This week, Richard has a short but spectacular mental breakdown and picks a fight with the entire western hemisphere.
I'll say one thing for this current crisis: it makes you take a closer look at your personal politics. I've been at odds with the so-called liberal media for some time now, particularly in relation to its empty virtue-signalling, but I'm really growing to despise their cant and supercilious rhetoric. (It amuses me, for example, how the BBC and The Guardian have been calling for a full-on China-style lockdown for some time now, only to get cold feet once cabin fever sets in, the ruinous economic cost of a forced quarantine suddenly dawns on them, and the police start acting like the fucking Stasi.) Conversely, I'm equally as fed-up with conservative commentators peddling stories about socialist takeovers and/or extranational conspiracies (which the UK media have done nothing to dispell, even in the face of idiotic backlashes such as the recent 5G mast-burnings in Liverpool and Birmingham: let's face it, they were handing out free petrol on that story months before anyone took a match to it.) When will these double-standards end?
Like most people, I was shocked to wake up to the news on Thursday that Trump had remarked during his latest press briefing that injecting disinfectant into the bloodstream was a way of combating Covid-19. Of course, anyone blessed with even a modicum of close-reading skills (or, y'know, had actually watched the footage and listened to what he said) can see for themselves how his admittedly clumsy choice of words has been twisted by partisan media to suit their own agenda. And this doesn't stop at individuals, either. Consider the sheer volume of pro-EU propaganda being churned out by many of the same news outlets who have conveniently taken it upon themselves to side-step how Italy has effectively been hung out to dry by other major nation states yet still denigrates them for receiving humanitarian aid from China and Russia. And don't even get me started on the intense criticism of Orbán's emergency measures in Hungary, which it must be emphasised aren't all that different from the ones enacted in France under President Macron. Why is one a problem but the other isn't? Could it be that the media can't seem to move beyond this view of Eastern European states as something unknowable, alien and 'problematic' because they can't be bothered to consider history, context and social perspective? Then to cap it all, just to tighten the throat and send tremors down the left arm, we're bombarded with poorly-argued, space-filling editorials asking if female heads of state such as Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern are better suited than their male counterparts to handle the outbreak (falling back on tired stereotypes identity politics is supposedly meant to be a reaction against), pieces asking why the virus seems to be disproportionately affecting BAME people (failing to take into account population density in the inner-cities) and, most bafflingly, outrage at the postponement of gender realignment surgeries for trans individuals despite the very obvious fact that the health service has had to free up space to deal with the pandemic (which, hypocritically, a lot of the pundits complaining about this have been lecturing us about for several weeks).
But aside from the many frustrations listed above, if there's one thing that's really starting to piss me off about the media's response to the current crisis it's the endlessly repeated, dumb-ass assertion that this is "The New Normal". Now, I've treated that statement rather flippantly for the last month or so, but my blood really ran cold when I heard foreign secretary Dominic Raab use it on The Andrew Marr Show - and I say that beause... Well, it's not the sort of expression you want to hear used by a member of government (it makes one think of dictators like Nicolae Ceauşescu and Idi Amin justifying measures that led to the curtailment of civil liberties and the deaths of thousands of people under the pretext of 'security'). The fact is that many people, guided by the corrupting hand of the MSM, seem to think this is a sort of interim period between what used to be 'normality' and the geopolitical/-social/-economic climate that will come afterwards - one that's already being touted as a more egalitarian society by hopeful doves who seem to think a global recession will increase awareness of social injustice. But to quote Marx: "The birthmarks of the past still exist."
I'm done with ideology, and I'm finished with projections of what this/that means in the eyes of the media. When this is all over and there's at least a semblance of normality, it's going to take more than a few tired slogans and empty rhetoric to convince me that any political party or media outlet is worth my investment or trust. As the great reformer Tom Mann observed: "A sensible man is not anxious that any particular '-ism' shall prevail, he is only anxious that the right conditions shall obtain."
Amen, brother.
