Cassandra Voices

Tag: Black Lives Matter

  • COVID-19: Torches of Freedom

    ‘Harold Evans used to say that an investigation only really began to count once the readers – and even the journalists – were bored with it’
    Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news?

    In New York city on Easter Sunday 1929, in a premeditated move, a group of women brought the annual parade to a halt and proceeded to light up cigarettes. In a choreographed response, the tobacco industry, guided by the legendary Edward Bernays, re-branded cigarettes ‘Torches of Freedom’.

    This manipulated scandal had the desired effect of connecting smoking cigarettes with female empowerment. Within a few years, a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke had largely been conceded. Effectively doubling its market, the tobacco industry laughed all the way to the bank.

    Such an apparently spontaneous public spectacle is arguably the gold standard in advertising, wherein an avant-garde movement is associated with a product or service – all while the consumer is blissfully unaware. Importantly, radical or even rebellious social groups often inform mainstream taste, as with the popularity of so-called ‘ghetto styles’.

    This article explores how the pharmaceutical industry, in league with technology corporations and so-called stakeholder capitalism – which entails giving corporations more power over society and democratic institutions less – successfully associated global support for universal vaccine uptake against COVID-19 with a ‘left-wing’ political outlook, infused with youthful idealism.

    In particular, global Black Lives Matter demonstrations appear to have been harnessed – without the consent of organisers – to popularise the use of face masks, which became the enduring global symbol of the pandemic. The fretful atmosphere these inculcated offered a chilling reminder that COVID-19 was constantly in our midst.

    This arrived despite an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2020 dismissing calls for widespread masking as ‘a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic’. That same month the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine referred to 14 trials on the use of masks vs. no masks, saying these ‘showed no effect in either healthcare workers or in community settings’. Thereafter, even experts who questioned their efficacy were censored on social media.

    Masks were supposed to play an equivalent role to the assumed purpose of vaccines: protecting others. They were made – and in some cases remain – compulsory in many settings in numerous states, foreshadowing similar laws enforcing vaccine compliance. In essence, the vaccine would set us free from an obligation to wear masks.

    Summer, 2020

    By the summer of 2020, with case numbers plummeting, many were wondering whether COVID-19 had become an endemic, seasonal respiratory infection. We learnt that France’s first known case was in December, 2019. Later, it was discovered to have been circulating in Italy from September, 2019 and in Spain from as far back as March, 2019, apparently without overwhelming medical systems.

    But a whole industry had been waiting for a pandemic to occur, with the incentive of producing a vaccine for global use and, seemingly, an architecture of surveillance that had been publicly discussed from the outset. In contrast to the Swine Flu debacle, this opportunity would not be lost.

    Moreover, it was being reported that PCR testing was inflating case counts (and thus mortality statistics) through false positive results. Publicity stunts that generated a wave of global hysteria were by then appearing increasingly absurd. Meanwhile, extraordinary predictions for mortality, suggesting we were contending with a challenge equivalent to the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1919 were proving seriously wide of the mark.

    Spanish Influenza caused approximately 75 million deaths, whereas COVID-19 may have been responsible for a global death toll of 6 million, the vast majority of whom were beyond average life expectancy, at a time when the global population was about five times that of 1919.

    Indeed, the early spike in deaths from (or with) COVID-19 in some countries can be attributed to hospitals transferring sick older patients into care homes, where outbreaks followed and only basic medical care was available.

    The ‘Scientific’ Advice Changes…

    After a period of social isolation brought about by unprecedented stay-at-home orders and lockdowns, there were no significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in the wake of large and often disorderly Black Lives Matters demonstrations triggered by the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25.

    In response, some outlets claimed protestors’ use of face masks had prevented outbreaks. However, most of those in evidence were cotton fabric, which health agencies now acknowledge to be next to useless. Furthermore, masks had been worn as a defence against tear gas, or in order to preserve anonymity prior to COVID-19, as the feature image for this article from 2014 demonstrates.

    Whatever the purpose, an impression was created of ‘caring’ mask-clad protestors demanding racial justice around the world. Subsequently, Joe Biden’s own lawyers helped Whole Food workers mount a legal challenge to allow them to wear Black Lives Matters-branded facemasks while on the job. More revolutionary aspirations – including to disband the police – were conveniently ignored by lockdown-enthusiasts who craved enforcement.

