Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*
Covid 19 in Spain
- Things are getting better but no one knows why . . . See the 1st article below. As I’ve said, one factor surely is that - while the virus might revisit those whose antibodies are no longer effective - it can’t kill the old and the vulnerable twice. You only die once.
- Anyway, here’s a nurse’s guide to having a safe family gathering or dinner party.
Living La Vida Loca
- It’s said that - possibly contrary to expectation - the Spanish were very good at obeying the rules during our fierce lockdown. As I’ve hinted, this might well have had something to do with the combination of huge fines and officious/efficient police forces. Since the relaxation, things seem to have returned to normal as regards obeisance towards rules. If only because it’s rather harder to know about indoor get-togethers. Though drones are helping with the illegal raves and botellones(binge parties).
- Here’s something on the fines that the Andalucian government regards as essential to contain the parallel (and synergistic) epidemic of youthful gatherings.
- Talking of rules . . . I think the fine for chucking your mask on the ground is €300. Yesterday, I passed 4 of these on a short walk - across the famous bridge - into town.
- Said bridge is today being used for some sort of long-jump competition associated with the national triathlon competition being hosted by the city.
- A couple of rather nice fotos of the construction:-
Never let it be said I'm only negative about it . . .
- Yesterday I had a go at getting a cita on line for the collection of my TIE. With a little difficulty, I went through the various stage of the process - including selecting the Pontevedra province - only to be told at the end that I could only get it from either Vigo or Tui. Which conflicts directly with the shortly-to-expire document I have, which says I must do this from the office in which I started the process. Which is in Pontevedra, of course. So . . . Tomorrow, I’ll try the phone again and if/when this doesn’t work, I’ll go to the Comisaría and ask the policeman at the entrance how he suggests I can solve this problem. Without a high degree of confidence that a solution will be offered. If not, I’ll just have to wait until people return to work in September and rely on the benevolence of any police person who - in the interim - tries to fine me for not having a current residence document.
The USA
- The curse of identity politics. See the 2nd article below. The polarisation of politics there, it has to be said, is not entirely Fart’s fault.
The Way of the World/Social Media
- How ‘woke’ America cancelled press freedom. See the 3rd article below. Not just in the USA, of course. Though perhaps it’s far more of an Anglo-Saxon than a global/developed world problem,
English/Spanish
- When it rains it pours: Siempre llueve sobre mojado.
- Where there’s muck there’s brass: Ensuciandose los manos, se puede hacer un rico.
- Where there’s smoke there’s fire: Donde hay humo hay calor.
THE ARTICLES
1. Coronavirus: Things are getting better but no one really knows why. Doctors warn against complacency despite the global fall in death rates from Covid-19: Tom Whipple. The Times
At the beginning, when beds were full and deaths common, doctors were still trying to understand the best treatment for coronavirus. “In March, if you came in and had trouble breathing, you’d be put straight on a ventilator,” says Alison Pittard, dean of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine.
This was what, in frantic Zoom calls to Italy and China, they had been told was the best approach. The learning curve since then has been steep. These days, Dr Pittard and her colleagues are more careful about who is put on ventilators, lest invasive treatment causes more problems. They also have a drug, dexamethasone, that can significantly improve survival among those who do reach ventilators.
It would be easy to claim that we are seeing the results of this. In Britain, even as recorded cases rise, deaths are not following. In the western world daily deaths and death rates are falling. But Dr Pittard is not prepared to take credit on behalf of her colleagues. “Yes, the way we manage patients has changed,” she says. “But I don’t think that has had much impact on mortality.” Some statisticians have argued that the effect is an illusion, created by more testing. She disagrees, at least to the extent that more tests explain everything. “Something does appear to have changed. We don’t know for certain what that is at the moment.” She has a theory though. It may not be that the disease has altered, or that treatment has. It could simply be that the people getting it have. “I think the group of people who are being infected is different now,” she says. One explanation, favoured by Dr Pittard, is that the virus has already claimed the lives of those most at risk. “I think the more susceptible people have got the virus and been sick with it,” she said. “Now the people who are getting it respond in a different way.”
Another, not necessarily mutually exclusive, suggestion was put forward this week by Takeshi Kasai, a senior WHO official. Covid-19, a disease of the old, is becoming an infection of the young. “People in their twenties, thirties and forties are driving the spread,” he said. “The epidemic is changing.”
