“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.” Saint Teresa of Avila
Can’t blame U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Barrett for being born Amy Coney. Nor would I fault my fellow New Orleans native for having Irish Catholic parents who, like mine, sent her to St. Mary’s Dominican High School. Back then it was cool. We were both in the same boat. And far as I know, we still are, that is if you’re in the habit of comparing educated middle class white females wielding our kinda funny Louisiana convent French accent. Women’s tuition is typically tubular. What I mean is, it’s wampum well spent.
Sod it, hatched on the same patch of swamp, Amy n’ me should be two peas in a pod. However, I’m not ashamed to say gun control and reproductive rights are where we part ways. These were fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Seventies and Eighties, for girls, rich or poor, growing up in The Big Easy. Matters of… deep breath… life and death.
"A child is a sponge, able to absorb the plethora of Playboy and Cosmopolitan's iconic chronicles accumulating on the coffee table." 'Old School' is Ilsa Monique's hilarious account of growing up in New Orleans..https://t.co/BTUzLHVxbn@IlsaCarter1@BenPantrey @Des_The_Dog
But in order to begin a coherent conversation on either issue, one must comprehend this. Paired like a couple of chromosomes, the right to bear arms or avail of an abortion are inexorably intertwined.
The Honorable Amy once penned a unanimous opinion affirming the summary judgement against a claimant in the case Smith vs. The Illinois Department of Transportation, finding while egregious, it was not racial discrimination when a supervisor dismissed an employee for what was later stipulated “poor performance” as, and I quote, being a “stupid ass nigger.” Because they were both black. Thus, perhaps she’ll pardon my French when, with Malthusian enthusiasm, I need point out that, unlike me, Barrett is a breeder.
The greedy GOP plucked this pro-lifer directly out of her indoctrination by a secretive charismatic Christian cult called People of Praise and would have you, me and Barrett herself believe the proceedings around Roe vs. Wade were about her unqualified opinion. One based on a bizarre Czar-like wish to not squish the least little fish. A sweeping generalization to keep inconsequential caviar in its crevice, no matter how marred things get. So, you see, as women we are now all set. In a bind. Because profoundly blinded by nothing more than good faith, the Sturgeon General’s brand of justice finds it sound.
This is not my first rodeo. I’ve a habit of being in the right place at the wrong time. Managing marketing and advising on regulations in several sovereign nations for a British boss at a bank based in Hong Kong during a currency crisis and the Handover of our S.A.R. to the P. R. C.. Watching an IPO window slam shut on a tech boom not sparing the white knuckles of a thousand plus entrepreneurs, including Connecticut fat cats, four Finns in Malaysia and more than a couple of Kiwis that like a Trojan camel we tried to pass through the eye of a needle. Not tired, I got hired to launch Tokyo ops for one of the U.S. firms which then perished in their entirety when the Twin Towers fell. Sometimes you might as well call it a day.
Only to sit spitting nails, like an old spy in from the cold, wearing a crusty trusty power suit at a hedge fund desk high up in the Empire State Building. Swearing my federal tax dollars were squandered by an incompetent Army Corps of Engineers, while Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath sinks New Orleans’ natural defenses into the drink. Five years on, an unfettered BP blast on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig heaved 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Left every last bivalve bereft.
Thing is, for all the money in a world I can’t unsee as my oyster, I wouldn’t trade this front row seat watching Ireland’s Celtic Tiger tumble, jigging in The George the very night same sex marriage legalized. Seeing medical cannabis and safe abortion made less murky than a transubstantiation of the Magdalene Laundries into this tip top corporate tax haven. And learning how to ask for the Ban Jax.
Where me and homegirl differ, is before we had graduation under our Prince of Wales plaid chastity belts, God didn’t see fit to show Amy how it felt to be raped at gunpoint and escape.
Hence, the power of Christ has yet to compel the now anointed Coney concerning exceptionally unsexy circumstances. Those surrounding the sort of nonconsensual contortions likely to lead to a swelling belly aborted.
