“A Shining Moment” series resumes tomorrow…and this interruption to it does still have music!
Over recent weeks I have read countless journalistic responses to “the virus”.
The article to which this post points is the most intelligently provocative one.
Lee Jones is a reader in international politics at Queen Mary, University of London.
The relevant article’s actual title: Coronavirus is the End of the End of History.
Wherever is “your” part of the political spectrum, this piece will likely provide a deal of nourishing food for thought.
It is far from nihilistic, but not reassuring.
Lee Jones offers potentially-useful discomfort to any adherent of any orthodoxy, whether “Left” or “Right”.
Three wee extracts:
The coronavirus pandemic is killing off the neoliberal order in a way that the diminished left could not. The ‘free market’ – supposed home to titans of industry and rugged venture capitalists cannot survive the virus for five minutes. Investors dissolve into hysteria. The fundamental irrationality of markets is exposed as stocks swing wildly from one hour to the next. Asthmatic grandmothers display greater resolve.
The anti-austerity Left has been exclusively focused on demanding higher government spending for so long, it hardly knows how to respond when it gets it. In Britain’s general election last December, the Labour Party ran on a platform promising adherence to fiscal rules which the Conservative government has torn up. As one Twitter wit put it so nicely, the far-left has been calling for ‘fully automated luxury communism,’ but Boris Johnson has provided ‘quarantine socialism in one country’.
Indeed, perhaps the most terrible question posed by the pandemic is: how can democracy function when the citizenry cannot? A new order is being improvised primarily by right-wing politicians, while the citizens are stuck indoors, hoarding toilet paper and watching Netflix. Curbing the disease requires social distancing, but shaping the future requires collective action.
Click here to read the full article, published 25 March by Tribune.
This post’s musical bonus comes from an unassuming, but great singer-songwriter.
Jesse Winchester (1944-2014) never became as famous as Bob Dylan or Emmylou Harris or Elvis Costello or Joan Baez or the Band’s Robbie Robertson, but all of them admired him greatly, most of them covered at least one of his songs, and one of them was moved to produce Winchester’s eponymous 1970 debut LP.
Many of his songs are at once very personal, yet universal, and poignant, but undefeated.
Some of them, I think, are especially resonant, as the present pandemic erodes our complacency.
Defying Gravity surfaced on Winchester’s 1974 album, Learn to Love It.
This live” version is, I think, an early 21st century performance:
Do It is one of my favourite songs/performances from any songster.
This is the original recording, from Third Down, 110 To Go, Jesse’s second LP, issued in 1972:
Hi Doug, thanks, a very interesting article indeed. While I agree with it, I think there is a slightly different way of looking at it. My reading of what he is saying is that a particular (neo-liberal) theory was developed during the Regan/Thatcher era, and the world went along with it, thinking it was the right one, and it has since been found to be not the case.
I suspect that what really happened was that our social democracies were hijacked by oligarchs and the neo-liberal theory was a pure invention of those in power to justify and institutionalise their kleptocracy.
So his critique of the left does not recognise the fact that the people have have been rendered powerless, and the power of ideas in a society swamped with propaganda by a compliant media has little chance of success.
The big question: what changes will this crisis bring, I don’t really know the answer to. But I am not particularly hopeful.