Pandemic at Large

An awful lot of nonsense lands in my email inbox, but every now and again, amongst various claims and counterclaims about “misinformation”, or war propaganda dressed up as journalistic comment, something pops up which catches my eye or excites my interest. Such an item was a scholarly article entitled The Folly of Immunological Determinism? by Gary Feinman and Stacy Drake, details in link below.

 The article takes issue with the current thinking that the pandemic holocaust that took place in the Americas following the invasion from Europe from the 16^th century on was due to local immunological “naivety”, ie the local people hadn’t been exposed to the kind of pathogens from domestic livestock etc that the Euro-Africans had; it claims that far too little attention has been paid to the slow socio-economic disruption caused by the incomers, not only in terms of their military aggressiveness but in terms of their introduction of differing work practices and socio-economic  habits which impacted on local people and their traditions and well-established and spectacularly successful agricultural practices, thus creating conditions whereby the natural resistance to disease in indigenous populations was drastically lowered.

It puts forward an interesting, if debatable, parallel with what we witnessed during the Covid pandemic, summarised as follows (quote):

“No matter how comforting it is for certain leaders and governments to try to apportion blame for Covid-19’s tragic consequences on exogenous contamination and the perils of immunological determinism, the highly disproportionate effects across countries belie this simple deterministic explanation. A multivariate, socio-political, and contingent suite of causes surely is at play….. To date, most of the contemporary nations with poor Covid-19 responses and outcomes are either autocratic regimes (Russia) or countries (United States, India, Brazil, United Kingdom, France) that have moved toward less democratic, authoritarian governance during the past decade, a shift marked by lessened concern for broad public welfare initiatives and a diminishment of the role of expertise in governmental policy and practice.”

It’s quite a generalisation, and I think the article was written before the pattern of the pandemic had entirely played out, but I guess what caught my attention was the association with a notion already well discussed by those of us who are dubious about the wisdom of routine mass vaccination campaigns. Vaccination is hailed as the great technological saviour of countless lives, without that much attention being paid to the likely origins of many of the epidemics it has targeted with such “success”. Social disruption due to de-population of rural areas and the destruction of rural economies was – and indeed still is – probably a greater factor in creating the conditions where epidemics occur than some mysterious advent of virus or infection out of nowhere. The diseases in question have been around for a long time, and for the most part coped with by human populations: what turns them deadly are the good old factors of oppression, greed, and inequality due to people being deprived of what was once regarded as their birthright. Deprived by whom? you may enquire. Well, basically by anyone who acquires the power to put one over them! Concentration of populations into urban or metropolitan centres continues on a worldwide scale, and whatever fancy socio-economic language is used to explain it, Power, whether exercised on a petty or a grand scale, is likely the great granddaddy Pandemic, and it’s still raging….

https://www.academia.edu/44835549/The_Folly_of_Immunological_Determinism?email_work_card=thumbnail

Escalation, Restitution

I was recently recommended some podcasts about the development of the British “Raj” in India (I think Raj means “rule”, but for some reason we have always gone a bit Indified when we talk about it), which I’m busy listening to between bouts of my usual occupation when sedentary, ie. sleep (ah, sleep!). The series is delivered by a jaunty pair of historians, William Dalrymple (who says he’s a Scot but don’t sound it) and Anita Anand, whose grandfather as a boy witnessed the 1919 Jalianwalla Bagh massacre in Amritsar carried out by British troops. Pretty chilling listening a lot of it makes, to be sure, and I dare say the pious nodding of us latter-day descendants of the Colonialists is not entirely out of place, though I see it as only right that we should question the often strident demands for atonement and restitution that get directed at us, the so-called Privileged of the West. 

It’s odd (well, fairly standard, actually) but what most of us ‘fifties young’uns got at school was the horror of the Black Hole of Calcutta and that was about it. It kind of led by various incomprehensible (and to young boys fairly boring) degrees to the British government feeling it really had to take control in India – which in a manner of speaking started off more or less true: you had basically a big corporation, not unlike what we have a few of today, responsible only to its shareholders, running the show via a private army, which went ahead and committed atrocities, as in war crimes, the equal of anything of the kind in recorded history. Maybe the British government had a point when it, so to speak, “nationalised” the East India Company, though I suspect it didn’t do this precisely for the sake of human decency.  At the start of the process the (official) British army had not long finished doing its thing in the Scottish Highlands following the Jacobite uprisings, and they were more than up to a bit of massacring of natives when push came to shove.