    Circumstantial evidence suggests that demonstrations were seized on by an alliance of vested interests that exert control over a swathe of media, new and old.

    The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appears pivotal. The Foundation is the second-largest contributor to the WHO budget, and put over $10 billion into universities in 2020 as well as at least $250 million into journalism in the first half of 2020 alone.

    Unprompted by the publication of any scientific study, the WHO changed its advice on wearing masks on June 5, 2020 shortly after the Black Lives Matters demonstrations. Most national health agencies – long subject to regulatory capture – followed suit, although a few countries declined to alter long-standing advice.

    In the U.S., NIAID director Dr Anthony Fauci claimed he had previously told a white lie to the effect that wearing a mask offered no protection in order to prevent a run on stocks. But emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal he was giving the same advice in private — against mask use.

    Manipulation of mortality statistics can also be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. This set out strict new rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths that differed fundamentally from registration for other causes.

    The guidelines define a COVID-19 mortality as ‘a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).’

    The achievement of universal vaccine uptake – no matter how limited its usefulness – offered dizzying possibilities to the super-rich intent on engineering a new world order, which was openly being referred to as the Great Reset.

    Political Identification

    There was also a direct political purpose for stoking fears around COVID-19, which goes some way towards explaining the involvement of actors beyond the pharmaceutical sector. Application of ‘the science’ against COVID-19 would undermine right-wing Populist movements around the world, which had been to the fore in challenging globalisation – alongside chauvinistically asserting national and religious identities.

    The political quiescence of the radical left in a period of authoritarian lockdowns led by rapacious global corporations arrived following the defeats of Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and a concomitant decline in investigative journalism. Fresh from seriously undermining Corbyn with bogus charges of antisemitism, the once-progressive Guardian became a leading conduit for fearmongering coverage of COVID-19. It now provides fawning interviews with Bill Gates, whose Foundation subsidises the newspaper.

    Nonetheless, in the era of the internet political allegiances retain a tribal dimension that can be exploited. Thus, at the outset of the pandemic when lockdowns were first mooted many identifying as left-wing assumed that in ‘following the science’ and/or ‘listening to the experts’ they would be preventing the medical system from collapsing.

    But as the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris put it: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    In fact, from the outset there were huge divisions, and arguments, in the scientific community over the efficacy of lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports. But these debates were largely concealed from public view through online censorship of authoritative academic sources.

    2020 was also the year of the U.S. Presidential election during which the Democrats used the pandemic as a weapon against incumbent Populist President Donald Trump, who actively antagonised those identifying as left-wing.

    In order to defeat Trump, the Democrat establishment seems to have entered a Faustian Pact with Big Tech, ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and Big Pharma.

    One still hears partisan support for vaccines against COVID-19 being expressed by those identifying as left-wing. Most seem oblivious to the world’s ten richest men doubling their fortunes during the period, while the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fell; besides the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies.

    It is axiomatic that young people are drawn to idealistic ‘left-wing’ ideas – any man who is not a socialist at age twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head. This was also the cohort that would be most difficult to persuade to take a vaccine.

    Therefore, apart from allaying individual health concerns, taking a COVID-19 vaccine was sold as an exercise in civic virtue. Hold outs were decried as selfish and put other people’s lives at risk, even unAmerican, while ‘anti-vaxxers’ were portrayed by a prominent (however hypocritical) left-wing ideologue Fintan O’Toole as a motley crew of ‘egoists, paranoiacs and fascists.’

    Generally ignored in this coverage is in that in the U.S. vaccination rates lagged among people of colour, and that leaders of the Black Lives Matters movement were steadfastly opposed to vaccine passports.

    ‘We Realised We Could’

    In a revealing interview with The Times Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, whose unpeer-reviewed paper in March, 2020 proved pivotal – ‘due to the professor’s WHO ties’ – to the introduction of lockdowns in the U.K. and elsewhere, revealed amazement at the influence he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    “Getting away” with imposing lockdowns – that appear to be causing ongoing excess deaths – was predicated on the assumption that a vaccine, or vaccines, against COVID-19 would be invented within eighteen months or longer.

    A subsidised vaccine against COVID-19 would be all the more lucrative if it was not simply a one-off treatment, and as long as states were offering a captive market, through coercion if necessary.

    It also represented a unique opportunity to trial new technologies. Unsurprising, the industry, and their supporters, were highly resistant to any suggestion of a safe, off-patent treatment being used instead.

