in which all current calamities are justified in the name of some future good?

Power the seeking of it, and the protection of it certainly breeds this kind of nihilism. Ive met people on the other side of the aisle, including politicians, left-leaning thinkers and celebrities, and others, to whom I would apply the same description. However, the nihilism of the American right far outstrips anything you see in other political quarters, in large part because the Republican party, the right-wing social media apparatus, and their partners in social media, have become the de facto party of nihilism. Not belief is sacred, not fiscal responsibility, opposing corruption, eliminating tariffs and other protectionist economic policies, standing by our allies, standing against our rivals and foes, defending democracy, or maintaining the rule of law. The Republican Party, its allies, and many of its supporters, have switched positions on these issues with a speed and unashamedness that would make totalitarian propagandists like the Communist International of the 1930s gape in astonishment.

It is fair to say that the Democratic party has, to use the common cliche, lost touch with its roots in the working class and rural communities. With fierce determination, the Republican Party has excavated its roots, burned them thoroughly, and scattered the ashes, leaving no traces behind.

Yes, power can dissolve someones moral core. Power may tend to corrupt, but it doesnt have to. Just as adults have to learn how to be loving and firm as parents, maturity demands that people, when wielding power, have to balance political expedience with moral necessity. Not everyone is capable of doing that. Some succumb, just as some celebrities collapse under the weight of their fame. Institutions should help people from taking these dark turns, or when they do, remove them from where they can do harm.

Instead, one political party has embraced nihilism. When you have reached a point where, as in the case of Lindsey Graham, you deny the words you said a few years ago, even when anyone can search and find them within seconds, you are beyond simple political expediency. When you are afraid to stand up to a mendacious demagogue, when a thousand Americans die each day because of his incompetence, because you fear for your re-election chances, you have arrived at the point of nihilism. If you cannot act to save American lives, then the only justification you have for holding on to power is holding on to power. Public service is no longer an issue, when the most basic responsibility is to save Americans from preventable deaths.

But again, most of the people I am describing may believe themselves to be principled, well-intentioned people. That is what makes this form of nihilism extremely dangerous. In one of the best episodes of The Americans, a woman about to be murdered asks her assassin, a Soviet sleeper agent, Why? You think doing this to me will make the world a better place? When her murderer answers yes, the victim replies, just before dying, Thats what evil people tell themselves, when they do evil things.

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The Downward Slide Into Nihilism - Outside The Beltway - Mobile Edition

The penultimate episode of The Boys second season begins in unnerving fashion, even by the shows standards. A lonely young white man who lives at home with his mother is slowly enveloped, and radicalized, by the dangerous rhetoric spewed by the Vought Corporation superhero and newest member of the Seven, Stormfront. Over time, and with Stormfronts warnings of super-terrorists invading America from beyond our borders constantly booming from his phone and computer screens, the loner begins to suspect that his local bodega owner is one of these threats in hiding. (The owner is, of course, a person of color.) The tragic sequence culminates with the man shooting the innocent owner in the face.

While The Boys is a pessimistic thought exercise exploring what would happen if super-powered beings actually existed among usspoiler: yes, superheroes would absolutely abuse their powersthis particular moment, unfortunately, feels very much rooted in our current reality. As other on-screen superhero stories have confronted historical examples of fascismHYDRA, originally an experimental scientific branch of the Nazi Party, is a recurring antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe Boys portrays more contemporary racist ideologies. Modern fascism comes by way of social media, memes, and conspiracy theories.

Stormfront, a being who the second season reveals was originally created by Heinrich Himmler (a side effect of her powers is that she doesnt really age), is the evolution of the white supremacist rebrand in practice. Once a literal Nazi from Nazi Germany, she shaves part of her head, is undeniably crafty with her faux-feminist/anti-corporate messaging, and succinctly underlines her philosophy for recruiting people like the aforementioned loner. You cant win the whole country anymore, so stop trying, Stormfront tells Homelander, the shows sociopathic Superman/Captain America stand-in. You dont need 50 million people to love you, you need 5 million people fucking pissed. Anger sells. You have fans; I have soldiers.

That The Boys season finale, What I Know, premiered the day after the FBI uncovered a terrorist plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is further proof that, existence of superpowered humans wearing dorky costumes aside, the series has a firm grasp on how actual cults of personality are formed. Reality these days can be just as strange, and depraved, as fiction. (If the second season wasnt put together in 2019, Stormfront may well have given a shoutout to the same white supremacist group that the president told to stand by just two weeks ago; The Boys is rarely subtle.)

