26.03.2020
The word apocalypse came to us from Greek via Latin. Apo meant un, off or away from and kalyptein meant to cover, so literally we could say it means discover, the same in German, entdecken, ent (un) decken (cover), or revelation. Apocalypse is the revelation of the true nature of reality, the end of the world meaning is modern.
On these terms we are without doubt living through an apocalypse.
Ok, I’m going to have a little rant before I get on to news from the pizza place.
Think, for a moment, in the last week how many cast iron assumptions have proved false.
The nation state is there to protect you? Clearly not. In America anyway, Donald Trump wants you to die working at Joe and The Juice in order to give the Dow Jones a 3% bump, during which he and his buddies can off load their shares before they cease to mean anything.
And Boris Johnson didn’t want to shut the pubs because the Tory donors in the insurance industry might lose a lot of money. In fact, his stated aim was to ‘take it on the chin’ allow the virus to spread through the population to infect 60% of the population, by which time, they lied, the country will have achieved herd immunity. Don’t worry about the half a million or so dead.
How about our strong economy? It turns out having tertiary service industries such as estate agents and hedge funds as the driving force of an economy isn’t so healthy. All that growth seems to have vanished into thin air. Maybe investing in productivity was a better idea than putting all the money into share holder dividends to inflate share prices. Since 2007 productivity has stagnated, asset prices have been falsely inflated by historically low interest rates, in other words, all the growth was created by a corresponding increase in debt, now that productivity has taken a small hit, it’s no longer enough to sustain share values, so all those billions are disappearing. Maybe they never existed?
Maybe basing the whole economy on wealth extraction rather than productivity isn’t so great either. The growth we’ve seen over the last ten years is merely an upward transfer of wealth. Like that McDonald’s I got my high horse about the other day, people say they’re good because they provide jobs, but all the jobs are below the living wage, and all they do is poison and suck up wealth from the community they’re in and send it abroad. Same with all the landlords who resist keeping the flats fit for habitation but charge extortionate rates.
And all those unskilled workers Priti Patel wanted to kick out the country because the Tories have nothing left to offer but racism? Turns out they were the most important people all along. Who do you think is going to be inserting a ventilator nozzle down your trachea in a couple of weeks?
Socialism, or any planned economy would lead to empty supermarket shelves. The market always knows best. Well I just went to the super market…
And money, what even is it?! Governments all around the world are creating billions of dollars to bail out business who will use the money to buy back their own shares and falsely inflate their value before they inevitably crash again. Budget deficits will rocket, national debt will have to be written off, in which case, whose mortgage am I paying? Is the whole world a giant ponzi scheme? It’s starting to look like it.
We could never afford to nationalise the trains? Well the Tories just did and it barely interrupted the news cycle because it seemed so obvious that it had to be done. Trouble is, they nationalise the losses and will doubtlessly sell them off the moment the trains become profitable again, just like they did with RBS.
Solving homelessness is an insurmountable task? Well they’ve just requisitioned hundreds of hotels to get people off the streets. Seems like their misery was just a political choice.
Universal basic income can’t work according to Ian Duncan Smith, because it would remove the incentive for people to go to work (which right now would be the whole point). The very next day Matt Hancock launched NHS volunteers and asked for 250,000 people to sign up (in my opinion a tacit admission that his party have destroyed the NHS through cuts and privatisation). 24 hours later half a million people had signed up. Unpaid. People want to work, and will, especially if the work has some meaning. Work can improve our lives rather than imprison us.
Then we come to disability and unemployment benefits and universal credit. According to the Tory party’s nudge unit, cutting them to the bone isn’t only necessary but provides an excellent incentive to get people back to work. From personal experience I know, being on your knees, losing self respect because you’re broke doesn’t make finding work any easier. And all these centrist hacks who’ve cheered on these cuts as sensible are now freaking out because they might effect them. I’ve seen headlines like “£94 a week, how on earth can anyone live on that?!” Well hundreds of thousands of people have had to for years, through no fault of their own, thanks to you denigrating the alternative.
Ian Duncan Smith’s even quoted as saying the 5 week wait for universal credit is good because it provides an excellent opportunity for claimants to learn about budgeting. Which can only be described as punitive. I think that moralising attitude to poverty is another thing that will change.
Then there’s our housing crisis. In the last week or so rents have plummeted because hundreds of thousands of properties have been taken off air b n b and put on the long term rental market because holiday lets suddenly aren’t profitable. It’s almost like the pandemic is doing a better job of regulating markets than any of our governments did.
Jeremy Corbyn did his last prime minister’s questions yesterday, it felt like a very tragic event. Here’s a man who was vilified, ridiculed and destroyed for presenting ideas that seem like common sense now, and will be implemented in the worst way possible. The world is upside down. Kier Starmer’s been conspicuously quiet through this whole thing, turns out the Tories want to form a unity government, Keir must smell power. Seems like a trap to me. I’d let the Tories own this fucking mess they’ve created. Just at the moment when a radical socialist government seems like the pragmatic option, we’re going to get Kier Starmer.
So news from the pizza place. I’ve still not been in, but one of the other riders put this video on the group the other day. It’s a video of someone being loaded into an ambulance a few doors down from the shop. I really think carrying on is madness. People will die.
The other thing is they seem to be rationing mozzarella. Usually they use ersatz stuff that comes in little blocks in big plastic bags, now they using the real shit (from Sainsbury's I think, till they run out anyway). They have signs up all over the place saying they fly the stuff in from Naples every week. They don't, they get it from an industrial estate in Slough.
I’m going to walk down to the big Sainsbury’s today to see if I can get a job (I’ll let you know what I see tomorrow). If not, and if the government still aren’t doing anything for self employed people, I’ll have to go back to delivering pizzas.
One thing I've noticed is thanks to the lack of planes and reduced traffic, everything in my flat is much cleaner. Normally everything needs dusting every couple of days but not now.
Yesterday I was prescribed methylphenidate (Ritalin/Concerta) for my ADHD, which is a major reason I’ve ended up delivering pizzas at 32, believe me it wasn’t part of my five-year plan. I’m supposed to get my blood pressure checked before I go on it because it’s a type of amphetamine, and they need to know it’s not messing up my heart and blood pressure. Trouble is I don’t think I can get into my GP to do it. The health service is fucked and as far as I know they aren’t seeing patients in person. So I might just have to raw dog that speed blind and hope for the best.
I’ll be starting on 18mg a day and maybe going up in two weeks. I only found out about my ADHD a few months ago, mostly because I have the attention deficit rather than hyperactivity so it was unnoticed, but it’s been a massive issue for me, so this medicine isn’t a luxury. I think I really need it.
The English teaching course I’ve been doing is still taking the written work, so I need to get an essay done today.
Yesterday an air raid siren went off near by, no idea why, but it was spooky. The constant sirens remind me of an account I read of the first outbreak of plague in 1348. Every village rang the church bells for each funeral. Before long the ringing was constant, rolling over the countryside until suddenly it wasn’t. There was no one left to ring the bells.
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