To me the most poignant thing about the various accounts – because there’s a limit to the tally of horrors you can actually digest – is the issue of Escalation. The Black Hole incident was really a case of criminal negligence rather than something you could call an atrocity or a “war crime”. However it led to a considerably-sized army being dispatched to India with, one, the original purpose of protecting the East India Company’s assets against the growing numbers of bloody foreigners who wanted to get in on the act of “extracting” the goodies of India (it may be of note in a symbolic sort of way that one of the main British defensive establishments that got so up the noses of the local rulers was called Fort William); and two, with the more sinister aim of “protecting” the British company people against the increasingly irritated local populations – increasingly irritated because from highly respectful and engaged, the British incomers’ attitudes subtly morphed, through alertness to potential danger, to paranoia plus arrogance with respect to the local population.  The increasingly nationalistic modern Indian take on all this history insists that, when things got really screwed up and bloody, what the British called the “Indian Mutiny” should be called the “First War of Independence”, though strictly speaking, as it began with (native) soldiers in the employ of the British army shooting their superior officers, it actually does conform to the definition of mutiny. What it escalated into was a different matter of course – but really what strikes me most forcibly is that the habit we have of looking at historical events and dividing the protagonists into Righteous and Unrighteous is part and parcel of a normal (I assume) human capacity for lazy thinking.

Escalation is a force in itself, and real right and wrong very seldom come into it. In fact it probably defines the entire course of Civilisation: you feel the need to protect yourself and your assets – livestock probably – originally I suppose against bears or leopards or whatever, but pretty soon also against their human imitators, real or imagined; your protective structures then announce that you are “strong”, so that invites reaction from someone who suspects that your strength somehow threatens their own… I don’t need to go into the whole sorry process, but sometimes I think about the sheer numbers of wonderful cities that have been built and then wantonly destroyed – not to mention the slaughter and brutalisation of their inhabitants – and wonder if “civilisation” can really be held up as something we aspire to rather than an awful disease.

 The notion of protection goes to a peculiarly male view on existence, and I think it would be fair to describe the process of Escalation as the process whereby guys’ testicles migrate north and take over their brain’s frontal cortex. You may hope for something to administer some kind of chemical castration but more often than not what brings a temporary stop to the whole unfolding horror is when the two opponents sit down for a breather and with luck have clobbered a little sense into their respective thick skulls.

It’s odd to think that we – well, those of us who remember it – are commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the so-called “Cuban missile crisis”, which was the last time – the story goes – that we were on the brink of World War, though I do seem to recall some threats and trumpetings around.1974-time. The feelings of this time of year – the light, the temperature, the wind – actually help to bring the thing back to me very vividly. – So, following an abortive invasion of Cuba from the American mainland, the Prime Minister of Cuba – we normally refer to him as the “dictator of Cuba” – asked the Soviet Union for its protection against future invasion from the US by setting up nuclear missile bases in Cuban territory, that’s what got the ball rolling, that’s what “caused” the crisis.

I must have been in my school’s second eleven at the time and there was a day when we got thrashed 8-0 in an away match that finished with a sombrely glorious October sunset. After that I recall days punctuated by dread newspaper headlines and other omens – “Russia Cancels All Leave” was a Daily Telegraph top-line that made no sense to me until my mother explained it meant Russia was probably mobilising for war. The quiet lane where our house stood (we lived in Sussex at the time) was apparently being used as a convenient back-route to get troops down to the south coast with minimum scrutiny – a whole heap of them, judging by the fleets of military vehicles I heard rumbling through the night. It wasn’t long after my team’s humiliation on the football field that I discovered I was too sick with – well I don’t know, but it felt like flu – to even move, I took to my bed and as I recall I was still there, off school, right through to the morning when I finally glimpsed the newspaper headline “Russian Missiles to be Packed up and Taken Home” and realised I was suddenly feeling better. I don’t know if that was the exact wording, but I do remember a comforting warmth stealing over me at the homely sound of “packed up”. Judging from the size of the – probably relatively small – missile cases currently on display at Williamson’s scrap metal yard in Elgin, that was a whole lot of wrapping paper!