Viewers expecting a crass, irreverent take on superhero culturethe tone of Deadpool in the form of a TV seriescertainly wont be disappointed by The Boys, but Season 2 sure goes down with an un-Deadpool-like bitterness. Amazon Studios originally sent critics the entire second season in advance over the summer, so my enjoyment of the show was distilled in a few afternoons. But The Boys actual release modelafter the first three episodes premiered on September 4, Amazon went with a weekly rollouthas its pros and cons.

On the one hand, the series reaped the rewards of sustaining interest for weeks on end; its popularity is such that not only was The Boys renewed for a third season, but a spin-off about superpowered kids in college is also on the way. (Suggestion: Cast Nicholas Braun for all the Sky High heads out there.) On the other hand, stretching out this particular season into weekly morsels is asking fans to become gluttons for punishment. Even though her name was an obvious reference, Stormfront doesnt reveal her true nature until the end of the third episodeat which point, the show takes its time laying out the full extent of her awfulness (an ageless Nazi who, in a previous superhero iteration under the name Liberty, viciously murdered a young Black man). Its compelling, up to a point: Eventually, you just want to see Stormfront, like Ramsay Bolton on Game of Thrones, get her comeuppance.

To the credit of The Boys, What I Know does deliver a satisfying rebuke to, as many characters end up dubbing her, the Nazi bitch. After A-Train discovers the real reason why Stormfront doesnt want him back in the Sevenbecause hes Blackhe goes about stealing buried, classified documents of her Nazi past. With Hughie and Starlights help, Stormfronts real identity is leaked to the press, giving Vought another PR nightmare to deal with. (One of the many effects of the revelations of Stormfronts Nazi ties is that A-Train is let back into the Seven so the company can try and save face.) As for Stormfront, who confronts the Boys in the finale, she pivots very quickly from decrying the information as a deepfake to acknowledging that people like what she has to saythey just dont like the word Nazi.

And then, thankfully, she gets walloped. Queen Maeve, whos spent much of the series wallowing in self-pity, leads a Stormfront beatdown, joined by Starlight and Kimiko. The sequence is immensely cathartic and scored to the on-the-nose tune of Peaches Boys Want to Be Her. The Boys loves to take jabs at Marvelwhether intentional or not, three female heroes beating the crap out of a Nazi feels like the shows answer to Avengers: Endgames cringey and entirely unearned girl power moment. Stormfront eventually does her best Anakin Skywalker getting roasted on Mustafar impressioncourtesy of Homelanders superpowered son Ryan nailing her with his laser visionto cap off her arc. With all due respect to Aya Cash, who delivered an incredible performance, Id be fine if that was the last we ever see of her.

Season 2 was a transitional period for The Boys. After all, What I Know saves its biggest mic drop for last: Victoria Neuman, the representative reminiscent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whos been trying to hold Vought accountable for its actions, has powers herself. And not only that, shes the character responsible for the series of head-exploding assassinations this season. (Her final kill of the season was the leader of the shows equivalent of the Church of Scientology.)

While Neumans motivations arent entirely clear, it appears that Vought is covering all bases: Since the company cant stop the government from interfering in its nefarious plans, they might as well have a mole in charge of the newly established Office of Supe Affairs. If a Nazi becoming the most popular and social-media-savvy member of the Seven was The Boys appetizer, the shows main course looks like it will be Voughta conglomerate with shades of Disney and Lockheed Martin that turns a blind eye to fascists and murderers in its ranksvying for complete global domination.

Having a young representative in the mold of AOC secretly being a ruthless assassin who can explode heads with her mind is, uh, definitely in line with The Boys provocative sensibilities. But the finales Neuman twist also reaffirms what the show has hammered home from the very beginning: Whether its superheroes, celebrities, or politicians, you should always have a healthy dose of skepticism for authority figures and the institutions that put them on a pedestal. And if you ever find yourself confronted by a Nazi, punch them square in the face.

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The Second Season of The Boys Was Fueled by the Nihilism of Reality - The Ringer

When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, he was a frail man, disappointed and also withdrawn from national politics. He was 78 years old, and one thought it was a travesty that a person who spoke tirelessly of non-violence all his life met a violent death. But it now looks it was not happenstance; almost 70 years later we are now witnessing a series of events that echo it.

It began with the murders of Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar and Kalburgi all of them into their 70s, and more recently the arrest of Varavara Rao, and now Stan Swamy, both into their 80s. The silent but unmistakable ageism in the way the Right in India thinks will hold important clues to how they see life and the nihilism, and contempt for anyone considered vulnerable. What can explain the series of killings and arrests of octogenarians, and what could be the possible message that they wish to communicate?