In Britain, as the number of Covid-19 patients on ventilators continues to drop, from more than 3,000 to 70, infection rates have risen by 35 per cent among the under-44s. In Australia, the Philippines and Japan, more than half of new infections are now in the young. In continental Europe too, where rising cases have not been matched by rising deaths, it seems like we are seeing a breaking of this year’s fragile social contract — that the young, who do not get sick, are increasingly refusing to suffer on behalf of the old, who do. That is, arguably, fine, provided it continues to spread only among the young. The problem is, says Richard Grewelle from Stanford University, that if Europe looks across the Atlantic it will see that this does not happen. “When public spaces reopened in May and June, young adults were more likely to be seen socialising than older adults,” he said. This could be seen most clearly in Florida where, a bit after what would traditionally have been spring break, there was a spike in cases among those in their early twenties. It did not stay there for long. “These individuals came in contact with older relatives and friends, which has driven the subsequent increase in deaths [now up two to three times since the daily lows in June]. Similar features are probably true in some European countries,” he said. If he is correct, then we would expect to see first a shift in the population getting infected then, a fortnight later, a rise in deaths.
With coronavirus, however, there is always another theory. Paul Tambyah, president-elect of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, said that an increasingly common mutation in the coronavirus may be making it less deadly. It is a truism of virology that viruses, which have no interest in killing their host, evolve to be increasingly benign. They fade into the background to the point where they become a “common cold”. Is this what we are seeing? It is not impossible but, other scientists said, it is unlikely. Brendan Wren, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “It would be offering false hope to suppose it is weakening yet.” He did offer yet another explanation for why the disease’s apparent severity could be diminishing. It could be that what is key is not who it infects, but how. “With hand hygiene and social distancing, the infectious dose would be lower,” he said. Instead of sitting next to someone on the bus and breathing in exhaled air for 15 minutes, we catch the virus as a glancing blow — and, like a glancing blow, can fight it off better.
As ever with the pandemic, simple questions have a complex answer — normally several. But if there is one lesson most virologists do agree on, it is that countries have not yet gone wrong when they have prepared for the worst. This is why Dr Pittard hopes that the idea the virus is weakening, or health services are getting stronger, does not take hold. “I wouldn’t want the public to be lulled into a false sense of security.”
2. How ‘woke’ America cancelled press freedom: Digital platforms have empowered as never before small groups of critics to bully and silence views they deem politically incorrect: ByJudith Miller
America has awakened. Or gone woke. So has American journalism, or much of it. Only two decades ago, boycotts of unpopular ideas and the people who held them were confined to extreme newsletters, obscure journals and college campuses, where students have long taken pride in shutting down provocative speakers. But the decline of "legacy" newspapers and the growing concentration of power and influence in the hands of Big Tech - primarily Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter - have enabled those behind these causes to exert far greater influence.
While social media and digital platforms feature more diverse views of dramatically varying quality from more people from across the globe than ever before, they have also empowered as never before individuals and small groups of critics to bully and silence views they deem politically incorrect. Posts on Twitter calling for activists to "rise up" in response to perceived intellectual and cultural offences instantly go viral. Online shaming, callouts, doxing (digging up and disseminating dirt on targets and foes) and so-called "cancel culture" writ large have become the order of the day. Such online intimidation often results in grudging conformity and silence, and not just among journalists. Many shop owners in riot-plagued Portland, Seattle and New York have posted "Black Lives Matter" signs on their boarded-up store windows. Many undoubtedly sympathise with the mass uprisings in May sparked by the brutal killing of George Floyd.
A shocking video of a cop's knee on Floyd's neck triggered not just months of protest against police brutality and America's lingering endemic racism, but sweeping demands for greater social justice. However, some others posted signs simply to prevent their businesses from being looted and trashed. Meanwhile, the list of cancel-culture victims and targets continues to grow. What began with the targeting of Nineties sexual predators such as America's TV dad Bill Cosby, the late Michael Jackson, and media mogul Harvey Weinstein, soon spread to those accused of thought crimes.
Comedian Shane Gillis was hired and quickly fired by the television network NBC for defamatory comments about Chinese Americans, LGBTQ people and women. Another comic, Sarah Silverman, claimed to have lost a coveted movie role because she wore blackface in a comedy sketch in 2007. New films by Woody Allen, who has repeatedly denied having molested his adopted daughter, are not shown in most US cinemas. Scarlett Johansson stands accused of "white privilege" and "cultural appropriation" after asserting that she should be permitted to play "any person, any tree, or any animal" rather than characters only of her own race, gender and sexual orientation. The online streaming service HBO Max recently slapped a moronic trigger warning on Mel Brooks's brilliant 1974 parody of the Western, Blazing Saddles.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the newspapers reporting such instances of cultural shaming would eventually be targeted. The paper where I worked for 28 years, The New York Times, has been at the forefront of this trend. It has repeatedly succumbed to the woke demands made by its young, mostly Left-of-centre staff, at the cost of its reputation, its mission of publishing "all the news fit to print", and its commitment to hosting a diversity of opinion on its op-ed pages "without fear or favour". Of course the Times was never "objective." Its overwhelmingly liberal staff ensured that. But its editors usually deleted the worst examples of reportorial bias, and it remained open to comment articles written by conservative politicians and commentators. In June, however, the paper's publisher, A G Sulzberger, pushed out his editorial page editor, James Bennet, for having published an op-ed by the Republican senator Tom Cotton, which argued that the military ought to be deployed to US cities in order to quell riots. While polls showed that a majority of Americans agreed with him, Times staffers protested the paper's decision to give him a platform. A month later, Bari Weiss, the Times's contributing editor and writer, also resigned under pressure. In a scathing open letter to the publisher, Weiss denounced the paper's failure to defend her against internal and external bullying for having strayed from an ideological orthodoxy. Because Times reporters and senior editors had so often succumbed to the prevailing intolerance of far-Left mobs on social media, she charged, Twitter had become the paper's "ultimate editor".
