Most prominent virus news today is the release of the Commonwealth Government’s app for detection and tracing. Medical and political leaders endorsed it and urged us to download it. It will be interesting to see what the take-up rate is. Global death tally has passed 200,000 from over 2.86 million cases. Australia has 83 deaths from 6,711 cases, 16 more today. NSW scored 8 more cases overnight for a total of 3,002 and 36 deaths.
As I get towards the end of my social isolation journal of 40 days and 40 nights I am faced with a dilemma. I have been promising myself, and my readers should there be any, that I will cease and desist commenting on Trump, not wanting to give his trumped up ego any more oxygen. But he keeps on supplying something more ridiculous every day. It’s gold! I find myself trapped in a Bermuda triangle of compulsive reflection on his antics. So I will turn the discourse around with some helpful tips for Donald, one each day over my remaining days of this journal, concerning other substances he might like to ingest. Today’s preferred elixir is avgas Donald, but be sure to gargle before you swallow. I’m sure it will have great therapeutic value. Try it and recommend it to your friends.
Writing in the New York times (April 24, 2020) Roger Cohen does a big eye roll with:
“Trump embodies the personal and societal collapse he is so skilled in exploiting. Insult the press. Discredit independent judges. Remove the checks. Upend the balances. Abolish truth. Pocket the system step by step. Mainline Lysol. Dictatorship 101.”
Wake up USA, you’re anything but great. Get some therapy. See yourself for what you are, acknowledge your manifest imperfections (including subversion of democracy) and admit you are drowning in sophistry.
As the curve continues eastward there is less of an alarming or cautionary nature about media reports and more items related to what we may be emerging into. It is important to note whose hands are on the levers as some of us try to alert decision makers not to go down the road of all those things we already know don’t work. As Laura Tingle reports (ABC News Sat 25 April 2020) “The “usual suspects” have been dusted off: company tax rates, industrial relations and red tape. The government has said it’s no longer “business as usual”.” We want a new settlement on our social contract.
Lifting the lockdown has been topical: when and how much and in which areas. Tingle asks:
“Shouldn’t we start with questions about what has happened to the economy – and what is likely to happen to it – in a structural sense, and what that might require of policy, rather than starting with well-worn answers and working backwards?”
Simon Tilford asked in Prospect (March 26, 2020): “Will the crisis discredit a whole way of thinking, by demonstrating that the state is not an obstacle to economic resilience but the indispensable guarantor of it.” He notes that “privatized profits and socialized losses will be a tough sell politically.”
Finally today, I note compatible sympathies with my own from Jonathan Freedland (Guardian, 25 April, 2020) on the nature of time under corona. An amorphous blob of time, an unpunctuated sentence for the duration of our sentence. He says:
“For everyone, this is a challenge of a different order. A sustained, long-run lockdown means that a vast stretch of undifferentiated time is unfurling ahead of us, stripped bare of the usual divisions and markers. We are facing a form of confinement that will not be brief.”
Awesomely Astute 