Maybe I don’t have a womb with a wide-angle view at high tide, but my bet is Barrett’s not tangled in a “long game” as Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker article subtly suggests. At best she’s a half-baked Trump tumor deposited on the Supreme Court, but what if she’s been groomed Brothers Grimm style? The Manchurian Candidate meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers? She’s one of seven who, come hell or Haitian high water is spawning seven more into a scenario not of her own making. Ingenue actress? Goodbye RBG and Hello All About Eve? Or anchor baby for the alt-right?
What I ask political strategists who bask in what few filthy cards they’ve slipped up their starched sleeve is a burning question. At what point did conservative Christians earn what they’d always yearned for? Carte blanche to pull up to the Republican bumper, and dive in like Flynn to the D.C. dumpster. When did The Religious Right become your Rumpelstiltskin?
Knowing the ropes on the lesser navigated, one could almost say, fallopian-like, canals of Venice, I’ll venture vetting Casanova’s confessions is yet an even better trip. I for one am not impervious to stumbling on stuff our nuns neglected having Amy, blessed vessel that she is, translate directly from the French. Simply for shits n’ giggles mightn’t they have wiggled something cunning like Sade in to Sophomore English Lit? Not the sublime Nigerian-born British chanteuse…but the felonious philosopher of freedom. An equally smooth operator. I’ll explain.
Couple hundred years before we were in high school, if memory serves, the year 1787 saw yes, a libertine, one of Fibonacci proportions, imprisoned in the Bastille. During his two-week incarceration, minus a lick of obscenity, the Marquis de Sade managed to nail a novella he named Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue. Seems his fictitious femme fatale was willing to bend over. Take one for the team. Don’t know about Amy. Wouldn’t blame her for being game, but, as for me, I’m not. Not anymore. Are you?
There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
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April is generally associated with fresh flowers and cooling rain showers. It is also the dreaded deadline to file taxes. Whether you were enjoying the foliage or sitting down to calculate your tax refund, I think we can all agree that April was particularly cruel this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The dangers posed by this outbreak, and future ones that nature will throw at us, require a thorough reappraisal of public health priorities. Medical systems in advanced Western countries – especially those dominated by the private sector – tend to prioritise treatment of the symptoms of the main non-contagious diseases. We ‘live’ with cancer and heart disease as opposed to addressing multifarious lifestyle causes, which the virus is now preying on.
As Boris Johnson’s predicament underlines, anyone is susceptible to Covid-19, but chances of exposure – without recklessly ignoring medical advice – are often determined by social class, which intersects with lower life expectancy already.
NGO worker Justin Frewen drew on his experience of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea. He recognised that ‘the potential onward transmission of Covid-19 is far greater than for Ebola, as it does not require direct physical contact with the carrier of the virus.’ By that stage, however, it seems it could not ‘be transmitted through the air directly which would greatly increase its range and ease of transmission.’
Frewen also recalled the failures of the WHO during the Ebola epidemic, and speculated as to whether the organisation had been too slow, again, in controlling the outbreak.
Meanwhile a pandemic doctor was steeling himself to the arrival of the grim reaper:
By recognising what death is we recognise what life is. That is maybe why this feels like such a moment of quickening. Death has come knocking at our doors and we are forced to open and acknowledge him. The door will close again, but the collective memory will remain, and when the pandemic is over this may help us to invest life with more meaning.
Last I saw her, rendered unrecognisable behind sheets of dehumanising plastic, she clutched at my hand with her failing limbs and begged me not to leave. But in every room, each now unadorned with the usual ersatz trappings of home and identity one finds in nursing homes – photographs, homespun blankets, love letters from grandchildren – fellow residents lie awaiting their rushed assessments. Oxygen saturations, pulse and respiratory rate, a survey of existing co-morbidities, and finally resuscitation and transfer status to be revisited and revised: who might possibly be saved by hospital transfer, and whose last comfort would be the inevitable cocktail of morphine and midazolam, slipped quietly under the skin at intervals until death arrives.
The pandemic created an enormous burden on the finances of most European States. By April according to Kyran FitzGerald the E.U. was teetering on the brink:
Across Europe, national Governments have moved to tackle the crisis by propping up incomes. Northern European states tend to have efficient bureaucracies and reasonable resilient national balance sheets. But even in places such as prosperous Denmark, there are concerns that many businesses will not reopen after what is increasingly looking like a long shut down.