The Times is hardly the only paper to have suffered a collapse of moral courage in the face of an internal staff revolt and external pressure. But the failure of the "newspaper of record" to adhere to its principles and commitment to free speech both reflects and stems from broader troubling trends within the industry. Newspapers have become an increasingly endangered species. Over the past 15 years, more than one in five American papers has closed. According to the Pew Research Centre, the number of journalists at newspapers has been cut in half since 2008. Hardest hit have been local and community papers, whose closure, purchase, merger or consolidation have turned many American towns into "news deserts". Surviving papers, moreover, tend to have less ideological diversity, as both TV and newspaper ownership is increasingly concentrated. The largest 25 newspaper chains now own almost a third of the nation's papers, including almost half of its dailies - a historically high level of consolidation. The pandemic has accelerated local journalism's plight, according to Penny Muse Abernathy, a former Times journalist and now an academic at the University of North Carolina. Papers in dire financial straits tend not to be pillars of courage. They can no longer afford to offend remaining readers. The revenue that ensured resources and relative clout has increasingly shifted to digital platforms - Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter - which have also become virtual monopolies. Protected at birth to encourage their survival, Congress exempted them from the many onerous requirements and the accountability that newspapers shoulder. Now, even Congress lacks the political will, or perhaps the ability, to control them.
Such massive technological shifts usually drive equally massive cultural shifts. While Twitter on paper barely breaks even, it has galvanised communities of the like-minded. In a defunded media environment, the younger masters of the new digital technology have disproportionate power. They can decide whether an article is worthy of professional approbation or is "racist", "offensive", and hence, cancellable. What they can create - much to Twitter's financial benefit, since it exists simply to generate revenue by attracting clicks and keeping customers on its platform - is an instant, constantly powerful culture of complaint, accusation and smearing, whose perpetrators are unlikely to be punished. The Times, for instance, has rules against slandering colleagues on social media, which, as Bari Weiss painfully discovered, senior editors fear to enforce. "The Times once had a professional hierarchy," said a journalist who has written often for the paper. "A young reporter lived in fear of being fired by a mid-level editor, who lived in fear of his senior editors. Now it's the reverse: top editors live in fear of the Twitterati, because they can get you fired."
A third source of cancel culture is Donald Trump. His relentless campaign against the "fake news" media is aimed at undermining the public's already fragile faith in the press, which not only monitors his almost pathological lying but acts as a constitutionally mandated check on his imperial executive aspirations. According to The Washington Post, Trump has made over 20,000 false or misleading claims in office.
But his incessant Twitter attacks on journalists as "liars", "human scum", and the "worst people in the world", and his hypocritical denunciation of cancel culture in the name of free speech, have further divided and polarised Americans. Because Trump has ignored activists' positive calls for racial justice and police reform, and has tried to turn to his political advantage the movement's reprehensible insistence on ideological purity and the loathsome heretic-hunting that have long characterised Left-wing (and Right-wing) movements, liberals hesitate to criticise their illiberal fellow travellers.
As the Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote, calling out Left-wing illiberalism in the era of Trump is like "complaining about a bee sting when you have stage-four cancer". If Trump is reelected in November, America's great cancel culture divide can only deepen.
3. Identity politics has shattered America. If Biden wins, he must confront the left’s ‘oppression Olympics’: Matthew Syed. The Sunday Times
I first noticed the depths into which the American left had descended during the build-up to the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017. The Million Woman March scheduled for the day after was supposed to be the first step in the fightback leading to 2020, a broad base of people campaigning on mainstream issues and showing Trump that he still had a fight on his hands. Within minutes, the vision was being pulled apart by forces that, I fear, the Democratic Party leadership still doesn’t understand. Black women objected to the name of the march because it was the same name as that used for a largely black march in 1997. One poster on Facebook regarded this as “cultural appropriation” while another described it as “white supremacy disguised as white feminism”. As activists started pulling out, the name was changed to the Women’s March, but minorities continued to feel “uncomfortable” walking alongside white women, given that 53% of this group had voted for Trump. White women — particularly those of a Democratic persuasion — retaliated, appalled that they were being singled out. “You’re no better than Trump supporters,” one wrote. As these skirmishes ricocheted through the internet, other factions piled in, with yet more boycott threats and recriminations. Even though the march went ahead with an impressive 4.2 million people, a headline in the Washington Post called it “The somehow controversial women’s march in Washington” — a classic understatement.
