For the last several years, and with no
particular objective, I have taken the period between Christmas and New
Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I
paid attention through
epigrams and aphorisms. It follows an end of year tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), and 2019 (for those see here).
At the end of 2019 I wrote as the introduction to 2019's closing epigrams and aphorisms the following:
The year 2019 is ending with the great rifts--opened in 2016, exposed
in 2017, and acquiring a greater urgency and revealing the
power of its consequences in 2018--now exposed. More than exposed, 2019
marked their explosion, the aftermath of which, in 2020, will be marked
by the start of a variety of end games in law, society, politics,
culture and economics. Global divisions, more acute in 2018, finally
reached moved toward climax in virtually all states, and with respect to
all systems--law, compliance, religious, societal, cultural, and
economic. While 2020 will likely be the year in which the climax events
of 2019 will play themselves out, the year 2019 was in many ways the
year of the "big bang" for the third decade of the 21st century. (Ruminations 89(1) (Blasphemies): Looking Back on 2019 in Epigrams and Aphorisms).
The
year 2020 has indeed proven to be the year of end games of all sorts,
the aftermath of the big bang that was now the faded memory of 2019. It
was a year that was consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic. But that was
hardly all--many things happened under the cover of the virus. This was
the year of the transformation of Hong Kong, of the realization that
governance was becoming both data driven and managed by algorithms, and
of the indulgence in state killings to suit the tastes of their
leaders. It was the year that saw the return of borders and the
refinement of the techniques useful for managing the movements of
populations from the most to the least developed states. It was the
year the Americans were continued their civil war and in which the
rupture of the aristocratic elites produced successful campaigns to
demonize virtually anyone. Indeed, beyond the virus, 2020, appears to
have been the year of the demon, it was the year of oni (鬼, demons) and yurei (幽霊, ghosts); it was the year the demons (恶魔) left hell (地狱).
In
this Part 3 we look back beyond the daemons 2020 has permitted us a
certain delight in creating, or the gods we have attempted to make of ourselves, to that great natural disaster that we have made our own--the COVID-19 Pandemic. In this form the Pandemic provided the great mirror on human organization, and human organization stared back. The virus that is COVID-19 in its physical form is a tragedy claiming lives and livelihoods, but it is also a virus that attacked the bodies politics and the great institutions that were created in the expectation that they would be virus proof. COVID-19 then is both a physical and metaphysical infection from out of which there may be no exit. That is the last kiss of 2020.
1. The marvelous thing about catastrophe, like a pandemic, is that it is meaningless without context; and humans appear unable to judge a thing unless it is compared to another; a pandemic, then, is without meaning, until it acquires form by only when measured against other things by those who purport to know better (
Think 2020 was the most stressful year EVER? Think again.....
historians say it was only the EIGHTH worst time to live through in US
history ("Ivy League and Oxbridge university professors have said 2020 ranks only
the eighth worst year in US history, behind the peak of the American
Civil War in 1862, the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the
Spanish flu pandemic in 1919" Ibid.)).
2. Pandemics, like other great catastrophes require sacrifice for the hubris from which they arise--perhaps the Greeks had it right, every pandemic is an iteration of the plague that the gods decreed for Thebes as a reflection of the illness that affected its core leadership; incest, hubris, murder, rigidity, and a refusal to take auguries seriously. COVID-9 has produced its Oedipus; its Creon; Jocasta; Tiresias--the leadership cores that have killed their father and fathered children with their mother, surrounded by the amoral honey tongued politician and the seer who infuriates by revealing the truth. The pandemic is the manifestation of the folly (in its ancient sense of wicked unwise conduct, of its social construction as madness) of the human collective (
From Trump to Erdoğan, men who behave badly make the worst leaders in a pandemic;
What sets good and bad leaders apart in the coronavirus era;
How Xi Jinping Blew It).
3. Every society needs an excuse to break its own rules, and every authentic excuse to break rules makes it that much less possible to even think that the rule has any relation to the realities of life in that state; COVID-19 has provided that excuse for the state which can to some excuse lose its self control in relation to its se of the police power (
Amnesty International Report: COVID-19 Crackdowns: Police Abuse and the Global Pandemic).
No comments:
Post a Comment