    Since the nineteenth century, the pharmaceutical industry has been implicated in a host of scandals, including the recent opioid epidemic. Oliver Wendell Holmes, dean of Harvard Medical School concluded in 1860 that ‘if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the seas, it would be all the better for mankind – and the worse for the fishes.’

    Moreover, in a history charting advances in longevity, The Changing Body (2012), Floud et al argue that ‘it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it.’

    Of course medications such as antibiotics continue to save many lives, but as David Healy put it ‘we are living off scientific capital accumulated in an earlier age.’

    Peter C. Gøtzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre has argued that the industry’s conduct today closely resembles organized crime syndicates. He wrote perceptively: ‘Drugs always cause harm. If they didn’t, they would be inert and therefore unable to give any benefit.’

    A recently published work entitled The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research (2020) by Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry argues:

    Pharmaceutical spin doctors are the contemporary counterparts of the sophists of fifth century Greece. The essence of sophistry is to shape public opinion by skilful mastery of persuasive speaking without regard for any considerations of truth. Pharmaceutical marketing is a form of sophistry, whereby the serious attempt to discover efficacy or safety in medicine is subjugated to the goal of promotion. Medical rhetoric has usurped medical science – an embarrassment in an age allegedly devoted to evidence-based medicine (p.126).

    Qualitatively Different

    Attitudes to the COVID-19 vaccines were also scaffolded on tried and tested paediatric vaccines against common infectious diseases such as measles. Parents are encouraged to vaccinate their kids not just for their own sake, but for the sake of all children.

    The COVID-19 vaccines were, however, from the outset qualitatively different to most traditional vaccines, which generally produce a herd immunity that diminishes childhood morbidity – and even mortality – from infectious diseases, notwithstanding at times spurious claims of adverse reactions.

    All COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ produced so far are qualitatively different to most – with rare exceptions – traditional vaccines that are designed to prevent an infection from occurring.

    At the very least, one would have expected the trials to determine whether a COVID-19 vaccine would seriously diminish illness; yet as British Medical Journal associate editor Peter Doshi observed in October, 2020: ‘The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are.’

    He continued:

    None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.

    Moreover, the companies were busy covering their tracks, meaning efficacy, and long-term safety data, would be difficult to determine. In January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer the vaccine to those who received a placebo. Yet Doshi and Light argue that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    The information in the public domain was easily manipulated by servile media. In April, 2021 a Lancet article by Ollario et al referred to the ‘elephant (not) in the room’, wherein vaccine efficacy was being reported overwhelmingly in terms of a relative risk reduction. This gives percentages of around 95% efficacy, whereas the absolute risk reduction of developing a serious illness was in the region of just 1%.

    Importantly, relative risk reduction only considers ‘participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population.’

    Peter Doshi has since publicly argued these ‘products which everyone calls MRNA vaccines are qualitatively different from standard vaccines.’

    Whistleblower

    In November, 2021, Paul D. Thacker in the British Medical Journal brought to light a whistleblower’s account of poor practices at a contract research company carrying out Pfizer’s trials. Brook Jackson raised questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight which, once again, gained little or no traction in mainstream ‘progressive’ media.

    The real scandal is that often coercive attempts to persuade the entire adult – and in many cases child – population was not based on a cost-benefit analysis.

    Recently, a peer reviewed article in Vaccine – the premier journal for vaccine research – found the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with a 16% higher risk of serious adverse events.

    The study was limited to an analysis of trial data the companies had submitted to the FDA and did not evaluate the vaccines’ overall harm-benefit. The authors argue that

    The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.

    A young, healthy person faces a vanishing risk of hospitalisation from COVID-19.

    However, throughout the pandemic industry-aligned ‘fact checking’ initiatives served to undermine scientific integrity. The tactic of so-called fact checkers is to highlight absurd claims from random sources that serve to undermine informed criticism of the lockdown-mask-vaccine policy.

    Apart from its political ramification, the vaccine was, and is, a cash cow. It is instructive that the AstraZeneca vaccine, which in an apparent appeal to left wing sentiment was to be sold ‘at cost’, never received U.S. authorisation, and the manufacturers have since announced that it will be sold for a profit.