From the left: Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar, Varavara Rao and Stan Swamy. Credit: PTI

Predatory state

There seems to be a mix of factors as to how activists who are old, ageing and ailing seem to be picked up and made a spectacle of. It immediately communicates certain ruthlessness and recklessness. Varavara who was once known to be a powerful public speaker was struggling to find the right words and who was known to have an elephants memory failing to recognise his own family. All stress-induced symptoms also come with ageing. But repeated refusals to grant bail and machinations to keep him in prison are a clear message of seeing this as a fight to finish.

It symbolises a predatory culture where one can either be a victor or the vanquished. Targeting the old seems to bring a sense of doomsday where there is no escape for the rest if the old and ailing are not spared.

It seems to also resonate with the idea of a strong nation that has little space and patience for the unproductive bodies. It brings back the memories of Nazi rule that targeted not just the Jews but also the disabled White German kids and put them through the same gas chambers. It symbolises a kind of productivism of both the market and the nation. If one is not of use and not productive it is not immoral to dispense with them.

This, figuratively, seems to stand in opposition to the young and productive nation that is looking ahead. By default making a spectacle of the old and ageing seem to also signify that the values and ideologies they stood for are outdated and irrelevant. Shrinking bodies become the templates for conveying coded message of fading ideas and upend value system.

The recent video of Stan Swamy complaining of ailments and yet remaining steadfast for the values he stood for in fighting for the tribals can send a message of unflinching commitment, but it can also mean they are stretching themselves at a time when they needed to retire and spend time with grandkids, be contemplative and await the inevitable.

In Hindu philosophy, it signifies an age to move towards vanaprastha and sanyasa referring to giving up worldly pursuits. It goes with the symbolism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi meditating in the cave and taking a lonely walk between the election results and announcing 75 as a cut off year to hold administrative posts in state or central governments. He had moved the ageing leaders to a freshly minted Margadarshak Mandal.

The Right seems to believe that given the cultural codes of Hindu way of life, dispensing with the old will meet less protest and resistance from the society. It creates a scope for more fear and less resistance. The suffering they are being put through seems to be seen through the prism of a calculus of how many more years are really left and society would forgive and may be even forget the excesses more easily but the message of being ruthless and un-pardoning slowly seeps in.

Also read: Modi 2.0: A Coming-of-Age Drama for Majoritarianism and Authoritarianism

Political nihilism

While the arrests of young men brings a spirit of resistance that can inspire the society, incarcerating the old makes us more contemplative, look at the meaning and purpose of life, and we associate it less with action. It brings in a sense of nihilism, reminding us of the inevitability of death and futility of suffering. It reminds us of a time for other worldly pursuits as is poignantly reminded to us in the film Mukti Bhawan. In fact, in much of religious philosophy, death is Moksha, a kind of liberation for the corporeal self and body and is not something to grieve over, much less resist.

Ageing reminds us of a sense of loneliness that awaits us with a deep sense of vulnerability. It reminds us of the need to plan for ones safety and care and pursuit of collective interest and heroic activism can cost you not just your life but the bare needs necessary for an ageing body. It can have deep roots in psychology of creating innate insecurity; the Right consciously targets sites that harbour our latent and dark selves.

Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar notes how rumours of poisoned milk being sold are spread during communal riots as figuratively milk symbolises a primordial maternal security. It can arouse latent fears and insecurities and primordial instinct for violence. In killing and arresting the old and ageing, the Right is targeting a psychological warfare on its own society to disempower and silence it.

It is an empowering irony to watch and get inspired by the dadis of Shaheen Bagh where Bilkis Bano symbolises the new hope. Her age evokes happiness, love and mischief. It transcends social boundaries of religion and place. Time magazine listed her in 100 most influential people of 2020.

Shaheen Bagh, on one of the evenings in March. Photo: Rayees Amin

Life moves through dialectics, as the current regime looks at the underside of age, dadis of Shaheen Bagh are reminding us of what Mark Twain once famously said: Age is an issue of mind over matter, if you dont mind, it doesnt matter. Age brings the best of lighter side of life and reminds us of taking life with a pinch of salt and standing for causes well beyond ones immediate interest could possibly be the most meaningful way of living ones life. Collective resistance needs to upturn the cynical spectacle in resisting for and celebrating the lives of these ageing soldiers of salvation and emancipation.

Ajay Gudavarthyis an associate professor at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU.

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How the Right Is Starting a Psychological War by Targeting the Old and Ageing - The Wire