The picture in Southern Europe is as mentioned much more bleak. In Italy and Spain, there is a real sense of let down amid the crisis, though better off nations like Germany have latterly moved to show solidarity by sending supplies and flying some patients from Eastern France and northern Italy to their hospitals for treatment.
I had booked a hotel – but ended up alongside five families living in a large apartment for seven days. Only two of us were allowed outside to buy food – everyone else had to stay inside. Before leaving we were covered head-to-toe, in gloves, face masks and head coverings. On our return we went through elaborate cleaning procedures before re-entering the apartment. We had to remove our ‘outside’ clothing and spray everything with 75% alcohol.
No cars with registrations from outside the capital city were allowed in. The schools were on holiday and due to return the first week in March but are still closed all over China. Only students doing important exams at the end of term will be allowed to return initially, which hasn’t happened yet.
Leaving Beijing, I returned to my home city of ****. You are supposed to scan your phone so they can track potential carriers arriving into the city – which I hadn’t, having used a private firm for the airport collection. This meant my car registration didn’t show up on the cameras. So the next day the authorities were in touch to find out how I made it back from the airport.
Our bodies, already weakened by sedentary lifestyles, are becoming weaker, muscle-mass decreasing quickly through lack of exercise. We do what we can, setting up home gyms, doing yoga in our bedrooms, a few push ups in the morning. No running, swimming, no going for walks; hardly breathing in the fresh air, panting, moving, or sweating. I do a little gardening in pots on the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. All of a sudden tomato seeds seemed the most important item on my shopping list during my weekly, stressful visit to the supermarket.
It was a particularly challenging period for older people who were advised to cocoon in Ireland, another unwelcome neologism from this period. Fergus Armstrong reflected on the experience:
We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times. We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.
Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning. Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world. It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.
What I, other immigrants, and the Portuguese hope is that we can return to the life we had before, and be able to leave this prison, without bars, that our homes have become. While we try to renew ourselves, the city is still and visibly lacking the energy and joy of the local population.
What is most intriguing in this situation, at least for me, is that we are trying to reinvent ourselves. For example, I have started to cook a lot more during these days of confinement, learning new recipes, in addition to adapting the house for new activities we never used to do at home, like dancing and exercising.
Despite everything I believe that together we will overcome this difficulty, which is happening on a a global scale; staying at home admiring the birds and their songs that echo along with an inaudible cry for freedom from the citizens.
The Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of underlying differences in how they understand morality in the public sphere, and how they relate with each other: this comes from a more utilitarian perspective.
Utilitarianism has earned a bad reputations as it has been incorrectly conflated with crude capitalism, when it is really about taking peoples’ wellbeing seriously, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ As Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills understood it, utilitarianism is extremely equalitarian .
Notably, the Swedish government has taken the advice of moral philosophers who come from a moral utilitarian perspective. The core difference between their approach and what we are seeing for the most part elsewhere is they attempt to avoid an understandable reaction to save lives immediately. They put aside an emotional response and consider the future consequences.
Also, across the water in the United States, Bull Moose was typically bullish about opening up, in a dispatch from Atlanta:
What the hell? Most people in the U.S. appear to be freaking out about Georgia ending its lockdown before anyone else. Even Trump weighed in, saying he disagreed with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. As we stand, restaurants here opened yesterday, as have bowling alleys, parks, nail salons and other facilities. The State also just declared its one thousandth death from COVID-19.
On April 2nd Kemp admitted that he didn’t know that this coronavirus could spread asymptomatically, something the world knew since late January. Kemp may be an idiot, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong to re-open Georgia’s economy. With all respect to those who have lost loved ones or suffered from a bout, it’s time collectively we get back to our new normality.
Earth Day
Image (c) Daniele Idini
April 22nd marked the fiftieth anniversary or Earth Day, and leading environmental writer John Gibbons recalled how this had been closely followed by the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon in 1972, along with a host of other key environmental protection legislation, writing:
Viewed through the political prism of today’s deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan U.S. politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time when people, irrespective of their politics, religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they breathed and the water that their children drank was a good idea.