Things don’t happen in a vacuum. We’re appalled when a powerful country invades a ”weaker” one, but the action may be initiated by apparently valid concerns, and the course of events thereafter frequently depends on the amount of resistance the invaders encounter. I don’t know what to think of this, but I do know that Real Men are expected to stand up for themselves – ie to “fight for their home”, at the very least. Genghis Khan  was supposed to have “pardoned” the cities that opened their gates to him, such that few atrocities and very little plundering happened in those locations, but that opening of the gates probably also meant that the conquering horde looked down on those male inhabitants as less than men, if not directly effeminate. It’s not something that seems to have changed much, and the retrospective apportioning of blame that everyone enjoys when they’re no longer having to duck or crouch or burrow to save their own skin is really nothing but a fairly fatuous distraction from that central issue of migrating testicles.

Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the Cuban crisis with some straight bargaining between what were essentially two reasonable guys. It didn’t come out till a good deal later that there was real negotiation and real concessions. The Americans made a woolly sort of promise not to invade Cuba again at the time but their real, and for the time being undisclosed, concession was to remove their own nuclear missiles from their bases in Turkey – a proper quid pro quo. But of course when Khrushchev was removed from office a couple of years later one of the reasons given for his removal was his handling of the Cuban crisis – ie Russians were Real Men and he had made them look like less than real men. So the big boys were clearly ready for another round of Cold War, and of course Kennedy’s death showed what could happen to a leader who appeared too nicey-nicey. I guess that now he, along with his brother, and Martin Luther King, and Mohandas Ghandi, and probably a good many more – or at least the icons that have been made out of them – now gaze ever more dimly out from an ever more dusty and neglected shrine that’s somehow got mixed up with hippies and other soft eejits.

I spent an interesting hour or so not long ago at the Findhorn Community’s café being harangued by an Indian lady about the realities of modern India and the country’s rejection of everything British. She came from a military family in the north, and was at pains to stress that her travelling alone in Europe without needing her husband’s permission was a mark of how progressive people in India were now. I couldn’t disagree with much of what she said, though I do have more than a little sympathy with the thinking of people like Douglas Murray (and even Liz Truss, I suppose, if she’s actually capable of thought).  On the subject of throwing off all the trappings of the Raj I asked the lady, almost innocently – because the pronoun “we” was, as usual, much in evidence – if everyone in India would be content to speak Hindi as their first, ie national, language. “Of course they would”, she snapped with true military crispness…. 

Like many “hard right-wingers” Douglas Murray pours scorn on the current fashion in the West for apologising – even atoning? – for crimes of the past committed by previous generations. Personally I like someone who does a good rant, if it’s well-argued, but I needn’t go into details. I suppose C S Lewis would come over as a “hard right-winger” nowadays too, but it’s always my favourite quote from his Narnia stories that I come back to: Caspian, at his coronation as King of Narnia, remarks to Aslan “I was wishing I had come from a more honourable lineage” (ancestors were pirates), to which Aslan replies: “you come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, and that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.” – Which I assume is an oblique reference to John Ball’s “when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”  

I’ve been thinking – and a-wondering, a bit – why I’m calling my new story Restitution, as that choice of title was actually rather haphazard and spur-on-the-moment. In my mind “restitution” presents a slightly different slant from, say, “atonement”, which has definite nuances of crime and punishment. Restitution suggests to me more the righting of a balance – it’s directed more to the future than to the past: it looks more to the digging of a new well than remain slodging about in the mud of an old one, to use an I Ching image. Anyway, the third chunk of Chapter 8 is above in the Restitution Notes tab, but now re-named Chapter 10, and I note the word “restitution” starting to occur more frequently in the text.

“The old that is strong does not wither….”

I love the recent clip of George W Bush speaking to an audience at his GWB Institute about the absence of checks and balances in Russia, resulting in “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq…(confused pause)…  I mean Ukraine”! Ha, an understandable mistake if you’re up there on one of those wretched podiums (look at the trouble Joe Biden seems to have getting off them!), but really – why do they keep wheeling out these superannuated old heroes and letting them speak at public venues? What is wrong with letting them have a few happy years quietly sipping piña coladas on some nice beach? I say, come on into my blog space, you dear old farts, and I’ll teach you how to say stuff that nobody ever listens to!