    The failure to interrogate vested interests reflects a serious decline in contemporary journalism, especially from publications previously associated with progressive viewpoints, many of which now depend on philanthro-capitalist handouts. We have reached an absurd juncture where a centibillionaire such as Bill Gates is attacked for being ‘left-wing’.

    Sell to Anyone

    The COVID-19 pandemic realised former Merck CEO’s Henry Gadsden dream of making drugs for healthy people, which Merck would be able to ‘sell to anyone’, as he candidly revealed to Fortune magazine in the 1970s.

    This could not have been achieved without the active collaboration of technology corporations and stakeholder capitalism in an era of surveillance capitalism. The censorship and disinformation used to bring the world to a halt in 2020, and beyond, represents a unique attack on democracy and worked to the benefit of a global financial elite.

    As Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry anticipated ‘the ideal of an open, democratic society is threatened by an oligarchy of corporations’ (p.23).

    However, at least much of the evidence that was used to permit coercion is slowly being decoded by investigative journalists such as Paul D. Thacker and research scientists of the calibre of Peter Doshi. We can remain optimistic that the truth will eventually out, at least on the margins, despite continued social media censorship.

    Nonetheless, the willing dissemination of disinformation in once-reputable publications has been increasingly normalised. Thus, the first and enduring casualty of the war in Ukraine has been the truth.

    On September 10, 2022 the Guardian reported that ‘the much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive was a disinformation campaign to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s special forces have said.’ Strikingly, the authors do not refer to the Guardian previously publicising that disinformation.

    COVID-19 generated a conveyor belt of disinformation that has cast doubt over the reliability of contemporary journalism, and revealed how medico-scientific discourse can be captured by vested interests. It is vital for the future of humanity, as we confront environmental challenges, warfare and crushing poverty that scientific rigour, coupled with values that can be traced to Aristotle, are reasserted.

    Feature Image: Black Lives Matter demonstration in Oakland, California, December 2014.

  • Unforgettable Year: June 2020

    June brought criticism of Big Data censorship and the coverage of the pandemic in mainstream media, as it became clear the doomsday scenarios certain epidemiologists painted in March were wide of the mark. Frank Armstrong wrote:

    Accepting Covid-19 represents an extraordinary challenge requiring a concerted response, censorship by Big Data in such a blanket form, including of recognised academic authorities, surely only lends credence to conspiracy theories, fomented by the far-right in particular. Disregard for freedom of expression casts doubt over the integrity of scientific inquiry and inhibits rational debate.

    He found fault in particular with The Guardian’s coverage:

    The free digital site with an estimated 42 million monthly visitors devoted unrelenting rolling coverage to Covid-19, emphasising the simple moral calculus with a banner across its home page. This has been to the almost complete exclusion of all other content for the months of March, April and May.

    The Guardian’s loss of proportion, and nuance, has been particularly damaging as it is the most trusted newspaper brand in the U.K., including, importantly, among readers aged 18 to 29.[lviii] This may be traced to its position as a global news provider of free content dependent on maintaining an enormous click rate to derive a profit.

    He also interpreted the global Black Lives Matters eruption as an unconscious response to the lockdown experience: ‘The extraordinary scenes witnessed around the world could also be interpreted as a proxy for societies throwing off the heavy knee of lockdowns, containing a basic human impulse to interact.’

    Ireland witnessed a number of exuberant demonstrations, including one in Sligo covered by Fellipe Lopes.

    Image (c) Fellipe Lopes

    Justin Frewen scholarly account was to the fore in June, discussing the attendant repression and a Pandemic Shock Doctrine.

    Covid-19’s rapid spread around the world has impacted upon people living in a wide variety of political, economic, social and cultural contexts. These diverse contexts have mediated the repressive policies available to governments – facilitating, refracting or impeding the measures they have attempted to impose – the insecurity and fear caused by the pandemic have undoubtedly facilitated the imposition of repressive measures.

    By PJeganathan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89483458

    He continued:

    Repressive policies and measures can be introduced, as the ‘shock’ caused by the Covid-19 pandemic leaves the public less able to resist. In a world where lockdowns, isolation and quarantining have become the new accepted norm, coordinated, active resistance to repressive and inhibiting policies has become more complicated.

    In another article Frewen discussed whether we are really all in this together:

    Never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, the advertising industry has swiftly conceived and produced a slew of adverts to hawk their clients’ wares by tapping into the positive sentiments of this catchphrase. Praising frontline workers or highlighting our newfound unity – separated but together – they strive to manipulate the emotions and purchasing decisions of their target audiences.

