“There aren’t many comparisons in American history for Thursday’s press conference in which Donald Trump suggested that the coronavirus might be defeated by shining lights inside human beings or injecting people with disinfectant. But there is the song ‘Miracles’ by Insane Clown Posse.”
A permission structure for ignorance
“Search for Bill Bennett’s name on this site [Twitter], and you’ll see ‘Fox & Friends’ viewers cheering him on. And that’s the real problem. This show provides a permission structure for ignorance.”
CNN Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter (@brianstelter), 13 April 2020
Stelter was reacting to dismissive statements on Fox & Friends by William Bennet, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, about the severity of the Coronavirus.
Bennett smugly stated,
And now they say 61,000 people will die…I’m going to tell you I think it’s going to be less.“…We’re going to have fewer fatalities from this than from the flu. For this we scared the hell out of the American people…closed down the schools…closed the churches… This was not and is not a pandemic…Look at the facts.
At the time William Bennett made those statements — April 13, 2020 — 22,000 Americans had already died of COVID-19.
The Bible could not have known numbers such as these
India:
On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown.
…He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice?
The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.
Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.
The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these.
The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.
Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police.
Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km].
“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.
“Us” means approximately 460m people.
The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.
Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.
The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these.
The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.
Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police.
Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km].
“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.
“Us” means approximately 460m people.
The Pandemic is a Portal, by novelist Arundhati Roy, on India's response to the Coronavirus. Financial Times, 3 April 2020
Only until they are personal
Crises are political only until they are personal. As news of Mr. Frilot’s diagnosis spread, among his friends and on Nola.com, his story was no longer just that of a young, healthy person who caught a virus that young, healthy people had been told they were not supposed to catch. It was a revelation for the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, where many had written off the pandemic as liberal fear-mongering. Mr. Frilot, a registered Republican, and his family are generally apolitical, and were not thinking much about the virus — whether as a fiction or anything else — before he got sick.
On Facebook, Kathy Perilloux shared a similar conversion. Before March 16, Ms. Perilloux’s page was almost solely posts questioning the severity of the virus. March 10: “Hurricane Corona …. HYPE …. sigh,” she wrote. (“I stole that from Rush, but I was thinking the same before he said it!!!!!” she added in a comment.)
Then Ms. Perilloux commented on Ms. Frilot’s post: “Your story puts a real face on a real danger, that’s what had been missing.” She hasn’t posted anything else about the pandemic.
Since Friday, March 13, Mark Frilot has managed just two breaths on his own.
Then Ms. Perilloux commented on Ms. Frilot’s post: “Your story puts a real face on a real danger, that’s what had been missing.” She hasn’t posted anything else about the pandemic.
Since Friday, March 13, Mark Frilot has managed just two breaths on his own.
Her Facebook Friends Asked if Anyone Was Actually Sick. She Had an Answer, by Elaina Plott, New York Times, 19 March 2020
Cultural Engagement to Mitigate Social Isolation
My collaborator Dana Mitroff Silvers and I have received a grant from the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, to help museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations work more directly with their communities during this awful, challenging moment in America.
The Aspen Tech Policy Hub announcement and press release is here.
10 cultural organizations, together serving over 4 million people across the United States, have joined us.
Our partners are,
Arts & Minds, New York, New York (with Howes Studio), with Carolyn Halpin-Healy, Nellie Escalante, and Deborah Howes
Akron-Summit County Public Library System, Akron, OH, with Jennifer Stencel
Center for Art and Public Exchange, an initiative of the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, with Monique Davis
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, with Liz Neely
Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA, with Andrew Utt and Claudia Cano
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, with McKenzie Drake
Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ, with Deborah Kasindorf and Silvia Flippini Fantoni
RED EYE Theater, Minneapolis, MN, with Emily Gastineau, Jeffrey Wells, and Rachel Jendrzejewski
Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN, with Katherine Covey and Susannah Schouweiler
The idea of this project is very humble and straightforward: Dana and I will bring the group together and provide workshops, facilitation, coaching, know-how, and outside perspectives; and the participants will bring their vast professional expertise, imagination, and intimate knowledge of their communities, missions, and values. We’ll meet weekly over the course of 10 weeks and together we’ll try to nudge new experiments and ideas into the light of day.
When we conceived this project back in April we were focused exclusively on addressing the harm being caused to communities and individuals by the social isolation of Covid-19, but April seems like it was 100 years ago. Now, with our hearts aching from the eruption of pain, fear, and anger of what we have all lived through and witnessed over the last few days here in the US, and with many of our collaborators dealing with the immediate consequences and long-term root causes of violence and injustice on their own doorsteps, we will inevitably be drawn together towards a larger and more consequential response.
I hope you will follow this project here, with the participants directly, on my Twitter and Dana’s Twitter — and I also hope that everyone, everywhere, will become more deeply committed to the social and cultural life, social justice, and wellbeing of their own communities.
P.S.
In addition to this Aspen project I’m also beginning to lead a series of sense-making workshops with Europeana Network members this week, with Jasper Visser, to help understand and support the digital transformation they are currently experiencing across the European cultural sector.
Also, we have launched a call for participation for What Matters Now, an online community event to be held on July 10, 2020 [was previously July 3]. Please check it out and join us!