 And then there was a clip of a youthful Joe Biden (well, in his sixties) tearing into the infamous Scott Ritter at a senate committee for speaking “above his pay grade”. Scott of course had been the UN weapons inspector in Iraq and he resigned because – well, it was all very complicated, he became some kind of hawk-turned-dove who at any rate believed that the US Democrats’ (secret? – can’t recall) drive towards regime change in Iraq was illegal and could only lead to major trouble….. But hey Joe, those were the days – what a tiger you were….  Of course he was proved right about Scott, who turned out to be not half as smart as he sounded: he was a Very Naughty Boy and got caught having a wank on some Forum that was supposed to be for over-18’s but was actually populated by youngsters. It was all a police sting of course, some cop (male, if that’s not too contentious a word) posing as a 15-year-old girl to lure him into dirty deeds. Scott really must have been unbelievably stupid, as he’d already been warned that he was under constant surveillance from the FBI who were determined to “f*** him in the a** for the rest of his life” on account of his un-Americanness – but, I guess if a man’s gotta go….

Personally I didn’t even realise that was a thing – I don’t mean the FBI bit, I mean the forum bit: but there, probably I haven’t really stepped properly into the Digital Age. Anyway they managed to throw enough (rather arcane-sounding, I thought) charges at him that he got convicted on one of them, but the judge very nicely ordered that details of the case not be released to the public. The Truth will out, however, and the sorry tale was leaked to the press a couple of years later – coincidentally right on the very eve of the invasion of Iraq (or was it a “special military operation”? – it’s all so long ago…) that led to Saddam’s overthrow.  Yes, I could almost hear “son” at the end of Joe’s little speech about the pay grade, like the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men. No Tom Cruise though, and of course no long happy years with the piña coladas. And of course Scott got properly shafted a few years later for Even More Misdemeanours – curiously enough a couple of years into the next Democrat administration after George W’s exit – and actually went to gaol.

A little French joke, I heard it at school. A man is apprehended by the police for relieving himself at the roadside. “Défense de pisser!” they scream . “Mais je ne pisse pas, je m’abuse”, the man protests; at which the police declare, all smiles, “ah alors, vive le sport!”. But of course that’s France. They do say that the stuff you learn at school you retain for the rest of your life…. Anyway, under the Restitution Notes tab above I have added the cut-off second chunk of Restitution‘s Chapter 8, now Chapter 9. It seems to have been a very long chapter, as there’s still a third chunk to come. If anyone asks me if the story is at all autobiographical I do an ancient quavery voice – “I can’t remember” – which I think I got from an old comedy show on the BBC Home Service (it was before they invented numbers) called Round the Horne, and which used to give my family laughter indigestion over the supper-table, though I think my father sometimes found it a bit too racy.

Tinkering with Tech

Driving around recently (and what a lot of it there’s been, just when we need to observe such thrift) I’ve been listening to a recording of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas given me by Maddy, seeing as my old recording was a victim of the Burning. Why particularly late Beethoven just now in the car? Well there may be a tie-up with the mention of the “Forester-spirit”, mentioned in the newly edited chapter 8 of Restitution, that’s all I can think of.

Anyway, it’s an old re-recording by a maestro I never cared for much – too flashy, I used to think – but it’s funny, you get given something by a significant person in your life and that tends to tilt things around – I’m getting to quite like the flashy. Of course these last five (or six, depending on your standpoint) works have been etched into my soul since my teenage years so in a way it doesn’t really matter who plays them – the music can always shine through. On the whole I don’t like to physically see professional performances of “posh” music – generally too histrionic for my taste – but a couple of years ago I came across a Youtube video of a young Korean student playing sonata 31, and that really was a moving experience and dammit I can’t remember her name – I think there was a Jumin or a Sumin somewhere in there – but she seems to have disappeared off Youtube anyway. She was a lanky sort of girl with big spidery hands that she seemed to watch with a kind of rapt awe as they executed unlikely-looking feats on the keyboard, and I very much thought, yes, that’s how late Beethoven ought to be played. They are such singularly exploratory works – they seem to be reaching, like old Tom a Bedlam, “five leagues beyond the wide world’s end” – that you sometimes wonder if they should really be called sonatas in the set-piece sense. Beethoven was mainly known in his time as a pianist whose extraordinary extemporising ability crowds to his recitals, and I guess the late sonatas often feel like they may be memories of particularly good extemporisations jotted down formally for a publisher when the guy needed to make some cash. Of course he was deaf as a post by the time he wrote these works, and you wonder how he went about his business – did he have some sense of the vibrations his piano was making, or was it a pure visualisation thing? Myself, I can get that: because of my own upbringing and training I can really only get a proper fix on a tune if I can visualise it on a piano keyboard, and I look on with reverence as various of my offspring approach a piece of music from a completely other direction – by ear, by feel, I suppose you’d say – though I get pretty frustrated at our inability to communicate over particular points in a piece, in that as far as of music goes we talk essentially a different language.