     

    Moreover, Laurent Muzellac was proposing that greater attention should be given to the impact of lockdown on younger people, including children:

    governments should not only care about the lives of its citizens today, but also be concerned with the longer term health and wellbeing of the nation. To mitigate the next crisis and guide future investment, the government should first consider how many, and which, lives confinement saved, and which it destroyed.

    Justo Lapiedra (wikicommons)

    Next in an important article on The State of Irish Agriculture Eoghan Harris demonstrated the hypocrisy of the Irish agricultural authorities in claiming that Ireland was the most food secure country in the world:

     Food security in this scenario equates to commodities being traded on a global market with minimal restrictions. The evaluation is predicated on current availability, price and diversity of food consumed – regardless of productive factors or supply chain interference. It takes no account of the environmental or social consequences of this supply line, or any risks lying further down the line, whether a hard Brexit, a global pandemic, or that the global food system has eroded a quarter of all arable topsoil on the planet since the 1950s.

    He further revealed:

    Over the course of the twentieth century, the adaptation of new and increasingly expensive inputs into agriculture have been sold as ‘progress’ to farmers. Numerous chemicals and pharmaceutical companies, including SmithKline, Pfizer, Merck, Schering Plough and Roche located their manufacturing facilities in Ireland during the 1960s and 70s, availing of lax or non-existent environmental regulation and lower labour costs. They stayed because of an attractive corporate tax regimes and unrestricted interference in Ireland’s educational system. By the turn of the twenty-first century they accounted for nearly seventy percent of global pharmaceutical output.

    Also on an environmental theme, David Langwallner was drawn to the work of Arundhati Roy, who has also highlighted the trials of the dispossessed through this pandemic:

    In India and beyond, Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neo-liberalism and environmental damage go hand in glove in her Capitalism a Ghost Story (2014).  Since the publication of The God of Small Things (1997) she has channelled her energies into political activism against the growing environmental and economic calamity being perpetrated on her native land, through the depredations of neo-liberalism. It is that political conscience that is the primary interest of her new awareness.

    While on World Refugee Day Evgeny Shtorn drew attention to the importance of the storytelling medium.

    For centuries only certain people could share their stories. They were those occupying positions of power: men, for example, as opposed to women. Feminist methodologies made it very clear that having one’s voice heard is essential to having a societal impact. Since women’s voices were counted, our societies have changed. Following this logic, other communities made their voices heard through various forms of storytelling: they were LGBTQI communities, disabled people, ethnic and racial minorities, working class people and many other groups. Hearing each and every one of these stories has brought our societies closer to real equality.

    ‘When Travel Means Need’ from ‘The Timelapse’ (c) Letizia Lopreiato

    Artist of the Month Letizia Lopreiato found a sanctuary from a sense of exile in Ireland:

    For many years the sensation of exile following the death of my father truly followed me too, just like the narrator in The Plague, until I arrived home. Ireland, Dublin, its magical people, its incredible feeling of community, allowed me to be present, to slow down, to feel my own thoughts. Thoughts that I have had for so long but that I could not hold the energy to engage with, it was like I couldn’t handle the intensity of them for so long, until when It finally felt like I had no escape from the awareness of them, if I truly want to make through it and still be myself.

    Musician of the Month Richard Egan, meanwhile, brought us on a journey from noise to silence:

    In the beginning they need and want to be heard yet, at some point, silence will be required to stay sharp. They should never choose the sound of their own voice over the work. Staying quiet is not what artists are very good at but it is what needs to be done sometimes. Silence doesn’t have to last forever and invariably there will come a time when a fork in the road is reached: one way ‘stop talking’, the other ‘continue speaking’. The artist will feel in their bones when this fateful day arrives.

    Photo credit: Peter Campbell

    Also in music, Andrew Hamilton found Joy in epigrammatic quotations:

    You may ask why on earth do you find these quotes useful? I fully own up to having a tendency towards the austere myself: over the past five years I have gone at least twice a year on silent retreats in a Buddhist monastery and my biggest disappointment during this lockdown has been missing out on a cancelled ten-day silent meditation retreat at the monastery led by an amazing nun. But also reflecting on it for this article I suddenly realised that I probably need a corrective or balance to clichéd notions of what the arts exist for and the gush spewed out from the art and music worlds to continue making anything. Maybe I am very contrary (okay, I am) but when I read blanket statements about how art needs to reflect life (whatever that means and what if mine is really boring and mundane?!) I think of Martin at her fiercest: ‘art work…does not represent life because life is infinite, dimensionless. It is consciousness of itself. And that cannot be represented’.