Fifty years later, the ideologically toxic Trump regime is busily dismantling large chunks of the progressive regulatory framework that the actions of the U.S. environmental movement ushered into being in 1970. Most sane people think it’s probably a bad idea to allow high levels of mercury, a potent and irreversible neurotoxin, to be released into the air from coal-burning plants.
The Public Intellectual Series continued with assessment by David Langwallner of John Gray, the U.K.’s leading intellectual, and Jonathan Sumption the former U.K. Supreme Court judge who became an outspoken critic of lockdowns, and a defender of civil liberties first formulated in England in the Magna Carta (pictured above).
It is very strange for me to hear people talk about pure ‘African Music’ that doesn’t exist – unless you go back thousands of years before humans started roaming around the globe. This concept is simply not true, and frankly, it drives me crazy when people, especially African musicians who use equal-tempered tuning with Western instruments, say so.
I sauntered up to the sertão
in the northeast to a town called Iguatu
to find the river
where my cousin drowned in 1973
the name of the river was the Jaguaribe
they called it the dry river
but as his sister Joan said –
‘there was nothing dry about it that day.’
One surprisingly popular article explored how the Longford town of Ballinallee featured in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ with a suggestion that it may have come about after a night Dylan spent in the company of fellow bard Shane MacGowan.
Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too,
The flowers are dyin’ like all things do,
Follow me close, I’m going to Ballinalee,
I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.
Uluc Ali Kilic in his studio in Istanbul. Daniele Idini
My subject-matter is often the harm and destruction humanity inflicts on its surroundings, or other traumatic issues occurring in our time, such as the refugee crisis and homelessness. I try to make long-lasting artworks using plastic material which isn’t biodegradable in nature. Likewise, these artworks aim to last long in any viewers’ consciousness.
Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.
While Gary Grace brought us to the chaotic streets of Dublin to life after a night out in ‘A Slice’:
Robbie was in what his friends referred to as “swaying tree mode”. This meant the slender greying hipster was pissed, his eyes barely open, and not engaging with anyone but moving slowly side to side, mouthing the lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing.
There was poetry in English and his native Romanian from Radu Vancu.
With no less haste than the crisis deserves,
All faces one mask of consternation,
We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,
This virus respects no race or nation.
Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber
Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,
Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,
Children in hiding, on their own, at home.
His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,
Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;
Warm April predicates wearing no hood,
His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.
Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick
Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick.
Walk down the bare,
trembling aisles of your
self. Everything dispensible
is now after its Best Before.
Pass by the Two for One indulgences
of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
of novelties that amused us
fade behind their
spent Use By dates. Remembered now
as infatuations bought to distract us.
Is it time to close shop?
Turn out the lights?
Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
We are open twenty four hours
and we must never close.
No matter the Feast Day.
The Plague or The Hour.
Turn toward that aisle within,
so often passed in the hurry
of what seemed to matter
there you will find the plenty that
always was and will be.
Load your cart, fill your bags,
weigh your trolley down.
Stock pile on hope!
“Yes. I’m moving on. Been puttin’it off, but gotta go today.”
“Baggage ready?”
“Gonna do that now because it’s getting late.”
“Why don’t I pack you a tuna fish sandwich, just in case?”
“Yep. Good idea.”
In the bedroom, I flung the doors of all three floor-to-ceiling closets open wide, which were designed like the entrance of a cathedral, doors that for the greater glory of God, make man minuscule, put you in your place. The perspective of my many possessions purchased, carefully cleaned and stacked up high in an orderly fashion was somewhere between repulsive and overwhelming but mostly beyond my reach. I selected a few books and that fuzzy bear my parents brought back as a gift from Germany, but little else before closing the suitcase.
She caught me off guard, intercepting me in the hall on my way out, to hand over a brown paper sack as promised. I’d forgotten she’d offered the favor. Preoccupied, I guess.
“Listen, there’s a chocolate pudding and an apple in with the tuna fish sandwich too.”
“Thank you.”
“Okay, bye-bye”
Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.
Across the street, its source obscured by a high fence hugging lush foliage, smoke was rising. Must be the Mexicans. Like too many magpies, they gathered around their granny on her tiny purpose-built patio. No one was more thrilled than she to be grillin’ again.