I dare say having Beethoven around and visiting your house could be pretty annoying: no small talk possible, I assume he’d just drift off to your piano and start extemporising (reminds me of a lot of musicians I’ve met – real musicians that is: I’m more the small-talk sort) which, considering his brain had no volume control could have made it fairly infuriating if you were trying to just chill with your pals. But what really intrigues me about Beethoven in particular – on the piano at least, which is where most of his compositions started – is that his lifetime coincided with some remarkable developments in instrument-making, where technological “improvements” meant that really skilled instrument-makers were frequently held in as high regard as the maestros who performed on them (think of Stradivarius). Beethoven was clearly hugely inspired by these, often purely mechanical, developments – musical machinery? – such that the question has to arise in my mind whether the exploratory feel of his late works isn’t actually less due to some great spiritual release and more the product of a guy just sitting down and fiddling about with a new piece of Tech. And of course the two things may coincide – which is a bit of a kick in the teeth for my luddite sensibilities.

Further to this – and relating to my editing work on Restitution , now at Chapter 8 stage – I have a slightly disturbing thought about the whole nature of what we know as the posher kind of music – of Europe at least, though I dare say there are parallels in the East, certainly in India – well, in jazz too I suppose, I always forget about jazz….. Before the advent of “pure” music, of classical music that’s to say, you could pretty much define music as indicating either song or dance – or processions of various kinds I suppose, and of course a bit of nonsense from the musicians’ gallery if you were entertaining in your castle. I’m not quite sure exactly where “pure” music started off – rich Italian Dads I always think, wanting their daughters to have a rounded education and so insisting that they could at least play a couple of tunes on an instrument (assuming their singing sounded like a peacock braying – if they could sing prettily it’d be a different matter). I think Vivaldi had a whole girls school to deal with, while Domenico Scarlatti just had a single lonely and homesick princess to cater for – though clearly a highly sophisticated musician at that – but it seems like the same kind of deal. Rich people could afford the latest tech in instruments, and the girls, as Boccaccio pointed out in his intro to the Decameron, had a potential life of stricture and boredom to look forward to if they couldn’t develop some amusement to fill the hours, including developing some artistic skill or other, at least if they’d run out of naughty stories to read. So I guess “classical music” was born, and who could have predicted the way this pure music – music without the accompaniment of words or dancing or pacing feet – would then develop and branch out? By “music” I must mean specifically tunes plus variation: things seem to have passed beyond that nowadays, song has surged back as the central musical preoccupation, and “classical” composers are more involved with the exploration of sound, as opposed to what most of us oiks would recognise as music. So we’re talking about a relatively defined period in human musical history – well western, at least, though it’s interesting how this music came to flood modern Eastern consciousness in such a big way – and crucially, for me, this period happens to correspond with the first four centuries of what in Restitution is referred to as the Third Reich. The nature and purpose of the Reichs is, I guess, what the book’s all about, but it divides them into First, which is the age of naked power and brute force, the Second, being the age of the “great religions”, and the Third which is the age of “scientific” technology. Come to think of it, naked power and brute force aren’t that far away in any of them, but I guess it’s nice to think that there might be at least a trace feeling of evolution and development going on. Restitution is equally about the strands and elements and currents that run counter to the naked force of the Reichs, among them the force that pure or classical music took on in the collective consciousness – and not purely the upper classes, either – becoming in and of itself an “other way” of being and thinking, even a constituent of a revolution in consciousness. Only for a while, of course – nothing lasts. Which is why the high-tech aspect of classical music troubles me a bit, though not too much I have to say: I still have faith in the message delivered by Peter’s single combat with the usurper Miraz in Prince Caspian – “there’s a man for you!”, loyal Trumpkin exclaims as Peter, battered and bruised, hauls himself back to his feet – “uses his enemy’s arm as a ladder!”

Anyway, Chapter 8 is up there under the Restitution Notes tab as usual.