    And Constance Hauman discovered a creativity in the silence of New York after it shut down on April 4th.

    We also received fiction from Camillus John in which ‘The real facts don’t matter. Only the goal and dream of ultimate justice.’

    Image (c) Constantino Idini

    And new poetry from Micheal O’Siadhail:

    SIDE EFFECT

    So few cars on our Manhattan street
    Pigeons leaving nests that swirl between
    Highrise ledges, fearless land to eat
    Any mid-street grain or scrap they glean.

    Told to stay at home most acquiesce.
    Now we learn how unbeknownst we spare
    Our New York as we’re emitting less
    Long-lived greenhouse gases in the air.

    Same in Paris, London, Madrid, Rome.
    If our frenzied whirl restarts, when pressed
    To create more jobs and we leave home,
    Will we foul then worse our global nest?

    Covid fear amends our habitat –
    Nature’s own backhanded caveat.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    Unforgettable Year: May 2020

  • Freedom’s Just Another Word

    I left a depressed New York city following the surprise election of Donald Trump in November 2016; a city reeling in disbelief at what occurred – but I had captured history unfold in Time Square – now I was heading into the heartland of how this had actually happened – the Rust Belt – then the bus broke down at night in rural Pennsylvania and I missed my connection to Kentucky. I overnighted in a cheap motel and caught an early bus to Kingsport, as we pulled into Bristol, Virginia we alighted for a cigarette break and this anonymous traveller waved his American flag, in defiance or support? To understand this election, one had to be in the rural American heartland, to see what was actually going on – coal-mining towns decimated by unemployment, despair and opiates.

    Shades of Grace ©Barry Delaney

    I arrived in Kingsport station tired and dishevelled, after days travelling around the Rust Belt, looking for a taxi to take me to my Motel. As the bus took off I realised the station was closed and not opening – I wandered up the deserted town looking for a taxi or bus – nothing, not even a car – like a Ghost town in an old Western, except this was 2016 in Tennessee. Eventually a man pointed to a building that was not closed. I pressed the buzzer and realised it was a funeral home. A large man in a suit answered. I said I needed a Taxi He said there was none, but if I waited until after the funeral someone would give me a lift. I politely declined and continued walking – the afternoon heat was quite intense and my bags heavy so I returned to take up the offer. I waited at the back of the Shades of Grace hall as the funeral commenced. Amidst a congregation of church goers three casual dressed mourners stood out. They kept shuffling outside for a quick smoke. Then an image appeared on a large monitor – a bearded thirty something male – I was intrigued. The service commenced with a sombre Springsteen song and his short life was celebrated. Jail was mentioned; school; a broken family; a lover and a child; unemployment; drugs. Then the funeral was over, like his life, the three friends left and I was asked to join the gathering over the food platter provided. I was told the real story. It was murder – a drug deal gone wrong; no money for funeral or burial; the Shades of Grace stepped in; it had become a common theme in Kingsport and all over mid-America, where murder and drugs cut life short – money was scarce as debt was due. Talk turned to the newly elected Donald Trump, and I was told when you have nothing, anything will seem better. I got my lift back to my Motel, shaken by what I had witnessed and the fragility of life.

    Ferguson ©Barry Delaney
    Ferguson ©Barry Delaney

    I had been to St Louis a few times, but like most was unsure where Ferguson was – the birthplace of Black Lives Matter. I boarded a bus from downtown St Louis, a 10 mile journey through some of the most deprived areas I had seen in America. I stood out, the only white, and with a camera, eventually the silence was broken. Where you going? I was asked suspiciously. I told them I was a photographer from Dublin. They never heard of Ireland. Eventually the bus driver told me where to alight. He pointed to the liquor store where Michael Brown was accused of stealing the cheap pack of cigarillos. I wandered around this typical American low income shopping strip: the McDonalds; two liquor stores and a convenience store and a few businesses to let, in the searing September heat; eyes peered on me suspiciously; no one talked to me, never mind wanted to be photographed. Eventually a gang of teens, heading out of the McDonalds, agreed to a quick photo. they said they knew Michael Brown then they were gone. I wandered back to the liquor store and something happened: one of the gang was into photography and he interviewed me. I was real so I was  in – a few photographs and then the history of what happened to spark the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the most engaging conversations of my life. I was taken down to Michael Brown’s home; shown where the shooting occurred and met his neighbours. We smoked and I told them about Ireland, I showed them my Instagram and then I was gone, back on my bus

