by Denis A. Conroy for The Saker Blog

A ‘thing’ is a ‘thing’ because it’s not something else. The ‘thing’ we are presently preoccupied with is the coronavirus, a thing that has become the scourge that presently eclipses every other scourge, even the Western Worlds’ penchant for continuous warfare.

The self-incarcerated multitude…of which I am one…might well wonder (at this time) what lies around the next corner. Some of us in our isolation will struggle to overcome the vain and intrusive interpretations that identify a culture of mesmerism that has come into existence these past four decades. From the Department of Shock-dock Wizardly…Wall Street et al… came a form of speculative hyperbole determined to take control of the social agenda, and by succeeding in doing so, required all of us to submit to their latest market stratagems.

What stratagems are employed in this context are anybodys’ guess. Communitarian concerns have long been privatised under legislation that came into effect to transferred ownership of the public purse to the Neo-Cons. With the arrival of the coronavirus, the effects of the Neo-Liberal coup on public infrastructure came sharply into focus. It exposed what had been happening these past four decades within the public arena. The Neo-Cons had successfully quarantined the public domain with superlative nonsense of the deluded kind…Friedrich Hayek…so that they might parasitically suck on the marrow of the American dream.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” ……Friedrich Hayek.

But sadly…and with the benefit of hindsight…we now observe the fundamental illiteracy of Friedrich Hayek’s economic design. He advocated a privatise-or-perish process that would enable Wall Street to privatise the public components (safeguards) within the system…originally put in place to regulate the system itself…thus making it easy for casino capitalism to shit on public trust.

THE MARKET ECONOMY as a ‘thing’ (or design) is an instrument with many strings committed to the profit motive and enables the 1% to make usurious whoopee via asset buybacks at the expense of the 99% while peeing on the fiscally vulnerable. The ‘thing’ is, how much longer will we tolerate Old Testament capitalism to be our ‘thing’- of-choice?

The thing is: Saudi Arabia princes luxuriate in their billion-dollar yachts while Yemeni children die from starvation.

The thing is: In Britain, the Queenly Royal matron sits in her castle and comes out intermittently to speak to her subjects while managing to avoid addressing questions of inequity.

The thing is, why is so hard to rid ourselves of elitism!

Was Hegel right; “The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.”

The thing is: individuality in the Western world is centred around myths of exceptionalism and martial effectiveness to create an illusion of righteous purpose …the sense of who the ‘good-guys’ are and who should be annihilated in the name of ‘enlightened causes’ have become an American mantra that has had the effect of pushing the national psyche into perpetual warfare.

But the strangest thing about the USA…the biggest economy…is that it has a Jewish problem insofar as it is home to millions who went there with the legends of Jewish historic identity that cannot be fully integrated into the mainstream population. It has made an artform of ghetto identity by masterfully balancing the in-and-out (ness) of political correctness to a tee, which in turn, causes perceived anti- Semitic slights to produce lachrymose responses.

“If you want to understand anti-Semitism, read the Old Testament.” –George Orwell.

It also has a debt problem, alongside an America First problem, and not least a population that regards itself as emancipated in a most simplistic way. Not least of all, it believes itself capable of solving the problems of the global community with coercion and apple pie. It has produced a capitalist client-market-oriented culture that sojourns the public in a fake holism while using its militaristic capability to dominate all competition by relying on the wiles of brute strength to achieve its’ ends.

Hence the Hollywood ‘thing’; the spinning of self-interested narratives to promote the elitist notion that modern Jewish self-identity and American culture need the threat of omnipresent antithesis to ensure its very survival against assimilation or influence…a drama that produced unsavoury elements when used as an anti-Semitic trope against Jeremy Corbyn in the recent UK elections in relation to Palestinians rights. The Jewish right to use what it perceives as vanguardism directed toward acquiring a place in the legislature of a host country eerily coexists with Empirical American ambitions of infiltrating its hegemonic protoplasm into the biosphere.

The thing is, will the virus have a seminal effect on the house-of-cards economy that America has become? A Taj Mahal tribute to love of easy money built on derivatives, piled one on top of the other in fake alignments that disguise the very essence of the ecoTHE THING IS…nomic process. Will Blackrock’s Larry Fink be astute enough to hold together asset-values for the elite…gains a la usurious whoopee… or will “Wild Bill” Hickok rise from his grave in true American style to lead the ‘yeomen’ in a putsch against the Rothschild central-bankers whose grip on the system is formidable.

For now, the ‘thing’ is… will those cosseted asset-managers who have now become financial advisers to US Fed and Treasury create a less than brave new world where the twin evils of privatisation and redundancy render the herd-instinct subject to parasitic dystopia, or will the coronavirus be the event that loosens the grip of the hoary traders’ hands which continue to grab a fat-cat portion of the commonweal.

The thing is, only time can give us a clear picture of the state of global health and the health of the global economy.

Just as Indian residents can now see the towering peaks of the Himalayas from Punjab for the first time in thirty years, after a massive drop in pollution caused by the country’s coronavirus lockdown so, might we discover clarification when the fog of confusion that comes with the coronavirus has passed.

As my 86th. birthday approaches I consider myself lucky to have made it thus far. To be sure, I’m in the acute category in matters of coronavirus infection. But the virus is not foremost in my thoughts…it’s the aftermath that interests me. Could a new and improved awareness of natural causes become part of a newfound purview…a holistic view of human society that replaces the inanity of celebrity culture?

It takes some ‘thing’ like the coronavirus to obviate the obvious…it’s the tinted glass of the chauffeur driven limousine with ‘Larry’ the fat-cat-passenger smugly luxuriating within the partitioned-compartmentalised space he has carved out for himself through sheer wile while separating himself from the downtrodden homeless ‘Larry’s’ he fleetingly notices lying under makeshift coverings in the doorways of shop fronts or any portion of real estate that they can identify as their own until they are moved-on once again. ‘Larry’ sees all this and is comforted by the fact that wealth can buy health care.

So, the ‘thing’ is, when the mop-up comes and those amongst us who have perished, or are perishing because of inequities, will they merely be regarded as collateral damage. Will the system that cultivates individual gratification at the expense of the less wily resume its business-as-usual charter? An incontestable fact that is re-emerging ever more poignantly with the advent of the coronavirus, is the paucity and glaring lack of literacy in matters pertaining to health services and social wellbeing.

Most Western societies have become mean places because their wallets occupy the place where their hearts ought to be…and, how sad a ‘thing’ is that?

Denis A. Conroy,
Freelance Writer
Australia