Yes, our side of Bayou St. John was on low boil, but the houses on its opposite bank undulated in a mirage. So I was leaning left, feeling in my bones, a future of possibilities and personal freedom lay that way. Right hand tightening its grip on the sweaty suitcase handle, I stashed the sack lunch under my moist armpit, elbow clamped in to keep it there and descended the wrought iron stairs. Pausing at the bottom, I opened the suitcase to put the brown bag in with the rest of my treasures. Now, really on my way, I was again delayed by the obligatory exchange of pleasantries with Steve, our landlord and neighbor below. As it happens he was walking his well-dressed Chihuahua whose name was N’est-ce pas which is French for “Isn’t it so?” Keeping in mind a direct question can indeed be misperceived by older gentlemen as intrusive, in a carefully modulated tone I dared ask,
“Pardon me Mr. Steve, but why does your dog have on a colour coordinated raincoat and galoshes?” At this juncture, in unison we surveyed the quivering creature sporting four knee-high Wellingtons on palsied paws.
“Because it’s a brand new set I just bought that was too cute to leave in the closet even if there isn’t a cloud in the sky. You gone for good this time?” he answered, giving me the eye and theatrically inspecting my little luggage.
“Afraid so. You two, do take care.” Turning, I saw mucho macho matching heads. The Mexicans were like one monstrous centipede, lined up as they were for a last look over their high wooden fence. We both yelled “Adios” and waved at them but they did not disperse. Didn’t move a muscle. The scorching sun on my scalp said, don’t take all day for this stand off. With better things to do, I would leave the bayou behind.
I hadn’t got halfway when I spotted the strangers sitting on their front steps just as if they’d lived here forever. They were smoking those cigarettes that smell better than the store bought ones, but you have to roll them yourself. Though unknown to me and mine, these people were in a really good mood, so pleasant in fact that I paused. Especially on account of how thirsty walking with a heavy suitcase made me, and the hissing sound the ice cold can of Dixie Beer let out when they pulled the crackling metal tab stopped me in my tracks. Without hesitation, I held it to my forehead for a minute then next to my neck and drank it slower than heck, so as not to get one of those excruciating brain freezes, to which we Southerners are prone.
The new tenants invited me inside. Said I could bring my suitcase with me and I did, gingerly placing it on the coffee table, which frankly it monopolized in an absurd fashion. I sat down on their silky soft sofa, but not before being welcomed to do so. Everything of theirs was smaller than ours, and they smelled strange, but were so nice to show interest in what I cared enough about to carry with me. They confirmed my bear was genuinely German. And though I knew every word in my books by heart, indeed they politely declined to borrow them, just as they didn’t care to share my tuna fish sandwich three ways. Said they’d just eaten and instead offered me one of their piping hot homemade brownies. After I don’t know how long, what most intrigued them was that a midget could memorize her digits. I proved my point by borrowing their pencil and a notepad of pretty purple paper to jot down my home telephone number.
We were having such fun, I nearly forgot they were foreign. The shades were drawn, and I guess I’d been there a while, when one prolonged blast from the building’s main buzzer led to two terse raps on the first floor apartment’s soft hollow-sounding wooden door. Furthermore, when it swung open, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Glaring from the hallway, hands on hips, was Mom.
Like stumbling on an oasis in the nick of time, an accidental magic had occurred. That haphazard ambience which happens in abandoned colonies with greater frequency than you might imagine. Well, that mystical moment had passed and with a firm grasp on my suitcase, Mom was on the march.
“Step on a crack, break your momma’s back,” I sang real low, hopscotching on one foot, alongside her back to a home that in my eyes was about the same size as The Superdome. Right or wrong, now that meanders of mine are no longer confined, I see Herbsaint-soaked curbs cloaked in ceramic smiles, their teeth-like tiles intelligently fired in the truest hue of Belgian blue. They spell out street names like: D-A-U-P-H-I-N-E, D-R-Y-A-D-E-S, or D-E-S-I-R-E. But the four corners of a sublime world that will always keeps me squarely entertained are contained in time, and still say D-U-M-A-I-N-E.