    All activity is being recorded ©Barry Delaney

    Waiting at Memphis station for my early morning bus to Mississippi and a prison van rolls up and drops off five newly released prisoners; we were all congregated in the smoking area; the guy in the Nirvana T-shirt agreed to be photographed and as I’m shooting the black guy drops in. It’s the perfect picture. I return to my coffee; then he approaches menacingly, “did you take my photograph?”  I’m always honest, people on the street see through bullshit. I said yeah, he tells me he had been locked up for eight years since he was eighteen. “What are you going to do with the photograph?” he asks. I told him, hopefully a book or exhibition somewhere in Europe. He said “am I going to be in a book or exhibition in Europe?”  I said, hopefully, and bought him a coffee, he told me about his fears about going back to his home town in Mississippi, and getting mixed up again in the gang lifestyle; the horrors of living in a prison dormitory; the violence he witnessed and the segregated racial tension of prison life.

    When my exhibition – Americans Anonymous – opened at Ranelagh Arts centre two years later he was honoured at the opening.

    Freedom day ©Barry Delaney
    Freedom day ©Barry Delaney

     On the bus from Jackson we picked up this sweet little Louisiana twentysomething, four kids and just released from a six month stretch for a petty drug offense; at the next stop I photographed her. We chatted all the way to Louisiana – telling me her story, me mine. When we arrived at Baton Rouge station it was Friday night chaos with more new releases .I took my camera out and suddenly it was not so friendly. Then this guy who had begun flirting with the girl, whipped of his shirt and yelled: “Fuck it – I’m Free – shoot that.” I nearly missed my ongoing bus to New Orleans. Janis Joplin playing in my mind: “Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose.”

    ©Barry Delaney

    From my central Chicago tourist base I caught the L train out to the South Side; as I approached Englwood there were no other tourists on board. I was on my own as I embarked, noting the gang activity near the station in the late August heatwave. This was not Dublin. This was a place where there was a gang related murder every day. It seemed deserted and strangely suburban: a world away from the Chicago Magnificent mile; suspicion was everywhere; was I an undercover white man (with a camera)? Alone, I endured the fear and kept walking; approaching different groups; no one here had heard of Dublin, most waving me abruptly away. Eventually agreement, a couple chilling agreed to one shot. I quickly moved on; the next group also agreed; then suddenly, as I was shooting, a guy on a low rider bike circled around me and warned: “you and your camera get the fuck out here NOW.” I scurried quickly back to the station still armed with my camera and my one shot.

    Reflections of Tenderloin ©Barry Delaney
    Reflections of Tenderloin ©Barry Delaney

    Right bang in the centre of San Francisco, a stone’s throw from the shopping hub of Union Square, across the road from Market street, home to Twitter itself, is the Tenderloin. Amidst the liberal affluent chic of San Fran is an oasis of the real Wild West, riddled with sirens, drugs, gunshots, hookers, hostels, soup kitchens, fashion and vice; crackheads yelling incoherent paranoid mantras. Is this the home of the Hippies, Apple and all things new-age?

    And yet, somehow, it’s all carried out in style, maybe a beat pimp style, in that cool California way, like a set from a 60’s Steve McQueen drama. Each time I return the action has moved on, sometimes across the street to the Mission, but it always has that edge. The last time I was there I was run out by a gang of punks, angered by my candid street photography style. Always an adrenaline rush, in fact a Fear and Loathing. This is a sample of some of the characters I have met down through the years, that I’m putting together for my new book: Americans Anonymous.

  • Photo Desk: Black Lives Matter Sligo Protest June 5th 2020

    Around 200 people gathered in front of Sligo City Hall this Friday afternoon. The majority of those attending were young, and they spoke about George Floyd, supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, but also raised questions about Direct Provision in Ireland.

    Photography Felipe Lopes

  • Photo Desk: Black Lives Matter Dublin Protest June 1st 2020

    Photography by Frank Armstrong