I mention this because it indicates, however tenuously, how identity politics is tearing America apart, and is likely to continue to do so regardless of who is elected in November. On this side of the pond, we tend to focus on the alt-right white nationalism of Donald Trump. The president has played on white fears, stoking racial tensions in often shocking ways. But while Trump has demeaned his office, the left has played its own deadly game, only with a different and mutating set of identity grievances. This isn’t just about the trans movement, but “intersectionality”, where oppression is said to be proportional to the number of minority identities a person embodies. On this rubric, black women are more subjugated than white women, black trans women more than black women, and so on in what has been called the “oppression Olympics”.
So desperate are people to commandeer minority status that Elizabeth Warren, briefly the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, took a DNA test to show that she was between 1/1,024 and 1/64 Native American Indian, explaining to the public in 2018 that one of her great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great (great?) grandparents was indigenous. In a society based on shared interests, this toenail of DNA would have been irrelevant. In today’s America, based on every kind of difference, it was endlessly portentous.
It is for the same reason that the LGBT movement became LGBT+, then LGBTQ, then LGBTTQQIAAP. It is difficult to know what term to use today because the cause is adding letters faster than the German mark added zeroes during the 1920s hyperinflation.
Twenty years ago, people would call themselves Irish-Americans, Pakistani-Americans or Italian-Americans, but the emphasis was on the second word in that couplet. Americans were proud of their heritage but more proud of the identity shared with millions of others by virtue of what they saw as the honour of citizenship and commitment to the constitution. The joint crime of left and right has been to shatter this identity, focusing, instead, on narrower identities based not on shared beliefs, but immutable traits such as sex, race, ethnicity — and their intersections. Because these characteristics are unchangeable, they cannot be bridged or shared, and are jealously policed, based on “lived experience”. This is what caused such deep tensions on the Women’s March, and explains the explosion of allegations of cultural appropriation. A few weeks ago, Morgan Bullock, a black American dancer, was castigated as a “racist” on social media. Her crime? She performed a beautiful Irish jig that went viral. Or take the trend of shaving one’s eyebrows so that they are slightly thinner at one end — yep, one eagle-eyed activist read racism into this, too, a point missed by the wider world until he ignited a firestorm of protest. Apparently, the technique “appropriates Asian beauty features”.
I’m sorry, but this is madness. The left insists that identity politics is necessary. It points to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the feminist cause a little later. It says, not without reason, that the unifying rhetoric of the republic — that all citizens are equal before the constitution — always had a strong element of hypocrisy. Black people were denied rights for centuries, as were women. Yet, it doesn’t seem to see the fundamental difference between the movements of the 1960s and the surrealism of today. Martin Luther King, a great African-American (emphasis on “American”), sought to build bridges, not erect more barriers. His vision was for a society where blacks and whites were treated the same; where colour mattered less, not more. It was the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam who were the precursors of today’s identitarians, for they insisted upon irreconcilable differences, demanding a separate homeland for blacks within the borders of America.
And this is where identity politics is headed today, not least with the phenomenon of “neo-segregation”. Last year, Harvard staged separate ceremonies for students of colour and Latinos, while Brown University celebrated its “blackalaureate” and Columbia its “Black” and “Raza” ceremonies. One review found that 72% of colleges hosted segregated graduations and 42% had segregated residences for black and minority students. The left, needless to say, regards this as a celebration of diversity — a catastrophic misreading of that important concept. [I’m reminded of the 1980’s liberal, multiculturalist admiration for Muslim ghettoes in Bradford, now seen as a big mistake]
November’s election takes place against the backdrop of the shattering of American identity. Identity politics in the UK, although troubling, doesn’t yet come close on the Richter scale of divisiveness, or match its McCarthyite dynamics. Given Trump’s serial incompetence, Joe Biden is faced with an open goal. But if he wins (his cognitive capacity remains an issue), his primary task will not be facing down the Trumpian right — hopefully that brand of grotesque populism will come to be seen by Republicans as an aberration. No, his challenge will be facing down the identitarian left.
Let me re-emphasise that America has much work to do in combating racism and other scourges, particularly in the south, but this reinforces the point: social progress is impossible in a society retreating deeper into hermetically sealed silos. Is it any wonder that Congress has lost the capacity for bipartisan action, or that special interests loot the republic as progressives on both sides of the aisle bicker over whether to add an X to LGBTTQQIAAP?
When a nation is divided against itself, it loses strength, virtue and any hope of collective action. America can become great again only by ditching its identity obsession.
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.